RE: Hydrogen as SCAM?

From: Gary Miller (garymiller@starband.net)
Date: Fri Jan 31 2003 - 12:14:12 MST


>> Moreover, wind farms are incredibly land intensive. Three newly
proposed wind farms in West Virginia would occupy 30 to 40 square miles
but would produce slightly less electricity than a new 265 MW gas-fired
combined-cycle generating plant, which would occupy a few acres. Sallie
Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, estimates,
using very conservative assumptions, that producing enough hydrogen with
wind power to replace just one-third of the vehicles on the road today
would require 210,000 square miles. In reality, that number would likely
be much higher.>>

 
Couldn't these be built in the desert where the land has limited use for
anything else?
 
Couldn't solar arrays be place between the wind mills to increase the
energy output per acre?
 
Even geothermal could be colocated in the same area.
 
All these forms of energy generation could use much of the same
infrastructure.
 
Plants farther away on the power grid near plentiful water could
generate the hydrogen.
 
Also isn't the oxygen produced as a byproduct by the process also useful
in other forms of energy production such as the incineration of waste
at high temperature?
 
Colocation of multiple forms of power generation should reduce the cost
of each!
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: owner-extropians@extropy.org [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]
On Behalf Of Spudboy100@aol.com
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 11:54 AM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Hydrogen as SCAM?

http://nationalreview.com/comment/comment-georgia013103.asp

<<The "hydrogen economy" has been promoted for years by environmental
activists and alternative-energy gurus like Amory Lovins. But hydrogen
is not a source of energy, something which hydrogen advocates either
don't understand or refuse to acknowledge. Since hydrogen does not exist
in geological reservoirs it must be extracted from fossil-fuel
feedstocks or water. The process of extracting hydrogen uses energy,
which means that using hydrogen is less efficient that burning fossil
fuels. And if you're worried about global warming you certainly don't
want to go that route. As a recent energy-technology review in Science
magazine pointed out last November, "Per unit of heat generated, more
CO2 is produced by making H2 [hydrogen] from fossil fuel than by burning
the fossil fuel directly." >>



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