Apple: Nation’s biggest private fuel cell energy project at NC data center

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12 pointsiProject2 comments

>It will extract hydrogen from natural gas supplied by Piedmont Natural Gas.

And this is why I wish we'd stop talking about hydrogen as some sort of panacea for the environment or future source of energy. The most common source of Hydrogen is splitting hydrocarbons, resulting in Hydrogen and CO2.

This conversion is fairly efficient, but then you still have to re-combine the Hydrogen with O2 to get electricity which is also fairly efficient, but not nearly as efficient as just burning the natural gas in a conventional steam driven generator.

So what's the point of all this? Could someone explain it to me?

PS, go to the article, grab some text from the body, copy it, then past it anywhere. Pretty neat what they did there, huh?

I'm struck by a sense of extravagant expense toward an inefficient process in the name of company PR: "we're green, here's what we've done."

I'm willing to admit I don't understand the process behind this powerplant, but three things jump out at me: a) the natural gas must be extracted from the earth in some fashion, b) the oxygen also, and c) the resulting CO2 must be disposed of in some Earth-friendly fashion.

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