Inspired by: Current Events
Hydrogen is a very useful fuel that can be used for a vast number of applications; including heating your homes and running your cars.
Hydrogen can be produced in any number of ways. Of recent focus is producing hydrogen from solar energy.
The potential is that solar energy can be converted to energy stored in hydrogen. We then use the hydrogen to provide the power for our needs.
One main problem is the safe storing of hydrogen. Hydrogen (H2) is a gas in our everyday life, or it combines with other elements to produce things like gasoline, alcohol, and methane. Methane is commonly liquified into propane.
Hydrogen gas is the raw material generally created by splitting water with electricity. Hydrogen gas is very difficult to store in quantity.
There is currently no commercially available system to safely store hydrogen for residential use. The hydrogen generator must feed power converters directly to avoid H2 buildup. The major effort in the hydrogen community is to develop an efficient and safe means of storing tera-watts of hydrogen.
For example: To run a car 400 miles using hydrogen, you would need a balloon 25 feet in diameter at STP (standard temperature and pressure). Any compression of the gas consumes power and reduces efficiency. But it's not practical to carry a balloon 25 feet in diameter with the car. Yet if you compress that same gas in a typical cylinder, the pressures easily exceed 3,000 pounds of pressure per square inch (psig). If you want more fuel, you can't just keep increasing the pressure and the danger due to rupture is explosive.
My Proposal:
Net-Zero Carbon Emissions using Methane or other Hydrocarbons
If hydrogen is extracted from the environment, and combined with Carbon extracted solely from the atmosphere, and then create methane or other hydrocarbon with these elements. The burning of these hydrocarbons provides a Net-Zero Carbon emission.
If you extract the hydro-carbons from the atmosphere, and then burn those hydrocarbons, that leaves atmospheric carbon bound up in peoples storage tanks. So the net carbon in the atmosphere is reduced because of the stored carbon as fuel.
Methane when compressed under low pressure will liquefy (i.e. propane cylinders). The energy density is quite high as compared to other methods of storing hydrogen. The safety systems and infrastructure have already been developed. We currently heat our homes in many areas with propane and propane vehicles are used in mass transportation already.
So by creating systems that extract hydrogen from water, extract carbon from the air (carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide), then creating a hydrocarbon like methane. The net effect is reducing our carbon footprint through the storage of carbon in our fuel storage systems. The release of carbon back into the atmosphere results in a slightly negative net usage of atmospheric carbon.
I said slightly negative carbon emission. Whenever we have a non-ideal combustion, particulate carbon is produced and discharged commonly on or near our highways. This particulate carbon is absorbed commonly by plants.
So the current engines would be able to utilize the methane produced by solar processing of hydrogen/carbon generators. Indeed, most vehicle engines can be retrofit with propane fuel systems.
Now take this one step further:
Potentially, gasoline and ethanol can both be produced from solar processing of hydrogen/carbon generators. The problem with gasoline is that it produces more byproducts during its combustion of the additives/fillers.
