11 ms·
Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power
- hannob 4y agoHaving seen too many such announcements about promising green technologies, I tend to ask a few questions when seeing something like this. One of them is what state a technology is in (early research, announcement, small prototype, industrial scale prototype). It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It's of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being "cheap" sounds dishonest if you're far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.
- defrost 4y agoCOVID saw some interesting procedral changes - massive industrial scale parallelism. Multiple candidates were developed and trialled in parallel with ramping out mass production, storage and shipping. Some of this was wasted effort, some of it was useful regardless of which candidates made the final vaccine cut. The end result was dramatically compressed rollout times. Right now the world has a billionare or two with negotiated contracts to deliver green (not blue) hydrogen (eg: to Germany) at a scale that significantly increases world hydrogen production within a 5-10 year time frame. Already the industrial elements are being built for transport, end use, power collection sites, etc. This activity makes the possibily of dropping in better methods of hydrogen spliting as they are developed feasible in a shorter time frame than otherwise thought possible.
- uluyol 4y agoUnless it says otherwise, it's generally safe to assume that an article put out of a university is in the early research phase.
- natch 4y agoIs hydrogen cheap to transport, cheap to store, and cheap to use though? I thought making it was only a small part of the problems with hydrogen.
- defrost 4y agoHydrogen is a small slippery hard to contain gas molecule. Ammonia transport and storage is far more likely.
- fsh 4y agoHydrogen is not at all hard to contain. Just put it in a gas bottle. The real issue is the very low density which makes the tanks rather large.
- theshrike79 4y agoThen why do the actual people who work with hydrogen worry about transport losses if you just need a thick enough tank? In Michael Liebreich’s Keynote Speech at World Hydrogen Congress 2022[0] he speaks about the problems of shipping hydrogen. you get around 1% of loss PER DAY (0.1% for LNG). And because of the huge tanks the energy capacity is 1/4 of a comparable LNG carrier. The economics just don't make sense. [0] Michael Liebreich’s Keynote Speech at World Hydrogen Congress 2022 (16:00 mark about)
- fsh 4y agoThe talk is about liquefied gas. Bottled gas has way too low density to put it on a tanker. The losses are due to boil-off, not due to leakage.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIn gas form, hydrogen is much worse. You need about 18 truckloads of hydrogen stored at 200 bar to match a single truck load of diesel in terms of energy.
- hef19898 4y agoYou can also use certain oils to absorb (not sure if that is the technical correct term here) the hydrogen for transport. Renders it inert, no losses and it doesn't even count as dangerous goods for land and sea freight. Seems to be pretty easy to get the H2 out of the oil for use or transfer.
- Animats 4y ago"The catalyst is made of indium gallium nitride nanostructures, grown onto a silicon surface." World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year. How did "cheap" get into this?
- defrost 4y agoProduction is driven by demand and will very likely expand now that prices are rising again, just as production doubled back between 2011-2014 when last the price/kg rose [2] as it has in recent times. Annual Gallium usage includes a substantial amount of reclaimed material from electronics which isn't counted as production against reserve. > World primary low-purity gallium production capacity in 2021 was estimated to be 774,000 kilograms per year; high-purity refined gallium production capacity, 325,000 kilograms per year; and secondary high-purity gallium production capacity, 273,000 kilograms per year. [1] [1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-gallium.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-gallium.pd... [2] http://strategic-metal.com/products/gallium/gallium-price/ http://strategic-metal.com/products/gallium/gallium-price/ ( Similar story with inidium )
- Schroedingersat 4y agoMost rare elements are extracted primarily as side products. Scaling production directly is very difficult without demand for the co-occuring minerals.
- philipkglass 4y agoGallium is a side product of producing aluminum and zinc. Most processing of gallium-bearing raw materials for aluminum and zinc production does not currently incorporate any gallium separation stages. Current rates of gallium production can increase 5-fold without increasing rates of aluminum/zinc production or improving extraction techniques; current extraction techniques would just need to be deployed more widely. See "On the current and future availability of gallium": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301420715001233 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005
- DubiousPusher 4y agoIs it just me or has it been like 18 months of one supposedly "game changing" hydrogen catalyst after another? I'm not trying to be cynical. It just seems the science press is awash in results from one research project after another in this area and I find it very difficult to rank which ones have any credible chance of utility.
- bamboozled 4y agoI'm also sick of 18 months worth of negative comments about how hydrogen is a waste of time...
- DubiousPusher 4y agoAgreed. I neither said that, nor think that.
- adrianN 4y agoThe truth is that we can already produce hydrogen at like 80% efficiency with PEM electrolysis. There is not much "game changing" left, except for improving cost.
- fbdab103 4y agoI am waiting for the day when there is an affordable (<$5k? <$10k as an absolute maximum) residential system that can run on home solar and produce ethanol/hydrogen/ammonia/whatever combustible fuel from excess electricity. Round trip efficiency can be horrible, so long as the system is low maintenance and can be configured to run exclusively off of spare generation. Is anything like that on the horizon? Or do all of these liquid fuel synthesis options require industrial pressures/volumes/input electricity so as to forever be out of reach from residential synthesis?
- ben_w 4y ago> combustible fuel from excess electricity. Round trip efficiency can be horrible If that's really all you want, you can get a 9 year old to put together some kitchen waste and art supplies to achieve this. That's how I did it at that age. I did use a battery though, so you might want to check the wiring and add a voltage divider, but those are also easy to build even without understanding. And I have no idea if you even can, let alone should, just pour gaseous hydrogen into, for example, a gas heater's fuel input pipe. But actually making hydrogen is utterly trivial.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoLow maintenance, safe, compact, and high enough output is a different story. For the second, you probably want a methanol, methane or ammonia output and they all require high temperatures or exotic materials.
- asien 4y agoIn my opinion you are mistaken , affordability does not mean home appliance. Hydro is pretty cheap , does not mean it’s fit for home. Here the best scenario is similar to Singapore - Australia or UK - Morocco remote solar grid. This innovation is very interesting compared to Water- Hydrogene electrolysis that is a bit expensive and needs metals that are going to become difficult to source in the coming decades. Gallium is quiet abundant from my understanding.
- 35mm 4y ago
- Sozar2000 4y ago[dead]
- kwhitefoot 4y agoUnless you need hydrogen for a capability that only hydrogen has it is much more efficient to use solar electricity either directly or to charge batteries.
- mrleinad 4y agoIn those parts of the globe where it makes sense to use solar, and during the day, yes. For everything else, you need a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks, not hours. You also need to transport it. And you need to stabilize the energy output not to be entirely dependent on whether the sun shines. That's why hydrogen might be a good energy reservoir.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago> a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks, My Tesla Model S does that pretty efficiently. And for static batteries there are plenty of alternatives that don't use difficult to source elements. > You also need to transport it. We have a grid to do that already, with HVDC interconnects we can even sell it to places where the sun is not shining.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoYes hydrogen is has a pretty terrible volumetric energy density. In gas form stored at 200 bar, you'd need about 18 truckloads to math the amount of fuel in a single truck load of petrol. In liquid form stored at a few degrees above zero it gets a bit better. It's "only" 2.5 times less dense than lng. Of course cooling and keeping the gas at that temperature is not free. It takes energy. And as it heats up, you have to boil some of it off. So, it doesn't store that well for longer time in liquid form. So, that makes shipping or trucking around hydrogen spectacularly uneconomical. Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite. Mainly for things like fertilizer production. Moving hydrogen around at scale is an unsolved problem. Gas pipes (after they are re-enforced) could work of course. But some of it would leak. And hydrogen mixed with air is not a good thing to have in your house. The same property also makes using hydrogen as a fuel in planes or shipping unpractical: most of your plane/ship would be taken up by the enormous volume of hydrogen you'd need to move it around. Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is a good reference here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic... In it he organizes different use cases by their economical value. Things like road transport and domestic heating are at the bottom of the scale (i.e. you could do it but it would be very inefficient and costly). Near the top are some of the more realistic things, some of which are already being done. Instead of moving hydrogen to where you implement those use cases (e.g. steel making), it would be more practical/logical to move the use case to where you can produce the hydrogen the cheapest. The bigger the energy need, the higher the savings. You basically compete on energy cost.
- EugeneOZ 4y ago> As humanity tries to reduce its carbon emissions It's time to change this stereotype. Humanity tries to reduce its greenhouse gases emissions, and CO2 is not the biggest problem.
- EugeneOZ 4y agoDear downvoters, read the facts and numbers: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emissions-are-driving-climate-change-heres-how-reduce-them https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emission...
- cyri 4y agoImpressive idea. Hope they get a better efficiency factor. On a side node, you can already add Hydrogen to your home. There is a startup in Berlin, DE which sells complete systems for home: solar roof, heat pump, electrolysis device, bottles and ventilation system. During summer you fill the bottles with H2 and during winter you consume it. I'm not affiliated with them. The price before Corona for the whole system was around 65k Euro and now around 100k Euro. https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ Picea is the name
- oezi 4y agoNice! So it seems demand is so high they can increase their prices. Do you know what the capacity of a single system is? Could one unit be shared between multiple residential units?
- pfdietz 4y agoIf I understand correctly, this is producing hydrogen and oxygen mixed together. This is useless. It's also overall less efficient that commercial PV cells driving commercial electrolysers. One common issue with all these concepts doing electrolysis at the collector is how do you gather the hydrogen. Rigging PV modules together with wires is much more practical than hooking hydrogen emitters together with tubing or pipes.
- daneel_w 4y agoCheap and sustainable in your lab, neither once it hits the market.
- surume 4y agoWould we use these like regular existing solar panels on our rooftops? And does 10x efficiency mean that we could harvest 10x the power of what existing solar panels provide?
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI do wonder about the potential of converting excess summer-time rooftop solar energy into storable liquid fuels of some sort (e.g. methanol) for winter-time heating.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoBurning hydrogen will still create a lot of NOx. Not recommended for places where people live.
- otterley 4y agoI think the idea is to use it as a fuel in a fuel cell, not to use it as a combustion fuel.
- tomtomistaken 4y agoI don’t think so. Hydrogen is being burned the old fashioned way.[1] [1]https://www.cleanegroup.org/hydrogen-hype-in-the-air/ https://www.cleanegroup.org/hydrogen-hype-in-the-air/
- rexspex 4y agoI am doubtful that this scales. Main concern is the cost in materials, fuel, and electricity in manufacturing large lenses. Sure, it seems that there are large increases in efficiency when generating hydrogen.. But not really once you take into account the cost of generating the infrared.