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.
