Hydrogen is most commonly found in water - H2O - and in fossil fuelsPosted on 03/21/2015 5:36:00 PM PDT by ckilmer
20 March 2015 Last updated at 10:21 ET
Hydrogen is most commonly found in water - H2O - and in fossil fuelsHydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. And when you burn it or use it to produce electricity, the only waste product is water.
In the era of global warming, it would seem to be the perfect fuel.
So why aren't we all driving round in hydrogen-powered cars, moving our goods in hydrogen-powered lorries, and heating our homes and offices with this wonder element?
In short, fossil fuels got there first.
Oil, coal and gas were easily accessible and powered the industrial revolution. Around them, entire economies and transport infrastructures were built.
It was only much later that we realised the potentially catastrophic effects hydrocarbon waste products could have on the environment.
"In the Seventies, the oil crisis made people realise that oil-based economies were vulnerable, so people started to get excited about the potential for the hydrogen economy," says Alex Hart, hydrogen expert at the Carbon Trust.
"But then climate change saw a push towards electricity as the answer to hydrocarbons and hydrogen seemed like a distraction."
Now hydrogen is staging something of a comeback.
Fuel cell tech
Hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades, but they have always been heavy and expensive.
America's first street-ready hydrogen fuel cell car took to the road in 1998
Toyota's Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car will cost about €66,000 (£47,000)
Fuel cells are now smaller, cheaper and more efficientNow Japanese car manufacturers in particular, like Honda, Toyota and Nissan, as well as Korea's Hyundai, believe they have finally made the fuel cell commercially viable and much more efficient.
Toyota's Mirai fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV), for example, is being rolled out in the US, Japan, Denmark, Germany and the UK this year.
With a range of about 300-400 miles (480-640km) and a tank that can be filled in a matter of minutes, Toyota is hoping FCEVs can give conventional electric vehicles (EVs) a run for their money.
How does a hydrogen fuel cell work?
A fuel cell is composed of an anode, a cathode and an electrolyte membrane. Hydrogen is passed through the anode and oxygen through the cathode. At the anode, the hydrogen molecules are split into electrons and protons.
The protons pass through the electrolyte membrane, while the electrons are driven through a circuit, generating an electric current and heat. At the cathode, the protons, electrons and oxygen combine to produce water molecules.
Fuel cells are clean - the only by-products are electricity, heat and water - and they are quiet, because they have no moving parts.
The proton exchange membrane fuel cell is currently the most suitable for vehicles because it can operate at lower temperatures than other fuel cells, but it is not the most efficient.
"In Japan we have a three-year waiting list for the car - demand is outstripping supply," says Toyota's Nik Pearson.
Earlier this year, Toyota announced that it would share nearly 6,000 of its hydrogen fuel cell patents in a bid to boost FCEV development.
The patent portfolio covers fuel cell stacks, high-pressure hydrogen tanks, software control systems and the industrial processes involved in generating and supplying the gas.
Pump priming
But will all the other manufacturers develop FCEVs - and consumers buy them - without a filling station network already in place?
"There are already 100 hydrogen stations in California," says Mr Pearson, "and in the UK the government has given £11m of backing for a small network of 15 stations in the South East."
This is still small beer compared to the hundreds of thousands of petrol and diesel stations worldwide.
Hydrogen cars can be refuelled in a matter of minutes, whereas electric battery vehicles take hours to recharge"The technology of HFCEV has come on in leaps and bounds," says Dr Hamish Nichol, innovation manager for hydrogen at industrial gases giant BOC, part of the Linde Group. "But you need the infrastructure to fuel those cars - it's a chicken and egg situation.
"We're a commercial business - we're not going to build a hydrogen network just for the good of mankind. So we're going to need subsidy from the government."
Industrial gases companies, energy companies, vehicle manufacturers and governments are beginning to realise that they have to work together to build the infrastructure, otherwise each stakeholder will be waiting for the other to make the first move.
For example, in Germany just such a consortium - H2 Mobility - is building 100 hydrogen stations over the next two years, with a target of 400 by 2023. The project will cost about €350m (£250m).
And in the north-east of the US, Air Liquide is co-operating with Toyota to build 12 filling stations as a way of boosting interest in hydrogen cars.
But building a comprehensive network will cost billions, experts believe.
Grey or green?
Hydrogen may be a fuel with water as the only waste product, but producing it - most commonly by "cracking" hydrocarbons such as methane - uses a lot of energy and creates greenhouse gases as by-products.
"One of the reasons for using hydrogen is to reduce the carbon footprint, so splitting methane leaves you with the problem of what to do with the CO2 produced," says Dr Nichol.
This German power station can produce electricity, heat and hydrogen from renewable energy sourcesThis industrially produced "grey hydrogen" currently accounts for about 95% of total production, says Pierre-Etienne Franc, head of advanced business and technology for Air Liquide, another big industrial gases company.
Far more eco-friendly is hydrogen produced through electrolysis - splitting water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen molecules - particularly if the electricity used has come from renewable sources, such as wind and solar.
This is the ideal zero-carbon solution.
Hydrogen facts
Another big advantage of electrolysis is that it allows hydrogen to be produced on site, cutting out distribution costs.
Denmark already has five hydrogen filling stations with embedded electrolysers, and Aberdeen City Council recently opened the UK's largest hydrogen production and bus refuelling station, owned and operated by BOC.
Aberdeen is now home to Europe's largest hydrogen bus fleetThe station will fuel 10 hydrogen fuel cell buses.
"But [electrolysis] is about 10 times more expensive than industrial production," admits Mr Franc.
These costs could come down if night-time wind power electricity were used to produce hydrogen when domestic demand is at its lowest, he argues. Oil companies like Shell are currently exploring this option.
Hydrogen future?
So are we well on the road to a fully-fledged hydrogen economy, weaned off our dependence on damaging hydrocarbons?
Possibly, but most industry experts believe that road will be a long one.
"It's going to take a long time because you're completely changing the paradigm - the infrastructure, the regulations - everything," says Mr Franc. "We're on a journey, but we can't go too fast."
The Carbon Trust's Alex Hart is similarly cautious: "Vehicles will definitely be fuelled differently in future, but whether by hydrogen, electricity or biofuel is less clear. We just don't know what the dominant technology will be.
Feasible engineering doesn’t mean it actually delivers what the global warming hoaxters claim. What they claim is just a bundle of lies.
Electricity has to be generated for a natural gas-to-hydrogen reformer to operate.
Fuel has to be burned in trucks to deliver the huge tanks needed to transport hydrogen.
Los Angeles could cover itself with photovoltaic arrays and take itself off the grid; it could require all vehicles run directly on electricity (batteries, or overhead lines for trolleys) or hydrogen, and use the photovoltaics to produce the hydrogen as a storage system to bridge the period of the day (known as “night”) when the cells weren’t doing anything but electricity was still being used; and of course, electricity would be needed to run the desalination of seawater that they are geographically advantaged to access.
And the wealthy showbiz jackasses in the Los Angeles basin could pay for it themselves, and leave the rest of us out of it. For the first time in their miserable lives they’d actually acquire some moral high ground — on that one issue. The rest of the country which paid for the huge water projects could then cut them off from both the hydroelectricity supply and water pumped from the reservoirs to their canals.
What’s most interesting about the article is not where hydrogen cars are right now but rather how far they have come and the determination, technological chops and deep pockets of the people behind them.
imho what’s most interesting about the article is not where hydrogen cars are right now but rather how far they have come and the determination, technological chops and deep pockets of the people behind them—meaning improvements will continue to be made.
The only benevolent work that needs to be done on desalination is R&D and likely not even that because all the pieces for dirt cheap abundant desalinized water are already being worked on. Desalination costs are roughly 1/3 energy 1/3 capital costs and 1/3 maintenance.
On energy the 4th generation portable nuclear plants using thorium or waste nuclear fuel promise to drop energy costs by 1/2 or better in volume. In the USA the companies working on that are Flibe, Terrapower, Transatomic and a new entry which looks impressive based on their staff called—Martingale. There’s also a canadian company which the DOE has seen fit to support —over american companies—called Terrestrial. There http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/01/07/nuclear-power-turns-to-salt/
These systems are all +-5 years to pilot and 10 years to production. (this is going to happen unlike fusion which is always 20 years away. )
On maintenance/energy “Engineers at Lockheed-Martin recently developed and patented a molecular filtration membrane called Perforene which can desalinate seawater using only 1/100th the energy of the best existing desalination systems.”
http://www.greenprophet.com/2014/12/graphene-nanotechnology-makes-desalination-100-times-more-efficient/
engineers still need to figure out how to produce graphene to spec on industrial scales. but I’ve seen regular improvements there. I think that’s five years away or less. There are companies around who already say they can do it. but conservatively speaking it will likely be five years before the kinks are got out of production to spec for desalination membranes.
Likely 3d printing will collapse capital costs in desalination plants. As well as newer/better/faster maintenance free materials are coming out all the time because of the ongoing revolution in materials research which will lower the cost of maintenance because salt is very corrosive.
One thing that has not had much attention paid to is finding ways to turn Na and Cl into useful industrial products. Though there are several companies that currently do so. Few desalination plants actually do this. Rather they dilute the brine and send back out to sea. This causes problems with the environmentalists.
Ya but only the surface is exposed to O2 in a liquid versus a gas that disperses and spreads out quickly.
My chemistry teacher made a very volatile explosion using simple flour. He showed that the flour wouldn’t ignite very well in a pile on the dish. However when he tossed it in the air it ignited very dramatically AND it behaved like a chain reaction that consumed all (or most) of the fuel in an instant. The more a fuel is despersed the more volatile it is. To a limit of course. The question is can it sustain a chain reaction.
Ok, great. How do we lubricate the engine?
I don’t buy into manmade global warming, at all.
In fact, I would have especially welcomed a little warming last month.
I just mentioned Los Angeles and Mexico City, because those cities are notorious for having smog and bad air quality, due to their geography and climate - air masses frequently sit in place for an extended period, like water in a bowl, so local pollution can build up until it makes folks eyes burn. Most other cities are naturally better ventilated.
Air quality is better now in LA than it used to be, but auto exhaust is still their number one air pollution source. Burning hydrogen in the city instead of gasoline and diesel would improve local air quality, and total carbon output be damned. Hydrogen could be produced up the the coast, over the border in Mexico, or even offshore.
California requires automakers to meet tighter fuel efficiency and pollution than the rest of the country, and they closely monitor local air quality, especially in LA. But they don’t enforce total carbon output or overall energy efficiency. So their system would be fine with wasting money or energy elsewhere, to improve what they do measure.
Hydrogen is suitable for niches like that. As the technology improves, there could be a good business case to use it in other niches, or even for widespread adoption at some point.
There are no hard showstoppers - many hydrogen cars are driving around today. They are just not the best value for regular car owners at this point.
Again, I have no bitch about LA wanting to clean up its own air — but no one has a gun to their head to live there (Mexico City either), so unless their bluejean millionaires from the entertainment industry — the ones who want to get rid of dams because they want to canoe down the “lost” canyons — want to spring for the means, they’re free to move somewhere else.
Thanks!
I’m not really getting your point. Too many cross currents. I’ve heard its better to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. But that’s just me. In any case.
Can you clarify?
looks like thorium/small pebble reactors are the way to go right now..think/stay small.
I agree with you that the cost drivers should be the bill payers - no subsidies.
What do folks think about the platinum constraint on widespread fuel cell use?
Fuel cells depend on platinum to work well, and it is 20 times rarer than gold. Production is limited, 80% comes from one country (South Africa) suffering from labor unrest, and other uses compete for the limited supply.
I’m not saying that, either. I’m saying, we don’t need a nationwide top-down one-size-fits-all solution to a problem unique to the LA basin. That’s where we water-rich states got stuck with low-flow toilets and other stupid garbage.
What do folks think about the platinum constraint on widespread fuel cell use?
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Prices on electric car batteries will be cut in half by Tesla’s gigafactory so Tesla’s cars can move from 70k to 35k in about 3 years.
There is currently no such plan in place in the USA for fuel cells so if they come down from their comparably high prices —the authors of their price decline will be in Germany or Japan.
Whatever, we are setting up for some really golden years for consumers in the world of transportation as several competing transportation systems push each others prices downward.
I would support siphoning off ten-twenty feet of water from the Mississippi during flood stages from March-June and pumping it to several places including west Texas, the Ogalala aquifer in eastern Colorado and over south pass in southwest Wyoming.
This would both serve as flood control on the Mississippi as well as providing water for points west.
This dual purpose was the original intent of the Hoover dam on the Colorado.
Likely this job will have to wait until portable nukes make electricity much cheaper and power plants drop in easy to post.
As it is this would be money better spent than the current policy of spending 4 billion dollars annually by the Army corps of engineers to dike the Mississippi and do FEMA disaster relief and flood plain buy outs.
If it were practical (perhaps using large, high power lasers from orbit, to bore just barely non-level tunnels) I’d like to see the diversion take place from the eastern watershed (basically, high areas of the Missouri River basin) to the western watershed, iow, feed the Colorado with all of its hydroelectric dams and reservoirs with the annual flood.
No need for lasers. tunnel boring equipment is very fast and good. tunnel building costs might be made up for by lower pumping costs until you come to the foot of south pass.
However, once the water was pumped over south pass —the falling water in the pipes could be used to turn turbines to run generators that power the pumps that pump the water up on eastern side.
That said, there’s not all that much water available at the headwaters of the missouri (that is not enough to lower the missippi) in western montana and you don’t want to go as far west as Cody because there’s several ranges there between the missouri and the plains of wyoming.
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