Panamah found the link about the catalyst; or I think she did, I'm starving so can't remember well right now.

In an effort to enlighten those who argue that hydrogen production still keeps us based on fossl fuels, here is some other information which I was lead to look into based on an article in the latest Discover magazine.

Hydrogen Production from Pond Scum (http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392633)

There are battery driven hydrogen generators which are sold to laboratories which have instruments that run on hydrogen. The generators basically do a fractional distillation of air to get the hydrogen out. I've wondered why the same technology hasn't been applied to cars.

Similarly, there are bacteria which emit hydrogen as their byproduct of respiration (much like we emit carbon dioxide). I've never understood why they couldn't do vat scale production that way.

I'm sure there's probably something I'm missing.

From reading this guy, the natural occuring biologicals can't produce hydrogen on the vast scale needed. This altered algae can in a pond about 100 miles square (which oddly he wants to place in New Mexico). It is engineered such that much of its energy is put into producing hydrogen rather than sugars.

10% conversion of sunlight into hydrogen in a 100 square pond could produce enough hydrogen to power 200 million passenger vehicles. So he says. (He == J. Craig Venter of the Venter Institute)

I don't know about hydrogen battery generators. I imagine it comes down to cost and maintenance.

Also found this:

http://curtrosengren.typepad.com/alternative_energy/2005/06/new_hydrogen_po.html

Battery driven hydrogen generators are a no-go. You already have energy in the battery that you can use. Why bother using that energy to make hydrogen, which then is used as energy? It's kinda like driving to Boston from New York via Memphis. You can do it, but it's not very efficient.

Are you sure that these battery operated hydrogen generators use fractional distillation? It's much much easier to generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water using a battery. Give me a container, some wires, a battery, water and a hunk of zinc metal and I could build a hydrogen generator. Fractional distillation of hydrogen requires air that contains hydrogen. There is very little hydrogen in air because
* It combines with oxygen to form water.
* Hydrogen rises rapidly. It's by far the lightest naturally occuring gas molecule.

I'm not saying you can't use fractional distillation but it would be hugely expensive. You'd need cryogenics, reverse osmosis, pressure swing absorption or any of a number of feasible but costly processes. (Note: Rigorously speaking, none of these are true distillation, but I'm already getting too technie to pursue that line of reasoning.)

Using pond scum/biomass for hydrogen generation is also a stretch. I'm sure it's possible but not inately efficient. Photosynthesis takes carbon dioxide from the air and turns it into carbon used by the plant, and oxygen which is returned to the atmosphere. Sunlight is the energy source. There is no hydrogen in this process.

Plants can turn water into hydrogen and oxygen using solar energy but there are much better ways of using biomass for energy production. Decaying vegetable matter produces methane (swamp gas). Biomass can be burned directly to generate energy.

Hydrogen production research from non-hydrocarbon energy is great but conventional (or even unconventional) chemistry and biochemistry is unlikely to provide economical solutions, unless we find a way of discrediting the 3 laws of thermodynamics -- there are still people trying to build a perpetual motion machine.

Nuclear chemistry and fusion -- now this is research that could provide breakthroughs.

Well, Thicket, I'm going to take Dr. Venter's word over yours. He's not a quack. At the same time, I'm not an expert and won't be copying the entire article from the magazine into this forum.

"Normally, no hydrogenase (a natural enzyme that promotes the formation of gaseous hydrogen) is involved in the process. But with microbes, it is possible to intervene genetically in ways that encourage the activation of hydrogenase enzymes. The end result is an altered photosynthetic process that producess less oxygen and more hydrogen.

Research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, have already succeeded in converting solar energy directly and continuously into hydrogen by manipulating photosynthesis in Chlamydomanas reinhardtii, a common species of green algae. Biologist Michael Seibert and his colleagues found they could activate hydrogenase during photosynthesis by witholding sulfate.

"This is a neat little system that shows that you can get an alga to produce hydrogen for days. In fact, we've now done it for about six months, continuously," says Seibert."

J. Craig Venter (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/venter.html)

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_production_delivery.html) (specifically hydrogen production)

I could find no credentials for Thicket Tundrabog nor B_Delacroix.

Thanks for the link and post.

I think I did mention in that other Hydrogen thread that algae will probably become a foremost energy producer in the future. Photosynthesis is one of the most efficient energy production models that we know of(besides nuclear of course). And considering that the source of that energy production is for all intents and circumstance, limitless,, until we have the power to design a Dyson sphere it will serve our purposes.

It makes complete sense to try and tap into it.

When we gain the techology to tap the electrical production in the cells directly, we could then just skip all these intermediary steps.

Bacteria at sewage treatment plants could probably be harnessed in a similar fashion. Imagine if we powered our dishwashers with our own ****.

Well, Thicket, I'm going to take Dr. Venter's word over yours

I dunno how fast I would discount Thicket's ideas and opinions.
Certainly, not that fast.

Heh... I don't see any disagreements between my post and the eminent Dr. Venter. Could you point them out for me?

Perhaps the disagreement is in the commercial viability of hydrogen production from microbes. I say it's unlikely to be economical especially when compared to existing technologies that recover energy from biomass. I'm not quite sure what Dr. Venter believes. The science of an 'altered photosynthesis' process to produce hydrogen is interesting and certainly worthwhile pursuing.

Perhaps the disagreement is in the commercial viability of hydrogen production from microbes. I say it's unlikely to be economical especially when compared to existing technologies that recover energy from biomass.

Commercial viability is not constant. I am sure if you looked back far enough you could come upon a group of 100 or more of the worlds most emminent (at the time) scientists who were saying then that given the world's current [then] rate of consumption, fossil fuels would be depleted entirely before 1980. The people who look at current ways of doing things and say they won't be enough are always right -- but there's is an entirely moot point! It's the innovations you didn't see coming, the carberator, the feul injection systems, the technology they use in ink jet printers that can also be used to create fuel/air mixtures that are say 10 times more efficient then the current way of mixing fuel and air in combustion engines -- its all those things and more that make terms like commercial viability seem like a spec on the highway that you passed at the speed of light. It only meant something in that brief period of time we called "present" before it was gone forever.

After all, if existing technologies were so great, we wouldn't be trying so hard at coming up with new ones, would we?

apprently 100% pure oxygen is the most powerfull combustable fuel in the world, there have been afew car's made to run on 100% pure oxygen, but obviously those people vanished, and there car's along with them... apparently america loves its fuel, and dosent wanna lose its money.

After all, if existing technologies were so great, we wouldn't be trying so hard at coming up with new ones, would we?

the funny thing is that alot of these new technologies goverments dont like, so they get rid of them.

apprently 100% pure oxygen is the most powerfull combustable fuel in the world, there have been afew car's made to run on 100% pure oxygen, but obviously those people vanished, and there car's along with them... apparently america loves its fuel, and dosent wanna lose its money.

Oxygen is not really a fuel.

It is a reactant.

Without a fuel, O2 is inert.

its a gas, and gasses are fuel's so oxygen can be a fuel.

its a gas, and gasses are fuel's so oxygen can be a fuel.I'm no chemist, but I would think that only combustable gasses could be fuels. What's the flash point of oxygen? *scratches head*

its a gas, and gasses are fuel's so oxygen can be a fuel.
Um... you know "gas" is a state of matter right? Any element can be a "Gas" (think back to science class where they explained that whole "liquid, gaseous, solid" thing).

By your thinking, all gasses are fuels, and since all matter can be a gas, all matter must therefore be fuel.

I'm pretty sure I can easily find articles that refute that... unless of course we're talking about the whole "contained energy in an atom" sort of thing, but then you wouldn't really need the gaseous form at that point.

Thicket made a point that utilizing battery power to produce hydrogen (generally through electrolysis) would be inefficient because you already have the energy in the battery. I think the reason that combustibles are desired instead of electricity is b/c of the current make-up of the torque engine. The ability to mechanically pressurize a combustion reaction produces a fairly large force on a torquing piston. I don't believe there is a similar mechanism in place that can utilize electricity to produce similar effects.

Admittedly I've done little research on this exact topic. My conclusion comes only from the general failure to produce a similar amount of torque from an electrical source as from a combustion source. Even high efficiency hybrid vehicles which have improved greatly over the past 20 years, still use a combustion reaction for producing higher torque (quick acceleration).

Admittedly I'm ignorant on the specifics in this field so I'm only asking these questions out of ignorance and curiousity. On another note, what has been the limitation on utilizing a self-contained hydrolysis / hydrogen combustion system? It seems an alternator could be used to provide electricity for a hydrolysis apparatus. Is it true that combusting hydrogen produces more energy than separating it from oxygen?

Is oxygen a fuel? The answer is no.

Fire is usually considered as a triangle. It requires three components. They are;

1. Oxygen
2. Heat (aka ignition source)
3. Fuel

If you remove any one of these three elements, you cannot have a fire. You will not have a fire with only an ignition source and oxygen.

Note: Sometimes people add a fourth component making fire a tetrahedron. This component is,

4. Chemical, exothermic reaction.

Responding to Daiffan.

Your observations about mechanical torque are correct.

The problem with using a battery, or any type of electricity to produce hydrocarbons is fairly simple. Most electricity production uses hyrdrocarbons as fuel. For example, I manage a power plant that uses natural gas to produce 250 MW of electricity. Picture the following scenario.

Natural gas --> electricity --> fuel

You can do it, but each arrow includes efficiency penalties. For example, in my plant, 57% of the energy in natural gas ends up as electricity. The rest goes out as heat up the stack, or out in the cooling water. Since natural gas is a perfectly good fuel, you best use it directly. Even if you are producing hydrogen, it's easier to get it directly from natural gas, than to first convert it to electricity.

We do get a lot of electricity from hydro and nuclear plants. However, incremental electricity production almost always comes from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Is it true that combusting hydrogen produces more energy than separating it from oxygen?

Nope.

If this was true, we would have invented the perpetual motion machine, and kicked sand in the face of a fundamental law of thermodynamics -- conservation of energy.

Electrolysis and hydrogen combustion is just a big circle. Electrolysis takes water and turns it into hydrogen and oxygen. Combustion takes oxygen and hydrogen and turns it into water. All energy conversion processes involve some loss of efficiency.

Why is the production of hydrogen from algae unlikely to become commercially viable compared to other biomass technology?

The problem is not the technology to get algae to produce hydrogen using sunlight. Research shows that this is feasible. With enough effort, I'm sure super, hydrogen producing algae can be developed.

The problem is on the practical side. The basic energy path is,

Sunlight ----> Hydrogen Fuel

By its very nature, you need a large area to utilize sunlight as an energy source. There is limited sunlight energy density on the earth's surface, and you would need huge amounts of land to convert that energy into hydrogen by using algae. Fine... lets say you indeed have that land available, and you have square miles of algae ponds to convert sunlight. How do you recover the hydrogen produced? How do you separate it from the co-produced oxygen? You can't leave the ponds open to atmosphere because your hydrogen would rise more quickly than a helium filled balloon. (The Zeppelin used hydrogen to float through the air.) Are you going to cover these square miles with some kind of roof to capture the hydrogen/oxygen mixture? Remember that the roof must allow sunlight to pass through, but must be tight enough not to allow hydrogen to leak.

You can take the hydrogen and co-produced oxygen and immediately burn it to produce heat/energy... but why would you do that when you could have used the solar energy directly without the need for intermediate hydrogen/oxygen production?

Are these kinds of problems solvable? Sure, but it would be difficult and hugely expensive.

Are there biomass technologies that have a better chance of being economically viable? Absolutely yes.

* You can use sunlight to grow trees, plants, algae... any kind of biomass.
* You can use the biomass directly as fuel by combustion, or turn it into fuel using fermentation/gasification.

These are all currently available technologies, and are economically viable today in certain circumstances.

It's great that researchers study novel ideas such as using algae to produce hydrogen. There will be energy technology breakthroughs. There will also be huge numbers of failures and deadends.

As a scientist, I'm delighted that people are doing research into hydrogen-producing algae.

As an engineer, I doubt that it will ever be economically viable compared to alternatives.