The other peculiar thing about aluminum is that you can’t shut the refineries off. If they cool down for more than 4 hours the aluminum solidifies necessitating a complete rebuild of the tank. and about power, we may have enough peaking capacity (read expensive electricity), but is the base load capacity there? The cost of electricity varies form moment to moment as the generation mix changes during the day. Electricity must be generated in exactly the amount used; there really isn’t any storage any significant increase in al production is going to drive the cost of electricity up and decrease the reserves.
Actually, I think the excess capacity is all at night and the baseload capacity is more than the night-time demand.
So as long as you do your aluminum recycling at night, you are ok ;-) The author does make the point that new generating capacity dedicated to aluminum recycling would be best. I’m just saying we have some excess capacity that could be used without waiting for that.
Controlling the reaction to provide the amount of hydrogen needed according to varying demands of the vehicle seems like it is left out of the article entirely.
It wouldn’t make sense for the reactor to be a single big tank where all the aluminum and water is dumped at once. Similar systems that I’ve seen move the reactants together via screw delivery systems into the reaction chamber. So you can move only as much as necessary to provide the hydrogen output needed at that time, and few of the aluminum pellets would be wasted when the reaction (and vehicle) are shut down. Just those remaining in the reaction chamber and flushed out with water into the alumina waste tank. Maybe not even those, if the reaction is allowed to continue and the hydrogen from those last pellets is compressed for storage in a relatively small gaseous hydrogen tank. I think a vehicle reactor would need to do that anyway, so it could produce hydrogen at an average rate and temporarily store it to meet the varying demands of the vehicle.