4 ms·

Well, for electricity the world still burns coal, gas or destroys nature for things like dams. I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to

• VLM 14y ago
  "I imagined it takes a bit of electricity to transform the H2O to hydrogen at first," No talk to a chemist or chemeng. Virtually all industrial H2 comes from steam reforming natgas. At red heat in the absence of air, natgas basically "burns" steam generating reformer gas or syngas or whatever which is carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Then at a much lower "cooking" heat you oxidize the toxic / poisonous carbon monoxide to CO2 with more steam. Separating out the CO2 is moderately annoying an energy intensive, too. In summary H2 comes from partial combustion of natgas, using water as an O2 source. Or another way to phrase it is you burn the carbon out of methane at great effort leaving you with just the hydrogen. As you'd imagine its terribly inefficient, even if you fed that H2 into a 100% eff fuel cell (LOL) you'd get more kilowatt-hours per BTU of natgas by simply burning the natgas in a turbine. Even a small turbine (hybrid car sized) would be a higher system efficiency than H2. In theory is not relevant WRT electrolysis, because in theory you could have a natgas hybrid turbine in a car, or in theory you could have a mr. fusion burning the H2. In practice H2 is just extremely highly processed natgas.