Topic: U.S. Hydrogen Economy - A requirement for a sustainable future (Read 567 times)

http://news.utoledo.edu/index.php/08_29_2019/u-s-department-of-energy-awards-utoledo-750000-to-improve-production-of-hydrogen-as-clean-fuel

DOE doing grants. Good... good. Let the hydrogen flow through you.

Pretty sure we're making hydrogen cars a thing with the GND.

18.3 trillion dollars towards revamping the future.

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/07/innovative-ai-system-could-help-make-fuel-cells-more-efficient

Neat, better fuel cells coming.

Also, global markets are starting to become a thing; https://www.forbes.com/sites/timtreadgold/2019/07/24/japan-and-australia-launch-an-experimental-coal-to-hydrogen-export-industry/#16236bdc7332

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We're going to see hydrogen economy grow and replace oil in the next 30 years.

It looks like the 2018 base price of the Toyota car is right at 60,000, and so plus a few options it is clearly in the mid 70s. That is right in the middle of the range I previously quoted, 50-100k.

So why are you misleading people, and claiming this is cheap, when it is clearly not?

The market simply disagrees with your fantasies?

Ugh. Do you even read? Economies of scales. You're pulling out of date articles from a half of decade ago.

Only a moron would think these articles describe the current ecosystem.

I suppose you also think BTC is $100 still, right?

I agree. Why do you try to tell people things that are not true? See bolded above; compare to below quote from Toyota. Battery power is far, far cheaper than fuel cell power. And everyone has heard that fuel cells are ridiculously expensive, although they may not know or care about the details.

Toyota says it’s made several advances to hydrogen fuel cells that will make them significantly cheaper, and will allow the company to sell a car using the low-pollution technology in 2015—years before its competitors.

blue sporty hydrogen toyota
Hydrogen concept: Toyota plans to display this new hydrogen fuel-cell concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show.
The car will be expensive: between $50,000 and $100,000. But that’s a big improvement over the million-dollar cost of experimental fuel-cell vehicles in years past.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/521616/how-toyota-will-be-first-with-a-fuel-cell-car/

Obviously, cars exist that get over 100 miles range. The example was referenced in the original post.



Posting low quality comments may be acceptable in certain areas, but not really here.

I was wrong. 100 miles is better than what I estimated. Yup. forget h fuel cell cars. Electric is the dominant tech.
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That's a function of what you or someone thinks might be a safe size of a h2 pressure tank. You will have a maximum of 4.5 lb/cu ft, compared to 46 lb/cu ft for gasoline.

Go down from the 4.5 (liquid h2) to something real wordish, you have much less than 10% the power density of gasoline in that tank.

Yes modern batteries are much more interesting than that sort of thing.

California had a big push on hydrogen fueled cars. IMO I think the reason it never quite took off despite the media's best efforts were two fold. First, the logistics of delivering hydrogen to existing gas stations. They don't have the right equipment, not used to doing it etc. The second and probably the most damning reason is because the range of a hydrogen fuel cell car is very low. At the time they were around 50 miles. That doesn't work.

The best scenario has a central station that converts H to electricity, and send that to electric vehicles.

Here's an article on why hydrogen fuel cell cars can not compete with  electric cars:

https://energypost.eu/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-competitive-hydrogen-fuel-cell-expert/

Main points:



I was wrong. 100 miles is better than what I estimated. Yup. forget h fuel cell cars. Electric is the dominant tech.

Well, that's crazy weird, complicated and expensive, plus being an obvious terrorist target.

There's no particular reason to focus on H2 at all. H+ is the active agent in most chemical energy transfers, various molecules carry and store the H ions. They have different physical characteristics and advantages/disadvantages.

The point is, we do have a hydrogen economy.

Pretty much. It can be as dangerous as dihydrogen monoxide to be honest.


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https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid

That's an interesting reporting building up a power grid using superconductive wires cooled by liquid hydrogen. Effectively delivering both hydrogen and electricity to regions around North America.

Capex would be quite a lot, but it'd revolutionize our entire grid here in North America.

I don´t see safety as an issue. There are much more dangereous petrochemical product being mass produced and there are immensely more dangerous products transported by road everyday. Not to mention the jet fuel in planes.

Around a decade ago, due to my work at that time, I assisted a meeting in which an emergency plan was discussed. The option that was taken in the case of spillage of certain chemical product transported by road (routinely) was to vent it towards the valley north of the installations.That would imply the certain death of around 5k people and that was the least damaging option.

Believe me, hydrogen is not particularly bad in that regard.

In order for them to distribute it, they will be needing consumers, and for them to massively create a product, they'll be needing investors. So basically, they need consumers to attract those who can give them a capital amount, cough, fund their disruptive technology.

I'm always watching your thread on P.S, reading those intellectual debates between those pro and anti hydrogen, I don't want to join that discussion, but seriously, hydrogen is more safer than gasoline. Hydrogen inhalation therapy shows promise in hospitals across Japan. And they also fear that a leaking hydrogen from a "some sort of tank" is explosive, but debatepedia said;

"...Hydrogen does ignite easily, needing 14 times less energy than natural gas, but that’s of dubious relevance because even natural gas can be ignited by a static-electricity spark.36 Unlike natural gas, however, leaking hydrogen encountering an ignition source is far likelier to burn than to explode, even inside a building, because it burns at concentrations far below its lower explosive limit. Ignition also requires a fourfold higher minimum concentration of hydrogen than of gasoline vapor. In short, in the vast majority of cases, leaking hydrogen, if lit, will burn but not explode. And in the rare cases where it might explode, its theoretical explosive power per unit volume of gas is 22 times weaker than that of gasoline vapor. It is not, as has been claimed, “essentially a liquid or gaseous form of dynamite...” Read the supporting quote or the whole parent debate.

So my dad was surprised, after talking about your other thread on P&S, he just said, "hydrogen powered car was an old technology, dating back in the 1930's, but electric cars are way older. But are you seriously thinking that it can be a disruptive technology with this kind of system we have, water is so abundant you can't even manipulate it, and besides, have you heard of the hindenburg? "

His inserting his fear with the hindenburg tragedy which I never knew of before. Heck with hindenburg, they even blame the wardenclyffe tower for causing the tragedy.

But what I do love to see how hydrogen can disrupt the energy industry is by replacing nuclear power plants with hydrogen power plants, I hope you didn't get me wrong here, hydrogen powered plants is way different on hydro-electric power made from dams.

There was a new technology that was introduced to replace the idle nuclear power plant country. They were so afraid of the chernobyl power plant incident that's why it's just basically sitting in idle. A private company introduced the hydrogen power plant back in 2002-2003, it was never built because of the fear of hydrogen. But there are some members of my government, after seeing that the danger is not that severe recently(4th Q of 2017), wants it to be built, the only problem is the government can't pull out some of the funds to built it and they need to protect those investors who helped fund the natural gas power plant. To settle the dispute, they have to find investors and let them compete with each other.

So basically, after seeing so much ICOs on this forum, none of them have seen the power of hydrogen power plant as a greener and much more safe than a conventional "ticking bomb" power plant. And the energy distributor in my country implemented prepaid electric system. Do you want hydrogen + electric system + crypto? There you have it, forget about hydrogen flying object, someone might say - "I don't want a burning object flying above my head". The only least thing you will probably think about hydrogen power plant is a mad scientist who wants to detonate it.

Since generation has been an argument time and time again;

https://art.inl.gov/NGNP/NEAC%202010/INL_NGNP%20References/INL-EXT-10-12967%20PCDR.pdf

Neat article. I've looked into solid forms of hydrogen storage, but compressed and liquid hydrogen was so much more energy / weight. I did a bit of reading of similar systems, but they required precious resources.

I'll probably dig into this solution a bit more, but I doubt they'll be able to scale manufacturing economically.

According to Enass Abo-Hamed on a LinkedIn video;

"We had the technology that could store hydrogen, but we were not sure what to do with it. Who would be our customers, who would be our users, and who could benefit from a technology like that?"

Read the article.

I would love to see how this hydrogen power would work in the future and I do hope that no one's gonna suppress it. If the day would come that the hydrogen power is widely used, we can now move on discussing if the electric generator of Paramahamsa Tewari really works.

Novel production method of hydrogen; using our wastewater:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2018.00107/full



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Ahaha.

Combustion energy conversion ratios are lower than PEM fuel cell stacks.


It'd be nice to skip the intermediary step, but we just simply can't for portable energy.

Battery technology has improved a lot over the past couple of decades, but fuel cell systems have become way more cost effective. Storage of hydrogen at high pressures is less resource intensive than holding the same power in lion-ion batteries (even with losses included).

Also, tanks have way more cycles than lion-ion batteries, and the durability of fuel cell stacks are insane.

Rather than focusing on hydrogen, I think a more realistic option would be to stop at an intermediary step proposed in your OP.


We have plenty of methods of storing, utilizing, and transporting electrical energy generated from wind farms or solar panels. By focusing on converting that electrical energy back into a combustible source, we've already lost a fair bit of energy. On top of that, hydrogen is obscenely dangerous. Its molecular structure is so small that it can't reliably be contained in a gaseous phase. I'm not sure if it could be odorized the same way natural gas is, but at this point as far as I know, there is no way to detect gas leaks besides just assuming they are there. Another major issue is that its combustion is a temperature far higher than what modern combustion engines can handle. I use an oxyhydrogen torch that I've gotten pretty close to melting tungsten with at ~6200 degrees Fahrenheit. I know there are catalysts that can lower the temperatures, but that involves another process, another cost, another new piece of machinery to engineer, and another failure point.

My point isn't that it shouldn't be done, I'm sure there are proper ways to handle hydrogen safely, but if the first step is creating it by splitting water, even assuming that we are using Nickel Oxide catalysts rather than platinum to make it economically feasible, it requires that the energy is available in the first place. If we are generating the power needed to create the hydrogen gas in a green fashion, and the only perk to using hydrogen is that we can transport the energy, I'd propose focusing on improving battery technology, or ideally making the switch over to capacitors once we can figure out how to increase their capacities.

I think what you are describing is a vehicle like the Chevy Volt, but with the gasoline-powered generator being replaced by hydrogen. It could be an effective solution, though it is not necessarily the best solution.