Do we have the technology yet to break down water into usable energy with the hydrogen?
July 20th, 2010 | 
Author: I have seen videos of cars running off of hydrogen all over the place and I once went to an event which had cars running off of hydrogen but is there any company out there taking water, separating it to oxygen and hydrogen and burning the hydrogen? And since its so easy, why can we just take ocean water with desalination, turn it in fresh water, convert it to oxygen and hydrogen and use the hydrogen since hydrogen emits zero pollution and the BTU’s is far greater than gasoline and Diesel?
Posted in Green Q&A | 
Tags: btu, cars, diesel, fresh water, gasoline, hydrogen, ocean water, oxygen, zero pollution
Yes but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do so. Take a look at the Sandia Labs CR5 project. It started as an attempt to find a more efficient way of extracting hydrogen from water. The conclusion was that it was possible to extract hydrogen more efficiently but the method could also be used to extract carbon monoxide from CO2. With both hydrogen and carbon monoxide, you can synthesize gasoline via the exothermic Fischer Tropsche reactions. Consequently, you could efficiently produce hydrogen with clean energy sources but you might as well just synthesize gasoline from those clean energy sources and achieve the same carbon neutral goals as hydrogen but without the storage and distribution problems and without having to manufacture replacement vehicles.
Some might say that the emissions aren’t as clean. But the emissions are still a net of zero as what’s emitted are just what the synthetic gasoline was originally made from.
Synthetic gasoline has another advantage. It’s possible to synthesize gasoline in a carbon negative way by using biomass to liquid technology with biochar carbon sequestration of the resulting charcoal byproduct of gasification/pyrolysis. This means that unlike carbon neutral hydrogen vehicles, continuing to use our existing gasoline vehicles but changing how we get our gasoline can result in the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere thereby undoing some of the damage that we have done. There’s poetic justice in having the owners of gas guzzling SUV’s essentially pay for correcting the problem that they created in the first place.
Note that hydrogen gas compressed at 2175 psi (150 bar) has 1/22 the energy of an equivalent volume of gasoline hence hydrogen effectively has far less BTU’s then gasoline or diesel since it’s volume that counts with automobiles. Hydrogen has more energy by weight but as it’s so much more voluminous the weight doesn’t matter and a few kilograms in weight savings isn’t going to make that much of a difference with an automobile.
The only reason why so many people believe hydrogen to be a good solution is because their only exposure to the science of hydrogen as a fuel has been the grade school electrolysis demonstration that we’ve all seen. Fact is that hydrogen is simply the simplest fuel and definitely isn’t the best for an automotive application.
It takes about as much energy to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen as you get out of burning hydrogen. Given that there are always losses in the process, overall it doesn’t really add anything to the amount of energy available.
Hydrogen is also a very small molecule, so difficult to store. The easiest way to store it is cryogenically, which adds a much higher level of complexity to storage.
Gasoline/diesel stores very easily at normal operatong temperatures, and has a very high amount of available energy.
It would be nice, wouldn’t it?
But it turns out that it takes more energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen than you get back by using them as fuel.
It is all a big scam.
The claims about it are unrealistic, and fabricated.
Have you ever thought why ‘heavy water’ is named that?, the raid on the distillation plant in Telemark in the second world war put paid to Hitlers chance of building an A bomb. There ye go, some clues for you. Enjoy finding the answer to your question.
Shennies,
Yes we have the technology.
No there is no company separating water and then burning the hydrogen because that produces ZERO energy. The amount of energy required to split water is the same amount of energy liberated when it burns.
We need energy to fuel cars. What you are describing does not produce energy, in fact it will consume waste substantial amounts of energy due to heat losses in the system
currently you can buy little kits for it but uts bull it takes more energy to do that then to simply use gas and it doesnt really help any because the process costs to much atm for it to do any good to the public
Everyone talks of Hydrogen by electrolysis. But be aware that Hydrogen is a common gas available in many refineries and fertilizer plants. Some of the Synthesis gas producers have more than the required Hydrogen and they just burn it in the reformers. Again as somebody mentioned Hydrogen is a light gas but it does not mean that there is no technology to store it. You can see Hydrogen being transported in "bullets" all the time and also it comes in cylinders for many industrial uses.
Secondly there is something known as a ‘catalyst’ which can reduce the energy requirement for reactions. The challenge is to find the correct catalyst. There was a news item recently that in some china university they had succeeded in using a right catalyst to break the hydrogen , Oxygen bond in water to produce Hydrogen. The energy required to do this comes form ordinary sunlight. Don’t you think t is amazing. Just don’t come to a conclusion everything is a scam or it is not possible. May be it is not possible at this point of time, but technology will definitely solve the problem in future. If electricity is made cheaper by going all out to nuclear power then electrolysis of water itself can be economical. Isn’t it?
1 takes energy to make hydrogen [free it]
2 hard to store and transport[
3 COST..even at 5 dollars a gallon plus gas is cheap…let me repeat,,gas is cheap…easy to get..yes easy…great supply system set up..relatively safe.