Topic: U.S. Hydrogen Economy - A requirement for a sustainable future (Read 538 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 You're pulling out of date articles from a half of decade ago.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.

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.