My car and house run on love.
And oil. And goat blood. But love too.

"But hydrogen is expensive to make and uses fossil fuels. The researchers say their reactor will produce hydrogen exclusively from ethanol and do it cheaply enough so people can buy hydrogen fuel cells for personal use."

But where is all this ethanol going to come from in the first place? They would have to factor that into the overall efficiency of this kind of power source.

I would like to think there's real potential here, but it still seems like science fiction.

The collest "free energy" I've ever seen was at my old job - it was a Pharmaceutical plant built on an old landfill. They had a small power plant that tapped into the methane produced from the trash and used it as back-up power for the entire campus.

Wow. It's great that we don't have to use fossil fuels to get hydrogen. Now we just have to bulldoze millions of acres of natural habitat for millions of acres of sugarcane!

The new technology holds economic potential for Midwest farmers, who are leaders in the production of corn-based ethanol.

Agriculture lobbyists vs oil industry lobbyists. A true clash of titans.

Don't get your hopes up. They've been trying to prop up ethanol as an alterantive fuel for two decades. It sucks. This sounds like another pie in the sky ethanol scheme to me. The goverment dumps a ton of money into this black hole to appease corn growers. In five years you'll hear of another "revolutionary" use of ethanol after this one flames out.

Then again, rumor has it that the ocean might be full of hydrogen.

Mmmmm....Didn't the Hindenburg go BOOM!!

Buncha words and discussions I don't understand in 3, 2, 1

madcharlie
"I remember that Mr. Fusion could be fed garbage, but I don't remember how Doc said the process worked. Anyone care to enlighten?"

Listen madcharlie McFly, you lazy non googlers just need to made like a tree, and get outta here !

Not exactly completely farking boring, but close enough

CadetHappy: Absolutely correct.

As a sidenote, you can make hydrogen at home. Get a PLASTIC gas can. Not metal. Take the spigot, and duct tape it to a 20 foot long hose. Put a big garbage bag at the end of the hose. Then, put aluminum foil and lye (the dry granular kind) in the gas can. Now, fill the gas can with a little bit of water so as to barely cover the foil and lye.

The foil will react with the aluminum. It will create immense heat, enough to boil water. The hydrogen this creates travels out of the spigot down the hose. The steam/noxious substances condense into the hose as the gas travels down and cools.

Then you end up with pretty pure hydrogen in the bag. The bag should float very, very well. If you add a tad bit of air to the bag, it will make a very nice explosion upon igniting it with a match on the end of a pole. You can also breath it, and it will make your voice high just like helium.

Mind the incredibly hot and corrosive byproduct though. It will burn your skin if you ever touch it. The fumes are too be avoided as well.

I am a leading consumer of ethanol. How come the Midwest farmers haven't come to me to solve their demand problem?

But where is all this ethanol going to come from in the first place? They would have to factor that into the overall efficiency of this kind of power source.

It's going to come from US agriculture, specifically corn farmers. It states that right in the article. Go figure, I wonder how much money the farmers invested this time.

It's not a matter of what "fuel" to extract hydrogen from, its a matter of what the highest bidder wants to use.

I'm lactose intolerant.

Every time I eat ice cream it creates enough hydrogen to propel me straight to the nearest john at amazing velocities.

There must be some way to harness this power!

A cheap renewable energy source?
That sound you hear is Haliburton ordering a Horse Head to be FedEx'ed.

Gasoline is still the most effecient way to extra Hydrogen that I know of, the only reason we don't want to do this besides being a non-renewable source is that we are trying to create independence from the middle east. Hell you can get H from water (duh) it's just the fact that gasoline has 28 molecules of hydrogen (I believe) where as water has 2 (does anyone know how many hydrogen atoms ethanol has?)

Legato:2 litre bottle, liquid plummer, tin foil, balloon. Pour the liquid plummer into the bottle, drop the tin foil ball in and put the balloon attached to the top tightly, it produces hydrogen, same effect.

I'll have to take a look at this thing...I think it's supposed to be installed in this shack on the U of M campus I have access to (formerly a toxic chemical shed, now the ham club's shack and a storage shed...)

ethanol is C2H5OH.. so that'd be 6

To make hydrogen.
Find one of those godforsaken places where there are strong prevailling winds, like around self-serve gas bars and railroad stations.

Set up some wind turbines. Use the resultant electricity to split water into H2 and O2. No ethanol needed!

See, you not only get Hydrogen, you have some bonus Oxygen too. Sell it to those nutcases who have hypobaric chambers.

d00fy -

Ethanol is CH3-CH2-OH. 6 Hydrogens. And gas (octane) has 8*2+8 = 18, but that's only an average, since there's actually a substantial fraction of septane and nonane in the mix as well. So, 16-20. Ish.

Chemists - what's the mechanism for getting H2 out of saturated carbon chains? I thought that took a lot of energy; knocking them off of water or ethanol seems way easier. But I don't really know.

I have no doubts that we'll figure out a way to get off oil when the time comes. American creativity is boundless.

But ethanol is a joke. Massive agricultural subsidies prop it up, even though it takes more energy to produce a gallon of the stuff than that gallon produces.

I'm just ashamed that I immediately knew the reference. 80's movies rule!

Ethanol requires more energy to produce than it stores ergo it is a negative carrier of energy. In order to grow the corn to begin with amonia is necesary for fertilizer (source: natural gas) and pesticides (source: petrolium) This is bullshiat anaesthetic for the simple minded while instead of developing a viable solution (there isn't one) our leaders are working to precipitate a faster crisis so they can get back to the business of doing whatever it is the plan to do in their gated estate survival shelters built with your tax money while 4/5ths of the global population kills itself off.

As I stated before, the "fuel" to be used to extract Hydrogen is going to be chosen from the highest bidder.

Thanks for clearing the ethanol's hydrogen atom count for me, I was recalling back from high school.

How much electricity does it take to seperate hydrogen from oxygen? I still recall my science teachers H20 seperating experiment being quite effecient, still seems easier\more effiecient to borrow hydrogen from water.

That headline (Wired's, not the submitter's) sounds like a Scientology memo.

"Brother Travolta, you must increase your hydrogen tech before ascending!"

/got nuthin'

Arthen:

Ixnay on the Oomsdayay! It's still a big secret that "they" plan a "war" to cut the population down to 5oo million. That's why the Georgia Guidestones don't mention it....

d00fy -

Obviously, more energy than the hydrogen releases when it's burned to produce electricity. Stupid entropy.

the saving grace would be if the H2 was generated with a renewable source, like solar. Of course then we might as well just charge batteries or capacitors or something.

d00fy
It takes a lot of energy as the H-O bonds are hydrogen bonds, that are as strong as you can get in covalent compounds.

The future may be in vegetable oil... it's oil, but it's also organic. Water would be much more difficult

Solar? You mean like corn-fed-by-the-sun derived ethanol? Thats the point of the myth, corn is suposedly renewable but the fact is ethanol is a black hole for energy, you have to put in more than you get out, it does not produce energy. And hydrogen is an excelent carrier for energy we just require a source. No source means you have a bunch of friggin hi tech batteries with no way to charge em.

Biad the impaler:

What? I can understand public mockery and thats fine I don't really have any vested interest in whether western civilization comes to a end or not however I am leaning a bit toward returning to a tribal society but thats neither here nor there. However you lost me at georgia guidestones . . . please illucidate.

Just think about it folks. Why is oil so cheap (compared to its energy cost) to harvest right now? Because there's a century of infrastructure built around its harvest. There are researchers making things more efficient, oil wells galore, efficient refineries, and why? Because we put a whole bunch of money and time into the research of it.

The total cost of delivery of a single gallon of gasoline is still quite high. It has to be mined, shipped to refineries (which uses oil!) refined in several stages (also uses oil), then shipped in individual semi-trucks (also uses oil) to get to it's final destination, which is for the most part a huge network of individual mom-and-pop owned gas stations. In addition to this, tankers fall over, refineries produce the occasional bad batch, pipelines break and need repair (oh boy, how about those SUVs needed to get to the point the pipeline broke in alaska), there are oil spills in Alaska, oil tanker ships. All these indirectly use oil to harvest oil.

As opposed to the infrastructure surrounding ethanol -- a fledgeling (no, I don't mean ADM) industry with some government and corporate funding and only 30 years of poorly funded research backing it. In 100 years, where will we be with this? One really darned great thing about grain alcohol, is that nearly every place in the non-desert world is suitable for growing some kind of grain that can be changed. Sugar cane, barley, hops, corn, rice. All can be turned into alcohol organically, with yeast, and the varieties of each can be grown in nearly every clime in the world, as opposed to having to be mined and distributed on the hub-and-spoke system. Locally managed stills can make enough ethanol to power entire towns for the most part, with a surplus. Believe me, we know the volume of ethanol homemade, illegal, inefficient, made-by-the-village-drunk 'stills can produce in Arkansas and Tennessee. How about efficient distilleries made by corporations with the money to put into the research of draining every last drop out of the infrastructure they create? No long, hazardous shipping across outdated hub-and-spoke shipping lines. Fine-grained (no pun intended) distributed, low cost production facilities are a much better way of creating the electricity and vehicle fuel needed to power a continually growing America.

The really great thing is that all these grains don't need a ton of upkeep to grow, we just do a ton of upkeep to keep it edible. No one gives a sweet damn if the corn they use to power their vehicle was infested with ergot or weevils or blight, or the various other little green bugs that damage our crops. It's all hydrogen in the end.

This can be the key, folks. This can avert the disaster heading our way once oil becomes expensive to mine. We just have to put the money in now while we can.
Oh, and a few more things that turn into ethanol quite readily.

1. Potatoes (really good. soil-healthy crop)
2. Grapes
3. Wheat
4. Sugar Beets
5. Honey
6. Rye
7. Apples
8. Peaches
9. Oats
10. Several types of hardy grasses, including milkweed, dandelions, cattails.

The list goes on. What's more, there's a surplus of all these every year. Regularly, crops simply get dumped into the ocean to mitigate price drops caused by low supply/demand ratio. We already farm too well. What if farmers could sell their entire surplus, every year? The revival of agriculture as a way of life. Even the (gasp!) small-farm -- remember what I said about local farming being a better way to produce energy because you don't have to ship it?! The small farm was the early center of American teamwork and pride in craftsmanship. It was absolutely central to what made America a great nation.

And why not stack something else great on top of this? The by-products of fermentation are absolutely wonderful, fast-soil-recycling fertlizers cellulose, nitrates, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus everything that went into making the plant but the components of distilled alcohol. Fertlizers that don't need shipped, are naturally processed and almost ready to use, and already local to where the crop was grown. Plus we have the advantage that the net CO2 gain from hydrogen extraction of these materials is zero. No more carbon is released into the atmosphere than was used in growing the plant the alcohol came from.

I never knew much about science but wouldn't any source of energy cost more energy to get then it could produce? otherwise wouldn't you have purpetual motion?

I submitted this a day ago, and with a vastly funnier headline. :-P

d00fy: Law of Conservation. The bonds that create water are very strong. It takes a LOT of energy to remove those bonds. (the bond is such that the Oxygen atom has 8 electrons in its outer layer, and each Hydrogen atom has 2). Atoms are happy like this. Yes, energy is released when they react with something, but you can't get more energy out than you put in to begin with. So overall it's not viable to get H2 from water. In an ideal situation there's no net gain. In the real world you lose energy (some is always lost as heat)

We still need SOMETHING to get us off our oil addiction. I don't know about all the doomsday stuff, but the oil supply WILL run out someday, probably someday not terribly far off. If we don't come up with something soon, we are going to be SO screwed when that eventually does happen.

Oil Companies to buy patent to this technology for the purpose of keeping it from ruining their profit margins in 3...2...3...

I think the real question is, how MUCH ethanol? I haven't seen this answered. Is it a small enough amount that our existing farmlands (and those overseas) could make enough? Or would we, as has been suggested, have to convert over huge amounts of land to produce the needed corn?

Otherwise, for gods sakes, why is everyone being so negative about this? OUR OIL IS GOING TO RUN OUT. Period. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be for fifty years, but it is NOT renewable on any reasonable timescale, and we are going to have to switch over to a new fuel source.

At this point, when we know that the End is Nigh - just not exactly HOW nigh - is when we need to be dumping money into any research project that seems even halfway promising. These guys can see how many kilowatts they can squeeze out of a corncobb, while the water guys keep working on smaller hydrogen strippers. We already are very close to having workable home-use fuel cells. We just need to find a good source for hydrogen.

This isn't a time to be nay-saying.

oh yeah, minnesota saves the world again.
who woulda guess'd it'd have something to do with corn

groverpm

Uh so you're saying since there were visible flames that proves the hydrogen wasn't burning because hydrogen burns with a very light blue flame, nearly invisible . . . I hate to say it but hydrogen is indeed extremely flamible, there is simply no getting around that. And given that say if a helium reinforced derigible managed to generate enough static off the atmosphere to discharge along a guide rope it wouldnt set the damn thing on fire much less bring the whole farker to its knees kinda points toward hydrogen as the ultimate culprit.

You didn't belong to the american agriculutre association thought did you MacLochlainn.

// Got nothing, just bored. Going to watch Back to the Future.

fark, people ethenol is NOT A SOURCE OF ENERGY. Is any of this getting through?

arthen: maybe u should let, i dunno, the professionals know about your amazing sources of information then