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Nanoparticles Could Make Hydrogen Cheaper Than Gasoline
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to EE Times, a California-based company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years. The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving."
*cough*bullshit*cough*
What's with all the science articles lately that are basically investor scams?
Speaking of odds, what are the odds that if this turns out to be viable the inventors will have unfortunate accidents and the patents bought up from their estates by either Exxon or Shell?
Why post articles like this? It's just an advertisement for a non-existent technology. There are tons of crap like this out there, why single this one out?
Let us know when someone actually develops something real and working, then it might be news.
Exactly as likely as you having an unfortunate accident, because you're a crazy conspiracy nutcase.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Everybody giggling about this would mean the end of "Big Oil" forgets that gasoline is only one of many petroleum based products. Plastics are still going to be a huge market, for example. The oil companies still won't like it, as their profits will no doubt go down. On the plus side, the profits for terrorist funders (Saudi Arabia) would go down, too.
-- Will program for bandwidth
You're just simply... nuts.
"Big oil" are energy companies. They really don't give a rats ass if they sell you oil or nuclear fusion. "You" arn't even their real customer, but rather the power plants are.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
The article says "Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
That's a completely baffling statement to me. So baffling as to trigger my BS detector.
Presumably the point of producing it in the car is to avoid the need to store the gaseous hydrogen. But electrolysing hydrogen requires energy--the hydrogen is not a source of energy so much as it is a storage medium for energy. So where would that energy come from?
From a gasoline-powered generator in your car? Or what?
Sounds like a smooth-talking snake-oil salesman who's answer to everything is "yes, we've solved that problem too."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
So instead of a tank of pressurized hydrogen gas you have a tank of distilled water in your car and it's broken down into hydrogen on demand. No need to store/transport/etc. hydrogen at all if this is really the case.
Yes, I read it, but it seems you didn't comprehend it. You need energy to perform electrolysis, which in turn releases hydrogen. If the car is powered by hydrogen, and you propose extracting it on the go via electrolysis, where is the power for the electrolysis coming from? Unless you get more energy out of the hydrogen powered engine per unit of hydrogen, then it takes to extract that hydrogen via electrolysis, then it won't work, you have an energy deficit in the system. That was my point, but you totally missed it.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Thats stupid. Why would you use energy to make hydrogen to make electricity in a fuel cell to run an electric motor when you could of just used that same energy to run the motor in the first place?
No to speak for any of those companies, but if this or other technologies are as good as they claimed to be and if Exxon/Shell/big-oil buy the technology, why would they shelf it in the basement of their lawyer's office? These are just for-profit companies. As such, they don't really care what they sell. If shits can power cars better/cheaper than gasoline, they will sell the shits because they have a competitive advantages compared to others in their business. Why would they pay the Saudi emirates if they can just monopolize the production of energy at home?
The article does not say anywhere that you can produce hydrogen while driving.
My mistake (last post. Read the article and not the summary)
The article says that Kevin Maloney says "Instead of switching 170,000 gas stations over to hydrogen, using our electrodes could enable consumers to make their own hydrogen, either in the garage or right on [sic] the vehicle,"
Doesn't say 'while driving' It implies that you can supply some sort of power source, presumably plugging the car into an outlet to run the fuelcell backwards and produce hydrogen.
I don't care if H2 is FREE to make. The general public will never be driving H2 cars around.
There are many reasons BOTH competing H2 technologies can't work. Most of it boils down to safety (driving H2 bombs around town), logistics (how do you ship highly compressed H2 since it can't be pipelined), fuel cells might have good reliability, but if you crack it in a wreck, it's half the cost of the vehicle to replace, the only safe ways to store H2 gas (metal infusion) weigh too much, take 8 hours to refuel, and have less than 200 mile range.
We'll have full electric cars, air powered cars, and a full ethanol industry hopping long before they solve the safety, vehicle weight/efficieny/range problems, costs, and other very big negatives surrounding H2.
the ONLY thing H2 has going for it it it burns 100% clean. So do air poewred cars and battery powered cars, and the energy used to fill the tank with all 3 can be just as clean, safer, cheaper, and less of a logistics challenge.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Everyone seems to have missed the point. With efficient electrolysis, you can build the entire system into the vehicle. You'd have a closed system that cracks the water and stores the H2 in a tank. The fuel cell burns the H2, creating pure water that goes back into the tank. You'd "fill up" at home (or office, or where ever) by running the electrolysis off of grid power (or however you get it), removing the need for the gas station. You could even use the power from regenerative breaking to crack the water again (assuming you could do it fast enough), meaning you wouldn't need to lug around extra batteries or ultra-capacitors.
Remember: you shouldn't think of hydrogen as a fuel, but rather as an energy storage mechanism (like a battery).
... to have the on board electrolyzer. You would have to think of the whole system as a rechargeable battery as opposed to immediately thinking of it as a perpetual motion machine. You plug your car in overnight, which generates the hydrogen for your next trip/commute. In the morning you unplug and have some hydrogen to go. You don't need a combustion engine, just your standard fuel cell + electric motor. I suppose you could add in a large solar panel roof to produce a little extra hydrogen on the go and when parked. By having it onboard you gain the ability to "charge" your car anywhere where there is power. /patent pending + copyrighted + .... + ???? :-b
Why would you kill someone if you're going to buy up the patents from their estates? It would likely be considerable cheaper to simply buy the patents. Besides, the oil companies don't care what kind of fuel they supply, only that you give them money to buy it. I'm sure that they would be happy to sell you hydrogen, biodiesel or ground up babies if there were a profit in it.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
The biggest issue with current electric cars is battery technology, or the lack thereof. You can't just replace a 15 gallon gas tank with a battery of the same size and end up with the same result. The amount of electricity required to drive an electric car a reasonable distance results in huge, very heavy, and expensive batteries. There are also potential issues concerning battery lifetime, environmental impacts of manufacturing/disposal, etc.
So you basically end up with the question, how are we going to store all of that electricity in the car until it's needed. If batteries aren't a viable option, what other forms can we use? Hydrogen is attractive because it has a very high energy density, but it has its share of drawbacks as well. The article is about somebody who claims to be able to overcome some of those drawbacks via nanotechnology. I have no idea if his ideas are feasible.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
All you have to do is close the loop and it becomes a decent energy storage system. put energy into the system and get hydrogen from water, use the hydrogen later to make energy and the exhaust is pure water again. Collect the exhaust and start all over.
Basically, it's an electric car with a different sort of battery. Regenerative breaking in this case turns some of the water back into H2 rather than putting the electricity into a normal battery. Since hydrogen has much better energy density than standard batteries, if they can get the rest of the system small enough to support closing the loop, you can make a hydrogen battery that's pound for pound much better than eg a lead acid battery.
1) I was referring to the "2 competing H2 technologies" not this on-demand system, i'll debuke that in a minute. 2) gasoline is not a volatile hig compression fuel like H2. Your gas tank leaks, you throw sand on it. Your H2 tank leaks, the repair shop needs to be evacuated or people get killed (think porpane leak). Also, at 4000PSI of pressure, you don't even neeed H2, when a gas at that pressure blows, it takes out everything that's not reinforced concrete within 200 feet. Add flamability to that and you're talking about the explosive force of nearly 10 pounds of TNT.
Pipe water using our existing system? most cities are already at or beyond capacity of theirt systems today, let alone adding this load. Second, it's not clean enough. It's needs to be pure distilled water for this system to operate. this means an entire new water system, including on-site distillation, storage, filtering, and the expense and energy to make it possible. This is simply not feasable. We can build 100 new solar and wind plants and a superconducting electrical grid for less money and less hassle. Third, water is a limited resource! unless desalination comes a loooooong way, this idea doens't float (pun intended).
The price of fuel cells wil come down, but it has a minimum price of about $15K per engine. Right now that's at over 200K once you factor out the governement subsidies. I get in a wreck, even a bad one, an air engine, electric motor, or ethanol cobustion (ICE or turbine) is easy to fix. Crack a fuel cell and you have to take half the car apart to get it out, and the whole damned thing requires replacement. btw: have you SEEN a fuel cell? They take up most of the trunk of large SUV's, turning a 7 seat vehicle into a 4 (or in some cases 2) seater.
not only is parking a leaky tank in a garage a bad idea, so is any underground parking lot, dense parking area with low wind, or other places. Second, H2 is not a liquid at that pressure like propane is. H2 only becomes liquid at rediculous pressure or extreme low temperuature. A propane tank of H2 at safe pressures would only take you about 5 miles. To pressurize directly to liquid and store it without 70 degree below zero refrigeration would be a massive tank, several inches thick, and still only have enough storage for about 200 miles. At that pressure, a rupture could kill a hundred people, rip your house apart, or crack a bridge, just on vapor expansion laws alone. Oh yea, compressing H2 to that pressure has less than 8% efficiency. We can make it at 96%, but loose most of that transporting it.
H2 will never happen, except under extreme goverment subsidies. It;s a tactic to appease less inteligent environment nuts until a etter technology that both big oil and big politics can proffit from. Theyr'e fighting Ethanol because it's too simple (they can't controll who produces it, they can't corner the market).. At least with electric drives, big oil can become big solar, and they're happy to do it, they're just delaying until they can buy up the research firms and construction companies, and to pay off politicians in the meantime to prevent new power plants they won't own from being built. I'm OK with this. Let them own it... If I don't like their prices per kilawatt, I'll put solar panels in my back yard and sell my energy back to the grid at a proffit.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I'm not sure why people are making this logical jump from "even when driving" to "produce all your hydrogen from driving".
Just as in a Prius you could use regenerative braking to help you create some hydrogen to help you extend your range.
I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense that way either, the added components to put that system in the car surely would cost more than a reasonably sized hydrogen tank that you could refill at home or at work or at a hydrogen station.
Clean energy sources like electricity? In half of the US, "electric cars" should be renamed "coal-powered cars".
I don't know. Shipping hydrogen probably isn't all the more dangerous than ethanol. Ehtanol is some nasty sh*t in large quantities. Far more dangerous than gasoline. Obviously you can't use water on gasoline or ethanol fires, you have to use foam. Well, the foam used on gasoline fires doesn't work on grain-based ethanol fires. The ethanol flame burns right through the foam and conitnues to burn. To put out an ethanol fire you need an alchol-resistant polymer foam which is very expensive. Not many firestations are equiped to handle this sort of thing and as E85 becomes more popular, larger amount of ethanol are going to be shipped long haul.
Hydrogen on the other hand is very bouyant, disperses very quickly and won't puddle on the ground. If this article proves true and they can produce hydrogen that efficiently, shipping it is a moot point. Just produce the hydrogen on site and do away with the shipping all together.
Also, at that point, you might as well use electric cars. Charging a battery is more efficient than splitting water, even with supermagicnanoparticles. the only safe ways to store H2 gas (metal infusion) weigh too much, take 8 hours to refuel, and have less than 200 mile range. Why not just store it in the same tank I store propane gas in? Sure it will slowly leak, but how long will it take to leak out enough to be a problem? Besides, slowly leaking tanks is a good thing for producers. Hydrogen would corrode a normal propane tank. I don't know if leaking can be dealt with, but it would be a huge problem if it can't. Imagine if you left your car running whenever it was parked.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
You say that companies would sell the wonder widgets now and screw all for the future, but nothing in corporate history really supports. You're using the percieved fallacy that companies only care about the immediate revenue. That's very true if your name is "Middle-class-Bob" but when it comes to product they stick with the same thing for as long as possible and really only desire to kill competition. Them buying such a technology and hiding it or ruining/discrediting the people making it are far more likely to occur than them selling. Do you really need to look any further than your mp3 collection and the numerous RIAA articles to see how much industry leadership resists change? Speaking of long term, car companies, fast food, and wal-mart all started their market conquests with the idea to not have the best product, service, or technology, but rather to make sure there tech and product was the only one that mattered.