High Gas Prices
OK, I can’t stand this. Once again the price of gas skyrockets and all we can think about is “drill baby drill.” So drilling short term for petroleum and methane makes good sense for the economy, but long term petroleum is obviously a dead end. Natural gas is cheap and abundant. It’s a cheap abundant exploitable energy resource that the economy desperately needs, but long term we can do even better.
Like it or not, we are in competition with other potential super powers. We need to retain leadership not politically, militarily and wasting our resources, but economically and technologically. Whichever nation makes the transition to an advanced energy source or sources will dominate economically. Energy is, to a basic extent, a critical common infrastructure. That is, warmth and shelter remains a common need and must be affordable for all no matter the circumstances. So, energy must first and foremost be cheap, abundant and exploitable.
MIT has done marvelous research in developing an energy source analogous to the green leaf. It captures sunlight and converts water to hydrogen, oxygen and carbohydrate, removing CO2 from the air. You can’t do much better than that, but you are still left with the problem of storing the H2 and burning (oxidizing) it as a fuel.
The beauty of H2 is its energy content. Hydrogen by weight contains more thermodynamic chemical energy (enthalpy) than any other element. That’s good, but the trouble is, at ambient temperatures hydrogen is a gas. As a gas, each molecule of H2 occupies one cubic meter of space at normal temperature and pressure. The only way to store it in anything like a usable container is under enormous pressure or at a low enough temperature that it exists as a liquid. (-253o C)
The MIT way of the leaf is a means of reducing water to hydrogen. That’s great, but hydrogen is already the most common element on earth. The trick is to get it into a concentrated and oxidizable state without all the cost and energy required to compress it or freeze it into a liquid. Is there another model in nature that does that with the efficiency of MIT’s green leaf?
As a matter of fact, there is. Animals do a fine job of storing hydrogen and converting it into energy. My first year medical students just got through their biochemistry exams, a course in which they learned about the carboxylic acid (Krebs) cycle and the conversion of ADP and ATP to muscle energy. It’s all about the mitochondria. The mitochondria store protons (single atoms of hydrogen, no longer a gas) in a chemical cascade that ends in water. The mitochondria are tiny but contain a great number of H ions; they are the animal’s furnace. Simply put, the animal ingests carbon based food, harvests out the hydrogen, stores it in the mitochondria and delivers energy on demand. The byproduct of oxidation is water and carbon in a solid form appropriate for fertilizer. The green leaf on the one side and the mitochondria on the other make up the biological cycle of reduction and oxidation, the life cycle of the planet.
Like it or not, we are in competition with other potential super powers. We need to retain leadership not politically, militarily and wasting our resources, but economically and technologically. Whichever nation makes the transition to an advanced energy source or sources will dominate economically. Energy is, to a basic extent, a critical common infrastructure. That is, warmth and shelter remains a common need and must be affordable for all no matter the circumstances. So, energy must first and foremost be cheap, abundant and exploitable.
MIT has done marvelous research in developing an energy source analogous to the green leaf. It captures sunlight and converts water to hydrogen, oxygen and carbohydrate, removing CO2 from the air. You can’t do much better than that, but you are still left with the problem of storing the H2 and burning (oxidizing) it as a fuel.
The beauty of H2 is its energy content. Hydrogen by weight contains more thermodynamic chemical energy (enthalpy) than any other element. That’s good, but the trouble is, at ambient temperatures hydrogen is a gas. As a gas, each molecule of H2 occupies one cubic meter of space at normal temperature and pressure. The only way to store it in anything like a usable container is under enormous pressure or at a low enough temperature that it exists as a liquid. (-253o C)
The MIT way of the leaf is a means of reducing water to hydrogen. That’s great, but hydrogen is already the most common element on earth. The trick is to get it into a concentrated and oxidizable state without all the cost and energy required to compress it or freeze it into a liquid. Is there another model in nature that does that with the efficiency of MIT’s green leaf?
As a matter of fact, there is. Animals do a fine job of storing hydrogen and converting it into energy. My first year medical students just got through their biochemistry exams, a course in which they learned about the carboxylic acid (Krebs) cycle and the conversion of ADP and ATP to muscle energy. It’s all about the mitochondria. The mitochondria store protons (single atoms of hydrogen, no longer a gas) in a chemical cascade that ends in water. The mitochondria are tiny but contain a great number of H ions; they are the animal’s furnace. Simply put, the animal ingests carbon based food, harvests out the hydrogen, stores it in the mitochondria and delivers energy on demand. The byproduct of oxidation is water and carbon in a solid form appropriate for fertilizer. The green leaf on the one side and the mitochondria on the other make up the biological cycle of reduction and oxidation, the life cycle of the planet.
Challengingly, we just need to figure out how to create big mechanized mitochondria that store protons in a form readily available for use --- the other half of the MIT project. Call it a proton drive. Ideally, the medium will be a liquid or a solid.
Intriguingly, one might dump garbage into a hopper, the device strips off the protons (hydrogen ions) and stores them in the artificial mitochondria and then burns them on demand to create electricity, heat or both, and out comes fertilizer and water on the other end.
Labels: Energy
posted by Clancy Hughes | 3/11/2012 12:14:00 PM
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