Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water 141
An anonymous reader writes "Traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen are either extremely expensive or release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with drastically more affordable materials. Goodbye platinum; hello nickel and ammonia."
Will it work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, many people don't believe that spending money now is in our best interest - they'd rather wait until gas hits $10/gallon to invest in reducing the average price of energy. There are already many semi-viable alternative fuels, but for some reason, a large majority of people are content to continue "as-is", and let the current energy crisis continue.
Most of those people though, claim "What energy crisis?"
Re:Will it work? (Score:0, Insightful)
Few are content, but far fewer can do anything about it. We live in a capitalist society, and our challenges are cost and logistics, not complacency.
Re:Will it work? (Score:1, Insightful)
That is because "most people" refers to the 1% who have the money necessary to invest in this sort of thing. And of course they don't believe there is an energy crisis they aren't effected by it.
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe.
I think you answered your own question there.
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Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:5, Insightful)
Say you want or need to live off the grid
If you need to live off the grid you're already such an edge case that we don't need to be optimizing for you. Living off the grid is expensive. And if you just want to live off the grid, then you're obviously not optimizing for 1) low cost or 2) efficient use of resources, so why should I care about your problem?
How about this for crazy, install one on an offshore wind farm and run a pipe back to shore and have a wind farm producing not electricity but hydrogen gas!
Yes, it's crazy alright, but what good is that? The electricity->H2->electricity round trip efficiency is something like 25%, and that's not counting the massive amounts of energy required to compress the H2. 25% sucks bad enough that you can't change things with handwaving as you scale that efficiency to the transportation sector.
Put the energy directly into the battery (we already have better batteries than H2 fuel cells) and drive several times as far. There's a reason electric cars are here today, but fuel cell cars are not.
Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from (Score:4, Insightful)
The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
You think so? I reckon you're missing the "thermodynamics of capital". If you have to borrow $10k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will have to cover the $1k/year repayment on that loan. But if you only borrow $1k to start your electrolysis company, then the prices you charge will only have to cover $0.1k/year repayments.
Its probably 5 to 10 years out (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will it work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.
All strong sources of energy are inherently dangerous and expensive (in absolute terms). They differ enough from each other to make you choose your poison, that's it. For the amount of energy nuclear plants produce, they are relatively cheap and safe.
Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area.
Coal plants are failing continuously (as a part of their design), and by doing so they affect much larger area than nuclear plants will ever do.
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Re:Will it work? (Score:4, Insightful)
You use the electricity generated by nuclear power stations to drive the (energy intensive) process of generating hydrogen, that you then use for fuelling vehicles.
It's the same process as simply charging up an electric car, it's just a different energy storage method.
Like the purely electric car, however, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the problem of range brought about because hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and is difficult to store effectively as a gas or a liquid (compared to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel, for example).
The market is all interlinked, and that market is energy.