Do you think that Liquid Hydrogen has been given enough effort in Research and Development?

Question

Hydrogen is one of the most common substances on earth. If turned into a power source the potential is limitless, however the energy industry would go bankrupt (most of the wealthy on this planet make thier money on energy) currently it is more expensive to produce and more energy is required to develop the energy recieved (The R & D question).

Answer 1

Liquid hydrogen is very cold and can, therefore, be very hazardous as a general use fuel (i.e. spilling some on you is highly likely to result in loss of limb), not to mention there is a relatively high cost involved in putting it into liquid form and keeping it that way. Also, a big problem with hydrogen is that it is an element and is the smallest molecule in existence. This means that it is hard to store in a storage tank. Essentially, it turns to gas and will simply leak out fairly rapidly. One big part of the research effort into making hydrogen a usable fuel is a way to store it in a fuel cell. There have been significant breakthroughs lately. However, there is still much work to do. If you are interested in participating get a degree in chemical engineering or other nano-scale related field and join the party.

Answer 2

pure hydrogen is actually not even close to one of the most abundant elements on earth. Most hydrogen is either a component of molecular water or is part of several organic chemicals. reclaiming that hydrogen from the molecules takes a lot of energy. It is done on organic chemicals during certain processes at petroleum refineries for use as a feed for hydrogenation reactions, but there is not enough feed stock of petroleum to make this source of hydrogen viable. electrolysis of water is highly expensive because it takes large amounts of electricity to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms, large amounts of energy (or membranes) to distill them, and the efficiency involved in using hydrogen as a fuel (and thermodynamics in general) demands that the energy recovered from it will always be less than the energy necessary to capture the hydrogen in the first place. research will be great in terms of making it more efficient and more feasible, but where do you get all of the electricity/energy to do the separation in the first place? Most electricity these days comes from coal fired power plants and those are very pollutant.

Answer 3

Hydrogen is plentiful because it's locked in water. The way you get hydrogen out of water is to run electricity through it, BUT it takes more energy to seperate out the hydrogen than you get when you burn the hydrogen (turning it back into water).

The only way that I can see hydrogen being of any value whatsoever is in combination with another periodic energy source.. like solar or wind. When it's sunny/windy you can use *that* electricity to make hydrogen, and use that whenever. In this way Hydrogen would basically act as a battery.

But yeah, I think Hydrogen research is a dead-end. Much better to harness natural forces like sun / wind / waves.

Answer 4

Hydrogen is attached to hydrocarbons. It doesn't exist as pure hydrogen in the air. It is very abundant yes but not in any immediately usable form. There are two main ways of harvesting it. One is electrolysis of water and the other is hydrocarbon reforming. Both are very energy intensive. Steam methane reforming (which is done where I work) requires temps of 1700 deg to get the reaction going. Also storing it safely is of large concern because it is highly flammable and heats as it expands (unusual for gases). They still are working on fuel cells and hyrdogen economies but there are a lot of daunting tasks to overcome. basically what I'm saying is the problem isnt as simple as you may think.