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Bishop Hill
Copyright © 2006-2013, Bishop Hill All rights reserved.
Reader Comments (111)
Your Grace,
I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is "Why is this person telling me this and what have they got to gain by doing so"?
Cynical? Me?
[His Grace is on holiday. TM]
My Dear Bishop,
The answer is easy on this one. If hydrogen generated power or wind generated power stored as hydrogen are either one beneficial to mankind then they will be profitable for whomever takes the risk. There is no need at all for taxpayer provided incentives, grants, payoffs, or bribery.
Laissez Faire free markets built the industrialized western world in spite of governments and not because of them. Stop all incentives, punishing regulations, red tape, rule by bureaucracy, and Soviet style interventions and let the UK again show the world how much innovation is inside her people. (or continue to allow the east to be the dominate powers of the modern world -- you have a choice)
~ Mark S.
Engineering a viable system design has not yet been worked out nor tested. Hydrogen is a very difficult material to contain and when it leaks, which it is prone to do, it is extremely dangerous. And energy loss due to having to manufacture the stuff (it does not exist on earth naturally) is sobering. My hunch decades away, if ever. Some other design needs yet to be invented.
Bishop,
A number of years ago I was CEO of a hydrogen energy company. There are many myths and misconceptions about hydrogen that cause confusion all around.
For starters, hydrogen is not a primary energy source but an energy carrier like electricity. Hydrogen has to be derived from another primary source -e.g. a hydrocarbon or water and that takes energy. Bottom line, unless you can use a renewable energy source to do the work and a renewable hydrogen source, you gain little or nothing. Most certainly not if one looks at the issue from the perspective of the alarmist man-made CO2 take on things, for cracking hydrogen out of a hydrocarbon achieves nothing.
So unless one uses water as the hydrogen source and say solar as the primary energy source required to crack the chemically very strong hydrogen/oxygen bond in water, producing hydrogen in any other way makes little or no sense. And we are not even looking at the storage/ infrastructure issues involved - hydrogen is a very "slippery" matter indeed and will work its way through some of the most common storage materials.
Put in plain everyday user terms, stark reality is that on a "well-to-wheels" basis -from source to use and overall environmental footprint included- a state of the art hydrogen powered vehicle is no more energy efficient and no more environmentally friendly than a state of the art turbo diesel electric hybrid engine configuration -for which both the fuel source and all around infrastructure already exist.
In other words, there is no compelling market argument for hydrogen powered vehicles. The rest, as with Tesla's beautiful electric car [which uses the equivalent of 3 liters/100 km hydrocarbon fuel except not in the car's engine, and in actual fact has an atrocious overall environmental footprint] is green dreaming...
I guess it comes out of PR agencies
article 1 : Do Hydrogen Haters Have A Molecule To Stand On? We Asked An Expert by Peter Braun, March 19
..Come on there is no such thing or movement as "Hydrogen Haters" so it seems like a marketing headline
* phrase "Hydrogen Haters" is mentioned 3 times on Google before 2015
expert quoted : "Steve Ellis, the head of fuel cell vehicle marketing for Honda"
article 2 : "The car of the future — the very near future — might be driven by the wind" by Reporter Peter Thomson of PRI in Berlin, April 08
..the photos are all credited as Reuters, but I can't find a Reuters story
expert quoted : Lutz Wiese of Vattenfall power company
: Roland Kaeppner, with the hydrogen energy company McPhy,
: Robert Döring, head of communications at the green energy company Enertrag.
As mentioned in the article, industry uses quite a lot of hydrogen, but treats it with enormous respect. Hydrogen has an explosive range from 4 to 80% in air, and detonates over about half that range. It is an extremely small molecule and will as a result quickly find any leak sites. As it is lighter than air it will accumulate in roof voids and similar unventilated upper spaces.
It's energy density is so low that any storage system for hydrogen in a car will be operated at high pressures, subject to vibration, etc. with a relatively high potential for leaks to generate. Let's face it, it is the genie in the bottle, you let hydrogen cars be widespread on the road, how many will be properly serviced, especially when they are older and reach their second or third owner?
People have short memories, the dreadful explosion in the ICL plastics factory in Glasgow, which killed nine and injured forty five, was due to a leakage of LPG in the basement.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/229279/0838.pdf
Letting hydrogen powered cars roam at will around the streets and into underground car parks is criminally irresponsible.
So the Path is Wind Power -> Hydrogen -> Storage/Transportation -> Work
Wind power: 25% efficient.
Conversion to hydrogen: 70% (High end of Alkaline (cheap), mid range of proton exchange membrane(expensive))
Storage/Transportation: 90% (pure guess, but storage and transportation will use energy and incur losses)
Conversion to Work: 50% (from wiki)
This makes the overall efficiency 7%.
When you take into account the extra materials and infrastructure needed for cracking, storage and transportation I doubt that a 7% efficient energy source would generate more energy than it took to build it.
NB As noted above the Bishop is on holiday this week.
TM
New Aluminium battery is magic - was yesterday's story .. It's flexible as paper, it can fast charge
..BUT then it does only contain a fraction of the charge of a similar Lithium Ion battery. So it has to be recharged more frequently or much bigger.
... no one mentioned considering fire risk : Pure aluminium burns ..it is used as rocket fuel
The aluminium we normally see is actually covered with aluminium oxide as it oxidises on contact with air.
I'd add to what tetris wrote, hydrogen is rather ineffective fuel too. It takes a lot of space. It's not physically possible to compress it behind certain limit and that limit is pure liquid hydrogen. Any chemical compounds invented recently to store hydrogen don't tackle the volume problem, they only tackle the safety problem and they further reduce effectivity as they increase the volume and mass.
If we use Thorium based electricity electrolysis plants can be located at refuelling stations which could also cater for plugin electric and hybrid vehicles. Much safer storage cylinders have been developed with a spongy filling. Hydrogen vehicles (including buses) are already in use. Hydrogen fuel cells are the way forward.
Actually Yesterday Paul Homewood/Dave Ward pointed us to hydrogen debunking in the response letters to a Daily Mail story
Easier said than done methinks.
Hydrogen is a very unstable form of energy, any source of heat and bang.
Following up on commenter tetris Apr 11, 2015 at 11:04 AM:
Since wind and solar during their lifecycles hardly save any fossil fuel when connected to the electricity grid, these technologies are fairly useless for production of hydrogen as a fuel. Perhaps biomass could be used, but this is increasingly no longer considered as renewable. Suggestions to use wind energy for dissociation of H2O to solve the problem of intermittency are floating around, but no entrepreneur has as yet been successful.
It seems to me that adding a problematic technology like hydrogen to solve the intermittency of wind- or solar energy is just adding extra problems to technologies that are not very promising already. It's a lose-lose situation.
If it is really necessary to reduce fossil fuel use, the obvious candidate for doing this is nuclear energy. One does not have to look very far: France has been using nuclear energy for years to satisfy 75% of the national electricity demand. The remaining 25% of demand is satisfied by hydro power. Gridwatch now gives a very good insight in French electricity production, in addition to the UK fuel mix. For those who do not know the Gridwatch URL:
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
The other detail that is often overlooked is that the ICE is very happy to burn hydrogen, with the technology to do so common knowledge for many years. In the event that the storage and infrastructure issues for hydrogen are solved to a commercially viable standard the lowest cost method of converting the hydrogen to propulsive power will almost certainly still be the internal combustion engine.
Oh the humanity!
If my school/college days scientific study were correct, it is the most common element in the Universe, & the most volatile element known to mankind! I'd feel rather uncomfortable sitting on top of a tank of hydrogen regardless of how it is stored, the potential for leaks seems too high & what happens in a rear-end shunt at speed? A rear-end shunt at speed in thepetrol car is bad enough & the fuel tanks can rupture as we know & it doesn't matter how secure they are designed & made, there will be flaws somewhere down the line that only surface at inoppertune moments!
Remember the Hindenburg, enough said.
We need to see numbers -- cost and efficiency from source (wind, solar) to wheels. What Steve McIntyre calls an engineering document.
Honda and Toyota have been working on this for years and they have years to go. Proof of concept, not proof that it's ready for production.
How about all those articles that show hydrogen is simple not a very "dense" energy source? Lots of folks confuse "hydrogen" with methane/natural gas/propane. I've even seen articles that state (seriously) that natural gas (CH4) will move us completely away from a carbon based economy and into a hydrogen economy. You can do the internet searches but, for example, even not factoring in energy conversions, etc., the replacement equivalence for liquid hydrogen compared to liquid gasoline is boaut 4 to 1. Suppose you have a 50 litre tank today and want to have the same driving range with hydrogen. You will need a 200 litre tank snuggled into that Smart Car. Don't want 60 gallons of instant-bomb sitting next to you? Then be sure to fill up at that high pressure service station or be ready to bang around bottles of compressed gas.
Better to take India's prototype 300Mwh thorium reactor and manufacture pure hydrocarbons. Plus not much need to replace the entire energy infrastructure of the planet.
Mark Stoval wrote:
+++++++++++++++++
Laissez Faire free markets built the industrialized western world in spite of governments and not because of them. Stop all incentives, punishing regulations, red tape, rule by bureaucracy, and Soviet style interventions and let the UK again show the world how much innovation is inside her people. (or continue to allow the east to be the dominate powers of the modern world -- you have a choice)
++++++++++++++++
Currently the government of Panama is expanding the Panama Canal to allow it to handle vastly larger ships. These ships are intended to carry containers from China to ports in astern North America. Ports in eastern North America are being upgraded to handle these ships. Bridges are bring raised to allow the ships to pass under them into the ports as one example. At the ports, the containers will be transferred to trucks to be carried to their destinations over the extensive highway system available in North America.
All of this infrastructure was created by the actions of government. This is in addition to the system of property rights, both physical and intellectual, that is created and maintained by government. This is in addition to the management of the money supply to create and maintain capital for operations and innovation in the economy and to manage the boom bust cycle inherent to capitalism.
Laissez faire markets didn't build the western world unless you mean the laisssez faire capitalists who worked hand in glove with government to do it. This cooperation can either be ethical or corrupt but it is always there.
My view is simply that the market rules.
The H2+2O2->2H2O reaction sounds marvellous. But so many ancillary issues need to be sorted - issues we are only dimly aware of as yet.
The one piece of info I take from these articles is that journalists don't know what they are talking about. Which I knew already...
tetris Apr 11, 2015 at 11:04 AM
I agree - and IMO there are a lot of people who have/are benefiting from R&D funding and tax breaks etc who are fully aware of this. Your further comments on the "hydrogen as fuel" business model would be interesting. Thanks for any insights.
If there were no warmists then by now man would be working hard on figuring out the best way to add CO2 back to the atmosphere as fast as possible :) If we do not do that then as we recover from some future ice age there will be no vegetation on the surface of the planet and very quickly not not much animal life either. However fear not because we are swimming in massive hydrocarbon fuel resources and as luck would have it this fuel releases CO2 into the atmosphere again so we are saved. There will then be no need for current solar and wind and battery technology and energy will be available at the touch of a button.
@Tom Grey
...Currently the government of Panama is expanding the Panama Canal to allow it to handle vastly larger ships. These ships are intended to carry containers from China to ports in astern North America. Ports in eastern North America are being upgraded to handle these ships. Bridges are bring raised to allow the ships to pass under them into the ports as one example. At the ports, the containers will be transferred to trucks to be carried to their destinations over the extensive highway system available in North America.
All of this infrastructure was created by the actions of government. ...
I do not think that this infrastructure is 'being created by the actions of government'. It is quite obviously being created as a result of the entrepreneurial development of trade with China. There is a huge difference between government mediating agreements between developers and inhabitants (which it is designed to do), and developing new ways of living (which it is very bad at). In this case laissez-faire produced the expanded trade with China, the new requirement for bigger ships to pass through Panama, and the proposals to upgrade the infrastructure in several countries. The governments of these countries have simply responded to these requests by overseeing development agreements and funding arrangements. They have not driven the requirement in any way.
The metal/solid oxide hydroge-air fuel cell based on the in-situ catalytic reforming of natural gas has a 55% methane to electricity conversion efficiency, and is available now in rapidly increasing supply.
10 million homes fitted with such CHP would save about 40% of the fossil fuel needed to provide the same wind power backed by CCGTs and Diesel STOR, the latter actually increasing fossil fuel consumption for that nominal wind power.
Use the fuel cells to power a heat pump and you save 65% of the fossil fuel.
Windmills to hydrogen would be an economic and technological disaster. Better to have nuclear to produce hydrogen in about 200 years when the methane gets short.
There is of course net zero CO2-AGW, proved theoretically and empirically; the IPCC pseudoscience has, a World First, got ALL the radiative and IR Physics wrong, as any professional taught standard physics realises very quickly!
Hydrogen for fuel is like ammonia for refrigerant. Wonderful stuff, even stunning at times.
==================================
The biggest problem with all these 'green' plans is that they're a technological step backwards. Whether it's safety, efficiency, convenience, price etc, these things are less useful than the things they attempt to replace. I'm sure that if they were the only option then we'd make do but at the moment nobody really sees a reason to make the best of a bad lot.
If the only electricity available was from a windmill then we'd be happy to see one going up in our area and wind would go from being my least favourite weather to my most. If the only personal transport we were allowed then we'd manage. We'd change how we live to suit what's available.
Greens dream of a time when our government will make us do these things. However, nobody's going to seriously vote for this kind of austerity and if they did vote it in through ignorance, they'd vote it out again PDQ.
I understand all the technical issues outlined above. But in general I agree with Mark Stoval. The current Panama Canal development is a bit of a red herring in my opinion. It is a government taking advantage of a opportunity created by (relatively) free markets and entrepreneurs. Nothing wrong with that and a lot better than some vanity projects governments go in for.
Also no one knows what technical break throughs will solve the horse manure issue.
Nobody ever knows what technical breakthrough will solve the horse manure issue.
The difference between then and now is that while the Victorians could extrapolate by simple calculation (number of horses*tons of manure per day/tons cleared per day) to find the answer we seem to be trying to do the same sort of calculation without understanding the variables.
Their problem was staring them in the face (nose, especially); ours is the product of hand-waving activists with an axe to grind, hedged about by ifs, ands, maybes, and coulds. Not a situation favourable to a sensible outcome. And as TinyCO2 reminds us the options being presented by those same activists represent a step backwards in human development and are intentionally antithetical to a proper solution, and beg the question as to whether there is a problem that requires a solution.
My chemist friend in college knocked over a tall tank of compressed gas. When it hit it knocked off or the valve and the thing shot across the room and through the wall. A tank of compressed gas in a car would act like this but also EXPLODE, whereas leaking petrol just burns usually (a few explosions). I think the explosion of a tank of compressed hydrogen would be like a small bomb. No thanks.
Aluminum plus H2 gives you the Hindenberg. Still a debate about which was more dangerous, the H2 or the aluminum paint on the skin of the Zepplin. Solid rockets use aluminum in their fuel.
The most dangerous manure these days, comes from the mouths of climate alarmists.
At least bull and horse manure has a proven track record in boosting agricultural output. And its greeny/brown ish.
It seems to me that electrolysing water to make hydrogen and oxygen should stand a reasonable chance of solving the problem of ‘storing electricity’. The electrolysis process is virtually 100% efficient and doesn’t require elaborate equipment. The gases would need to be compressed for convenient storage, so some additional, none-recoverable energy would be required.
How you then convert the resultant gases (I’m thinking that oxygen could also be used) into useable energy I guess needs some engineering – straight forward combustion or fuel cells are the obvious candidates. Due to the low density of hydrogen it would probably be marginal for use in vehicles, although weight for weight it’s about 2.7 times as energy ‘rich’ as petrol. To get the equivalent of a 75l tank of petrol you would need about 250,000 litres of hydrogen at atmospheric pressure; so some high compression would be necessary. If however the energy conversion process was made more efficient than the internal combustion engine, it might be practical.
Although hydrogen is flammable it is very difficult for dangerous pockets of it to build up in buildings etc. to dangerous levels, because of the way it ‘leaks’ quickly through small openings. Heavy gases like butane, propane etc. pose a much bigger risk as others have noted. It’s curious how people talk about these flammable risks but are quite content to have tank full of petrol in their car, parked in garage next to their house. Petroleum vapour is one of those dense and very dangerous types. There is an obvious risk of carrying highly compressed gas about but containers for it are in common use and have very few accidents. I don’t think the Hindenburg incident translates to the problem here.
Tom Gray wrote in support of the US role in creation of the Panama Canal, "All of this infrastructure was created by the actions of government."
The first action of the US government was a war of conquest.
President Roosevelt infamously stated that "I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me." Several parties in the United States opposed this act of war on Colombia: the New York Times called the support given by the United States to Mr. Bunau-Varilla an "act of sordid conquest." The New York Evening Post called it a "vulgar and mercenary venture." More recently, historian George Tindall labeled it "one of the greatest blunders in American foreign policy." It is often cited as the classic example of U.S. gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, and the best illustration of what Roosevelt meant by the old African adage, "speak softly and carry a big stick [and] you will go far." After the revolution in 1903, the Republic of Panama became a U.S. protectorate until 1939.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal#U.S._acquisition
Speed, the 'engineering document' you seek is essay Hydrogen Hype in ebook Blowing Smoke. Tetris is correct on all counts.
Would the more common sense approach be to trial using hydrogen in electricity generation, centralising it. And carry on with the standard recharge points for electric cars as we have now?
So basically keep Hydrogen away from the consumer.
I make no claims as to whether having hydrogen power plants is feasible by the way. It is used as rocket fuel though so maybe it can be burned to spin a generator but whether this has any advantage of other fuels I don't know.
MikeA
"The electrolysis process is virtually 100% efficient"
Is it? I thought there were significant losses, but even if not, you've then got to compress it and then carry it around safely...
This is one of the best critiques of hydrogen I've seen:
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/the-case-for-nuke-cars-its-called-hydrogen
I think provided current density is kept at sober levels it is highly efficient. I think that they use the electro deposition of a metal as a standard for electrical power measurement ie they assume that is 100% efficient.
Transport etc would probably spoil the economics somewhat so I guess it would be better to use it where it was generated.
Electrolysis efficiency can reach 65% in alkaline processes, up to 90% for proton-conducting membranes.
Worth remembering that when you fill up a tank of diesel at the filling station in about a minute you are transferring energy at the rate of 25 MW. Yes mega watts.
Re the straightforward electrolysis of brine and using the more modern process using membrane technology for the production of chlorine and NaOH - I would suggest that the simple electrolysis of water (with appropriate additions to make it conductive) would be far more efficient at producing hydrogen.
Incidently the hydrogen produced by the chlorine process used to be an unused byproduct when I did some work with that industry a few years back. They (Runcorn plant) used to store it in large pressure vessels then vent it to atmosphere every so often.
Have the wind-turbines / solar panels supply DC to the hydrolysis plant to generate hydrogen. This makes them a lot more efficient , since they don't now have to match grid demand and frequency.
Now burn the hydrogen in a gas turbine to produce smooth high-quality power.
Storage and quality problems with renewables alleviated, if not completely solved.
Make sense?
Speed wrote:
=======================
Tom Gray wrote in support of the US role in creation of the Panama Canal, "All of this infrastructure was created by the actions of government."
======================
I don't mind people disagreeing with me. however I do mind if people put words into my mouth and especially if this is designed to embarrass me. I made no mention of the US in the building of the Panama Canal just like I made no mention of the French failed effort to build the canal. Indeed no part of my comment could be seen to be in"support" of the US effort or the new effort by the Panamanian government to do the same. It was simple an observation on the use of collective efforts mediated by government to build the massive infrastructure needed for world economy.
In response to the assertion that these infrastructure projects are vanity projects, one could point to the essential nature of this infrastructure to the economy. Take away modern highways and the world economy would collapse.
Tiny amount of googling got me here: http://phys.org/news85074285.html
"Why a hydrogen economy doesn't make sense"
They find about 20% efficiency, which is higher than some other figures I have seen.
There must be a lot of low level waste heat produced during electrolysis and liquefaction which might possibly be usable for space heating if there was something handy to heat.
It looks like a dead end, absent a cheap catalyst to directly dissociate water in the presence of sunshine ( or moon beams)
Don't use wind for electricity generation, use it to generate heat for homes. So large municipalities build hot-water storage tanks (c.f. Iceland) heated by wind power; don't connect wind to the main national grid (it's not fit for purpose). Neanderthal technology which will work and might just be cost effective - err, perhaps not, but pure green!
If you have to compress the hydrogen why not just compress the air and cut all the rest of the processes out. Use the by product heat from compression and the cooling of the decompression if it is quick enough.
In the middle ages there was a school of philosophers who believed that if you could name a thing then it must in some way exist (nominalists? I forget). There seems to me to be an awful delusion of human omnipotence about this, and try as a might, I can find no evidence for the existence of the hydrodildophone or the Merovingian bowel sock.
It looks like greenies are stuck in this mindset: they seem to imagine that all you have to do to invent some wondrous new technology is to put words together.
Hydrogen leaks through containment vessels, while causing brittleness in metals. It cannot be compressed into liquuid form above its critical temperature which is -240ºC. Your car would need one hell of a fridge, and the power to run it. As many have mentioned, the explosion risks are considerable. And you need as much energy to break the H+ chemical bond as you get out recombining it (plus losses).
What is the point of wasting money on such a project?
My local MP was doorstepping today and came to my door. Big mistake. I reminded him - and he, bless him, remembered - that I had written to him MANY times about his stance on AGW/CC.
He said he was in favour of some PV and Wind, so I asked him if he knew the power factor of wind and PV: Nope! So I told him: 27% and 11%, respectively. To his credit he looked genuinely surprised, but countered with the fact that 'off-shore wind was good, no?' - No, I said, not at £150/MWhr (but he seemed not to know what the current (reasonable) price of electricity is). I asked him if he thought wind and PV would succeed without subsidy.....duh?
Then, realising he was on a sticky wicket, he decided to play the 'precautionary principle' card. Oh boy! And they want our votes! He'd probably vote for hydrogen!