Hydrogen

I think that the one thing that has not seemed to have sunk in to some in this thread is that we can no longer assume that we can carry on doing all the things we do now. Life is going to have to change dramatically. Less travel, less consumption and less waste.

regards Martin

In other words, use less energy. I fully agree with you but I feel that this is so unlikely, about the same likelihood as fusion power becoming a reality within the next 50 years or colonizing Mars.

JA

Has anyone else seen Eddie Izzard's sketch about going back in time and 'explaining' how modern stuff works? The answer to how does the magic box that keeps things to a constant temperature that's less than ambient, or produces moving pictures is that it plugs in the wall.

An electrical device is now the universal solution to any problem, even for the instances when the correct answer is don't do it.

In other words we are unlikely to prevent the extremes of climate change and will have to take the consequences.

Martin

I think you may be right. Whether we prevent them or not we will all struggle to aim for that, and will all suffer from either eventuality.

We live in one of the have-it-all nations while still wanting more (How many of the most basic aspects of our lives, before any hobbies or cultural activities, need rely on things that "plug in the wall"?). While huge areas of the world naturally want vital needs that can only be delivered by mineral fuels or plugs in walls. Many would like have the sockets to plug things into.

Our society waffles virtuously about saving "energy" without worrying what the word means, and by ending using mineral fuels; but insists on increasing waste such as "smart" 'speakers, video-type advertising hoardings and operating anything and everything by "smart"-'phones. Gadgets not even built domestically but imported from many thousands of miles away.

While for governments of any flavour to keep hammering we motorists is very hypocritical, when they continue to allow the huge waste of electricity in motorway service areas and by the spreading rash of those giant ad displays, and the continued development of big out-of-town shopping-centres designed for car users only.

Hindsight is wonderful, letting us see we should have been investigating for example, using hydrogen as a fuel and ore-reducer, developing nuclear power, encouraging domestic manufacturing, etc; decades ago when the focus was on minerals depletion rather then the climate.

(The Swedish and German iron industries were using arc furnaces for iron-ore smelting 100 years ago - though my reference does not state the reducing-agent. The text is a contemporary electrical-engineering book that also covers the battery-electric vehicles of the time, when electric cars were allowed in London's Royal Parks that banned the petrol versions!)

Climate-change induced by atmospheric pollution was predicted well over 100 years ago, but the forecast danger-point was well ahead of our own time, now, so largely ignored in an era of "taming Nature"; then probably pushed out of mind by two World Wars and economic depressions.

By our collective failure over the last fifty years, we now face a bizarre, frantic scramble tainted by politics and desperately low technical literacy, to end one set of things before ensuring sufficient supplies of practicable, replacement things.

Replacements that will not only husband finite resources but are now also "enviromentally friendly" - to verge on the trendy jargon beloved of those barely knowing "energy" from "power".

Do our much-vaunted replacements meet both criteria? Not very well, if at all.

I agree. On the (very rare) occasions when I drive, I look at the thousands of cars on the roads, 95% of which have internal combustion engines, and I just wonder how the hell we are going to get out of this mess.

Ditto, home insulation. Our house was built in 1989, by which time, insulation was fully understood, but it has solid concrete ground floors, which are like blocks of ice right now, and suck the heat out of the house. There is not enough clearance to put insulation (other than carpet) on top, so I face the prospect of digging all the ground floor out and going deeper to accommodate an insulation layer; as well as improving the insulation in the roof, windows and walls. And I noticed some new houses being built yesterday, that also had no insulation under the ground floor - just compacted grading.

Yet, it is possible to build houses that literally take only a few hundred Watts to heat them.

Yes it is silly, I watched a series on TV some time in the 1970’s called House for the future. Insulation was a no brainier even then. Fifty years later they still aren’t insulating houses properly.

On the earlier mentioned issue by someone else about changing habits. The public rarely seem to have any real choice about it, they’re just along for the ride. If for example the lack of new oil fields in the coming years doubles, triples or quadruples the cost of petrol I suspect most people will end up driving less. Even with recent price hikes I decided not to make unnecessary journeys.

Did anyone else see this the other day?

Exxon Prediction

So much focus on energy sources and technical changes. The real elephant in the room is our economic structure. We rely on year on year growth to stay afloat the whole of which is based on increased consumption. We have to change the model.

To take just a small example, during the pandemic many people were able and permitted to work from home myself included. This cut road use quite significantly but instead of exploiting this gain we hear calls from government and today James Dyson demanding that this practice is outlawed in the name of growth.

The challenge is how a nation can live well on less and still function economically.
regards Martin

Reynolds Tobacco all over again. Criminal. There should be serious jail time involved for those responsible.

Re housing insulation: Had to laugh at reports recently that Ukrainian refugees staying in British homes were appalled at how cold they are. Ukraine, like Russia, has been building fully insulated housing forever. Saw a pic of one building site and it looked like 6" thick styrofoam or similar insulation sandwiched between an inner and outer brick wall. And their concrete floors have pipes embedded in them to carry hot water or steam from the central heating boiler.

I re-discovered this the other day, NanoFlowCell. I'd come across it years ago, but had largely erased it from memory.
Beware, the website is hard on the eyes, until you scroll the top banner off screen.
https://www.nanoflowcell.com/

There's quite a few videos on Youtube about it, going back something like 8 years, but here's a more modern one



Having listened to the whole of the video, I'm not promoting the presenter's conclusions, but it does give a bit of an insight.

Bill

Edited By peak4 on 19/01/2023 12:42:52

We’re on the same wavelength, they keep on about growth. I think they sometimes forget we have finite resources. Large numbers of the public are struggling to pay their bills at the moment but I suspect the rich and super rich like Dyson are doing quite nicely?

Dare no-one mention...........there may be too many of us ?

The MSM even predicting the natural decline of the Chinese population as a BAD thing !

I thought our prosperity would improve with automation making up for a smaller number of people.

A lot of miss-direction on the website. They seem to be very keen not to say "battery" but that is what it is. The difference id the anode and cathode are liquid. The cells are sized to suit the power requirement and the liquid storage is sized for the energy requirement. However they have drawbacks. First is charge / discharge efficency. This is only 40 to 75% compared to 95% for lithium batteries. Second is they need to be hot to work. They require quite a bit of "support" plant.

Robert.

Fuel cell efficiency for PEM is an interesting one, efficiencies over 60% have been claimed, some in the high 60’s however in my (non car) world they are usually 200kw units linked together to provide the base demand. However, maximum efficiency does not normally correspond with maximum output but sits around 2/3 of their maximum rating. They do run at a relatively low temperature and there are several ways of managing cooling particularly if teamed up with liquid cooled batteries. If you are running on liquid H2 you have a ready made source of cooling that will take far more heat than you want to surrender! LH2 has its own challenges and and risks in terms of cryogenic temperature and of course costs more to produce with the additional compression and cooling cycles but it is significantly safer in terms of pressure and provides around twice the energy by volume than gas at 700bar. One drawback with PEM low temp cells is they require high purity gas, a high temperature cell is more tolerant to lower gas quality.

A step further than hydrogen for gas boilers expounded at an event I attended was high purity H2 in mains to houses with fuel cells installed could provide individual electricity supply to each house, killing the load on the grid and power stations in an instant and also providing a heat source for water and winter heating. Given a fuel cell life is currently relatively short (depending on load cycle) that will be a significant burden to those at the bottom of the money tree! Be interesting if that ever grows legs!

Definitely Hydrogen is not the whole answer to everything energy but it does I think have a part to play. Anyone watched the JCB hydrogen video on the net?

Paul.

Jut realised I made a typo for h2 fuell cell with 100kW electrical out put you have to get rid of 100kW of heat not 10

Robert.

The easiest and most predictable way to reduce energy comsumption would be to reduce the population.

So how exactly do you propose this “easy” solution be carried out?

regards Martin

The laws of Darwinian natural selection are still at work. However with regard to Homo Erectus the selection process has become less natural and more mechanised. What countries population would not be asking their leaders and military to do something when there's no food on the table or fuel in their tanks. With the rate of the world population growth at present we already have "Trouble right here in River City". We could handle the situation well but if history tells us anything the human race invariably handles it badly. A rather pessimistic view but none that have not already been portrayed in many Sci-fi films. If the views expressed on social media are a reflection of our society we are in for a bumpy ride.

CS

May not have been posted yet

Diesel engine on hydrogen