Oil refineries... (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Gatie]

If there is no more oil, what are you going to burn to make the electricity needed to extract the Hydrogen? Hydrogen is a substance that you have to put more energy into than you get back when you burn it. That means for every joule put into the extraction process (Energy in) you get a fraction of that joule back out when you burn it (Energy returned). Only when the cost of the original joule is free (or the cost of the hydrogen is more than the percentage lost over the cost of the original joule) will you turn a profit. Right now the oil companies turn a profit on a 17:1 EROI. How much will you have to charge for H2 to turn a profit with a EROI < 1:1? Answer - a heck of a lot more than it costs for energy in the first place (making H2 a poor "source" of energy). Put the cost of the original joule close to zero by using cheap, renewable sources (ala Iceland) and the use of Hydrogen becomes more financially (and environmentally) feasible.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Ajay, here's another interesting link for you to read. That explains why the hydrogen economy is a pipe dream.

I question the numbers in your paragraph that you keep going back to. I'm fairly certain that, though they use the same term "efficiency" in both their oil to gasoline production numbers and their whatever-to-hydrogen numbers, that they are comparing apples and oranges.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Yes, I believe they are saying that there is a net loss of about 9-27% in the refining of crude (i.e. you get 73-91 units of usable fuel(s) for each 100 units processed). That does not take into account the fact that each unit of refined crude supplies an exorbitant amount of energy compared to that which is spent (17:1 in fact). The figures in the efficiency of water->H2 example seem to compare the energy used to the energy produced (70% is about right for electrolyzers). This is a joule to joule comparision, not a gallon to gallon (or volume to volume) which tells us nothing without a comparision of how much energy the unit of volume of refined crude contains (which is a whole heck of a lot).

Sneaky way of crunching the numbers, and yes, it is apples to oranges.

Edited for my bad spelling

 

[mark alan]

You have to be trolling on this. Everybody on this board is patiently and repeatedly told you that it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you recover from the hydrogen. Every single engineer and scientist in the country will tell you the exact same thing. There is no way that you do not understand the points that have been made.

 

[CharlesD]

Oil is "free" energy in the sense that we don't have to make it. Obviously energy is expended to recover, transport and refine it, but we get more out of it than we put into the process, so it is an energy source.

If we could drill for hydrogen and we got H2 coming out of the ground, it too would be an energy source. Instead, however, we have to make hydrogen. We don't have to make oil.

Luckily hydrogen is easily made, but it still requires energy to do so. Imagine if we had to start with Hydrogen gas and some carbon and a some sulfur and made oil out of it and then used the oil in the same way we do now. Do you honestly think oil would still be an energy "source"? Its the same thing with hydrogen.

 

[mark alan]

Interesting op/ed piece on peak oil

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110006880

 

[Jeff Gatie]

(crickets)

 

[mark alan]

Is there anybody out there?

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Water? Those saying that water isn't an energy source obviously have never seen a dam. Not only is it an energy source, it is a reusable, sustainable and virtually unlimited energy source. However, turbines in vehicles aren't practical, even in BC where it rains all the time.

I'm not going to argue conversion losses, since I am not spending the time to factor in everything, but I can see Ajay's point that if there is no more oil, doing comparisons is pointless. Even if hydrogen creates a net loss, if you have no alternative, what else are you going to do? Energy will have to come from somewhere, otherwise our civilisation is over. With no oil, what power is available will will become outrageously expensive, and those areas that don't have a ready source will be driven back to the stone age.

I still have a hard time deriving a 75% net use from oil when the costs of exploration, drilling, cartage and refining are factored in, versus refining/extracting hydrogen from sources that require little to no cartage.

I think the oil companies want us to believe there are no alternatives, thereby continuing demand for their product at high prices. Those who come up with viable alternatives are either bought out or dead.

 

[Philip Hamm]

Quite a conspiracy you've concocted there. As I have written before in this thread, there has been exactly one new energy source discovered by humans in the last 150 or so years, nuclear. The laws of nature are more powerful than human ingenuity.

 

[RobertR]

Perhaps we should try to discuss viable alternatives. I agree with Philip that it's rather pointless to raise conspiracy theories.

 

[Mike Voigt]

Forget it, Ajay is a troller. His "arguments" remind me of simplistic "logic" statements "proving" that 1 = 0. It has about as much true information content.

He's on my ignore list after this particular load of nonsense.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Once again, energy does NOT "come from" hydrogen. Only after adding energy to seperate the H2 out of water or hydrocarbons can it be used to burn and produce energy (at less of an energy output than was put in). Hydrogen is not an energy source, although it may be an effective energy carrier if cheap, reusable, replenishable energy can be found from another source that will allow the net loss of energy in 2H20 -> 2H2 + O2 (or extraction from hydrocarbons) to be minimized.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Well, water would not need to be carted nearly as far as oil, it's not like we'd need to go to Iraq to get it, then freight it to a ship, over the Atlantic, and freight it again to a refinery, then to the consumer. Surely those costs aren't negligible.

Are there any viable alternatives to oil? From the sounds of it in this thread, there aren't, at least none that the public is aware of. The ones that make most sense to me are solar and wind power, but both of those require far better fuel cell storage than we have now. There is nuclear, but that is only going to work in the western world, since any other place can't be trusted with it (sarcasm on).

I'm sure that when oil is unobtainable, someone will come up with a solution. If not, well...

 

[Jeff Gatie]

The French were just awarded the rights to develop a joint effort fusion reactor. You want solar energy, what better way than to harness the true power of the sun?

 

[Nathan Eddy]

Ajay is not a troll. He has a point, and I agree with him, but I do think he has painted himself into a corner.

Many of you here are right: the cost of getting energy out of oil is less than the cost of getting energy out of water (hydrogen). I'll go even further: the cost of getting energy out of oil is less than the value of the energy gained in the process--while the cost of getting energy out of hydrogen is MORE than the value of the energy gained in the process. Did you hear that? I AGREE. (But wait, there's more.)

However, Ajay is also right that no form of energy conversion can escape entropy. There is alway a net energy loss. The ONLY reason oil is profitable despite entropy is because the sun and gravity supplied the initial energy (for "free") by growing the plants and then compressing them into oil [or however the hell oil was produced--you get my point; the details aren't important].

But the point many of you are missing is that if we can make an analogous use of virtually renewable energy sources--like the sun, wind, gravity--then Ajay's point is RIGHT.

You all keep assuming that there will NEVER be a way to make hydrogen profitable because of entropy. However, if it weren't for the sun's and gravity's initial input of energy, oil would never have been profitable, either. All we have to do is use renewable energy sources to produce the electricity needed to make hydrogen, and the situation is perfectly analogous to oil--except that the initial input from the sun is happening NOW, not millions of years ago. We can use solar/wind/geothermal/tidal/or some as yet unexplored use of renewable energy sources to make the initial input of energy to extract the hydrogen.

The single assumption that those on the other side are making which allows you to berate Ajay is this: we will NEVER make use of renewable energy sources (sun, etc.) in a finacially feasible manner to offset the cost of producing hydrogen--yet you confuse this with the entropy arguments and think you have won the debate with the laws of physics, while all you've really done is limit the terms of the debate with an unwarrented pessimism.

Your assumption is a matter of the present state of TECHNOLOGY, not the universal laws of physics. You don't know what future R&D will produce in the areas of renewable energy use, and the efficiency of electricity production from them. All we have to do is find a way to make solar/wind/geothermal/hydroelectric practical on a large enough scale with a great enough efficiency, and this debate would be over. Use nature to offset the cost of hydrogen extraction, and the hydrogen economy is off and running. [I posted a link earlier from an atmospheric scientist who thought this was feasible, but that went largely ignored.]

If the rest of the world thought like you, society would definitely be doomed. Thank god there are innovators and optimists who do more with their lives than post in Internet forums, otherwise none of the advances we enjoy would have been possible.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

I never, ever, ever said that. Check every post of mine if you wish. I always said that hydrogen was possibly viable when the cost of the initial energy investment was cheap and renewable (ala Iceland). Then again, I asked why we need hydrogen (aside from a portable carrier) if energy is cheap and the logistics of making hydrogen vehicles are prohibitive. My quarrel with Ajay is that he was claiming that both hydrogen and oil either (a) both gave a net negative in energy produced or (b) both gave a net positive. This was decidedly untrue, along with his repeatedly referring to hydrogen as an energy "source", and yet he kept arguing both points over and over until we proved his "data" wrong and then -poof - he disappeared.

 

[mark alan]

That is a great idea. You make excellent points, and I have no problem with a future hydrogen economy. However, I think that we are probably 50 years (if not longer) from that being possible. We need to move from a hydrocarbon-based economy long before then. Using current, and relatively low cost alternatives (hybrid, electric hybrid, cellulose based ethanol, even coal gasification), we can significantly reduce our dependence on oil in 10-20 year period. This will have major benefits to the western world, and the world in general (except possibly the middle east).

I just get frustrated because of politics and special interests influence, the sensible and cost-effective solutions are being held back. Worry about a hydrogen economy in the future, when our country is not be held hostage by a few countries who happen to have a lot of oil.

 

[Nathan Eddy]

"This was decidedly untrue, along with his repeatedly referring to hydrogen as an energy "source","

It doesn't matter if you call hydrogen an energy "source." Again, the only reason oil is an energy "source" is because of the initial input from the sun that we didn't have to pay for. If we had to create oil from scratch, it wouldn't be a "source" either.



I didn't say it was an explicit assumption. It's implicit in your arguments--otherwise, you'd just admit that the future isn't doomed and that a viable energy source can be developed with the right innovations--which is the "meta-point" that we're all dancing around.

Sure, Ajay should have changed his tactics from physics to economics and the potential of future technology . . . but this was his point from the beginning. You all lured him into a pointless debate about the physics behind this (talk about trolling) by pretending that he was a retard.

The physics don't matter. We've all been through 7th grade, we all know about entropy. It's not that hard to undertand. As I said above, this is a technological issue, not a debate about whether the laws of physics can be violated. No one has ever suggested that hydrogen is a perpetual motion machine.

So the real quesiton that should have been debated all along is this: is there a way to make use of renewable energy sources so cheaply that they offset the cost of hydrogen production?

Sure, you can try to circumvent this question by saying, "let's just use the electricity and skip a step," but for transportation, that means carrying your electricity supply around with you (heavy batteries as opposed to lightweight hydrogen). I think there will always be a demand for combustible fuel.

I may be wrong. But I'm not ready to give up on society just yet. Neither are all the investors who will eventually reap the benefits of all your pessimism.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Didn't circumvent the issue, I raised the question. It's what engineers do. I don't know enough to answer it, but I certainly would want the question to be asked if I'm going to toss away 30% of an energy source to a technology which may or may not be superior, renewable or not.