Ditching Platinum For the Ocean Could Make Hydrogen Cheap (popularmechanics.com) 195
Shotgun shares a report from Popular Mechanics: [S]cientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have found a pairing of minerals that surpasses other precious metal materials when it comes to producing hydrogen. Testing a molybdenum-phosphide (MoP) catalyst with wastewater in a small reactor called a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC), scientists found that the MoP worked better than platinum. The most frequently used method of producing hydrogen is known as electrolysis. Bringing together chemicals called electrolytes with electricity, a catalyst triggers a reaction that creates hydrogen. Platinum is currently the best of these catalysts, although its high price is a big drawback. If platinum could be discarded, that could bring hydrogen production costs down rapidly. And that's not all. The MoP catalyst excelled at working with another abundant source: seawater.
Using an MEC, the team was able to combine the electrolysis technique with hydrogen fermentation, a low-yield process that consumes less energy. Unable to afford expensive platinum catalysts, the team needed something that could reduce production costs to approximately $2 per kilogram of hydrogen. With a strong microscope, the team discovered that the catalyst assembled into a mixture of two distinct crystal phases: MoP and MoP2. With slightly different atomic structures, they produced different reactions. MoP2 released hydrogen atoms from water molecules, while MoP was able to convert hydrogen atoms into hydrogen gas molecules. It was a welcome surprise. Would a hydrogen generator be a partial solution to the energy storage story for solar and wind?
Using an MEC, the team was able to combine the electrolysis technique with hydrogen fermentation, a low-yield process that consumes less energy. Unable to afford expensive platinum catalysts, the team needed something that could reduce production costs to approximately $2 per kilogram of hydrogen. With a strong microscope, the team discovered that the catalyst assembled into a mixture of two distinct crystal phases: MoP and MoP2. With slightly different atomic structures, they produced different reactions. MoP2 released hydrogen atoms from water molecules, while MoP was able to convert hydrogen atoms into hydrogen gas molecules. It was a welcome surprise. Would a hydrogen generator be a partial solution to the energy storage story for solar and wind?
Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:2, Informative)
Hydrogen is pretty explosive and difficult to contain. Otherwise, it's a great storage medium. You don't even need fancy exotic materials to make it. Wind and solar can easily be built to over generate as much as they need to, and then very efficiently convert the extra power into hydrogen.
Except for the inevitable boom it's a great idea.
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Someday someone will figure out how to contain hydrogen.
Re:Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:5, Informative)
it is hard because it is so small, H2 is just 2 proton and electron cloud pair, it's so small compared with everything else. Methane have 4 hydrogen and one carbon, its much, much bigger. Cristals are usually very near each other, but it still a huge gap for hydrogen. You need a big layer of material to try to contain it. Pair this with the pressure needed to contain the H2 in a small space and you need even more material to create enough resistance to that pressure. Finally remember that it ignites very easily and in a explosive way, so you need huge security margins.
a perfect container would be a inside layer of some crystal/allow material were the atoms are very closed, plus a outside layer of strong and resistant material.
Toyota is spending years of researching trying to improve this as they very soon figured that there is not enough lithium to make electric cars to replace all the existent ones, so hydrogen would be perfect replacement for gas. (tesla bets that we can create much better batteries in the future to solve the scale problem by the way)
Re: Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the hazmat placard used with the routine transport of it:
https://www.safetysupplywareho... [safetysupp...ehouse.com]
Material data safety sheet here:
https://unitedhydrogen.com/wp-... [unitedhydrogen.com]
This stuff is not antimatter.
Re:Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:4, Funny)
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I point this out in every thread, but if you can produce hydrogen at reasonable cost/efficiency, you can solve the storage problem by combining it with a chain of carbon atoms. Depending on the length of that chain, you can get pretty much any set of physical properties that you want.
This made me smile. :)
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Which is kind-of funny, since I was just thinking that we might have a lot of spare platinum as we move to electric cars, because they won't need catalytic converters. I guess the big question would be whether or not we'd be able to produce ultra-pure hydrocarbons with a process like this. If we could, we likely wouldn't need catalytic converters and could still be using hydrocarbon fuels, just carbon-neutral ones.
Re:Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
Someday someone will figure out how to contain hydrogen.
We know how to contain it, we just don't know how to contain it at a cost less than other fuels.
Even in an already expensive industry like launching satellites to orbit we are finding that hydrogen isn't all that great of a fuel. When needing the biggest "bang" from a rocket the use of liquid hydrogen is often worth the extra cost. But when there's a larger consideration on the "bang" to "buck" ratio there's alternatives that are considered like liquid methane and kerosene.
I once thought that hydrogen would make a good fuel for jetliners. Hydrogen has a very high energy to mass ratio, nearly triple that of the fuels commonly used now. But the need for expensive and heavy containers to keep the hydrogen in makes it impractical. The energy to volume ratio is about 1/4 that of the kerosene based fuels commonly used, meaning the tanks would have to be larger than they are now. As it is today the fuel tanks on a jetliner are the wings. The tanks are not "in" the wings but the tanks are the thin aluminum wings themselves.
A container for hydrogen would have to be very thick for compressed hydrogen. If there was a way to liquefy the hydrogen cheaply and easily then there is still the problem of the tanks building up ice if exposed to the air, and venting off the fuel as it boils. If the liquid hydrogen is not vented then we get back to needing thick metal sides on the tank to hold up to the pressure. If insulated to minimize the boiling then that still means thick and heavy walls.
It's just far easier to use something like kerosene or gasoline for fuel if you need to go somewhere with it. If you aren't going to move, which makes size and mass much less of a concern, then there is still the matter of getting the energy out that was put in to make it. If the hydrogen is just used as an energy storage device then it still has to have some advantage over the alternatives in efficiency or costs to get people to consider it.
Burning anything in some kind of heat engine for electricity or motive force is not all that efficient. The best we can do is often between 40% and 60% for something big and stationary (or slow moving like a ship or train). This has to go along with the losses of making the hydrogen to compute the total efficiency.
This isn't just a matter of a storage problem. It's far more complex than that.
That accomplishes nothing but wasting energy (Score:2)
Because I can't hear your tone of voice, I'm not quite sure if you're joking.
If your motor is sitting next to your power source, connected to it, there would be no reason to throw away 66% of the energy by converting it to hydrogen and back. Just use an electric motor and skip the whole hydrogen thing.
The thing is, we want to be able to *drive* to the store. Even at night. Which means the motor is not connected to the windmill 200 miles away, and it's certainly not connected via a time machine to 8 hours
Energy btw, not electricity. (Huge difference) (Score:3)
By the way, remember that enough storage to cover our current ELECTRICITY usage during a cloudy weekend isn't nearly enough. We need to have enough for all of our ENERGY usage, which means all the cars, trucks, planes; all the heating and cooling currently using natural gas; all of the industry - not just our bulbs bulbs, we need to power our cars and planes too.
That's huge source of error when discussing energy policy. People reason along these lines:
We can sometimes get clean electricity by doing _____.
Sarcasm, brain fart, stupid, group think, uninform (Score:2)
It's frustrating sometimes that in discussions like this the following can all result in writing the same sentence:
sarcasm
troll
brain fart
stupid
group think
group think / misinformed
My embarrassing comments tend to be the "brain fart" variety. A post I wrote earlier today included 10,000 / 200, which I almost wrote as 5,000. I swear I can math.
I suspect the last option, group think / misinformed may account for a plurality of crap posted - the writer has read a lot about a topic, all from the same circle jerk
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Someday someone will figure out how to contain hydrogen.
Maybe gravity or something like that?
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The solution is called a tank. The problem is if you need to store a lot of energy that way, you need a big tank, or a modest size tank under a lot of pressure.
You will lose *some* hydrogen of course, but the fast dispersal rate of hydrogen works both ways: it's hard to contain hydrogen *completely*, but on the flip side it's hard to build up any concentration of hydrogen. It is lighter than air and migrates quickly. This is the same reason that natural gas explosions are rare events, even though compres
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Re:Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen is pretty explosive
It is only explosive when mixed with oxygen. It is safer than gasoline fumes, because H2 rises and dissipates.
very efficiently convert the extra power into hydrogen.
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity has a roundtrip efficiency of about 32%, which is crap.
Except for the inevitable boom it's a great idea.
This is backwards. H2 can be safely handled, so no boom, yet using hydrogen as a storage medium is a really bad idea.
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How are you arriving at the 32% number?
The article is kind of light on details but if they can make hydrogen for $2/kg then it seems like it must be better than that. 1kg of H2 has 33kWh of energy in it, fuel cells are about 50% efficient so that would yield around 16.5kWh of power for $2 of input. If you figure that electricity typically costs around 10c/kWh then that yields an efficiency of around 82%.
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32% efficiency (Score:2)
Whats the comparable efficiency of battery dtorage of electricity? And what about the cost?
Will we have enough Lithium?
We are going to need a lot of energy storage in the near future to enable wind, and especially solar to keep our power grid going 24x7
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Battery storage DC-DC is above 90% efficient.
We know how to generate and store energy efficiently, nuclear is above 90% efficiency without any CO2 emissions.
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That's true about renewables but lithium isn't the only storage technology in town, it just happens to be the best for high density storage, which if you're storing things on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhere having your batteries be way bigger than those you'd want to put in your smartphone isn't a problem.
So Vanadium flow batteries are good for grid-scale, as are compressed air storage or even a mountainous lake full of water and a couple of pumps.
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That's kind of my point, this posits some amazing breakthrough in the first step.
Customer facing hydrogen pricing looks to be about $15/kg in california. If they can indeed produce it wholesale at the $2 price point then the electricity to hydrogen step has surely got a *lot* more efficient. But the story seems to miss out on truly quantifying that.
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If you figure that electricity typically costs around 10c/kWh then that yields an efficiency of around 82%.
Wholesale electricity rates for solar/wind/coal are about 3c/kWh.
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True - but even if they are counting on that, being able to product a kg of h2 for $2 still represents something pretty big having changed. That's pretty close to the same energy content as a gallon of gas.
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In many places where hydropower and nuclear is a thing, we pay 4c/kWh retail.
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New nuclear power may be many things, but inexpensive is not one of them.
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Which is still one third more than the solar plus battery installation Los Angeles is putting in, and takes up dramatically more space, plus is much dirtier, and much more dangerous. (Nuclear AND hydro? So that's risk of meltdown, PLUS risk of flood!)
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Where is that? This site, https://www.electricchoice.com... [electricchoice.com] shows Louisiana as the cheapest State at 9.37 cents per kW/h. Without the expense of nuclear, I pay about 7 cents (9.45 cdn cents)
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As always, it's a terrible Slashdot summary.
Here's the article [acs.org]. It's about a MEC [wikipedia.org]. You can't use a MEC as a way to reversibly store energy because it works based on bacteria fermenting organic waste (plus electricity). The waste is the primary source of energy. And MECs are a tech in its infancy, so pointing out that there are better options than platinum for MEC is sort of like saying, "Well, we found a better material for the airlock seals on a space elevator." Great, but how about that cable?
Don't get
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Thanks - i can't get the article text, but the abstract alone contains more tech detail than the original linked story
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I'm afraid that the crew and passengers would disagree about how easy it is to handle hydrogen safely. Mistakes with hydrogen are very easy.
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You could increase the efficiency by creating an algae that produces hydrogen in a sterile salt water environment, it would be preferable that nearly every living thing be capable of readily eating it, as you would not want it to run wild. So large tanks into which you pump cooled boiled seawater, you would need a use for the algae excess and the very salty waste water (of course you have fresh water produced by the combustion of the hydrogen, so add excess algae to the water to be boiled as food for new al
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PS For real efficiency I would regulate planning adjoining the facility to put in industrial scale laundries (hospital linens etc.) and maximise energy return on the heat with heat exchangers (hot clean water to wash and hot air to dry) that help cool the waste of the steam turbines. Really insulate everything to keep temperatures up because of cold cloth to be washed and evaporation tanks, where to suck out the steam, so the hot water boils at low pressure, still need fresh waster inputs because of wet was
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Sorry couldn't resist, for extra efficiency the algae farm, think long plastic tubes filled with water and algae, could be roofs over the dirtiest industrial premises, the roofs, box gutters between, collect and store the water you need, those large diameter tubes supported on metal framing structure, if you know industrial design, the weight actually helps. All piped to and from the power station supplying the energy they need.
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This is a long way to go when you could instead grow any algae that simply comes out of the air in open raceway ponds and use it as feedstock for butanol. Trying to dick around with closed reactors makes the whole thing a lot more expensive and fragile.
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Hydrogen also has the widest flammability limits of just about any known substance, so only tiny amounts of oxygen need be present to cause an explosion, and also, it's very easy for flame fronts to propagate back up the supply lines. And is also vastly more energetic than gasoline vapor per unit mass.
It IS NOT "sa
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You would have better connections for hydrogen pumps - one that locks into place and then delivers the gas and cannot be unlocked without turning the supply off. Consumers may be sloppy - but we can fix them by not using a rubber hose with a trigger on the end.
Hydrogen is still a poor choice for fuel, it only looks good on paper.
Re:Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:5, Informative)
It is safer than gasoline fumes, because H2 rises and dissipates.
I'm sorry but that is an incredibly narrow view. Yes H2 rises, but that's its only good quality. Here are some of the reasons why H2 is far more dangerous than gasoline:
- The ignition current of H2 is similar to that of Acetylene, and these two gases have their own special classification for hazardous areas due to how much easier they are to ignite. As such as there is a whole different class of equipment needed to safety handle it compared to gasoline as they need less than 10th of the energy to ignite them.
- H2 has one of the widest explosive ranges of any gas making it extremely volatile. Gasoline contains some volatile compounds but these are in small supply. The generally accepted number is that H2 is 10-20x more likely to explode than gasoline when presented with a suitable ignition source.
- H2 leaks from anything, including through the metal of the container itself. Which is one of the reasons you never store hydrogen packs in a closed room. It's extremely difficult to contain.
- H2 burns clear. I have actually witnessed a fire response team not put out a H2 fire at a refinery as they didn't see it burn. It was the fire chief that came running down shouting "WTF are you doing, put water on it now! Can't you *hear* that it is on fire!"
- H2 burns hotter than gasoline which presents additional risks to fire and explosion including structural risks for anything around it.
- H2 is stored in liquid form and as such gives around a 1:800 expansion ratio when a tank is ruptured or leaks. Gasoline just leaks, and evaporates slowly presenting little risk even a small distance away.
Yes H2 can be safely handled. As someone who works in the industry of handling and manufacturing these dangerous goods, the effort we go to to safely handle H2 is orders of magnitude higher than gasoline.
My old lab agreed (Score:2)
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"It is only explosive when mixed with oxygen. It is safer than gasoline fumes, because H2 rises and dissipates."
Or it's more dangerous than gasoline, because it will rise right into your car (as will natural gas) while gas fumes (or propane) will fall to the ground and spread away.
Let's face it, there is no completely safe way to store energy. Capacitors can explode, springs can let go, air tanks can explode too. All you can do is mitigate risk.
Re: Except for the boom part Hydrogen is great! (Score:2, Insightful)
Energy is all about the inevitable boom. Consider the deep water horizon spill, Chernobyl, or when coal caused the great smog of London in 1952 that killed 8000. The key is containing it to the power plants. Maybe too dangerous for cars, but not for pro handling. Pros handle hydrogen all the time anyway.
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Need a detailed technical /cost comparison (Score:2)
Hydrogen and batteries and pumped water storage perform similar functions of storing energy in an overall energy system. Hydrogen is typically less efficient than batteries, but for fixed installations is likely to have a lower cost per stored joule, and it can be transported by pipeline- though the pumping losses can be high. Pumped water storage is not portable but can be very low cost per energy and power in appropriate terrain.
I don't think its possible to just guess - a detailed efficiency and (cap
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it can be transported by pipeline
Pressurized H2 can diffuse through metal, embrittling the metal in the process, and will destroy many plastic and rubber seals, gaskets, and hoses.
Sending H2 thought existing natural gas pipelines is a bad idea.
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I recall reading somewhere about experiments with the use of a mix of hydrogen with methane and other gasses as a substitute for natural gas. Apparently by "dissolving" the hydrogen in methane it won't tear up the metal pipes.
Hydrogen has less "bang" for the same volume/pressure/whatever than the methane that is the primary component of natural gas. This means having to add something with more "bang" with the hydrogen and natural gas to make up for it. Perhaps by getting a "heavier" mix than typical natu
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FTFY
Given the horrendous losses in high voltage cables, and the miniscule losses in pumping gas around the country, distributing energy as gas will piss on all other solutions. In most of Europe, we already have a network to do this.
Electric cars are a good plan, but gas is better for energy distribution, and putting (gaseous) gas i
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what is needed is an easy way to make diesel from electricity
There are ways to make diesel fuel from electricity, whether it is considered "easy" is up to debate. The US Navy is quite interested in improving this process. They have a lab scale system that takes in electricity and seawater to produce a fuel suitable for their aircraft and diesel engines. The process works, there is no doubt about that. The question is if it can be made big enough, reliable enough, and for low enough cost to matter.
Why the Navy is having any trouble finding money to develop this fr
When I was a kid... (Score:5, Interesting)
I hooked wires up to a 9v battery.
I submerged the other ends of the wires in water and put a test tube over each.
In one test tube i collected pure oxygen, in the other i collected pure hydrogen.
For the past decade or so i have considered the applications of using solar power to fuel this process.
Scenario:
You don't need to use your vehicle very often. Sitting in your driveway it collects solar power quietly using the energy for electrolysis.
(some of the energy is used for compression)
When you need to go to town your hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle can get you there no problem.
Zero energy cost in , and zero emissions.
Sure it might be niche, but to me its fascinating
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I hooked wires up to a 9v battery.
I submerged the other ends of the wires in water and put a test tube over each.
How long did the wires last?
For the past decade or so i have considered the applications of using solar power to fuel this process.
Scenario:
You don't need to use your vehicle very often. Sitting in your driveway it collects solar power quietly using the energy for electrolysis.
It's much more efficient to put the electrons in a battery than do a hydrogen cycle.
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Hydrogen also _leaks_. The molecules are very small indeed and are very difficult to store long term.
Hydrogen Leaks (Score:2)
Hydrogen also _leaks_. The molecules are very small indeed and are very difficult to store long term.
A friend of mine had the same experience whilst trying to solve the issue of a useful cooking gas in an eco-village, the hydrogen would leak very easily and thus there were a lot of losses.
I've wondered if the relative emptiness of wind towers would be a good place to have hydrogen storage tanks and some fuel cells. The compromise would be a lower electrical yield from the tower however you could switch the tower to fuel cell mode when the wind stops blowing.
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Hydrogen also _leaks_. The molecules are very small indeed and are very difficult to store long term.
I had no idea.
Did you not take a high school chemistry class? There's a whole day of discussion about hydrogen as an introduction to the structure of the atom and the design of the periodic table. Knowing that hydrogen containment is difficult is common knowledge.
So I looked :
At least you did that.
But, yeah I think you assertions are correct.
It wasn't an assertion. It was a recitation of common knowledge any high school student should know. Congratulations on finally catching up. Adult education is always to be encouraged. But you should be less snarky while you're still
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It's much more efficient to put the electrons in a battery than do a hydrogen cycle.
Yeah, you are correct.
In the back of my mind, the short life span of current battery tech always looms over my thought like a shadow.
But the rest of the tech in the car probably wouldn't outlast the battery by too much anyway right? (unless it was engineered)
I often think in extremes.
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I did exactly the same thing when I was a kid (and somehow avoided setting myself on fire). If you had have asked me back then I would have told you that hydrogen was the future of transportation. I was totally jazzed about it.
Heinlein famously said TANSTAAFL (Their Aint No Such Thing As a Free Lunch). As a previous poster said (sort of), you lose efficiencies when you have to move, compress, store, and otherwise deal with a very light volatile gas. Dumping the electricity into the best batteries we can
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Well ... you have to rotate the tires every 6250 miles and then replace the battery coolant every 2 years, so there is that. I expect some wiper blade replacements will also be needed.
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Pipes, valves, and joints which are watertight and airtight are not necessarily hydrogen-tight.
Yet "Stadtgas" networks were apparently working just fine with high concentrations of hydrogen.
Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen (and oxygen) is relatively low efficiency - typically about 30% efficient.
That makes no sense. The current standard for electricity consumption is around 50 kWh per kg of hydrogen. [europa.eu] Regardless of whether you look at it from LHV or HHV perspective, both are way higher than 30%.
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Even SpaceX is moving from hydrogen to methane with the Raptor engine because of methane's advantages (e.g. easily liquifiable, nee
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When you need to go to town your hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle can get you there no problem.
What problem would be presented simply storing that energy in a battery?
Did someone say "electrolytes"? (Score:5, Funny)
Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.
Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.
Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?
Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.
Joe: Yeah, but why do they use them to make Brawndo?
Secretary of Defense: 'Cause Brawndo's got electrolytes.
So, in short... we're going to steal the electrolytes from the ocean plants. Got it.
Hydrogen storage is still a problem (Score:2)
Hydrogen fuel cells and compressed hydrogen are still waaay too expensive and problematic to be practical.
Next-gen fuel cells are supposed to be affordable (Score:2)
GM and Honda have a factory in Michigan where they are building fuel cells that are supposed to be economically viable in the very near future. Storing hydrogen is a pain, and there have been a couple of filling station explosions already even though there's barely more than a double handful of filling stations, but the biggest problem is the energy cost of production. If they really can solve that, it will make a big difference in hydrogen's viability. It could also make it very appealing for airships. Yea
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It could also make it very appealing for airships. Yeah yeah, Hindenburg blah blah, but if you take reasonable precautions (like using the right materials) it can be done safely.
Maybe you are convinced of that, and I could be convinced of that, but try to convince the FAA and other such regulatory agencies of this. Good luck with that for anything that carries passengers.
As I recall there are plenty of weather balloons and the like that use hydrogen as a lifting gas. It's far cheaper than helium, provides similar to slightly more lift (depends on purity and such), but to comply with safety rules to get a launch license has it's costs.
GM and Honda have a factory in Michigan where they are building fuel cells that are supposed to be economically viable in the very near future.
I've been hearing things that for far more yea
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I remain skeptical about the consumer viability of fuel cells, but this seems like the real deal when it comes to the consumption side. The supply continues to be the biggest problem.
Link to paper please (Score:2)
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What’s with these ludicrously bad titles? (Score:2)
I realize editors aren’t cheap, especially when compared to “writers” who’ll throw some words together just to get their name and a tiny photo on some website... but come on. At least pretend you’re still a real magazine, Popular Mechanics.
At a minimum, hire some sixth-grader to do a once-over on your stories before publishing them.
While most obsess over batteries, (Score:3)
at least there are some big players entertaining alternatives.
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
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You say that as if you're against batteries. It's okay to entertain alternatives in the same way you entertain the idea of putting up with dinner with the inlaws. H2 won't ever replace gasoline. The difficulties presented in the alternate technology need to be outweighed by convenience, and there's nothing convenient about building H2 infrastructure and economy from the ground up.
We obsess over batteries because it's the most likely way of getting away from oil as the infrastructure is already in place for
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I have nothing against batteries or EVs.
there's nothing convenient about building H2 infrastructure and economy from the ground up.
H2 "could" offer convenience that equals gasoline. Building fast charger infrastructure is not a small task either. I'll be interested to see how Japan does H2 over the next decade. My next car is almost certain to still be an ICE anyway.
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Japan backing fuel cell is because most of their big auto manufacturers missed the boat on EVs. Only Nissan got in early, everyone else has now realized that other companies have all the patents and experience and they don't.
It's not just Toyota and and all the rest, it's their suppliers. Japan has thousands of parts suppliers making things like gearboxes, fuel injection systems, pistons, catalytic converters and more which are not needed for EVs. Worse still they can't just pivot to making EV drivetrain pa
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"Japan backing fuel cell is because most of their big auto manufacturers missed the boat on EVs. Only Nissan got in early, everyone else has now realized that other companies have all the patents and experience and they don't."
The problem with your analysis is that HFCVs are EVs. The "only" difference is that they have a smaller battery, which is refilled during use by running the fuel cell. So they have none of the same powertrain parts as an ICE, and all of the same parts as an EV.
Given this fact, the obv
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You should drive a decent EV sometime, they are nothing like golf carts.
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Personally I would much prefer a hybrid (like an i8, which is unfortunately out of my price range) where I could still go through the gears.
I will never understand this fixation with fucking around with the stick in the floor. You do realize the automotive manual transmission only exists because the torque curve of the internal combustion engine is literally not fit for purpose? The transmission is a giant kludge. It's an engineering monstrosity. Its very existence is a relic of the criminal activity of gasoline auto dealers against the electric auto dealers at the turn of the 20th century. Without that, the superior torque curve of the el
Why the fascination with hydrogen as a fuel? (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters this is just demonstrably false.
The most frequently used method of producing hydrogen is known as electrolysis.
No, the most frequently used method of producing hydrogen is steam reforming. This is taking something that is already a fuel, like natural gas, petroleum, or coal, and turning it into hydrogen, a fuel that is far less valuable than the fuel you started with. That is unless you are in the rocket business. Even then it looks like more future rockets will be using liquid methane instead of liquid hydrogen. This is being experimented with right now, and hydrogen still has some advantages in rocketry, but outside of that hydrogen is a terrible fuel.
Hydrogen doesn't play nice with common metals used for containers and engines. This makes it expensive to store and burn. Making storage even more difficult is that it's not all that energy dense by volume even when liquified, which is an energy intensive process. The energy density of liquid hydrogen is about 1/4 that of most liquid hydrocarbons and about equal to that of liquid ammonia.
I do believe that we will at some point have this "hydrogen economy" that so many hydrogen fuel advocates claim, only not the form they often envision. I believe the hydrogen economy will look a lot like the petroleum economy we have now. This is because the most convenient form of storing hydrogen as a fuel is when attached to carbon chains.
Maybe this upcoming hydrogen economy will use electrolysis for getting the hydrogen used to synthesize the fuels of the future. I'm thinking that there are other options to get hydrogen that are more likely to prove economical. The source of the carbon for this fuel synthesis will not be from coal or petroleum in the future, because the use of carbon that's been dug up from the ground is often seen as a "bad thing". The carbon will instead come from a carbon neutral source, like plant matter (paper, cardboard, sawdust, and the like), getting CO2 that's dissolved in water, or being extracted directly from the air.
Another thing I'm quite certain about, this is not a process that will be powered by solar or wind power. These processes are more efficient at high temperatures, and the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Getting everything hot and keeping it there makes it more efficient and therefore will need something that is reliable for the electricity needed, and having something that produces a lot of otherwise wasted heat would also improve the efficiency.
There's another energy source we have available to us that produces heat and electricity, is plentiful and reliable, is inexpensive, is exceedingly safe, produces little waste, and is a well developed technology. This would be well suited to producing carbon neutral fuels. All we need is to get more people on board with this energy source and we could have a carbon neutral economy very soon.
I'll let the reader research what that energy source is.
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It burns clean.
The amount of energy is good.
No buying from some evil nation, using their currency to pay for energy.
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Any nation can make it.
Sure. There's still a problem that I'll get to later.
It burns clean.
There's no volatile organic compounds, CO2, or CO, like from a hydrocarbon fuel. No sulfur like in a petroleum fuel. Anything that burns in air will produce NOx though, I don't know how much of a concern that is.
The amount of energy is good.
Debatable.
No buying from some evil nation, using their currency to pay for energy.
Petroleum is an energy source, hydrogen is not. What is being bought from "some evil nation" isn't just a convenient form of energy but it's energy. A nation cannot make hydrogen if they don't have energy to make it. Solar and wind
Q. Why hydrogen as a fuel? A. Rockets (Score:2)
Why the fascination with hydrogen as a fuel?
Rockets.
"Liquid Hydrogen--the Fuel of Choice for Space Exploration
Hydrogen -- a light and extremely powerful rocket propellant -- has the lowest molecular weight of any known substance and burns with extreme intensity (5,500F). In combination with an oxidizer such as liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen yields the highest specific impulse, or efficiency in relation to the amount of propellant consumed, of any known rocket propellant. "
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/te... [nasa.gov]
Which gets some thinking of jet packs
"Back to the Future IV" (Score:2)
Why the fascination with hydrogen as a fuel?
Rockets. "Liquid Hydrogen--the Fuel of Choice for Space Exploration Hydrogen -- a light and extremely powerful rocket propellant -- has the lowest molecular weight of any known substance and burns with extreme intensity (5,500F). In combination with an oxidizer such as liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen yields the highest specific impulse, or efficiency in relation to the amount of propellant consumed, of any known rocket propellant. "
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/te... [nasa.gov]
Which gets some thinking of jet packs and flying cars. Personally I'm OK with just the H2/O2 fueled rockets.
What's the count on the "Back to the Future" movies? Three? So in "Back to the Future IV":
We take the Mr Fusion equipped Delorean, remove any cocaine bricks from the fuel tank and fill it with 13gal/50L of water. Mr Fusion converts that to H2/O2 on demand, is that enough to get the Delorean orbital? Never mind, artistic license, our hero has to deal with family sh*t on the moon so the Delorean gets him there on a tank of water.
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Rockets.
I'd believe that's where they were going with this hydrogen fuel if it wasn't for the links to articles on the sidebar with titles like, "Where are all the hydrogen cars?" And, "How does a hydrogen engine work?"
There are all kinds of articles on the internet on just how bad hydrogen sucks as a fuel for cars. Some of them even make a good case that hydrogen isn't that great of a fuel for rockets. I remember in high school having the teacher in a science class show a video on how hydrogen fuel was the futu
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"There's another energy source we have available to us that produces heat and electricity, is plentiful and reliable, is inexpensive, is exceedingly safe, produces little waste, and is a well developed technology. This would be well suited to producing carbon neutral fuels. All we need is to get more people on board with this energy source and we could have a carbon neutral economy very soon.
I'll let the reader research what that energy source is."
It's obviously not nuclear since that's the most expensive w
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As we transition to renewable energy we will have a lot of excess power available at times. With enough renewable capacity to ensure a 24/365 supply there will be times when energy is abundant and extremely cheap, so previously expensive and "wasteful" processes will become economical. While industries will grow around using that power when it happens to be available.
Hydrogen is one option.
Using hydrogen as an energy carrier is a scam (Score:4, Informative)
tl;dr:
Using hydrogen as an energy carrier is a scam, it is stupid and it is wasteful.
Unless you have a very specialized use case.
Let's say you have 1 standard m3 of LNG. That is ~11 MWh of energy.
Spent in a ship engine with 50% efficiency, you get ~5.5 MWh of net propulsion.
Convert the samme Sm3 of LNG to hydrogen via steam reforming, and you get 250kg of hydrogen. Burn that in an engine (at 50% efficiency), and you get ~3.6 MWh net propulsion.
Use 7 MWh of electricity and create 100kg hydrogen via electrolysis, and get 1.5MWh of propulsion.
See a pattern here?
Converting any energy to hydrogen is a lossy process. Then lossy *again* when you spend the hydrogen. The lost energy is lost as heat. *May* be partially recovered via some machinery (requiring space, construction, maintenance, resources and recycling) for *potential* use in some process.
Say you get 80% efficent electrolysis and 65% efficient fuel cells. I believe that is pretty rad tech these days. If what you need in the end is electricity for driving an engine, you just started out by converting half of the energy to heat. Which you need to recover and find use for.
And at the same time: if what you *had* initially was electricity (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) and what you wanted was heat, a heatpump will return 5x the energy you put into it.
Put 7 MWh (not 11) in a battery, and you get 6,5 MWh of propulsion in an electric engine.
Battery technology is here today providing >6000 cycles, before the battery is down to 90% efficiency.
Hydrogen as an energy carrier does not make the slightest common sense. And I have not even mentioned distribution and storage, for which none of the hydrocarbon infrastructure is reusable. (Apart from drivers and roads.)
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"Battery technology is here today providing >6000 cycles, before the battery is down to 90% efficiency."
s/efficiency/capacity/
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You would be completely correct if we could build batteries infinitely quickly, at zero cost. We cannot. You are therefore incorrect, by a percentage amount which could be calculated by considering a complex set of data including comparative speed of construction, monetary costs, environmental impact, recyclability, and so on.
There is likely a temporary place for hydrogen in our energy infrastructure while we improve our battery production capacity. Right now some power is essentially thrown away, as we hav
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No, you just fail at understanding engineering and power production.
Obtaining and transporting fuel and burning any fuel to power an electrical station is lossy, as is getting that power to your home.
Obtaining, transporting and burning any fuel in an internal combustion engine is lossy.
You can't power a passenger aircraft, long haul or cargo ship with batteries, not in 2019. Get that nonsense out of your head.
You have no point, other than your ignorance of thermodynamics.
Hydrogen storage is the problem (Score:3)
Hydrogen makes a great fuel, but storing hydrogen is a nightmare: it seeps out of essentially any container. Aside from the loss this represents, it also means that any large scale hydrogen storage must be well-vented (or outdoors), because of the explosion risk. Imagine an oil refinery with leaky pipes everywhere.
A far better solution is to take the next step, and convert the hydrogen into methane. Methane can be easily liquified (more compact storage), doesn't seep through solid metal tanks, and we already have the infrastructure in place to distribute it.
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Alternatively, you could bury a large, thick-walled tank deep underground. Windmills and grid-scale solar have an issue that they spike at times that may not coincide with demand. Batteries are available, but capacity is limited. Pumped storage is limited. Shunting the excess energy to producing hydrogen, that is available when supply drops but demand peaks makes the payback time for those technologies cheaper.
Finally, clean energy! (Score:2)
Hydrogen is an environmental disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
Using hydrogen as an energy source is an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Hydrogen is a necessary building block of water. Hydrogen itself is a very light gas. What allows hydrogen to exist at the surface is being bound to oxygen atom which "weighs it down" enough to stay at the surface. Otherwise, like helium, hydrogen will float upwards through the atmosphere and would be lost to space. The earths gravity is not enough to hold it down. So take water and then remove the oxygen atom form it, the free hydrogen is then light enough to float into the upper atmosphere, essentially what you are doing is eventually releasing the hydrogen into space and reducing the supply of water. Over time the accumulative effect could deplete water supplies. Any electrolysis or other hydrogen release process, and hydrogen tank storage would be leaky and irreversibly destroy water and release hydrogen which would then float up through the atmosphere into space. Essentially this is destroying water resources and then releasing them irreversibly into space. If you want to make Earth more like Mars this is the way to do it,. So there should be a ban on any process that separates oxygen atoms from hydrogen.
What to do to store solar energy? There are so many other simpler solutions to the problem, that are much safer. One is to use solar power to pump water up to the top of a water tower. This stores the energy. Then when you need the energy back, open a valve causing the water to rush back down through a pipe and drive a turbine. Another is to store energy as pressurized air or as a vacuum, like use solar energy to pump air out of a vessel and then when you need energy allow the air to blow back into it and use the blowing air to drive a turbine. Tata in India was also even working on a car that directly uses compressed air.
nitpicky question (Score:2)
Thanks everyone, for the technical analyses of practicality in regard to hydrogen. While I appreciate all the insight and knowledge displayed here, I am left with a question that some of you can easily answer. It's just a tiny nitpicky question that is surely just an annoyance, but it bugs me and I must ask.
Regarding this from TFS:
"could reduce production costs to approximately $2 per kilogram of hydrogen"
How does one weigh a kilo of hydrogen?
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So well we might get a surplus of oxygen from the electrolysis, wouldn't we eventually start to run out of water?
I think we just found a way to solve the problems of where to get our fuel and the rising sea levels.
I mean, you aren't serious are you? There's a lot of water in the sea, the probability of such losses being noticeable is quite remote. I'm also quite certain that when or if this is a problem then we'll just stop using hydrogen as an energy storage system.
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If you consume a resource faster than you can replace it, then regardless of how much of that resource you have, the only way you can truly guarantee that the losses will remain negligible is if your usage also remains negligible.
The amount of hydrogen that you lose to the atmosphere because it escapes through the walls of a container over time is, in fact, entirely measurable... and while it's probably true that much of this hydrogen will still combine with oxygen in the atmosphere owing to how reactive
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There may not be much free oxygen in the atmosphere, but there is enough that a small amount of hydrogen released near the surface is most likely to combine with some before it escapes the atmosphere. But we actually get hydrogen from the solar wind. Protons scavenge free electrons and become hydrogen...
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I agree with this, of course... but if we actually really tried to scale hydrogen production, then it's not necessarily just a small amount anymore, is it? And in turn, the amount of hydrogen that escapes into space may not be very small either, meaning that we would (however slowly) be depleting our water resources, while the ordinary water cycle of evaporation and condensation allows i
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Go troll somewhere else. We understand the water cycle here.
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When water evaporates, it is still H2O... and it remains H2O the entire time when it condenses and falls as rain.
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Truly an idea who's time has come... in today's twitterocracy it shouldn't be too hard to lobby the Government to repeal the laws of thermodynamics...
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Break down only what you need for the burn. Then you don't have to store massive amounts of dangerous chemicals (hydrogen and oxygen) in high pressure vessels.
Where do you get the energy to break down only what you need for the burn?
Or perhaps you're being Poe.
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Why would you push hydrogen to anyone's home? Bury a large tank somewhere near the solar or windmill farm, and use the off-peak generation capacity to generate and store the hydrogen. Route it to a generator when supply drops or demand peaks.