On Tue, 5 Nov 2013, Henry Vanderbilt wrote: > > There have been a few small demo projects which have used electrolysis for > > making hydrogen, usually due to special circumstances... > > I'd be tempted to use the hydrogen produced plus carbon to produce CH4, > which can be stored, transported, and used as vehicle fuel in > mostly-standard vehicles with a wide range of affordable off-the-shelf > technologies. Better yet is to go one step farther and make methanol (CH3OH), which is not quite as good a fuel, but is a room-temperature liquid, dramatically simplifying use in vehicles. (As a fuel, it has about the same issues as ethanol, i.e. there are some nuisances but it's practical.) > Now THAT would be revolutionary - drill two ~$10 million fracked dry > wells with the right geometry, pump water down one, get steam out of the > other to run some number of megawatts of power plant indefinitely. The idea is an old one -- I remember seeing it suggested many years ago -- although fracking technology may make it work better. The main problem in earlier attempts, as I understand it, was establishing a long-lived network of fine cracks connecting the two wells. In particular, erosion had a bad habit of gradually concentrating the flow into a few wider channels, which didn't make nearly as good a heat exchanger. Henry Spencer henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) (regexpguy@xxxxxxxxx)