Topic: U.S. Hydrogen Economy - A requirement for a sustainable future - page 2. (Read 577 times)

Nah, that's not really the biggest difficulty. The most difficult problem is the chicken-egg scenario; to use hydrogen, you require the infrastructure for hydrogen. To justify the infrastructure, you need items to actually utilize the hydrogen.

People have been long opposed to the infrastructure. Storing the hydrogen's not even that expensive.



Compare those rates to battery and you get a pretty decent deal. Even if you toss in the losses (post storage) of about 50% (to convert to electricity), it's still more cost effective than battery.

Also, that's plenty of power. A $1000-2500 tank that can get you over 400 kilometers in a car is pretty awesome.


That's a bandied rather than an actual solution. Unless you're also suggesting collection filters for the car, which probably is more expensive.


When we scale up energy demands, any carbon emissions are going to be hard to offset. We need to think about progressing forward rather than regressing to the past.

If you truly think methane is the solution to climate change and a renewable, sustainable future going forward, then feel free to make your own post.

The biggest problem is storing hydrogen. IT is difficult to store efficiently.

That is why methane is more interesting. Easier to store, and almost as good as hydrogen as a source of energy. Methane has one carbon and 4 hydrogen atoms. It can be produced using renewable energy.

Some new space rocket engines are being designed to use methane just for that reason. More stable and easier to store in smaller containers. And it burns quite cleanly too. Compared to hydrogen, while burning, it does produce some co², which hydrogen does not , but is does burn cleanly.

Wonder when we will have cars that burn methane?

My whole thread is can be summarized by mostly wikipedia.

However, if you want the numbers, here they are. Few years out of date though, so you might need to update the figures and re-run the math yourself.

If you're looking for actual costs, per cent and dollar for stuff, these numbers are probably more helpful.

The provable part of "your work" is basically contained here and there is a good rationale behind producing hydrogen in Nuclear Plants, yet in no way by the means suggested.

Even you don't have a background in energies or economics, you do understand that your proposal has to make economic sense. I can't "double check your work" because you have not provided any numbers of your own that I could possibly check. Again, this is so basic that it does not make sense to argue.

Umm, I'm from academia, abet a different focus (information technology). I'm not a "wannabe".

I've provided sources and information to support claims which you refuted. Now you're saying "the sources are fake!!!!!". If you're too lazy to double check my work, fuck off?

If you want, I can provide DOI for each bit of research; eg; 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2014.05.078
On the tungsten carbide synthesis for PEM fuel cell application - Problems, challenges and advantages

This is were I can see that you are a "wannabe" without any scientific nor economic background. When you are proposing a new "solution" YOU have to prove that is feasible. That means that you have to provide at least the basic numbers on which your "theory" (you insult that word) is based. And no, just having a transportation cost is not enough.

Example: "We could put rockets on the moon using butterflies and if you say is not possible you are spreading FUD."  That´s exactly what you are saying.

Bah, this is wasting time. BTW, you will find biased reports to justify anything. That is what lobbies are for.

I disagree. I'm pretty sure you're just randomly Google'ing shit.


Most hydrogen is produced using steam reformation (and gases from fracking). This isn't green or sustainable, which is why I didn't suggest using it as a production method. I have the numbers, because they're all published online. Electrolysis has been studied for over a hundred years.


So, this is where I know you're just Google'ing shit. BWR's second circuit cooling is already released into the atmosphere. We all already know nuclear uses massive cooling towers. So, are you suggesting that's all fake and the nuclear engineers that built the existing systems have no idea what they're talking about? Here's a cool lil' animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BWR_nuclear_power_plant_animation.ogv


So, I'm pretty familiar with liquification of hydrogen. You need to supercool it and compress it to turn it into a liquid. If you look, I even included a link to a jet that used liquidized hydrogen.

There are a few gaps, such as a better catalyst for the PEM fuel cell stack (currently platinum-carbide is the best iirc). I think tungsten-carbide is another interesting idea, but it comes with its limitations.

So far, none of your points have disproved the hydrogen economy being possible. If you have actual constructive feedback, it'd be nice rather than just being a naysayer spreading FUD.


Edit: So, for some reason, BTCtalk dropped my section where I argued the price. Hydrogen production is under $2.00 per GGE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/06/f34/fcto-h2-fc-overview-dla-worldwide-energy-conf-2017-satyapal.pdf

Transportation and storage is where the $4 GGE comes in.

I think this post contains mostly ideas that are imaginative, but terribly inaccurate or simply wrong.


Hydrogen nowadays is produced in refineries. The reason is that the dissociation of water in H and O2 is very energy consuming. Its easy to put forward solutions if you don´t have to do numbers.


Again, the problem is the costs. It does not add-up.



The reason why the nuclear power plants produce vapor is because they put it through a turbine to generate electricity in a quite efficient process. And before you suggest anything "obvious" with that, learn the basics of it.  What you propose would cost x10 times more at least. Also, you will be generating even more radioactive waste that will last for centuries to come.

If that is not enough, simply know that the water used is normally radiated. You don´t want that outside the reactor even if it is the secondary cooling circuit water.


Nope.


Get familiar with the liquefaction of gases and the cost implicated, the design parameters of oleducts and the engineering constrains. In a world without physics laws your idea is great. You are not mad, you simply think that engineering is what you see in the Discovery channel.



I wouldn´t know where to begin honestly.

It really all depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of storing energy as hydrogen.

Nope, that's not even remotely what this thread is about. I'm not really interesting in removing carbon from the atmosphere with this. It's about making sure no more carbon is added to the atmosphere and to distribute water vapor everywhere.

However, if you want to talk about ecological solutions to removing CO2, feel free to start your own thread. I'll go ahead and do that for you if you want.

Looking for alternative energy source that have a zero CO2 emission is a priority, already we have gone beyond the threshold whereby nature cannot effectively convert the emitted CO2 even if we plant trees on the available land space. So in addition to what you outlined, there is need to build artificial CO2 farms, we already have  prototype, such farms does more effectively what plants are supposed to be doing with very small space used. Check out Tedex show on subject https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_wilcox_a_new_way_to_remove_co2_from_the_atmosphere?language=en&utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
It is our collective responsibility to make a better world and will involve multiple changes simultaneously, else we are doomed

Climate change is a concern. A huge concern.

Let's address one of the quarter of the problem; Transportation.

Transportation is one of those industries that we absolutely require, so the anarcho-primitive idea to solving "climate change" is just out there. Without our robust transportation infrastructure, we'd have mass starvation.

I propose we replace our dependence on oil with two new dependencies; water and energy. When you take energy, in the form of electricity, and apply it to water at a specific voltage, you can actually split the oxygen and hydrogen bond, forming some good old Hydrogen and some pure Oxygen.

Production:

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

Electricity and hydrogen from nuclear.



A renewable way to solve this problem would be huge wind farms and solar panels to convert the local water source into hydrogen. However, it'll take a while to build all the turbines and solar that we'd require to replace gasoline with electric. Not to mention, we're already burning coal to produce energy producing items. In reality, this is where we see diminishing returns on hydrogen.

The energy required depends on the state of the water, when it's in a vapor form, it requires less energy to split, because it already has heat energy.

With that in mind, there's another really, obvious solution. Just rig up a fancy steam engines with a nuclear reactor equipped. Not only do nuclear generators already have the requirement of water, it produces massive amounts of energy. Also, it's output is water vapor, exactly what we need to make a lot of hydrogen.

Ideally, we could bootstrap our hydrogen production infrastructure with nuclear very cost effectively (as in $1.80 / GGE (gas gallon equivalent) in 100% clean fuel).

Logistics
That leaves logistics, how do you transport hydrogen?

Well, there's actually several ways. I'm going to leave out the bootstrapping method, mostly because I lost my train of thought.

The idea way would be to use pipeline. I think it'd be a good idea to retrofit our existing pipeline infrastructure and build out where we can. We can use pipelines and work at phasing out natural gas lines (because hydrogen can be burned for heat, just like your natural gas heat).


Safety is normally highly regulated when it comes to gas lines, I don't see how this would be any different. I think it's safer than many existing pipelines. With your irrational fears annulled, let's continue on.

Vehicles

We already have these. Electric motors are exactly what we need. With a fancy fuel cell stack, hydrogen is converted into electricity. The fuel cell stack does have a byproduct; water vapor. Also, PEM fuel cells aren't perfect, but only because we don't have a perfect catalyst. If our materials scientists and engineers would get off their lazy asses and make a ground breaking breakthrough, we'd see better than our already amazing 50-60% efficiencies with existing materials.

Well, the battery's way more materials costly (even including the fancy hydrogen tank). Also, it's weight is much heavier for less energy, due to batteries very low energy densities. A Honda clarity and Tesla Model S go about the same distance. A clarity has a curb weight of 1,600 kg, a Tesla has a curb weight of between 2000 kg and 2250 kg, depending on how many batteries you add in.

How many losses are generated from having to move that extra 400-600 kg everywhere you go? Not to mention, it's only possible to get only get so many cycles out of the materials heavy battery. With hydrogen tanks, it's feasible to simply reforge them after their service lifetime, given the energy supply.

Boats would utilize the same sort of system, going from diesel generators to hydrogen tanks and PEM fuel cell stacks. However, I have another solution to our boating problem as well.

Now, jets... jets are a different beast. Lockheed CL-400 Suntan exists, where they used liquidized (super-cooled) hydrogen. Program successes included the concept design of a Mach 2.5 aircraft capable of flying at 30,000 meters, and successful conversion of an existing turbojet engine to run on liquid hydrogen, as well as 25+ hours of testing on a customized LH2 engine design. This was back in 1956, if we can't figure out how to retro-fit an airliner with this technology (or compressed hydrogen for that nature), we're doing something wrong as a species.

Missing concepts, filling in the gaps
Please suggest new information here, or ask questions. I'm not really for a social-economic argument. I'd be excited if someone contribute more than "here's how I'd build a commerical airliner powered by hydrogen fuels", but the chances of crypto + hydrogen are slim to none.