Related posts put together in a type of series on how to get a hydrogen source at an affordable price. The latest idea is to use algae for that purpose.
By way of review, let's start with this post:
Haber+Sabatier+Bosch+LFTRs+ Oil shale = Clean energy independence
The objection here could be from using fossil fuels. So, the idea moved on to biologic sources of hydrogen.
What the hay?
What the hay, Part II
That brings us to algae.
Why algae? Is more prolific producer of biomass. Shouldn't be interested in producing oils, just biomass. Want to pyrolyze it to make biogas and biofuels. Also makes biochar, to improve soils. Canadian company already doing this---
Dynamotive . Dynamotive doesn't push algae, though. They make biofuels via pyrolysis.
If you avoid the algal strains that are meant to maximize oil production, you can simplify the algae production. The idea is simplicity in order to get costs down. Natural strains of algae will be the most hardy and probably the cheapest, in my opinion. I looked at Sargassum yesterday.
You may want to use seawater as opposed to fresh water. You don't want to add to fresh water shortages.
An idea here is to use ponds close to the sea.
An idea I got yesterday was to use LFTR's for process heat for pyrolyzing algae biomass for fuel. Why LFTR's? The energy is cheaper than coal. Secondly, don't make electricity, only make process heat. The nuclear reactions will produce the process heat. Avoiding the production of electricity will make it more efficient. The best you can hope for if you make electricity is about in the 40% range efficiency. If you avoid that step, you make the energy produced more than doubled in efficiency. That and the low price potential of this type of energy should help in the goal towards getting hydrogen prices down to competitive levels.
I don't know how Dynamotive gets its process heat. They may use the biofuels themselves. However, the biofuels aren't necessarily the cheapest, so why go that route?
Even if you can get the prices of hydrogen down to low enough levels, you still have a problem with the cost of platinum. That's why astroidal platinum comes in. You need to solve the launch problem for that, which is one of the ideas that I've explored a lot on this blog.
An alternative to platinum fuel cells is
Solid Oxide Fuel Cells. But those are too heavy. If the weight problem can be solved, then asteroidal platinum won't be necessary.
Putting it together into a comprehensive plan. You will need a comprehensive plan to make all these ideas work.
Update:
It is May 27th, 2013. Five months ago, I posted this with missing pieces of the comprehensive plan. Those pieces have now been found.
You can read about them in these series of posts of which this one is a part.
The first missing piece was the fuel cell. I found a solution to this one in this series called Electric cars are feasible today.
Actually, upon further review, the Apollo fuel cell / hydrogen generation system will work by itself. But I found yet another way to make it work, although it may be an inferior design to Aronsson's.
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