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New Way to Make Hydrogen
zymano writes "Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store. The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water. A new startup is trying a new way to make hydrogen. The process uses sodium which industry shuns because it generates sparks and heat when mixed with water. Signa has devised a way to mix sodium with silica gel or crystalline silicon to create a powder that essentially strips electrons from the sodium molecules in advance and stores them. When water is introduced, the chemical reaction proceeds calmly. The powder generates hydrogen efficiently. More than 9 percent of a kilogram of the powder gets converted to hydrogen and little energy is lost through heat."
Coal gas seems to be where the big boys are going.
Hence here in coal rich australia our rulers are mad keen on the "Hydrogen Economy".
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
This is a very signifigant step up to using hydrogen as a fuel source, although we're still a ways away from using fuel cells as TFA states.
Hydrogen is expensive to make and difficult to store.
You might want to check out http://unitednuclear.com/h2.htm, which is their R & D page. They have been working on hydrogen powered vehicles in a much more sensible method for the short-term: just convert gasoline engines to run on hydrogen. They use a solar-powered electrolysis station (though they do say their current models are too slow) to get hydrogen from water. It's then transfered into metal-hydride tanks in your vehicle, which is a brilliant way to store it. Heating elements inside the tank release the hydrogen, and very little modification needs to be done to the engine. If the tank is cut and burned, the hydrogen is still released slowly enough to just smolder.
This is a neat method, since most people think of hydrogen powered cars as electric vehicles that run off of fuel cells.
Sadly, it isn't available for diesel vehicles due to the lack of a spark plug.
Death by snoo-snoo!
Hmm, sodium doesn't naturally occur in a solid form very often, it is usually crystalized with other elements or already in water. I don't see any breakthrough here whatsoever.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
this and things are starting to pick up for fuel cell cars to the public.
Don't save Windows XP! http://www.petitiononline.com/jjw1xp/petition.html
How about putting a big-ass nuke plant out in the middle of the ocean? You could produce tons of hydrogen through hydrolysis, and if it decides to blow then you don't have nearly the fallout problem.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
But how will you know how your hydrogen has been generated?
One brand very expensive, one very cheap, which will most people buy?
But lets leave coal bashing aside for a moment. It's a solid fuel which causes reasonably little damage in it's extraction and transport. (As opposed to burning it which is a nightmare)
compare that to widespread sludge farms to grow your bacteria?
or wind farms destroying the skylines and slaughtering migratory birds?
Realistically I'm betting methanol fuel cells will work out safer and better than hydrogen ones in any event.
Which isn't to say the widespread creation of methanol won't pose industrial challenges of its own.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
The idea is not producing hydrogen with sodium as an energy source. There is no pure sodium whatsoever around, it's too reactive (same reason there is no hydrogen in the atmosphere).
So, instead of buying methanol cartridges, we would buy sodium sticks, put some water in a small tank in our laptop, and this would produce hydrogen and power for the machine.
Furthermore, the most common way of producing hydrogen is not electrolysis, but reforming of hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas), which is done on an industrial scale in any refinery.
The article itself has a good number of inaccuracies. For instance, other than the electrolysis thing, you read:
This is insane. The powder does not get converted to hydrogen, the water does. And still I'm afraid a unit error may be lurking.
The PEM fuel cells are not a way to store hydrogen, but a way to convert it to electricity; the solid oxide fuel cells will never be used in vehicles, since they are expensive, running at temperatures up to 1000 degrees, good only for large-scale plants, and brittle. And they take 8 hours to start up, and they can start up only so many times before they start cracking (about ten).
Oh my, did they know that hydrogen is extremely reactive, and will burn with oxygen at the first occasion? You don't even need a spark, all it takes is the static electricity of a windy day. CO2 accumulates, hydrogen would disappear rapidly.
Of course it is. It contains energy. There is no such thing as an energy carrier that does not contain some sort of danger. It would not be much of an energy carrier if it were inert. So, gasoline burns, hydrogen burns, nuclear goes bad big time, methanol burns, and lithium batteries explode if you hammer them or if they are produced with poor standards.
Solid oxide fuel cells do not require a catalyst. They are the only ones that do not, since they operate at high temperatures. Assuming the article meant SOFC.
Common misconception, hydrogen costs about 0.8 euro per gasoline liter equivalent: in Europe that's already way convenient. It's the infrastructure that's missing.
Alkaline metals being ignored? Of all the bullshit... they might not be C, O or even Al, but most know sodium better than technetium, praseodimiun or some transition metal forgotten somewhere in the limbo of rare earths.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Obviously the emergency jerrycan is a technology too complex and difficult to arrange compared to a simple sodium store, water tank, reformer, purifier and additional carburetor...face it guys, most of the easily led idiot investors lost their cash in the dot-com bubble.
BTW there is an existing technology for producing "safe" sodium involving mixing it with mercury to form amalgam. This has been around for many years (it is the basis of early plants for producing sodium hydroxide from salt.) It has not revolutionised fuel cells or led to a practical mobile phone fuel cell. So explain why this should be any different?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Destroying skylines? I've seen maybe 2 windmills in my life, much less a wind farm. Smog and pollution does much more to destroy any views I may have than a windfarm would.
And I can't believe birds getting chopped up in windmills is a big problem. If i'm wrong, please link me, but for one there aren't many wind farms, and for two birds tend to travel much higher than the blades of any windmill.
Hydrogen is the most abundant resource in the UNIVERSE! Why the hell would we need to make it? We should stop worring about making more of what covers almost all of the universe and worry about stuff that matters - like fuel, greenhouse gasses, bandwidth wars, online duals, and reading slashdot?
Take all claims by United Nuclear (aka United Nyuck Nyuck Nyucklear) with a grain of salt. It is run by the infamous Bob Lazar Whose claims to fame include reverse-engineering alien spacecraft and working with their power source "element 115"(which doesn't exist in this part of the galazy) and advanced degrees in physics from MIT and CalTech which no paperwork can be found on. His old site has got some "interesting" info on the alien craft.
not so good fo return trade if you're ripping them open for that.
Liquefied Natural Gas is shipped in specialised tankers with a row of enourmous domes.
they look pretty cool.
here's one I prepared earlier.
(ok, i just googled it then)
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Coming from a country where a sizeable percentage of energy is generated by wind mills..
- We don't put them right next to places where migrating birds are known to stop. There are no problems with dead birds - they avoid the mills, but it wouldn't do to upset them.
- LF and interference; They are noisy yes, but the LF/interference thing is tinfoil-hat stuff.
- They are ugly; yup. So are smokestacks.
Anyway. Trials are underway to stuff carbon back into the drilling holes instead of releasing it into the air. That shuld keep oil and natural gas CO2 emmission close to zero for power plants.
All of the current technologies employed for the
"hydrogen economy" either (1) require more energy
to produce than can be stored, (2) are derived
from the "hydrocarbon economy" it's supposed to
replace, or (3) rely upon nuclear energy which
has a 50,000 year environmental pollution problem.
The "hydrogen economy" provides continued
centralized control over energy distribution, but
is not a viable long term solution.
The best long term solution is reliance upon only
renewable energy sources, including initially bio-
diesel/hybrid. The main obstacle to this goal
has to do with political will overcoming vested
corporate interests that continue to seek total
centralized control over energy distribution.
Reliance upon the "hydrocarbon economy" for the
source of the "hydrogen economy" does not make
economic or environmental sense. Hydrocarbons
are a limited resource. Excess carbon must be
"sunk" in order to derive any real benefit from
hydrogen, since COn are greenhouse gases.
IMHO, every politician involved in promoting
nuclear energy as "the solution" should be
willing to commit themselves, their children,
their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren,
(et.al) to perpetual servitude to the new "quasi-
religious order" that oversees the continued
safe storage of radioactive nuclear waste -- for
the next 50 to 60 thousand years.
Reliance upon renewable energy, with increasingly
modest demands upon hydrocarbons like biodiesel,
is the only solution (barring the improbable
development of controllable fusion reactors).
Great post, I was skeptical to start with, so I stopped reading TFA shortly after "The key is sodium" statement. IIRC (and I bow to your chemistry knowlage), isn't sodium created in commercial quantities by melting salt? Doesn't the molten salt also create equal quantities of chlorine gas? Is this anymore envriomentally friendly than mixing "Draino" with aluminum and water to produce hydrogen?
PS: You're right, I've never heard of technetium or praseodimiun. When I saw the quote "That side of the periodic table people tend to ignore", I got a mental picture of a bunch of whitecoats (ala "The Farside" cartoons). They were hudled over a poster size periodic table that was spread out on a lab bench. None of them could complete the formula scrawled on the whiteboard because Eric was leaning on the Alkaline metals and nobody noticed them.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
1) The most densely-populated cities (where X would likely provide the greatest benefit) have already been built. Retrofitting features to implement X would very likely be hideously expensive and impractical, e.g. where X == bike paths in a major city.
2) Are new cities founded/designed/built at such a rate that changing the designs to accommodate X would provide any substantial benefit?
Zoning laws and long term urban planning can reduce the need for cars by making urban sparl less desirable for developers. Say put a constuction surcharge of X dollars on developement and have X grow as the distance from downtown increases, make incentives for residentual reclamation of parts of the downtown areas ect... All these things can reduce emission by making distant suburbs less desirable.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
There was an article in the NY Times about the inventor of this. Apparently, it started out as his grandfather's idea for an air freshener. The original idea was to capture some kind of deodorizer in the silica gel which would be released when dissolved in the toilet. The grandfather envisioned naming the product "Plop and Drop"
This thread is so puerile.
Seriously though, this whole thread is refreshingly optimistic. Let me be the pessimist: it isn't just inefficiency that will stop the advent of this new technology. The oil industry is keeping a lot of powerful people rich, who could give a flip about anything new or better. It also gives a seemingly great reason for the US to exert its global muscle.
Now I want to respond seriously to the Anonymous Coward who frowns on the use of the word pedantic. Some of us have a vocabulary, something that's good for self expression. It does not make us pricks, we are not speaking with condescension (well you know, some of us). I really get riled when someone lashes out at another because they say "whom" or because they don't otherwise contribute to what is, in my opinion, the language being dumbed down.
If the Family Guy can get a new word out to the masses, then I applaud it (moreso). Screw you, consciousness shrinker.
"How many charge cycles before the nasty insides of those batteries end up inside a landfill"
The insides are lithium based rather than heavy metal based for a start and if you had bothered to follow the link and read the article before bothering to reply you would have known before bothering to reply that there is a one percent degradation per one thousand full cycle discharges. Battery electric cars have been capable of 300+ miles per charge for several years now. We are talking hundreds of thousands of miles, more probably millions of miles of life out of the battery.
"Lithium is considered a pollutant, as is sulfur"
Hydrogen is highly explosive and oxygen makes things burn very quickly, the combination of the two must be horribly dangerous, I wouldn't like to have any dihydrogen monoxide anywhere near me, would you... Do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Deleted
As another alternate fuel - what about biodiesel?
I worked with a fuel company for a while, researching the possibility of introducing a bio-diesel blended fuel for trucks and heating. I'm fairly convinced that this will be one of those big milestones on the road to more environmentally friendly fuel. It's safer to handle, has a higher lubricity and cetane rating and reduces almost all the major emissions (except SO2). Not only that, but some of the newer manufacturing techniques really lower the impact of the manufacturing - using chemicals that can be reclaimed, room temp and pressure production etc. Plus, in low blends (~10%), you can stick it right into a diesel engine (at higher blends, usually the manufacturers get worried about warrently, and there may be some effect on certain types of rubber seals with really high blends). Not only that, but you can make it out of TONNES of stuff - we were working with soy based fuel, but we also had a bin of fuel from rendered animal fat. Not the greatest smelling stuff, and it wasn't as good as the soy, but they company we were working with was doing major reserach with a rendering plant - killing 2 birds with one stone - enviro-fuel and a way to recycle rendered fats. In fact, the most major problem to the introduction of these fuels is cost, and the gap between the bio (soy) diesel and the regular fuel is closing fairly rapidly. We managed to get to market for farm fuel with 2, 5 and 10% blends, and I think they're expanding those soon.
As the parent points out, hydrogen isn't the only alternate fuel out there, and it's a fairly long way off from being a viable source. Using stuff like ethanol and biodiesel would be an excellent first step, and would be way easier than transitioning to hydrogen, since the infrastructure is already in place. The current fuel prices are making this more viable than ever before.
...no two people are not on fire.
- Gasoline
- Ethanol (a.k.a. Alcohol)
- A combiation of Gasoline and Ethanol, at any ratio
- Natural Gas
While Gasoline and Natural Gas are fossil fuels, ethanol comes mainly from corn (here in US) or sugar cane (Brazil). Renewable, clenaer sources of energy. Check out:Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
That and reclaimation of materials from the batteries has improved as well. So you could reprocess the material and remake batteries from old ones, some waste product is to be expected of course. Still, battery technology is a whole lot more efficient than hydrogen. Using straight electrical power instead of a combustible mass to heat, electricity, and motion means a much, much greater efficient. Tack on a few regenerative cycles to recharge that battery and we'd be set. I change my car battery every 5 or 6 years out of habit, not necessity, so I think battery packs might be a whole lot more reliable than a large tank of explosive material. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't want my car to explode like a Pinto from a fender bender on the freeway. As much as I'm for new energy methods, I'd still like to see the journal article on this method before I believe it's the next big thing. Somehow I'm doubting efficient conversion using a silica gel and sodium.
Currently we're better at making batteries last a long time than we are at making either I.C. engines or fuel cells last a long time.
According to my friends in the industry, one of the big problems with fuel cells is that they get easily poisoned and ruined by pollutants in the air that they suck in to consume the O2. Batteries actually last longer, and it is possible to properly recycle them, particularly if they're part of a large bank of batteries in a car. Junkyards have really become pretty darn efficient at recycling; it makes good business sense for them to be as efficient as possible.
We're in for such a rude awakening much earlier than that. Long before the oil runs out, the demand is going to exceed the supply. More specifically, the supply follows a rough bell curve shape, and we are pretty much at the peak now. This means that although demand is rising faster and faster (especially as India and China start to think that their billions of people all need cars), the supply is more or less immediately going to start to decrease. When this happens, the price is going to go ballistic. (And $60/barrel isn't ballistic, not by a long shot.) So long before we run out of the stuff, it is going to become totally uneconomical to use it for little things like driving to work.
Just wanted to drop into anonymous coward mode to say a few things:
1. Thanks for the links! I'll be watching to see the rollout of the next generation of batteries.
2. If you could try to be little less offended by people who disagree with you, you'll find more people open themselves to what you have to say.
3. Re: "Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas."
Many attempts at generating hydrogen are based in making hydrogen a byproduct of existing industrial processes, like water treatment. In other words, which energy technologies succeed will depend more on manufacturing efficiencies than on output efficiencies. Having said that, hydrogen has some horrible manufacturing and transport efficiencies to overcome. Zinc may actually turn out to be a better replacement.
First my bias: I am a chemical engineer with a few years experience designing refineries and chemical plants. I am currently an equity analyst--it is partly my job to be up to date on trends that affect oil and natural gas consumption.
Now some facts:
- Hydrogen is not not not not made from electrolysis, because that would be stupid. It's made from reforming methane (passing high temperature steam and methane across catalyst) in an endothermic (ie, energy-consuming) reaction.
- The vast majority of hydrogen produced in North America is consumed near the source at oil refineries, to "crack" the heavy oil fractions into gasoline. In other words, hydrogen is an intermediate chemical in the methane-to-gasoline value chain.
- There is no commercially competitive process to produce hydrogen. The DOE is investigating nuclear-to-hydrogen, but that's about it for non-fossil hydrogen generation.
- Electricity is either primarily fossil fuel (in North America) or nuclear (in Europe and Japan). Pick your poison, but don't pretend that electrolysis is clean.
Now for some opinions:
- The "hydrogen economy" is a stupid expression. As time has passed, society's energy needs have been met by progressively less carbon and progressively more hydrogen (wood to coal to oil to natural gas). This is a continuing evolution, not an end state.
- The methane transportation infrastructure cannot be co-opted to transport hydrogen, because of metallurgical and chemical reasons... hydrogen has a fraction of the energy density per unit volume of methane. Metallurgically, hydrogen is extremely challenging and even today results in explosions and fires.
-The lower energy density of hydrogen (compared with methane) means higher compression costs and lower transportation efficiency. This is non-trivial.
There is too much wasted natural gas in the world to even contemplate manufacturing hydrogen by another process. Once oil and natural gas prices start moderating (and they will, it's just a matter of when), it will be even harder to compete.
So you can stay hopeful about hydrogen fuel cells divorcing you from relying on dead dinosaurs, but you're living a fantasy. Your energy is better served in turning the lights out, slowing down, and STOP DRIVING SUVs!!