Researchers have investigated using electrolysis to split water into oxygen and hydrogen but today it costs ten times as much as natural gas, and is three times as expensive as gasoline.It has long been known that plants chemically split water with much greater efficiency than electrolysis as part of the photosynthesis process. The obstacle to finding out how this occurs has been our inability to study the process as it occurs. Just four days ago the journal Science published a report from researches at Imperial College London that begins to explain how plants do it:
[T]he splitting of water occurs at a catalytic centre that consists of four manganese atoms… three of the manganese atoms, a calcium atom and four oxygen atoms form a cube like structure, which brings stability to the catalytic centre. The forth and most reactive manganese atom is attached to one of the oxygen atoms of the cube. Together this arrangement gives strong hints about the water-splitting chemistry. "Our structure also reveals the position of key amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, which provide a details of how cofactors are recruited into the reaction centre."The researches used X-ray crystallography to study this activity at one hundred millionth of a centimeter. So when I hear pronouncements that "the age of oil is ending" I tend to yawn. The "age of stone" has ended too, and it wasn't for lack of rocks. Posted by Stephen Gordon at February 9, 2004 02:53 PM | TrackBack
Interesting, Stephen, but it won't help. Hydrogen is not an energy source. It's just a fuel.
Or something.
Sometimes I get really confused by the "technical stuff." ;-)
Posted by: Phil at February 9, 2004 08:33 PMWhen Goodstein said hydrogen is not a source of energy surely he meant that it is (with current technology) prohibitively expensive - the net energy expenditure problem.
No other interpretation makes any sense at all. If he is not completely stupid (and he's gone much too far in the academic world to be stupid), he's still guilty of loose and inexact language.
He must have been wearing a lobbyist hat rather than a lab coat.
Posted by: Stephen Gordon at February 10, 2004 07:51 AM>>He must have been wearing a lobbyist hat rather than a lab coat.
No doubt. I wonder how many IQ points you automatically lose when you put one of those on?
I remember reading the report of the President's Commission on the Challenger disaster (many years ago). At one point, the mission control folks were at an impasse as to whether they should launch. One of the engineers had a very clear idea of the risks.
His superior told him to take off his engineer hat for a minute and put on his management hat.
The rest is very tragic history.
Posted by: Phil at February 10, 2004 08:30 AMGuys-
WRT the fuel / energy source issue, I have to weigh in on the side of Goodstein on this one.
In the simplest sense, petroleum and other 'fossil fuels' are 'fossilized sunshine'. Which is to say that the energy bundled into their molecules came from biological processes driven, at the lowest trophic level, by photosynthesis. (Yes, undersea bugs use geothermal energy. This, in it's turn comes from radionucleides in the Earth's crust, mantle, and core. These radionucleides were produced in intense fusion reactions in ancient novae. Same goes for nuclear power plants and geothermal power.)
'Renewable' energy sources either depend on sunlight to move some working fluid (air in the case of wind, water in the case of dam-produced hydroelectic), or more direct extraction of gravitic attraction by large masses in motion (tidal).
Add to these the fact that Mother Nature doesn't provide the optimum blend of petrochemicals in each underground puddle. Therefore energy (and lots of technical labor) have to be expended to convert the 'bottom of the barrel' or 'natural gas' into gasoline, deisel, 'pure hydrogen' and other neat and useful products.
Bottom line, fuel is a means of storing energy produced by fusion energy in a conveniently storable and portable form. Energy, as the wild-haired professor said, may only be had by the conversion of matter and that only happens under certain extreme conditions.
(Talk to me offline about the time I spent in a refinery turning big molecules into little ones if you're interested in the gory details.)
-- El Jefe Grande
Posted by: El Jefe Grande at February 10, 2004 10:50 AMI see your point, Mike. Still, if one takes a slightly broader view, isn't hydrogen really just "fossilized Big Bang?"
Posted by: Phil at February 10, 2004 11:41 AMPhil -
I guess the fundamental distinction is whether you are playing with the electrons (ie. chemical storage of energy in the H-H bond, as in burning hydrogen with oxygen to, for instance, drive your car or fly your rocket) or you are dealing with the nucleons (protons and neutrons) and H + H fusion (or other, more exotic versions).
Basically, the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy applies: Mass/Energy may neither be created or destroyed, it may only change location or form. At that level of analysis you indeed have the 'fossilized Big bang'. But! (And this is a big But.) When discussing fuel cycles in a semi-enclosed system (Earth) and especially when discussing the deficit expenditure of stores of energy to drive contemporary activity at the expense of future availability of that store (simply put, using more energy to drive our economy than we capture from the sun in a given year) the fuel / energy source distinction is particularly relevant.
What those who study that distinction frequently fail to include in their models is the economic force of scarcity (or frustrated demand) and its effect on the pace of innovation in replacing a given store (or account) with a different one that, until now, has been inconveniently costly to tap. In other words, I have firm faith that BIG OIL will morph into BIG SOLAR and / or BIG FUSION as soon as the cost / benefit analysis drives the change.
-- EJG
Posted by: El Jefe Grande at February 10, 2004 12:23 PM