Ubiquitous Hydrogen Power Not Getting Any Closer 267
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."
Nobody's interested (Score:2, Insightful)
Now oil prices are falling, bobody's interested. Till the next time.
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Storing energy. And apparently not a very efficient one.
But then again, the first internal combustion engines weren't very efficient either and look where we are now.
Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Inefficiencies of conventional fuel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure you might still need to suck some energy off the grid to create enough hydrogen, but even if the grid is burning fossil fuels to provide energy, it's doing it a HELL of a lot more efficiently than a car does.
The key is to get everyone producing as much as they can at home, and then getting the rest off the grid. Then the grid can be converted to green over a long period of time and it will be seamless.
Re:Thermodynamics? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Insightful)
actually as things go within 5 years it should be possible for even northern latitude homes to produce enough energy to cover 60% of there yearly energy use. Currently in active development between solar and vertical turbine wind generators the ability for roughly 10,000 watts to be generated at the average home. Now all wee need is a method of storage other than batteries, and a convertor that will allow the excess to dump back out onto the grid.(for when your not home anyways)
cutting down the need for home heating oils, and electrical usage will go farther in the short term than electric cars. of course that some storage cell will be good for electric cars too. Cars really don't generate a lot. they have been cleaning up their arse emissions for 15 years.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Gasoline is only 15% efficient. (Score:1, Insightful)
Gasoline is only 15% efficient.
Who Killed the Electric Car (Score:5, Insightful)
Exclellent movie, well worth watching. Really makes you want to see the big three go under rather then receive another big subsidy.
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more accurately called the Franks, Dodd, Reid recession.
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see, ways to make Hydrogen:
1. Use algae to generate it
2. Direct solar conversion of water to hydrogen using photoelectrochemical semiconductor panels.
3. Using high temperatures from a nuclear energy plant to heat and crack water into hydrogen and oxygen
4. Oh yeah! Neanderthal-style electrolysis.
BTM
Re:Yet Again, the obvious requires stating (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nobody's interested (Score:3, Insightful)
Batteries can already store electricity at 90% efficiency.
Electricity -> Battery -> Electricity = 90%
Electricity Hydrogen electrolysis is not very efficient, using fuel cells to create electricity is not very efficient:
Electricity -> Hydrogen -> Electricity = 40%
Hydrogen will only work as a fuel storage mechanism if you have an abundance of very cheap electricity(nearly free).
24 percent.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (Score:2, Insightful)
The volume (and mass) of waste per kilowatt hour of power is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for fossil fuels.
Yes, but nobody's going to die from inhaling an equivalent mass of CO2 versus, say, a radioactive isotope of cesium. And if somebody releases a thousand pounds of CO2 over a populated city, I doubt anyone would notice... A thousand pounds of any radioactive compound and you're talking major ecological disaster. (and yes, everything is radioactive, for those in the peanut gallery... you know what we're talking about here though)
The bulk of nuclear wastes can be cost effectively reprocessed to make more fuel,
The bulk of nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed if and only if the plant was designed with that in mind. Most currently in production aren't breeder plants because they can be used for weapons programs. To say it in laymans terms... They've been neutered. They break the uranium down into isotopes that don't necessarily lend themselves to reprocessing in several common configurations. As well, breeder reactors are more expensive to operate.
Much of the remaining nuclear waste material has a short half-life
Much of it does, but enough of it doesn't and the stuff that doesn't lasts millions of years.
The remainder of the nuclear waste material is long-half life solids which, due to the very nature of half lives, aren't very radioactive
...and when you pack enough of it into a confined area, which is what we're doing when we store it... It's still lethal. The Chernobyl disaster area is covered in these "not very" radioactive isotopes. Do you want to live there?
Re:Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. (Score:3, Insightful)
And why exactly are you comparing two, outdated technologies when you really should be comparing them to solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, hydro, tidal and geothermal?
It's because rusted on nuclear proponents are still living in the 70's and honestly believing that nuclear is so good compared to coal, but they can never win the debate against renewables.
Re:Just Stop! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydrogen is a power source, just bang a couple of atoms together with enough velocity and you get Helium + a lot of enrgy.
However we have not yet developed a working fusion reactor.
We'll just have to use the nearest one we can find, its only 93 million miles away, and has enough hydrogen to keep going for a few billion years.
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:3, Insightful)
And where does the energy come from to power that 90% efficient electric motor? Your local power plant will run at 70% efficiency if it is very modern, probably more like 50% if it is not so new and it most likely burns coal. If it does not then its efficiency will be even lower. There is a further loss involved in transporting the coal to the plant and digging it up in the first place. There is the other issue as to what we do with variable power, I believe much is lost to heat anyway at off peak times. There are losses down the tubes, then there are losses as you charge. Ever felt a power pack and battery when charging? Heat is energy, if something is hot you have lost energy.
The picture is not quite so rosy and simple as many like to think. If it made economic sense to be using electric vehicles right now we would be, but it does not so we do not. I doubt if it ever will - we are tooled up to use oil so we are more likely to synthesise it than completely restructure our entire industrial machine.
The thing people don't get is thermodynamic efficiency is always very low. There is a simple law and it is related to the temperature of your heat source and sink (reversible carnot cycle):
n = 1 - TL/TH
Where TL is the sink temperature (ambient in the case of air cooling) and TH the source temperature. So, what this means is that for a perfect, lossless heat engine, 100% efficiency can only be achieved with an absolute zero heat sink, or an infinite temperatured heat source.
Using this equation and some approximate figures from a quick google, the Carnot efficiency of a typical ICE is in the order of some 42%. You cannot exceed that level of efficiency without violating some laws of physics. Given that modern ICEs run at some 30%+ efficiency, which gives you a figure more like 70% efficiency in terms of what is possible. The truth is that ICEs are in fact very efficient within the realm of what they can achieve. But hey don't let physics get in the way of environmental dogma.
Thermodynamics is a bitch isn't it?
The really inefficient part of driving a car is the dead weight you carry around with you, factoring in how much energy moves the driver I think you are down to 1% efficiency. If you do the calculations on electric vehicles the numbers a similarly dismal. Truth is we aren't admitting to ourselves what the real problem is: our expectations of what "personal transport" is.
The bicycle is still the most energy efficient personal transportation machine devised by man. Use it, if you care.
Re:What I still don't get is... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about the "Americans are idiots who spend money they don't have and now they defaulted on their loans" recession.
The average American carries $150,000 in housing and credit card debt. There is no other adjective that fits that situation than "idiot".
Re:Who Killed the Electric Car (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who Killed the Electric Car (Score:2, Insightful)