If you knew your house was going to collapse at a predetermined time if you did not change your habits, would you continue with what you were doing or change? This is the question we must ask ourselves. We call Earth home, yet we continue to help in its eminent destruction. We as humans must be conscious of our ways and change for the better of our planet. Gasoline powered vehicles are on the decline. Hydrogen is on its way to remove gasoline as the world’s fuel. Hydrogen powered cars are rising in popularity for many reasons such as low emissions and efficiency, but there are major obstacles in the way. Hydrogen as a fuel is the change needed to save the world from global warming. One of the leading contributors to the destruction of …show more content…
The current passes through the water and as it does, a chemical reaction takes place. Everyday water turns into its natural elements: hydrogen and oxygen. The beauty of electrolysis is that any form of electricity can be used, including renewable energy like wind and solar. Through this process we can extract hydrogen gas from water only to be reunited with oxygen and form water once more. With the use of renewable energy and the process of electrolysis, we can have a virtually never-ending supply of fuel for the future. The next big question is what will power electrolysis. Many scientists are leaning towards wind power. There are several ways in which the power can reach the electrolyzing plants. The first option would be to have the electrolyzing station at the base of the wind turbines. This would provide a sufficient amount of hydrogen, and the price would be anywhere from $5.55/kg to $2.27/kg. The second option would be to have several turbines set up and remotely send power to the electrolyzing plant. This way will allow the station to run extremely efficiently. The station would only produce hydrogen if the wind was blowing. The fact that several wind turbines are set up in various locations makes the chance of the wind blowing on at least one turbine relatively high. This in turn will bring the prices down to around $4.03/kg to $2.33/kg (Levene, Kroposki, and Sverdrup). Steam reforming is the number one producer of hydrogen to date. The United
This source mainly concentrates on the use of hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative to the United States dependency on foreign oil. It elaborates on the negatives of our countries reliance upon external sources for the vast majority of our power production needs, and suggests that hydrogen fuel cells are the answer to a sustainable energy future. The author is a writer for CQ Researcher who concentrates on energy, environmental, and defense issues. While the article is mainly geared toward individuals interested in the automotive industry and the applications of hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, it does an excellent job of contrasting oil based
Lo addresses further alternative, aside from hydrogen, more specifically, electrified rail. Pointing out the rising costs of electrifying rail infrastructure stands as of 2003 at $2 Million per mile, ballooning to over $10 Million per mile in present day (Lo, 2013). By taking a hard approach on the arguments for all other options rather than hydrogen, the author captures a sense of growing question in the direction of why else might this technology not yet in use.
Proponents of a world-scale hydrogen economy argue that hydrogen can be an environmentally cleaner source of energy to end-users, particularly in transportation applications, without the release of pollutants like particulate matter and carbon dioxide. However hydrogen continues to have technical obstacles associated with it, including storage issues, due to the fact that hydrogen has a high energy density by weight, but has a low energy density by volume when not highly compressed or liquefied.
Instead, if you use that electricity to split water, separate the hydrogen with extreme purity, pressurize it to crazy levels (or, even worse, liquefy), transfer it to a giant (even in liquid form) hydrogen storage tank in the car and then recombine it with oxygen to generate electricity, you would be lucky to get ~20% efficiency. Expensive, complex, bulky and super inefficient. It loses on every dimension.” Musk said in an email exchange with Tim Urban (Urban). Now on to gas engines they have over 200 parts to an electric engine’s 10.
Even though hydrogen as a fuel seems to answer every problem we want it to; it also has setbacks. Although we have the technology now to bring us an endless supply of hydrogen fuel we do not have the storage or infrastructure capabilities for it. “Hydrogen
As you go throughout your day, you use energy many times. Turning on the lights, using the toaster, taking the bus to school, all examples of using energy. Slowly, the fossil fuels that we are burning to get this energy are harming the environment. Hydrogen energy and biofuels would bring many benefits to Long Beach,
The Hydrogen Fuel Cell could revolutionize the world. This ingenious technology, which creates electricity from the chemical reactions of hydrogen and oxygen has, in its 150-year history, passed many of the critical tests along the path from invention to innovation. Recent developments in fuel cell technology and concurrent developments within the energy and automotive industries have brought the world to brink of the fuel cell age and the hydrogen economy.
At this point in time, hydrogen fuel is not used for much else besides in spacecraft, but that is because it’s hard to come by on Earth. If it was to be sent from the colonized moon in large quantities, companies would certainly pay for it as it is very effective and efficient.
It derives energy from spinning water turbines. Hydroelectric power is a low-cost, renewable, air pollution-free energy source. Unfortunately there is not much room for this source left in the US and building large dams, flooding valuable river valleys, and eliminating free-flowing rivers are the negative externalities of this alternative. Electrolysis of water could be used to convert biomass (plants or plant-based materials) into methane or electricity to generate hydrogen gas. Current technology with little improvement could lead to these fuels being used more abundantly. Moreover, the storage, use, and transportation of these fuels would be
In the story, “A Costly Treasure” a boy pursues an underwater treasure and faces a dangerous obstacle. The figurative language in the contributes to the tension in the story. For example, Personification, Similes, and Alliteration all contribute to the tension in the story.
Recent years have shown an increasingly large need for a practical renewable energy source for such reasons as diminishing fossil fuels and increases in greenhouse gasses. Hydrogen appears to be a way out of this gasoline-dug hole, or at least, a way out in the future. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are being engineered as we speak as the technologies to refuel them cleanly are being proposed. Unfortunately, most of the technologies associated with hydrogen are still in the prototype/pre-production stages and require better enhancements before becoming mainstream. This paper assesses the practicality of hydrogen power in cars both now and in the future while explicating the actual process of how a
For the past three decades Oil dominates the agenda of political discussion. With scares over price volatility, sizes of reserves, international imports and least of which are the environmental impacts due to carbon dioxide and other emissions. Various speculations and educated guesses place our total depletion of crude oil within the next 50 years and there is a general consensus between environmentalists that we steer toward a hydrogen transportation system given the projected work and nonexistent carbon dioxide emissions (Environmental Technologies class lecture, Santa Clara University). However many barriers stand in the way of attaining such a goal, most of which pertaining
E. Testa, C. Giammusso, M. Bruno and P. Maggiore, "Analysis of environmental benefits resulting from use of hydrogen," Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, vol. 16, pp. 875-890, 2013.
On a volumetric basis, the energy density of hydrogen is very low under ambient conditions. This presents greater transportation and storage hurdles than for liquid fuels. Storage systems being developed include compressed hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, and physical or chemical bonding between hydrogen and a storage material (for example, metal hydrides).The ability to create hydrogen from a variety of resources and its
In order to understand the why behind the need to change from fossil fuels to hydrogen power, it is necessary to understand what that power is and how it works. Hydrogen is the most abundant and simplest element on earth. It is most commonly found as part of water. In its pure gaseous form it is extremely light, but when ignited in this state releases a large amount of energy in an explosion. In this violent reaction the hydrogen combines with free oxygen molecules in the atmosphere and creates water vapor. This is similar to the way gasoline is combined with air and ignited in an internal combustion engine in the cars used today and like with gasoline, the combustion of hydrogen has risks. In addition to the risk, some of the energy released in the reaction is lost in the form of sound and heat. As an alternative to burning, these same gases can be combined with the use of catalysts to extract the free electrons produced as liquid water is formed(Popovici and Hoble Dorel). Using cables connected to a fuel cell such as this, those electrons go through a circuit, generating electricity. This is more efficient than combustion because less energy is wasted in the form of sound and heat. Going further, greater efficiency for this reaction can be had the lower the temperature it is allowed to take place at, with 83% power at 25◦C(77◦ F)(Popovici and Hoble Dorel). As fuel cells are created with better heat management and