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Liquid Sponges Extract Hydrogen From Water
New submitter gaelfx writes: Researchers at Glasglow University have an interesting method for separating the hydrogen out of water: Liquid Sponges. Most methods of extracting the hydrogen involve some form electrolysis, but these generally require some pretty expensive materials. The researchers claim that they can accomplish this using less electricity, cheaper materials and 30 times faster to boot. With both Honda and Toyota promising hydrogen fuel cell cars in Japan within the next few years (other manufacturers must be considering it as well, if not as publicly), does this spell a new future for transportation technology?
Call me a cynic, but wouldn't nature of done this long ago as a primary source of energy for oceanic life? Take Hydrogen and combine with oxygen. Lots-o-energy with a simple path of ingestion. It's like, inhaling food!
Life is not for the lazy.
Or is it the comparably low demand for hydrogen, due to its dangerous and/or inconvenient differing characteristics with hydrocarbons?
I mean, either way, it's good news, but in one case it's opening a possible revolution, and in the other it's just nice to have.
You still need very pure water or you poison the process. Where's that water coming from? How do you collect the gaseous hydrogen? You still need to liquify it and all the emrittlement and cryogenic issues are still there.
Even if hydrogen gas is free, it makes no sense as an energy carrier for cars.
"Most methods of extracting the hydrogen involve some form electrolysis, but these generally require some pretty expensive materials"
You can build your own Hydrogen fuel cell (which separates hydrogen from H2O) fairly cheaply and simply, or purchase pre-built units starting at around $100.00. You can even build one to augment the fuel in your standard gasoline combustion engine vehicle to increase your MPG.
Just food for thought.
This ignores the big problem of hydrogen, leakage. Currently about 10% to 20% of all hydrogen produced is lost to leakage. This has serious environmental ramifications. Hydrogen leakage will cause bigger and longer lasting holes in the ozone layer. By making hydrogen production cheaper and easier it just makes the leakage problem worse. http://www.nature.com/news/200...
I don't want to do a sig now
The process uses a liquid that allows the hydrogen to be locked up in a liquid-based inorganic fuel. By using a liquid sponge known as a redox mediator that can soak up electrons and acid we’ve been able to create a system where hydrogen can be produced in a separate chamber without any additional energy input after the electrolysis of water takes place.
I am interpreting your first question as "Is the expense of electrolysis the main inhibitor of a hydrogen-fuel economy?" I believe the answer is "sorta, but not really." The cheapest way to get hydrogen is from natural gas. The problem is that the whole reason to move to a hydrogen economy is to become carbon-neutral. If you use natural gas mines, you defeated the purpose. So to that point, a cheaper form of electrolysis might help.
Your second question is really a chicken-vs-egg question. There's low demand, because there aren't hydrogen-powered vehicles. But that is because it is difficult to store the hydrogen with sufficient density to make a car that can travel a long-enough distance. Compressing it takes time, wastes energy, and makes the tanks heavy and expensive. The next generation of attempts stores the hydrogen chemically. But bear in mind that there is already a really really good way to store hydrogen chemically. In the US, we call it "gasoline" and it is great because all you have to do is burn it, and it releases the energy from the hydrogen-carbon bond! Awesome! Perfect! Right? Ooops, that darned carbon-neutral thing again...
I've found this difficult to understand what has been accomplished, and I found this other summary helpful. From sciencemag.org:
Scheduling hydrogen release from water
Photosynthesis splits water to provide protons and electrons for plant growth; oxygen is a by-product. When chemists split water, they're also more interested in making fuel, and the simplest product is hydrogen (a combination of protons and electrons). One challenge is keeping the reactive hydrogen and oxygen product streams separate. Rausch et al. present a scheme that captures the protons and electrons in a molecular cluster of silico-tungstic acid. Later, they expose the cluster to platinum, coaxing the acid into releasing hydrogen. Eliminating the mixing risk increases the potential for household use.
This appears to be a power-efficient process that on the back end produces a bluish liquid which contains a high quantity of hydrogen. When this liquid is combined with a metallic catalyst it then releases the hydrogen at normal atmospheric pressure/temperature without requiring any further electricity.
I wonder if the bluish liquid could serve as a hydrogen storage mechanism that is both easily transportable and transferable between containers such as liquid fuels today? Does production scale to industrial quantities? Is it non-toxic and non-explosive (while kept away from a catalyst)? Lots of questions not touched on in the articles.
However, for hydrogen vehicles, the ability to transfer useful quantities of hydrogen fuel at room-temperature liquid and normal pressure could be a real boon. Let's hope this provides a possible path to practical hydrogen vehicles.
This discovery allows the hydrogen to be stored and created at regular atmospheric pressure, since it is stored as a liquid acid. So at least during storage and production, I think this discovery solves that.
There are a few changes that jump out at me as being significant:
fairly sure Iceland maintains a fleet of Hydrogen fueled vehicles, and they're just a stone's throw from Scotland.
The question is: what is a reasonable distance? most EV have that question too.
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Any form of gas has that problem. Methane and gas from wells also have a high leakage rate.
Doesn't mean we don't use LNG or methane in fuel cells, though.
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If this is used to create hydrogen from water, the reactants with Oxygen will be Dihydrogen Monoxide pollution. And I, a red blodded Amerikan who is informed by our media, do not like this polution!
I DEMAD that my water is uncontaminated by hydrogen byproducts!
What a misleading item, both the /-dot headline and the actual articles.
This is just another attempt to find a way to store hydrogen produced by good old electrolysis, Plus you "can't get it back" unless you use another catalyst to get it released from your Blue liquid.
Wonder how awkward the liquid is to handle and how expensive it and the extra catalyst are? Seems like a liquid version of the metal sponge methods of storing hydrogen.
This makes one wonder how bad our higher level education system has gotten. :-[
Well the argument that it is better for the environment never really holds much.
So to get people to switch we need the following.
1. Cheaper then our current sources of energy. A little cheaper we can get some traction, a lot cheaper we will get good movement.
2. Economics 101 low demand means low price. The issue is low supply (in terms of it being packaged) that is keeping its price high. Making a technology to do this cheaper will help improve supply because people can produce Hydrogen and make money off of it.
3. Danger isn't as big of an issue as people think. Granted the fuel in our cars is safer then hydrogen. But good safety measures in place there shouldn't be that big of a deal.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It takes more power to separate hydrogen and oxygen from water than you get when you burn it..
Or in even simpler terms
Note that platinum is still required, but it works 30 times more efficiently. Also the pressure needed is much lower.
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This is interesting because 3M has a substrate barrier that combines hydrogen and oxygen in order to create a voltage without any need for combustion. Hopefully these two companies get along and the 3M barrier is deemed 'spongeworthy' because if you paired the two of these up in a vehicle then you would just need to add a little water since the 3M barrier's byproduct is water. You could basically have closed circuit electrical production.
Why is it always "econ 101" with you guys? Reducing things to the basics is a great way to engage in reductionistic dismissal of reality. Simple economic policy to place externality costs onto energy producers could radically change what defines "the cheapest".
Si. OH WOW
The next generation of attempts stores the hydrogen chemically.
I'm not sure if it qualifies as "the next generation" when it has been studied since well before my now-adult children were born.
Skepticism with respect to hydrogen exists in part because some of us have heard this tune before. Storage of hydrogen in metal sponges is nothing new, and they have some very nice theoretical properties, including reasonable volumetric energy density, which is a big problem for hydrogen.
Getting up to 1/5 the volumetric density of fossil fuels--which is the likely upper limit--would make hydrogen cars more than competitive with electric vehicles. But so far no one has managed that, despite continuous work on the problem.
For some reason TFA doesn't say anything about the long history of storing hydrogen in metal sponges, or make clear what makes this one different, although one can guess that as a liquid there are likely metal particles in suspension and that gives a huge surface area advantage.
It's almost as if the articles were written by junior staff members with no actual knowledge of hydrogen storage technology, but since we live in a "knowledge based economy" where STEM skills are in incredibly high demand there is no way reputable news organizations like the BBC would do anything like that, right?
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
True, but Hydrogen is especially problematic in this regard because it is too light for earth's gravity to hold it in, and any hydrogen that doesn't recombine with oxygen in the atmosphere to form water on its way upward will just escape into outer space. In a nutshell, if we were to actually do this at large scales, we would eventually run out of water.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Not really. Natural gas is methane - CH4. It's about 35-85x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. If you're converting methane to hydrogen, then converting that to CO2, you're not reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but you're still helping reduce the greenhouse effect.
All this is of course contingent on what would have happened to the methane if you weren't using it as fuel. Methane is primarily a byproduct of oil drilling. Until recently energy prices were low enough that it wasn't cost-effective to capture it, so oil companies just burned it as it came up the wells (those fires you see on top of long poles at oil fields). So since it was going to be converted to CO2 anyway, converting it to hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is actually carbon neutral. If oil production drops enough that we need to drill for methane specifically to keep up production, then it starts being carbon positive.
Steven Chu: I think, well, among some people it hasnâ(TM)t really shifted. I think there was great enthusiasm in some quarters, but I always was somewhat skeptical of it because, right now, the way we get hydrogen primarily is from reforming [natural] gas. Thatâ(TM)s not an ideal source of hydrogen. Youâ(TM)re giving away some of the energy content of natural gas, which is a very valuable fuel. So thatâ(TM)s one problem. The other problem is, if itâ(TM)s for transportation, we donâ(TM)t have a good storage mechanism yet. Compressed hydrogen is the best mechanism [but it requires] a large volume. We havenâ(TM)t figured out how to store it with high density. What else? The fuel cells arenâ(TM)t there yet, and the distribution infrastructure isnâ(TM)t there yet. So you have four things that have to happen all at once. And so it always looked like it was going to be [a technology for] the distant future. In order to get significant deployment, you need four significant technological breakthroughs. That makes it unlikely.
⦠If you need four miracles, thatâ(TM)s unlikely: saints only need three miracles.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
We're roughly on the 2nd' generation of car battery technology. Advances are being made in labs seemingly at a weekly bases, with reports of 2-3x power storage, 10 times charge speed etc etc.
Here is just 1 example of literally dozens: http://www.gizmag.com/dual-carbon-fast-charging-battery/32121/
Most people won't want a Leaf that has a 80 mile range. Will they buy one with a 240 mile range with a lower cost? One that when you drive it into your garage it recharges over wireless (which the tech is already here)?
Now imagine one with a 400 mile range in the next in line generation of battery. It's already being talked about.
And any of these vehicles could still have a gas engine for range extension. There are Volt owners today who every year have to run their gas on purpose so the gas doesn't break down.
Still think hydrogen is the future?
This ignores the big problem of hydrogen, leakage. Currently about 10% to 20% of all hydrogen produced is lost to leakage. This has serious environmental ramifications. Hydrogen leakage will cause bigger and longer lasting holes in the ozone layer. By making hydrogen production cheaper and easier it just makes the leakage problem worse. http://www.nature.com/news/200...
Your own article says "Although its environmental benefits would still far outweigh any drawbacks.", so maybe you're overreacting a bit.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
...says the guy dismissing my arguments about purity by reducing things to tolerances.
You really are a dank rectal smear on the underwear of the internet, aren't you?
Most fish regulate their buoyancy using air-bubbles inside their bodies. Water is not air, but for a precedent it would do because Archimedes' law applies to gases and liquids equally...
And even in the air — the way plants like dandelions spread their seed... Well, they aren't lighter than the surrounding air of the same volume, but they are light enough to not require any power for flight.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seems to me you are arguing FOR econ 101, when you think you're arguing against it.
To be able to do a "real" supply vs. demand comparison, you DO need all costs involved included.
What I'm saying is that these guys go "Supply/demand the end" without consider how those factors are considered. It's far too simplistic and it's like the a sphere of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum is to physics, in that it helps you understand the concepts, but applying it so simplistically is going to get you bad results.
A stone's throw.... for a volcano.... maybe.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
This is not the thread to engage me this point. Go back to the one where you made the stupid simplistic statement that didn't adequately reflect reality, and defend what you actually said.
Yeah, right around the time that the sun is boiling our water anyway.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
> does this spell a new future for transportation technology?
Nope, it spells a future of $4 a gallon for water.
To free hydrogen from water, you need energy, not low quality energy like heat but high quality energy in the form of electricity. So there is no special advantage there. You still go through hydrolysis. But instead of releasing hydrogen as a gas, you dissolve it in this oxide solvent. The liquid can be stored at room temp and pressure without the danger of leaks, fire or explosion. When you want hydrogen, you pour it over catalysts and the gas is released. So it can serve as energy storage medium. Since the efficiency of { electricity --> hydrogen --> electricity } is much higher than { renewable energy --> molten salt --> heat --> electricity } it could be useful.
I am sure some click baiting writer jazzed up the headline with a totally irrelevant comparison 30 times faster. The catalyst releases hydrogen from the solution 30 times faster than electrolysis. But it is electrolysis that produces the solution in the first place.
You need an energy source. You need electricity. It is, at best, a good energy storage solution. Modest improvement. Nothing to sneeze at, most advances come by small increments. But still ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
people should understand that re: 'hydrogen powered cars' and equipment, if the source of the hydrogen is electrolysis powered by electricity which is ITSELF sourced from traditional coal and natgas power plants, then the environmental impact is not at all the rosy scenario people wish it would be. the promise of a hydrogen economy (vis a vis being environmentally clean) is to take the green impact all the way to the sourcing of the hydrogen production stage.
the real problem with renewable energies (like solar, wind, geothermal) is that they are very dependent on being produced in the right geographic region, and energy is notoriously difficult to transfer long distances efficiently. You can't realistically expect to run a solar plant in a region that gets little sunlight (while you can build a coal or gas power plant anywhere). Running a solar or wind farm, the best you can hope for is to supply power to a particular region thats nearby, or charge up batteries which loses a LOT of energy in the transfer AND the physical transport of the (relatively heavy) batteries themselves.
hydrogen offers the promise of being a 'better battery' so to speak -hydrogen is compressible and relatively light to transport while maintaining it's energetic potential. if the efficiency of the electrolytic process can be improved as the article states (and in such a way as to compete with fossil fuels for transport)then solar and wind farms can power electrolytic processes to produce fuel that can be stored and shipped, for a truly carbon neutral impact.
If you are worried about running out of water by doing this on large scale industrial process then you have far too few concerns in your life. Seriously we have use about 1 trillion barrels of oil in all of human existence, or about 55 trillion gallons. Assuming that all 1 trillion barrels of oil were used in the last century and if we used water at the same rate it would take somewhere around 5000 years to completely drain Lake Superior and by volume there are bigger lakes and on top of that there is still the oceans which I gather are rising so it might solve that problem as well.
Time to offend someone
Remember, you can't bypass thermodynamics. Water is the end-product of burning hydrogen. So any energy released when you convert hydrogen to water, is also energy you must put back to convert water back into hydrogen. You can't get something for nothing. Otherwise you create a perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen for energy, convert the water back into hydrogen, then burn the hydrogen again for more energy, repeat.
Electrolysis is just a way of putting that energy back into water to convert it into hydrogen. It's about 33% efficient, though I read that they've been able to get the efficiency up to 67% in the lab. In that respect, hydrogen generated by electrolysis is just a battery. You're storing the energy from the electricity by converting water to hydrogen. Then releasing that energy when you convert the hydrogen back into water.
A stone's throw.... for a volcano.... maybe.
I specified the delivery, not the mechanism.
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Seriously we have use about 1 trillion barrels of oil in all of human existence, or about 55 trillion gallons.
55 gallons per barrel? What strange barrels you use.
The question is: what is a reasonable distance? most EV have that question too.
I would say a "reasonable distance" would cover the daily needs of 90% of the general public. I accept that my needs are atypical, thus I will have to wait for an EV that meets my needs.
All those small other manufacturers may be either ignoring it or doing secret research projects the depths of their garages.
Or the article simply ignored the one company which has been quite publicly showing off a hydrogen car for the past 7 years. The BMW Hydrogen 7
It's not perfect but improves current process so leakage is not a main concern (yet).
You must be joking about the effect on ozone layers?
Most hydrogen should bind with oxygen in atmosphere and generate water, you know, as in rain of water..
Well, American barrels are 55 gallons. Are metric barrels a different size? I didn't even know there were such things as metric barrels!
Small hydrogen from water units have been common for decades to power jewelers torches. In industry much larger gear exists to provide fuel for welding and it all works great. Yes, electricity is consumed in liberating the hydrogen but so what. If that electricity comes from solar, wind or tidal generation all the transaction involves is using electricity that would be wasted to generate hydrogen. Obviously that same hydrogen could be used to power turbines at night or on windless days. Hydrogen will play a big role in the Future Shock that is already beginning to slap people right in the face. Imagine big oil and coal and what could happen to investment funds when they collapse. How many mutual funds would crash if oil, gas and coal stocks imploded and how well would pension and retirement funds survive? Yet our political system is not in tune with these escalating breakthroughs in technology at all. How would the economies of the Arab states, Russia and others survive if oil and coal became effectively worthless? Why is it that people see future shock as a pie in the sky notion when it is already creating some chaos? Will real leaders please step forward!
The gas bag itself was flammable; it wouldn't have mattered what gas was in it, when it disintegrated
In particular: The paint. It contained a mix of powdered aluminum and iron oxide pigments, in sufficient concentration to maintain a redox reaction.
You and I know this mixture as "thermite". It's really hard to get the reaction started - but an electric discharge can do it. (They tried to tether it with an electrical storm approaching. That would make one hell of a spark when the charged envelope comes near to connecting to the grounded mast - which is about when the fire started.) Once it's started, the reaction is essentially impossible to extinguish. The aluminum steals the oxygen from the iron oxide. The heats of formation of the two oxides differ so much that the energy released leaves the resulting elemental iron as an orange-glowing liquid and the aluminum oxide incandescent white-hot.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
someone needs to engineer a conversion unit that is safe from accidents. This process relies upon a controlled release of hydrogen from the solvent by a careful (and small) reaction with a catalyst. If the catalyst component were suddenly submerged in the liquid solvent (such as might happen if a car bumper forced the component through a containment wall), there would be an uncontrolled release of hydrogen that would be accelerated from any heat resulting from combustion of that hydrogen.
Gasoline doesn't combust if a spark plug is dropped in...
Nice PR spin. Do you work for big oil, by chance?
Seriously though you should consider running for public office. You just argued that two wrongs equals a right, and you did it with a straight face.
What is done with the carbon when the methane (CH4) is converted to hydrogen, can it be captured and stored?
Because using the hydrogen itself wouldn't cause CO2 - there is no C or O in pure H.
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PS it is 100% not carbon neutral that logic is utterly fallacious.
"So since it was going to be converted to CO2 anyway, converting it to hydrogen to be used in fuel cells is actually carbon neutral."
Either way - NOT carbon neutral.
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This could be the answer to rising sea levels. Just use these sponges to convert it into hydrogen.