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Hydrogen and water


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Just one thing that bugs my sense of symmetry (and science), is the water-hydrogen/oxygen-burn cycle.

 

We can split waters for oxygen and hydrogen, great, though it costs energy, this is good.

But then we 'burn' hydrogen, which...disappears...and doesn't take oxygen, and...turns into...nothingness...

Couldn't we actually have it consume oxygen again and produce pure water, the way anyone with the most elementary chemistry knowledge would expect ?

 

The lack of oxygen consume on burn.  Is this to keep oxygen needs in check in a place that seems to have only one alternative to fossil fuel burning? (if we count the mutant disappearing hydrogen as a fossil fuel).

 

The dissonance between the energy cycle needed for a base to be maintained, and what basic chemistry might suggest took a bit of getting used to.

I know we aren't doing a science simulator here, but the difference between real chemistry and ONI chemistry is not only fiddly to learn, it's highly arbitary, and you cant learn system principles, but have to check and memorise every single energy transaction and chemical change for where the voodoo free stuff is coming from.

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If you can split water into oxygen and hydrogen and then burn it to produce energy and get water back. The only way to balance this would be to produce less energy than it takes to generate hydrogen and oxygen which then makes the hydrogen generator pointless or make it so that it produce less water than you consume generating hydrogen and oxygen which then does not make sense scientifically. If not then this is basically free unlimited energy

On 11/21/2017 at 10:33 PM, AlexRou said:

If you can split water into oxygen and hydrogen and then burn it to produce energy and get water back. The only way to balance this would be to produce less energy than it takes to generate hydrogen and oxygen which then makes the hydrogen generator pointless or make it so that it produce less water than you consume generating hydrogen and oxygen which then does not make sense scientifically. If not then this is basically free unlimited energy

So what I'm asking for is effectively a rework of the current system of one way energy gain, replaced by conservation of energy and mass.  So you couldn't power your base AND get free oxygen out of hydrogen cracking, it should be zero energy gain at best, and probably a bit of a loss.  This would mean you would need another way to get oxygen (probably back from the CO2, where most of it ends up), but at the cost of something (usually energy).

The current solution for any long term oxy problems (post initial algae and oxylite), is the rather unsatisfying hydrogen disintegration pathway we currently have.  If we instead had to discard hydrogen as an energy source (at least the cracking of it), and resort to spending energy to get the CO2 to uncouple (and leave us with carbon residue, which might make for various interesting uses), we would have a more interesting engineering problem to solve than 'can I find a hydrogen or water geyser somewhere'.

 

(I may have spent too much time on the net painfully explaining why batteries that crack water to hydrogen and then burn it to charge the battery will not give us cars that run on water and solve the worlds energy crisis as many conspiracy 'dupes' like to propound.  I personally attribute this tendancy to standing on strips one tile high whilst friends do construction work on the level above.  It seems the resulting oxygen deprivation from having their heads sealed in stone floors produces funny ideas about oxygen at that stage....)

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