MSNBC - Big Egos stood in way of Aluminum / Hydrogen breakthrough research

[FormerDittoHead]

This bumps on another post, but I think it deserves another thread.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18700750/

Professor Jerry Woodall and students have invented a way to use an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water — a process that he thinks could replace gasoline as well as its pollutants and emissions tied to global warming.
....
Woodall says the method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen — two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy.

"The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it," he said in a statement released by Purdue this week.
...
and now my favorite part:
"But there are some speed bumps on the highway to hydrogen.... With internal combustion engines, the cost of recycling the aluminum oxide must be reduced to make the process competitive with gasoline at $3 a gallon."

OH MY GOD - WHO COULD HAVE *EVER* SEEN GAS GOING ABOVE $3.00 A GALLON!!!!

[pinkpops]

1. well yeah but -

how are the pellets produced, and what happens to them when they are spent?
The last I heard, aluminum takes vast amounts of energy to extract it from ore. Suppose you started with scrap aluminum from cans. You still end up with aluminum oxide. Getting the aluminum out is another refining process. What the procedure lacks is an original source of energy.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

[Jackpine Radical]

2. What you say is generally true of H2 tchnology AFAIK; I generally

think of H2 as a sort of battery, a way of storing the electric energy expended in its production.

The thing that people forget to calculate, though, is that there are hidden benefits in any non-fossil-fuel technology, in that we don't have to maintain our huge military to safeguard the supply. Given a military budget of 700 billion (that they actually admit to) and a conservative estimate that half goes to protect our oil supply, that's an additional billion a day we spend on gasoline and that should be added to the price of a gallon. When we look at those expenses, plus imagining carbon-neutral electricity in the mix, then maybe the whole thing is worth a second look.

[bahrbearian]

3. There is a never ending supply of aluminum,,

thats why scrap goes for 74 cents a pound
.

[Pab Sungenis]

4. And if we can get the recycling costs down

taking a spent tank of "pellets," separating out the unspent gallium and then breaking the oxygen atoms off of the aluminum, then melting and re-alloying, we would eventually not "consume" anything other than the energy costs of reclamation. We wouldn't need to mine fresh aluminum for every single tank.