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New Catalyst Allows Cheaper Hydrogen Production
First time accepted submitter CanadianRealist writes "Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is very inefficient without the use of a catalyst. Unfortunately catalysts are currently made of crystals containing rare, expensive toxic metals such as ruthenium and iridium. Two chemists from the University of Calgary have invented a process to make a catalyst using relatively non-toxic metal compounds such as iron oxide, for 1/1000 the cost of currently used catalysts.
It is suggested this would make it more feasible to use electrolysis of water to create hydrogen as a method of storing energy from variable green power sources such as wind and solar."
There may be some benefit to lowering the cost of electrolysis, but the real problem is still the cost of fuel cells, or the inefficiency of producing power from the hydrogen through conventional means.
You never know. If the catalysts are relatively cheap, instead of trucking or piping hydrogen to stations to fill up people's cars, you could generate the hydrogen from water and electricity on site. That might be safer because you may not have to store a large amount of hydrogen and the infrastructure is already there (the water and electricity I mean). Of course, that does not solve the storage problem in cars nor the fact that water and electricity aren't free, nor the relatively low efficiency of using hydrogen as a fuel...
Hydrogen is a very poor storage for energy. It takes a lot of energy to get a small amount of hydrogen and takes a lot of hydrogen just to store a small amount of energy. We are better off with the current system of pumping water up a hill than with anything hydrogen can give us. You need a more energy dense fuel to compete, and using the least dense thing in the universe is the dumbest idea. Pair that with the fact that hydrogen is an atomic whore and binds strongly to everything. Making it that more difficult to get it all by itself.
Cheap hydrogen? This lad here only settles for premium. Not only are the atoms more shiny but all my my friends use it and I really want to be part of the in crowd.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Basically the same catalysts have been reported previously. In this new paper, they don't bother to highlight the fact that their films are extremely thick, so of course they get great catalytic activity (though it's an oxide, so the series resistance might just be a problem...)
While we are at it, E=mc^2, all matter has the same energy density. Stop making useless comparisons. If you have a fusion reactor in your phone, my anti-matter+ air battery will beat it. What we care about is usefulness. Hydrogen fuel cells have good energy density for the mass yes, but for the volume the suck.
Yeah... I remember the first time I slashdotted on weed.
I think hydrogen fuel cells are a dead-end technology. Batteries are steadily improving and by the time they're able to solve the fuel cell issues there won't be demand. By then batteries or possibly graphene supercapacitors will have taken over, with much higher efficiency. Lithium batteries are very efficient at storing energy and it's a lot simpler to just use a battery, an inverter and an electric motor than a hydrogen storage system, fuel cell, inverter and electric motor.
They're already able to give cars 150 miles worth of charge in 30 minutes and the batteries will last for many years before they need replacing.
Even with a catylist, cracking water to make hydrogen then storing it will be nowhere near as efficient. The energy density of hydrogen is also fairly low. I believe the future belongs to batteries and all-electric vehicles. I realized this after having acquired an EV of my own, a Tesla model S.
EVs are a different mindset. Each night when I come home I spend about 10 seconds plugging in. In the morning it takes 10 seconds to unplug and I basically have a full tank. Even the current wait at a supercharger is not necessarily time wasted unlike when filling a gasoline car. There is no reason for me to stand next to the car waiting for it to fill up. I can just as easily walk over to a restaraunt and have a nice meal for the price of filling up a tank, or I could surf the web, read E-mail, whatever.
Right now the biggest limitation is there are not enough of these rapid charging stations, but that will change as the infrastructure improves. The other biggest limitation is the cost, but the cost of batteries is steadily declining while the capacity is steadily increasing. The cost of electric motors like what Tesla uses should not be that high, especially since their induction motors do not contain any rare-earth minerals.
-Aaron
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and thinking to myself ... how can be AMD latest drivers be connected to hydrogen production ... my brain is just to preconditioned :)
"I suppose it could lead to a more 'low-tech' way of producing fuel on the Moon, asteroids, or the like."
It's Mars you're thinking of, it has so much of that stuff that you can see the red glow from earth with the naked eye.
We'll find a good use for hydrogen one day. The idea of sunshine + sea water + rust = hydrogen + ??? = portable energy sounds so good though. We just need to solve for ???
Maybe it's not portable though, maybe it's just a temporary store that then takes more sunshine to convert back to electricity.
Not terribly efficient but if the hard components are cheap enough it's really just wasting a little sunshine. Not too bad as a trade off for base load from solar/wind power. It has its uses in any case.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.