Slashdot Mirror

This is is an article on how it is created:

http://www.millenniumcell.com/fw/main/How_it_Works -31.html [millenniumcell.com]

But do we really think big oil is going to let this happen?

This is is an article on how it is created:

http://www.millenniumcell.com/fw/main/How_it_Works -31.html

But do we really think big oil is going to let this happen?

There are folks working on battery tech, and the latest focus is on Fuel Cell and Hydrogen.

This backs up to *where does the energy come from in the first place* since a battery is not a source of energy, just a carrier. With that, there are no good sources. Consolidating on electric borne of nuclear sources is perhaps the highest volumetric consolidation of waste, but the willpower isn't there yet.

Regardless of battery tech and applications, the side-effects of the current energy production infrastructure are only going to increase with demand (population size). If you're looking for a snappy solution-oriented comment here, forget it. Just get ready for some incredible sprials ("energy production->global warming->energy demand..." as just one) that push our society to the edge of survival.

These buckyfilm batteries still have a way to go. At 100mWh:cm^2, rolled around gaps for methanol flow, they might get 1W:cm^2, which is 3.6Mj:liter. Battery volumetric energy density about 1Mj:l, while the same (biased) source reports their own sodium borohydride offers 26.3Mj:l, (over 7x), while the more practical and directly comparable DMFCs they mention from their competitors offer about 17.3Mj:l (4.8x).

The buckyfilm offers a flexible material, which combined with tactile sensor fabrics and flexible displays will make mobile computing even more convenient. With this early effort already within 20% of the efficiency of inflexible DMFCs, we might be very close to smart clothes and upholstery, integrating computing into all common devices without transforming them into "computers". That might sound pretty dull, but "pedestrian" has come to mean both "completely ordinary" and "conveniently mobile". Fabric is one of the older technologies on which our civilization is based, and revolutionized us when we became smart. Maybe its time to do it again by returning the favor.

Darn, I was just about to believe my eyes when I saw the video (sorry Real Video), which featured a lighter being held to a petrie dish of the feul. Other reading suggests that this stuff, while not entirely benign, is much safer than gasoline. It's a good thing the parent warns of the, otherwise, unapparent dangers ;)

Not all hydrogen technologies involve high-pressure tanks. Millennium Cell has a sodium-borohydride based solution that is (according to them) environmentally friendly, non-explosive, non-toxic, recyclable, and plentiful, and has a higher energy density than high-pressure hydrogen. Read more here. Of course I wonder what they're not telling me, and there's no standard yet for hydrogen storage technology for passenger vehicles, so all bets are off right now...

Not all hydrogen technologies involve high-pressure tanks. Millennium Cell has a sodium-borohydride based solution that is (according to them) environmentally friendly, non-explosive, non-toxic, recyclable, and plentiful, and has a higher energy density than high-pressure hydrogen. Read more here. Of course I wonder what they're not telling me, and there's no standard yet for hydrogen storage technology for passenger vehicles, so all bets are off right now...

.... and won't be for at least a couple of decades. Battery electric vehicles on the other hand are ready and have been for over a century. BEVs were popular before the gasoline engine took over.

Here are some problems with hydrogen:

1) Where does it come from? There aren't any hydrogen wells, you have to make it.

2) What do you make it out of? Right now nearly all of our hydrogen is made from non-renewable fossil fuels. (This is my guess as to why the Bush administration is pushing hydrogen fuel cell cars.)

3) Yes, you can make it out of water, but to do that takes TONS of electricity. How do we make the electricity?

4) What does a hydrogen fuel tank look like? Hydrogen is difficult to store. Cryogenics are probably not feasible on a small scale, pressure tanks are bombs waiting to go off, and metal hydrides have a low energy density, esp. when compared to gasoline. This means that a fuel cell electric vehicle will have range similar to a battery electric vehicle.

5) Hydrogen fuel cells are expensive and delicate - not yet ready to be stuffed into millions of American cars.

I have seen at least one concept for creating and storing hydrogen for use in small vehicles (boron hydride and water, http://www.millenniumcell.com. But it requires infrastructure we don't have yet.

OK, on the other hand, batteries:

1) are very well understood technology
2) are cheap, safe, and easy to store
3) are made out of recycleable materials
4) can use the electric grid infrastructure for refueling
5) can use unused night-time capacity for charging, eliminating the need to build more power plants

The Achilles heel of the battery electric vehicle is range. They have less range than gas cars, true. But the vast majority of car trips are less than the round-trip range of even the cheesiest home-built BEV.

As is so often the case, it's a perception problem. Americans don't want to buy a car that isn't capable of driving across the country. But most families have two cars - why not make one of them a BEV? Or, if you only want one car, then own the BEV and rent the gasser when you need to travel out of the city.

Gas and diesel powered cars can do things that BEVs can't. We can't get rid of them today, because we still need vehicles that can carry huge loads or go long distances at high speeds or travel to places with no electricity. But the vast majority of passenger-miles travelled in the USA could easily be fueled by 100% American electrons.

Consider the microwave oven. It can't bake bread, it can't brown meats, it can't roast turkeys. Why would anyone want such a useless appliance?

Well, because most of the rest of America's food-heating needs can be met by the microwave, more cheaply and convieniently than by the conventional oven.

I bet that you have a microwave in your house.

Why don't you have a battery electric vehicle in your garage?

Because you think it's range is impractical, and even if you wanted one, you'd find that you can't buy one!

Hydrogen is the obvious fuel of choice for portable fuel cells - it packs more energy than any other (non-nuclear) fuel into a given amount of mass.

The problem is finding a safe and efficient mechanism to transport the hydrogen. A fuel cell powered by a canister of highly compressed hydrogen gas could have the destructive power of a grenade if ignited... not something you'd want sitting next to you on a plane or subway. Meanwhile, the logistics of transporting liquid hydrogen (which must be kept cool at cryogenic temperatures) are such that it will probably never be used in portable fuel cells.

Considering how important viable hydrogen storage is to our future economy, it's amazing how few research dollars have been directed at the problem. One possible solution is sodium borohydride in an aqueous solution. Hydrogen is released when the NaBH4(aq) is passed through a catalyst. The solution is completely stable and nontoxic at room temperature, yet stores more hydrogen per liter than liquid H2.

As for storing hydrogen, what about the article on Slashdot a while back about a method of using Borax to store hydrogen in water which is extracted via a catalyst?

A hydrogen based economy is possible, people just need to put some serious effort into looking into all of the methods of extraction and storage to come up with a good inexpensive solution.

The problem is that the initial costs of any solution will be high until it is widely deployed.

-Aaron

I think we need a few more breakthroughs before we get to Marty McFly on a hoverboard.

The breakthrough here is engineered bacteria that break down glucose to produce hydrogen. That hydrogen is then sent to a normal fuel cell.

So, to run a stove or a home furnace and clothes drier, all we need is the bioreactor with the bacteria in it, and some pure glucose.

Let's go one step further, and add the ability to break down cellulose, like the bacteria in cows and termites have. Now you can throw in paper, cardboard, lawn clippings, sawdust, onion skins, etc.

To run a car, we would probably want to make borohydride as a hydrogen storage mechanism with decent energy per unit volume. That seems easier and safer than the very high pressure hydrogen tanks GM is proposing.

The reason I say this is because I think the size of the bioreactor needed to convert glucose into hydrogen at the rate a car would burn it would not fit into the back of my pickup truck.

You would need a place to store all that glucose, plus the bioreactor, which would have to be big enough to have lots of bugs to do the conversion without heating up enough to cook them.

Not to mention the stench you would get in an accident...

I don't understand the chemistry (count me as one geek who never really understood stochiometry/balancing of chemical reactions), but it utilises something called "sodium borohydride" which is made from borax, which is supposedly abundant. Now, one thing I haven't managed to figure out from the site is whether the hydrogen exist naturally in the borax derivative (and released by the reaction with water), or if the hydrogen has to be put there (ie, chemical reaction to create it, then water releases it). If someone could tell me, that would be great.

Let's suppose it needs to be put there (or you need a way to get hydrogen cheaply). You need a source of borax, but you also want hydrogen. One method of obtaining hydrogen from water (though I don't quite understand the process - though I know a version of it is used in commercial production of hydrogen) is to pass superheated steam over hot iron (red hot? dunno). This method was used back in the early 1800's to produce hydrogen (called at the time "combustible air") for gas ballooning - it is what caused gas ballooning to win out over hot air balloons (well, that and coal gas). Prior to that, hydrogen could only be made with iron and dilute sulferic acid mixes, that didn't produce hydrogen quickly enough (had to wait days to fill a balloon).

So, if you need to put the hydrogen in the borax - what do you do? Build a production plant near Barstow, California! This area is very near to the town of Boron - a major borax producer, and Barstow hosts a major solar generating plant (solar tower using steam and focused mirrors). Now, use two such plants or systems - one superheating water to steam, then pass the steam over the other heating iron very hot, thus obtaining hydrogen from water using the sun's energy.

I am NOT saying you will get more energy - that isn't my claim. I am saying that this would be a method to get a large hydrogen production plant going, that would be non-poluting in production (the industrial processes I was speaking of that do a similar job utilise petroleum systems and some kind of water mix to produce the hydrogen), and using the energy of the sun - it would be a method of storing solar energy in the production of hydrogen (which could be stored in the borax, or if that isn't what happens, used in some other manner).

Is this thinking flawed - ie, the method of producing hydrogen using solar energy? If so, why? If not - then WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THIS (outside of startup costs, etc)?

We are talk 100 year old technology...

"Now McCormick wonders how to get enough hydrogen on board the car to give it the 300-mile range drivers expect."
This problem is already solve by Millennium Cell

"China builds a system to deliver hydrogen without ever having one in place for gasoline".
What many don't realise is that you don't need a fuel network. You can sell solar powered fuel recycle systems along with the car and have people making their own fuel.

Knud

This one company I have been keeping my eye on called Millennium Cell has a technology called Hydrogen on Demand that seems pretty cool. They invented a way to store hydrogen in a borax solution and extract it only when needed to generate energy. The cool thing about Millennium Cell's technology is that they figured out a lot of other issues competing fuel cell companies have not. For example, they can retrofit an internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen, and it's exhaust would be 100% free of carbon monoxide. They also even worked in gas stations into the equation and have figured out how to retrofit them to "refill" the hydrogen fuel cells. Also of note is that their fuel cells have a range similar to that of a full tank of gas, and takes up slightly smaller area of space. Definitely some cool R&D going on out there...

--Jon

Of course, Millenium Cell's FAQ states that the fuel is actually stored in a water-based solution, so all the necessary water is already available; it's just waiting for the catalyst. Afterwards you get soap (Borax, actually) and hydrogen, with the hydrogen going through the fuel cell. So what happens to the soap? You put it into the waste tank.

The car has the same space as a regular car because the electric motors take less space than the ICE; enough so that the extra tank and electric control circuitry fit into the leftover space.

So, when you go to the Sodium Borohydride station, you'll empty your waste tank and fill your fuel tank. I expect it'll be the cleanest fuel station ever!

Well, according to them [millenniumcell.com] it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline.

Actually, they say there that their solution contains about as much energy per gallon as gasoline, but they also say that they are "weight-energy" equivalent. From the website:

The weight-energy storage is almost equivalent to gasoline. This means it generates about the same amount of energy per gallon of fuel as gasoline.

The molecular weight of sodium borohydrate is around 37.8 g/mole, the molecular weight of water is around 18 g/mole. So 37.8 g of sodium borohydrate would need 2 x 18 g of water, or 36 grams. Total them up and you get 73.8 grams, which produce 4 moles of H2, or 8 grams of hydrogen. Burning hydrogen produces approximately triple the energy of an equivalent mass of gasoline, so you would need approximately 24 g of gasoline to match the energy output of the solution.

So on one hand you have 73.8 grams of sodium borohydrate solution, on the other you have 24 grams of gasoline - and according to my calculations both are supposed to be roughly energy equivalent. With a specific gravity of around 1.0 for the solution and 0.72 for gasoline this translates to about 73.8 mL of solution and about 33.3 mL of gasoline. Something is not right here. You need around 3 times the weight and around 2 times the volume for equivalent energy according to my calculations.

Does anyone see anything wrong in my assumptions or calculations? It seems like their figures are very hyped-up and don't have basis in reality. Even assuming they are talking about dry sodium borohydrate (not including the water), you would need 37.8 g of it to be the equivalent of 24 g of gasoline. This is still about 1.6 times as much mass and 1.1 times as much volume.

Not that this makes the idea unworthy, it's just annoying to have the hype when their figures seem inflated.

Well, according to them it contains about the same amount of energy per gram as gasoline. It's as dense as water (about), while gas is half as dense, so, assuming you don't have to dilute it in order to store it, your tank of sodium borohydrate should be smaller than an equivalent gas tank. However, you're right about the water.

So, every 3+5+4 = 12 grams of sodium borohydrate (1 mole) need 2 * (18) = 36 grams (2 moles) of water. At that rate, you end up with four times the mass, which is over twice the volume, of water and sodium borohydrate together, as you'd need of gasoline.

Not that I expect them to take on the Dubya's oil folks, but Yahoo's Market Guide has some interesting background on the company, Millennium Cell.

The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not (for now) just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars, whereby one uses coal-generated electricity to drive around instead of gasoline, substituting one fossil fuel's energy for another?

There is a way of creating Hydrogen On Demand. There are more ways than just this company, but this one looks like an easy way.

Well, okay... haven't these guys solved exactly that problem?

In particular, I'm interested in clean, sustainable energy sources and delivery systems that would give the energy-hungry USA the luxury of acting according to its democratic principles in the international arena, instead of its all-too-common current tendencies to do whatever it has to to keep cheap oil flowing in.

The article talks about liquid hydrogen but if this ever gets to the engineering stage I doubt that they would use it. Cryogenic hydrogen is difficult and expensive to store, dangerous to handle, and still really not dense enough for aircraft.

There are other solutions however: a variety of liquids are safe sources of hydrogen and can be reformed into hydrogen quickly. For instance, Millenium Cell has information on their process, quote:

In the process, the energy potential of hydrogen is carried in the chemical bonds of sodium borohydride, which in the presence of a particular catalyst either releases hydrogen or produces electricity. The primary input components of the reaction are water and sodium borohydride, a derivative of borax.

I'm also interested in reasons why this system might be practical or not practical in automobiles, if anyone feels like going a bit off topic ;^)

I'm also interested in reasons why this system might be practical or not practical in automobiles, if anyone feels like going a bit off topic ;^)

This information is from this page [www.milleniumcell.com]

Times are getting interesting!

I wasn't aware of the powerball company. Cool idea.

Here's another company that uses sodium borohydride (NaBH4). The company's site has a short movie demonstrating its safety:
Millenium Cell
Here's some general info about the chemical formulas:
NaBH4