Word: gas
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Drilling for oil and gas around the harsh, remote island of Sakhalin in Russia's Far East was never going to be easy, but a political chill has put some of the world's biggest energy projects in an unexpected deep freeze. In the decade since they [an error occurred while processing this directive] negotiated separate drilling agreements with Russian authorities, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have gone way over budget and incurred the wrath of leading environmental groups. But last week, the two oil majors faced their biggest challenge so far: a Kremlin backlash that could hold...
...amidst the hydrogen hype, few have noted where the new fuel comes from: fossil fuels. As it stands, burning hydrogen reduces neither demand for fossil fuels nor emissions of carbon dioxide, because almost all the hydrogen used today comes from natural gas...
...most common technique for producing hydrogen is known steam reformation. In this process, natural gas is heated with water at high pressures, yielding hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide, which is converted to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Thus, because carbon dioxide is a waste product, hydrogen cars recreate the same problem that they are advertised to sidestep: greenhouse gas emissions, which the balance of scientific evidence suggests lead to global warming. More environmentally friendly methods of generating hydrogen, such as coaxing bacteria to turn water alone into hydrogen, are still largely in the exploratory phase...
...There are also a host of technological hurdles stand between our current capabilities and a highway full of hydrogen vehicles. Distributing hydrogen to consumers will require an entirely new infrastructure to transport the gas as well as new filling stations. Safely holding hydrogen in cars will require heavily reinforced tanks to prevent the family station wagon from going the way of the Hindenburg. And although hydrogen has a high energy yield per pound, it has an incredibly low mass density, even at subzero temperatures, so fuel tanks need to be unreasonably large to give hydrogen vehicles usable driving ranges. Still...
...manufacturers (and, in turn, the public) tend to conflate two separate problems: finding a safe, steady supply of energy, and finding away to store that energy in a car. Gasoline easily solves the latter problem because it is so easy to transport compared to, say, a lighter-than-air gas like hydrogen. Hydrogen, which is at best a troublesome way to store energy, is being touted as an energy source when the actual source of hydrogen is a fossil fuel. In the end, hydrogen is just a convenient way for handling the energy originally stored in natural gas?...