6 ms·

MIT Researchers Make Hydrogen Fuel from Aluminum and Water

40 points by mardiyah 5y ago

chovybizzass 5y ago
another non-green, inefficient "breakthrough" that if adopted will just make things worse.
mardiyah 5y ago
Looks something pretty short distance from lab to fab ?
ahnick 5y ago
So would it be possible to make a mini hydrogen power plant from a rain water cistern and scrap aluminum?
- politician 5y ago
  Right? It's like the perfect post-apocalyptic semi-portable power solution.
  - xkcd-sucks 5y ago
    Al is so easy to melt and recycle though, post-apocalypse the value of the metal is likely higher than fuel
    - freemint 5y ago
      I am not sure fuel won't be coming in magically and everywhere besides the middle East or permafrost all easily accessible fossil fuels have been already exploited.
- rini17 5y ago
  Yes if you have a way of using generated hydrogen effectively. No idea how easy is to regulate the speed of reaction. It might be preferable to make aluminium-air battery instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ExuhMrnQSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ExuhMrnQSw
perihelions 5y ago
Aluminum (metal) is way more expensive than hydrogen. This is such a waste. Is it prohibitively difficult to recycle this scrap instead? And if you go with this idea, what do you do with the spent aluminum hydroxide? That's toxic waste, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mud
- noduerme 5y ago
  I think you've got it wrong. The red mud is not aluminum, it's what's left over from mining aluminum. Aluminum hydroxide is used in vaccines, antacids, and as a precursor to other Aluminum compounds. It can also be converted to alumina under heat, so it should be reusable as a portable hydrogen generator.
- politician 5y ago
  You pour the waste into a crater because you're using this technique to create fuel and oxygen from Lunar regolith.
- smellsinore 5y ago
  Disclaimer: never took chemistry but wouldnt it be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin(II)_hydroxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin(II)_hydroxide ? since aluminum foil is not aluminum?
  - InDemoVeritas 5y ago
    Reverse that. What is called tin foil is actually always aluminum. Once upon a time, though…
- mannykannot 5y ago
  As it is apparently essentially a purified bauxite, I imagine it would be a desirable raw material for an aluminum smelter. Consuming it in this manner would create a closed cycle for generating hydrogen from electricity (as aluminum smelting is an electrolytic process) - electrolysis of water by proxy, if you will. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/bauxite-and-alumina-statistics-and-information?qt-science_support_page_related_con=0#qt-science_support_page_related_con https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/bauxite-and-alumina-statis... One downside is that currently, graphite anodes are used, with which the oxygen of the hydroxide anion reacts, creating CO2 in an amount commensurate with the amount of of hydrogen produced - so this process would be far from carbon-neutral, though presumably this CO2 could be relatively easily captured in a pure form (disposing of it is another matter.) Here's some research into reducing the CO2 production (by 50%) as well as being more efficient, but it is still in development with some as-yet unsolved problems: https://news.osu.edu/electrode-to-lower-cost-of-aluminum-smelting-lessen-pollution/ https://news.osu.edu/electrode-to-lower-cost-of-aluminum-sme...
lvxferre 5y ago
I've been doing something similar since I was, like, 10? Put some aluminium in water, add lye, and you got hydrogen. For me it worked because it was faster than electrolysis, enough to fill balloons with. [inb4 yes, my childhood was weird and I got access to lye.] As another user mentioned however this is more expensive than making hydrogen the "old" way. You're better off recycling the aluminium.
- xkcd-sucks 5y ago
  Yeah I was going to say, when I was a preteen, would mix lye (in principle, sustainably produced via leaching wood ash) with aluminum (not sustainably produced, but readily available), fill up garbage bags with H2 and torch them for lols. A bit scary when the pot got hot enough to boil. Generally stopped blowing things up after sex, drugs, appreciation for injury all started to seem more important
- pengaru 5y ago
  One of my childhood neighbors had an in-ground pool which gave him access to all sorts of pool cleaning chemicals... many an "hcl bomb" were made from 2-liter bottles and aluminum foil scraps.
- litoE 5y ago
  Back in grad school we would put lye, water and aluminum foil in an empty wine bottle, tie a (unused) condom around the neck of the bottle, wait for it to inflate and then light it up with a match tied to a very long stick.
- djmips 5y ago
  Lye is fairly common. In my childhood you could even buy, as a child, things like potassium nitrate at the drug store.
- dghughes 5y ago
  > yes, my childhood was weird and I got access to lye. I used to make gunpowder. Sulphur and potassium nitrate at the local pharmacy and charcoal from the BBQ. I wasn't very successful because it all has to be ground really fine without killing yourself. I just lit it never made anything with it more for the science than anything. The Radioactive Boy Scout was ten years later but if I had been aware of him and of Americium (I probably was) I bet I would have tried that too. I was a nerdy kid on my own but a 75% range (C) student in school. Weird is good but it seems to be frowned upon these days. Too often it's seen as dangerous to even just ask about certain things.
ummonk 5y ago
I doubt this has a practical application (better to just recycle scrap aluminum), but it’s still cool just from a “you can do that” perspective.
neltnerb 5y ago
I love that this project investigated some novel surface chemistry. I hate that the article ignores that the aluminum is made using a bunch of electricity. Just use that electricity to make hydrogen in the first place, hydrolysis is approximately as efficient as aluminum smelting already (and both are over 90%)...
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  Actually, that works in favour of this method here, provided certain conditions are met. Aluminium takes a big juicy bunch of electricity. Its very energy intensive. But, if we can extract a good portion of that aluminium energy as hydrogen gas, then aluminium acts as a highly energy dense battery. It can then be effectively used for grid scale energy storage.
- bordakt 5y ago
  > Using aluminum as our source, we can ‘store’ hydrogen at a density that’s 10 times greater than if we just store it as a compressed gas. The point is that it is beneficial to store the energy as Aluminium instead of hydrogen gas.
- elcritch 5y ago
  Hydrogen production via electrolysis isn’t over 90% in real systems. It’s more on the order of 70% for real world systems. Some small scale research systems can hit 90% or more for various solid oxide electrodes, but they’re fragile and generally not commercially available yet. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589299119300035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929911... as an example overview.
- burnished 5y ago
  Are you thinking of aluminum recycling, which is much easier than aluminum smelting, which is not an incredibly efficient process? I think recycling aluminum requires 5% of the energy that smelting it requires.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
... painted the scrap aluminum with a eutectic mixture of gallium and indium There may be a problem with the economics of this approach.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Fortunately, "the mixture does not react with aluminum and can be recovered at the end of the process and used again."
  - Animats 5y ago
    With how much difficulty?
okareaman 5y ago
> Additionally, even the generation of hydrogen results in the release of greenhouse gases, which quite beats the purpose of using hydrogen in the first place. Why does every article about hydrogen keep saying this? Running electricity through fresh water generates hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity can come from the nuclear power plant, a solar array, etc... What am I missing since I first saw hydrogen and oxygen created in high school chemistry?
- sp332 5y ago
  There was a recent study about generating hydrogen using power from natural gas and capturing the carbon dioxide from it. It found that methane leaks almost certainly made it too dirty to consider as a green energy source. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/blue-hydrogen-pushed-by-gas-companies-harms-climate-more-than-coal-study-says/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/blue-hydrogen-pushed... I agree the article left out this important context.
  - freemint 5y ago
    That's just an attempt to make fossil fuels produce green hydrogen. A thing often attempted by the fossil fuel industry to stay relevant. There are other ways to make hydrogen from water.
- ufo 5y ago
  The problem is that it is cheaper to produce hydrogen using fossil fuels, instead of using clean energy + eletrolysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production > As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas, partial oxidation of methane, and coal gasification.
- DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
  The so-called "blue hydrogen" is made from natural gas.
fxj 5y ago
The chemistry behind that is simple and well known for some time. The novel idea is that Al can be used as a storage for H which is much denser than you could ever achive with compressing H. In the end a car would then be fueled by an Al rod and water. The whole transportation nightmare of H2 (liquidification, cooling, etc) would be gone. Al is made by electrolysis as is H2. So it is a staged process, where first the Al is made and later transformed to H2 by an exothermic reaction which generates additional heat which can be used for heating or cooling (via adsorption coolers).

40 points by mardiyah 5y ago

chovybizzass 5y ago

another non-green, inefficient "breakthrough" that if adopted will just make things worse.

mardiyah 5y ago

Looks something pretty short distance from lab to fab ?

ahnick 5y ago

So would it be possible to make a mini hydrogen power plant from a rain water cistern and scrap aluminum?

politician 5y ago
Right? It's like the perfect post-apocalyptic semi-portable power solution.
- xkcd-sucks 5y ago
  Al is so easy to melt and recycle though, post-apocalypse the value of the metal is likely higher than fuel
  - freemint 5y ago
    I am not sure fuel won't be coming in magically and everywhere besides the middle East or permafrost all easily accessible fossil fuels have been already exploited.
rini17 5y ago
Yes if you have a way of using generated hydrogen effectively. No idea how easy is to regulate the speed of reaction. It might be preferable to make aluminium-air battery instead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ExuhMrnQSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ExuhMrnQSw

perihelions 5y ago

Aluminum (metal) is way more expensive than hydrogen. This is such a waste. Is it prohibitively difficult to recycle this scrap instead? And if you go with this idea, what do you do with the spent aluminum hydroxide? That's toxic waste, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mud

noduerme 5y ago
I think you've got it wrong. The red mud is not aluminum, it's what's left over from mining aluminum. Aluminum hydroxide is used in vaccines, antacids, and as a precursor to other Aluminum compounds. It can also be converted to alumina under heat, so it should be reusable as a portable hydrogen generator.
politician 5y ago
You pour the waste into a crater because you're using this technique to create fuel and oxygen from Lunar regolith.
smellsinore 5y ago
Disclaimer: never took chemistry but wouldnt it be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin(II)_hydroxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin(II)_hydroxide ? since aluminum foil is not aluminum?
- InDemoVeritas 5y ago
  Reverse that. What is called tin foil is actually always aluminum. Once upon a time, though…
mannykannot 5y ago
As it is apparently essentially a purified bauxite, I imagine it would be a desirable raw material for an aluminum smelter. Consuming it in this manner would create a closed cycle for generating hydrogen from electricity (as aluminum smelting is an electrolytic process) - electrolysis of water by proxy, if you will. https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/bauxite-and-alumina-statistics-and-information?qt-science_support_page_related_con=0#qt-science_support_page_related_con https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/bauxite-and-alumina-statis... One downside is that currently, graphite anodes are used, with which the oxygen of the hydroxide anion reacts, creating CO2 in an amount commensurate with the amount of of hydrogen produced - so this process would be far from carbon-neutral, though presumably this CO2 could be relatively easily captured in a pure form (disposing of it is another matter.) Here's some research into reducing the CO2 production (by 50%) as well as being more efficient, but it is still in development with some as-yet unsolved problems: https://news.osu.edu/electrode-to-lower-cost-of-aluminum-smelting-lessen-pollution/ https://news.osu.edu/electrode-to-lower-cost-of-aluminum-sme...

lvxferre 5y ago

I've been doing something similar since I was, like, 10? Put some aluminium in water, add lye, and you got hydrogen. For me it worked because it was faster than electrolysis, enough to fill balloons with. [inb4 yes, my childhood was weird and I got access to lye.] As another user mentioned however this is more expensive than making hydrogen the "old" way. You're better off recycling the aluminium.

xkcd-sucks 5y ago
Yeah I was going to say, when I was a preteen, would mix lye (in principle, sustainably produced via leaching wood ash) with aluminum (not sustainably produced, but readily available), fill up garbage bags with H2 and torch them for lols. A bit scary when the pot got hot enough to boil. Generally stopped blowing things up after sex, drugs, appreciation for injury all started to seem more important
pengaru 5y ago
One of my childhood neighbors had an in-ground pool which gave him access to all sorts of pool cleaning chemicals... many an "hcl bomb" were made from 2-liter bottles and aluminum foil scraps.
litoE 5y ago
Back in grad school we would put lye, water and aluminum foil in an empty wine bottle, tie a (unused) condom around the neck of the bottle, wait for it to inflate and then light it up with a match tied to a very long stick.
djmips 5y ago
Lye is fairly common. In my childhood you could even buy, as a child, things like potassium nitrate at the drug store.
dghughes 5y ago
> yes, my childhood was weird and I got access to lye. I used to make gunpowder. Sulphur and potassium nitrate at the local pharmacy and charcoal from the BBQ. I wasn't very successful because it all has to be ground really fine without killing yourself. I just lit it never made anything with it more for the science than anything. The Radioactive Boy Scout was ten years later but if I had been aware of him and of Americium (I probably was) I bet I would have tried that too. I was a nerdy kid on my own but a 75% range (C) student in school. Weird is good but it seems to be frowned upon these days. Too often it's seen as dangerous to even just ask about certain things.

ummonk 5y ago

I doubt this has a practical application (better to just recycle scrap aluminum), but it’s still cool just from a “you can do that” perspective.

neltnerb 5y ago

I love that this project investigated some novel surface chemistry. I hate that the article ignores that the aluminum is made using a bunch of electricity. Just use that electricity to make hydrogen in the first place, hydrolysis is approximately as efficient as aluminum smelting already (and both are over 90%)...

kumarvvr 5y ago
Actually, that works in favour of this method here, provided certain conditions are met. Aluminium takes a big juicy bunch of electricity. Its very energy intensive. But, if we can extract a good portion of that aluminium energy as hydrogen gas, then aluminium acts as a highly energy dense battery. It can then be effectively used for grid scale energy storage.
bordakt 5y ago
> Using aluminum as our source, we can ‘store’ hydrogen at a density that’s 10 times greater than if we just store it as a compressed gas. The point is that it is beneficial to store the energy as Aluminium instead of hydrogen gas.
elcritch 5y ago
Hydrogen production via electrolysis isn’t over 90% in real systems. It’s more on the order of 70% for real world systems. Some small scale research systems can hit 90% or more for various solid oxide electrodes, but they’re fragile and generally not commercially available yet. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589299119300035 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258929911... as an example overview.
burnished 5y ago
Are you thinking of aluminum recycling, which is much easier than aluminum smelting, which is not an incredibly efficient process? I think recycling aluminum requires 5% of the energy that smelting it requires.
- neltnerb 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

... painted the scrap aluminum with a eutectic mixture of gallium and indium There may be a problem with the economics of this approach.

DennisP 5y ago
Fortunately, "the mixture does not react with aluminum and can be recovered at the end of the process and used again."
- Animats 5y ago
  With how much difficulty?

okareaman 5y ago

> Additionally, even the generation of hydrogen results in the release of greenhouse gases, which quite beats the purpose of using hydrogen in the first place. Why does every article about hydrogen keep saying this? Running electricity through fresh water generates hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity can come from the nuclear power plant, a solar array, etc... What am I missing since I first saw hydrogen and oxygen created in high school chemistry?

sp332 5y ago
There was a recent study about generating hydrogen using power from natural gas and capturing the carbon dioxide from it. It found that methane leaks almost certainly made it too dirty to consider as a green energy source. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/blue-hydrogen-pushed-by-gas-companies-harms-climate-more-than-coal-study-says/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/blue-hydrogen-pushed... I agree the article left out this important context.
- freemint 5y ago
  That's just an attempt to make fossil fuels produce green hydrogen. A thing often attempted by the fossil fuel industry to stay relevant. There are other ways to make hydrogen from water.
ufo 5y ago
The problem is that it is cheaper to produce hydrogen using fossil fuels, instead of using clean energy + eletrolysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production > As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas, partial oxidation of methane, and coal gasification.
DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
The so-called "blue hydrogen" is made from natural gas.

fxj 5y ago

The chemistry behind that is simple and well known for some time. The novel idea is that Al can be used as a storage for H which is much denser than you could ever achive with compressing H. In the end a car would then be fueled by an Al rod and water. The whole transportation nightmare of H2 (liquidification, cooling, etc) would be gone. Al is made by electrolysis as is H2. So it is a staged process, where first the Al is made and later transformed to H2 by an exothermic reaction which generates additional heat which can be used for heating or cooling (via adsorption coolers).