Posted on 10/10/2004 7:23:59 PM PDT by ckilmer
Will hydrogen from water soon run your car?
By Tim Bradner Alaska Journal of Commerce Publication Date: 09/13/04
The concept is elegant and simple. Pull up to your neighborhood creek or tundra pond, and fill 'er up. Forget gasoline and diesel - hydrogen, extracted from good old H2O, is it.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. If we can figure out a way to economically extract hydrogen from water, we'll have an inexhaustible, pollution-free source of fuel. Our world is awash in water, quite literally.
"When you burn hydrogen your emission is water vapor. You start with water, and you end with water," says Jack Robertson, executive director of the Portland, Ore. based Northwest Hydrogen Alliance, and a hydrogen enthusiast.
Starting with water, of course, assumes you can economically extract hydrogen from water, and that's a problem.
Today, most hydrogen is extracted from natural gas, which is expensive and in short supply itself as a fuel. The holy grail of hydrogen research is to improve the technology to extract it inexpensively from water. The other key ingredient is to have plenty of cheap electricity available, preferably from a renewable, non-polluting resource.
Given the challenges, we may be stuck in the hydrocarbon age a bit longer. Hydrogen appears a bit over the horizon as a viable energy source.
However, a band of fierce hydrogen loyalists, such as Robertson, is hard at work pushing research on its use as fuel for vehicles and power generation.
The era of fossil fuels is showing its age, they argue, and the theory of global warming is now widely accepted. The hunt for environmentally friendly alternative fuels has become serious business.
Robertson believes the Northwest states and Alaska could become a testing ground to demonstrate that the hydrogen economy could be with us sooner than many believe.
"Alaska's remote small villages, high costs of conventional fuels and abundant sources of renewable energy - wind, and in some places, hydro and geothermal - make the state ideal to demonstrate the hydrogen economy," he said.
Steve Colt, a University of Alaska Anchorage economist who works on energy issues, agrees.
"If it can be made to work, hydrogen could be a neat solution for remote rural Alaska communities who are desperate to find alternatives to high-cost diesel," Colt said.
Most rural villages have access to water. What's needed is a source of cheap energy to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water, Colt said.
Wind could provide that energy, according to Chris Rose, an attorney and mediator who lives in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Rose has organized the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, a coalition of utilities, conservation groups, consumer organizations and businesses interested in renewable energy.
In most coastal Alaska communities the wind blows, sometimes a lot, Rose said. Wind can create electricity which can be used to break the hydrogen out of the water.
There is also excess hydropower available in some coastal communities, and potential geothermal resources, he said.
Colt said much of the work on hydrogen research is focused on its use in fuel cells. But fuel cells themselves are still too costly for widespread consumer use. More attention should be paid to using hydrogen as a fuel for conventional power generation turbines and combustion engines in vehicles, he said.
It's possible, Colt said, that a remote village could make hydrogen locally and meet all of its needs for power generation and transportation fuels, and with a non-polluting source of energy.
Science fiction or a real possibility?
Is all this pie in the sky? Could be. As usual, the devil is in the details.
"The concept of hydrogen made from wind or excess hydro (power) is pretty attractive. The difficulty is in the cost of storage and moving it from place to place," Colt said.
Bob Chaney, a researcher working on Alaska energy projects for the consulting company Science Applications International Corp., said studies his research team has done casts doubt as to whether hydrogen can be made economically in rural communities unless the capital equipment is subsidized.
There are other issues, too. Hydrogen is the lightest element and thus has a very low density, Chaney said. It easily diffuses through many materials, including some metals. That means hydrogen can leak from storage tanks if they're not built properly.
A more challenging problem is that because it is light it is less dense than hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline or diesel, it takes much larger volume of hydrogen to produce a comparative amount of energy. A gallon of liquefied hydrogen, for example, weighs just over half a pound compared with six pounds for a gallon of gasoline.
Gasoline weighs more partly because there's a lot more hydrogen chemically bound to carbon in a gallon of it, Chaney said. While hydrogen contains a lot of energy, its low density means that a gallon of it contains about 22 percent of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline.
"Liquid hydrogen just doesn't contain the same energy as conventional hydrocarbon fuels. It doesn't have the same 'oomph,'" Chaney said.
The lower energy density means that storage and containment are significant issues relative to hydrocarbon fuels. There is currently very little infrastructure for the production, storage and distribution of hydrogen on a large scale anywhere in the world, he said.
"There's just no getting around the fact that conventional fuels pack a lot of energy and are very efficient," he said.
Renewable, cheap energy key to production
Still, a lot of people, undaunted by the problems, are pressing ahead. Shell, the multinational oil company, has built the world's first hydrogen fueling station for vehicles in Iceland. The hydrogen is made with electricity generated from geothermal heat and hydropower.
The state of California has a major initiative underway to build two prototype hydrogen fueling stations, and to demonstrate hydrogen's use as a vehicle fuel.
Jack Robertson hopes to secure federal grants to build hydrogen fueling stations at Fort Lewis in Washington state, and at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, to demonstrate hydrogen's use in vehicles as well as in power generation.
He also wants to show that hydrogen can be made economically from water in the Pacific Northwest using cheap off-peak hydropower that is available from the Bonneville Power Administration.
The hydrogen, made at night, would be stored and then used during the day by Northwest utilities to meet peak demand requirements, Robertson said.
Most utilities in the region now meet peak power demand needs by firing up standby natural gas-fired generators, which is very expensive.
Robertson believes Alaska offers similar opportunities to tap potentially low-cost renewable energy sources, such as wind, to make hydrogen.
Alaska has unused hydro-capacity, too. About a third of the electricity that is generated at the Lake Tyee hydro-project in Southeast Alaska is being used today by nearby Petersburg and Wrangell. Two thirds of it is available for other uses.
There are also potential geothermal projects which could generate power to make hydrogen, Rose says. These are mainly in communities on the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, which are active volcanic zones. Work is being done now on possible geothermal projects at Akutan and near Unalaska.
"This could be a business opportunity," Rose said. "The major ocean shipping lanes of the North Pacific are just off Unalaska and Akutan. The location is perfect to supply hydrogen to Asia."
However, the potential for wind energy in the Aleutians is far greater than geothermal, Rose said. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's wind resource maps show the entire Aleutians as a Class 7 wind region, near the top of the scale as a windy place. Very few places in the Lower 48 states are designated Class 7, Rose said.
Wind power may soon be available in many rural communities, also. At least six rural communities now have functioning wind generation projects. Wind monitoring projects, the first step in developing a generation project, are underway or are planned in about 45 other villages, he said.
The right circumstances could lead to the right price
Can hydrogen from water be economic in the near-term? Robertson argues it could be under certain circumstances.
His group plans to buy "graveyard-shift," or bargain-priced hydropower from midnight to 6 a.m. in the Pacific Northwest for 2 to 3 cents per kilowatt hour. He would use that electricity to make hydrogen from water from the Columbia River.
Robertson estimates he can break the hydrogen out of the water and produce a kilogram of hydrogen, which has an energy content roughly equal to a gallon of gasoline, using about 55 kilowatt hours of electricity.
If each kilowatt hour costs 3 cents, it means the approximate cost of making hydrogen is about $1.65 per kilogram, the equivalent to a gallon of gasoline.
That's just the raw cost of making the hydrogen, Robertson admits. Capital and operating costs must be added.
Still, Robertson believes the total cost of producing the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline in the form of hydrogen will be about on par with a premium grade of gasoline, about $2.11 per gallon in the Pacific Northwest today.
"The simple cost of producing and compressing hydrogen from water is at or below premium gasoline. However, the all-in costs, including infrastructure capitalization, of producing hydrogen will be higher than gasoline to begin with, but this is expected in early phase pilot projects," Robertson said.
"As demand for hydrogen related technologies increases, we believe production costs and efficiencies will increase dramatically."
Robertson said the production costs are close enough for hydrogen to be viable as a fuel to test in vehicles, but a more important benefit will be having an affordable local supply of hydrogen for utilities in to meet peak power demand, Robertson said.
"Most analysis of hydrogen production assumes the costs will be borne only by the transportation sector," he said. "Our vision is to create hydrogen fueling parks in which the hydrogen infrastructure will be shared by both the transportation infrastructure and electric utilities. We see the hydrogen from storage tanks being diverted into generators to help meet electric peaks," he said.
"This sharing of costs between two industries allows the price of hydrogen production to be far less for each than most standard analysis indicates," Robertson said.
Could it be economic in Alaska?
Assuming continued work on electrolysis technology, the key issue to producing hydrogen in the state is securing power that is cheap enough.
Lake Tyee is the only existing hydro-site in Alaska that has substantial surplus power. The wholesale price of power sold from Lake Tyee is 6.84 cents per kilowatt hour, according to Stan Sieczkowski, operations manager at the Four Dam Pool Power Agency, which operates Lake Tyee and other hydro-projects in Alaska.
That's about twice the off-peak rate from the Bonneville Power Administration.
The capital costs of equipment to make and store hydrogen could be the death knell of any small village application on a straightforward commercial basis, at least until costs of the technology come down.
Chaney's team has researched the possibility of making hydrogen with surplus power that could be available from a micro-scale nuclear reactor at Galena, on the Yukon River.
Mainly because it would cost about $6 million to install the capital equipment to make hydrogen from water at Galena, the costs would be about $46 per million British thermal units (Btus) even assuming the electricity is free, Chaney said. That is more than twice as high as the equivalent energy in the form of diesel, which is about $15 per million Btus, according to Chaney's analysis.
As with so many things, the economics of energy projects in small communities is adversely affected by the size of local fuel demand, in this case about 400,000 gallons per year. The economics are more attractive if more hydrogen is produced, such as would be the case in the Pacific Northwest.
Chaney also looked at whether more hydrogen could be made with the surplus shipped to other Alaska communities.
It was a non-starter. The transportation costs were prohibitive, an estimated 90 cents per gallon, because of the special requirements for shipping liquid or compressed hydrogen.
Hydrogen's day will come
"The production and use of hydrogen is supported by real chemistry and physics, and so it is real science," said Dennis Witmer, director of the Arctic Energy Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Witmer, who is doing work with fuel cells at UAF, is still cautious. "Technology is different than science, however, and for a technology to be real it must also be affordable, reliable and safe," he said. "At this point in time, hydrogen fails to meet those criteria."
Robertson, however, sees the big picture. He believes that if hydrogen could eventually be made to work in small, isolated Alaska villages, similar projects could be spurred in third-world nations.
"If we can prove this concept in Alaska, we can develop the technology packages so they can be shipped on pallets," Robertson said. Click here to return to story: http://www.alaskajournal.com/stories/091304/loc_20040913016.shtml
Big recent news generally overlooked:
"Hydrocarbons could be formed inside the Earth via simple inorganic reactions -- and not just from the decomposition of living organisms as conventionally assumed -- and might therefore be more plentiful than previously thought."
Petroleum under pressure
14 September 2004
Scientists in the US have witnessed the production of methane under the conditions that exist in the Earth's upper mantle for the first time. The experiments demonstrate that hydrocarbons could be formed inside the Earth via simple inorganic reactions -- and not just from the decomposition of living organisms as conventionally assumed -- and might therefore be more plentiful than previously thought.
Methane is the most abundant hydrocarbon found in the Earth's crust and is also the main component of natural gas. Reserves of natural gas are often accompanied by petrol, usually only a few kilometres below the Earth's surface. The possibility that hydrocarbons might exist deeper in the Earth's mantle, or could be formed from non-biological matter, has been the subject of debate among geologists in recent years.
To explore these questions further Henry Scott of Indiana University in South Bend and colleagues at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, Harvard University and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab subjected materials commonly found in the Earth's crust to temperatures of up to 1500°C and pressures as high as 11 gigapascals (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. to be published). These conditions are similar to those found in the Earth's upper mantle.
The set-up
Scott and co-workers squeezed together iron oxide, calcium carbonate and water between two diamonds with flattened tips while heating up the device. The advantage of the "diamond anvil cell" technique is that the sample can be analysed in situ -- through the diamonds -- using a variety of spectroscopic techniques. The US scientists found that methane was most readily produced at relatively low temperatures of 500°C and pressures of 7 gigapascals or below.
The sample
In 2002 J F Kenney of Gas Resources Corporation in Texas and co-workers in Moscow found methane and other hydrocarbons in similar experiments. However, their apparatus did not allow them to follow the formation process in situ (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 99 10976).
Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton believes the results are important because they could help answer the question of whether natural gas and petroleum could be created inorganically. "If the answer turns out to be inorganic, this has huge implications for the ecology and economy of our planet," says Dyson.
However, Scott is more cautious about his team's results. "Although I believe the Earth's mantle could contain a significant quantity of even heavier hydrocarbons, I cannot constrain how much of this reaches the Earth's surface, or the extent to which it may augment resources that we exploit commercially," he told PhysicsWeb. "I do not want to suggest in any way that these hydrocarbons are likely to represent an untapped energy reserve."
About the author
Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb
Jojoba.
Steam is a power plant that is simple and easy to operate. Is it the answer? Maybe and maybe not..but it worked before and back then they were crude. But they worked and worked with less than one third of the moving parts of todays cars.
Take a gander at the power plant on steam car news page 2..scoll down the opening page. Its a simple four cylinder and is nearly direct drive. Then some of the articles like to guy who has built them and gets about 25 MPG..and this guy does this by himself! What could be done with a big corp with advanced engineering developing this type of power plant. The boilers could be made smaller and better and no doubt they could come up with a engine that would reach the 300 HP range and get 40 to 50 MPG burning your type of fuel..or any type of fuel. LPG, Methane, whatever.
The ideas are there and have been since the turn of the 20th century..heck they made electric cars in the late 1800s I believe..I have some pics of them someplace around here someplace. Wish I knew how to post them on here I would.
"...if they would get off the hydrogen "high" and find another way to generate power."
From the standpoint of the laws of physics there are only three sources of "free" energy available to us on Earth.
1)Geothermal (the heat remaining inside the Earth)
2)Nuclear power (either fission or fusion)
3)Solar (this includes hydrogen and fuel cells, all petroleum including coal, natural gas, propane etc. and burning of any kind).
The source of power that has the largest energy yield and the least running cost is fusion. Now if only we had lots of fusion plants laying around ready to be turned on ;>)
And what energy source are we gonna use to heat the organics to 900 degrees?
Uh huh. It's coming, and soon.
Stay safe and keep your powder dry.
Just think of the whistle a guy could put on one of those cars! MPG would drop quite a bit with the whistle I'd put on mine.
Remember the Challenger?
Challenger actually broke up due to "external dynamic forces" when the plasma leak through the booster, cut through a supporting strut on the external tank (like a cutting torch). This caused the shuttle to get sideways during flight, and at many thousands of MPH the whole thing instantly breaks up.
I'd prefer not to try it with gasoline. Diesel fuel would extinguish the match without question, but a 'pool' of gasoline is likely to have a layer of fuel/air mixture directly above it.
I'd suggest a different experiment: create a moderately fast leak in a gasoline tank and a hydrogen tank, wait a minute, and strike a spark. I would posit that the gasoline is much more likely to 'pool' in air than is hydrogen, which is much more likely to dissipate.
To be sure, storing a pressurized gas poses issues, but I don't know that hydrogen is any worse than e.g. methane in that regard. To be sure not as nice as propane or butane (which liquify under reasonable pressures) but not an unsolvable problem.
Michael Moore?
Is the Earth getting smaller, are there big holes down there where oil and gas came from? What happens to all the hydrocarbons we burn? We don't gain or lose much to space so they must still be here in a different form. Why is inconceivable that the planet recycles those too? For that matter why aren't we up to our necks in humus, maybe oil making is an on-going geologic process. We never seem to run out of lava either.
What about the concept of a piston engine which uses the burning fuel as the working fluid instead of steam, but burns it in a combustion chamber prior to feeding it into the drive cylinders? While I'll admit that the state change of water contributes greatly to the effectiveness of a steam engine, efficient heat transfer from the fuel to the water is difficult. If the fuel/exhaust were the working fluid, the heat transfer to the working fluid would be 100%.
Great comments, how true. These people are evil and if they had their way, would destroy our civilization. They are the enemy of freedom.
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