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Climate change hope for hydrogen fuel:
A tiny spark in the UK's hydrogen revolution has been lit – at a university campus near Stoke-on-Trent. Hydrogen fuel is a relatively green alternative to alternatives that produce greenhouse gases. The natural gas supply at Keele University is being blended with 20% hydrogen in a trial that's of national significance. Adding the hydrogen will reduce the amount of CO2 that's being produced through heating and cooking. Critics fear hydrogen will prove too expensive for mass usage, but supporters of the technology have high hopes.
But the only product of burning hydrogen is water.
As a fuel, hydrogen functions in much the same way as natural gas. So staff in the university canteen say cooking on the 20% hydrogen blend has made no difference to their cooking regime. The project – known as HyDeploy - is the UK's first live trial of hydrogen in a modern gas network. Keele was chosen because it has a private gas system. Its hydrogen is produced in an electrolyser - a device that splits water (H2O) into its constituents: hydrogen and oxygen. The machine is located in a glossy green shipping container in the corner of the university's sports field.
The gas distribution firm Cadent, which is leading the project, says that if a 20% blend were to be rolled out across Britain, it would reduce emissions of CO2 by six million tonnes - equivalent to taking 2.5 million cars off the road.
The hydrogen could be generated pollution-free by using surplus wind power at night to split water molecules using electrolysis.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @07:08AM (13 children)
'could'...however, the current predominate hydrogen production method is steam methane reforming...and having worked in a place where large amounts of hydrogen was stored and used, and remembering the necessarily anal precautions taken about storing the stuff, I worry about how 'simple' they're trying to make this all sound....and there isn't a word of truth about my teenage self almost blowing up part of the house when my hydrogen generation and storage for my DIY hydrogen torch got a wee bit out of hand....and out of the storage tank.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @08:11AM (7 children)
This... when I first heard that hydrogen is mostly produced as by-product of the oil industry, it became a lot less "green".
The storage is a second issue, and the third is the "solution" they provide, electrolysis of water is very energy inefficient.
These are the three main reasons why I think hydrogen isn't the answer and batteries as ways to store the energy seem more logical to me.
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Monday January 06 2020, @10:53AM (5 children)
It's the primary issue, actually. In compressed form, the energy density per volume is horrendously low - which means either big tanks or the nasty cost of liquefying it (don't go down with humongous pressure, lest it blows the bottle in your face [wikipedia.org]).
I wouldn't call 80% efficiency [wikipedia.org] (or slightly better now [ecsdl.org]) as "very inefficient".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @02:49PM (3 children)
For energy conversions you might be right, but in terms of economics it's bad. Imagine that you want to store money in a bank account and the bank takes 1/5th of it. My guess it that you'll take your money somewhere else instead, at least I would do that. These guys are basically doing the same. They buy energy from the producers, convert it to hydrogen (storing in the bank), and loose 1/5th of the energy in the process.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 06 2020, @03:32PM
Depends on the price. If the producers are paying to get rid of the energy (as has occasionally happened), it's going to be a great deal.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Monday January 06 2020, @03:35PM
Wind power is currently producing more energy than we in the UK can use at times, and they pay people to use it. Surely better to make some hydrogen at 80% efficiency?
It is more efficient to make hydrogen and pipe it around our existing network and use it with existing hardware than to upgrade the electricity generation and network and send it
as electricity, and, in all probability, this is true even if you generate the electricity at point of need from hydrogen with small turbines if you sell the waste heat for home heating.
It might not be a great idea in some countries, but it has great promise in the UK.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday January 06 2020, @08:42PM
Heh, the entire "biofuel" thingy works on efficiencies at a lot under 15% [wikipedia.org]
The solar panels themselves work at around 20%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @05:54PM
A good way to store hydrogen is around carbon atoms. Make better hydrocarbon fuel cells and better ways to generate hydrocarbons from solar/wind etc ( https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/cheap-catalysts-turn-sunlight-and-carbon-dioxide-fuel [sciencemag.org] [1] http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/solar-cells-converts-co2-into.html [nextbigfuture.com] ) and the problems are solved (kinda ;) ).
Then vehicles could run off hydrocarbon fuel using hydrocarbon fuel cells, and have supercapacitors or smaller batteries for regenerative braking and power boosts.
The other option is stuff like biodiesel but that kinda pushes food prices up - rich people can afford cars that eat a lot more vegetable oil than entire villages of poor people.
[1]
It's hard to compete vs stuff that was "mostly paid for" millions of years ago and you're just paying the price of extraction and refining. Fossil fuels are likely to get more expensive, unless it turns out the Earth is somehow generating them at a high enough rate.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Monday January 06 2020, @11:46PM
A story out today [xinhuanet.com] on a new process increasing the efficiency and safety aspects of solar based generation. Details are too skimpy though. Might see something a bit beefier down the road if it turns out to be viable.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 06 2020, @08:31AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 06 2020, @12:26PM
My optimistic journalist filter is what actually happened is trad "town gas" which comes from steaming burning coal producing mostly carbon monoxide and some hydrogen can be "replaced" by 80% natgas 20% H2.
Town Gas systems already held a couple percent H2 and will be fine.
At least I hope thats what they're doing... Isn't town gas essentially dead and historical with a century of cheap natgas?
Yes town gas was a huge safety problem. If it didn't blow up, the leaks caused CO poisoning. Kinda a mess.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 06 2020, @12:23PM
Wikipedia's hydrogen production article explains electrolysis is running about 4% of production, the other 96% are fossil fuel.
Much like ethanol gas in the USA mostly burns more crude oil net (after factoring in diesel requirements) the H2 enriched natgas will overall net require burning more fossil fuels than running unenriched natgas.
Theoretically its a bootstrapping routine where demand for H2 will result in electrolyzers connected to wind farms... VERY optimistically...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @12:58PM
I predict good things for uptake of this technology in the coming months, surely Solemani isn't the only thing that's going to blow up this year.
(Score: 1) by slashnot on Monday January 06 2020, @08:43PM
This is the first thing I thought when I read the summary: Why would you mix hydrogen, which is largely derived from fossil fuels (about 95%) [wikipedia.org], back with a fossil fuel? Aren't there better things that can be done with "surplus" night time energy from wind? How about pumping water up hill so that it could later be used to power a generator during the day?
I have nothing against hydrogen power. In fact, I think it is a longer-term solution compared to lithium-ion batteries, since lithium is a such a finite resource and hydrogen is so abundant. However, we need to work out the production and storage problems first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @02:17PM
makes for one huge explosion.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday January 06 2020, @02:49PM (10 children)
Is it even right to call Hydrogen a fuel?
Don't we use it more like an 'energy storage medium'?
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @02:53PM (9 children)
Can you name any fuel that doesn't store energy? What's its use in that case?
I think it's part of the definition of fuel.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 06 2020, @04:34PM (7 children)
I don't know about formal definitions.
It just seems that everything commonly called 'fuel' is pumped out of the ground and provides lots of 'free' energy without much energy input. Hydrogen is generally manufactured, and then compressed, at the cost of more energy than you get from burning the hydrogen. So H2 is more like an inefficient battery.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday January 06 2020, @06:00PM (6 children)
Is charcoal a fuel or an energy storage medium?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday January 06 2020, @06:32PM (3 children)
I don't know about formal definitions either, but hydrogen seems less like a fuel and more like an energy storage medium because building a closed-loop cycle with hydrogen seems possible. In other words, you could take the water coming out of an H2 car exhaust, re-split it, and re-use it to power the vehicle indefinitely. The fuel is what does the splitting. That's a lot like the gas/liquid refrigeration cycle. Is the working fluid in the warm side of a refrigerator a fuel or an energy storage medium?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday January 06 2020, @09:24PM (2 children)
Everything is an energy storage medium. Oil is just sun energy in condensed form. Given enough energy you can manufacture hydrocarbons in any proportion you need. We don't do it because it is cheaper to just dig it out the ground. Hydrocarbons are the most dense energy storage medium we have because the energy is stored at the molecular level, where hydrogen atoms are bound to carbon atoms.
As noted elsewhere, unbound hydrogen atoms are a PITA to store and transport (they are small enough to leak out of the tiniest fissures).
You can build a closed loop carbon cycle with oil/petrol if you wanted as well, or with anything else really.
Most of the energy on earth comes from the sun in some form or other, the sun gets it from Fusion, and its turtles all the way down till you get to the study of entropy.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday January 06 2020, @11:52PM (1 child)
OK, I should have qualified the closed-loop differently. Not possible--they're all possible. I should have said "practical" or "more practical". A closed loop H2 cycle might be practical if we fudge a bit and only cycle the hydrogen and use free oxygen from the atmosphere. A closed loop oil cycle, OTOH, would require removing many different chemicals from the exhaust stream. We'd have to separate desirable components and then re-synthesize oil from the good parts. It seems much less likely to ever be practical unless you fudge it a lot more than just using free oxygen. That's what I'm driving at. Ultimately though, it's a bit of a judgement call. You know it when you see it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday January 07 2020, @01:10AM
> A closed loop oil cycle, OTOH, would require removing many different chemicals from the exhaust stream.
The Major compounds in a car exhaust are water, CO2, and Nitrogen. Not exactly a toxic mix.
The others (NOX, and traces of other hydrocarbons) are essentially trace elements, and should not be an issue to separate (AFAIK you would only have to separate the NOX, the other elements are Hydrocarbons themselves and can be kept in).
Personally, I am more leaning towards bioethanol/biobutanol as a replacement for fossil fuel, because:
1. Easy to make
2. Burns cleanly
3. Butanol can actually run in standard cars, so no need to modify/scrap all cars in existence. You can literally switch the entire transport infrastructure to carbon-neutral at once.
4. You can re-use existing pipelines/infrastructure, rather than building it all out again.
5. In the case of bioethanol, you can actually make it at home if needs be.
6. It will work in fuel cells (allowing for electric cars with the range and refuel speed of ICE), in addition to ICE support, avoiding an either/or scenario with ICE and BatteryEV/Hydrogen infrastructure.
7. It would be a closed carbon cycle, so essentially carbon neutral (assuming the energy stored in the fuel is done using a carbon-neutral source of course, such as nuclear power).
8. Just as easy to store as fossil fuel, and roughly the same energy density
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 06 2020, @06:53PM (1 child)
You should have mentioned 'clean' coal. The fuel favored by the current administration.
I liked the definition above about a cycle defining hydrogen as an energy storage medium. With fossil fuels, you can't un-burn them in some sort of cycle. Hydrogen is much more like a battery in this sense. And, you don't mine hydrogen from the ground and bottle it up. Charcoal would seem more in the fuel category. It is made from something you collect, and you can't un-burn it in a closed cycle.
If the H2 for cars is manufactured by splitting water, then even if the car burns it far away, it is, in some sense a big closed cycle. The car re-emits water back into the biosphere from recombining the hydrogen with oxygen.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday January 06 2020, @07:13PM
Well I mentioned charcoal specifically because it's manufactured out of wood.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @07:52PM
The difference is:
- Fuel can be harvested in a high energy state
- If a material must first be energized before you can get (most of) that energy back, it is a battery.
Hydrogen is a mix of both, you can harvest Hydrogen with your hydrocarbons, but not without harvesting hydrocarbons. To get it without hydrocarbons, you can make it with electrolysis, but then it is just a battery.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 06 2020, @05:55PM (1 child)
Hydrogen Fuel cars seem to be the major loss in the "race" for environmentally friendly vehicles. There are causes for concern with regards to the volatile nature of hydrogen and the use in something like a consumer vehicle. Still, it would be awesome, if some day the exhaust coming from my vehicle was water vapor. As opposed to just outsourced to whatever means we use to create electricity.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @07:53PM
It's still being outsourced to whatever method we use to create electricity.
Even though hydrogen is, by far, the most abundant element in existence it's surprisingly expensive to capture large amounts. The article suggests using electrolysis - zap water with electricity and the hydrogen splits from the oxygen and can be trapped. But that process is so absurdly inefficient that it's probably more about pork than possibility. You're looking at around 200 megajoules for 1 kg of hydrogen with electrolysis. The cost to produce that with windmills would end up costing so much at the pump that the whole idea becomes a nonstarter because it wouldn't be economically sustainable.
The [relatively] efficient way of creating it is steam methane reforming. But they're you're not only dependent upon methane, but also output CO2 at about a 9:1 ratio. After you factor in transportation, compression, and other factors you're not saving much over the 19:1 CO2 released from burning plain old gasoline.
Hydrogen fuel cells are really just an ultra-inefficient battery.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 06 2020, @07:20PM
I wonder how this does not end up creating methanium, CH5?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06 2020, @08:58PM (1 child)
1. Each flammable gas has a range of air mixtures within which it can burn. Hydrogen has an unusually wide range. This greatly increases the chance of a leak leading to a building explosion.
2. Hydrogen gas has a molecular mass of 2. This makes it extremely prone to leaks. It will leak right between the individual microscopic crystals of a metal pipe. Note that it will leak much much better than the chemicals that can be added to give gas an odor for safety.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @11:03AM
Extreme opportunities, imagine political capital when after a few months (and blowups) there will be massive gubermint effort to modernize gas pipes. Jerbs for pipe layers and producers of ultra fancy pipes that can contain hydrogen that will be painted green.