[AR] Re: Fw: Hydrogen / oxygen news
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 12:17:47 -0500 (EST)
On Tue, 5 Nov 2013, Henry Vanderbilt wrote:
> > There have been a few small demo projects which have used electrolysis for
> > making hydrogen, usually due to special circumstances...
>
> I'd be tempted to use the hydrogen produced plus carbon to produce CH4,
> which can be stored, transported, and used as vehicle fuel in
> mostly-standard vehicles with a wide range of affordable off-the-shelf
> technologies.
Better yet is to go one step farther and make methanol (CH3OH), which is
not quite as good a fuel, but is a room-temperature liquid, dramatically
simplifying use in vehicles. (As a fuel, it has about the same issues as
ethanol, i.e. there are some nuisances but it's practical.)
> Now THAT would be revolutionary - drill two ~$10 million fracked dry
> wells with the right geometry, pump water down one, get steam out of the
> other to run some number of megawatts of power plant indefinitely.
The idea is an old one -- I remember seeing it suggested many years ago --
although fracking technology may make it work better. The main problem
in earlier attempts, as I understand it, was establishing a long-lived
network of fine cracks connecting the two wells. In particular, erosion
had a bad habit of gradually concentrating the flow into a few wider
channels, which didn't make nearly as good a heat exchanger.
Henry Spencer
henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
(regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)
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