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
NO .... hydrogen will take 25 yrs to develop once someone says go...... then another 10yrs to get it a staple.......
Ah, if only we could repeal the laws of thermodynamics.
"...The concept is elegant and simple.
Pull up to your neighborhood creek or tundra pond, and fill 'er up..."
- - -
Somebody has been smoking something.
Not my car. It barely runs on regular octane gas.
Make that a BIG someone! (i.e. Executive Office status)
Then again, nanotechnology looks promising...
Ah, if only we could repeal the laws of thermodynamics.
One could also argue that coal and oil and natural gas are energy storage sources also (solar from long ago), but at least they are laying around. To get hydrogen, you need to electrolyze water, and for that you need to generate electricity--either by burning something or using nuclear power.
I don't believe it will happen until we run out of gas or the gas companies find a way to charge us as much or more than gasoline. We cant't be allowed to just hook up to the water hose:')
One place I already know of that produces hydrogen from water disposes of it uselessly, though for good reason.
Nano is in the same pattern......
if i had a chance to get a hydrogen car i would turn it down for my 74 oldsmobile, it gets the envirowackos upset.
Hydrogen power is a giant boondoggle.
Expensive to produce, difficult to transport and store, dangerous as all hell to use, and less efficient as a power source.
I don't buy the "global warming" crapola, but it is true that there is a finite supply of hydrocarbons available. The eco-wackos won't let us drill for more oil/natural gas, and gripe loudly at the thought of coal being burned. Oil prices are high and will only get higher.
The "scientists" would serve us better if they would get off the hydrogen "high" and find another way to generate power.
There is no way someone is going to invent a process to develop hydrogen cheaply...If we could do it cheaply, it will be illegal...And how much in federal and state taxes on the (free) water???
Where's the guy with the "Not this **** again" graphic?
i like oil..... it is easier to deal with ......
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