One of my customers has become involved in a movement in Italy to put pressure on the oil giants to invest more money in alternative energy sources, particulary Hydrogen production & Methane capture projects.

Thus was born the Hydrogen Petition Project in Italy, where they garnered 500,000 signatures & on 28th of June this year, managed to have new legislation be placed in front of the Italian governement for consideration.

The next phase is to go global in order to have a large enough example of public consensus to get this on the agenda of the COP-15 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, which will take place in Copenhagen in November 2009, which is when the Kyoto protocols are due to expire.

Note being a scientist, I am not looking to get embroiled into a pros & cons of the different techniques, I'll leave that to Boris, Catalyst & Chemgoddess , however I feel strongly enough in change, that I wanted to bring this to the forums notice.

Regards P

I think that is a great idea and I applaude Italy for wanting to implement new legislation. I love Hydrogen fuel cells, EtOH powered cars, Methane capture, solar cells. Alternative sources of energy? I'm all for it.

Unfortunately, it's gonna be a long process because as of now a large majority of methane and hydrogen comes from petroluem. So not only will there need to be a ton of research into actually making viable fuels cells but finding an alternative source for the hydrogen or alternative feed stocks, that aren't petroleum based.

I hope this raises awareness though and the companies stand-up and take notice.

Just equip every cow with a methane collector up it's arse.
Less greenhouse gas, less petroleum use...

Great idea mate, the problem currently is as Chemgoddess has explained the majority of H2 comes from crude ultimately.

The other option which is clean via splitting water takes up vast amounts of energy.

But pollution wise this is all good.

I'll sign up!

Yup - hydrogen is good. Only problem is storage. There's an awful lot of people working on hydrogen storage materials worldwide so that if you have a bit of stack with the car, you at least stand an even chance of walking away from it.
The cleanest way to generate the hydrogen is by splitting water using electricity from nuclear power stations.
However, methinks that generally, people who would really push for a clean fuel would also baulk at the idea of building a lot more nuclear power plants to generate the stuff. Reminds me of the way a few years ago when Greenpeace and the CND almost went nuke-friendly in order to reduce CO2 emissions, then backed out when they started getting a lot of letters concerning subscriptions...
If fusion gets off the ground (hopefully not in terms of riding on top of a huge fireball...), then conventional nuclear power stations would only be a temporary thing anyway.
fuel cells with methanol/ethanol are good, but tend to have more complications with carbon deposits (I think I remember correctly). Hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a long time (a few were used in Apollo missions in the 1970s), but it's always been the cost, bulk and safety concerns that have kept them off the market. That and an awful lot of oil money.

Can only agree, I did do a little research on thsi a while back & although methane capture projects are starting to take off, its all in a very ad-hoc & micro manner ... but from small acorns do big trees grow.
On the hydrogen production, I understand that there is a relatively new break through being discussed (from an economy point of view) that may provide a viable solution away from chemical production :
biomass - Hydrogen + charcoal :

Nice, Ammonium Nitrate is a byproduct of the process

Yup I agree only way to win completely with this is to split water using nuclear fusion.

Didn't I hear someone was storing H2 as pellets under compression.

Obviously liquifying it isn't really a option at norm pressure (-252.87C )

Also, we could all learn a lesson from South Africa concerning production of fuel from coal and not crude oil. It might not decrease CO2 emissions but it could lesson our dependence on oil (and hence stop the needless fighting in places we have no need to be fighting in but, I digress, that's the topic for another thread).

There was also a pretty sweet paper in The Journal of the American Chemical Society not to long ago where a group was able to slit water into H2 and O2 using light and platinum on a titanium oxide surface. The amounts weren't huge but. . baby steps, baby steps.

Isn't it a platinum catalyst that's normally used to split the H2 out of water? That could be quite pricey too.

The previous idea polorise encorporates a lot of well known processes, the difference is the feed into the system, all the other stuff is old rope

Another one for you, using aluminium

http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html

Yeah, the whole platinum thing isn't 100% new, and yes it's expensive but you only need cata1ytic amounts and it's reusable. They also only used sunlight and produced a constant stream of H2.

If it ain't fusion it ain't nothin'?

Pt is pricey indeed, but as it's a catalyst, then you only need a bit and keeps on being reused (unless you get a lot of sulphur in the reactions, then it's buggered).
Liquefying hydrogen's no big deal. You don't actually need to cool it to those temperatures to achieve a liquid, compression will do it. The temperature mentioned there is to liquefy it at atmospheric pressure.
if that project does what it says on the tin, then it's pretty neat. The only downside is that to produce useful amounts of diesel or hydrogen, you're going to have an awful lot of unused fetilizer knocking about...
Even so, it's well worth persuing.

Ooohhh. . .Sweet sweet seredipity.

Dear oh dear - use the phrase 'seredipity' in a research application and you'll be jobless... Try 'inadvertant targetting of compounds'.

He might have beaten you up, but there's no need to emphasise his sexuality. Some people...

Quote from the article though. . .Gotta love it.

"I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum," Woodall said. "When I added water to this alloy - talk about a discovery - there was a violent poof. I went to my office and worked out the reaction in a couple of hours to figure out what had happened. When aluminum atoms in the liquid alloy come into contact with water, they react, splitting the water and producing hydrogen and aluminum oxide."

I think his explanation of how he figured it out might be a little toned down a bit though.

LOL Funny. You killed me with that one. I didn't even catch it until you said something.

Unfortunate wording...

The idea's not bad for the alumium cell. Makes me wonder if it would be a lot easier to make it as a removable cartridge so you can pick up a new one at the garage/petrol station and dump the used one there for recycling back at a plant somewhere. If I had a car with this, I'd want two cartridges so I can swap over while driving in case one runs out. You wouldn't want to be lugging a heavy box of alumina out of your car on the hard shoulder of a motorway when one runs out...

The upside is you can generate H2 on the spot, avoiding the significant problem of how to transport H2. Downside is the EROI is affected by having to replace or recycle the Al2O that is produced. I thought there were still open questions about the feasibility of H2 as an energy source, but perhaps it's more about in which applications H2 would be sensible.

This was posted about a month later, about small H2 fuel cells working at normal temperature and pressure, using "modified aluminium powder".

http://www.physorg.com/preview102266813.html

At night consumption is low so what happens to all the power put out by Nuclear stations? Can't it be used somehow?
They are still working on 'safe' nuclear power stations, but there are enough in operation to provide extra night time energy that can be stored.
I am a complete idiot when it comes to chemistry, but compressing hydrogen and stacks fertilizer? Sounds like a bomb.