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      09-01-2020, 02:54 PM   #15
jonjo001
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Drives: BMW i3s and G05 45e
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adc View Post
I’m sorry, but how will you obtain all that hydrogen to fuel the millions of cars? Will you burn coal or natural gas in an electric power plant to extract it from water? Or will you decompose some fossil fuel to get at it?
There is a really interesting/geeky bit of science about producing hydrogen, from a BBC Radio program called Costing The Earth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002z43

If you can listen to it, then 20 minutes on is where the interesting bit comes in. If you can't listen, then my low-brow summary:

- Produce ammonia by using a sort of fuel cell that takes in regular air at ambient temp, using the nitrogen in the air. Do some clever physics/chemistry that produces ammonia, with a bit of electricity (solar).
- Ammonia is made of 3 atoms of hydrogen and 1 atom of nitrogen. Is nice and stable and is easy to transport as a liquid, which is obviously how the world is geared to shipping it's energy around the world.
- At the point when you need to get to the hydrogen, pump it into a hydrogen cracker, which is supposedly something relatively small and cheap
- Use your hydrogen as needed :-), maybe just as you would with a current fuel pump.

Bit more to it than that, and not yet ready for worldwide consumption, but I agree with the earlier poster that lumping all this metal and other heavy stuff around to store electricity, is just a stop gap.

Cool stuff, I think
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