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Thoughts on Hydrogen From Oil (Black Hydrogen)
Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 @ 22:28:36 GMT by vlad
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Mike Johnston writes: Hi,
This week there was a news story that caught my attention. It was about the Pacific Northwest Lab (a government lab) having developed a device that can produce hydrogen fuel from gasoline to power a fuel cell car. This device produces the H2 on board, while the vehicle is running. It does this by a process referred to as "steam reforming or partial oxidation". It is touted as being a major breakthrough.
Link: www,tri-cityherald.com
It is definitely going to allow for fuel cell cars to be introduced to the market much faster than had previously been anticipated as the infrastructure to transport, store and distribute gasoline is already in place. Whereas such a system for hydrogen gas is totally nonexistent. In fact, it could be used anywhere fuel cells would be employed to generate electricity (such as homes and businesses).
If such a unit was built to the right size it could just as easily produce H2 fuel for internal combustion cars and diesel trucks as well. This would allow consumers to retrofit their existing vehicle to run on clean non-polluting hydrogen fuel.
There are additional benefits too whether you would use such a device to produce fuel for a fuel cell or an internal combustion vehicle. One benefit would be to enormously increase your fuel mileage. How could it do this, you ask?
Well, to explain this we have to understand how the steam reformation process works. It involves passing the gasoline and steam over or through a catalyst. The reaction that ensues looks like this:
C6H14 (gasoline) + 12H2O (water, as steam) = 6CO2 and 19H2
The oxygen atom in the water/steam molecule releases it's hydrogen atoms as do the carbon atoms in the gasoline molecule. The oxygen and carbon atoms bond with each other. It takes two oxygen atoms to oxidize one carbon atom into CO2. So the products of the reforming reaction are CO2 and H2. The H2 is used to fuel the vehicle and the CO2 is sequestered.
But notice that the gasoline molecule only had 14 hydrogen atoms (7 if you look at them as H2) and the end product of the reaction was 19 H2 atoms. How is this possible? Because the water molecules also released their hydrogen atoms during the reforming process. So 12 of the resulting H2 atoms came from the water molecules and only 7 from the gasoline molecule. That is nearly 2/3 of the Hydrogen produced coming from the water molecules! So you car would be running mostly on H2 from water NOT H2 from hydrogen. That would reduce your car's consumption of gasoline by a similar percentage. Too bad no one thought of this sooner, especially since it is a hundred year old technology.
I believe that hydrogen from water is the solution to the future of the world's energy production needs. Steam reformation of hydrocarbons is a first step in that direction. By blending the tried and true fossil fuel energy sources with the cutting edge hydrogen from water technology we form a bridge between the two. Especially since most of the energy derived is from the water hydrogen.
I am surprised that the oil companies and the Bush administration aren't publicizing this exciting facet of their hydrogen energy plan.
MJ
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Re: Thoughts on Hydrogen From Oil (Black Hydrogen) (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, May 04, 2004 @ 12:11:58 GMT | ummm... excuse me, since when does C6H14 = Gasoline? From high school chem class, I recall that a hydrocarbon chain of 6 carbon atoms would be called Hexane. Isn't gasoline Octane?
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Re: Thoughts on Hydrogen From Oil (Black Hydrogen) (Score: 1)
by baldy on Tuesday, May 04, 2004 @ 20:46:17 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | | The costs for such a conversion from gasoline to hydrogen fuel goes something like this. For the last fifteen years all cars have run at the end of a computer , and each size and model have a separate and different on board computer. Each computer has to reformated to burn the hydogen water gasoline mixture. There are no off the shelf such devices in existence. Each has to be custom made. Once the idea caught on and the maufacture of the auto had a chance to build 50-100,00 of them of course the cost would come down. I looked into it on the HICEF of Genesis. Very expensive and complicated and I talked to the biggest H conversion company in the US. They nearly laffed themselves silly at this old mans niavite(sic) The oil patch made sure with the help of Detroit that was not going to be a simple retrofit! |
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Re: Thoughts on Hydrogen From Oil (Black Hydrogen) (Score: 1)
by pieter on Thursday, May 06, 2004 @ 11:13:19 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | The problem with on-board reforming of gasoline into Hydrogen is twofold :
A. It takes energy to do the reforming process, i.e. you'll have to ''burn'' some gasoline to get the Hydrogen. Even though the fuel cell is more effective (well to wheels efficiency) then the combustion engine, some loss will occur.
B. Without a CO2 recuperation unit on board, you emit more CO2 then with the combustion engine.
So, energy-wise and environment wise, this is not a good solution.
Last thing : reforming units are highly complicated things, require long start-up times (> 5 minutes), have poor reliability, are very costly and rather bulky. Sorry, you don't want the present state-of-the-art under the hood of your car.
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Re: Thoughts on Hydrogen From Oil (Black Hydrogen) (Score: 1)
by pulsed_ignition on Thursday, May 06, 2004 @ 11:49:48 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://diamondlube.com | Mike,
I think you just like trying to look like you are on top of things.
It was just a couple months ago you disbelieved I could crack hydrogen from oil and even if I could - I couldn't do it at a rate better than allowable by current science. Question, what would that current technology be if the best old "breakthrough" they have is an old steam reformer that you didn't even know existed??? FYI, I have been producing "black hydrogen" for several years already.
Now you praise PNL as having a breakthrough "steam reformer" but this is very old and well understood within petroleum, steam will crack hydrocarbons into H2 and CO2. And now - out of the chemtrail laden skies.... , $350 MILLION is dropped in the laps of the big boys for a Black Hydrogen project for just the project I first proposed three years ago to the DOE. (actually I proposed twice) I only asked for $100,000 and now they pass out $350,000,000 - and to whom, many of the same companies that I had personal contact with such as Shell, Argonne and Gas Technology Institute that is about 8 miles away from me and GTI "only" wanted to buy a prototype last year.
A couple years ago the ICCI, (Illinois Clean Coal Institute) was not interested either. So much for anyone wanting clean air.
I can say - once PlasmaKing's stock sale brings in enough capital, we will proceed with converting kerosene into hydrogen, at a first year projection of aprox 30,000 gallons into $5,000,000 in commercial hydrogen at wholesale.
Warm Regards,
Chris Arnold President/CEO
PlasmaKing Corporation
http://members.aol.com/hypercom59 |
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