Hi Roger,

The place where many scientists might go first to find that type of information would be the “Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.” There you can see how many calories are generated when you oxidize hydrogen, carbon, aluminum, and other elements. So, that provides a theoretical starting place for which element would be the most efficient for transporting energy.

Then as Skywise proposed, you need to take into account the efficiency of the energy conversion processes such as H2O going to H2 and Al2O3 going to Al.

It is difficult to compare the H2 and Al conversion numbers to the efficiency of a nuclear power plant. Uranium fission generates staggering amounts of energy. But safety and security need to be taken into account when final cost analyses are done.

If it can be clearly shown that one form of energy conversion and transport is far superior to other forms, scientific ingenuity can be counted on to dramatically improve energy conversion and transport efficiencies. For example, if you want to move aluminum metal from one place to another so that it can be “burned” in a power plant, you can ship it by rail on a flatcar. Then the transport cost of moving the flatcar has to be taken into account. Or, in theory anyway, you could make the entire flatcar out of aluminum and then “burn” the whole flatcar at the destination power plant. Of course you would then have to figure out another way to transport the resultant aluminum oxide power back to the power plant for recycling! Your railcar went up in smoke, so to speak.

One of the things that nuclear power offers us is unlimited amounts of energy to start with if you can build and run the power plants safely and securely. If the energy conversion and transport efficiency is low you can just build more power plants to compensate for that. Unfortunately, international energy cartel agendas are keeping those types of things from getting done. The two key words are “make profits” instead of “save lives.” However, if our governments felt enough pressure from voters etc. to do things correctly they could get around the energy cartel roadblocks. That isn’t likely to happen any time soon. But that is not an acceptable reason to not try to make an effort to get things to work better.

These are personal opinions.