Burn natural gas to boil water to generate electricity to seperate out hydrogen from (more) natural gas? (What other by products come out of this process?)
I thought the idea was to move away from burning NG, Oil, Coal and the associated carbon release.
To fuel millions of hydrogen vehicles, wouldn’t that be a crap ton of NG burnt in your method?
Would it still be an overall reduction of carbon released?
Well, maybe it hasn’t, but from a financial standpoint the Minerals Management Service (MMS) of the Department of the Interior, which administers oil and gas rights on federal lands and waters, IMO is a rather sophisticated and profitable (for the Fed) operation. Consider this article currently on the industry site Rigzone: Lease sales 206 and 224, held early this year for tracts in the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico, combined to generate more than $3.7 billion in high bids. Consider also that the MMS eventually collects royalties (don’t recall the range of percentages at the moment) on production from leased tracts.
This brings up a point to ponder: GWB’s talking up of expanded offshore leasing probably is not just a case of his looking after his ‘oil buddies’, as the popular mind has it, but of augmenting what is already a rather healthy revenue stream for the Fed. I leave it to the reader to decide whether adding to this revenue stream by the opening of additional offshore acreage is a Good Thing, a Bad Thing or just a thing.
As you say yourself, though, offshore drilling is expensive. Looking at lease sale 206, the largest numbers of high bids were received from BP, Chevron, Murphy Oil, a consortium headed by Anadarko, and Hess, among others. BP bid high on 63 leases, Chevron 49, and Hess 25. Offshore exploratory wells especially in deep water (>3000 ft.) are Very Big Deals for the oil companies and can involve a year or more of costly planning, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars the wells themselves cost. The number of such wells that can be drilled is partly a function of the financial health of the company, partly a function of its available internal engineering resources, and partly dependent on the availability of rigs and other contractors. The most expensive wells are often drilled under risk-sharing agreements among several companies, but most mid-sized to large oil companies themselves drill no more than two or three exploration wells in a given offshore province per year, as that is about as much risk as prudence will allow.
I have become somewhat familiar with BP’s Gulf of Mexico exploration and development activities as they are one of our major clients. Like most large oil companies in the current climate they are not so much revenue-limited, but they are most certainly limited in engineering resources and rig availability. To the best of my knowledge there is no chance whatever that they (or Chevron, for that matter) could drill exploratory wells on more than five or ten of the leased tracts a year, no matter what effort they made.
You are probably correct. I haven’t reviewed lease terms so the MMs may make no such provisions at present. I know this this sort of thing was quite common for offshore tracts outside the US.
Sorry to go on for so long but it’s a large and rather involved subject. I’ll turn the floor over to someone else now.
Until such time as other methods of producing hydrogen become cheaper than steam reforming of natural gas, hydrogen will remain a fossil fuel. That we wish to be environementally correct is irrelevant if the economics are not there.
Isn’t hydrogen the most plentiful element in the Universe?
So if our current ways of extracting/converting other elements or combinations thereof result in a difficult struggle to obtain hydrogen are a reality, then why would a company like Honda even bother to make a hydrogen-powered car?
PR?
Second question first:
The reason for a hydrogen powered car is exactly because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is, for all intents and purposes, a limitless fuel source. Even after it is used in the hydrogen engine it is put back into the environment and can get used again.
Fist question last:
Yes it is the most abundant element. It is also very fond of linking up with any number of other elements to form molecules. Free hydrogen (just hydrogen by itself) is exceptionally rare on earth (the sun is almost all hydrogen but for obvious reasons getting it from there is a non-starter).
So, to get hydrogen we need to break it apart from other elements and that takes energy. We get some (not all) of the energy back when the hydrogen reforms with other elements in the engine providing power.
Yes it is a net energy deficit when the whole process is taken into account. The ideal is renewable energy sources (solar, geothermal, etc) are used to get the hydrogen. As an idealized situation it would be limitless energy with no adverse effects to the environment. Hence the attraction to it.
Achieving that however is another matter entirely. If we use coal for energy to get hydrogen then the environment is not really better off. Natural gas as a source is a fossil fuel…same issue.
Problem is the “dirty” ways are already established, relatively efficient and substantially cheaper than the clean ways.
Never mind
Well, I have a gas station down on the corner, and I know they have to swap the tanks now and again. It’s a hassle, but a known one.
If I were Honda, I’d subsidize the darn tank installs, along with whoever is the hydrogen dealer. I’d start in one location, like they’re doing, and spread, first in-state, then, maybe, down an interstate highway cross the country. I’d ally with other manufacturers who were starting in-state, and join their supply lines with mine. Maybe some government subsidy too.
At some point, we’ll reach a tipping point where dealers will want it enough to pay for it. And tra la.
Yeah, there’s issues there, but they’re not huge ones, just annoying ones.
And we still burn fossil fuels to create hydrogen. 
With that kind of logic we should just shut down the whole North Field.
The main thing I wonder about (after all this political wrangling) is… why not keep our stockpiles? If oil is just going to keep going up and up, why don’t we think of our reserves as future investment? If we wait another 5 years to start tapping it, it may be up to $6/gallon. That’s taking our own natural resources, and earning 50% interest in 5 years.
I’m sure I’m sounding like a selfish American, but we already know we have these reserves, why not let the Mullah’s in the Middle East pump themselves dry to support their extravagent lifestyle? It’s a finite resource, why should we use all of ours up when we really don’t have to?
RE: more drilling or nuclear energy. Why bother to plant crops? We are hungry now.
:rolleyes:
The reserves in the areas proposed for expansion of exploration activity are NOT known; they are estimates only, currently without a particularly large base of data that might confirm the amounts.
I think what’s really being argued here, and I tend to agree, is that the writing is on the wall as far as relatively cheap petroleum is concerned, and that much more could be done to attempt to shift some of the applications now using petroleum to other fuels and products. Exploit these remaining domestic sources now, or later; in the long run it probably doesn’t make that much of a difference either way.
A few points. First, we have to think of hydrogen only as a means to store energy - it’s not by itself an energy supply, because, as Whack-a-Mole pointed out, hydrogen is almost always found in forms other than pure hydrogen, and it takes energy to get that hydrogen into a form we want to use. It will always take more of some other form of primary energy (fossil, solar, nuclear) to make H2 than we will get out of it, so if it’s going to have any viability as a fuel to address either climate change or fuel prices, it has to be generated much more cheaply and using non-carbon primary energy than it currently is now.
Point 2:
Although reforming natural gas is currently the most economical way to make hydrogen, it’s not unlimited. According to the Energy Information Administration, the US had 211 trillion cubic ft of proven dry natural gas reserves in 2006, but also had 21.6 trillion cu ft of consumption. Although that seems to imply a very short remaining supply, it should be noted that in 1990, the US had 169 trillion cu ft of reserves, and 19 trillion cu ft of consumption. So far, we’ve been able to stay ahead of the race by putting more into the proven reserves category than we’ve consumed. That won’t last, though, and at some pont we will need to move toward other primary energy sources to generate H2.
Point 3:
Hydrogen is incredibly leaky, and it will get into the atmosphere. Although it’s not toxic, it does have implications for stratospheric ozone. There was a study a few years ago (2003, I think) that estimated that stratospheric ozone could be depleted by 20% if we went to a completely H2-driven transportation system, due to the chemistry of hydrogen and compounds formed by free hydrogen in the atmosphere.
Point 4:
I’ve also seen a couple of studies, about 10 years old now, that suggest that we may not physically have enough of the right types of metals needed to support the number of fuel cells that would be needed for wide-spread application of fuel cell vehicles. I don’t know whether fuel cell designs have changed so that would not be an issue, but the point is that there will need to be additional mining, refining, and etc. of relatively hard to produce metals to support any significant switch to hydrogen.
Bottom line - hydrogen is no panacea. It’s not simply a matter of getting governments or manufacturers to “see the light” - there are some real and serious physical limitations and problems that need to be addressed before there will be anything approaching a “hydrogen economy.”
That’s been my thought on this issue, too. And further, we may have a more desperate need for these reserves in the future (for strategic, military uses, e.g.). We shouldn’t waste our untapped resources trying to keep Hummers on the market a few months longer.
Not if we go nuclear.
Thanks for the knowledge, I didn’t realize some of the issues with hydrogen extraction.
shakes fist
Damn you hydrogen for being so duplicitous!
Is it in the realm of possibility to safely have a nuclear-powered car? I guess there would be too many ramifications of human access to fissable materiel and the risk of exposure in the event of an accident, but what if it could be sealed in a permanent container core that would be buried as nuclear waste once it’s energy was used up?
I’m talking about using nuclear power to produce the hydrogen or charge the batteries.
So yes, indirectly, it’s possible to have a safe nuclear-powered car.
You could always sink it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. But of course, then you have a Godzilla problem.
(There will always be unintended consequences of some sort. Tokyo will just have to adjust to having the occasional city destroyed.)