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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."
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.
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?
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.
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'
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.