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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?
Sounds like vaporware to me!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I already make my own combustible gas while I drive. I just need a motor that will work with it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
So I can make hydrogen while driving. At an efficiency of perhaps 96%. So, 100 units of energy in resulting in 96 units of energy in the form of hydrogen. Those 96 units then pwoer the car.
Why wouldn't I cut the middle step out and simply use 100% of the energy to make the wheels go round and round?
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
As someone pointed out in the comments on the last hydrogen story, the problem isn't so much making the stuff as it is storing it. Hydrogen cars are a pain because it's incredibly difficult to store hydrogen in such a way that it doesn't leak out. They mention in TFA that this process is so efficient that cars could do the electrolysis on the go with a tank of distilled water, but unless it's efficient enough to be self sustaining that won't work.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Hydrogen is a method for transmission and storage of energy. It is not a source of energy. At least not until they figure out controlled fusion.
Here's a two sentence summary for the people who don't read articles:
Instead of using a really good conductor to make the electrodes used for electrolysis, these people propose increasing the electrode's surface area 8,000 times by coating an ordinary steel electrode with butt loads of nanoparticles that are optimized for surface area and conductivity.
That sounds feasible to me.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. -Aldous Huxley
Related post: Nano particles could make hydrogen cheaper than [some other very expensive commodity whose price has been driven up artificially]
I want a wind powered car! A flying wind powered car. A flying wind powered car that drives itself.
And a pony.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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
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!
Dude, do you need everything spelled out? Just start your car, drive around, and after a while you'll generate enough hydrogen to start your car.
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 commentary on the original article, though, links to the the press release which clarifies it. The application they're talking about is a plug-in rechargable car. When you're at home, you plug it in, the car electrolyzes water to produce hydrogen, and then, when you unplug it, you run the car on the hydrogen.
The application, then, doesn't address the problem of how to store hydrogen, only the problem of how to produce it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
There's some criticism as to the notion that hydrogen could be created right on board a moving vehicle represents perpetual motion. It doesn't. Those critics are just jumping to conclusions. The implication is that the coating supposedly improves electrolysis efficiency to such a degree that hydrogen could be created with a small enough on-board system on-demand. With today's elecrolyzers, to make enough hydrogen on-demand to run a vehicle, the hydrogen generation gear would be bigger than the vehicle, so efficiency improvement translates to size reduction which makes this approach plausible. The PEM fuel cell went through similar size reduction before it was ready for passenger vehicle use. Anyway, it means you would have to have a power supply such as a rechargeable battery to run the electrolyzer on. I did not take from the story that they were claiming a system where: 1) water + power in, 2)hydrogen out, 3) hydrogen in, 4) power out, repeat for a water-fueled system. It needs power.
Now, why would you want to do this instead of simply use the battery for electric drive? Well, one could make the argument that converting standard hyrdocarbon fuels from the pump to hydrogen ON the vehicle eliminates the need for fueling infrastructure change which is a MAJOR barrier to the widespread adoption of a "hydrogen economy". With hydrogen on the vehicle it could be used to power a fuel cell for electric drive or some other combustion engine such as BMW's multi-fuel hydrogen car. "Just add power" (solar? plug-in? other?) and if it's all done just right, what you get is more efficient fuel combustion with lower emissions than you would have gotten from burning the gasoline straight. That model I think could be viewed as a "stepping stone" towards conversion much like today's hybrid cars are regarded as a stepping stone towards all electric.
However, I do see the danger that parking a car in an enclosed space for any length of time can slowly turn your garage into a bomb.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
... 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
last question first:
"What would the drug companies try to do to someone who invented a miracle pill that made people immune to every possible disease and disorder forever?"
Sell it. Do you think the current C*0s, and board give a rats ass about 10 years down the line when they can make a billion or 3 right now?
How many companies sold key manufacturing technolgies to overseas buyers in exchange for a large chuck of cash now? A hell of a lot, that's who.
So, you own this magic widget. You can sell it for 1000 dollars 100's of millions of dollars. cha-ching, YOu RIGHT NOW make huge cash in your pocket. I don't think there so altruistic as to think "I could put a billion in my account, but we better not so some guy I don't know can makes some money in 5 years after I have left"
Not to mention the 15,000,000 new cars are bought in the US every year, and if you owned this you would be getting royalties from each of those cars for 20 years. So the company will still get some money, but the people making the decisions now get a hell of a lot of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I propose using ancient deposits of carbon to lock up excess O2. Not only will this process remove excess O2 from the atmosphere but the process if exothermic and could also be used as a source of energy. In the mean time I suggest breathing as hard as possible at all times.
Personally I look forward to an oxygen rich atmosphere and the return of our dragonfly overlords.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Not only do you avoid all the issues of converting vehicles --a very big issue indeed-- you can also invert the normal equation and actually consume atmospheric CO2 in the process.
How bout them apples? Not only would such a technique halt the addition of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it would actually begin to actively reduce CO2 levels.
The chemistry is old school.
CO2 + 3H2 --> CH3OH + H2O
CH3OH is methanol.
Using catalysts, which is this company's specialty, it is possible to convert methano into gasoline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_to_gasoline
This way you change as little as possible on the consumer automotive side and yet still move to a post-pertroleum world without any new massive automotive technology roll out. That's a freakin' huge plus right there. A lot of people genuinely love their old cars. This way they can keep their old rides forever. As much as I love clean tech, I kind of have a love affair with my old car I've rebuilt so many times and there's a lot of people like that in this world. The easier we make it for everyone to participate, the faster the impact will happen. If you just go with gasoline, the switch can happen almost overnight.
If the hydrogen production process is really as efficient as they claim, it should be quite cheap on top of the environmental and political benefits. Moreover, you could install the production facilities very near existing gas tank farms located at the edges of large metro areas thus further maximizing efficiencies that petroleum can't hope to match be eliminating the need for extensive liquid fuels transport systems.
The CO2 could be produced through simple air compression. Local gasoline would once more be a reality.
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.
I agree with your overall conclusion that hydrogen cars are probably not going to happen, ever. Hydrogen is difficult to make, difficult to transport, difficult to dispense, difficult to store on vehicle, and difficult to utilize. We have not really solved any of these issues. And as you said, the only real advantage is that it burns clean (sort of, if you burn it in an ICE you will likely still have NOx issues).
There are plenty of problems with hydrogen powered vehicles, but you really aren't hitting on them. Safety isn't the issue.
You talk about propane leaks, but propane is heavier than air and hydrogen is lighter. You aren't likely to asphyxiate from a hydrogen leak. It's not likely to accumulate in a low space and cause an explosion. Tank bursts are typically directional, and the force can be dampened; it's not like a bomb going off..
Other responders have already pointed out the inaccuracies with your pressure analysis.
You talk about the expense of distilling water, or piping distilled water around and neglect the fact that we power our vehicles with truck delivered distilled product right now. And that product is flammable during trucking and distillation.
Garages? Gasoline fumes are very explosive. That's why cars have one-way venting systems on their tanks, and boats have fume alarms. Yet we don't have gas stations and garages blowing up all the time, because we've engineered our way out of the problem.
Your alternatives are just as poorly thought out... Ethanol sounds great, but causing grain to be priced as energy won't work. There will be wars and famine (we're already well on the way in the latter department) before ethanol becomes our primary fuel. Photovoltaics are promising, but just plain not ready. They require a breakthrough large enough that we can't accurately predict how far away practicality is. You didn't mention wind, but others in the thread have... It has promise, but geographical and political concerns will keep it as a niche solution. Neither wind nor solar are transmission solutions either. They're just production. So how do you get the solar or wind power to your car anyway?
Your information about H2 technologies is amazingly flawed. They're not made out of metal, they're made out of graphite composite. They can just about drop those things out of passing airliners without cracking them, and they don't have to be "several inches thick".
Pipe water using our existing system? most cities are already at or beyond capacity of their systems today, let alone adding this load.
You're obviously not grasping the scales involved here. The US uses somewhere on the order of 150 billion gallons of gasoline each year. We use three times that much water every DAY. I think that the system can handle it. Purification isn't nearly the problem you suggest it is. Existing filtration systems would be more than adequate to supply water to your typical hydrolysis system.
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
This is amazingly poorly thought out. It's based on gasses that are about the same density as air. Hydrogen is much less dense than air (think twice as boyant as Helium), and doesn't require anything resembling a wind to disperse upwards. This stuff seeps through solid metal, you think a parking garage ceiling is going to stop it?
The entire logic of your argument is based on bad science and the idea that things will never improve. I don't buy it.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Answer: They're not an OIL company, they're an ENERGY company. They understand this. If something else displaces oil they don't want it to displace THEM. Instead they want a piece of the new thing, too. They're just as happy to invest in developing and manufacturing solar panels and pocket some money when you buy them (or to run solar farms and sell electricity) as they are to invest it in exploring for oil and taking a cut when you buy that (while passing on the bulk to the people sitting on the land over the oil.) And meanwhile it gives them a power source to run some of their own remote equipment. B-)
There's a lot of money in oil. But there's little margin. Virtually all of it goes to pay for the crude feedstock and the infrastructure to extract, refine, and ship it. (That's OK. Like groceries, oil goes from purchased raw material to sold product in a short time. So the company's money gets cycled through the buy/refine/sell process several times a year, making a small profit margin add up to a good rate of return on investment.)
As with solar panels, energy companies have more incentive to develop new processes than to buy and sit on them. Because they won't be the ONLY processes to achieve results. So if company A buys process a to develop product whiz-bang, then sits on it, company B eats their lunch when it buys and develops process b and owns the market as whiz-bang displaces refined oil.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Lubricants can be done effectively without oil these days, most of the companies that sell motor oil provide at least one line of synthetic oil.
You misunderstand the meaning of "synthetic" oils. They are synthetic in that they are lab-created from stock ingredients to specific and precise formulations, rather than refined directly from crude oil as in a "traditional" oil. That said, the base stock chemicals still come from petroleum, such as an alkene, an ester, or the newer gas-to-liquid where a light-chain gas fraction is separated, hydrated and catalyticaly converted into a desired liquid.
The advantages of synthetic oils are that you can pretty much completely eliminate undesirable compounds, and you can precisely tailor chemical ratios to achieve a desired behavior. Neither of those are possible/feasible with distillation, since a "bad" compound might have a boiling point within a hair-fraction of a degree of something "good", and a lot of different "good-for-different-purposes" chemicals have very close boiling points as well.
You are right about plastics being relatively easy to make from non-petroleum carbon sources -IIRC the first plastic was made from cellulose- but there are many types of plastic that can't be made with something that simple/natural, and don't even get me started on the problems of using corn for bio-fuels and carbon stock. There are better plants, but that's what you get for letting Iowa choose the presidential candidates.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
For the retailer, perhaps; a friend owns a gas station and told me they make 1-3 cents per gallon. That's a razor-thin margin of 0.3% to 1%, at current prices.
However, there's a ton of margin for the oil companies. Just look at their record profits for 2007 to tell the real story: yes, the price is going up due to conflicts and reduction in supply and other factors; but their profitability tells a different story, and profits tend to tell a real story (except in unsustainable cases like Enron).
I think eliminating subsidies to the oil companies is a smart move; I read today that the House is passing it, and Democrats are trying to avoid a filibuster in the senate. Only for the top 5 oil companies, though; I'd rather see all oil subsidies eliminated, in favor of "renewable energy" subsidies (it's not really renewable, the sun will burn out someday and take the Earth with it we recently re-learned, but it's "essentially renewable").
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I'm not concerned with slow leaks from the H2 that passes through the tanks naturally, that dispurses quick. I'm talking about a REAL leak, due to a bad seal or tank rupture. Even the tiniest imperfection could leak out massive volumes of H2 that are not going to be cleared by anything less than powered emergency ventalation. A repair man that forgets to follow every safty step could release a few litres of -230 degree H2 liquid into a shop (where there's likely welding or other sparks present) and this liquid explosively expands, fills all space in the shop, and contacts the spark. Boom. Goodbye shop, all inhabitants, and possible a bunch of people nearby. this WILL happen. People are careless and stupid. Propane tanks blow up all the time. H2 will just be mode deadly when it does.
Don't believe me how powerful this is? Do this for me: Go buy a small container of H2 from a local container store (I don't know how to do this, but my science proffs in college could get H2 anytime they wanted). Now, take a milk jug, a large cork with a hole in it, and a glass tube with a tapered end. Cut the bottom completely off the milk jug. put the tube in the hole in the cork and cap the jar with it (mare sure it's a tight fit). Place tape over the small remaining hole to prevent gas leaking out.
Now, mount the apparatus tube side up (open bottom of jug pointing at floor) from a clamp on a pole (so it will stay that way without you holding it, trust me, you don't want to be holding it!). You should in essence now have a big bowl, suspended upside down, with a small hole in the top. Open the valve on your H2 container and allow the gas to rise up into the bowl (since it's lighter than air, it will fill it and stay there).
Now, take the tape off the tube so that the H2 will start to rise through it. Light the escaping gas with a match (I suggest from as much distance as you can give it to be safe, a match held from a 3-6 foot long handle or longer, just in case this goes off before expected).
Now, what you will have is a small flame coming out of the glass tube. This flame operates like a torch because the vapor pressure from the H2 trying to go up is more than the air tring to go down and gas only flows one way. You should have a very feint blue flame here. This may burn for 15-90 seconds depending on how well the milk jug got filled, and how small your tube is.
After a minute or so, the H2 remaining in the milk jug will start to lessen, and air pressure above and below the tank will eventually equallize, allowing the flame to go down the tube and contact the remaning, ambient room pressure gas in the milk jug. BOOM!
trust me: If you do this indoors, say in a large classroom lab in a school, you'll have security personell and panicked people running from all directions, since this small amount of H2 gas, trapped in a gallon of airspace at static room pressure will generate a fireball that will shake the windows and ring eardrumbs.
Immagine now 3,000 times this much H2 in an underground parking area that has just rapidly escaped a leaking car's tank....
I can also image far darker options: Imagine the gree an arab suicide bomber will get when he's handed the keys from a Hertz employee to a portable H2 bomb for his $35 a day plus $300 credit hold... All he needs is a commonly available industrial shaped charge (from a construction yard) and he can take out a bridge or building. If he's really good, he can make some C4 himself from stuff at the grocery store.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.