The need for H2 fuels for personal car transportation is doubtful, with the advent of super-batteries, giving up to 300 miles per charge as is. See the “Tesla Sedan” on this net. H2 is a smaller, hard to store molecule, that does cost energy to isolate! Rechargeable batteries are more energy efficient, and most practical – so practical, the corporations bought the patents and buried them! Don’t believe me, see the documentary “Who Killed The Electric Car” found on this net for free in some places! The Electric Trains can be H2 + O2 gas driven, once storage difficulties are hammered out. The problem lies in the astounding paradigm shifts required by Americans.

Only through terrible tragedy, perhaps economic tragedy, can they be convulsed into the massive swing from gasoline to anything else! They buy gasoline with borrowed money now, and break the economy of their own country to burn it! Even diesel, burnt in the new Mercedes Blue TEC turbo diesels, Hybrid and plug in-able, giving passenger cars 90+ mpg, is turned down for the beloved low compression, spark ignition, gasoline engine, in all but heavy trucks! For the various political, social, sentimental, even romantic reasons, we have a convention so bound up even in our Mythology as to entrap us into uneconomic and impractical behaviors – overcoming this, the great barricade to common sense, will take perhaps the great depression, now lurking in the next trough of our naturally cyclic economy, crashing dollar, and due in part to our Oil bill in the Middle East, to OPEC and their ilk, all the while solar power wastes in our South Western deserts, Wind blows up the Prairie Corridor, bringing only rain, not power, and we spend even more for precious gasoline.

The Holy Grail, copious amounts of a synthetic gasoline from Wind Turbines, Solar power stations! It isn’t gonna happen! Yankee Doodle! the “Merry Oldsmobile’s” of the past are in fact in the past, the Fuel cell powered Electric Bullet Train about to be built, and battery cars are already on the streets! They all chip away at the Harley Davidson’s, Two Cylinder Radial rebels from the 1920’s aircraft industries, and Electric bikes are on the pave as we speak, faster, smoother, and silent but mostly rechargeable for pennies with Solar, Wind generated fuel, goddammit! beat that with your ten-thousand parts, gasoline behemoths! We have only three in the electric contraptions!

Way back 50 years ago in high school science I made Hydrogen and Oxygen with a battery and a couple of graphite rods scavenge from pencils. This would be a great way to store intermittent energy from sources like the sun or wind. The idea, of course, needs alot of upscaling. Perhaps making methane or ethane as a storage intermediary would have some merit.

Alex Heinze

At around 1900 degress c (achievable with solar-thermal technologies) ZnO dissociates into Zn and O, release the O into the atmosphere and direct the Zn into another reaction (at a much lower temp than the first but still quite hot) with H2O and you get ZnO and H2, recycle the Zn0 to the first step and store/use the H2 as you see fit. Total emissions H2 and O (usually as O2).

There are other chemical cycles that can be used at lower temps.

If the hydrogen were produced by electrolysis from water, the whole cycle would be carbon neutral and would not necessitate big changes in energy distribution infrastructure nor in motor technology.

Has anyone looked to wind energy by-product to produce Hydrogen