11 ms·

Electrolyser development: 200 times less iridium needed

beckingz 4y ago
This is exciting because it could reduce the capital expenditure needed for hydrogen production. The biggest reason we don't use intermittent electricity generation (wind, solar) for hydrogen production or desalination is that a significant fraction (~30%) of the total cost is capex. The efficiency here is lower by a factor of 2 or 3 for electrical consumption (for now in the lab), but if you can get electricity at near zero cost for a few hours a day this could make economical sense.
- prox 4y ago
  Had to look capex up : business, finance CAPitalEXpense or CAPitalEXpenditure; A financial term for the initial costs of a business, in contrast to operational expenditure.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    Commonly used along with OPEX (operating expenditure).
  - stevage 4y ago
    Not just a business but any project. The cost to start something vs to run it.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  I think a big part of the reason we don't do it is that if negative/zero electricity prices were expected to be common in a location for many years, then it would usually be more profitable to build more transmission capacity to take that power to consumers who will buy it for more money.
  - h0l0cube 4y ago
    The big reason for doing this is arbitrage across time. Solar generation is increasing exponentially, to the point where it makes sense to have excess generation and store it for night time. Hydrogen could be a companion technology for intermittent renewable energy sources.
ajross 4y ago
So... this is a fuel-cell-adjacent technology, and as such you need to read announcements like this with a somewhat cynical eye. I have no reason to doubt the science here. It probably works, or certainly is no less likely to fail than any other new technology. But here's the thing: PEM electrolysis promises to reach hydrogen production efficiencies of... 80% or so, using exotic materials and entirely new chemistries. Regular DC electrical electrolysis (literally the "stick a wire in water to make bubbles" experiment we all did as kids) is starting out around the 65-70% mark. This just isn't that much better. And doubly so when you realize that the most efficient reconversion of that hydrogen to electricity is going to lose another 20%. This is better, but it's only incrementally better. 30% cheaper hydrogen would be nice, I guess, but it's not going to change any fundamentals of the energy economy.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  But it should be noted, this is how progress usually happens, right? Little incremental gains in efficiency, added together over time. Although that does make it hard to judge the significance of any one breakthrough.
  - ajross 4y ago
    Yes. But you don't plan on an entirely new organization of the energy economy on the basis of that. To pick other examples: VLSI scaling happened first, then the software industry explosion. Lithium batteries arrived first, then people started developing mobile devices (and eventually cars). Planning on this great new "hydrogen economy" thing when even the best-case theoretical technologies represent only a mild improvement over what we have isn't responsible punditry, it's just playing "What if George Jetson had a Jetpack?" games.
    - someweirdperson 4y ago
      Hydrogen doesn't suddenly appear to create a new kind of market, like sudden availability of jetpacks would. Burning remainders of dinosaurs is on the decline. It is frowned upon by many due to CO2, it is not always readily available (see current war), and finally supply is limited. This leads to a decrease of availability, and at continuing demand an increase in price. Unavoidable. Prduction of electrical power from renewables is the cheapest form available already today. Also, it can scale without any practical limit. Power just isn't always available when needed, with surplus production at other times. Any improvement in storage cost (mainly device cost, much less efficiency) decreases the price of power from storage. At some point, the price of power from storage will drop below the price of power from fossil fuels. No magic step will be needed, simply increasing/decreasing prices will meet at some point.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
egeozcan 4y ago
They are decreasing by a factor of 200, which means 1/200 of the starting amount. English is not my native language so I was a bit confused by "200 times less", which I (wrongly) imagined to mean starting amount (x) minus 200x, getting to -199x, which didn't make sense. Math in speech is a tricky thing.
- entropicgravity 4y ago
  The trick is in the word "times". In english every kid learns the "times table" ie "3 times 5 is 15; 6 times 7 is 42" so in this case "200 times less" means x/200. Live and learn, especially in a second language :)
- GoldenRacer 4y ago
  I am a native English speaker and this annoys me as well. 200 times less sounds more impressive than 99.5% less even if it's kind of ambiguous. Same with saying it only needs 1/200th the amount. They want big numbers in the headline and people will figure out what they meant.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    It’s even more ambiguous when people say “200% faster”. What does 50% faster mean in a world where people can say 200% faster with impunity?
    - aordano 4y ago
      200% faster means 3x the nominal speed: You're adding speed ("going faster"). You're adding a 200% of speed, which is twice the nominal speed (the 100%). Given the nominal speed is 1x and you're adding 2x, you end with triple the magnitude of the original nominal speed.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - hinkley 4y ago
pfdietz 4y ago
The important metric for electrolysers now is not so much efficiency (although that's nice), it's capital cost. For use with intermittently available power capital cost becomes more important. This is different from the old notion of a hydrogen economy, using relatively expensive nuclear power to drive electrolysers 24/7. It may also be nice if the electrolysers were reversible, so they could also act as fuel cells.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Have we solved the hydrogen storage issue yet? This seems like pumped hydro storage except the dam has a not-so-slow leak. People keep the o2 as well right? Even in fuel cell mode you could use air as the oxidizer and keep the purified o2.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Hydrogen can be stored in underground reservoirs, like solution mined cavities in salt domes and spent natural gas fields. The cost is as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity. This is the great advantage of hydrogen over many other storage schemes, which have a much higher cost per unit of energy storage capacity. There is also the per-power cost of charging and discharging equipment, but that's independent of per-energy capacity cost. I don't believe the oxygen is kept. Even if it were, O2 is very cheap. Liquid oxygen is the second cheapest industrial liquid, after water. Maybe it would make sense to store O2 underground as compressed gas also, for use in Allam cycle turbines (which would prevent NOx formation and even recover the water of combustion for reuse.) In fuel cell mode you're consuming oxygen, not purifying it.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      What is the source on the price of liquid o2? That seems insane that it would be so cheap, don't you have to either chill the air until it condenses, or use a selective absorber to separate it from air? My point was why waste purified o2 on the fuel cell when you could use air and then sell the o2?
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of research. In practice it remains a FUD/policy distraction by petroleum interests to develop an energy ecosystem that is reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable (and profitable) future. This is research that falls into the former category, but it's presence and other "green hydrogen" headlines in the news feed is due to the influence of the latter. The economics of solar/wind/battery are and will be the driver of primary carbon reduction for the next decade, likely two decades. Practical hydrogen has the same issue new nuclear has: what price target? LCOE and many other measures of solar/wind/battery have fallen at 10 percent or more per year for the last decade, and while "who knows" when that exponential curve tails off, looking at the scale of what's needed, forthcoming techs like perovskites and forthcoming production of sodium ion / LFP / LMFP and the prototypes of Lithium Sulfur / Solid State in batteries, there is likely another decade of improvement at those rates. So like "new nuclear", sure, keep up the research, and if price competitive applications can compete with sodium ion batteries (which I think will be a killer app in grid storage based on the materials and gravimetric densities), sure, but I think these techs will be kind of like magnetic RAM vs DRAM: it simply missed the boat of the economies of scale rampup, and now has to wait for that curve to stabilize before anything competitive can crop up. For hydrogen to be practical in any green form in large scale requires a huge development in generation (which this is), storage, transport, and infrastructure. Fundamentally that hydrogen creation/transport/storage/delivery infrastructure, which is 99.99999% unbuilt, competes with the existing power grid, which likely has TRILLIONS of dollars in accumulated investment and will receive likely another trillion or two globally over the next two years to adapt to dirt cheap solar and wind, to say nothing of what will be invested in home / commercial distributed solar generation and battery storage which hydrogen is not applicable. Big Oil had a chance when the Bush Administration was talking about hydrogen circa 2003. But the fat cats sat on their hats, and Tesla and solar/wind left them in their dust. The only ones really pushing hydrogen are those and Toyota, who perplexingly missed the EV boat despite releasing hybrids in 1997 and should have been providing an entire product line of PHEVs by 2005 that pushed the entire industry towards PHEVs for all consumer transport by 2015. We'd be immune to OPEC and russia if that had happened, and 70-80% of daily miles would be electric with no range anxiety.
- wedn3sday 4y ago
bilsbie 4y ago
Could this be used in fuel cells also? Whatever happened with fuel cells anyway? Did we give up on them?
- comicjk 4y ago
  Too expensive, too easily degraded by minor impurities in the fuel, not improving nearly as fast as batteries (their main competition). Using rare materials more efficiently would definitely help with the cost problem.
  - narrator 4y ago
    Asteroid mining for catalyst medals might pencil out one day.
  - ephbit 4y ago
    I'd guess the one important application of fuel cell tech that people often appear to forget is going to be long haul trucks where it'll replace the diesel power train. It's a big chunk of overall land transport that IMO in the long-term won't have other technologically/economically viable options besides the fuel cell. Rail doesn't serve the last few miles to the destination. Electric trucks are viable for short distances. Trucking dozens of tons of cargo over distances > 500 miles isn't going to roll well with carrying another 3-5 tons of battery. And having to recharge that at 2 MW every now and then would require a very reliable/available and ubiquitous high power charging infrastructure.
    - vardump 4y ago
      I think about 2 ton battery is closer to truth for a truck that has about 400-500 mile range. Less, if you consider all the heavy diesel engine and transmission parts an electric truck is not going to need. Charging at the starting point while loading, at (mandatory) breaks and at the destination should be enough; a BEV truck done right shouldn't require extra waiting time.
      - 4y ago
londons_explore 4y ago
Electrochemical cells (ie. Batteries and electrolyzers) are normally very efficient. Ie. Normally they get about 90%-98% of the energy into the desired form. So why are water-splitters so inefficient?

This is exciting because it could reduce the capital expenditure needed for hydrogen production. The biggest reason we don't use intermittent electricity generation (wind, solar) for hydrogen production or desalination is that a significant fraction (~30%) of the total cost is capex. The efficiency here is lower by a factor of 2 or 3 for electrical consumption (for now in the lab), but if you can get electricity at near zero cost for a few hours a day this could make economical sense.

prox 4y ago
Had to look capex up : business, finance CAPitalEXpense or CAPitalEXpenditure; A financial term for the initial costs of a business, in contrast to operational expenditure.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  Commonly used along with OPEX (operating expenditure).
- stevage 4y ago
  Not just a business but any project. The cost to start something vs to run it.
londons_explore 4y ago
I think a big part of the reason we don't do it is that if negative/zero electricity prices were expected to be common in a location for many years, then it would usually be more profitable to build more transmission capacity to take that power to consumers who will buy it for more money.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  The big reason for doing this is arbitrage across time. Solar generation is increasing exponentially, to the point where it makes sense to have excess generation and store it for night time. Hydrogen could be a companion technology for intermittent renewable energy sources.

ajross 4y ago

So... this is a fuel-cell-adjacent technology, and as such you need to read announcements like this with a somewhat cynical eye. I have no reason to doubt the science here. It probably works, or certainly is no less likely to fail than any other new technology. But here's the thing: PEM electrolysis promises to reach hydrogen production efficiencies of... 80% or so, using exotic materials and entirely new chemistries. Regular DC electrical electrolysis (literally the "stick a wire in water to make bubbles" experiment we all did as kids) is starting out around the 65-70% mark. This just isn't that much better. And doubly so when you realize that the most efficient reconversion of that hydrogen to electricity is going to lose another 20%. This is better, but it's only incrementally better. 30% cheaper hydrogen would be nice, I guess, but it's not going to change any fundamentals of the energy economy.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
But it should be noted, this is how progress usually happens, right? Little incremental gains in efficiency, added together over time. Although that does make it hard to judge the significance of any one breakthrough.
- ajross 4y ago
  Yes. But you don't plan on an entirely new organization of the energy economy on the basis of that. To pick other examples: VLSI scaling happened first, then the software industry explosion. Lithium batteries arrived first, then people started developing mobile devices (and eventually cars). Planning on this great new "hydrogen economy" thing when even the best-case theoretical technologies represent only a mild improvement over what we have isn't responsible punditry, it's just playing "What if George Jetson had a Jetpack?" games.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    Hydrogen doesn't suddenly appear to create a new kind of market, like sudden availability of jetpacks would. Burning remainders of dinosaurs is on the decline. It is frowned upon by many due to CO2, it is not always readily available (see current war), and finally supply is limited. This leads to a decrease of availability, and at continuing demand an increase in price. Unavoidable. Prduction of electrical power from renewables is the cheapest form available already today. Also, it can scale without any practical limit. Power just isn't always available when needed, with surplus production at other times. Any improvement in storage cost (mainly device cost, much less efficiency) decreases the price of power from storage. At some point, the price of power from storage will drop below the price of power from fossil fuels. No magic step will be needed, simply increasing/decreasing prices will meet at some point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

egeozcan 4y ago

They are decreasing by a factor of 200, which means 1/200 of the starting amount. English is not my native language so I was a bit confused by "200 times less", which I (wrongly) imagined to mean starting amount (x) minus 200x, getting to -199x, which didn't make sense. Math in speech is a tricky thing.

entropicgravity 4y ago
The trick is in the word "times". In english every kid learns the "times table" ie "3 times 5 is 15; 6 times 7 is 42" so in this case "200 times less" means x/200. Live and learn, especially in a second language :)
GoldenRacer 4y ago
I am a native English speaker and this annoys me as well. 200 times less sounds more impressive than 99.5% less even if it's kind of ambiguous. Same with saying it only needs 1/200th the amount. They want big numbers in the headline and people will figure out what they meant.
- hinkley 4y ago
  It’s even more ambiguous when people say “200% faster”. What does 50% faster mean in a world where people can say 200% faster with impunity?
  - aordano 4y ago
    200% faster means 3x the nominal speed: You're adding speed ("going faster"). You're adding a 200% of speed, which is twice the nominal speed (the 100%). Given the nominal speed is 1x and you're adding 2x, you end with triple the magnitude of the original nominal speed.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - hinkley 4y ago

pfdietz 4y ago

The important metric for electrolysers now is not so much efficiency (although that's nice), it's capital cost. For use with intermittently available power capital cost becomes more important. This is different from the old notion of a hydrogen economy, using relatively expensive nuclear power to drive electrolysers 24/7. It may also be nice if the electrolysers were reversible, so they could also act as fuel cells.

galangalalgol 4y ago
Have we solved the hydrogen storage issue yet? This seems like pumped hydro storage except the dam has a not-so-slow leak. People keep the o2 as well right? Even in fuel cell mode you could use air as the oxidizer and keep the purified o2.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Hydrogen can be stored in underground reservoirs, like solution mined cavities in salt domes and spent natural gas fields. The cost is as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity. This is the great advantage of hydrogen over many other storage schemes, which have a much higher cost per unit of energy storage capacity. There is also the per-power cost of charging and discharging equipment, but that's independent of per-energy capacity cost. I don't believe the oxygen is kept. Even if it were, O2 is very cheap. Liquid oxygen is the second cheapest industrial liquid, after water. Maybe it would make sense to store O2 underground as compressed gas also, for use in Allam cycle turbines (which would prevent NOx formation and even recover the water of combustion for reuse.) In fuel cell mode you're consuming oxygen, not purifying it.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    What is the source on the price of liquid o2? That seems insane that it would be so cheap, don't you have to either chill the air until it condenses, or use a selective absorber to separate it from air? My point was why waste purified o2 on the fuel cell when you could use air and then sell the o2?

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of research. In practice it remains a FUD/policy distraction by petroleum interests to develop an energy ecosystem that is reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable (and profitable) future. This is research that falls into the former category, but it's presence and other "green hydrogen" headlines in the news feed is due to the influence of the latter. The economics of solar/wind/battery are and will be the driver of primary carbon reduction for the next decade, likely two decades. Practical hydrogen has the same issue new nuclear has: what price target? LCOE and many other measures of solar/wind/battery have fallen at 10 percent or more per year for the last decade, and while "who knows" when that exponential curve tails off, looking at the scale of what's needed, forthcoming techs like perovskites and forthcoming production of sodium ion / LFP / LMFP and the prototypes of Lithium Sulfur / Solid State in batteries, there is likely another decade of improvement at those rates. So like "new nuclear", sure, keep up the research, and if price competitive applications can compete with sodium ion batteries (which I think will be a killer app in grid storage based on the materials and gravimetric densities), sure, but I think these techs will be kind of like magnetic RAM vs DRAM: it simply missed the boat of the economies of scale rampup, and now has to wait for that curve to stabilize before anything competitive can crop up. For hydrogen to be practical in any green form in large scale requires a huge development in generation (which this is), storage, transport, and infrastructure. Fundamentally that hydrogen creation/transport/storage/delivery infrastructure, which is 99.99999% unbuilt, competes with the existing power grid, which likely has TRILLIONS of dollars in accumulated investment and will receive likely another trillion or two globally over the next two years to adapt to dirt cheap solar and wind, to say nothing of what will be invested in home / commercial distributed solar generation and battery storage which hydrogen is not applicable. Big Oil had a chance when the Bush Administration was talking about hydrogen circa 2003. But the fat cats sat on their hats, and Tesla and solar/wind left them in their dust. The only ones really pushing hydrogen are those and Toyota, who perplexingly missed the EV boat despite releasing hybrids in 1997 and should have been providing an entire product line of PHEVs by 2005 that pushed the entire industry towards PHEVs for all consumer transport by 2015. We'd be immune to OPEC and russia if that had happened, and 70-80% of daily miles would be electric with no range anxiety.

wedn3sday 4y ago

bilsbie 4y ago

Could this be used in fuel cells also? Whatever happened with fuel cells anyway? Did we give up on them?

comicjk 4y ago
Too expensive, too easily degraded by minor impurities in the fuel, not improving nearly as fast as batteries (their main competition). Using rare materials more efficiently would definitely help with the cost problem.
- narrator 4y ago
  Asteroid mining for catalyst medals might pencil out one day.
- ephbit 4y ago
  I'd guess the one important application of fuel cell tech that people often appear to forget is going to be long haul trucks where it'll replace the diesel power train. It's a big chunk of overall land transport that IMO in the long-term won't have other technologically/economically viable options besides the fuel cell. Rail doesn't serve the last few miles to the destination. Electric trucks are viable for short distances. Trucking dozens of tons of cargo over distances > 500 miles isn't going to roll well with carrying another 3-5 tons of battery. And having to recharge that at 2 MW every now and then would require a very reliable/available and ubiquitous high power charging infrastructure.
  - vardump 4y ago
    I think about 2 ton battery is closer to truth for a truck that has about 400-500 mile range. Less, if you consider all the heavy diesel engine and transmission parts an electric truck is not going to need. Charging at the starting point while loading, at (mandatory) breaks and at the destination should be enough; a BEV truck done right shouldn't require extra waiting time.
    - 4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago

Electrochemical cells (ie. Batteries and electrolyzers) are normally very efficient. Ie. Normally they get about 90%-98% of the energy into the desired form. So why are water-splitters so inefficient?