Tech Won't Save Us

[K-Dog]

Meanwhile True Believers flock to the 'Alt Propulsion Engineering Conference' (APEC), as no self-respecting conference or scientific paper will accept such wishful claims.

The after party could be freaky.

[RE]

Looks like the competition for ICE Hydrogen as the power source savior is heating up.  This is actually the 3rd different design I have seen reported.  The article also says the engine can burn either hydrogen or gas, whichever is available.  That's a new claim.

IF enough solar/wind/hydro/geothermal/tidal/nuke power is brought online, even without full grid connection and IF all the infrastructure for clean hydrogen production, storage and distribution is built,  this would enable our current level of technological lifestyle to go on.  Hydrogen packs enough energy to run the big fast SUVs, the Jet planes and the container ships.  It can heat all the homes and use the same NG pipelines currently in existence.  About the only problem it doesn't solve is all the juice necessary for the AI and Data Centers, but if they have their own dedicated generators that run on hydrogen, it solves that problem too.

The main problems I see are with the economics, the resources to build all the infrastructure and the time available to get all this done.  The technology though is straightforward and not sci-fi hopium so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/new-massive-hydrogen-engine/1333/

This is the new massive hydrogen engine: 3-liter internal combustion engine for more than just cars

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[RE]

Yet ANOTHER ICE design for hydrogen from AVL, an Austrian auto tech company.  Interesting how all these companies are coming forward at the same time with their designs.  Obviously, they have all been working on them for a while, one of them (I think BMW) was ready to put it into production and announced it, then everybody else comes flying out from behind the cloak & dagger world of the design boards of industrial manufacturers to capitalize on the hype and not get left behind as Venture Capitalists start sprinkling out cash for further development of their favorite model.  BMW being one of the biggest and arguably technologically the best automotive engineering companies in the world doesn't need money from venture capitalists, but I'm sure AVL could use some extra Euros to try and compete with them.

In AVLs case they're talking 400HP as opposed to around 150 HP in the last one, which puts it right up there with the Muscle Cars of the 1960s like the legendary Oldsmobile 442.



Nobody fucking needs 442 HP for a car to drive to work or go shopping or even a vacation, the only reason for this kind of power in an engine is either for a racing car or for a semi that has to pull 20 ton loads.  That is usually done with diesel engines which are big, heavy and very robust because there is a lot of strain on all the parts of the engine and they have to last about 1M miles of use to get your money's worth out of them.  Reading between the lines a bit, AVLs engine is lightweight and uses aluminum and titanium instead of steel, so how well this engine would stand up to dragging 20 tons of beer over the Rocky mountains every day from the Coors bottling plant is an open question.  The article speculates its use in motor racing, but unless there is a consumer application also, auto racing by itself doesn't justify tooling up to build these engines.

The big question therefore is the economic one, how much will one of these engines COST when mass produced for a consumer level car, presumably at a somewhat scaled down HP rating?  All of the designs sound significantly more complex than a standard ICE gas model, and even more still than a diesel which doesn't even need spark plugs.  More strokes, higher compression ratio, higher temperatures, computer control of fuel injection,  plus having to store the fuel as a compressed gas all will drive the price tag up pretty high I imagine.  If you consider how long it has taken them to bring EVs to market at a semi-affordable price, it's hard to imagine that say even BMW could have a consumer level car rolling off the production line in Stuttgart in less than a decade.  They're also not going to start building them until the green hydrogen is being produced in greater volume at a lower price, which also will take a few more years to occur.  Timing is a big issue here, as well as in which direction the development money and the engineers are directed by the money men.  So much money and time has already been spent developing EVs as the solution to the transportation problem that they're not going to abandon that idea, which means the money and brainpower wil be divided between the two methods, which while not mutually exclusive do require differentt types of infrastructure and supply chains be developed.

So, bottom line here is that although technically Hydrogen powered ICE vehicles provide a plausible solution to maintaining the transportation systems of our modern techno-civilization without carbon and in a renewable fashion, practically it doesn't seem likely to succeed.  Just have to see how it develops though.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/400-hp-hydrogen-engine-water/1118/

The latest 400 hp water engine: better than all hydrogen and the end of electricity

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[K-Dog]

Although technically Hydrogen powered ICE vehicles provide a plausible solution to maintaining the transportation systems of our modern techno-civilization without carbon and in a renewable fashion, practically it doesn't seem likely to succeed.

Just like an electric car.  Take a water car and park it on the black asphalt of an out of business mini-mall.  Draw a chalk line around it.  Park a Tesla next to it and do the same thing.  You have just drawn a circle that defines zero emissions for both cars.  Hell draw one big circle around both of them. 

Now bow to the north, south, east, and west chanting.  Carbon free cars.  Do a tap dance.  Sing a happy song.

Enjoy yourself, and be like the half million Tesla fools who think they are saving the planet.  But do not think too deeply about this.  If you do you might harsh your mellow.  Do not think that drawing circles on a sphere enclose two areas not one.  The area inside the circle is finite.  And it is carbon free.  The area outside the circle is also finite.  That area is the rest of the planet, and no more than that.  That area is not carbon free.  That area has to supply the hydrogen.

As of 2022, more than 95% of global hydrogen production is sourced from fossil gas and coal.  Considering energy losses converting fossil fuels into hydrogen, a water car may wind up being the dirtiest car of all.

Where are you going to get the hydrogen.


You might as well be walking on the sun. 

'So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out
'Allow, if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive
'And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow
'But if the offer's shunned
'You might as well be walkin on the sun

'You might as well be driving a fossil car

[RE]

Where are you going to get the hydrogen.

The idea is to source it all by hydrolyzing water utilizing electricity sourced from Wind, Hydro yadda yadda.  Of course as of right now, only about 5% of hydrogen is sourced that way, it's currently too expensive.  The projection is that as more renewables are built, the cost of this electricity will drop and the carbon free hydrogen will be competitively priced.  Given they probably can't hook up all the Solar farms to the grid, they might as well use the juice to make hydrogen.



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[K-Dog]

The projection is that as more renewables are built, the cost of this electricity will drop and the carbon free hydrogen will be competitively priced.

Yes, if you build it they will come.

Only in your dreams.  You can have a whole field of dreams.  And that is all you will have.

If their were any truth to 'build it and they will come' we would have ten thousand members by now.  We do not.  In America there are many delusions to choose from.

Pick one and you will be fine.  But you have to stick to it. If you don't you might see more than you will like.

Competitively priced.  How is 'the market' going to do that in a world of diminishing resources and ever more people? 

The American system is a system where all decisions are made by piles of money.  This means nobody is in charge to set a direction.  But never mind that, I just realized a bigger flaw.

In the American system competitively priced hydrogen would have to be done efficiently, and the only way this can be done, if it can be done, is by an entity which builds billion dollar factories.  Any plant that produces 'cheap' hydrogen in America can not be a mom and pop operation, or be an operatione owned by the commons.  Hydrogen will come from a monopoly supplier, and there will be no market to make the price competitive.  We got the Musk.  We got the Bezos.  We got the Gates.  A fucking trifecta.

Who will be the hydrogen billionaire.  I can hardly wait.

[RE]

Yes, if you build it they will come.

Only in your dreams.  You can have a whole field of dreams.  And that is all you will have.  If their were any truth to 'build it and they will come' we would have ten thousand members by now.  We do not.  In America there are many delusions to choose from.

Indeed, but of the plethora of delusions out there, unlike Fusion power or 1000s of thorium salt micro nukes or drilling 5 kilometer deep wells to heat water through geothermal energy, this delusion is actually plausible.  The tech is already proven, the solar and wind farms are being built and hydrogen is portable enough and packs enough energy into tanks that will fit on cars and planes to run their engines.  It doesn't have huge environmental issues with mining or battery manufacture, and the only gas it expels after combustion is water vapor.  You can't get any cleaner.

Do I expect it to be built up to the scale necessary to replace FFs in the time left before those supplies become uneconomic to keep being extracted or we have so much climate related problems with food production that social breakdown will collapse the system first?  No, probably not.  However, unlike all the other delusions I read about every day since every scientist and engineer out there if fishing for a solution, I find this one to be the most plausible.  Plausibility doesn't make it economic though, and they have a long way to go to demonstrate that before they could even begin to try and scale it up as a civilization wide solution. #1 on that hit parade is cutting the current cost of carbon free hydrgen production about in half, then producing a prototype car that would sell at say $30K or so.  We'll see if they even get that far before SHTF Day arrives.

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[K-Dog]

Simon Michaux has talked about burning iron powder.

My father talked about using powdered iron to power a car fifty years ago.  He knew powdered iron has high energy potential by volume.  My father made it clear to me there is a difference between an energy source and a transport mechanism.  At least nine of ten people do not know there is a difference.  I am being kind.

Using hydrogen in airplanes is just plain nuts.  The tanks to hold the hydrogen take up most of the interior space.  Every hydrogen powered airplane would be equal to a mini nuke, and they would explode.  How are you going to get people to fly on flying bombs?  There is an advantage here regarding car accidents at intersections.  The explosion from a crash will be strong enough to clear the intersection.

If the crater is not too deep cars will be able to use the intersection right away.  They will not need police and tow trucks to clear wreckage.  The wreckage clears from the intersection immediately from the blast, and visibility is improved since everything next to the intersection is taken out as well.  Buildings people plants dogs, everything.  But the explosion is clean.  No toxic residue except from what gets destroyed.   I have to admit hydrogen has potential positive benefits.

But regardless of positive benefits, hydrogen is only a transport mechanism.  Hydrogen is not a source of energy.  You can't mine hydrogen.  If you could mine hydrogen it would be a source of energy.  One way or another all hydrogen must be produced, and that always takes more energy than you get from using the hydrogen.

[RE]

But regardless of positive benefits, hydrogen is only a transport mechanism.  Hydrogen is not a source of energy.  You can't mine hydrogen.  If you could mine hydrogen it would be a source of energy.  One way or another all hydrogen must be produced, and that always takes more energy than you get from using the hydrogen.

Iron powder is also just a transport mechanism.  You can't mine it, it's not found in ore in reduced form. It's already been oxidized.  You have to put energy in by smelting the iron to get it as an element, then gring it to a powder.  When you oxidize the powder, you get the energy back from the smelting process.  There is some loss of course.

The oxidized form Hydrogen is found in nature is Water, the chemical name for it is Hydrogen Hydroxide.  When you reduce it, yu get Hydrogen and Oxygen in their elemental form.  Burn the hydrogen in the presence of oxygen, you get the energy back you put in to reduce it, just like with using iron.

Fossil Fuels are also a transport mechanism, using Carbon as the element that goes through the oxidation-reduction process.  The difference is with FFs the reduction was done over millions of years under high pressure and heat underground after the life process which left it in a partially reduced state.  You oxidize it when you burn it to get CO².  It's not a source of energy either, that came from the Sun and the geological processes.

Iron isn't good as a transport fuel because both as an element and combined with oxygen it's a solid.  You need your fuel to be a gas after the combustion in order to do work in a combustion engine.  The gas expands and pushes he pistons.  Or in the case of a Jet engine, the expanding gas directly powers the vehicle.

All planes are flying bombs, jet fuel is highly volatile and if a fuel line ruptures it goes BOOM.  If hydrogen escapes its pressurized containment system, it goes boom also.  Same with natural gas.  Cars run on NG or H that get in accidents will probably go boom too.  Clearly the engineers building these devices believe they can make them safe and reliable enough not to go boom too often.  On a society level, we're willing to accept a certain percentage of death from high speed travel, car accidents kill more people every year than heart disease or cancer.  Air travel is pretty safe overall by comparison.

According to the articles I have read thus far, they seem to suggest enough hydrogen fuel can be carried aboard a plane to fly it the necessary distances.  Running a prop engine plane they definitely could.  Range might not be quite as much as FFs, but I think the NY-London route would be feasible.  Non-stop NY-Beijing or London-Sydney is probably out.

Anyhow, it's way cleaner overall than batteries and electricity, and for propulsion works better too.  So I still consider it plausible.

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[K-Dog]

Clearly the engineers building these devices believe they can make them safe and reliable enough not to go boom too often.

Believe it yes, but engineers are only told what to do.  Some engineers are paid to make the biggest boom possible.  Generally engineers have a personality that will consider destroying a village in order to save it.  It is not a matter of moral deficiency.  It comes from considering too many things.  If one of the many things considered is socially sanctioned nonsense an engineer can be bewitched by technology to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Techno-narcissism says the problems of hydrogen flight can be solved.  I am not a techno-narcissist.  Cryogenic tanks to hold liquid hydrogen that size are not light.  To make them light enough to fly safety has to be traded away.  A compromise will not be safe.

On a mass basis, hydrogen has quite a high energy density, almost 3 times that of gasoline. However, on a volume basis, although liquid hydrogen has a higher energy content than compressed hydrogen, it is still much lower than most of traditional fossil fuels.  It works out to be three to one in the other direction.



History will rhyme.

Don't try this at home.  You have heard this before.  Seriously.

The Dog Mini Nuke:

(to understand this you should watch the second video)

A pipe with a shutter at the end connects to an extension of pipe which is capped with a parabolic mirror.  A button of fusible material is suspended at the focus of this parabolic mirror.  A lithium micro-sphere held by spider web.  The other end of the pipe has a transparent window made of highly transparent quartz which is kept cool by a jet of chilled dry air.  You will know why in a minute. 

The front of the pipe is filled with the optimal three to one ratio of hydrogen to oxygen.  the shutter is closed.  the other end of the pipe with the polished mirror is filled with argon.

Three two one fire. 

The shutter is rapidly withdrawn.  The argon has no time to mix with the hydrogen oxygen mixture which is ignited by multiple sparks around the periphery of the transparent window when the shutter is ninety percent open.  This starts a shock wave which travels through the explosive mixture at supersonic speed.  The argon gas is at 20 atmospheres like the explosive mixture is, but there is no compression of the argon by the explosion because the shock wave is supersonic.

The shock wave hits the argon and propagates through the tube producing intense light.  The entire tube is reflective and light streams out the transparent window, while it streams into the parabolic mirror.  The fusible material heats to fusion temperatures.  The nuclear fusion pulse is short.  The target blows itself up, but an order of magnitude of energy is released and a second shock wave moves through the argon gas in the opposite direction.  Now the light coming through the quartz window is so intense that channels of chilled air have to streamed against it to keep it cool.  However everything is designed to survive.

Vacuum valves are opened as the shutter is closed.  A new target swings to the focus point while the tube is pressurized with gas for another cycle.  The tube is three feet wide and the length is chosen to give enough power to drive fusion, but not enough to destroy the equipment.  Spider web silk and lithium micro-spheres are the primary disposable.  The tube is built to recover residual energy of the hydrogen oxygen explosion.  I have another invention for this.  It uses a principle that is used on railroad tracks to slow trains down if they go too fast.  The end of the tube can lengthen to transfer energy from the chemical side of the explosion.  The fusion reaction is over before the end of the tube with the mirror moves to recover the hydrogen oxygen energy.  It is a two step process.  This is like harnessing the recoil of a gun after it fires a bullet.

Tubes are fired a hundred times an hour but the fusion energy released makes for a total energy release which equals tubes fired at an audible rate if only a hydrogen oxygen reaction is considered as the energy source.

The light leaving the window hits a target where the light energy turns to heat.  The heat is passed into aluminum tubes which boil water to drive steam turbines.  Light to heat is not hard.  Part of the produced electricity is used to split water in to hydrogen and oxygen to keep the power plant running on all cylinders.

But I am not a techno narcissist.  No I am not.

[RE]

Hydrogen in the Hindenberg wasn't compressed and wasn't used for fuel.  It was just there to provide lift.  It was an unfortunate accident resulting from very poor attention to the design and construction of that dirigible.  They should have never been abandoned.  They would have saved a shit load of energy and could be built as safe as airplanes. Much less pollution than container ships running on bunker fuel.

Far as the H on planes goes, unlike cars I think they would probably liquify it for use in jets.  Airports are big enough to have the liquification equipment and staff trained to do the fueling.  As a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.

Much like the Hindenberg, if one of the first planes they fly using H as a fuel blows up, the technology will die right away.  If they fly for a few years before one explodes, people will just accept the risk as they do now with planes.  Does it really matter if you die from the plane exploding instead of crashing into the ground?

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[K-Dog]

As a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.

You did not look at the fuel tanks in the jet schematic.

Another diagram in another publication that is embedded in a pdf show JP-8 Jet fuel volumetric power density is intermediate between gasoline and Diesel with it being slightly closer to diesel.  The same graph shows liquid hydrogen to be at a four to one volume ratio.

You know how light hydrogen is.  It is the lightest element.  'As a liquid, H would actually take up less room than FF tanks do.' is something that makes no sense.  The lighter weight means more room needed for the same energy.  A cubic meter of liquid hydrogen only weighs 70.85 kilograms.  A cubic meter of water weighs 1000 kilograms.

Pointing out that the Hindenburg only used a gas and not liquid hydrogen does not help your case.  Pointing out that they only used it for lift also does not help your case. At atmospheric pressure the hydrogen burn was as mild as it could be with heat and burning gas mostly going up and away.

The Hindenburg displaced a volume of approximately 200,000 cubic meters.  Air weighs 1.225 kg per cubic meter so the lift is 245,000 Kg.  The actual figure was 238,000 kilograms  Hydrogen gas weighs 0.090 Kg. per cubic meter, which is about 1/11th the weight of air.  Using the 245000 Kg figure and dividing it by ll gives 22,272 Kg of hydrogen.  Converted to a liquid that is 314 cubic meters of liquid hydrogen.

A Boeing 747 could fly 14,000 kilometers on that much power.  It turns out the Hindenberg had the explosive power of a intercontinental hydrogen powered jet with a full tank.  Exploded in the most gentle way possible.

Liquid spills are not as bad as I thought, but hydrogen is strange stuff.  Under the right conditions unpredictable things will make news.  The Hindenberg turns out to be a reasonable approximation of a Hydrogen powered jet aircraft accident.  I can say that because of the large quantities of liquid that would be spilled.  The 6000 gallon test in the guvmint film seems big, but a real spill would be larger.

[RE]

Well, by weight you get almost triple the KWh per kg of H (34) than for gas (12).  Weight is much more important than volume for flying.

By volume, for every liter of hydrogen (2.5 kWh) you get slightly less than quadruple the kWh in a liter of gas (9kWh).

A liter of gas weighs .74 kg. 4.5X more, 1L H weighs .16 kg abou

So you probably need about 2X as much room for your fuel tanks, but they'll weigh about half as much for equivalent energy.  That's not exact, I'm ballparking it.  You can work out the exact numbers if you like.

According to Google, most jets have their fuel tanks in the wings, but the tanks don't take up the whole wing.  I suspect you could get similar range with tanks added in the luggage compartment, and you would need less fuel because the total weight of the aircraft would be less.

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[K-Dog]

The challenger before the leaking flame of the solid booster torched a hole into the dewar.

Hydrogen has to be kept in a dewar flask.  Nasa knows about them.  They can explode.  The complexity of the tank will cancel out your fuel weight savings.

When NASA launched the first astronauts to the Moon.  Propellants for the Saturn V's second and third stages were liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. They were stored in 850,000 gallon spherical containers about 1,500 feet from the pad and I presume not next to each other.

Once every airport had a setup like that, an accident would only be a matter of time.

[RE]

Once every airport had a setup like that, an accident would only be a matter of time.

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. 



Since you're not going into space, you don't need the liquid oxygen, just the H.  Also, according to that graph, compressed H at 700 bar pressure has similar volume/mass to energy ratio as the liquid version, so you probably can get away with using that and stay away from the liquid.

Now granted one of these thing going boom at JFK would be a pretty big disaster, but not as big as an LNG carrier going boom as it's being filled in Maryland or offloaded in Belgium.  They are pumping millions of gallons of this supercooled liquid fuel every month these days and so far we haven't had a major boom yet.  Liquid H is closer to Absolute Zero, but the cooling, pumping and storage equipment is all the same.

As disasters go also, I'll take a planeload of stockbrokers being incinerated over a nuke meltdown at 3 Mile Island.  I mean really, mainly the dead people would be the passengers, only a few ground crew would likely be inside the blast radius.  If you're worried about being vaporized on takeoff, stick to sailboats. 

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