Bio-Hydrogen and fuel cells

[hrothgar]

As I noted before, I'm high skeptical about converting biomass to hydrogen. I admit that I haven't done a deep dive into this side of the biomass equation (I did study bio-mass to ethanol conversion and concluded that its not a good place to invest my money)

 

Ultimately, my main critique is a simple one...

 

I don't see anyone investing much money in this. There's a lot of money being spent on alternative energy. If this system is as good as you say, there would be efforts to commercialize it. I would be able to go and invest $$$ in a company that was working to bring this to market. The fact that i can't suggests that there is some major problem... I don't know if its with converting biomass to hydrogen or the fact that there aren't any good ways to transport hydrogen (you need massive investment in infrastructure to pressurize and cool the gas)

 

So, where is the investment prospectus?

[whereagles]

A back of the envelope calculation (should be correct to within an order of magnitude or so) suggests that if getting energy out of sunlight is ~1% efficient then we'd need to devote about 5% of the earth's landmass to cover the world's total energy usage.

 

The 1% I used for efficiency may well be too high a figure.

Solar panels work around 10-20% efficiency, with research being done aiming at an increase to ~30%. Cover half the Sahara desert with solar panels and it should be enough :)

 

Plants used to produce ethanol or biodiesel feed on sunlight as well (that's where the energy comes from), with efficiencies of around 1-2%.