Re: Burning Salt Water

"ptooner" <someguy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4U1di.1132$nQ5.950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


This makes absolutely no sense to me.
With oil, the energy is already stored in the oil, ready for release.
If
the energy required to pump it out of the ground, refine it, and
distribute
it to customers were greater than the energy available in the oil, the
whole
concept wouldn't have gone anywhere. The same applies to the cost; if
it
cost more to get it from the ground to the customer were greater than
what
they could charge for it, it would make no sense.

This hydrogen issue fails on the first ground (with certainty, from
first
principles) and probably on the second as well.

Let me put it this way. If I'm a power company with 100 MW-hr of energy
at
my disposal, I consider two choices:
(a) I distribute the 100 MW to my customers.
(b) (Assuming the infrastructure's already in place) I use the 100 MW-hr
to
dissociate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Because of the second law, I
can
(suppose; this is really generous) extract 90 MW-hr of energy by burning
the
hydrogen, which I can now distribute to my customers.
Think about it; under what circumstances does (b) make any sense at all?


Okay, I'll tell you when. Power plants are designed to produce a
relatively
continuous flow of power 24hrs a day. Demand, though, fluctuates on a
somewhat predictable cycle. Plants running at reduced capacity are less
efficient and therefore power production costs vary with the load. This
is
the reason that large power customers are billed on a variable scale with
power cheaper at the times that the producer needs to sell it and more
expensive at it's peak demand times. So, at times of minimum demand power
companies have excess capacity going to waste. That's the time they could
be using it to produce the hydrogen gas efficiently.

OK, that I'll buy.


.

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