Hydrogen Stored in Safe High Density Pellets 889
sunbeam60 writes "A group of scientists are going to present their breakthrough in hydrogen storage this Wednesday. In contrast to previous storage mechanisms, this method binds hydrogen to a pellet which is completely safe to handle at room temperature. While bound in this medium no hydrogen loss occurs, enabling hydrogen to be stored cheaply for indefinite periods. When needed, the extraction of hydrogen is relatively simple. The pellets exceed all criteria set by the US Department of Energy for 2015, enabling a car to drive more than 500 km on a 50 L tank (13 MJ/l)"
How does it come out? (Score:4, Insightful)
Extraction? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
You should be an editor (Score:1, Insightful)
And you can obviously mash a button on the screen, so you're more than qualified.
Rob, hire this guy and others like him to make your site a non-joke.
Well, wait until Wednesday's report (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as neither the article nor the summary give any specifics, why is a press release being passed along as an article?
Why not wait until they've presented their findings, and then submit an article with more information?
Whoever submitted this article is probably interested enough in the subject to search for a better article come Thursday or Friday -- and if it gets on
Re:Other measurements (Score:5, Insightful)
500 km is about 310 miles.
50 liters is about 13 US gallons.
This is comparable to many US sedans. The question is whether the cost of hydrogen processing will be more or less expensive than the cost of refining oil.
I need information (Score:5, Insightful)
1) How do they get the hydrogen back out? Do they crush the pellets ( destroying them ), do they heat them, etc.
2) Are the pellets re-usable? Or do you have to get new ones? And if they *aren't* re-usable, can the carrier material be re-cycled into new pellets?
My concerns would be that if the material isn't re-usable/re-cyclable we'd end up with vast landfills full of crushed or otherwise useless carrier material, in which case this is hardly a boon.
On the other hand, if it's recyclable, I can see the oil companies being very happy with this, since you could go to a hydrogen station and dump your used pellets and "refill" with a dump of charged pellets. The station would send the used pellets to a recharging or recycling facility. I say "oil companies" because they've already got quite an infrastucture, and would probably be willing to make the investment into such facilities, since it would maintain their quasi-monopoly on automotive energy distribution.
Still, the appeal of safe hydrogen storage is great.
Re:Using Hydrogen to power your car (Score:3, Insightful)
I dont think that's an issue, what happens if your drink petrol or car oil or battery acid... don't expect it to be safe to eat (if is is, that's a bonus, but not really going to save anyones life...)
Why would a "gas station" be needed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:interesting (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not very efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't make sense to directly compare gasoline and plastic pellets on a volume basis to evaluate efficiency. The MPG number is only useful to show that the size of the fuel tank is in the same ballpark as those current cars, making it more feasible than bulky storage methods such as compressed gaseous hydrogen.
To evaluate efficiency, you need to measure the miles driven per unit of energy put into the hydrogen production facility.
Re:What about the economics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, yes. Sort of like VOIP will never happen because the old-school phone companies won't like it. Or DVD players are just a fad, because theater owners don't like them. Etc.
I'm always astounded by the imaginary power that people assign to particular industries, even as we watch the market tap-dance right around them, to the tune of that old favorite, demand.
Energy companies distribute energy in ways that are useful to the people who are willing to pay for it. If there is anything like a useful price point for technology such as this (though I think it will require a huge number of nuclear power plants to provide enough juice to pull that much hydrogen out of enough water to replace oil, per se), then companies will be there to provide that service. Whether its BP, or Exxon, or whether it's Uncle Jimmy's Hydrogen Shoppes, it'll happen. If there's fundamentally no way to make the math work, then it won't work.
Otherwise, saying that the (currently, mostly) oil companies are going to use their secret cabal super powers to stop this sort of thing is like saying that Detroit and Big Oil aren't going to let hybrid cars find a way to the market (a commonly enough heard argument, which plainly turns out to be nonsense).
Re:Not very efficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever used so-called "bio diesel" (RME) instead of mineral-oil based diesel? Spotted a difference in consumption and gave a thought where that difference originated from?
Btw, hydrogen production is easy. We have plenty of deserts on this planet with hot sunny days, which are just perfect for all-solar powered hydrogen fabs. Just pump (even used) water there.
The problems were rather storage and transport of H2, which just doesn't like to be kept imprisoned and leaked out of the bottle. If that pellet stuff is working as advertised, that problem is solved.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, even if we are getting hydrogen by using energy created at centralized coal processing plants we are still creating less polution then everyone running gas. And with distributed power generation on the rise, people could be creating their own hydrogen by using excess power generated by solar roofing during the day.
-Rick
Re:Not very efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Other measurements (Score:4, Insightful)
The oil companies will buy the rest of the world. Oil prices raised a dollar because oil companies refuse to stop gouging. If they started making a reasonable return instead of the ass raping they give now, gasoline would be at a more reasonable price.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear power is a short-term solution. It's pretty clean, nuclear reactors are safe (at least far safer than gasoline refineries; if you live on the southeast side of Houston, you know what I mean.) We'll eventually figure out how to make fusion work, I think it's only a matter of time. But the nuclear/hydrogen combo is pretty clean compared to the double whammy of coal/gasoline. And soon to be much cheaper in comparison.
Re:Why would a "gas station" be needed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Usually I need to refil my vehicle while I am on may way to some destination. I don't use my car to drive to the local hardware store so I can buy pellets to put into my car in the garage.
I would find it really cumbersome to leave the highway, find a grocery or hardware store, park, get my bag of pellets, wait some time in the que at the checkout, put the pellets in my car and drive back to the highway, just to fill up my car with some fuel.
Nyh
Re:What about the economics? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not very efficient (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare that to a normal gasoline car that does, say, 7 l/100 km. Gasoline having an energy density of about 45 MJ/l this works out to 3.15 MJ/km.
That is, the hypothesis is that the hydrogen car would be 2.4 times as efficient as the current gasoline car.
The utopianists don't like clean and cheap energy (Score:3, Insightful)
These folks are utopianists. They harbor a social agenda to force you to live your life on their terms. They see the rising costs and pollution from fossile fuels as a lever for gaining the control they need to remake society against most people's free will. They want to do things like move everyone into locally dense housing. Nobody will have their own free standing home and nobody will have the freedom to choose to drive their own car, on their own terms, whenever and wherever they like.
If this sounds like a nightmare to you then pray for clean and cheap alternative energy sources.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Insightful)
The figures I have to work with are:
50% conversion efficiency of fuel energy to electricity in large power plant.
66% conversion efficiency of electrolysis to make hydrogen.
66% conversion efficiency of making electricity in fuel cell.
95% conversion efficiency of electricity to motive power.
35% conversion efficiency of internal combustion to motive power.
SO: Total efficiency of a direct-burning fossil-fuel car is 35%
Total efficiency of fuel cell car is computed as 50% x 66% x 66% x 95%, or about 21%
Total efficiency of a hydrogen internal combustion car is 50% x 66% x 35% or about 12%.
Re:Why would a "gas station" be needed? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Insightful)
To make hydrogen meaningful, you need a way to generate large quantities of it cheaply, which basically means using nuclear power as your primary means of generating electricity. I mean, sure, you could get it by cracking hydrocarbons, but since your goal is to get away from needing hydrocarbons, that doesn't help much. And if you use nuclear power as your primary means of generating electricity, you can make enough hydrogen that 12% efficiency from an IC engine is just fine.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:4, Insightful)
CV
Re:My concerns with hydrogen... (Score:3, Insightful)
Second of all, and more obviously, our best options for using hydrogen as a fuel are in the exploitation of surplus energy sources that are _NOT_ derived from fossile fuels. Geothermal, wind, solar, and nuclear are the ones that immediately come to mind in this respect. Some of these are too rare or too inefficient to be seen as having a surplus at the moment, but in all honesty, this is unlikely to be the case forever.
That said, the problem with electrolysing water to produce hydrogen has the nasty effect of taking away the water supply on the planet. I'm fully aware that the hydrogen combusts to produce water vapour and that in theory no mass should be lost, but of course that doesn't necesarrily mean that would actually happen. In particular, there is potential for hydrogen to be lost to the atmosphere without ever combusting into water vapour because of imperfect storage, pumping (connections between two storage containers), or transporting facilities. These amounts may of course be trace amounts relative to the total mass of hydrogen being worked with, but accumulated over the number of potential hydrogen vehicles in the world, it has the potential to be appreciable.
And missing would be (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
The advantage is that the atmosphere can only hold a limited amount. When there's too much of it, it precipitates out of the atmosphere (unlike CO2).
And that precipitate is known as "cloud", which is one of the most efficient reflectors of solar energy on the planet.
Figuring out whether the net effect would cause an increase global warming or lead to a big chill is about like stepping into the middle of the debate about the safety of hydric acid (aka hydrogen monoxide).
Re:How does it come out? (Score:2, Insightful)
Funny, I just made a similar comment [slashdot.org] in another thread. Slashdot nexus
The question in my mind is, can we simply bypass the 'fossilization" requirement.
Isn't that basically the concept of biodiesel?
Re:How does it come out? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:MPG is a meaningless stat (Score:3, Insightful)
Gas MPG/Horsepower has changed a lot since the 70's. A new Corvette has 400 HP and gets about 18 mpg/28 mpg (city/highway).
It also depends on the type of engine in the car. If you have a naturally aspirated engine and you make it capable of producing more power, your gas mileage usually decreases a bit since you have to change the displacement/compression ratio/cam timing/etc, and it operates with that configuration all the time, it doesn't change (well the cam timing does nowadays).
However if you have a turbocharged car, making the engine capable of producing more power won't decrease the gas mileage. I have a 300ZX Twin Turbo that had 300 hp and got about 22 mpg (highway) when it was stock. After I increased the boost from 9.5 to 15 psi, I have about 400 hp and 450 lbs of torque. My gas milage stayed the same (during normal driving). That's because I didn't change the engine configuration, during normal driving, the engine doesn't operate any differently than it did before. While the wastegates on the turbochargers will now enable them to produce 15 psi of boost compared to 9.5 psi before, they aren't going to make that much unless I'm flooring it.
Now when I'm racing it, it will burn gas faster than it did before, since the potential for increased airflow increases the potential for fuel burn, and consequently potential for horsepower.
Basically, your engine will burn fuel at a rate that's proportional to the amount of horsepower it is producing at the moment. A 400 HP engine isn't always producing 400 hp... it's just capable of doing so.
This is still 3 times less than gasoline. (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't forget to add (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only advantage to electric vehicles is that they open up the possiblity of using alternate enery sources, such as Solar and nuclear power, which currently would not allow you to mount the original power plant on the car itself.
You don't gain any efficiency at all. Not everybody is aware of that fact.
Re:What's that in American? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not all power plants use oil/coal/fossil fuel. Hydroelectricity, wind power, solar power, nuclear power... the whole point of all this is to allow *other* sources of power into a car.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, since hydrogen gas has such a small molecule, unless it's chemically bonded to something, it tends to leak through just about every kind of substance that can be used to contain it.
If you come up with a safe, cheap way of storing hydrogen at the energy-densities of existing fuels, then you have found the Holy Grail of energy distribution.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's a bit untrue.
Electric vehicles also allow far more flexible designs than internal combustion. Like having the electric motors in the wheels - you now have zero energy loss from the powertrain and transmission (because there are none).
And the energy conversion process in the car (chemical to electrical to torque) makes the electric car a more efficient energy conversion device than an internal combustion vehicle.
It almost doesn't matter how the energy got onboard the car in the first place. But yes, you're right - electric vehicles do allow for lots of interesting, renewable and clean alternative energy sources - far better options than digging up oil and making gasoline.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think one centralized fossil fuel powered turbine plant, operating with a huge economy of scale, with the latest efficiency technology and pollution scrubbers, running at one speed all the time, is more efficient than thousands of poorly-maintained piston engines, purchased more for their power than their efficiency, constantly being started and stopped?
The efficiency gain could be significant, even if electric cars were powered solely by fossil fuel-generated electricity. Furthermore, the pollution could be significantly reduced, and located where it is not as much of a problem (away from city centers).
And another huge advantage is that the energy source can be *changed* at any time, on a moment's notice, simply by switching power plants. We would no longer be dependent on any single energy source to the extent we are on oil today.
Re:The utopianists (Score:3, Insightful)
"Similarly, these utopians believe that if your car will go at 100 mph, it is good and necessary to do so. They hate all speed limits and traffic cops."
Idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
How much do those batterys weigh? (much more then the difference between a four banger and an eight)
You're going to use regenerative braking for a panic stop? (they still need regular brakes)
The main point you miss is although central generation is more efficent you incur new losses (battery inefficencys, electric line loses etc). Each of which multiply.
You can put low rolling resistance tires on any car. The reason nobody does is they are as hard as rocks hence give an awfull ride.
But hybrid cars make hippy chicks puddle like nothing else these days. Who can put a value on that.