What Is The H-Prize?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Environment, Ideas, Legislation, MoneyI’ll give you a hint. It has something to do with our energy crisis.
Jeremy Dibbell has the answer.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 and is filed under Environment, Ideas, Legislation, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 16th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Anyone here have some thoughts about the challenges of and potential downsides of hydrogen-operated vehicles and the transport and storage of the hydrogen that will fuel them?
May 16th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
reader – here is a link to a working unit story http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4563676/
May 16th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
The cost issue will doubtless be solved as the technology evolves, combined with economies of scale. Likewise the availability (fueling stations) issue.
What is more concern is the safety issue. For all the movies of cars crashing and exploding into flames, gasoline is actually rather difficult to make explode; the movies typically include a detonator and extra open gas containers to get the cars to go up. (Police and firefighters of my acquaintance say they have never encountered one which burst into flames as a result of a crash.)
Hydrogen is a whole different story. And, in addition to being more flamable, it has to be stored under pressure — which provides more opportunity for explosions if the containers are smashed. Not to mention significantly higher weight for the storage — the mere sheet steel used for gas tanks just won’t cut it.
I suspect that hydrogen will be supplied in tanks (not unlike SCUBA oxygen tanks) and re-fueling will consist of swapping out the old tank for a full one. Which raises two issues:
1) if you aren’t able to “fill up,” do you get some kind of credit for turning in a partially full tank?
2) how much strength will it take to lift out an old tank and lift in a new one?
The alternative would be putting more hydrogen into a permanent tank. But that would mean taking a whole lot more care to keep the connection valves clean and to be sure that they were tight before starting fueling. But frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in the neighborhood of a fueling station which was dependent on the average driver to get that right every time.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
WJ: Bingo!
May 17th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Then are the amount of trucks it would take to transport the hydrogen, and the fact that these would be on the road, and … .
Certainly, part of the research involved is to address these issues (I would hope!). But my point is that we should not get too excited, nor get our hopes up too fast, and we should carefully consider what the downsides are, and the costs, in energy (it takes energy to make vehicles AND to destroy the ones they replace, among other things–let’s nto forget that), potentially safety, and other areas. For example, should an alternative pose greater risks, does that mean insurance costs go up, too? Etc.
I’m not pooh-poohing alternatives; please don’t think otherwise. It’s just that this whole area is far more complex than I think most people, including most politicians, pundits and journalists, either understand or make it out to be.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:07 am
rj:
What is really irritating (at least to me) is that, for a vastly smaller amount of money, we could be doing research on making gasoline-powered engines more efficient. After all, if you double the efficiency, you reduce the amount of fuel needed by half. And probably have results a lot sooner, too.
Unfortunately, improving efficiency has two draw-backs:
- it is generally incremental. Which means it doesn’t provide for a magic solution to the problem.
- it likely gets done by a lot of different people, in a lot of companies (existing as well as new). Which means that it does not provide an opportunity for politicians to fund new companies in their districts.
But perhaps its greatest handicap is that politicians, especially in the current hyper-partisan era, do not seem to have a grasp of incremental improvement. They see everything as having absolute answers (albeit different ones, depending on their ideology), with anything else being irrelevant.
May 18th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Hydrogen technology may eventually have a place in our energy portfolio. Unfortunately, that place is at least a decade or two away, since the technology has a LONG way to go before it is commercially and practically feasible. (Note – this is my own understanding and interpretation of readings on the subject)
The most likely solutions to the problems with compressed/liquified hydrogen at this point are:
1. Onboard devices or fuel cell variants that either release hydrogen from methane or other fuels, or use them directly. These tend to be less efficient than direct hydrogen fuel cells, create more pollution, and are not as stable and reliable.
2. Metal hydrides (stable solids with a high hydrogen content that can undergo a chemical reaction to release controlled amounts of hydrogen, and can be recycled). The technology is fairly far along, though still has some wrinkles that need to be worked out.
3. Carbon nanotube or other nanotechnology solution which charges and discharges hydrogen on demand. This technology is still in its infancy…at least a decade away from viability.
An issue that is rarely discussed, is that hydrogen itself is a greenhouse gas, and that its small molecular size makes it more likely to escape into the atmosphere than almost any other molecule. If the entire fleet of vehicles is replaced with ones which leak even small amounts of hydrogen, the environmental consequences could be huge. In addition, the production and distribution facilities for hydrogen could also emit large quantities of the gas.
Also, in the short term at least, hydrogen is likely to be produced mainly by processing fossil fuels, thus releasing large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, especially given the political clout of the fossil fuel pushers. More environmentally sound options, such as solar or wind generated hydrogen, receive little attention and less funding.
One of the biggest problems with fuel cells is the rare and expensive substances needed for the catalyst, the most common of which is platinum, of which the worldwide supply comes nowhere near the amount needed for mass production of fuel cells. Much research is directed towards finding less exotic compounds, but I have heard little success as of yet in this arena, and this is probably the issue that will keep fuel cells nonfeasible for the longest time.
The H-prize to me merely seems to be a ploy to make energy industry politicians look like they actually care about the environment. Rather than actually commit a substantial amount of money to solid R&D on hydrogen (or more importantly to other, more immediate green energy sources like wind and solar) they set aside a pittance with good PR value.
If you want to read a reasonably good proposal for weaning our country away from fossil fuels (though I don’t agree with all of their points and conclusions), go to:
Energizing America – Achieving US Energy Security by 2020 (Draft Five)
May 26th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
HYDROGEN ECONOMY
It is the wind machine that will power the new (22nd) century.
Electric power from the wind will always need high capital investment because the density of the medium is so low. Better generating equipment and standardized design has made wind power using horizontal axis turbines with some subsidies competitive to coal and gas power plants. The cost of wind generated electricity is now between .03 to .08 dollars per kilowatt hour. This cost needs to be reduced to .03 dollars or less to create the critical mass that would overcome the “technological momentum� of the coal, gas and oil based power. One advantage is wind power does not contribute to the greenhouse effect caused by the burning of hydrocarbons that produce CO2.
The state of the art wind power turbines have in the past 10 years has taken giant leaps. This was accomplished by scaling-up the wind turbines to immense sizes. Rotor diameters on some of the new turbines have reached 400 ft and tower height of 600 ft.
The typical horizontal-axis turbines under optimal wind conditions can operates at 59% or less of maximum available power. This is known as Betz limit. Statistics for turbines in Denmark is that they produce at 50% and as a rule of thumb 1000 kWh/m2 per year. The state of the art turbines are marvels of technology; they use the most advanced materials but are limited by Betz limit and the area of the rotor. My machine can operate at 80% of maximum available power and up to four times velocity cubed. The power machine can overcome most of the deficiencies of the horizontal-axis turbines, while at the same time using the same components. This is the machine that will power the new century.
As of this writing the cost of oil has reached $70/barel and gasoline is $3/gal. The supply of oil from the Middle East is at best unstable and could end abruptly. The oil that is now the lifeblood of the economy and transportation is reduced in importance. The new lifeblood will be the unstoppable wind. It will be the wind that will power the new century. The power machine will make it economical to build even in locals where wind turbines are not now economically sustainable. The wind will produce hydrogen that will power the fuel cell cars of the future. Hydrogen need not be produced by using
The so called “hydrogen economy� will become a reality. There is no need to deliver hydrogen with trucks. Hydrogen can be produced at home or purchased at former gasoline stations. Hydrogen generating electrolyzers can produce hydrogen fuel (high purity and pressure) anywhere electricity and water are available, they utilize electrolysis with a simple fluid electrolyte. Electrolyzers can produce the high-pressure hydrogen needed for efficient storage and distribution, without a separate compressor.
Do you think I could win the prize? Doubtful!