the new fuels with magnecular structure - Institute for Basic Research

10 RUGGERO MARIA SANTILLI
B) Alarming environmental problems caused by current hydrogen
production. The reformation of methane and other fossil fuels for hydrogen
production requires large amounts of energy because of the necessary breaking of
strong molecular bonds such as CH 4 . In this case, all byproducts of the reformation,
such as the “green house gas” CO 2 , are released into the environment. A
first year graduate student in chemistry can then prove (although his/her teacher
may disagree for personal academic gains) that the CO 2 released in the atmosphere
for hydrogen production from CH 4 is a large multiple of the CO 2 produced
in gasoline combustion.
Hence, simple calculations establish that the current methods of hydrogen production,
transportation and use release in the atmosphere carcinogenic substances,
green house gases and other contaminants that are at least twenty times bigger
than the contaminants releases by the gasoline production and combustion in contemporary
cars with efficient catalytic converters.
In fact, the production of hydrogen requires large amounts of energy while,
by comparison, gasoline production requires considerably less energy because
crude oil comes out of the group at pressure without any need of electricity,
while refining processes of crude oil into gasoline are mostly chemical in nature,
thus requiring minimal electric energy. The global pollution caused by gasoline
is therefore essentially restricted to the pollution caused by transportation and
combustion.
Being an environmentalist, the author certainly does not support gasoline as
the dominant fuel. Nevertheless, scientific honesty requires the admission that
gasoline is much less polluting than hydrogen as currently produced when considered
on a global scale including production, transportation and combustion.
C) Alarming threat to the ozone layer caused by hydrogen seepage
and losses. Another serious environmental problem caused by hydrogen is due
to its seepage, namely, the fact that, being composed by the smallest molecule on
Earth, hydrogen escapes through container walls irrespective of the used material
and thickness. Consequently, the large scale use of hydrogen must take into account
the inevitable release of free hydrogen that, being very light, instantly rises
to the upper layer of our atmosphere all the way to the ozone layer, resulting in
its depletion because hydrogen and ozone have one of the fastest known chemical
reactions
H 2 + O 3 → H 2 O + O 2 . (1.1)