Hydrogen is good!
Posted on 03/09/2006 7:45:38 AM PST by aculeus
GE says its new machine could make the hydrogen economy affordable, by slashing the cost of water-splitting technology.
Among the many daunting challenges to replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen is how to make hydrogen cheaply in ways that don't pollute the environment. Splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from energy sources such as wind turbines is one possibility -- but it's still far too expensive to be widely practical.
Now researchers at GE say they've come up with a less expensive, easy-to-manufacture apparatus that can directly produce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of gasoline -- down from today's $8 per kilogram. That could make it economically practical for future fuel-cell vehicles that run on hydrogen.
Electrolyzers are fairly simple technologies: water is mixed with potassium hydroxide electrolyte and made to flow past a stack of electrodes. Electricity causes the water molecules to split into hydrogen and oxygen gases, which bubble out of the solution. The chemistry makes a good high-school science experiment -- but commercial-scale quantities of hydrogen are extracted far more cheaply from natural gas.
The core problem in improving electrolyzers for hydrogen manufacture is not how to improve the fundamental conversion efficiency, says Richard Bourgeois, an electrolysis project leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. "You can only make it so much more efficient; there isn't a lot you can do. So we've attacked the capital costs," he says.
Today's electrolyzers are made of metal plates bolted together manually, with gaskets between them, and the whole unit is typically housed in a chamber made of the same metals used in the electrodes, says Bourgeois. The materials are expensive and assembly requires costly labor.
Bourgeois' research team came up with a way to make future electrolyzers largely out of plastic. They used a GE plastic called Noryl that is extremely resistant to the highly alkaline potassium hydroxide. And because the plastic is easy to form and join, manufacturing an electrolyzer is relatively cheap.
Inside the plastic housing, metal electrodes still do the same job. But because GE is using less electrode material, the reactivity of the electrodes' surfaces is improved. To do this, the researchers borrowed a spray-coating process -- normally used to apply coatings for parts on jet engines -- to coat the electrodes with a proprietary nickel-based catalyst with a large surface area.
GE has demonstrated the technology in a prototype, and is now building a larger production module -- one that can produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen per hour -- for testing in its labs later this year. A machine of that scale could be attached to small electricity sources to produce hydrogen on the side. The technology also has the potential to be massively scaled up to create a hydrogen gas station.
GE's new electrolyzer could be ready for production in a few years. "You can talk about transitioning to a hydrogen economy, but really these things don't move unless the economics are there," Bourgeois says. "This takes enough capital cost out of the whole electrolyzer system, so when you buy this and amortize it over so many years, you compete with gasoline."
Paul Bakke, an electrical engineer and program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy in Golden, CO, says a cheap electrolyzer could be a key component of the future hydrogen economy. "As far as I know, GE is the only one who has tried to tackle this problem," he says. "Assuming GE is successful in being able to produce these things with a high level of reliability and low cost, it will break through the barrier that has traditionally been there for electrolyzers -- namely, the capital cost barrier."
Bakke adds: "I would say it's an important piece; it may not be the only way to make hydrogen, but it's an important piece. Natural-gas reforming may be a near-term bridge, but in order to get away from the environmental concerns, we will have to go to electrolysis, derived from wind turbines and solar panels and so forth."
This sounds like a promising breakthrough. I hope the oil producing nations are crapping their pants.
OK, hydrogen will be cheap. Now all we have to decide is what we will do when they pass out buckets of free hydrogen.
Might I suggest Nuclear Power.
A couple of weeks ago, President Bush said that the US was on the edge of several energy breakthroughs. I wonder if this is what he was talking about.
Don't worry I'm sure we'll see a 'drop' in the price of oil soon.
[Bold '?']
ping
Hydrogen is good!
You might - and I would gladly second the motion! Nuclear energy is our only solution to our long term energy problems.
In the far future we'll run out of petroleum, we'll run out of coal but we'll never run out of atoms!
The sun is an abundant source of electricity for electrolysing water. But I am not suggesting we set up solar panels in Seattle.
Except it was the shiny aluminum oxide coating on the Zeppelin that doomed the Hindenburg. The nice-looking stuff that they used to "paint" the outer skin... was thermite.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Too little too late. It takes years for nuke plants to come online.
You're d--- Skippy right on that one. The reason oil is $60 a barrel, is because we have to pay that. Take the gun away from our temple, and we are good to go.
We have cost improvement from $8 to $3 a gallon on H-fuel. The next fold on that would be an improvement from $3 to about $1.11. The key question here is how long of an interval was required between the $8 H-fuel and the $3 H-fuel?
My idea (which I've been posting about for years here) is to use surf generators to both provide the water (the ocean) and make the electricity (beaches + floats + rods + cam + turbine + generator = electricity) to seperate the H from the 02.. I like the nuke idea as well.
" surf generators "
Except where Ted Kennedy lives.
LOL!! This is not an energy breakthrough. This is a net energy loser.
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