Recent content by melch

JNJ: Nuclear is very clean, but it is only safe under rigorous conditions so its not suitable everywhere. There are still the issues of radioactivity that lasts millions of years and the limited availability of nuclear fuel. Plus people hate nuclear. My front window looks out on Shoreham, which...

Borek: The only point to creating methane is the ready infrastructure for natural gas. You can ship it cheaply, use it in ready made appliances, buy Natural Gas if your supply of manufactured methane is inadequate. If we solved this problem, there would be a funding source for clean energy...

You may be correct, but 1) hydrogen cannot be shipped through natural gas pipelines, 2) there are 1800km of natural gas pipelines in most counties; but only a few hundred km of hydrogen pipelines in the whole US. I expect that a significant power source would take hundreds of square miles. As...

OK, Apparently I've found a bunch of engineers and the like here. The science is not the issue, the financial and political resistance to change are (what did I expect?). "My" method, which is the SI cycle and some other variants, should eventually be half as expensive as producing natural gas...

Thanks. Theoretically, the process used to separate the hydrogen out of water operates at 40% efficiency. reduces that by 1/3, giving 26% efficiency. If using free energy, then 26% should be OK, but there will be a major reduction in cost when the 1) capital for converting to methane is no...

No, Once converted to methane, it would be used as Natural Gas. Otherwise there is no realistic way to move the hydrogen and no efficient market to sell it. This has already started to change, but there is still little incentive and much risk. Losing the risk is the goal of this strategy.

This can be a very negative board. Wouldn't it work better, if in the brainstorming phase, if we focussed on creating ideas and only offered objections when the original poster was asking for that kind of feedback. There is enough negativity in experimental results that speculative...

J: If you had the energy where you needed it, why make hydrogen? The point is to store the energy in the cleanest possible portable format. Hydrogen could be made at James Bay and piped, without attenuation, to Ottawa. Cows backsides don't solve the problem either. Although there was a movie...

View hydrogen as a way to store energy. If you have the energy, then you can separate hydrogen from water to make the energy portable. One big point of resistance to clean energy is that the abundant wind, solar and hydraulic sources are often far from the places where they are used. Thus the...

Simple: Hydrogen cannot be shipped via natural gas pipelines without destroying the pipelines. Methane, the payload component of natural gas can be. From a game theory viewpoint, you create high risk if you either build the infrastructure without building the production facilities or...

Looking for ideas that allow me to create Methane ( CH4 ) from gaseous hydrogen. This requires bonding one carbon atom to four hydrogen atoms, which should be simple enough, but there needs to be a minimum explosive danger. I know there are appliances to go the other way, but don't have the...

The solution is not political, its physical. The secret is to be able to store and transport existing clean energy (Solar, Wind, Hydroelectric, etc.) in a sustainable format. Not particularly difficult; the same problem arises out of the breeder reactor program that is supposed to come on-line...