Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are Becoming Too Big to Ignore

[longship]

4. Thermodynamics 101.

Arthur Eddington:

"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations-then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation-well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Such are the claims of anybody claiming that hydrogen is an energy source.

The primary questions are:

1. Where does the hydrogen come from?

2. How much energy does it take to generate it?

3. Where does that energy come from?

4. How much energy does the resulting hydrogen itself generate?

Hints:

1. There is no natural pure hydrogen on Earth. The largest source of hydrogen is undoubtedly water, a simple molecule, H2O.

2. Hydrolysis takes a lot of energy. Look it up. There is a lot of research going into this, however advancements are incremental, not revolutionary. This is a tough cookie to crack. We likely won't get much better at it because one must after all break the chemical bonds which themselves have a certain binding energy dictated by the physics, not by hopes and wishes.

3. Ideally one would use solar or wind to generate the hydrogen so that the whole cycle would be a clean energy one. In fact, this is the soul argument for hydrogen that actually works. Except for the answers in #1 and #2, hydrogen would not even exist on Earth. So its only use is to store existing energy, not generate it, because of #1 it is not an energy source. But what use is it if you are burning coal to generate the energy to make hydrogen? None whatsoever. (Thermodynamics again, see the Eddington quote.)

4. This gets to the core of what Eddington is saying. The amount of energy generated by burning the hydrogen will always be less energy than what was required to generate it. Period! End of discussion on this point. Again, read the Eddington quote because he had it precisely correct.

QED

My best to you.