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Hydrogen? Meet Nitrogen.
Posted on Mon Apr 28 2008
Source: Katharine Sanderson, Hydrogen fuel goes liquid. News @ Nature.com, August 24. Photo by Jeffrey M. Vinocur. CommentsLet us know what you think! |
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Despite the hype, the hydrogen economy has always seemed a long way off because of the technical challenges of safely dealing with an explosive, compressed fuel. A researcher at Yale thinks he's figured out a way to get around that problem by putting hydrogen into an organic (i.e. carbon-based) liquid packed with nitrogen. A catalyst would separate out the hydrogen as it was needed for fuel, and the remaining liquid could be re-processed with more hydrogen. As a liquid fuel, the stuff could be distributed through the same facilities that currently sell gasoline.
Very good news. I hope, that the use of hydrogen as energy source is going to be much more wide spread, soon. And as this case had proved, nitrogen could be a very useful element, as well. Both elements are really present everywhere around us in vast quantities. Time is ready for new renewable, Eco-friendly energy sources.
people have been converting cars to run on hydrogen since the mid-60s. but elemental hydrogen is NOT an energy source - you have to PUT IN energy to make it, whether that energy is nuclear-, or coal-, or wind-generated. it's basically just an energy i-o-u, and not a solution to the question of sustainable power. wind, wave, solar, or nuclear are all energy sources that can be converted into hydrogen. the really bad news is that the most common, and economical, source for industrial hydrogen production is this stuff called methane, which puts us right back to burning good, old-fashioned fossil fuels, only much less directly (and hence, much less efficiently). converting methane to hydrogen leaves a bunch of waste carbon behind, and hydrogen just happens to be much trickier to store and transport (as in "hindenburg").
Please stop propagating the myth that hydrogen is dangerous. Hydrogen had nothing to do with the hindenburg disaster. I refer you to http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1052864.htm