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 >> >> >