Daily Post editor Bill Hudson posted an article last week, about hydrogen. And ‘clean energy’.
Which I found interesting.
Not interesting that our editor decided to post it — he can post whatever the hell he wants to post, and he usually does — but interesting because of the topic: hydrogen. A highly explosive gas that we may someday be pumping into our gas tanks.
Did I mention, “highly explosive”?
Of course, most of us are already pumping a highly explosive liquid into our tanks, called “gasoline”. Which, as it so happens, is mostly hydrogen.
In fact, almost everything is mostly hydrogen. Including water.
Hydrogen is literally everywhere. From Wikipedia:
Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, constituting roughly 75% of all normal matter.
Considering the amount of ‘normal matter’ in the universe, that strikes me as possibly a lot of hydrogen.
Scientists who have nothing better to do have calculated that an average star (which is mostly hydrogen) would weigh about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds if you had a bathroom scale big enough. Given the number of stars in the universe, the same scientists who have nothing better to do, have calculated the total amount of matter in the universe as:
20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds
Give or take.
And that’s just the ‘normal matter’. (About 70% of the matter in the universe is supposedly ‘abnormal matter’, also known as ‘dark matter’. Or so they tell us. It’s ‘dark’ because no one can actually find any.)
Anyway, we are talking about a lot of hydrogen.
The hydrogen that we pump out of the ground, as petroleum, is combined with carbon, making it into ‘hydrocarbons’. Those hydrocarbons explode reliably (and relatively safely) inside our car engines, but the carbon is a bit of a problem, because it forms CO2 (carbon dioxide) which is causing Lake Powell to dry up, and pissing off the houseboat owners there.
There’s nothing quite as ugly as a pissed off houseboat owner.
If you put hydrogen into a car engine — actually, into a fuel cell — the only exhaust product is water vapor. No nasty CO2 to worry about. (Scientists generally don’t worry about water vapor.) So certain people are arguing in favor of hydrogen fuel for cars.
Anyway, somebody had the bright idea of refining oil to extract the hydrogen, and the pumping the hydrogen into automobile fuel cells, thus making battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs) superfluous, and driving down the value of Tesla stock.
Apparently, certain people don’t like Elon Musk.
The problem is, when you exact hydrogen from oil, you still get nasty CO2 from the production process. (Oil company executives and stockholders wouldn’t mind selling us lots and lots of oil for hydrogen production, because they keep their houseboats in the Bahamas.)
A ‘better’ way to produce hydrogen is to extract it from water, which we have even more of than oil. You do this with electricity, so no reservoir-deleting CO2 needs to result, and the Lake Powell houseboat owners remain happy.
The problem is, if you use 100% renewable electricity to produce hydrogen from water, and then put the hydrogen into a fuel cell, you lose about 75% of the energy you used to make the hydrogen.
If, on the other hand, you simply feed renewable electricity directly into a car’s EV battery, using transmission lines, you lose only about 5% of the energy.
95% of the energy is a better result than 25% of the energy. As any scientist could tell you.
The problem is, the scientists won’t tell you… because they want to apply for a big federal grant to design the ‘WISHH’.
The Western Interstate Hydrogen Hub.
In February 2022, the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to spend, as quickly as possible, a portion of the $8 billion allocated in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act towards four or more “regional hydrogen hubs”.
And that’s the main problem with hydrogen. Politicians with too much access to money, and scientists with nothing better to do than spend it…
…And oil companies looking to make a buck, producing dirty hydrogen.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.