Study shows making hydrogen with soda cans and seawater is scalable and sustainable:
A MIT study shows that making hydrogen with aluminum soda cans and seawater is both scalable and sustainable.
Hydrogen has the potential to be a climate-friendly fuel since it doesn't release carbon dioxide when used as an energy source. Currently, however, most methods for producing hydrogen involve fossil fuels, making hydrogen less of a "green" fuel over its entire life cycle.
A new process developed by MIT engineers could significantly shrink the carbon footprint associated with making hydrogen.
Last year, the team reported that they could produce hydrogen gas by combining seawater, recycled soda cans, and caffeine. The question then was whether the benchtop process could be applied at an industrial scale, and at what environmental cost.
Now, the researchers have carried out a "cradle-to-grave" life cycle assessment, taking into account every step in the process at an industrial scale. For instance, the team calculated the carbon emissions associated with acquiring and processing aluminum, reacting it with seawater to produce hydrogen, and transporting the fuel to gas stations, where drivers could tap into hydrogen tanks to power engines or fuel cell cars. They found that, from end to end, the new process could generate a fraction of the carbon emissions that is associated with conventional hydrogen production.
In a study appearing today in Cell Reports Sustainability, the team reports that for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, the process would generate 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide over its entire life cycle. In comparison, fossil-fuel-based processes emit 11 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen generated.
Now the question is how to avoid a Hindenburg every now and then.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday June 13, @02:20AM (1 child)
Now the reply is to build huge fully robotized hydrogen airships and use them only for transporting bulk goods, not people. A rain of wheat is survivable on the ground, a rain of steel containers is not.
Or, place datacenters in them, clouds above clouds above sea.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DannyB on Friday June 13, @06:43PM
Every internet cloud has a cat-6 lining.
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by atwork on Friday June 13, @04:10AM (4 children)
> the process would generate 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide over its entire life cycle. In comparison, fossil-fuel-based processes emit 11 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen generated.
In comparison, solar or wind powered electrolysis produces SFA kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen generated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @06:32AM (2 children)
I guess I'm old and out of touch. I googled this and came up empty. One list had "Stands For Anything". Nothing really seemed applicable and I tried thinking of four-letter words you might be using too. Nothing. Absolute blank. Can you clue me in?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @06:38AM
My guess is this: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sweet%20fuck%20all [urbandictionary.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by gawdonblue on Friday June 13, @11:01AM
It's a metric unit. The imperial equivalent is 3/5xFA.
(Score: 4, Informative) by zocalo on Friday June 13, @07:26AM
It's still a whole lot better than just generating electricity through burning dead dinosaurs, but it's definitely not SFA.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @04:15AM (3 children)
Reacting seawater with aluminum is going to yield aluminum salts and oxides, a long with hydrogen.
What do we do with it?
It sure is an expensive fuel.
I question if we really want to build this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday June 13, @04:42AM (1 child)
Indeed. The calculation would need to include the refining of that aluminum, which would otherwise be recycled.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @05:50AM
Heat it up with electricity until it melts, and zap it with electricity to get aluminum back out.
Aluminum is easily recycled. Electricity can come from the sun. The problem being solved is one of dense, mobile energy (aircraft, trucking, garbage trucks), which sunlight doesn't provide enough of.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13, @01:56PM
And, let's not forget, from the linked article
'..The aluminum is pretreated with a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into a pure form that can react with seawater to generate hydrogen.'
so, not so much raw aluminium cans, but processed aluminium, sans it's oxide layer, maybe sourced from recyled cans, maybe not...
'Green' bullshittery.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fraxinus-tree on Friday June 13, @05:50AM (5 children)
this is an impressively inefficient method to recover some of the electricity used to produce aluminum in the first place. cans can be melted back into bulk Al with virtually no loss.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday June 13, @06:52AM (4 children)
I have wondered if aluminium produced in Iceland could be a store of energy so that Iceland could export geothermal power.
AFAIK, other people have looked at that and found it to be a non-starter. Not least, aluminium production is not entirely environmentally friendly.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Friday June 13, @07:03PM
When I asked an AI about industrial process that would produce a good economic return given cheap electricity, it listed aluminum but also silicon wafer production. It gave a much wider price range for silicon wafer prices--presumably due to quality and/or suitability for a particular purpose. It also mentioned that China floods that market though. It looks like Iceland's electricity can't be economically "exported", so they're just going to have to enjoy their low electric bills.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Friday June 13, @10:34PM (2 children)
Three mining companies believe so. There are four aluminum smelters in the country.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Saturday June 14, @11:54AM (1 child)
Eh, I know Iceland export aluminium, because electricity to run the bauxite smelters there is cheap. This is not news.
There aren't many datacentres there because the fibre-carried data connectivity to Iceland is not resilient enough.
What I was looking at was using aluminium in fuel cells, and sending the 'burnt' (oxidised) product back to Iceland for re-reduction using cheap electricity.
Unfortunately aluminium oxide is uncooperative stuff when it comes to making fuel cells. While the electrochemistry looks great, dealing with the alumina is just (currently) too difficult.
An ingot of aluminium is a lot of embodied energy, and cheap and easy to move around (not quite as cheap and easy as hydrocarbons).
A fuel-cell cycle that can use atmospheric oxygen would be very useful. Embody the energy by reducing something somewhere with cheap electricity. Move the embodied energy to where the demand is, Use local atmospheric oxygen to oxidise the fuel, releasing power, and capturing the oxidised end product. Send oxidised end-product back to be reduced. It would solve a lot of problems.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 14, @04:16PM
Sounds reasonable to me. The only two catches would be whether this is cheaper under the situation than transporting energy in more usual ways and whether it displaces higher value uses of aluminum. My take is that Iceland is a classic situation where there's no simple way to transport geothermal power off the island. And if the consumption of power is limited by existing markets for smelted aluminum, this can provide a scheme both for using excess power and exploiting economy of scale to reduce the cost of the existent transportation network for aluminum. Perhaps it could supply a non-carbon based shipping network, for example?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by esperto123 on Friday June 13, @08:54AM
As always, it comes down to energy efficiency, it doesn't matter that much the carbon footprint of the method if transmitting the energy via wires and storing in a battery for use is 3x more efficient, unless the process needs to have the molecular hydrogen (like creating ammonia or some other industrial chemical process), the round trip efficiency of hydrogen is way worse than using the electricity directly (seriously, transmission and batteries are in the +90% efficiency range and hydrogen is 35% with luck).
The only way to have hydrogen economy is to actually find hydrogen pockets at scale, which no one has found yet, there is a study that estimated billions or trillions of tons of natural hydrogen in earth crust but there only a handful of natural reservoirs known and most are quite small, until then it will be only a way for the natural gas industry to paint themselves as green.