Topic: Society's misguided fear of hydrogen; a result of oil corporation? - page 3. (Read 19534 times)

I'm not sure anyone's petitioning for hydrogen combustion when hydrogen fuel cell is so much safer. No flame = safer to work with.

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It's worth looking at Ford and Chevrolet. Chev became "gov motors", all the know-it-all greenies went in, forced them to make the puke-worthy Volt.

Ford stayed independent, kept improving the internal combustion engine, now has a F150 for sale that gets 30 mpg.

Pretty cool, right?

Well, its a bit beyond hobbyist, but its not industrial production. Saying leaks are only dangerous around flames or enclosed spaces is a not very helpful condition to place, considering we are talking about fuel gases around flames/combustion.

I don't recall why, but I was under the impression that fuel gases that are lighter than air pose some additional risk, such as acetylene, from when I was researching propane vs acetylene fuel sources. I mostly only work with Propane and Hydrogen though, so I can't recall the finer details of acetylene at the moment.

Another thing I thought reading back at your posts. You said Hydrogen Refineries are safer than Gasoline refineries. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that since I don't know if they are actually safer, or if there are just 1000x more oil refineries than hydrogen refineries. But to the point about brain dead people pumping or not being allowed to pump their own gas. People working in refineries are rigorously trained on all aspects of safety. Their equipment is top of the line, they pay attention to hazard details that others wouldn't know about, or might not have the safety equipment mandated by OSHA or whoever.

I hesitate to say that anything is more dangerous than something else. How do you say, whats more dangerous, a duck or a barbed wire fence? It really depends on the situation. The same is true of any fuel. I guess my position on the matter is that gasoline is more idiot proof than hydrogen. If you want to be safe with gasoline, you don't put it in the oven, don't throw a match at it, and if you smell it or see it leaking out, you do something about it that isn't throwing a match at it. Hydrogen is less intuitive, and I think there is more room for mistakes to be made. I know all of the safety protocols, I follow a pretty strict safety routine, like that guy you all know that actually checks and adjusts their car mirrors every time before they start driving, yet I still run into somewhat hazardous situations. I'm confident I wont blow up, but I'm also purposely limiting my risk exposure by not allowing another variable of pressure potential energy along with my chemical potential energy.

Individuals aside, As soon as we have hydrogen for consumer applications, we now have to trust Toyota hydrogen combustion engines, *shudders* Chevy hydrogen combustion engines. Weird chinese off brand $50 leaf blowers hydrogen combustion engines, etc. That's why I think its better to skip hydrogen fuel development research and just stick with a more sure thing. We've been searching for that magic battery for years now, we haven't found it, but battery technology is getting better. I think it'd be cheaper and safer to get closer and closer to that magic battery than to engineer "pretty" safe hydrogen appliances.

Ah, so you're doing hobbist hydrogen projects more than anything. I've read stories about low-pressure hydrogen.

The thing with hydrogen leaks is they're only dangerous in enclosed spaces. Hydrogen rapidly dissipates (as it just floats upwards); so leaks aren't really an issue unless there is flame nearby or if it's enclosed.

In some states, we don't allow brain dead morons even to pump their own gasoline...

But that's a feature not a bug! We'd have as a result a happy society with fewer morons!

I generate my own hydrogen with water splitting, compress it to a low working pressure, under 2 million Pa, and burn it. I do not store it, I use it as soon as I produce it, for a few reasons. One, I can't store it, hydrogen atoms are small, and they slip through solid objects. Two, while storing any compressed gas is typically not the safest thing, its far more difficult to find hydrogen gas leaks than a more common odorized fuel. If the propane line on your gas stove springs a leak, you smell it and know there is a gas leak. In that case, don't light any open flames, turn off the gas, and get some ventilation going. No big deal. With hydrogen you don't know until its too late.

The issues I've personally come in contact with are burn hazards, and backfire. As I mentioned, burning hydrogen, there is no flame that you can see. If there is a hydrogen fire somewhere, you might not even know if other things around it aren't catching on fire. On that note, I'll mention that you need to wear protective eye wear to protect from radiation. The second one that I've dealt with somewhat frequently is startling, but not dangerous since I don't compress it much, is backfire. I use flashback arrestors in my torch lines, but I've had condensation accumulate in my fuel lines, dampen the arrestors, and then have a little explosion blow the hoses off of my generator a few times.

Now I'm sure there are ways to mitigate backfire with a lot more certainty, but the fact that I have an issue with it, even with safety gear in place is a little alarming. We trust brain dead morons with fueling up their cars at a gas station. I think we'd have a lot more accidents with hydrogen in the hands of the general public.

Hey, did you know that owning a pool increases your chances of drowning? Owning a car increases your chances of getting in an auto accident. Also owning more than 2 functional brain cells increases your chances of understanding the more commonly used it is the more deaths there will be, and that is not a valid indicator of the safety of the technology.

lol....

So you don't want to work in MAKING hydrogen, which is steam reforming with methane. You just want to use it? Or is there GOOD hydrogen and BAD hydrogen, like GOOD being made from water and BAD being made from fossil fuels?

Because we sure wouldn't want to have the BAD stuff, right?

Fuck dying working with oil. That's how you get killed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_gas_and_oil_production_accidents_in_the_United_States

All the deaths.

I actually tried research death for hydrogen and got a french link of accidents dating back to the 1980s:


80 deaths due to hydrogen total.

No problem, get a job in a refinery and come back in a year or two and tell us about it.

You really need to be listening to people who have worked with hydrogen and stop believing you know something because you googled it. That's literally a way to get killed.

I already cited a battery explosion event, which is hydrogen.

We've been searching for the "next" super battery for ages. Honestly, the universe kinda already shows that hydrogen's a great fuel (at least for fusion).

Honestly, just because we have shitty catalyst now doesn't mean they we can't hit better energy conversion rates from and to electricity. Ideally, with perfect catalyst, you could convert nearly freely.

Instead of searching for that magic battery, I don't see why we don't search for the magic catalyst instead.



Liquid or compressed? Also, have you ever had a dangerous incident with hydrogen? If so, can you describe how so?

From all the sources I've read, it is dangerous, but you'd be safer working with hydrogen than gasoline in a refinery.

I use hydrogen fuel on a weekly basis anyway, and can say from personal experience, that the potential for danger is much higher. There are a lot of reasons why we don't use hydrogen commonly as a fuel now but.

Cons:
Proper materials for long term safe combustion are very expensive, its hard on equipment, when it burns you can't see the flame, its difficult to compress, it escapes through container walls

Pros:
Clean burning, water vapor as a byproduct, higher energy density.

As a matter of cost, its been getting cheaper to produce it. New technology that uses Nickle Oxide catalysts instead of Platinum lowered the cost to produce hydrogen gas, at least from water splitting. That said, it still requires that you put more energy into it than you are going to get out. I don't see the benefit over just keeping your electricity as electricity, except for specialized cases.

Rather than use the funds on researching and developing new ways to use hydrogen, I don't see why we wouldn't be better off finding new ways to store and use electricity, and then just generate clean energy from solar/wind/geothermal/hydro and call it good.

For those fear mongers out there, that's a list of most of the dangers of hydrogen. Let's pull up a couple more.


There's so much evidence that shows that hydrogen is safe and even possibly safer than our current fuel source.

It's crazy that people believe into the myth that "it's more dangerous than gasoline". I'm sure this myth is propagated by big oil.

If you have any issues with my "previous" sources (literally pulled off random .coms), here one from a .gov:

https://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/doe_h2_safety.pdf

Last month a friend of mine was woken up at 4am by fire trucks arriving to put out his neighbor's car fire. It seems the battery had exploded. No, we're not talking Tesla here, but a regular car. Now how do you think that might have happened?

I already explained in detail above why compressed gas fuels are more dangerous than liquid fuels such as gasoline. If you can't understand why fuel under pressure is more dangerous than fuel in liquid form at atmospheric pressure, then I do not know what to tell you.

Wasting my time educating the uneducated bums like you? Ha, it's quite fun to educate people on misconceptions. It's just amazing you can muster up any response considering how retarded you actually are.

Liquid hydrogen is literally super cooled. It doesn't matter what liquid cooled material you leak. At least it doesn't cause cancer in its natural state. In reality, you walk away from the frozen cooled liquid that's quickly converting to hydrogen gas (cause air is warmer than literally -200+C). But anyway, other than venting the area, I don't really see what damage would be done by the actual material. It's the lack of heat energy and everything around it that's the problem. If you build a proper containment area for something like "massive huge liquid hydrogen" storage areas (50 liters 8000 psi of liquid hydrogen ~= 111 kwh, which is a crazy amount of energy).

Of course, we're talking about compressed hydrogen rather than liquid hydrogen which doesn't have that whole freezing problem.

Yeah, I actually joined a local fuel cell coalition mailing list. I'm learning about cool applications with hydrogen through those streams. When I started this thread, I didn't. It turns out, there's public funding for these programs, so I might be able to suck off the tit of the masses of people I'm fooling into making the world a better place.

Hydrogen compared to gasoline, propane, or pretty much any other fuel shows it's much safer, especially if you look at the MSDS.

Spendulus, if you're done trolling and willing to learn more about the benefits (because you're nearly to the right path), I'd recommend you join a local coalition for the support of hydrogen.

You are truly wasting your time, but I do have a question.

Just one quote from MSDS for liquid h2 (roughly equal to 8000 psi h2 gaseous)

"Isolate spill or leak area for at least 100 meters (330 feet) in all directions. "

THE QUESTION: Are you influenced by the combustion products of h2 being h20 and not predominately Co2, since you view that as a GREAT EVIL?

Because I do suspect that's your motive.

Use your new found skill to search an actual element like I was implying originally; hydrogen.

Compare and contrast with gasoline; make my arguments for me

Yes, that is certainly possible.



Wow! I've now learned one can find an MSDS with a Google search!

And Gasoline's an element, lol!