[AR] Re: Fw: Hydrogen / oxygen news

  • From: Keith Henson <hkeithhenson@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2013 09:12:13 -0800

Henry V is right about making hydrogen in bulk.  Steam reforming gives
about haf the mass of natural gas as hydrogen.

So if LNG costs $1000 a ton, hydrogen would cost about twice that and
LH2 somewhat more because of the liquefaction cost.

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 6:13 AM, Henry Vanderbilt
<hvanderbilt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's significantly cheaper to crack natural gas directly to obtain your
> hydrogen. (Consider the alternative of burning that same natural gas in an
> electric generator then electrolyzing your hydrogen: You have losses in the
> generation, in the transmission, and in the electrolyzing.)
>
> What could change this would be a source of electricity several times
> cheaper per kwh than natural gas.  Not likely anytime soon, between fracking
> making gas cheaper and the immaturity of all the cheap bulk power
> alternatives.
>
> Oxygen production costs meanwhile are trivial by comparison; distilling it
> out of the atmosphere is hugely cheaper than getting it by splitting water.
>
> Henry
>
>
> On 11/1/2013 2:41 AM, Derek Clarke wrote:
>>
>> Obviously on-demand electrolysis is inappropriate, but there's nothing
>> to stop you using a smaller reactor to produce the fuel and oxidiser you
>> need over time. After all it's going to be burnt in a few minutes, so
>> while the GW rating may be high, it's not so many GWh.
>>
>>
>> On 31 October 2013 00:54, David Weinshenker <daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> <mailto:daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>>
>>     Henry Spencer wrote:
>>      > At the upper extreme, big
>>      > rocket engines typically are multi-gigawatt machines.
>>
>>     Clark calculates the kinetic power of the Saturn V first stage
>>     exhaust as about 41 gigawatts... this is on the same scale as
>>     the outage of the Eastern Interconnection of the North American
>>     power grid in August 2003. (Approximately 60 GW of generation
>>     capacity was initially tripped off line - IIRC, roughly 40 GW
>>     was still out of service a day later.)
>>
>>     -dave w
>>
>>
>

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