How is this not on the front page? If we have a low cost catalyst then Hydrogen Fuel cells become affordable and are well placed to disrupt how the world thinks about energy. This is an exciting time to be alive!
Energy breakthrough exhaustion. There are just too many breathless press releases and articles and they mostly drift away to join the aggregate body of scientific knowledge.
Way outside my field here, but this one doesn't address cost of production, only cost of components. Platinum is about $12/kW with current technology fuel cells. In a quick googling I found a 1kW fuel cell for $6000. It is safe to assume the platinum cost is fiddling about the edges. Combine with the hunch that creating large structures out of carbon nanotubes with nickel nanoparticles arranged in a certain way isn't going to be free, and my interest ebbs quickly.
The good news of this article is that if we do somehow end up in a future where fuel cells are widely used, we will need not be constrained by the world supply of platinum… but that isn't front page news.
I thought the problem with hydrogen as a fuel was storage --- liquification requires cryogenic temperatures and is very energy inefficient, compressed gases require heavy storage vessels and has terrible energy density, infusing it into the surface metals has poor energy density and is problematic for other reasons... actually turning it into energy is pretty well understood; it's getting it to where it's needed that's not.
Or has something changed since I last looked at this?
Way outside my field here, but this one doesn't address cost of production, only cost of components. Platinum is about $12/kW with current technology fuel cells. In a quick googling I found a 1kW fuel cell for $6000. It is safe to assume the platinum cost is fiddling about the edges. Combine with the hunch that creating large structures out of carbon nanotubes with nickel nanoparticles arranged in a certain way isn't going to be free, and my interest ebbs quickly.
The good news of this article is that if we do somehow end up in a future where fuel cells are widely used, we will need not be constrained by the world supply of platinum… but that isn't front page news.