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)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Informative)
The linked article calls the stuff "AMMINEX" which sounds like yet another ammonia hydrogen storage [google.com] scheme. I won't comment on their implementation but others have failed here.
The next problem facing hydrogen as an energy carrier (NOTE - never use the term "energy source" when referring to hydrogen because it only carries energy that has to come from somewhere else) is the fuel cell, which requires costly noble metal catalysts (i.e. - platinum). The whole electrolysis process is highly alkaline so conventional metals are quickly fouled.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:How does it come out? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:4, Insightful)
CV
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: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: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:5, Interesting)
The only benefit from using hydrogen is that this conversion process can be done somewhere outside your town so the emissions in town are clean. Same thing with electric vehicles. So what we need is some way of storing lots of potential energy in a car, which means you need high-density batteries for pure electric, or high-density hydrogen storage for fuel cell. Hydrogen is currently looking more likely. Initial versions just used high-pressure tanks, but that needs all sorts of high pressure pumps and heavy tanks. Trouble is that molecules in a gas in a confined space will naturally want to jump about (it's what creates gas pressure), so that's a pain.
The latest approach is to stash molecules of H2 in the gaps between molecules in various fancy compounds, kind of like dropping marbles into a tube (you may have heard of carbon nanotubes being used for it, which almost exactly mimics that analogy). Being "slotted in place" allows more H2 storage without the high pressure tank. And that seems to be what this one is about.
Grab.
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 Hol
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:5, Informative)
Right now, there are coal plants around the globe that are merrily spewing radioisotopes into the atmosphere; some coal has levels of uranium of 10ppm, and even higher levels of thorium, and just the amount of uranium the US has spat into the atmosphere since the 1930s could have, if fissioned instead, provided the entire present-day electrical demand of the entire United Kingdom for centuries. Seriously, I'm not joking. Since 1937, in the course of burning coal the US has dumped 145,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere. That's 10,440 tons of U-235, which fissions to produce about 17.6 kilotons/kilogram. Fission all that, you get 193 petawatt-hours, which is the current electrical demand of the entire UK for 500 years.
That's real radioactivity, that causes real illness and kills real people. So why isn't burning coal prohibitively expensive? Why doesn't the 'disposal and maintanance of the radioactive waste' drive the cost up?
The reason is because the regulations for dealing with radioactive waste are a joke. They've got little to do with real risks, real costs, and a lot more to do with public fear and hysteria over anything that has the word 'nuclear' in it, which is why if you twist your knee playing football you go to get an MRI scan instead of an NMR scan. If a human being were considered under the regulations dicating the disposal of radioactive waste, then simply the naturally-occurring radioisotopes in the body would make cremation or burial in wooden coffins illegal. But nobody's bothered by that, either because they don't know that all organic matter is radioactive, or because they think that somehow K-40 in organic tissue is different from K-40 that's sitting in a used fuel rod.
Blaming public ignorance, fear, uncertainty, and doubt for the high cost of nuclear power does the best technology we have available to us if we want to maintain our standard of living *and* clean up the planet a great disservice. Right now, every kilowatt-hour we get from burning coal dumps 2.3 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere, so for a country like the UK which gets 74% of its power from burning coal, that's 614 billion pounds of CO2, every year.
There is no way in hell the real costs of handling nuclear waste even come close to the costs of all that pollution. No. Fucking. Way. In contrast, a typical, 1000-MW nuclear plant produces something like 20 tons of high-level waste per year; that's under 50 *pounds* of waste per megawatt of plant capacity, and since it's so dense, volumetrically that's practically negligible.
Much of the high cost of nuclear waste is directly due to stupid-assed government regulations that are based upon the fact that PWRs in this country are a byproduct of nuclear weapons programs. They *prohibit* reactor designs that include fuel recycling, using additional reactor stages to burn the 'waste' produced by earlier stages. Don't want to deal with the waste for 10,000 years? Fine. Dump it into a seafloor subduction zone, by the time it sees the light of day again it won't be any more radioactive than any other molten material that spews forth from the Earth on a daily basis.
Considering that much of high level radioactive waste has a half-life of 12,000 years
If it has a half-life that long, it's not high-level.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
With conventional oil drilling technology is it possible to drill for oil with. Drill a hole into the ocean floor in a Subduction zone. On average I think you will drill through 1 mile of sediments. Then you drill a farther 1 mile into the ocean floor. Or hell, why stop at 2 miles down, current technology can drill down 4 or 5 miles easy. Encase the waste in glass, grind up the glass in to pellets and dump them in the hole.
Leave about a mile of the hole empty, the sediment layer, at the top. Then pile in the sediments that was removed, about a mile of it.
Problem solved. You've put the waste out of the environment. By putting it in to a Subduction plate it will be carried down into the earth where it will be cooked for a few billion years at 5,000 degrees.
I'm pretty sure I over simplified the problem but both the technology and theory are mature enough to be refined.
And missing would be (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget to add (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And missing would be (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Informative)
Consider the oil sands in Alberta. (They give Canada the second largest proven oil reserves in the world.) It takes a huge amount of energy to extract the oil from these sands (through boiling). It costs [energybulletin.net] about $10 to extract a barrel of oil from them, compared with $2 to pump it in Saudi Arabia. So here I've given two examples that suggest the cost of getting oil, and I haven't even mentioned transportation and r
My god! Negative energy! (Score:4, Funny)
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, when I finally want to drive my car, it is 50 + 66 + 66 + 95 + 35 = 312% of inefficiency! My God! My Car will drive backwards at more then three times the normal speed!!
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:How does it come out? (Score:3, Interesting)
How do you figure this? Coal is more carbon-intensive than gasoline, so burning coal to produce hydrogen puts more CO2 into the air than burning the equivalent amount of gasoline.
Coal also produced more sulfur and mercury emissions than gasoline and creates toxic and caustic ash that must be disposed of.
Finally, coal mines cause more environmental d
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the fact that any source of electricity can be used to create hydrogen, and wind power is cheaper over 20 years megawatt-for-megawatt than coal. (Google it.)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two sources of hydrogen, electrolyzing water, and stripping it from hydrocarbons. Both of these sources suffer severe drawbacks.
Electrolyzing water is short sighted at best. The second law of thermodynamics (which we obey in this house!) dictates that it will always take more energy to get the free hydrogen that you can ever get back in a fuel cell. This means that it will take a LOT of power to supply a hydrogen economy which means new power plants, which means burning more natural gas and coal. The single best leveragabile solution to a hydrogen economy is new nuclear power plants... Wait isn't nuclear bad? At least that's what the majority of the public thinks so it won't happen. The tree huggers of this world like to think that we can supply hydrogen with windmills, solar, and tidal power. Now while these alternate energy sources certainly merit investment we are a looong way from being able to produce anywhere near the energy needed to supply millions of autos with hydrogen.
The other option is, well ironic. We need fuel cells to free ourselves from foreign oil. So we'll get the hydrogen from hydrocarbons. We'll call them hydrocarbons, so that Susie Homemaker won't immediately pick up on the problem that hydrocarbons are foreign oil. Sure it can be more efficient from wellhead to power, which is undeniable a good thing. The problem is that if it works it will reinvigorate the commuter culture here in America, which will exacerbate the problem.
In conclusion the hydrogen economy is uneconomical, and will never happen. But then again the same is true of ethanol-blended fuel, so we can always prop it up on free government subsidies.
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:How does it come out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, sorry for the tree huggers, but right now nuclear is the ONLY power source that we have that can produce enough energy to get us off fossil fuels and is viable in the long term.
Solar is too inefficient with current technologies. Wind doesn't
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, depending on how you think of it, we've been using stored solar energy all alone. AFAIK, the best solar cells available are plant cells. Using solar energy and storing it in hydrocarbons. When the plants are fossilized, we get fossil fuels.
The question in my mind is, can we simply bypass the 'fossilization" requirement. Wired had an article [wired.com] about one possibility a while back.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct. The reason it is economically viable is that the human race has at least two virtually unlimited supplies of the very energy we need to break the hydrogen loose and today they go unused in any real capacity. That energy source is either solar or nuclear. Other sources could be viable as well eventually, such as geothermal.
The issue is that we need an energy storage and transportation method that works within our current tech development. Using hydrogen for portable power and electricity for stationary power is feasible as long as we can use an energy source that is plentiful and currently underutilized. Hence, solar or nuclear are the only real possible solutions right now. Solar would be best, considering the Earth receives 5000 times as much solar energy as we currently use in oil equivalents. Nuclear fusion might be a good alternative but I withhold making any concrete statements until we manage to get our first commercial reactor going. Modern nuclear fission reactors are perfectly feasible and safe as long as we manage to keep them out of the hands of terrorists (Note: The US has ZERO modern designs in operation -- we still use highly dangerous designs from the 50's and 60's).
So, in the sense that it takes more energy to break apart hydrogen than you get back from recombining the hydrogen, you are right. But it is practical to use hydrogen as an energy carrier because there is so much under utilized energy sources at our disposal, sources that do not make very good portable energy supplies by themselves.
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Correct, but it is much easier to put a large scrubber system on a Hydrogen 'factory' than it is to put that scrubber system on a car. The factory scrubbing can be much more complete and it makes less weight for the car to drag around.
Electrolyzing water is short sighted at best. The second law of thermodynamics (which we obey in this house!) dictates that it will always take more energy to get the free hydrogen that you can
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perhaps not... (Score:3, Informative)
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:3, Informative)
First of all, water is the major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Equilibrium is kept in the atmosphere by precipitation of the vapor into rain, snow, etc. Water added through evaporation or fuel burning goes through the same cycle.
Second, in terms of energy efficiency, the power stations are FAR more efficient than automobiles. If we're able to tap the energy from those stations for use in vehicles through electric cars, hydrogen cells, or some other me
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How does it come out? (Score:3, Informative)
With hydrogen we are talking about chemical energy. It's kind of like potential energy except that
Power (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Power (Score:5, Funny)
Q: Re:Power (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Power (Score:3, Funny)
Only if you chop off its head.
Hold on, more info in the summary than the article (Score:5, Informative)
There seems to be information in the summary that is not substantiated in the referenced article:
While bound in this medium no hydrogen loss occurs, enabling hydrogen to be stored cheaply for indefinite periods.
The article referenced mentions nothing regarding hydrogen loss (or lack therof).
When needed, the extraction of hydrogen is relatively simple.
Is it? Again, nothing in the article about the extraction process.
So where did the submitter get this extra data? If this data is correct, we'd appreciate a link.
If, however, this detail in the summary is unsubstantiated, we'd appreciate less speculation in the future.
Re:Hold on, more info in the summary than the arti (Score:5, Informative)
Royal TripMaster Monkey to You (Score:3, Funny)
I assume, as you aren't an editor, you have ascended to Royalty in your usage of the Royal We. Let me be the first to Welcome our new /. bashing Overlord.
If you could give me somekind of pointer on how to ascend to Your Highness, I would be forever grateful.
I look forward to Your Highness first "We are not amused post.
Re:You should be an editor (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot doesn't need editors that don't take that initiative!
Re:You should be an editor (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot doesn't need editors that don't take that initiative!
.
Re:You should be an editor (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You should be an editor (Score:3, Funny)
Airships (Score:5, Funny)
Will be good for solar homes if.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Tragically... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Tragically... (Score:5, Funny)
And we shall call these pellets... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And we shall call these pellets... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this lump I have here seems to have 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms and 11 oxygen atoms. Maybe you've microwaved yours a little too long
Re:And we shall call these pellets... (Score:4, Funny)
Using Hydrogen to power your car (Score:3, Interesting)
When you go to the pump, do you swap pellets with the gas station attendant? How flammable are these things?
What if I swallow one? Is it non-toxic?
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...)
Re:Using Hydrogen to power your car (Score:4, Funny)
Make 'em as toxic as possible and let natural selection do its thing. It'll clean up the gene pool for the rest of us.
Re:Using Hydrogen to power your car (Score:4, Informative)
By comparison the post office runs several propane powered vehicles around the city here. These poor performing vehicles run on a fuel with an energy density of 7.5 kwh/liter.
Re:Using Hydrogen to power your car (Score:5, Interesting)
Great, but how much carbon do they release into the atmosphere?
See, energy density isn't the only consideration.
Are they chewable? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Are they chewable? (Score:5, Funny)
*rimshot*
Extraction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would a "gas station" be needed? (Score:3, Insightful)
interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
What about the economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 t
Re:What about the economics? (Score:3, Informative)
For all of everybody's bitching about oil companies, here are some net profit rates for a couple of oil companies:
Exxon-Mobil [msn.com]: 10% net profit
Chevron [msn.com]: 8% net profit
BP [msn.com]: 5% net profit
Of course, as a consumer, I'd prefer that they make zero profit and lower the price, but these rates of profit don't seem outrageous to me.
I Wonder (Score:4, Funny)
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:Well, wait until Wednesday's report (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dtu.dk/English/About_DTU/News.aspx?gui
Nyh
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.
Some information (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Some information (Score:3, Informative)
all wet (Score:3, Funny)
* bind hydrogen
* that is completely safe at room temperature
* has no loss of hydrogen
* thus enabling cheap storage
* allows for simple extraction of hydrogen
I use a proprietary process involving oxygen. I'm not at liberty to give more details until the patent is issued.
Re:all wet (Score:5, Funny)
Unless your city is below sea level
Not very efficient (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless we come up with a serious breakthrough on hydrogen production it'll never happen.
There are several groups working on describing how photosynthesis actually works in plants. It is theorized that the process would yield us all the hydrogen we wanted. But that is still a few years off.
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: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.
Better article (Score:3, Informative)
The google translation is available at http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr
This is an interesting storage solution but to really evaluate this we need to know more about the process to extract hydrogen and the waste products involved and their potential re-uses.
Background info..... (Score:4, Informative)
http://lww.kt.dtu.dk/pdf_publications/department/
Not much there but adds a bit more ligitimacy to the claims. Its a university annual report from the Technical University of Denmark, see pages 24-26.
Rough translation of most important part (Score:5, Informative)
The ammonia is made catalytical by combining atmospheric Hydrogen and Nitrogen.
It can be stored as long as necessary.
Only when the ammonia is passed through a catalyst the Hydrogen is released.
When the pellet is emptied, it just needs a new shot of Ammonia to be ready again.
(I believe that heating is necessary in the catalyst)
What's that in American? (Score:5, Informative)
That would be 311 miles in 13.2 gallons.
Hah! I spit on your so-called metric system.
More information... (Score:5, Informative)
I've found another (from June) article here [bulletins-...niques.com] (in french). For a long time people have been talking about ammonia as hydrogen storage, as it's quite high in energy density and is a relatively safe liquid. However, there are issues with gas expansion, pressurization and toxic fumes.
Essentially, these pellets are an ammonia storage system that stores ammonia nearly as efficiently (by weight and volume) as liquid ammonia. The above article says that they are relatively cheap to produce (initial costs of 1 euro/kilogram of material, which translates to roughly $12.88 USD for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline). The article clearly states that the process is reversible, thus the base materials must be reusable. It does not state what the cost is of 'recharging' the pellets. The recharge cost would have to be at least 4x cheaper than production in order for it to be competitive with gasoline. The extraction technique is listed as 'desorption', which I imagine just means heating the pellets up and siphoning the extracted gas off. As for temperatures, and desorption rates, nothing is cited.
It doesn't state specifically how the reaction runs, but that ammonia is extracted from the pellets, which is then run through a standard ammonia converter (at temperatures of around 350 degrees celsius) to extract the hydrogen. It says the reaction runs quickly, so it's able to provide the hydrogen quickly enough.
The Amminex website has slightly more information available by clicking on the "ammonia storage" page, because it's the exact same technology as the hydrogen storage (link here [amminex.com])
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:The utopianists don't like clean and cheap ener (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, if you also pay for all the associated costs.
Cleanup costs of pollution should be factored into the price of fuel, the car etc.
500 km on a 50 L tank? Bah! (Score:5, Interesting)
Diesel. Jetta. And my fuel was 30% cheaper than regular unleaded. And I filled up with 20% Bio-Diesel blend before my trip.
Re:Proprietary technology. (Score:3, Informative)
The energy density of these pellets is 13 Mj/l (compared to gasoline's 34.6 Mj/l).
Tell me: what is the energy density of water?
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.
Re:Other measurements (Score:5, Informative)
That 10 liters per 100 km (23.5 MPG) is gasoline talk. US DOE wants to store hydrogen into a 50 liter (13.2 gal) tank and be able to drive 500 km (310.7 mi). What makes that challenging is the low density of hydrogen, only about 89 g/m3 (0.089 oz/ft3). High pressure tanks are either very heavy or very expensive, and chemical storage solutions always include reforming equipment or other processing steps to get hydrogen out.
Therefore, we should look at the energy content of the hydrogen stored into that 50 liter tank. With what Amminex claims, they can reach an energy content of 486 MJ (461 kBTU), versus 2150 MJ (2.0 MBTU) of 50 liters of gasoline. 486 MJ equals to 11.3 liters (3.0 gal) of gasoline equivalent. That makes 2.3 liters per 100 km (104.1 MPG!)
How is that possible? Fuel cells, electrical engines and braking energy harvesting. Fuel cells are electrochemical energy conversion devices that are free from the Carnot engine efficiency limitations, and furthermore, their efficiency increases on partial load. Operating a heat engine on partial load is detrimental to efficiency.
Re:Other measurements (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Other measurements (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the problem with some of these emerging technologies-- you can have a car that runs on happy feelings, but if those feelings have to be produced in a factory and cost $500 per gallon, then you might as well use gasoline instead.
I'm sorry, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. It's a slow week.
Re:Other measurements (Score:3, Interesting)
It could also be produced nearly anywhere a water supply is. So, shortages and pipeline restrictions would be a thing of the past. As would foreign dependance on energy.
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:Other measurements (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously,there are no other factors that should be considered.
LOL (Score:3, Funny)
We better just tell them they're "Magic Pellets"
Solution! (Score:3, Funny)
So if everybody eats enough to double their weight, the resulting efficiency would be dramatically increased. (Meanwhile, having cleverly intuited this for themselves, many people in the US have already begun the process ...)
Re:What's the catch? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:500 km on a 50 L tank (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My concerns with hydrogen... (Score:3, 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, you
Re:Waste of research money (Score:3, Interesting)
a) Magnesium is hard to ignite. So are tires. Still, they burn. Hydrogen is quite easy to ignite by comparison.
b) Both magnesium and tires, as well as the upholstry inside the vehical and