Like all hydrogen fuel schemes, the gotcha is in where do you get the energy to produce the hydrogen. currently there isn't much in the way of spare capacity on the US electrical system, so you'd have to build new generation to handle the energy needs. I read somewhere that it would take about 200 new nuclear plants to provide the energy used by the transportation sector. Another example (this "research") of taxpayer money paying for something we don't want and can't use.
Did you read the entire article? The hydrogen is produced on demand in the vehicle by taking advantage of the chemical reaction discussed.
A single plant will cost upwards of $10 billion and take 10 years to build. The time factor is the issue. Any utility that wants to build one of these plants will only be able to do so when it presents a capital plant to the market that the market will want to bid on.
The crucial point here is that building a plant ties up capital that some third party is willing to put at risk until the plant can pay off. That cannot occur until well after completion. If we embark on a program to build dozens, if not over a hundred new plants, each will end up almost sequestering billions of dollars from the pool of private capital. These plans will have to be attractive to attract funding and that will bid up the cost of capital for other activities such as biotech, manufacturing, and indeed all other business capital spending.
Why should an investor tie up his money in a project with a 10 year payoff rather than one that has a 3 year payoff? Only because the return must be higher. An make no mistake about the risk premium: a project in its 9th year could be stopped by a single successful environmental lawsuit.
Building 100 new nuclear plants will require raising almost $1 Trillion in capital in the open market. Our entire GDP is what, maybe $13 Trillion? Lest anyone suggest that government provide financing, even government money doesn’t grow on trees. Money is fungible and there is no way to avoid the substantial distortions such funding will induce.
But we have thousands of square miles of desert where the sun shines more than not....solar could suppliment the electrical need for the process.
I’m also wondering about the efficiency of this cycle. The article states that considerable heat is also liberated in this reaction - how much, and is it of any use? I guess it might be useful for heating the car in the winter. How efficient is the process of reforming the aluminum oxide back to aluminum? The devil’s in the details with these schemes. Of course, it’s not hard to beat the 25% (or so) efficiency of the gasoline powered internal combustion engine.
The point is that the aluminum is a carrier of energy — the electricity used to make it. It won’t give up that energy like a battery, but can be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen.
So it is an energy carrier, and the question is how much it costs for the energy retrieved later. That answer is pretty easy. The cost of the aluminum. Which is currently about $1 per pound. That cost includes the cost of the energy embedded in the aluminum when it was made. Used in an ICE engine, the article says $60 worth of aluminum would drive a mid-size sedan 350 miles — about 17 cents per mile. Assuming the mid-size sedan would get 30mpg on gasoline, it would take 12 gallons to drive 360 miles, which would be like $5 gasoline. That’s why the article says it isn’t competitive with gasoline at current prices. The cost of aluminum used must come down, or more energy must be usable from the hydrogen as in a fuel-cell compared to combustion in an ICE.
I only have high school chemistry but know you don’t get to split water, make hydrogen, for free. It takes energy and in this case it’s supplied by aluminum which is quite expensive. In supplying this splitting energy the aluminum becomes aluminum oxide. To reuse the aluminum oxide you turn it back into aluminum by electricity.
I fail to see what’s so clever about this scheme