Thread: Hydrogen filling station in your home

Originally Posted by Casper

The problem with Bio Fuels is that we would quickly run out of room to grow enough for our fuel supply which may then put our food supply at risk due to farmers converting to fuel oil crops over food oil/food crops.

There is also the question between weather or not the energy involved in producing the fuel oils is commercially viable at reasonable fuel cost.

Hydrogen is a very good source of energy if you can extract the hydrogen from the source at a reasonable cost in energy consumption and infrastructure costs.

Once the infrastructure is there, the hydrogen fuel supply would take up only a small fraction of the area that Bio fuels would need, a fraction of the on going cost in dollars and emissions to manufacture and only H2o as an emission once used in a fuel cell to run an electric car apposed to comparable emissions from petro or bio fueled vehicles.

I'm not knocking Bio fuels, they are also going to have to be part of the near future but I would hate to see Hydrogen dropped as it can be stored in relative safety and can be produced from Gio Thermal electricity rather than burning coal which is tried and tested technology which makes it cost effective and can be shipped in a similar way to natural gas or LPG.

Cheers Casper

Originally Posted by bee utey

Hydrogen is not a source of energy as it does not exist in a useful state until it is formed by industrial processes. It is a medium where one type of primary energy is transformed to hydrogen and then transformed to energy again. This process is wasteful and inefficient. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, methanol is a better transfer medium, one litre of methanol at room temperature contains more hydrogen/energy than cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen. And it is easy to make and store. It can be used in conventional engines and there are fuel cells designed to use it. Forget hydrogen, it's a pipe dream. You are better off improving sources of primary energy, solar, geothermal etc. The transfer medium is secondary.

Hey Beeutey,

I'm not arguing with you, and if you can run a fuel cell off Methanol then that would definitively be the way to go.

As in the sections highlighted in red, I did not say what the medium was and I said that "hydrogen was a source of power once it was extracted from the source " meaning that you could extract it from what ever you wanted.

Regardless of the semantics, I personally have seen machinery which has been converted to run on Hydrogen fuel cells but was told just what I have said here, it's not viable as yet but is something that is may become more possible in the future.

It was a bit of a strange feeling driving a golf cart with 40 odd Kg's of Hydrogen right under the seat.

They told us all it was safe but the Hindenburg still runs through your mind.

Cheers Casper

I think the future will be something like a prius with a fuel cell in the boot rather than a battery, converting an internal combustio0n engine would not be ecomomic.
heres a good read didnt know how long fuel cells have been around

Fuel cells in Australia — EcoGeneration — The magazine for Australia's clean energy industry