Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogen Stored in Safe High Density Pellets
sunbeam60 writes "A group of scientists are going to present their breakthrough in hydrogen storage this Wednesday. In contrast to previous storage mechanisms, this method binds hydrogen to a pellet which is completely safe to handle at room temperature. While bound in this medium no hydrogen loss occurs, enabling hydrogen to be stored cheaply for indefinite periods. When needed, the extraction of hydrogen is relatively simple. The pellets exceed all criteria set by the US Department of Energy for 2015, enabling a car to drive more than 500 km on a 50 L tank (13 MJ/l)"
Ok, so I read the article and it's fairly light. The question I have is how do we get the hydrogen back out?
Sadly not much detail on the extraction process. Good ol' water can store a lot of hydrogen cheaply but getting it out is a PITA. Still, it'd be nice to pull up to a station and just drop a pellet (or bag of pellets) into the car and drive off again. D
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
The main thing to consider is the economics. More to the point, how will the existing oil/energy companies financially benefit from such technology? For if they don't have an interest in this product, it will never come to fruition, regardless of its technical merit.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
You do a much better job actually RTFAing (RingTFA?) they they, and, well, you actually read Slashdot as well.
And you can obviously mash a button on the screen, so you're more than qualified.
Rob, hire this guy and others like him to make your site a non-joke.
""A group of scientists are going to present their breakthrough in hydrogen storage this Wednesday."
/. again, I, for one, will not cry "Dupe".
Seeing as neither the article nor the summary give any specifics, why is a press release being passed along as an article?
Why not wait until they've presented their findings, and then submit an article with more information?
Whoever submitted this article is probably interested enough in the subject to search for a better article come Thursday or Friday -- and if it gets on
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I got 23 miles to the US gallon.
500 km is about 310 miles.
50 liters is about 13 US gallons.
This is comparable to many US sedans. The question is whether the cost of hydrogen processing will be more or less expensive than the cost of refining oil.
The linked article gives very little information. So, while I'm super stoked by this ( it's a really, really important development ) my questions are:
1) How do they get the hydrogen back out? Do they crush the pellets ( destroying them ), do they heat them, etc.
2) Are the pellets re-usable? Or do you have to get new ones? And if they *aren't* re-usable, can the carrier material be re-cycled into new pellets?
My concerns would be that if the material isn't re-usable/re-cyclable we'd end up with vast landfills full of crushed or otherwise useless carrier material, in which case this is hardly a boon.
On the other hand, if it's recyclable, I can see the oil companies being very happy with this, since you could go to a hydrogen station and dump your used pellets and "refill" with a dump of charged pellets. The station would send the used pellets to a recharging or recycling facility. I say "oil companies" because they've already got quite an infrastucture, and would probably be willing to make the investment into such facilities, since it would maintain their quasi-monopoly on automotive energy distribution.
Still, the appeal of safe hydrogen storage is great.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I dont think that's an issue, what happens if your drink petrol or car oil or battery acid... don't expect it to be safe to eat (if is is, that's a bonus, but not really going to save anyones life...)
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
This technology would render gas stations obsolete. Why would you need to drive to such a station in order to drop a small pellet into your pellet tank? It's completely unnecessary! You could easily buy a bag of these pellets from your local hardware or grocery store, and refill your vehicle in the comfort of your own garage!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm not sure you would really want to carry out of your food market something the volume or weight of a tank of gas. You'd need more pellets than gas too, since they have lower energy density. It's convenient having fuel loading stations along roads and where you don't have to handle the fuel.
It doesn't make sense to directly compare gasoline and plastic pellets on a volume basis to evaluate efficiency. The MPG number is only useful to show that the size of the fuel tank is in the same ballpark as those current cars, making it more feasible than bulky storage methods such as compressed gaseous hydrogen.
To evaluate efficiency, you need to measure the miles driven per unit of energy put into the hydrogen production facility.
Ever used so-called "bio diesel" (RME) instead of mineral-oil based diesel? Spotted a difference in consumption and gave a thought where that difference originated from?
Btw, hydrogen production is easy. We have plenty of deserts on this planet with hot sunny days, which are just perfect for all-solar powered hydrogen fabs. Just pump (even used) water there.
The problems were rather storage and transport of H2, which just doesn't like to be kept imprisoned and leaked out of the bottle. If that pellet stuff is working as advertised, that problem is solved.
--Udo.
> If they raised nearly a dollar in ~45 days what's going to happen in 10 years
The oil companies will buy the rest of the world. Oil prices raised a dollar because oil companies refuse to stop gouging. If they started making a reasonable return instead of the ass raping they give now, gasoline would be at a more reasonable price.
Actually, since what matters is the energy consumption, and this method according to the article delivers 13 MJ/l, it looks very efficient. That's about 1.3 MJ/km.
Compare that to a normal gasoline car that does, say, 7 l/100 km. Gasoline having an energy density of about 45 MJ/l this works out to 3.15 MJ/km.
That is, the hypothesis is that the hydrogen car would be 2.4 times as efficient as the current gasoline car.
There is a definite sub-culture of folks out there, many of whom play on SlashDot, that do not want to see any sort of cheap and clean alternative to fossil fuels. These are the same people who say things like "we've got to get people out of their cars".
These folks are utopianists. They harbor a social agenda to force you to live your life on their terms. They see the rising costs and pollution from fossile fuels as a lever for gaining the control they need to remake society against most people's free will. They want to do things like move everyone into locally dense housing. Nobody will have their own free standing home and nobody will have the freedom to choose to drive their own car, on their own terms, whenever and wherever they like.
If this sounds like a nightmare to you then pray for clean and cheap alternative energy sources.
Second of all, and more obviously, our best options for using hydrogen as a fuel are in the exploitation of surplus energy sources that are _NOT_ derived from fossile fuels. Geothermal, wind, solar, and nuclear are the ones that immediately come to mind in this respect. Some of these are too rare or too inefficient to be seen as having a surplus at the moment, but in all honesty, this is unlikely to be the case forever.
That said, the problem with electrolysing water to produce hydrogen has the nasty effect of taking away the water supply on the planet. I'm fully aware that the hydrogen combusts to produce water vapour and that in theory no mass should be lost, but of course that doesn't necesarrily mean that would actually happen. In particular, there is potential for hydrogen to be lost to the atmosphere without ever combusting into water vapour because of imperfect storage, pumping (connections between two storage containers), or transporting facilities. These amounts may of course be trace amounts relative to the total mass of hydrogen being worked with, but accumulated over the number of potential hydrogen vehicles in the world, it has the potential to be appreciable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And even more importantly price per mile per horsepower is what matters. Gas MPG/hp hasn't changed since the 70's. I want a 200hp car that gets 35-40mpg, or a Hydrogen powered car that for example gets 17-20mpg at $1.00 a gallon or the equivalent
Gas MPG/Horsepower has changed a lot since the 70's. A new Corvette has 400 HP and gets about 18 mpg/28 mpg (city/highway).
It also depends on the type of engine in the car. If you have a naturally aspirated engine and you make it capable of producing more power, your gas mileage usually decreases a bit since you have to change the displacement/compression ratio/cam timing/etc, and it operates with that configuration all the time, it doesn't change (well the cam timing does nowadays).
However if you have a turbocharged car, making the engine capable of producing more power won't decrease the gas mileage. I have a 300ZX Twin Turbo that had 300 hp and got about 22 mpg (highway) when it was stock. After I increased the boost from 9.5 to 15 psi, I have about 400 hp and 450 lbs of torque. My gas milage stayed the same (during normal driving). That's because I didn't change the engine configuration, during normal driving, the engine doesn't operate any differently than it did before. While the wastegates on the turbochargers will now enable them to produce 15 psi of boost compared to 9.5 psi before, they aren't going to make that much unless I'm flooring it.
Now when I'm racing it, it will burn gas faster than it did before, since the potential for increased airflow increases the potential for fuel burn, and consequently potential for horsepower.
Basically, your engine will burn fuel at a rate that's proportional to the amount of horsepower it is producing at the moment. A 400 HP engine isn't always producing 400 hp... it's just capable of doing so.
Web site lists 13 MJ/l for the storage. This is still pretty poor when compared to the good old gasoline (or diesel). In oil based fuels energy density is just about 34 MJ/l. I wonder, what car they were using than can get 500 km from 50 liters of such a low density stuff. On gasoline (or diesel) such car would go 1300 km from the same fuel tank (assuming similar efficiency of the diesel engine and fuel cell especially when one will take into account all the energy needed to extract the hydrogen from the stuff). That calculates roughly to 3.8 l/100 km. If we assume much more realistic 8 l/100 km for a typical mid size passenger car normally used in the city, suddenly you can only go 625 km on a gasoline and just miserable 240 km on the hydrogen pellets which is not that far off from today's battery driven electric cars that GM used to build and sell several years ago. Another problem is that the stuff is solid! Why is this supposed to be an advantage? Solid fuels require significantly more expensive and cumbersome delivery and refueling infrastructure. It's easy to send liquids over the long distances at low cost using pipelines. Storage tanks, barrels and liquid containers are simple and inexpensive. Pumping liquids is fast, uses relatively inexpensive pumps and hoses/pipes that scale well to different needs and sizes. Imagine all the devices needed to handle small, customer size and large and heavy industrial size amounts of solid stuff even in the powder form. This will require myriad of devices to distribute medium and small amounts of the stuff to the final consumer. Not mentioning that the solid stuff delivery devices do not scale well with the variable load. If the system is build to deliver large amounts of solid product, it becomes very inefficient when the required delivery volume falls to some smaller amounts at times. It's easy to quickly and efficiently significantly vary amounts of stuff send through the pipeline; it is more difficult to do so efficiently with solid type materials. Use your imagination and try to envision devices needed to quickly and efficiently remove 50 kg of used solid pellets from the fuel tank located somewhere in the middle of the vehicle under the trunk and replace it with fresh load of 50 kg new pellets in the same tank. Those devices suppose to be quick, efficient and very durable. They should be safe and simple to operate by the inexperienced, untrained person. They should resist exposure to elements and lack of maintenance/service over long periods of time (think rural gas stations in poor neighborhoods). They should work as expected when exposed to either +50 or -50 degrees Celsius. They should prevent any leakage of the transferred solid fuel to the environment. It's not that simple to replace good old fuel pump at the local gas station. Besides all this the web page does not mention, how long it takes to charge the stuff with fresh hydrogen? Is there any toxic product in the process either required to produce the stuff or even made during the process of hydrogen extraction that can be considered waste? How much energy is needed just to charge the pellet and later to extract the hydrogen back from it etc? And of course, not by fault of the company that developed the stuff, the main question that is missing from the whole hydrogen economy hype is where and at what energy cost the free hydrogen supposes to come from in the quantities required by the society transportation needs. JM
Um, just a guess, the gasoline part.
You could just as well say, "The utopianists believe that necessary energy technologies will always arrive in time to ensure our civilization's smooth path to utopia. They believe that either some hidden natural law or divine being assures this. They also believe that this law or being requires faith, or it won't come through. According to them, showing any caution in the rate at which we burn through our current energy resources would demonstrate a lack of faith. Such a lack of faith, if demonstrated, will cause the natural law/divine being to withhold the otherwise promised new energy technologies, and we'll enter a state of extreme planetary entropy instead of the promised utopia.
"Similarly, these utopians believe that if your car will go at 100 mph, it is good and necessary to do so. They hate all speed limits and traffic cops."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
How much do those batterys weigh? (much more then the difference between a four banger and an eight)
You're going to use regenerative braking for a panic stop? (they still need regular brakes)
The main point you miss is although central generation is more efficent you incur new losses (battery inefficencys, electric line loses etc). Each of which multiply.
You can put low rolling resistance tires on any car. The reason nobody does is they are as hard as rocks hence give an awfull ride.
But hybrid cars make hippy chicks puddle like nothing else these days. Who can put a value on that.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'