Comments on: Mechanochemical breakthrough unlocks cheap, safe, powdered gases

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 06:45:24 +0000

“powdered gases”

mfw

By: Michael van der Riet

Michael van der Riet — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 08:37:05 +0000

Hindenburg anyone? I read a blog about some British engineers looking at replacing domestic gas with hydrogen. From experience they learned to build their experimental apparatus in a small shed in the middle of the countryside and retreat a good distance before pressing the Go button. The shed was usually demolished. Domestic gas used to come off the tail end of petroleum refining. Over more than a century there have been very few disasters. Hydrogen has very low energy density anyway. Adding a filler at a ratio of one active ingredient and twenty sawdust doesn’t improve this. What do we do with the heaps of expended dust afterwards? But as long as the boffins can earn nice grants from hydrogen research, it will go on. As any economist will tell you, incentives matter.

By: Wang Wei Lin

Wang Wei Lin — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 04:09:17 +0000

Hydrogen is a very reactive gas and atomically tiny. Hydrogen storage is complicated by these two factors. If it doesn’t react with is container, it creeps out because of its size. Storing it in pellets doesn’t solve those problems. From a humorous point of view this process makes hydrogen pop rocks like the kid’s candy.

By: Altitude Zero

Altitude Zero — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 16:32:37 +0000

As John Michael Greer over at “Ecosophia” points out, there do not have to be easy, cheap, readily available substitutes for petroleum fuels just because we want them and feel like we need them. Personally, unlike Greer, I think that there are probably some substitutes out there, but finding something that is as energy dense, readily available, and relatively cheap as petroleum is not an easy task, and anyone who tells you that it is is probably scamming.

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 13:52:40 +0000

When did they stop teaching thermodynamics to engineers and scientists?

This sounds like a well-known chemisorption process, the ball mill merely increasing the surface area for adsorption.

The spontaneous, thermodynamically favored reaction is the adsorption itself. The bounding energies have to be overcome by “heating to a certain temperature.” Aye, there’s the rub. We can guarantee that the energy required for desorption is substantial.

So, you have an energy input to promote adsorption and a substantially higher energy input to promote desorption.

The amount of hydrogen stored is trivial amount of hydrogen, 6.5% of the total mass. That is absurd. The energy required to move the whole mass is substantial, and most likely would to be done by truck/train tank car. It would much easier to simply transport natural gas and reform it at the point of use to hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

But even that idea is stupid, because the highly toxic CO must be oxidized to CO2.

None of these wackjob schemes is viable. They all, however, lend themselves to scams, like bitcoins, solar/wind, barn painting (viz. travelers), et al.