Hydrogen from a AAA cell?

I thought that was a Hi School science experiment with any old electrodes? And how much hydrogen will one AA cell produce anyway? :-?

In the eyes of journos and polis Professors must be right. lol

Making hydrogen from electricity, to power vehicles, is insane.

That was the point of my post.

It is at the moment. As we have to dig progressively deeper to get to fossi l carbon, it will get to be more expensive, and it will eventually be cheap er to generate electricity from sunlight. Using renewable energy to electro lyse water to hydrogen (and oxygen) will then make more sense.

The press release is English-language science journalism at it's worst - th e actual news is about a cheap nickel-iron electrode material that would ma ke large scale electrolysis a little cheaper and a lot more practicable tha n it is with platinum electrodes. Quite why the AAA cell came into it escap es me. It does dramatise the fact that over-voltage as the new electrode ma terial is relatively low but since all dry - zinc-carbon, Leclanche - batte ries generate the same voltage, the size of the battery shouldn't come into it.

So the hydrogen gas coming from a device powered by an AAA cell could be used to power a vehicle? And this comes to us straight from Stanford? They must know they come across as crackpots. Why are they publishing these silly stories?

Jeroen Belleman

The article IMPLIES you could get hydrogen from this process using an AAA cell, extrapolating that the great unwashed would think that amount of hydrogen would power their car :-@ :-@

Yawn. Electrolysis has been done many times and for ages. Claim: "Splitting water to make hydrogen requires no fossil fuels and emits no greenhouse gases." All by itself, true, BUT what about the energy used to power the electrolysis? HOW was that electricity generated, stupid greenie?

Absolutely, that electricity had to be generated somehow, ain't no magic here.

Oh lord. Now I'm going to get calls from people wanting me to make something to power their house off of a AA battery.

So do it. Of course it'll need quite a lot of them.... ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The writer of course needs to be keelhauled, but a low cost electrode system with decent lifetime that needs less overvoltage to work is not a bad thing at all.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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ossil carbon, it will get to be more expensive, and it will eventually be c heaper to generate electricity from sunlight. Using renewable energy to ele ctrolyse water to hydrogen (and oxygen) will then make more sense.

- the actual news is about a cheap nickel-iron electrode material that woul d make large scale electrolysis a little cheaper and a lot more practicabl e than it is with platinum electrodes. Quite why the AAA cell came into it escapes me. It does dramatise the fact that over-voltage as the new electr ode material is relatively low but since all dry - zinc-carbon, Leclanche - batteries generate the same voltage, the size of the battery shouldn't co me into it.

cell, extrapolating that the great unwashed would think that amount of hy drogen would power their car :-@ :-@

The article explicitly states that you can generate hydrogen with an AAA ce ll hooked up to the new electrodes - that's rather more emphatic than imply ing it.

It doesn't say how much hydrogen you can get from an AAA cell, but even the great unwashed aren't going to be silly enough to think that an AAA cell s tores enough energy to power a car for more than a very brief instant. Nor would even an English-language science journalist, but sub-editors have bee n known to shorten such articles rather severely.

I think it is very unlikely that it would ever make sense to use sunlight to generate electricity, and use that to split water to get hydrogen for later use in fuel cells. There are too many inefficiencies, too many difficulties with storage, and too many better ways to achieve a similar effect.

To go from sunlight to portable fuel, algaes and genetically modified bacteria to produce ethanol (or at least sugar) directly are the most promising direction at the moment. This gives you a simple and easily portable fuel with high energy density, high compatibility with existing usage (i.e., car engines), and can be used in fuel cells. Ethanol has many advantages over hydrogen here.

And if you want to use electricity to produce your hydrogen (or to use directly for charging batteries), then atomic power is a better choice in many cases - it's the only technology that gives reliable continuous power generation with a high enough power-to-area ratio to compete with fossil fuels.

ml

emits no greenhouse gases."

electrolysis?

Intelligent greenies know that electricity can be generated renewably. Doin g that right now ends up with you paying roughly twice as much per kilowatt hour than you would if you got it by burning fossil carbon, but the just r amping up renewable power consumption until it could take over the bulk of our energy generation can be expected to halve the price.

A factor of ten increase in manufacturing capacity usually halves the unit price of the product being made. We've seen this happen a couple of times a lready in the renewable energy market and there's room for it to happen aga in.

The cheapest renewable energy generators - wind and solar photo-voltaic - c an't supply power on windless days and in the middle of the night respectiv ely - and electrolytic hydrogen is one of the ways in which energy could be stored until it was needed.

The local studies on renewable power are more fond of concentrated solar th ermal plants - where energy is stored by heating molten salts during the da y and extracted overnight by raising steam for steam-turbine driven generat ors - but the capital cost per kilowatt of generating capacity is higher th an for wind or for photovoltaic solar cells. This approach does have the ad vantage that there are working prototypes around, and nobody starts talking about the Hindenburg.

Mixtures of hydrogen and air are inflammable over a wide range of concentra tions, and capable of explosive detonation over most of them, so the safety wonks get nervous about storing lots of energy as hydrogen gas or as liqui d hydrogen (which is more compact, even if the energy density it offers is appreciably poorer than liquid hydrocarbons).

I'm still waiting for the bacteria that generates hydrogen as a waste product, in useful quantities. Mikek

So you make a black box, paint it green, and sell it for $1,000 a pop, all sales final, no refunds, no returns.

---"My car positively GLOWS!"

A few billion years ago, a bug generating *oxygen* as a waste product got lose. That led to what was probably the greatest pollution of all times. But eventually, life adapted to the now oxidizing atmosphere and it still thrives. I wonder what your bacteria might do if it gets lose. ;-)

Jeroen Belleman

fuel-082014.html

"Principal funding was provided by the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) and the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford and by the U.S. Department of Energy."

Let's drill a little deeper to

GCEP Facts and Figures at a Glance Project Status

$176M funding allocated to GCEP 82 Full-term research programs 35 Exploratory research activities 40 Institutions worldwide 18 Stanford departments 186 Investigators Over 700 graduate and post-doctoral students 39 patent applications, eight patents issued Over 600 papers in leading journals and 893 presentations at conferences

Professor Dia needs a new Audi and somebody's gotta pay