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Old 03-04-2014, 03:01 PM
 
Location: The #1 sunshine state, Arizona.
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Old 03-04-2014, 03:50 PM
 
Location: DC
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Originally Posted by Zot View Post
Yeah, and you'll need many new fossil plants is pee power becomes the rage. This will pollute far more than it ever greens.
You're wrong. The emissions per mile even for coal derived electricity are substantially lower than for a gasoline ICE.
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Old 03-04-2014, 04:10 PM
 
Location: Volcano
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Originally Posted by Zot View Post
Why wouldn't net energy be an important criteria? To use something as a power source that needs more power than it produces doesn't seem green to me.
If the electricity used to perform the electrolysis of pee... or just plain saltwater, for example... comes from solar energy, then producing hydrogen for fuel use when the sun goes down, or just when it is needed for mobility makes perfect sense.

And in research now is a new technology that uses sunlight to produce hydrogen from water directly, without the need to generate electricity at all.

Since the energy from the sun is essentially unlimited in terms of the human scale of current life on the planet, "net energy" calculations simply don't calculate the same way, from a practical standpoint, as they do when applied to diminishing fossil fuel sources.
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Old 03-06-2014, 02:44 PM
 
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How about a nice article on low cost hydrogen production using sunlight....

Hydrogen fuel from sunlight? Low-cost, long-lasting water splitter made of silicon and nickel -- ScienceDaily

I admit that there is still work to be done here.
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Old 03-06-2014, 03:17 PM
 
Location: DC
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Originally Posted by OpenD View Post
If the electricity used to perform the electrolysis of pee... or just plain saltwater, for example... comes from solar energy, then producing hydrogen for fuel use when the sun goes down, or just when it is needed for mobility makes perfect sense.

And in research now is a new technology that uses sunlight to produce hydrogen from water directly, without the need to generate electricity at all.

Since the energy from the sun is essentially unlimited in terms of the human scale of current life on the planet, "net energy" calculations simply don't calculate the same way, from a practical standpoint, as they do when applied to diminishing fossil fuel sources.
I don't think you can use salt water. It's conductivity is too high. When I ran electrolysis machines in the Navy we used high purity distilled water.
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Old 03-06-2014, 05:04 PM
 
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You could, you would just have to desalinate and purify it first.
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Old 03-06-2014, 06:01 PM
 
Location: DC
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Originally Posted by Dakster View Post
You could, you would just have to desalinate and purify it first.
Then It's no longer salt water.
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Old 03-06-2014, 07:17 PM
 
Location: Volcano
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Originally Posted by DCforever View Post
I don't think you can use salt water. It's conductivity is too high. When I ran electrolysis machines in the Navy we used high purity distilled water.
Something is not right with that. Maybe you ADDED distilled water like you would to a lead acid battery, to avoid contaminating the electrolyte, but when you connect electrodes in plain water to an electrical source you can hardly get any current draw at all. But add a pinch of sea salt, and voila... you now have an electrolyte.

Pee is conductive, and should be just fine...
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Old 03-06-2014, 07:19 PM
 
Location: Volcano
12,969 posts, read 28,355,558 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Dakster View Post
How about a nice article on low cost hydrogen production using sunlight....

Hydrogen fuel from sunlight? Low-cost, long-lasting water splitter made of silicon and nickel -- ScienceDaily
Exactly. There's a lot of very interesting research going on right now.
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Old 03-07-2014, 07:12 AM
 
Location: DC
6,848 posts, read 7,967,893 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by OpenD View Post
Something is not right with that. Maybe you ADDED distilled water like you would to a lead acid battery, to avoid contaminating the electrolyte, but when you connect electrodes in plain water to an electrical source you can hardly get any current draw at all. But add a pinch of sea salt, and voila... you now have an electrolyte.

Pee is conductive, and should be just fine...
I was mistaken, you do want to add a conductive agent, but you want to choose it carefully or you'll extract something besides H2.
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