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Ubiquitous Hydrogen Power Not Getting Any Closer
NewScientist has a story about the "hydrogen economy" that has been resting on the horizon for a decade or more. Despite a great deal of enthusiasm for and research into hydrogen-based power systems, the technology seems just as far away from everyday use as it's always been. A British startup, ITM Power, has recently claimed a breakthrough in lowering production costs by using a nickel catalyst (rather than platinum) with a membrane small enough for home use. But, even if their method is proven and adopted, it still wouldn't address huge energy efficiency problems in the process. "The point was made forcefully by Gary Kendall of the conservation group WWF in a recent report called Plugged In (PDF, pgs. 135-149). Kendall, a chemist who previously spent almost a decade working for ExxonMobil, highlights how the energy losses in the fuel chain - from electrolysis to compression of the hydrogen for use to inefficiencies in the fuel cell itself — mean that only 24 per cent of the energy used to make the fuel does any useful work on the road."
Are fossil fuels an energy source or a way of storing energy? Just a question of timescales.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd love to have an alternative - a real, no compromise one - for fuelling my activities without destroying the planet. Really.
But we ain't there yet. Not just because nothing - repeat nothing - comes remotely close to matching the energy density AND cost of fossil fuels. (And this after we've shipped the fuel halfway round the world).
No, the main problem is infrastucture. Be it public charging sockets for your Tesla or Chevy Volt, or H being available at your local gas (sic) station.
The only organisations with enough power - and money - to enable the promising technologies of the future to flourish is central Gov. As usual, they're doing nothing.
So how about it Pres Obama - ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit, and use them to build nuclear powerstations (no CO2) and a nationwide H and elec infrastruture. Now that would be change I can believe in.
Thats actually Wrong... I'm not a green freak (as can be attested by a number of my posts and the truth that real environmentalists commit suicide to lessen their impact on the planet...) BUT: I'd love a hydrogen vehicle... I don't care about the carbon being released by burning hydrocarbon fuels, etc... (Heck problaby more Carbondioxide released by brewing and drinking of beer...) I think we need a way to be free of the grasp of forign powers (some not so friendly) on our infastructure. My alternative to Hydrogen vehicles would be CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) and even the CNG has home filling units available now. and CNG is something we have plenty of HERE at home (if you're a Non-USA Reader... Pardon the egocentricity of my post.)
Wind and Solar are ok ideas, but they can't be put into my tank...
So I put forward that for national security and protection of our transportation infastructure, that we need to CONTINUE to look for Hydrogen and/or CNG solutions for our transportation needs.
I've told my representative the same, but she replied back with a form letter about how solar is the future, etc... etc.. etc.. Even a solar panel on the roof of my car would probably just run the radio and airconditioning fans...
Just my .02 worth...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Sure it does. Most of the current hydrogen (in its raw form) is generated from hydrocarbons.
Not a typewriter
That's an important point but how come these issues are never brought up in discussions about the inefficiencies of conventional fuel? It takes energy to pump oil out of the ground, ship it to a refinery, distill it into gasoline, and transport the fuel to a gas station. With conventional internal combustion engines you get about 25% efficiency from the time you fill up at the gas station. Fuel cells get over twice that.
that converting chemical energy to heat, then to movement, then to electricity, then to hydrogen, then to electricity, then to movement might not be the be turning out to be such a great idea after all...
Deleted
We have net positive energy right now with hydrocarbons, and it's not because of perpetual motion. It's because the energy we put into it (drilling, transport, etc.) is less than we get out when we burn it. That's because the majority of the energy to make the stuff was already put into it by the sun with some geothermal processes thrown in.
Thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole. You can have net energy production or a decrease in entropy if you're limiting the scale (either in time or space) of your solution.
Not a typewriter
It is not an energy source - it is an energy storage medium, little different than a battery.
The same as fossil fuels. The only "energy source" is the sun, that moves the wind and powers the waves and makes the plants grow and eventually turn into the mush we call petroleum, and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs.
The smart bit is if you manage to find a way to harness a huge amount of a non-portable energy source - like sun in the desert or waves in the ocean - energy that is really available in excess, and use THAT energy to make smaller, PORTABLE forms of energy that lets us move about.
Either way our current society will end when petroleum becomes really scarce. There's no way we can maintain a world where everyone has a car. As you pointed out, the inefficiencies just won't allow it. Trains will be coming back in style in a BIG way, and there will HAVE to be changes to our town planning. History teaches us that probably quite a bit of people will have to die before we accept this as a society though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The "Hydrogen Economy" was partly the result of a stupid book by Jeremy Rifkin. Read it and note how little it says about where the hydrogen comes from. It was promoted by the Bush/Cheney crowd as a means for diverting attention from electric cars.
Using electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, then liquefying the hydrogen, storing it as a liquid, then recombining it in a car (either in an engine or a fuel cell) is incredibly inefficient. The only advantage over batteries is that it looked like it might provide more range. Battery energy density has improved in the last decade, though. Battery cost is still a problem. But none of the hydrogen cars are cheap. Nor do they really have that much range. Arnold's hydrogen-powered Hummer only has a 60-mile range.
BMW actually built about 100 "hydrogen powered" cars. But they mostly run on gasoline; although they can optionally run on hydrogen, that's mostly for PR purposes. The liquid hydrogen tank has a "use it or lose it feature"; the BMW vehicle will evaporate all its hydrogen in about 10-12 days.
It looks like an idea whose time has passed.
ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit
Unless I'm reading into this wrong, you're missing something...
For Obama's plan for the US to be the leader in alternative fuels we're going to need Detroit. He needs an auto industry that he can lay hands on and manipulate. Otherwise he's going to be relying on the goodwill of other auto makers to meet him half way to his goal and that's probably still going to involve subsidies. If these subsidies are going to exist either way I'd much rather have them here than abroad. By using resources in the US he will have some say and legislation will give him a hand to work with these assets.
We need to draw a line between the oil industry and the auto industry. As long as we treat them as the same we're never going to rise above the muck that keeps alternative fuels beached. It's a hard pill to swallow but it's still there regardless of our outlook on all of it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I got all of those by doing a search here on /. Those are just some of the top ones too. These methods are to new to have become a fees-able opportunity so far; however, given a few years and another few gasoline panics (we all know they're coming), and they'll probably come around to being more standardized.
Neither, it takes more energy to make the hydrogen then you can get from it, and it is almost impossible to store...
Hydrogen is just a distraction, not a viable source of... well... anything really...
If hydrogen was so great, we would be all using it already, you can hose it directly into an IC engine and it would run with almost no modification.
The problem with hydrogen has been, and always will be 2 things.
1. Very difficult to produce, it takes a lot of energy, in the form of electricity. (Note: The concept of fuel cells is flawed inherently, because there is no way you can get more electricity out of the hydrogen then you put in to the water to make the hydrogen in the first place. Law of thermodynamics. I propose, we take that energy and store it in... say, batteries to power cars directly... There is no way that is less efficient then going from electricity to hydrogen to electricity.)
2. Very difficult to store. Needs to be kept under extreme pressure, and in some cases needs to be cooled.
Exclellent movie, well worth watching. Really makes you want to see the big three go under rather then receive another big subsidy.
Specifically, from Natural Gas. Which mostly comes from Oil Wells. Which is what XOM is in in the business of finding and exploiting.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I assume you're rejecting the solution presently used by the fossil fuel industry, which is just to dump it directly into the environment at the point of generation, right?
'cause if that's on the table, well, problem solved.
But if you, quite reasonably, reject this solution then it shouldn't be permissible for the fossil fuel industry either. So comparing apples to apples we see that nuclear power is much better off.
--MarkusQ
Actually, in terms of energy density per kg or per $, batteries are much, much worse than hydrogen. A typical 11V 6000 mAh laptop battery costs about $100 and holds 0.066 kWh of electricity (237,600 joules). Figure electricity costs $0.11 per kWh (average residential price for the U.S.) and your $120 battery is carry 0.726 cents worth of electricity - that's right, you pay a hundred dollars for your laptop battery to carry around less than a penny's worth of electricity. If you use it for 500 cycles (which is the typical life of a Li-ion battery pack), it's carried a whopping $3.63 worth of electricity in its lifetime.
Otherwise I don't disagree with anything specific you say. However, you're making the mistake of thinking that this is about making the cheapest fuel/battery possible. It's not. It's about making an energy storage medium which is a combination of cheap, lightweight, doesn't take much space, is safe, and doesn't destroy the world we live in. The best solution doesn't have to be the best in all those categories, heck it doesn't even have to be the best in any of those categories. The fuel/battery with the best mix will end up the winner. It can be sub-optimal in one or many of the categories as long as the combination is best. That's why petroleum is so ubiquitous - it fails miserably in the environmental category, but is or is near the best in all the others. Current electric vehicles can travel more than twice as far per dollar of energy as ICE vehicles, but the ICE still dominates because of its superior performance in the other factors.
Oh, please. Talk about selective data and card stacking.
1. $ per joule don't make any sense in this discussion. $100 per battery - sure - for retail!
2. right now eestor and others are developing ultracapacitors that have 3x the energy density of the best LIon batteres, and have many orders of magnitude more charging rounds than batteries, AND are cheaper to build AND they charge Really Really Fast. They will be expensive at first, but industrialism knows how to fix that through production.
3. The amount of energy per dollar per kg in gasoline blows all of them away. But gas is going away, so it doesn't matter.
I'm not worried about "cheapest" I'm more concerned about simple FACTS OF PHYSICS that people don't seem to understand too often or selectively forget when they talk about hydrogen.
Hydrogen is a BAD IDEA as a fuel. It is better left in water.
The other problem w/ICE vehicles is What Are You Going to Drive Them On? Peak Oil == Peak Asphalt. You can build your spiffy vehicles running on fucking pixie dust - if the roads are reduced to muck in the Springtime and frozen ruts in the winter, your aerodynamic cruiser car with its 4 cm clearance is going to stay in the garage...forever.
There's a lot more to the energy debate than substituting fuels - our entire way of life has been centred and modelled on a specific energy arrangement and density provided by fossil fuels. Without them, our civilisation itself is going to have to change, radically.
We've done it before. If you were born in 1850 and died in 1940 - think about it...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Kendall is apparently one of the few people who can analyze chemical energy storage systems rationally; the sorry truth is that hydrogen GAS - its default phase at the surface of this planet - is one of the least energy-dense materials we have. It's complete lunacy to think it can ever be EFFICIENTLY used as a fuel or source of stored energy.
What Kendall said of the "hydrogen economy" is also sadly true of virtually every other form of stored chemical energy we have or can envision: it takes more energy to create the stored form than can be recovered later as useful work. That is just my own restatement of what Kendall said. This is true of petroleum (though Mother Nature paid down the energy cost for us over millions of years), biodiesel, hydrogen as a fuel, batteries, and all the rest. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal generation are different, since they are not STORED chemical forms of energy, though even they are heavily dependent upon at least one form in order to be fully useful (to modern human society).
From where does the energy come to create the stored chemical fuels in the first place? We might possibly use solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal systems, but if the creation is significantly dependent upon the use of the very fuels created then it's a losing game of slow energy starvation.
If that's going to be the case, then we'd best just start getting comfy with having and using a LOT less energy than we do now: no more street lights, no neon signs, no more endless numbers of "wall warts" sipping power 24/7, no stadiums lit up bright as day in the dead of night, no more computer screens running screensavers every idle minute, no more "security" lights appeasing fears, no more giant metal birds shooting across the sky... and no more two hour commutes in Lincoln Navigators or Hummers.
I've been suggesting for some time that the "petroleum age" has been an energy anomaly, and one that we have not exploited wisely; we still don't have a sustainable presence in space or on another planet, for instance. Once the petroleum runs truly scarce, we will no longer even have the means to establish that sustainable presence; the heavy industry necessary to accomplish it is utterly dependent upon limitless supplies of petroleum.
Wanna know the real reason why we haven't been visited by ET? Poor little ET's species wasn't any more disciplined than we have been, they had their own Peak Oil event on their planet, and got trapped on their little rock for lack of energy to finish the exodus.