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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."
Michael Lefenfeld and James Dye of Signa Chemistry wanted to make rooms smell better. Instead, they stumbled on a way that could make hydrogen fuel cells a practical reality.
Who wants to bet that Michael and James have a room full of stinky unshowered nerds to thank for stumbling onto this innovation?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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 process may be efficient, but sodium doesnt grow on trees (or mined out of the ground). The easiest way to get it is.... electrolysis of sodium chloride.
So you've just shifted the electrolysis problem further upstream and instead of using nice friendly water, you're passing current through nasty, mean molten salt.
Not to be overly pedantic but even though this may correspond to the yield, the hydrogen is originally part of the water, not the sodium.
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!
Liberate it, perhaps. I think any method of actually making it would come with its own set of problems.
Being able to produce hydrogen in a way that does not use fossil fuels "at all" is a huge step in the right direction.
Another process in development involves bacteria that have a hydrogen waste product, if my memory serves me correctly.
Of course, solar, wind, and geothermal are also reasonable ideas.
The first person/company that is able to produce hydrogen cheaply using renewable resources will be an unbelievably good investment. (Assuming patents are taken care of properly)
mush of reacted silica gel, sodium, and water??
..you'd have about 10-11 kilos of mush left afterwards.
Say you need one kilo of hydrogen... (Which is about 6 cubic inches in liquifidy form, which is roughly equal to 7.5 gallons of gasolene for the energy you get out of it.. and I go thru around 15 gallons of gass in a week due to my job)
What do you do to recycle or reuse this stuff? How much energy do you have to put into (transporting it, creating/obtaining it, mixing it, etc) it before you can get any out, and how much energy is needed to deal with the waste afterwards?
Because at my current usage a person would have to produce 88 kilos of left overs... per month. Just for me to keep my job with a hydrogen powered car instead of a gasolene powered one I already own.
seems very innefficient for such a efficient proccess.
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.
A use for all those "WARNING DO NOT EAT ME" packets.
There is truth in humor.
if i only had some mod points... you have, good sir, embiggened us all with your cromulent analysis.
IIRC pure sodium is generally extracted from molten salt by electrolysis. So that means not only do you have to expend a huge amount of energy to get your sodium, you're also producing toxic, ozone destroying chlorine gas as a byproduct. Oh well, at least they can say it's GREEN!
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
FTA: Methanol is flammable
And hydrogen isn't?
Why do we need to make hydrogen? There's TONS of it sitting right out in the open, ripe for the taking!
My fellow slashdotters, what we need only to do is MINE THE SUN!
All we need is a space shuttle, and a team of roughneck oil workers. With a bit of training they will be SPACE MINERS, and we can send them on their merry way into the sun to mine it for us!
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.'
The story states:
"The most common way in making hydrogen is electrolyzing pure water."
From what I understand, this is wrong. I've heard that most hydrogen is ironically produced as a byproduct of refining oil.
Wikipedia for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen says that:
"Commercial bulk hydrogen is usually produced by the steam reforming of natural gas."
You want to make 10 times the volume of stuff for hydrogen you need, and you end up with 9 times the volume of stuff as *waste*?!
You've got to be fricken' kidding me.
Ok here is a major hint to the world leaders of this planet...
Nuclear power plant, Gulf of Mexico == Hydrogen. Ship it to all the countries that don't want or have nuclear. Become new major energy provider...
This is not rocket science people! Stop making it harder than it is!
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.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Millions of tons of hydrogen are made every year around the world (for ammonia synthesis, for example), and very little of it comes from electrolysis. Thermal reforming of natural gas and other carbonaceous compounds is much more economical.
Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation. Go check out the state of the art in battery technology.
0 1.htm
e.g.
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr29
http://www.sionpower.com/
You'll see them in mobile phones and laptops first. They'll make it into electric vehicles in a few years.
Generating electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity is, well, stupid.
Deleted
make cities better designed for walking and cycling
You know, in discussions like this someone will usually mention that cities should "be designed for X". This strikes me as a slightly silly argument:
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?
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
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.
1) The most common source of hydrogen is hydrocarbon reforming, done at oil refineries. It's the only economically viable method for bulk quantities. Thus, hydrogen energy is currently dependent on fossil fuels.
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2) You cannot electrolyze pure water -it's a poor conductor. You need some salt, or other electrolyte. Even then, the amount of electrical energy that goes in is less than the energy value of the hydrogen that comes out. And guess where most of the electricity comes from . .
3) Sodium metal causes a fire when dropped into water because of the hydrogen it releases. The activation energy for the reaction between oxygen and hydrogen is very low, and the heat released from the sodium metal - being converted into sodium hydroxide (aka lye, or Drano)- is more than sufficient to cause the reaction (fire).
4) Sodium metal is made by electrolyzing molten sodium chloride (table salt). A very expensive, energy consuming reaction, not to mention nasty (it releases chlorine gas, also).
5) The amount of energy released when an electron is stripped from a sodium atom is the same, whether it's in water or in silica.The energy is either converted to heat or to some other form of energy. Ever hear of conservation of energy (or mass/energy for nuclear reactions)? Unless they've developed something that can do what the transporters and replicators on Star Trek do, the enrgy is still going somehwere. Entropy demands it, otherwise we'd have perpetual motion machines, and ebergy would not be an issue.
6) Mediating the reactivity of alkalai metals is nothing new - that's what amalgams do.
This story does not deserve the attention it has already received.
MM
The problem is that batteries, even Lithium-Ion batteries, are extremely heavy by comparison. A Lithium cell produces about 3V potential difference. In order to produce enough juice to run something like an electric car, you need a lot of them wired in series. And then, in order to have decent battery life, you end up needing even more of them wired in parallel. By the time you've got a viable option for running an electric car, you're talking 300-500kg depending on the size of the car. When cars themselves often weigh less than 1500kg, that's a significant increase in weight.
There's also the cost. A Prius is a great alternative for a hybrid car, but what the manufacturer doesn't want to tell you when you're buying it is that the batteries only last about 6-8 years, and then they cost $10,000 to replace.
Others have wondered the same thing you just asked. And then they've looked at the price tag, and the increased weight, and decided that they need an alternative that can be as cheap and easy to refill as gasoline. Personally, I think the solution lies not in fuel cells, but in implementing a renewable-energy way to generate hydrogen.
Consider... I was at Canadian Tire yesterday. There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction. Set it up with a rain barrel and something in which to store the hydrogen, and you've got a renewable source of hydrogen for less than $1500 outlay. Sure, there are more efficient ways to store the energy being generated, but it's also freely renewable (no $10,000 expenditure every 8 years). All that's missing is a car that burns hydrogen.
And for times of drought, or during the winter, all it needs is a source of water, such as city water or a well. (You *could* use some of the wind power to melt snow, but that, like a rain barrel, wouldn't be all that useful on a scale larger than one or two cars)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb