Hydrogen Fuel Balls from a Gas Pump?

navalynt writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Energy has filed a patent for hydrogen fuel balls. From the article 'The proposed glass microspheres would each be a few millionths of a metre (microns) wide with a hollow center containing specks of palladium. The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter.' They are supposedly safe and small enough to be pumped into a fuel tank in the same manner as gasoline."

Comments

Oy, the usual hydrogen myths

[SuperBanana]

Hydrogen is often promoted as an ideal clean fuel for cars. But the explosive stuff is also darned dangerous to transport and store.

Actually, it is far safer than gas to transport and store compared to gasoline. Why? A)It requires a stronger fuel:air mixture than gas to ignite B)It is incredibly light, so except in buildings with sealed ceilings, the stuff just isn't very dangerous (gasoline vapors are heavier than air, hence why you should NEVER store it indoors) C)It is 100% non-toxic and disperses instantly (say, in an accident.) If a tanker full of gasoline crashes- you've got a HUGE fire hazard, a major environmental disaster so you have to do something about it fast (especially if the gas contains MTBE), and the fumes are pretty toxic (and flammable, and hug the ground.) If a hydrogen tanker cracks open on the highway, the fire department just has to stand around and watch until the stuff finishes leaking out. No fire hazard since the stuff rises away almost instantly.

The biggest technical hurdle for hydrogen in a distribution network is with seals and hoses; H2 is so damn small that keeping it from escaping through seals and the walls of hoses is very difficult (same reason helium escapes so quickly from balloons, except H2 is even smaller.)

The REAL problem with hydrogen, which everyone loves to ignore, is that there IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to produce hydrogen efficiently, from a renewable resource, without leaving toxic byproducts; current methods either involve hideously inefficient electrolysis, toxic catalysts, or non-renewable resources. Guess why Bush is so hot to trot on Hydrogen? Natural gas is the current "favorite" source. Except you've got to do some nasty processes to natural gas to get the hydrogen, and you have to do something with the carbon leftover when you remove all the hydrogen atoms. The whole point of going OFF hydrocarbon fuels is to get off the CARBON which usually ends up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide! Not to mention, natural gas is NOT RENEWABLE!

"Fuel cells!" you say. Except they're very expensive, have toxic catalysts in them, and have a very finite lifetime unless you use very, very clean water. Distilled/deionized water takes a lot of energy to produce...

Re:Oy, the usual hydrogen myths

[parlyboy]

Insightful comment, and almost entirely right. But you're forgetting something, too: hydrogen might not ignite at quite as low levels, but it is flammable over a MUCH wider range of concentration compared with gasoline.

My uncle is a rocket scientist. A couple decades ago, he was working on a NASA contractor test in Florida. One of the technicians was badly burned in a hydrogen fire. It was a hot day, and the tech walked right into the fire without seeing it. That doesn't happen with gasoline.

Re:Oy, the usual hydrogen myths

[RsG]

Actually, I saw a /. article some time ago about using a combination of high temperature + electrolysis to get hydrogen from water*. My memory may be wrong, but I think the gist was that it's easier to split water molecules when they're heated and/or under pressure (the electrical input needed is lowered). All you need to increase electrolysis effeciency is an abundant source of heat.

Now, where do we have tonnes of hot, pressurized water going to waste? Nuclear plants! The stuff in the heat exchangers is reused, but the stuff used in the turbines isn't. We could presumably use this as a hydrogen source - pipe the stuff through an extraction facility while it's still superheated, and split the water using electrolysis. You might have to construct a dedicated plant for this, one that doesn't produce commercial power, but it would be a self contained hydrogen source.

Now some people would argue that this is just trading Co2 for nuclear waste. Fine, that's still an improvement in my books, since the later is easier to contain, and can be recycled back into fuel. Plus, the final leaving sof nuclear power don't need to be contained forever - just bury them far below the water table in a subduction zone, and collapse the tunnel behind you. It'll eventually suck them back into the mantle.

But in the long run there's no requirement to get the superheated water from fission plants - if we can get fusion working, we'll have another source of power that presumably will produce lots of steam to run the turbines with.

Of course, the best solution in the meantime is a combination of different fossil fuel alternatives. Biofuels may be easier to convert our existing vehicles to, and might even be easier to make by using waste products (see the other /. story recently about using raw sewage to produce the stuff). But hey, having more than one approach is a good thing, and not hinging everything on fusion is sensible, given that the reactor technology is still many years away.

*Note: I am aware that I'm taking a /. science article from memory and assuming it was factually correct. In my defense, I did RTFA at the time and it seemed like it wasn't quackery.

Re:Oy, the usual hydrogen myths

[JSchoeck]

Your information is not correct. As already stated by another reply (which didn't get modded above 3) Hydrogen (H2) will form a very explosive mixture with air, also called detonating gas (if the translation from German is correct where it is "Knallgas"). This mixing happens always when you have Hydrogen meet regular air. So saying Hydrogen would be safe and just rise into the atmosphere is nothing but completely wrong and unsafe. In case of an accident there will be heat sources (be it a fire or a hot engine or the rapid compression of a gas tank) which will easily ignite the hydrogen:air mixture and cause a nasty, big explosion. Keeping Hydrogen gas inside metal gas containers is no problem, by the way. You can buy and store it, just like other gases (for regular materials the size difference of He- and H2-molecules really don't matter). On another note, it doesn't really matter if a catalyst is toxic, since by definition a catalyst is only needed in small amounts and will leave every chemical reaction unchanged. Thus it can be reused unlimited as long as it does not physically get thrown out of the fuell cell.

Re:Oy, the usual hydrogen myths

[RsG]

On the contrary, there is waste heat from nuke plants. There is heat lost from any form of steam power.

You boil the water to make steam (under very high pressure), you run it through the turbines, and you release it. When it leaves the power plant, it's still signifigantly hotter than the surrounding environment, so obviously you haven't taken all the potential energy out of it - however you've gotten what you can from turbines.

Now add an electrolysis plant to the mix. You've lost some of your power output - the water needs to be kept contained so it doesn't cool via evaporation, which limits your ability to use turbines. However, you can now derive hydrogen from it at greater power effeciency than you could before with cold water, which is the whole point of the exercise. This is because regular electrolysis, as the OP pointed out, is grossly ineffecient.

You aren't getting power from nowhere, you're getting slightly better use of the energy you input into the electrolysis. All the system does is improve an otherwise severly ineffecient process. And as an added bonus, while you still need to transport the fuel to it's destination (which is a problem for all alternative fuels), you're no longer losing power in transmitting electricity from a power plant to a hydrogen production plant, since they're at the same site.

Re:Not being a chemist

[shawb]

My guess is that absorb is really not what is going on, they just use that term as the article is for non-scientists. Adsorb is likely alot closer to the truth, although maybe a modified version. While it doesn't actually compress the hydrogen in the traditional sense, what I assume what is really meant is something to the effect that 1L of the substrate could bind to the equivalent of 900L of uncompressed Hydrogen. That seems like a ridiculous amount of compression, but it is probably similar to compressing it to a liquid state. From Wikipedia liquid hydrogen has a density of 70.8 kg/m while gaseous hydrogen has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Since 1 liter is 1/1000 of a m^3 the units are equivalent, so liquifying hydrogen produces a compression ratio of around 787:1. Since the hydrogen is being stored as a solid one could expect even more density gains and additionally concerns of danger due to pressure and innefficiencies due to molecular loss (since hydrogen is so small a significant amount will seep through any seams in the storage tanks) are pretty much negated.

It seems that once the spheres are created it is possible to essentially refill them by exposing them to a high pressure hydrogen solution, and then the hydrogen can be liberated with the application of heat and a partial vacuum. My concern is how much energy would be required to complete these processes. Although engineering techniques could allow waste heat from the combustion process to be used to liberate the majority of the hydrogen, with a small amount of energy from a battery or other storage system being used to liberate the original heat needed to start the engine or fuel cell. The vacuum possibly needed to liberate the hydrogen could be obtained relatively trivially if the hydrogen is used in an Internal Combustion Engine, but it seems likely that this would be used more with fuel cell technologies which means the vacuum would have to be specially created leading to some level of innefficiency. There would also probably be some overall energy consumption required in returning the glass balls to the recharging plant, although it may be possible to recharge the balls at the gas station economies of scale would seem to dictate returning to a central processing plant (although I have absolutely no data to confirm this, simply a gut feeling.)

And of course all of this does not get beyond the fact that hydrogen is not an energy source, but simply an energy storage medium with a fair amount of innefficiencies involved in creating it. The whole process from cradle to grave is going to be extremely expensive, using a large amount of relatively rare materials in a system whose components would likely degrade over time and require replacing and servicing. I really have my doubts that this invention is going to be the final key to solving all of our energy problems, but it could very well be one more tiny tiny push for some specific applications on the way to eventually weening society from the direct need for fossil fuel usage. A cheap, convienient, plentiful, clean, safe and renewable power source is still needed to drive the whole system, and right now I believe fossil fuels as a whole are the best compromise for the whole range of requirements. Although significant technological advances in alternative energy sources as well as the eventually inevitable reduction in fossil fuel supplies will eventually tip the scales to the point that fossil fuels are no longer the most economical energy source (economical including both internal and external costs.)

Too complicated

[MichailS]

Hydrogen is theoretically the most effective and clean fuel, but practically it is a nightmare.

Forget hydrogen. There is an abundance of alternatives out there already that can utilize the current infrastructure and car fleet with little or no cost, like ethanol and SVO and RME and so on. My personal fav would be hydrogen peroxide, but then again I am just a geek.

Governments and universities and car manufacturers like to speak of big, expensive and complex system changes because

1 - they won't happen. Keeps the oligopoly happy.
2 - they make politicians look smart and progressive.
2 - they require aeons of scientific funding to universities and such.
3 - they require us to purchase a new car from the manufacturers.

Thus, simple infrastructure changes such as using ethanol or RME aren't favoured because they are cheap and simple and only benefit us, the plebs.

How Safe are These Glass Balls?

[ferrellcat]

I am not a doctor, but for some reason the thought of millions of micron sized glass shperes does not seem very healthy to me. What would the effect of these glass bubbles be upon their entrance into a cut or other opening in the human body?

I once dropped a glass on my bare foot, and it shattered into thousands of incrediblly tiny shards. At the hospital, it took them hours to remove *most* of the pieces. Almost 20 years later, I still have pieces of fine glass sand in my foot. Now take this type of tramua, and miniturize it down even smaller. A powder so fine it acts like a liquid...Liquid glass. My foot throbs just at the thought of it!

Again, I have no idea if my experience is even relevant to this new technology. I guess I just wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this matter.

breakable?

[zogger]

I just saw "glass spheres" and thought about bumping around in a fuel tank while you are driving. Just a-wondering how tough a glass sphere one buhzillionth of an inch would be.

To *me*, and I readily admit I am skeptical and suspicious when big business and government collide (and collude), but the "hydrogen economy" seems designed on purpose to keep the same billionaires and their corporations...billionaires and "in control" of transportation and energy.

      I think I prefer right now and for the near future just normal liquid biofuels. We don't have to do any radical change to either vehicles or fuel delivery infrastructure, a pumpable liquid is a pumpable liquid after all. And the tech is here and it works, we really don't need a lot more government and industry billion dollar "studies", we just need the fuel produced in larger quantities and shipped. For example, using existing gas stations, just trash midrange, keep low test and high test, and use the midrange tanks for E-85, done, maybe swap out a bit of the plumbing perhaps, but nothing like setting up hydrogen production facilites and massive miniature christmas tree bulb factories, etc.

  Then we need a switch (an option at the car dealers at all the current various price ranges, same as the "normal" cars) to "plug in" hybrids, which they could make right now if they wanted to, a lot of backyard gadgeteers have built them already to prove it is possible. This could offset a large part of the transportation load, especially for short and mid range commuters, drastically reduce the concentrated pollution in the urban areas, the fuel part would be almost all carbon neutral, and a lot of the battery part can be addressed by such things as home solar panel arrays with overnight charging to the plug in hybrids from the home battery bank. This would also improve the over-all national "fuel" supply but with little to no impact on the normal electrical grid demand. The Sun is practical fusion power,the only one we have really, we have the existing tech to use it directly, and plants use the same fusion energy to grow and we can get a large percentage of the fuel we need from them. What's not to like?

An individual can now purchase and own a vehicle,but you'll still pay "rent" forever on making it run, and the rent money goes to already uberrich guys, who already have enough political and economic power, IMO. Remember that picture of the exxon hog jowled CEO giggling as he testified in congress over the massive petroleum price hikes? The dude who got hundreds of millions for selling gas, like that's a problem right now? Do we really need to keep paying that guy and dudes like him like that, letting this energy cartel just keep dictating prices to us and how we do our transportation? I think *not*, we can do better, and right now.

    It would be nice to start to become your own fuel producer. Even just some significant part would help your wallet, the economy, and the environment. The Sun -practical fusion power- helps solve these problems with tech we have today.

Calm down. It's not that simple

[Moraelin]

The problems with hydrogen are many, and handwaving some in, some out, just seems weird.

E.g., energy density is a real problem. While H2 does have 3 times more energy density than gasoline per weight unit, it's about 10 times lighter than gasoline even in liquefied form, and thus has worse energy density per _volume_. (And hideously less energy density if you use it as compressed gas.)

But transporting and storing it liquefied is harder than you'd think, because it boils at around -253 Celsius. That's cold enough to _freeze_ air on contact. It's also going to be a pain to keep it that cold, and even in the best insulated tanks it's going to constantly evaporate. In fact, a lot of it will evaporate every day.

And unlike natural gas, you can't just compress it until it stays liquid at room temperature. If you look at its phase diagram, a liquid phase just doesn't exist anywhere above -240 C. That's where its critical point lies. No matter how much you compress it, it just won't liquefy above that. So you _have_ to keep it that cold.

E.g., if you want to talk energy, there you go, there's even more energy spent cooling it to those temperatures, and a massive waste of energy when then it just evaporates in a car sitting in a garrage for a month.

E.g., energy density isn't really helped if you have to pack it in a massive tank, either to hold it under pressure or to keep it cold. If the tank itself adds an extra half a ton to your car, you haven't really won much. (Rememeber the lower energy density, so the tank will also have to be bigger to get the same mileage out of it.)

E.g., if you want to talk safety, you don't want to be the guy that gets splashed by liquid at -253C when the tank ruptures in an accident. Or yes, when a tanker ruptures on the highway. Yes, it will eventually just rise up, but in the meantime it will instantly kill anything it spills onto.

E.g., yes, a problem is that it leaks, so you'd have hydrogen constantly leaking in your garage. Whether your roof is sealed tight or not is a moot point when you have a couple percent of your tank's capacity evaporating daily in it. That's a _lot_ more vapour produced than gasoline produces. And you can't just seal the tak shut to keep the vapours in, since the resulting pressure will eventually be tremendous. So you don't want a garrage that's just not sealed shut, you'll want one that's ventilated constantly, even in winter. Otherwise it can jolly well blow up.

E.g., the problem is made worse by the fact that hydrogen has no colour or smell of its own, so you can't _know_ if you've walked into a room full of it or not. Gasoline, for all its other problems, does have a smell. Sure, it's _unlikely_ that you'd find the room just full of it, but do you actually want to take that risk? Plus, when you talk hundreds of millions of cars, some poor bugger may blow himself up every hour. (As they say, if you're one in a million, there are 6000 just like you. Probabilities are funny like that when they involve large numbers.) Do you want to be the car manufacturer hit by the lawsuits and negative PR of that?

E.g., worse yet, it also _burns_ with an invisible flame, so you could walk into a jet of flame from a punctured hose or tanker that did ignite, and not even know it until you get burned by it. Again, you can handwave that as _unlikely_, but it's a very real problem and given hundreds of millions of cars, somewhere it will eventually happen.

And so on. And, yes, I'd be interested to know how these palladium balls address those problems. E.g., will it actually make the energy density worth it, or just dillute it some more?

And conversely, hand-waving the energy and carbon concerns as some global catastrophe is... uninformed, to say the least.

E.g., yes, we already knew that on the whole you don't get more energy from burning hydrogen than you put into splitting the water. That's obvious. The problem is that while we're damn good at producing electricity, and outstanding at making electrica

Not really true

[mosb1000]

"there IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to produce hydrogen efficiently, from a renewable resource without leaving toxic byproducts;"

I'm not sure where you got that idea. High temperature electrolysis, for example, just uses really hot water and electricity. It's about 70% efficient.

"you've got to do some nasty processes to natural gas to get the hydrogen"

Well, there are a couple things wrong with that statement. First of all, hydrocarbon reformation could hardly be described as a "nasty process". You put you hydrocarbon in with some solid catalyst, hot steam, and that's all. Second of all, it can work with virtually any hydrocarbon. Thirdly, natural gas is primarily methane, which can be produced in other ways.

"Fuel cells!" you say. Except they're very expensive, have toxic catalysts in them, and have a very finite lifetime unless you use very, very clean water. Distilled/deionized water takes a lot of energy to produce...

Fuel cells do not have toxic catalysts in them, they have platinum, which is just about as non-toxic as a material can get. Though they are expensive and short lived.

The idea behind hydrogen is that it can be implemented now, and is compatible with existing infrastructure. Automobiles and power-plants that exist now can be converted to use hydrogen. Hydrogen can be produced using conventional energy inputs, but can also be produced using many other inputs. So the advantage is versatility, and the potential to operate industry without producing CO2. Of course, it's not ready for prime time yet.

Re:Not being a chemist

[Captain Hook]

I don't think that they are planning on burning the spheres. I read the article as, you pump the sphere into a tank in your car (because they can flow like a liquid), using some heat and a slight vacume, the hydrogen is released from the spheres.

The hydrogen goes off to the fuel cell/IC engine (what ever use you have for the hydrogen) and the sphere's are left behind.

I suppose the best possible solution would be to draw the sphere's out of the main tank, release the hydrogen and move the now emoty sphere's to a second tank where they can be collected next time you fill the main tank. Only problem I can see with that would be the second tank would have to be the same volume as the first because the sphere's volume are not going to change when the hydrogen is released.

For cheapness, I suppose you could use 1 tank, the hydrogen is released into that main tank which would increase the pressure and prevent further hydrogen being release, the faster the engine draws the hydrogen out of the main tank, the faster the hydrogen would be released from the spheres, it would make a nice self regulating system. Downside to that idea would be how do you then seperate empty and charged sphere's to return to the fuel station.

Re:Government patents and other considerations.

[Jasin Natael]

So, to be clear, you're saying that the government charges money for licensing so that there is a higher barrier to entry for licensees, which reduces competition against the richest of licensees -- thus inducing them to make the investment in manufacturing, advertising, and distribution.

I call shenanigans. The way you're saying it kind of comes across like, "Well, a patent creates a 'free monopoly' ticket. Someone has to use it! If nobody is granted an effective monopoly, how can anyone expect to get rich from the idea?". Forsooth! Has society not already paid its price by using its government to develop the patent? The people certainly owe no further debt to this idea, or its inventor, or its licensees. It is the property of the public, by virtue of having been developed with their money and by their direct agency.

Not to mention that the USA was designed in part to prevent the obscene accumulation of wealth. As little as 50 years ago, the common man understood that benefits of industry and science should be directed to society as a whole, not an elite few. How so many have forgotten this so quickly is vexing...

Re:Palladium's current price is...

[The Fun Guy]

Anonymous Coward says:

RTFA... palladium to hydrogen ratio is 1:900. Check your math, bozo.

That is, of course, the volume to volume ratio of absorption, not the weight to weight ratio used in the energy density calculation.

At a V/V ratio of 1:900, every cm3 of palladium can absorb 900 cm3 of hydrogen.

Density of palladium? 12.023 g/cm3
Density of hydrogen? 0.08988 g/L = 0.00008988g/cm3.

Therefore 1 g of palladium can absorb 0.006728 g of hydrogen. This is around 150:1, much, much worse than the 1:1 W/W ratio used in the parent calculation. This means that instead of every car needing $250,000 worth of hydrogen-saturated palladium to equal 20 gallons of gasoline, it's more like $37,500,000 worth.

Thanks, Anonymous Coward! You're good for something after all!

Re:Not being a chemist

[smellsofbikes]

It's generally a reasonable approximation that gases occupy about 1000 times the volume that liquids do. There's more dissolved oxygen in fresh water, per unit volume, than oxygen in the atmosphere, for this reason. (Which is one reason fish do so well.)

Heat and pressure are heavily interlinked (look up Boyle's Law some time if you're curious) so it's not probably necessary to use reduced pressure to extract the hydrogen from the palladium: heat will do fine. In some supersonic ramjet designs, they've used the waste friction heat of the airframe to heat the liquid hydrogen and vaporize it, simultaneously keeping the airframe from melting and converting the fuel to a more useful form. I guess that'd be called regenerative since that's a hip term these days. So: you could run your engine coolant through the fuel tank to keep the engine cool and produce the gaseous hydrogen the engine needs, which improves the overall efficiency.