Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen Part 2: The Ghost of Blue Hydrogen’s Future As we found in Part 1, conventional hydrogen production from natural gas using steam methane reforming (SMR) coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is easily written off as a waste of everyone’s time and money. It’s fooling nobody. Because nearly half the […]
Author: spitfireresearch
Blackish-Blue Bruise Coloured Hydrogen
My readers will know that I have never liked the “colours of hydrogen” that has been spread, as a meme, by the hydrogen-as-a-fuel lobby. There is only really one kind of hydrogen in the world right now. Hydrogen- 98.7% of it by generous estimate- is made from fossils, without meaningful carbon capture. It is barest […]
Waste to Energy/Waste to Fuels: the Great Greenwashing Machine
Most of us find waste to be viscerally repugnant. The smell and even the appearance of garbage revolts us. And yet we all generate it, in seemingly endless quantity. In “developed” (rich) nations, we therefore have built extensive systems to get this repugnant material out of sight, and hence out of our minds, as quickly […]
Global Warming Risk Arises From Three Facts
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a real risk for future generations including my own children. It’s a risk I’ve personally taken seriously, and have taken personal action against, since the late 1980s when I was in university. And while we’ve seen some extremely positive developments in the past 30 years such as the creation of new industries […]
What Are the Energy Solutions?
Oh Paul, you’re so critical! You just crap on other people’s “green solutions”, telling us why they won’t work in your opinion! Where are YOUR solutions? Put up or shut up! First Premises First, what are we trying to solve, exactly? Anthropogenic global warming https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-warming-risk-arises-from-three-facts-paul-martin/ (Any denialist posts to this article will be deleted. Want to argue […]
So: Exactly How Much Electricity Does it Take to Make a Gallon of Gasoline?
First, why do I care what the answer is? And why should you care? A little history may help you understand. My son Jacob and I took on a project a little over three years ago, to convert my 1975 Triumph Spitfire roadster into a fully electric vehicle, which we call the E-Fire. The project flowed from […]
Hydrogen From Renewable Energy- Our Future?
Image credit: https://www.rolandberger.com/zh/Publications/European-cities-bet-on-hydrogen-fuel-cells-to-help-meet-emission-targets.html Is the image I’ve used, and credited above, a fair representation of our future? Hydrogen proponents, particularly those who want to sell us on the superiority of hydrogen as a transport fuel for fuelcell electric vehicles, would like us to believe it. But what would it take to make such a dream- the […]
Ammonia Pneumonia
Few in our society realize just how dependent we all are on a poison gas. Ammonia has literally permitted about half the humans on earth today to exist at all. The vast majority of our food calories, and especially those of our food animals, are totally dependent on ammonia as the source of nitrogen fertilizer. […]
The E-Fire – Electric Triumph Spitfire
A number of LinkedIn readers wanted more detail about my conversion of my 1975 Triumph Spitfire to a fully electric vehicle, so I thought I’d put together a LinkedIn version of an article I wrote for my local Toronto Triumph Club magazine, “Ragtop”. (E-Fire, with its fuel pipeline in the background) I bought my 1975 […]
Home Heating-Electrification?
Warning: this article contains a lot of numbers. Numbers that tell a story. If you don’t like numbers, stop reading and spare yourself arithmetic anxiety. It should not be news to you that people in Canada need to heat their homes. Some of us also need air conditioning if we want to be able to […]