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US Army Pursues Hydrogen Fuel Concepts
securitas writes "According to GlobeTechnology/AP, the US Army is excited about the potential of hydrogen-powered tanks. The interest is the result of a technology demonstration that took place at Auburn University in December. Scientists have invented a process that removes the carbon and sulfur from hydrocarbon fuels like oil and gasoline. Hydrogen-powered vehicles could go three times farther than diesel-powered counterparts. DoD officials say 'it costs about $40 to move one gallon of diesel fuel from Kuwait to Baghdad.' The new process could let them take advantage of the existing oil industry infrastructure. Auburn University scientists 'realized there is already a lot of hydrogen in hydrocarbon fuel' and 'took jet fuel, which is very similar to diesel, and catalytically converted it, separating out the sulfur, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and the fuel cell ran.' The Auburn team is now pursuing military funding."
Why would they want to do this? Isn't there enough hydrogen in say, seawater? Why destroy an already depleted resource, or is there something here I'm not seeing?
Here's a tank truck that can carry 5000 gallons of gas. You can get one for less than $120,000.
The drive from Kuwait to Baghdad is approximately 400 miles. This means a truck can do at least one round trip between Kuwait and Baghdad per day.
That means that over the course of a year, this one truck with a driver that is paid, say, $50,000 a year, can haul 1,825,000 gallons of gas for a price of approximately $200,000 ($120,000 for the truck, $50,000 for the driver, and say $30,000 for incidentals... fuel, windshield wipers, those mud flap things with the pictures of naked woman on them... whatever.)
That works out to about $.10 per gallon.
The Pentagon is paying $40 per gallon.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Here's a company that has part of the contract on this. They are developing the solid (hydride) hydrogen storage system for these tanks. The hydride is like a hydrogen sponge that holds more hydrogen than high-pressure tanks. The biggest problem with hydrogen really is storing it since it is so low in density. Liquid hydrogen is actually lighter than air...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Military research and spending is often times the catalyst that drives innovation. If it takes the DoD to FINALLY create a means of providing hydrogen power to vehicles, I see it as a good thing. New tech, if it works, ALWAYS trickles down to the civilian world.
Surely, the answer has to lie in getting the hydrogen from water - we just need a massive breakthrough in solar panel technology.
There doesn't need to be a breakthrough because that has already happened. Stan Ovshinsky, pioneer of disordered materials, has developed a thin-film solar technology that is competitive with grid-supplied fossil fuel electricity. Now, he believes that they can achieve this feat with 100MW of production economy so they aren't quite there yet (they currently run a 30MW machine).
They just partnered with HaveBlue to develop a fuel cell hydrogen sailboat with solid hydrogen storage. The sailboats sit in the harbor most of the time so they are perfect vessels to soak up the sun and convert it to hydrogen.
Water is the best battery. We just need an affordable fuel cell to convert it back into electricity. Stan is working on that too.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
This process can use ANY oil, not just the nice sweet crude from Saudi Arabia. What is the benefit of this
1) Oil from sources that are not usable now. There are many areas that have high sulfur oil that would pollute if burned but could converted into usable non-polluting hydrogen.
2) Once you have a workable fuel cell that runs on hydrogen (with some oil-to- Hydrogen converter) you can fairly easily just switch over to your nice politically correct solar created hydrogen which will by then be much more economically viable and not just green welfare.
3) Even if you never got beyond a gasoline powered fuel cell, the emissions would still be FAR less (90+% less) than an internal combustion engine.
Well, think about it this way...its about 300 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad. M1 Abrams tanks get about 0.6 miles to the gallon. So, that means a single tank needed about 500 gallons of gas to get to Baghdad. Cost @ $40/gallon: $20,000. (Yes im not figuring in the fact that it is consuming gas, but the return trip should account for the difference) If a hydrogen tank got 3 times the gas mileage, the cost of getting it to Baghdad would be $6,667. A fine savings by my standards, but multiply that by the number of tanks going in there (say 500, im not sure the exact number), and $10 million in fuel costs drops to $3.3 million. Or maybe they could use 3 times the number of tanks. When it comes down to it, the more Dubya plays with his tanks, the more money could be saved by converting them to hydrogen.
No more than any other nuclear powered Naval ship. As it is now, a number of key naval combatants, such as Aircraft Carriers, Submarines, Cruisers are nowadays Nuclear-Powered. The same sort of measures now used by those ships to protect their nuclear reactors can be employed here. Unlike civilian tankers, these tankers will likely be fitted with Anti-Aircraft / Missile defenses. They will also enjoy the protection of the naval fleet and ground forces with which they will operate.
The hidden key to this story is actually catalysis. Methinks that sooner than you'd expect, we're going to be doing just fine throwing grass clippings, old newspapers, orange peels, and most any old kind of organic residue into the hopper and then driving off, leaving a cloud of water vapor and a stash of nicely organized chemical elements, which will also turn out to have some interesting uses.
Is it fascism yet?
"company wanted pretty silver shiny skin"
Sorry, no. You need that shiny surface for thermal regulation, otherwise when the blimp gets warm, it goes wayyy up....
Hydrogen is not any more explosive than diesel. It is combustive, so it will burn, but it doesn't explode in the sense that you seem to imply.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Think a little longer. Getting hydrogen from oil *also* consumes as much energy as it gives back, and then some. The oil is destroyed. The oil represents every bit of the energy latent in the hydrogen, plus some more. Breaking down water might turn out to be *more* efficient since nearly all the energy put in will be stored in the output, while the energy that could be gotten from burning the carbon in oil goes, well, where *does* it go? I hope it's used in driving the hydrogen production process, since we get stuck with the combustion products anyway. (Please tell me we're not throwing away millions of BTUs via cooling towers just to get the hydrogen. That would be pathetic.)
People do talk as though hydrogen is free energy, but I can't help it that so many didn't listen to primary-school discussions of thermodynamics. All we can do is to correct them until the light dawns.
Big and slow? You'd be amazed at how fast their engines can push those things through water. My step dad (a fire controlman) was ordered to clear his radar screen when the group his ship was in spread out because of a MiG sighting. The XO didn't want anyone else in the room to realize what it meant when those little blips could move off the screen so quickly.
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The nice thing about hydrogen is that you can make it from many different energy-producing processes and ship it fairly easily.
Actually, one of the big obstacles to using hydrogen as a fuel is that it ISN'T very easily transportable. As a gas, you have to employ very high pressures that involve expensive tanks. Compress it all the way to a liquid and you've burned up so much energy that its no longer attractive as a more efficient source. Chemical storage (metal hydrides, etc) is being researched, but AFAIK, it isn't ready to be main-streamed.
We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.
That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere. It can't be hydrogen, because it would take more hydrogen than you are making to do it.
The wind, wave, and solar power installations that some think will save the world can easily drive an electrolytic converter, for example, and the only byproduct is oxygen.
Let's be clear about what we're talking about. I'm not sure how much hydrogen you are planning on making (total replacement of hydrocarbon fuels?) but you will have to build enough solar/wind/wave/hydro/whatever installations to nearly match the amount of energy being produced by hydrocarbons for whatever application you are interested in. The "nearly" shows up because hydrogen power IS generally more efficient than hydrocarbon based power. This is a nice theoretical solution, but practically it would be very expensive and difficult, even if it is possible.
So the air is actually *better* downwind of an electrolytic hydrogen plant (if they don't bottle all the oxygen and sell that too), and the system is closed and fully recycling, since burning the hydrogen gives you the water back.
A lot of people consider water vapor to be a green house gas.
I still like the idea.
You can use a Nuclear Submarine Blueprint. Replace the missle bays with hydrogen tanks. Use the electricity from the engines for splitting the hydrogen from seawater while out at sea somewhere hidden. Come in near the coast to offload.
In order to make it harder to guess where the sub is while offloading run multiple temp pipelines into the water. The sub docks with a random one of these out at sea and pumps in the hydrogen to a land based fuel station. When you are done, the sub goes out to deep water and hides and the pipelines get rolled up and put on a plane.
in their entirety a second time.
And the loss of customer trust caused by the breach will reverberate throughout the company. Loss of customer trust, caused by the breach and publicised in a small article on the 12th page of the newspaper will disrupt the entire marketing campaign for the conglomerate. The image the company has strived for including customer confidence in the security procedures of MegaCorp Inc, is now tarnished and so the entire mega-millions cost of all marketing for MegaCorp Inc's products for the last 5 years will have to be included in the damage estimate. This figure will be included again in estimates for any future breaches.
So when they calculate the cost of moving a gallon of oil into baghdad they are probably calculating the cost of the Tank Escort, and all the troops in the troop carrier in the same convoy, as well as the bradley fighting vehicles and air cover. All these vehicles would be going to baghdad anyway even if they required no fuel, and air cover would still be provided to the convoy regardless of there being a fuel truck. But the entire cost of all these vehicles will be tacked onto the cost for transproting the gas as if bringing gas to baghdad were the end goal for going there. The gas truck is, in reality just tagging along.
And we probably already had the gas truck.
If you calculate the cost of maintaining a piece of military equipment and personel between wars, and then use that number as the cost incurred by using that equipment and personel *in* a war, even though the cost would have been incurred with or without the war, then you can really jack up the numbers.
If the cost of war were calculated as the cost of consumables, plus increased pay & benefits ( since we have a military regardless of whether we are fighting a war ) then it might turn out that war is cheap in terms of money...
Eat at Joe's.
There is an inescapable fact that is often overlooked by advocates of conventional fuel usage: There is a finite amount of fossil fuel on this planet. Once that's used up, that's it. We're screwed... BIG time. There's no getting it back without waiting a few million years for its users to all decompose back into oil. Now how long this oil is going to last us at the rate we are currently using it may be up for debate, but it is irrefutable that we are consuming it faster than it gets created, so eventually, however long from now, if we keep using it at the rate that we are, we *WILL* run out.
Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the entire universe. Further, even though there is a finite amount of it on this planet as well, when you burn it, the exhaust is pure water vapour. No more dumping poisonous gasses into the atomosphere. Further, this water vapour will eventually fall back as rain, and the net result will be cleaner rain water as hydrogen fueled cars become more popular.
With the application of some amount of energy (yes, I know it isn't cheap), hydrogen can always be extracted from water (which, considering hydrogen combustion exhaust *IS* water, makes it infinitely renewable). It is the energy for this extraction process that would be the greatest contributing factor in determining how much an end consumer would pay for gasoline. I don't think any serious advodate of Hydrogen fuel would insist that this process would be for free. But because such extraction processes could be large scale and centralized, alternative energy sources such as geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, or even nuclear power could be employed to obtain the energy ncecessary to extract the water from the hydrogen (a process which, as a convenient byproduct, also produces pure Oxygen which can be collected or released immediately as seen fit). Stricter pollution control measures could reasonably be enforced at such centralized locations than might be also possible in mobile internal combustion engines, so again the negative impact that using such fuel would have on the environment could be minimized.
Would worldwide adoption of Hydrogen fuel spell an end for the oil companies that have invested so much in their current industry? Not at all. Why couldn't current oil companies instead choose to run the plants that extract hydrogen from water for shipping to fuel pumping stations? That way, they would still get the same slice of the pie that they were always getting. Oh, their monopoly may be cut into a bit, but they currently have the resources at their disposal to implement such processes on a scale that would, in general, be likely to be cleaner and more efficient than the processes that might be employed by those with lesser capital to start out with. Further, if they wait until after there isn't enough oil to go around before starting this, their income will have already taken a hit and they simply won't have the same resources that they do now.
Also, there will always be a demand for oil, even if it is not used as a fuel. Oil is employed in many different manufacturing processes, not to mention also used as lubrication. Oil pumps won't be useless in such a world, they just wouldn't need to be as plentiful.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Off course the 'Hydrogen Tanker' will be well protected, but I'm an airforce guy. We're more conserned with how to take targets out than how to defend them. One of my favorite stunt when a naval officers points out that his ship has the capability to engave X number of targets at once is to ask what will happen if someone attacks with X+1 missiles... it's called 'swamping the defence' and has been a good tactic since man first started doing war.
I'm not saying a 'Hydrogen Tanker' is a bad idea - it will allow an armed force dependant on hydrogen for fuel to make their own (provided their relatively close to water off course) and can also be employed to make drinkingwater. BUT it will be a _juicy_ target for an enemy to hit, so a determined attemt to take it out is bound to happen.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
A little known fact about the Hindenburg
The designers were well aware of the dangers of Hydrogen gas and designed the airship to use Helium.
At the time the only source of Helium in large volumes was the United States. Already the US Government wasn't thrilled with the Nazi Government and blocked the exportation of Helium to Germany for use in Airships. So the owners used the only lifting gas that they had readily available, Hydrogen. BTW it had the unfortunate side effect of allowing them to increase the number of passengers on that final flight over what was originally designed.
Actualy test have shown that gaseous H2 is safer than liquid gasoline.
To adress your points;
should a rupture of the H2 tank occur the H2 would disapate upwards and be dispersed, lowering the danger of an explosion. In the same scenario with gasoline the fuel vapors would hug the ground and spread out till it was ignited, then the flame would travel back to the liquid and ignite that. What would you rather have if you where traped in a car? a single flame venting AWAY from the car, or a buring pool of gasoline and a fuel tank that would explode? An interesting point that was made about 9-11 is that if the planse had been using H2 instead of J4 fuel the WTC towers would not have colapsed, remember that the towers survived the impacts, it was the fire, the burning jet fuel, that caused the structure to melt and colapse.
As to your concern about "..a high-pressure flame-thrower.." yes there would be a flame jet, but thats all, one localized hot flame, not a spreading pool of burning liquid. Also, in a case where a vehicle powered by H2 where to catch fire the H2 tank would heat up till the relief valve triggered then the H2 would vent and dissapate, a gasoline tank would explode when the fuel hit flash point and then you would really have a mess.
Some years back (pre-net, no link sorry) I watched a safety demonstration of H2 tanks verses gasoline, H2 won hands down, here is why.
Puncture test, they fired bullet though a gasoline tank, BOOM!!!!, flaming gas in a 10 meter radius. Bullet through the H2 tank, small flame jet from the puncture till the tank was empty, no other damage.
Heat test, tank of sealed gasoline tank placed in a fire, result, BOOM!!!, flaming gas everywhere. H2 tank, release valve trips and the H2 vents (yes it ignited) away from tank.
fire supression, gasoline floats on water so you have to use CO2 or foam, plus it splaters when you hit it with a jet of water (think napalm), very bad. H2, a concentrated water mist can put out the flame in some cases and at minnimum it keeps the surounding matierial cool to prevent the fire from spreading.
Say what you want about H2 v. Gasoline, if my life was on the line I would want H2 fueling my vehicle. As soon as it becomes viable I'm getting my car converted.