solarbird | talking too much about things i know nothing about, or, preaching mostly to the converted (part two)

This was originally going to be part of my previous post, but I decided that one should stand alone as a single topic. Maybe this can be a series.

HAS EVERYONE GONE COMPLETELY INSANE?!

I heard a guest commentator on NPR this morning waxing ecstatic about how the hydrogen economy will usher in a new industrial revolution. Would someone please tell me how?

I mean, sure: it's great for portable devices, and that's really, genuinely exciting to me. Also, it's clean. It's quiet. I'm pro-hydrogen as a technology. But it's not an energy source, and its energy density is 1/4 that of gasoline and similar products even when stored at 10,000 PSI, which is a lot. (Alternatively, you can get better density by storing it in supercooled liquid form, but that has its own problems, not the least of which being that you need to use it to maintain it, and enough to give a vehicle decent range is going to be gone in a couple of days, just maintaining its own refrigeration.) Even after you solve the energy density problem, the energy that you're storing via hydrogen has to come from somewhere.

Coal and oil helped create the first industrial revolution because it was high energy density and high energy output for relatively little energy expenditure in; It's compact with a large net energy gain. It also proved to have an assortment of useful chemical applications. Hydrogen yields less energy than is put in (because nothing is 100% efficient), has lower energy density, and isn't all that interesting chemically - therefore having none of the primary energy qualities of coal and oil.

So where does this great "industrial revolution" come in? Aside from power for portable devices - it's got great battery-replacement potential - and the seriously good reduction in pollutants of all sorts (which provides many good things, none of which are new types of power or lead to new uses of power, as far as I can see)...

...where's the revolution?

Why are people acting as if this is free power? Free or cheap, limitless, nonpolluting power? The hydrogen-battery economy may be valid, but hydrogen isn't a replacement for oil.

And it's not fusion either. Is that what's going on? Do people have some subconscious connection to this and fusion power? Do they think there's a whole hell of a lot of hydrogen out there - it's part of water, after all - and that therefore all they have to do is come up with some way to mine it and viola, literal oceans of fuel, free for the taking?

Is this a fundamental failure to understand thermodynamics? Are people hoping for some kind of physics cheat? That seems kind of... unlikely. Or, to put it more bluntly, I think we'd have about as much luck waiting to discover an antimatter mine. On Earth.

So. Am I missing something? Or is this spirit dancing for the modern era?