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United States Science Technology

US Army Pursues Hydrogen Fuel Concepts 442

Posted by simoniker from the olive-hydrogen dept.
securitas writes "According to GlobeTechnology/AP, the US Army is excited about the potential of hydrogen-powered tanks. The interest is the result of a technology demonstration that took place at Auburn University in December. Scientists have invented a process that removes the carbon and sulfur from hydrocarbon fuels like oil and gasoline. Hydrogen-powered vehicles could go three times farther than diesel-powered counterparts. DoD officials say 'it costs about $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.' The new process could let them take advantage of the existing oil industry infrastructure. Auburn University scientists 'realized there is already a lot of hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuel' and 'took jet fuel, which is very similar to diesel, and catalytically converted it, separating out the sulfur, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and the fuel cell ran.' The Auburn team is now pursuing military funding."
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US Army Pursues Hydrogen Fuel Concepts More

US Army Pursues Hydrogen Fuel Concepts

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  • Oil? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guarddonkey ( 669975 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:23AM (#8053520)
    Does it seem kind of backwards to be using Oil in the fuel cell process?

    • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sarojin ( 446404 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:28AM (#8053540)
      Not really - right now hydrogen fuel is really only useful as a container of energy, not as an energy source.

      • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mwood ( 25379 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:03AM (#8054162)
        Since there are no wells of molecular hydrogen anywhere on the planet, hydrogen will *always* be only a storage medium, *never* a direct energy source. Hydrogen production will be coupled with some other source of energy because that's the only way to get free hydrogen around here.

        But the extraction-from-hydrocarbon method has got to go. Notice the byproducts: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide. Sound familiar? Aren't those a large part of the reason people have been whining about the need for alternative fuels?

        The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily. (Try loading 40 tons of electricity on a truck.) We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process. The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen. So the air is actually *better* downwind of an electrolytic hydrogen plant (if they don't bottle all the oxygen and sell that too), and the system is closed and fully recycling, since burning the hydrogen gives you the water back.

        Liberating hydrogen from oil is expedient in the short term, but it's stupid in the long term. Isn't short-term thinking how we messed up our atmosphere in the first place?

        That said, I'm happy to see an outfit with the size and clout of the U.S. Army getting serious about hydrogen. They can drive development to the point that the consumption end is a going concern, whether the production end is well thought out or not. Once there's a sizable demand for hydrogen fuel, there'll be money enough for bright people to tune up the supply side.

        • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rostin ( 691447 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:09AM (#8054766)
          The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily.

          Actually, one of the big obstacles to using hydrogen as a fuel is that it ISN'T very easily transportable. As a gas, you have to employ very high pressures that involve expensive tanks. Compress it all the way to a liquid and you've burned up so much energy that its no longer attractive as a more efficient source. Chemical storage (metal hydrides, etc) is being researched, but AFAIK, it isn't ready to be main-streamed.

          We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.

          That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere. It can't be hydrogen, because it would take more hydrogen than you are making to do it.

          The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen.

          Let's be clear about what we're talking about. I'm not sure how much hydrogen you are planning on making (total replacement of hydrocarbon fuels?) but you will have to build enough solar/wind/wave/hydro/whatever installations to nearly match the amount of energy being produced by hydrocarbons for whatever application you are interested in. The "nearly" shows up because hydrogen power IS generally more efficient than hydrocarbon based power. This is a nice theoretical solution, but practically it would be very expensive and difficult, even if it is possible.

          So the air is actually *better* downwind of an electrolytic hydrogen plant (if they don't bottle all the oxygen and sell that too), and the system is closed and fully recycling, since burning the hydrogen gives you the water back.

          A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.

          • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Informative)

            by Phronesis ( 175966 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:47AM (#8055162)
            A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.

            Anyone who knows anything understands that water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas and contributes more to the natural greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does.

            However, the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is very close to its saturation value, so excess water vapor will precipitate out quickly.

            The saturation vapor pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 1000 PSI, so excess carbon dioxide introduced into the atmosphere will not precipitate. It must be removed by other processes (e.g., photosynthesis), which run a lot more slowly. Current estimates of the residence time of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere are around 60 years.

            Other than this, your criticisms of hydrogen as fuel is right on target. I would only add that nuclear power looks like a very good source of power for industrial-scale electrolysis. This still wouldn't address the question of transporting hydrogen, though.

        • Re:Oil? (Score:4, Informative)

          by Hoser McMoose ( 202552 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:52AM (#8055208)

          Since there are no wells of molecular hydrogen anywhere on the planet, hydrogen will *always* be only a storage medium, *never* a direct energy source

          Err, well unless you count nuclear fussion. I suppose that's a little ways off though!

          But the extraction-from-hydrocarbon method has got to go.

          Have you got any other suggestions? There are only two widely available sources of hydrogen. The first is water, which is all well and good except that you only ever get out less energy than you put in (ie it's purely an energy transport mechanism, you still need a power plant to provide the electricity in the first place). The second widely available source of hydrogen is in hydrocarbons.

          Of course, there are some advantages to getting power from hydrocarbons the fuel cell way instead of internal combustion engines. First off, the real big problem with current energy production is that burning hydrocarbons produces all kinds of sulpher dioxide, nitrogen monoxide/dioxide, etc. By separating out the hydrogen using a membrane you shouldn't get nearly as many of these emissions. Also, if the claim of 3x the efficiency is accurate than it would be a BIG bonus, though most numbers I've heard place the efficiency as being much lower. Finally, a fuel cell powered car would probably work better with regenerative breaking than what you get in current hybrid cars, since you would now just have an all-electrical system instead of a gas motor and an electrical motor. At the very least it should make things easier/cheaper than hybrids.

          The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily

          Err, actually it's not all that easy to ship hydrogen. It's a gas, and a VERY light gas at that. You really need to compress it a whole lot before you can get any meaningful quantity. You also then have the problem of shipping a lot of highly compressed and highly combustable gas. In short, it's not easy at all. Storing is extremely troublesome for the same reasons. Shipping and storing fossil fuels is MUCH easier.

          The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen

          I love wind, solar, wave, etc. energy as much as the enxt guy, but lets face it, they aren't anywhere near capable of providing us with our CURRENT energy needs, let alone the SIGNIFICANTLY higher energy needs if we started doing electrolytic converters for all of our cars!

    • Re: Tanks? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Doesn't it seem kind of backwards to use an explosive gas to power vehicles that are designed to drive into a gunfight?

      There's a reason tanks run on diesel and not gasoline...

      • Re: Tanks? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ralph Wiggam ( 22354 ) *
        If a round penetrates the diesel fuel tank of a current vehicle, the crew is pretty screwed anyway. If they could make the hydrogen tank smaller than the diesel fuel tank, thus less likely to be hit, it would be an improvement.

        -B

      • Re: Tanks? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KDan ( 90353 )
        Hydrogen is not any more explosive than diesel. It is combustive, so it will burn, but it doesn't explode in the sense that you seem to imply.

        Daniel

    • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xolotl ( 675282 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:41AM (#8053615) Journal
      It's useful as a trnasition technology, exploiting the existing infrastructure and increasing use of hydrogen engines until a critical mass is reached where it becomes economically viable to create a dedicated hydrogen distribution system. And because they use catalysts the energy cost should be small. Very clever indeed.
      • You guys do know they didn't invent this? The technique has been known for years. The car manufacturers will be using it for the first fuel cell vehicles -- gasoline to hydrogen via catalysts, then feed the H2 to the fuel cell, making electricity to run the electric motors that drive the car. Almost no moving parts.

        Just saying, it's not the military that came up with it. They are jsut waking up to what it implies about the logistics of refueling vehicles -- a factor of three improvement in range means fewe
    • A good alternative to burning Oil for the Hydrogen would be to use Nuclear Energy to split Hydrogren from water.

      I could see the Navy building Nuclear Powered "Hydrogen Tankers", ships that could both store and provide Hydrogen Fuel. These ships could be moved to an operational zone and parked to produce all the Hydrogen fuel needed for an expeditionary force.

      • Re:Nuclear Alternative (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WegianWarrior ( 649800 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:39AM (#8053935) Journal

        Off course, the other name for such a ship will be "target". Not only would an enemy dry up the fuelsupply for your landbased forces, but he would also be able to spread radiactive waste (if he gets a good hit) among your fleet.

        • No more than any other nuclear powered Naval ship. As it is now, a number of key naval combatants, such as Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Cruisers are nowadays Nuclear-Powered. The same sort of measures now used by those ships to protect their nuclear reactors can be employed here. Unlike civilian tankers, these tankers will likely be fitted with Anti-Aircraft / Missile defenses. They will also enjoy the protection of the naval fleet and ground forces with which they will operate.
        • Those hydrogen ships would of course be guarded, just as big slow aircraft carriers are guarded. A carrier battle group is just about the most dangerous thing you'll ever encounter at less than interplanetary scale. I wouldn't mess with one, and a nuclear-powered ship full of vital fuel will likely be protected as well or better.

          • Off course the 'Hydrogen Tanker' will be well protected, but I'm an airforce guy. We're more conserned with how to take targets out than how to defend them. One of my favorite stunt when a naval officers points out that his ship has the capability to engave X number of targets at once is to ask what will happen if someone attacks with X+1 missiles... it's called 'swamping the defence' and has been a good tactic since man first started doing war.

            I'm not saying a 'Hydrogen Tanker' is a bad idea - it will all

        • Re:Nuclear Alternative (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Ugmo ( 36922 )
          I still like the idea.

          You can use a Nuclear Submarine Blueprint. Replace the missle bays with hydrogen tanks. Use the electricity from the engines for splitting the hydrogen from seawater while out at sea somewhere hidden. Come in near the coast to offload.

          In order to make it harder to guess where the sub is while offloading run multiple temp pipelines into the water. The sub docks with a random one of these out at sea and pumps in the hydrogen to a land based fuel station. When you are done, the sub goe

    • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Informative)

      by overunderunderdone ( 521462 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:04AM (#8053750)
      Does it seem kind of backwards to be using Oil in the fuel cell process?

      No that is the usual way of getting hydrogen. The other way involves getting it from water but that requires a great deal of energy - in fact, the same amount of energy that you get back when you turn it back into water in the fuel cell (really a fair bit more due to inefficiencies).

      This is the problem with many alternative energy sources - they all sound good but there are always downsides that don't get much press. People talk about hydrogen like it's magic energy for free - but you have to GET the hydrogen from somewhere, either from oil, in which case we're back were we started. Or from water which takes more energy to process than you get from the fuel cell. At that point you can simply think of fuel cells as a type of battery. It's a way to store energy which must be produced in some other way.

      • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DoraLives ( 622001 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:58AM (#8054118)
        you have to GET the hydrogen from somewhere,

        The hidden key to this story is actually catalysis. Methinks that sooner than you'd expect, we're going to be doing just fine throwing grass clippings, old newspapers, orange peels, and most any old kind of organic residue into the hopper and then driving off, leaving a cloud of water vapor and a stash of nicely organized chemical elements, which will also turn out to have some interesting uses.

      • Re:Oil? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mwood ( 25379 )
        Think a little longer. Getting hydrogen from oil *also* consumes as much energy as it gives back, and then some. The oil is destroyed. The oil represents every bit of the energy latent in the hydrogen, plus some more. Breaking down water might turn out to be *more* efficient since nearly all the energy put in will be stored in the output, while the energy that could be gotten from burning the carbon in oil goes, well, where *does* it go? I hope it's used in driving the hydrogen production process, sinc

        • Re:Oil? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) *
          Generally, the H20->H2+O2 process is at most 50% efficient in practice. There have been several crazy pseudoscientists who've come up with unreproducible results that claim 90%+ efficiency rates (these results are not repeatable by anybody else), but standard "cracking of water" is not a perfectly efficient process by any means.

          Likewise, you need to get energy from some source to drive the hydrogen production process. Hopefully you don't plan on getting that from fossil fuel sources, since they you h

      • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:29AM (#8054978) Journal
        The chief advantage of Hydrogen over fossil fuels isn't so much that it's cheaper, but that it's truly an infinitely renewable resource that's virtually perfect in terms of environmental friendliness.

        There is an inescapable fact that is often overlooked by advocates of conventional fuel usage: There is a finite amount of fossil fuel on this planet. Once that's used up, that's it. We're screwed... BIG time. There's no getting it back without waiting a few million years for its users to all decompose back into oil. Now how long this oil is going to last us at the rate we are currently using it may be up for debate, but it is irrefutable that we are consuming it faster than it gets created, so eventually, however long from now, if we keep using it at the rate that we are, we *WILL* run out.

        Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the entire universe. Further, even though there is a finite amount of it on this planet as well, when you burn it, the exhaust is pure water vapour. No more dumping poisonous gasses into the atomosphere. Further, this water vapour will eventually fall back as rain, and the net result will be cleaner rain water as hydrogen fueled cars become more popular.

        With the application of some amount of energy (yes, I know it isn't cheap), hydrogen can always be extracted from water (which, considering hydrogen combustion exhaust *IS* water, makes it infinitely renewable). It is the energy for this extraction process that would be the greatest contributing factor in determining how much an end consumer would pay for gasoline. I don't think any serious advodate of Hydrogen fuel would insist that this process would be for free. But because such extraction processes could be large scale and centralized, alternative energy sources such as geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, or even nuclear power could be employed to obtain the energy ncecessary to extract the water from the hydrogen (a process which, as a convenient byproduct, also produces pure Oxygen which can be collected or released immediately as seen fit). Stricter pollution control measures could reasonably be enforced at such centralized locations than might be also possible in mobile internal combustion engines, so again the negative impact that using such fuel would have on the environment could be minimized.

        Would worldwide adoption of Hydrogen fuel spell an end for the oil companies that have invested so much in their current industry? Not at all. Why couldn't current oil companies instead choose to run the plants that extract hydrogen from water for shipping to fuel pumping stations? That way, they would still get the same slice of the pie that they were always getting. Oh, their monopoly may be cut into a bit, but they currently have the resources at their disposal to implement such processes on a scale that would, in general, be likely to be cleaner and more efficient than the processes that might be employed by those with lesser capital to start out with. Further, if they wait until after there isn't enough oil to go around before starting this, their income will have already taken a hit and they simply won't have the same resources that they do now.

        Also, there will always be a demand for oil, even if it is not used as a fuel. Oil is employed in many different manufacturing processes, not to mention also used as lubrication. Oil pumps won't be useless in such a world, they just wouldn't need to be as plentiful.

    • Re:Oil? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Catbeller ( 118204 )
      Not oil - diesel fuel.The process has been well known for a while. Remove the oxygen and carbon with catalysts, then burn the liberated hydrogen.

      Can be done with gasoline, too, of course. When car manufacturers go on about "fuel cells", they are not talking about hydrogen tanks. They want to use plain old gas out of a plain old gas station.

      Makes sense to the oil companies as well.

      Not quite a perfect process, emissions wise, but at least you get three times the miles per gallon, and fewer impurities are s
      • Doesn't thermodynamics imply that expending energy to remove the impurities can never result in more net energy? Sure your fuel might be cleaner and pack more punch...but presumably some energy somewhere was expended to "clean" the fuel.

        Are you talking about a preprocessing, or dynamic processing of the fuel in the car?

    • Re:Oil? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cluckshot ( 658931 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:48AM (#8054035)

      The process actually has many advantages for the Military and for civilians. But first people have to quit viewing hydrogen as a fuel and see it more like a battery that they charge up. It is not a Energy Source. It is an Energy Storage Media.

      Working on such research myself for the USAF *yes military* I have learned a lot about what is going on. The process and demand for such changes is not exactly like what the media tend to report.

      The reason we burn gasoline etc is to provide the Heat Catalyzed Hydrogen for conversion to Steam when reacted with Oxygen. While the carbon provides some energy it is really for running a Steam Engine. This cycle is limited thermally to about 38% efficient of the original energy in the steam. This is functionally further limited by other factors leaving current petrol engines about 25% to 28% efficient thermally.

      The process for Cracking Hydrogen from fuel uses about 25% of the gross energy entering the process. Then the process of running a fuel cell drive eats another 15% (more or less) This leaves a potential thermal efficiency of a drive train at something close to 60%! This is more than double the current efficiency. Curiously this is not the military reason for doing this. It is but one fairly lessor factor. The military reasons for doing this have to do with issues of "Readiness" and "Dual Use."

      If you have a tank that runs this way and you have no longer use for the tank if it runs on standard engines you have a very expensive item to leave just sitting around doing nothing. But if you drive the tank using Hydrogen and produce Electric energy to drive it, the tank can just plug in and become a "Generator" for many uses after battle is done. The savings to the military here by going to such systems is about a 4 to 1 ratio in machinery that they don't have to haul around. This coupled with increased milage etc makes the process very attractive

      In Iraq this would have allowed us to just "Plug In" and have the electrical grid up and running. But this is hardly all. There are very big issues here on the weight of drive trains and also in issues such as stealth. Current engines would allow an enemy to hear the Soldiers coming for many miles.(often 20 or more miles) This system is very quiet.

      This will spin off into civilian use. The technology is going to do many things. It will make cars which are profoundly less noisy. The technology also has pollution control issues. It is essentially a clean burn for the fuel.

      There are other issues here that many people could hardly imagine. The storage of Hydrogen as a liquified gas, or compressed gas is essentially impossible for use in normal conditions. The losses of Hydrogen alone would kill the use. The natural solution is to store the Hydrogen as a Hydride. Much experimentation has been done with Hydrides. All solutions come back to the natural solution that Carbon Hydrides and essentially about 6 to 20 carbon Alcane chains (Gasoline Jet fuel etc) are just about the optimal solution.

      What is going to develop will probably be that Gasoline or similar fuel will be made using either Coal for the Carbon or by Hydration of poor quality vegitable oils or vegitable mass like Hydrilla or Algea. This will provide the store for the Hydrogen that may in fact be made from the same process fairly directly. This can be SOLAR in energy source.

      There are other features here that are most desirable. This provides a stable store which works with current technology. It is energy optimal. It is fairly clean and allows the addition of regenerative braking and other mechanisms.

      This is more or less what is going on. Sorry for those who thought that gasoline was going away, it looks as though it is here to stay for a long time to come. Fuel Reformers (Crackers for Hydrogen) will just make you have a 50 Kg Primary Energy Converter insted of a 500 Kg one. You will no longer have brakes or a transmission. Your controls will be as simple as computer joysticks. The

    • Re:Oil? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tunabomber ( 259585 )
      Not at all. The technology to strip hydrogen atoms off of common hydrocarbons is really the big missing link in the idea of a hydrogen-based economy because it solves the the big problems:

      1. How do we get hydrogen in the first place (without wasting energy)?
      2.If our cars are hydrogen-powered, how do we distribute the hydrogen to them without rebuilding our infrastructure?
      3. How do we store hydrogen in a way that doesn't take up a lot of space or weigh a lot.

      How well the Auburn students' solution can addr

  • Hindenburg (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertTaylor ( 444958 ) <roberttaylor1234.gmail@com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:23AM (#8053522) Homepage Journal
    Lets hope the tanks are not covered in iron oxide and aluminum paint as well ;)

    Cheers,
    rob.
    • Damn, beat me to it.

      "This is Wolf Blitzer reporting from the 1st Cavalry Divi...Oh the humanity!"

    • Joke apart, isn't hydrogen a major safety concern for standard road vehicles? I mean, they even have to store it as hydrates to make it safe, at the cost of limited trunk space and complicated heating equipment to get the gas out.

      If it sounds dangerous for an average car, it's probably even more so for tanks, that may be hit by any kind of nasty projectile while in battle. And if the tank stores the stuff as hydrates, or has a lot of shielding to protect the compressed gas area, that's as much less ordnanc

      • Re:Hindenburg (Score:3, Informative)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 )
        You may be right about tanks, but there's no worry about regular cars, which normally use gasoline. If you try your little experiment with gasoline, you could well be headed for the hospital if you're not careful. And people drive around with enormous amounts of this stuff stored in their vehicles. Hydrogen is much less dangerous.

  • hmmm... i dunno (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MrRTFM ( 740877 )
    depending on how much this costs, it seems like a waste of time extracting the hydrogen from 'oil', when there is a *chance* it could get up to 3 times more energy.

    Surely, the answer has to lie in getting the hydrogen from water - we just need a massive breakthrough in solar panel technology.

    • The problem at the moment is that there is little point building hydrogen powered vehicles because there is no ready source of hydrogen - and little point building a hyrdrogen distibution system because there are no vehicles to use it. This breaks the deadlock by letting hyrdogen powered vehicles run on existing fuel. Once there are enough it will make economic sense to distribute hydrogen from other sources instead.

    • Re:hmmm... i dunno (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:47AM (#8053649) Journal
      Surely, the answer has to lie in getting the hydrogen from water - we just need a massive breakthrough in solar panel technology.

      There doesn't need to be a breakthrough because that has already happened. Stan Ovshinsky, pioneer of disordered materials, has developed a thin-film solar technology [ovonic.com] that is competitive with grid-supplied fossil fuel electricity. Now, he believes that they can achieve this feat with 100MW of production economy so they aren't quite there yet (they currently run a 30MW machine).

      They just partnered [txohydrogen.com] with HaveBlue to develop a fuel cell hydrogen sailboat [haveblue.com] with solid hydrogen storage. The sailboats sit in the harbor most of the time so they are perfect vessels to soak up the sun and convert it to hydrogen.

      Water is the best battery. We just need an affordable fuel cell to convert it back into electricity. Stan is working [ovonic.com] on that too.
    • A 100% efficient solar panel gives you about 500-1000KW/km^2 during the day, and nothing at night. In North America we consume about 2KW of energy on average throughout the day.

      So, let's take a near best-case scenario of putting solar panels on the equator, getting full-intensity (ie noon hour) sun for 12 hours a day, we're still talking about only being able to provide power to 500 people per km^2. For the United State's 270 million people, that works out to 540,000km^2, or about halfway between the siz

  • Not just tanks (Score:3, Troll)

    by Eric S Rayrnond ( 739458 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:28AM (#8053541) Homepage
    The APU is a new invention that could also reduce the military's reliance on oil. It doesn't drive the engines of the Army's long-haul trucks, but it will run almost everything else, from the heating and air conditioning to the vehicle's water pump and other accessories. It's powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The hydrogen comes from a small set of tanks attached to the cab, but eventually the hydrogen could come directly from the diesel fuel that runs the engine itself. A fuel-cell APU can increase the efficiency of a typical diesel engine by as much as ten-fold. And the less noise and emissions a truck generates, the lower the chance it'll be spotted by the enemy.

    Personally, I think that best solution is a reduction in military and government spending on fuel, along with everything else. After all, the government is the greatest polluter on the planet.
    • Ah, brave words, but remember that every barrel burnt is a dollar earnt.

      Pollution is highly profitable for those who hold the levers of power. I've not yet seen a single example of people voluntarily stopping a profitable activity.

      So in this case the best solution is not going to happen. If the tanks don't burn the oil, the SUVs will. When the oil has almost gone, we will be left scrabbling for the few remaining drops. Until then it will be burnt at maximum possible speed.

      Incidentally, did anyone els
  • it costs about $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.

    Considering the war in Iraq cost the US military $1bn per week, I'd say that, even considering that one single tank guzzle more gas that a whole lot of SUV, they're not too worried about that, unless they start to run tank grand prix in the deset every day.

    Good luck finding fund to justify that saving ...

    • Re:forty bucks? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by agilen ( 410830 )
      Well, think about it this way...its about 300 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad. M1 Abrams tanks get about 0.6 miles to the gallon. So, that means a single tank needed about 500 gallons of gas to get to Baghdad. Cost @ $40/gallon: $20,000. (Yes im not figuring in the fact that it is consuming gas, but the return trip should account for the difference) If a hydrogen tank got 3 times the gas mileage, the cost of getting it to Baghdad would be $6,667. A fine savings by my standards, but multiply that by the numb
      • When it comes down to it, the more Dubya plays with his tanks, the more money could be saved by converting them to hydrogen.

        Wow! If we just had a trillion tanks, we could save enough to pay off the national debt!

  • This is a great first step! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Qwerpafw ( 315600 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:30AM (#8053559) Homepage
    The giant barrier for fuel cells is, and has been, transportation and distribution of fuel. Pure hydrogen is enormously expensive to transport and store since it "leaks" out of most containers (the molecules fit through the walls or something equally frustrating). Strides were made with that (boron?) chemical storage, but it's still pretty labor intensive and would require a vastly different infrastructure. This, however, manages to use the existing system (for diesel fuel) for hydrogen cells. That's a giant breakthrough.

    The article describes the technology as being "a four or a five" on a scale where 10 is production-level, so the whole thing is, to an extent, still vapourware. BUT, the transition path to hydrogren is so advantageous, I wouldn't be surprised if we were to see production examples of fuel-cell diesel trucks (apparently the tech works better with diesel...) in a few years domestically. First a transition for trucks, then a gradual increase in diesel/hydrogen fuel availability for the rest of America's car fleet, and finally a total switch to hydrogen tech. All without having to significantly rework the fossil fuel distribution network. This is the stuff of the future and I, for one, look forwards to it eagerly.
    • so the whole thing is, to an extent, still vapourware.

      LOL
    • OK, now we can convert fossil fuels to hydrogen to power the vehicles.

      Can anyone else see the logic flaw here?

      Hydrogen fuel was being touted as a replacement fuel which would mean that not only did we not need to use up the fossil fuel reserve but also that the polutants produced would be just water vapour in stead of the longer lived greenhouse gases of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The idea being that you'd generate the hydrogen using some renewable energy resource, hence not merely moving the po

  • Great! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Stile 65 ( 722451 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:32AM (#8053565) Homepage Journal
    Between this and Thermal Depolymerization [wikipedia.org], which can turn any organic material into oil, we're going to be in hog heaven. Who needs to import oil anymore? :)

  • Costs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:32AM (#8053567)
    DoD officials say 'it costs about $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.'

    It really costs that much? Seems a hell of a lot to me. How many gallons does an oil tanker hold? Let's me guess at 20,000. If so, then to drive an oil tanker from Kuwait to Badhdad is costing $800,000!!

    I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging. The war in Iraq looks like a damn efficient means to move money from the American taxer into the hands of friends of those in power in the USA. Go Bush!
    • I'm guessing those costs are due to the difficulty of transporting oil in hostile territory. Oil tankers in general don't have rocket-propelled grenades flying at them. Plus, you aren't moving oil via the ocean - to get to Baghdad, you have to move over quite a bit of land, which gives hostile forces the opportunity to attack your supply line.
      • I'm guessing those costs are due to the difficulty of transporting oil in hostile territory.

        Sure, that's going to make it more expensive. But there has to be a reasonable limit to costs. $800,000 to drive an oil tanker about 400 miles - is a cost of $2,000 a mile reasonable, even given the circumstances? I don't think so.
    • > $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.

      You're forgetting that when that gallon of oil set out from Kuwait, the entire Iraqi army was trying to stop it from going to Baghdad. When you even out the cost of changing the regime of an entire country, that's really not that expensive.

      Still, can't help wondering if the US military's next project will be seeing how much they can make it cost to transport coal to Newcastle...
      • When you even out the cost of changing the regime of an entire country, that's really not that expensive.

        But that's not a logical approach. The cost of transportation should be exactly that, otherwise it does not make any sense that the US army is excited about hydrogen fuel concepts because of the cost of transporting oil from Kuwait to Bagdad.
      • People always find ways of heaping the costs of tons of other things onto a cost they are calculating when trying to make a point. For instance, when a hacker does some damage to a company, like posting 100 stolen credit card numbers, they will come up with a damages number in the billions. They might, for instance, say that if it wasn't for hackers like him, they wouldn't need a IT Security department ( which in this case failed to prevent a breach ) Then you consider that every person in IT Security n
    • If so, then to drive an oil tanker from Kuwait to Badhdad is costing $800,000!! I guess these must be the prices that Haliburton etc. are charging.

      I'd guess that is the cost for actually getting the fuel there - including escorting it with armoured vehicles, patrolling above with helicopter gunships, etc etc, salaries for the bureaucrats keeping track of it, cost of labour at both ends for loading and unloading, etc etc etc.

      Fighting a modern war is not cheap, and the winner is almost always the one that

  • Hydrogen isn't the answer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by corebreech ( 469871 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:35AM (#8053584) Journal
    Here's a tank truck that can carry 5000 gallons [senecatank.com] of gas. You can get one for less than $120,000.

    The drive from Kuwait to Baghdad is approximately 400 miles. This means a truck can do at least one round trip between Kuwait and Baghdad per day.

    That means that over the course of a year, this one truck with a driver that is paid, say, $50,000 a year, can haul 1,825,000 gallons of gas for a price of approximately $200,000 ($120,000 for the truck, $50,000 for the driver, and say $30,000 for incidentals... fuel, windshield wipers, those mud flap things with the pictures of naked woman on them... whatever.)

    That works out to about $.10 per gallon.

    The Pentagon is paying $40 per gallon.
    • Don't forget the extra $50,000 you gotta pay the driver for hazard pay, and the 2 HumVees and 6 soldiers that have to accompany the tank truck to stop guerillas from rocket launching the truck into oblivion.

      (ok, even then it doesn't add up to $40/gallon. How can I become a Pentagon supplier?)
      • Don't forget the extra $50,000 you gotta pay the driver for hazard pay, and the 2 HumVees and 6 soldiers that have to accompany the tank truck to stop guerillas from rocket launching the truck into oblivion.

        Plus the losses you incur when the guerillas succeed. I reckon a lot of the cost would be in air cover for the fuel convoys. Flying planes and helicopters not only costs large amounts of fuel, it also costs a lot in aircraft maintenance. That's before you consider the loss of any multi-million dollar a

        • And then you have to factor in the fuel used by the air cover and so on, which also has to be transported to base - so, in order to move a gallon of fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad, you've got to move a hell of a lot of fuel about other places, too, to power the vehicles that:

          1. Carry the fuel
          2. Protect the vehicle carrying the fuel
          3. Carry fuel to the vehicles protecting the vehicle carrying the fuel
          4. Protect the vehicles in point 3
          5. Ad infinitum.

          So, once you've worked out a realistic base-rate per m
      • Just finance the President's election campaign and make your CEO his VP.
    • I pointed out that $40 a gallon sounded extrordinarily expensive in another posts, but it got modded down as flamebait.

      If the truck carries 5000 gallons then the journey of 400 miles is costing 200,000 dollars, or about $500 a mile. And I believe that is a relatively small oil transporter, they come much bigger.

      Of course, it's going to cost more in times of war, but what is reasonable? $40 a gallon sounds way off the scale to me.
      • And you think they want to be paid less for escorting a tanker full of hydrogen through enemy teritory?

        If the US army has tankfulls of hydrogen roaming around, its hard to see why anybody would bother making weapons of mass destruction!

  • Here's some more info (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swordboy ( 472941 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:36AM (#8053590) Journal
    Here's a company [ovonic.com] that has part of the contract on this. They are developing the solid (hydride) hydrogen storage system for these tanks. The hydride is like a hydrogen sponge that holds more hydrogen than high-pressure tanks. The biggest problem with hydrogen really is storing it since it is so low in density. Liquid hydrogen is actually lighter than air...

  • Love them or hate them... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by billmaly ( 212308 ) <bill.maly@mcl e o d u s a . net> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:43AM (#8053626)
    Military research and spending is often times the catalyst that drives innovation. If it takes the DoD to FINALLY create a means of providing hydrogen power to vehicles, I see it as a good thing. New tech, if it works, ALWAYS trickles down to the civilian world.
  • Any technology that promises 90 miles to the gallon (if I'm doing my conversion from klicks to miles correctly) is worth pursuing. Regardless of how the hydrocarbons are disposed of, such a huge increase in mileage will lower the total amount of greenhouse gasses pumped into the atmosphere.

    Another advantage is that it works off of less refined fuels, like jet fuel (i.e., kerosene) and diesel, instead of high-octane gasoline; these fuels are cheaper than gas, more abundant, and a lot safer to handle.

    And

  • They figured out hydrogens in hydrocarbons?? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:45AM (#8053640) Homepage
    "Auburn University scientists 'realized there is already a lot of hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuel'"

    Wow, theres no fooling with these guys. Those sharp megawatt intelligences are really on the ball, I mean its only been over a hundred years since
    most chemists realised the very same thing and even put "hydro" in the name of hydrocarbon as clue.
    • Don't rip on the Auburn University team; the article itself was badly written. For starters,

      The process is chemical, and there is no combustion.

      makes it sound like combustion is a non-chemical process. Combustion is, of course, a chemical process: reaction with oxygen. In the case of fuel cells, the hydrogen is allowed to react with atmospheric oxygen (or another oxidizer) in a controlled fashion. So combustion is a very apt description of a fuel cell reaction.

      Also, the sentence

      They took jet f

  • To me this makes sense.. they found a way to use the current infastructure with new technology. Is this not what hydrogen fueled vehicles were waiting for? It also helps that they have something the size of a tank and the funding of the Bush fueled military to develop it.

    I always thought that if you could convince the military of real savings you will get your new technology developed.. but saying your tanks can fight longer, requiring less resources, with relatively slight modifications probably is the ke
  • Blowing up a H2 powered tank would make a hell of a nice bang. Wait until Hollywood gets a hold of this!

    • Re:Great explosive potential here (Score:4, Informative)

      by ljavelin ( 41345 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:14AM (#8053788)
      A hydrogen-powered military tank wouldn't make any more of a bang than a diesel powered tank. Heck, the Hindenberg, with an incredibly large volume of hydrogen held in an unsafe container, didn't even make a huge bang - it simply burned quickly, and there were may survivors. If you ever see the pictures, note that the metal tower next to the air ship wasn't even knocked down by the so-called "explosion".

      Then again, hollywood often makes things "more exciting" than physical reality. I've seen lots of cars "blow up" in the movies. But for all the car fires I've seen, I've never seen a car explode. Or even heard of one exploding. Except in the movies and Grand Theft Auto.

      Remember, most of Hollywood is based on entertainment, not science.

  • This is not news (Score:4, Informative)

    by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:01AM (#8053731) Homepage
    Devices like this, known generally as "reformers", have beeen in use for a decade at least. They universally share the problem of leaking contaminents into the hydrogen output, where these stray molecules stick to the catalyst inside the fuel cell and slowly degrade it.

    If this team has invented a new type of reformer, great, but as it stands the article is a joke.

    • Re:This is not news (Score:3, Insightful)

      by uradu ( 10768 )
      > Devices like this, known generally as "reformers", have beeen in use for a decade at least.

      My thoughts exactly. What's news about this, other than that the military are all of a sudden interested in fuel economy? A clean and compact/cheap reformer has been the holy grail of fuel cells for quite a while, I don't see anything Auburn has done to change that. Perhaps they just had the brilliant insight that there's hydrogen in them thar fossil fuels?

  • Think long term (Score:5, Interesting)

    by voss ( 52565 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:01AM (#8053734)
    This process can use ANY oil, not just the nice sweet crude from Saudi Arabia. What is the benefit of this

    1) Oil from sources that are not usable now. There are many areas that have high sulfur oil that would pollute if burned but could converted into usable non-polluting hydrogen.

    2) Once you have a workable fuel cell that runs on hydrogen (with some oil-to- Hydrogen converter) you can fairly easily just switch over to your nice politically correct solar created hydrogen which will by then be much more economically viable and not just green welfare.

    3) Even if you never got beyond a gasoline powered fuel cell, the emissions would still be FAR less (90+% less) than an internal combustion engine.

  • Cheap sulfur and carbon for all! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Uninvited Guest ( 237316 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:15AM (#8053793)
    Finally! A cheap, abundant source of sulfur and carbon as an industrial byproduct. Soon, I'll be able to take all that waste carbon and sulfur to make my... uh... (a little help here, please?)...

  • Green tanks (Score:5, Funny)

    by mark2003 ( 632879 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:00AM (#8054138)
    Fantastic - now we have tanks that don't harm the environment...

  • No, H2 actually has three times LESS energy (Score:3, Informative)

    by DaveWhite99 ( 525748 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @12:50PM (#8056848)
    Sure, H2 has three times more energy per mass, but it has three times less [energy.gov] energy per volume, which is what really matters for transportation.

    So, no, that tank won't go three times farther on H2 than on diesel. It will actually have only 1/3 the range.

    As usual, distorted facts are reported on Slashdot as gospel.

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