Burning saltwater

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(etyler88 @ Nov 14 2007, 01:50 PM) [snapback]539672[/snapback]</div>

From that article:

So how much energy does it take for the radio waves to weaken the bond between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms? I suspect that it takes more energy than is produced by the small flash that the experiment produced.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(etyler88 @ Nov 14 2007, 04:50 PM) [snapback]539672[/snapback]</div>

Is this the future? I'm not sure what you mean by that question. It seems to be the past. As a matter of fact I believe this exact topic was discussed here on PriusChat months ago.

Is this real? Yes. If you separate the hydrogen atoms from molecules of water the hydrogen will burn in the presence of oxygen and produce only water as a by-product. Apparently if you use powerful enough radio waves focussed on the water, you can separate the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atoms in the water molecules.

Is this leaving out an important piece of information? Yes. You need to use energy to generate the radio waves. Burning the hydrogen releases energy that can be used for various purposes. However, the important piece of information is that you use much more energy to produce the radio waves than you release when you burn the hydrogen. It would have worked better to just use the original source of energy for the final purpose rather than first creating radio waves, so you can then create hydrogen, so that you can then create heat, so that you can use that heat to do something (like move a piston?)

 

On the other hand, you can then store this hydrogen for future use. Of course, there are more losses there, but stored energy is a good thing.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Nov 14 2007, 08:46 PM) [snapback]539778[/snapback]</div>

There's about an even chance that you could have stored the energy that was used to make the radio waves... And a much BETTER chance that the storage at that stage of the game would have been more efficient!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(darelldd @ Nov 14 2007, 09:19 PM) [snapback]539794[/snapback]</div>

Sure. You could store it in a battery or as a pile of coal. My point was that "firm" sources of power are worth a lot. Right now the only renewables that are firm are geothermal (which isn't really renewable, but close enough) and biomass (and its derivatives like landfill gas etc). All storage system incur a penalty. I don't know how well batteries will scale with utility scale power generation. I've read only a few blurbs about battery use. The most commonly talked about strategies are compressed air and pumped storage. Compressed air is pretty lossy, I don't know how it compares to pumped storage. These things are easy to implement, however, and are currently cheaper than batter storage I would assume. There are theoretical hydrogen storage techniques that are better. They're no where near ready yet, but they should be and are being explored. There's nothing wrong with hydrogen research. It advances a lot of basic science knowledge that will complement research in other areas, particularly renewables and material science. Darell, my sense is that you dislike hydrogen because you think that it is being used as a means of preserving the status quo (and rightly so). But there are many benefits to hydrogen research and I think that fuel cells will figure more and more into our energy solutions. Not in the transportation sector but in stationary power generation. As such, novel ways of producing hydrogen should be researched.