1255 The Hydrogen Economy

[Music] hi so the hydrogen economy the hydrogen economy is the replacement of fossil fuels with hydrogen and it's awesome because when you burn hydrogen you get water now when you look at it at the top level like that it seems like the answer to all our ills but when you dive down a little bit deeper you find it's not quite as green as it first appears because the main way of getting hydrogen is to steam crack petroleum put a lot of petrol in some steam crack off the hydrogen and release a load of co2 so it's not that green of course the other way of doing it is to electrolyze water so if you stick a water an electrolytic so you can electrolyze it and get a load of hydrogen but of course that uses a huge amount of power and that power is predominantly coming from nuclear and coal so again not that green so digging down a little bit you can see that hydrogen economy actually relies on the petroleum economy to run and of course that's not great but there's a lot of research going into it and some of the research is all about using catalysts and water to reduce that energy demand and still get the hydrogen back out in a nice green way problem with it is it's just research right now and because a lot of people are interested because burn hydrogen get water electrolyze water you get hydrogen it seems like a nice circle and there's loads of people looking at that trying to get that more energy efficient so we have this circular hydrogen economy with people electrolyzing water and it's a fascinating subject and super interesting that's for sure but you gotta think there has to be a better way don't you now there is a better way there is a better way that's gonna equally a huge amount of research and there's various projects one in australia comes to mind where they're essentially using solar in a hangar bosch process to make ammonia then they ship that ammonia across the seas to whichever country wants it and that country electrolyzes the ammonia and gets the hydrogen back which is pretty interesting stuff and you would ask yourself well what's the difference between electrolyzing water and electrolyzing ammonia electrolyzing ammonia takes far less energy and so it's much more energy efficient to electrolyze ammonia for your hydrogen than it is to electrolyze water problem is of course you've got to produce the ammonia now this is a really interesting thing this interesting thing was brought up by four girls in nigeria what they did was electrolyze some urea actually urine they electrolyzed some urine and were able to run an engine for six hours of one liter of urine that awesome have you any idea how much urine is produced per day by people i hadn't turns out it's 240 million tons per day by just people factor in all the cows and pigs and chickens and sheep that we have remember there are seven chickens to every person you have this massive absolutely massive amount of waste product that we basically chuck into the sea and of course chucking it into the sea means we get algal blooms we get land poisoning we get sea poisoning so all of this waste that could be used is just being chucked away and that absolutely fascinates me because the real problem is it's urine and when you mention that people have a little giggle behind their hands like school children urine you've got to think haven't you get over yourselves a little bit grow up a little bit maybe there's this massive pollutant that with very little energy could could be turned into hydrogen and more fertilizer and solve a problem that is what absolutely fascinates me okay so i took the time in trouble to listen to myself and to be honest that sounded a little preachy didn't i so i'm sorry about that however i do think that looking at urea and you electrolysis of urea is a really viable thing and if you do a google search you will see a lot of research on it so instead of focusing so much on electrolysis of water i think it would be much more interesting and certainly more useful or at least according to me to look at the electrolysis of urine anyway i thought i would raise those issues talk a little bit about it and hopefully accept your interest into the electrolysis of urea i hope you enjoyed the video and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 5,715

Rating: 4.9835839 out of 5

Keywords: hydrogen, electrolysis, urea, robert, fwg, tnt

Id: uBIJfi4-rRE

Length: 4min 39sec (279 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021