New H2 production 20-30 times cheaper

[Jammrock]

http://www.newswire.co.kr/?job=news&no=366039

Seoul, 2008-10-20 (Korea Newswire) -- Director of S&P Energy Research Institute (SPERI), Doctor of Science Sen Kim said on the 20th October that the company’s slogan, “Clean Energy for Clean Era” is early reachable.

Dr. Sen Kim (Academician of the European Academy of Natural Science), who has been developing methods of cleaning the greenhouse gases in SPERI since February 2008.

He said “Our laboratory tests show that CO2, CH4, or N2O was dissociated by low energy. We also confirmed that hydrogen (H2) and vapor(H2O) was dissociated with similar efficiency (90% or more). Traditionally hydrogen is made by electrolysis. The electrolytic method uses 4-4.5 kwh energy for getting 1 cubic meter of hydrogen. Our method uses 0.1 kwh for the same volume of hydrogen. As known the high cost of electrolytic H2 does not allow to use it as a fuel.

Manufacturing the H2 by our method will lower the cost of H2 as much as 20-30 times. A hydrogen energy is clean (It’s water when it is burned). Plenty of water is available on the earth. A hydrogen energy can be called “permanent clean energy”

If true it really could mean a revolution in energy. With all the recent advances a house with sufficient wind/solar energy could potentially be a micro-power plant, producing their own power, fuel cells (for night time energy) and H2+electricity for their cars. That would a very nice future indeed. Pending feasible costs, of course.

[Claymonkey]

how many kwh can you get out of 1 cubic meter of hydrogen? It does sound promising though. If you can make H2 generators that can then be powered by H2 that would go a LONG way in rural areas of the world.

[rylan]

Would that be a perpetual motion machine... using a fuel powered generator to make the fuel that it consumes?
You'd have to power it off something else.

Anyway, I wish they had more details on what the experiments are using. Sounds a little too good to be true.

[Claymonkey]

Pretty sure a perpetual motion machine has to be self contained. The byproduct water wouldn't be enough to be used to produce more h2 for long. Even if you 'embed' the generator at a lake or river it would likely have to be maintained and taken offline once and awhile. Still yes it does sound too good to be true but here is to hoping.

next we'll be talking about taking the H2 and using it in cold fusion instead of burning it

[Jammrock]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Energy_Density.PNG

It wouldn't be perpetual by any means. The cubic meter mentioned is likely in it's gaseous form at a relatively low pressure (atmospheric maybe?), and would need to be pressurized or liquified before being being used as fuel, afaik. If I remember my chemistry correctly the mass of a gas is related to it's volume and pressure, so at a low pressure the mass is low, while at a high pressure the mass would be greater, given the same volume.

That process takes more energy, on top of the production energy, so it would not be something that could be done "on-the-fly" or inside a moving vehicle. Likely rural areas would have wind/solar and use that energy to power the water splitting to produce H2 and O2 gas. That gas would then be processed into a fuel form (pretty much a fuel cell), and then loaded into the hydrogen based engine for use.

[Brian Ellis]

Had a look at their website but could make little headway. I suspect they are promoting nanotechnology catalysts. 1 m3 H2 weighs 89.9 g at atmospheric pressure. Assuming perfect 100% harnessing of the heat produced (?) on combusting it, you obtain 12.6 MJ of energy. This is equivalent to 0.097 USgal of petrol/gasoline.

However, reading between the lines, he is not dissociating water, but organic compounds to produce the hydrogen, probably methane. This will still produce CO2, so we are back to square one. The traditional way is by catalysing CH4 with H2O at high temperatures (reforming). It is conceivable that nanocatalysis could be a lot more efficient, but you would still get more energy by burning the methane than by burning the hydrogen extracted from it!

If it sounds too good to be true, then you can be damn sure it is!