Slashdot Mirror
Getting Serious About Fuel Cells
electroniceric writes "For those of us who moonlight as politics wonks as well as tech nerds, you may have noticed posts (1,2) in the Washington Monthly's blog pointing to interesting articles about the business community's new take on climate change, world oil supply predictions as well as a fascinating article about lower-cost ethanol together with a new fuel cell technology that can use impure hydrogen. Are we really about to turn a corner in global climate change response? Is this all vapor and breathless journalism about a world-saving new technology, or is it perhaps a brilliant investment strategy? Nobody knows (or claims to know) better than Slashdot..."
Personally I've always leaned towards Biodiesel.
Why? Well, quite simply, using biodiesel not only are you saving money and the environment, but you boost the economy via the agriculture industry!
From what I hear they are using it a lot in the midwest states, but I really would like to see some mainstream biodiesel technology.
Fuel cells, meh, they have their place. But accident safety with a hydrogen bomb under your hood is an interesting diversion from the subject in itself...
I have heard that Washington University in Saint Louis is getting quite close to making a useable ethanol fuel cell that could potentially power a laptop for a month. I really just think that alcohol based fuel cells make more sense; ethanol can be easily made from corn, and we make enough of that to have our government pay farmers to not grow it for economic reasons. I say that ethanol fuel cells will change the world more dramatically than the internet, and that is a pretty powerful statement to make.
don't understand why everyone is so down about fuel cells.
yes, pure hydrogen is hard/expensive to produce. but the next generation of fuel cells can use methane (or ethanol) for a source of fuel. ie, plug the fuel cell into the back end of a cow- suddenly wisconsin will be known for more than it's cheese.
for some reason, some are thinking fuel cells are going to replace gasoline engines in vechicles. well, ok. but what you really want to do is replace all the coal and oil burning power plants w/ fuel cells. so instead of acid rain and tons of greenhouse gases, you get H2O out, which you could use to water crops or drink. given that China seems to be building coal burning power plants as fast as they can, doesn't that sound like a good idea?
ok, fine, i might be biased. i am working on the next design of fuel cells (in particular solid oxide fuel cells- SOFC). but, still, the sooner we get to a place where producing energy is less harmful to the planet, i think we should. hell, we must.
Go here and read a General Motors policy wonk defending hydrogen against a naysayer. Fuel cells aren't an energy source, they are a storage mechanism. Until renewables or nukes step in to take up oil's slack, fuel cells will derive their juice from natural gas, which the fuel interests have in more quantity than oil (for the moment).
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Don't complain about fuel problems when you live 25 miles from your job and can't take the train!
I live about 500 miles from "my job". Actually, I have several, one of which is about 2024 miles from me. (a la MapQuest) See, I telecommute via the Internet. I can (and do) work anywhere, via any broadband 'net connection, from the Starbucks T-Mobile to some wifi hotspot in a residential area. So, I don't commute at all, though I tend to travel a lot.
But, I live in an area where you *could* do without a car, but I choose not to, owning two, one each for my wife and I.
In your world, am I part of the solution, or part of the problem?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Check this page
http://hydrogenfuel.tripod.com/ . This man has managed to run a regular diesel engine on hydrogen in a completely safe manner, and there is enough evidence. Just that the big oil cartels wont let anything come up. I have pesonally seen this work, and give out only water vapour from the exhaust.
The man is very open and does not hold back details, and he holds patents for the valves that he holds. He is also pretty much an environmentalist, so maybe other/.s will take to asking him direct questions.
I was also going to recommend biodiesel for the cars. As for the trolly's, that is easy. Where I come from, 87% of electricity comes from hydroelectric. Sure, it isn't feasible across the whole country, but that is why we have nuclear :)
Andrew
Every oil major has subsidiaries whose whole purpose is to bring hydrogen to market. There are plenty of well connected oil men in these companies whose careers are toast if hydrogen doesn't come online. Do you really think that Shell or Exxon care whether the profit comes from oil burned in ICE or hydrogen consumed in fuel cells? Get real, the bottom line for these guys is keeping the bonuses and stock options rolling in no matter what.
Helping in the development of a politically underrepresented energy-reducing technology like PRT, OTOH, might do more per dollar. Anything that gets more from less on a widespread scale, whether it's transportation or lighting or transistors, would drastically reduce energy use, and can be marketed without the same difficulties that energy production has. (a different set, but nonetheless probably a more easily surmounted one)
Two of your websites refer to the kooky "studies", from the oil experts of the world: modern russia!
Wanna invest in empty, poor, russian steppes!? SURE YOU DO!
Read the nice article, American. Ignore the lack of Russian development of said oil for the last 50-80 years (which would easily have fixed many of their huge energy woes). Digging deeper was what they were good at! Someone's apparently selling us sheep oil.
Abiotic oil is not possible from imaginary methane underground. Methane is impossible to bond with unless you oxidize it (oxygen) or rip away its hydrogens in some other way (without letting them re-join the carbon) and it's very light (rises) and its very very likely *not* sitting in rock solution, as an unoxidized carbon source near the pure silica mantle.
Oil is not "cooled" methane or propane. Geesh! what a rip! You have to cook up long molecules from more complex carbon soup. Gases occur because they couldn't get cooked! The natural gas we pump out has risen above the oil because they were formed around the same time and don't slowly go from one form to the other. You'd never find them togther if fluid temperature changed one into the other.
Besides, the proportion of carbon in the unruly methane gas is much smaller than the goo that was buried under tar pits and other sedimentary formations. Methane is hydrogen-rich and carbon-poor compared to coal and crude oil. Ergo: one don't magically all change to the other over eons.
Simply said, we (made of carbon) are the scum of the earth: carbon forms and compounds of *every* type are light and do not flow anywhere but up when buried deep. Even when compressed over eons with silica compounds, they still always come from the surface. (Obviously shows in coal, more common than oil!) So there's no magic springs of texas tea going to appear from 10000 miles deep oil wells. All the oil that was formed 60 million years ago has risen as high as it can, or sprung out already as tar sands.
Okay. Here's a simple test: do endless methane flares spew out of deep-fault (or any) volcanos? Nice pictures in Nat'l Geographic? NO!
Methane was in the atmosphere like every other gaseous carbon compound when the earth was formed. Gooey carbon chains were formed when that carbon in methane stuck to rocks in the form of algae and stuff that ate it. Carbon is light stuff!
(sigh) End lecture.
Kids these days!
Believing anything if a buck ad from unproven science in spam tells them to believe Uncle Bush and the Happy Endless Drillers,
(hint: who are losing investment $$ due to no new reserves.)
[Crawls back into hut and straps on tinfoil hat
to prevent the TV from eating his brain too.]
Nietzsche is dead - God
Which may very well be true, but part of the reason the US is suddenly motivated to get off fossil fuels is due to a desire to decrease dependance on the middle east. Deserts near the ocean are rather few and far between, though I suppose pipelines could be built. But it's much, much simpler to set up an algae farm in the desert and produce massive quantities of Biodiesel, also from solar energy.
Overall, hydrogen is simply not a good energy source unless we can find a way to produce it cheaply (not going to happen, I don't think), and can find a way to store it without putting it in high pressure, highly explosive canisters.
Biodiesel, on the other hand, runs well in current diesel engines, and even better in ones that have been slightly modified; uses essentially the same distribution system we already have in place for gasoline (gas stations with gas pumps) and as such would require practically no changes, other than people buying cars with diesel engines next time they go to the dealership. Restrictions on the sale of gasoline driven vehicles would accomplish this quickly; most people will buy a new car within the next 5 years, and those that don't can be "encouraged" through taxation on the sale of gasoline; not to mention that with gasoline officially a "dead end", gas stations would probably start serving up diesel in preference to gasoline pretty quickly -- the market would demand it, anyway, as the number of diesel cars overtook the number of gas cars.
And this wouldn't even need to be artificially subsidised, because once the refineries and such are in place, biodiesel produced via algae is cheaper than gasoline, which is CHEAP. So all you need is a little "push" from the government to head that way and the market will shift, no problem.
If we started this sort of legislation today, we could be running entirely on biodiesel in 15 years, with I would say more than 80% of vehicles on biodiesel in 10, and 50% in 5. That's really fast, when you think about it.
Of course, the question is, is biodiesel as profitable as oil, and the answer is probably not, but I suppose you never know. This would mean that oil companies would probably not be in favor of the switch, and they've certainly lobbied successfully against other beneficial non-oil based technologies before (electric street cars and trains come immediately to mind).
But one can always hope. It would be nice if people stopped pursuing technologies that will never work, like hydrogen, and concentrated on something that actually could work. But the cynical side of me snickers at this, because I believe the reason they make noise about hydrogen is to get an increasingly concerned populace to believe that something is actually being done about our economic dependence on the middle east.
Heh.
BioDiesel is THE number onealternative fuel in both US and Europe and is making hug inroads in developing nations like India.
It is a RENEWABLE resource, ie: biomass... growable fuel which converts solar energy into a very usable fuel, vegetable oil which can be used NOW by all diesel engines with NO modifications..
Less relevant emissions and even fewer when a catalytic converter is added (yes CATs are a problem for petrol based diesel but are NOT a problem for bio based diesel)... up to 50% less emissions and maybe more.
Better lubricant... less engine wear...
With increased production, costs will fall to less than current costs for petrol diesel, until then Federal subsidies bridge the gap to make BioDiesel equivalent in cost to petrol diesel.
Use soy, cotton, mustard and rape seed oils for what they are really good for, industrial energy - not food (BTW these cheap oils are being shoved down our throats as edible food products when in fact they are toxic poisons to all living creatures, only made edible by sleight of hand which is still only an illusion, except for when they are fermented as in Tofu...).
Go BioDiesel or GO Home! It's the best alternative to petroleum fuels... let nature harness the power of the sun and condense it into an oil that is perfect for generating energy.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
As mentioned previously, Fuel Cells are not an energy generation mechanism, rather an energy storage device, much like a battery, the suggested fuel to power said energy device being Hydrogen, Hydrogen, as has also been pointed out many times, does not exist in a harvestable form, the simplest method of getting hydrogen appears to be electrolysis of water.
So we do that, great, now we have this wonderful hydrogen, but hang on, didn't it just take us a bunch of oil to run this process of electrolysis on the hydrogen, doesn't that mean we're still dependant on oil?
Drats, foiled again.
Ok, so we've figured out though that hydrogen is a nice clean source of energy, just getting our hands on it is the tricky part, well how about Nuclear energy powering the electrolysis process to fill hydrogen fuel cells? OMG FUD Chernobyl argh are you crazy? nuclear energy is horrible! Ahh, *BUT* what if chernobyl was out in the middle of nowhere and largely automated using all the wonders of modern technology, rather than the soviet era tech that actually did handle it and the results of it, as such?
How about say, underwater, a really long way underwater, like, kilometers underwater, which puts the facility in easy range of an enormously abundant supply of the reagent required for hydrogen electrolysis, as well as puts it out of the way in case of catastrophic nuclear failure.
Seabed nuclear plant pouring out hydrogen fuel for fuel cells, or indeed directly hydrogen powered devices, such as cars, etc?
Is this at all practical?
I just bought a PDF instruction manual for building your own fuel cell at http://www.hsolar.com/.
:)
I've just been glancing through it. Looks good. It's certainly big - over 300 pages. And for $12, you can't really go wrong. Some damned serious work has gone into it.
For those interested in the technology, this is a great way to become more acquainted with it, and if your first project works out well, you can always build a whole stack of them and link them together.
The PDF I bought talks a little about using solar cells for electrolysis of water to charge the cells, and the site I bought it from also has another PDF book that specialises in this ( using solar panels ).
And for those thinking about buying it and uploading to to P2P - please don't. The asking price is very fair, and we really should support people doing cool stuff like this and making such a good product available to us for such a small price. Be nice
Solid oxide fuel cells us CO and H2 as a fuel. CO is extremely poisonous to people though. There's also probably a couple of other side reactions that go on which make this process a bit more complicated.
"Decreasing dependence on foreign oil" only works locally; the world dependence on oil, period, is what matters, and China and India are ramping up a lot. Even if we completely cut out our use for oil in surface transportation (right now there's not really a viable alternative to hydrocarbons for aircraft), we still consume petroleum products as raw materials for manufacturing. Since the entire world isn't going to curb its oil consumption, we'll be in trouble even if we don't use it to power our vehicles.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
(IAAUP - I am an Urban Planner, or at least I played one at University)
t _74-a.pdf
Per dwelling unit, per acre, or per person, any way you decide to calculate it, it is more expensive for people to live in the suburbs than in the city. The costs of living in the suburbs are usually offloaded onto the local, state, and federal government (think interstates, costs of sprawl, etc). The downside of this situation is that these governments pay for the increased costs by allowing the construction of strip malls and "big box" stores which cause more congestion and sprawl.
The closer that people live together, costs per person or dwelling unit go down significantly.
For more information on this phenomena, refer to Transportation Research Board's final report on the cost of sprawl:
http://gulliver.trb.org/publications/tcrp/tcrp_rp
There are a number of reasons why places like North America and Europe should be weaning themselves away from petrolium based fuels.
First, there is the economic reasons. Unless you are in a country that is a petro exporter, you have a financial reason. Why make some country overseas rich when you can grow your own fuel and keep the money in country? Any country that buys more than it sells from other countries is giving it's wealth away. Spending the money closer to home makes your economy better.
Second, there is the issue of security. If a counrty depends on imported energy, they are at the mercy of the countries that they import it from. A cartel of these exporting nations carries heavy political clout. They can in a sense control a much larger country by manipulating their production.
Third, By using agricultural products as feedstock, we are making the agricultural industry healthier and more profitable. In most first world nations, the agricultural industry has been hit hard. Many farms have failed and a "way of life" is in jepordy. What this means is that there is less diversity in that area of business which actually weakens it and makes it even more susecptible to grand scale failure.
We are at a place in our history where it appears practical to start moving away from a petro based economy (which when you think about it us what we really have today). We have successfully proven that E85 cars and trucks can and do work. Our governments can now safely mandate that internal combustion engines that run on E85 be built into all new cars and that all diesel engines be capable of burning "bio-diesel." If this is mandated, you can bet fuel producers will provide the traveling public with the fuel. Frankly, this would be less invasive than the switch to unleaded was in the 70's.
To do this in the United States, we will need a progressive leader who is not tied to the traditional oil-interests.
Think for a minute how much stronger our economy would be if we made our own fuel. Then think about how much more secure we would be if we did not have to import the lions share of our petro from oil exporting nations.
It is pretty obvious to me that this is something that needs to be started now. It will take perhaps twenty years to complete but the results will be worth it!
But it's a very poor storage method. Compare the volume energy density (watt-hours per liter):
- Diesel: 9700
- Gasoline: 9000
- Liquefied natural gas (LNG): 7200
- Liquefied propane (LPG): 6600
- Ethanol: 6100
- Methanol: 4400
- Liquid hydrogen: 2600
- Gaseous hydrogen (4500 psi): 750
Hence, it's not a very good motor vehicle fuel, either. And this doesn't even get into the difficulties of storing a cryogenic liquid, hydrogen embrittlement, the poor efficiency of fuel cells and electrolyzers, and the need for expensive precious metal catalysts in the fuel cells.I believe the fuels of the future will still be hydrocarbon liquids.