"Johnson boasts that his electrolyzer can produce hydrogen at about three or four times the rate of electrolyzers with similar footprints, using about a third the electrical current. That represents a stepwise drop in costs."
Three or four times? Current efficiencies are 65-70% for larger plants.[1]
There's a theoretical maximum here; it takes a known amount of energy to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. This isn't magic or perpetual motion. Electrolysis is energetically uphill. You can get most of the energy back recombining oxygen and hydrogen in a fuel cell or by combustion.
The "with similar footprints" is very suspicious. His demo unit is small. Little electrolyzers are known to be inefficient. Industrial units are bigger and more efficient.
As an emissions control measure, it might work out.
Considering the smaller footprints are less efficient, then perhaps that makes room for a 3-4 fold improvement. Whether that's true is another issue, but at least it appears somewhat consistent.
I think using it as a safe battery is a neat idea. I understand there are significant losses as compared to li-ion batteries, but the fact that the system has a longer lifespan is really interesting.
It's a way to preserve energy during surplus. As a gardener I'm constantly balancing inputs and outputs. A huge tomato harvest eaten raw off the vine is the most efficient use.
But during a huge glut, I cannot eat the tomatoes fast enough so I start freezing tomatoes and produce sauce.
I trade energy, and human time and labor to extend the shelf life of the tomato.
In this sense, from my naive perspective, A hydride fluid battery if cheap enough to build/install would be a great way to store surplus energy from solar / wind / etc.
The article names it, but then does not dive deeper into it: the hydrogen chain has huge energy losses. First, electrolysis unfortunately has not a high efficiency - I have read numbers around 70%, but then the compression of the produced hydrogen takes a lot of energy, as compressing gases heats them up. Then the hydrogen has to be transported and stored, requiring further energy. Finally, you have to use the hydrogen, there the efficiency varies between 60% (fuel cell) or as proposed in the article with a combustion engine as low as 30%.
At the same time, there are less and less applications which cannot be powered by electricity directly, having only a fraction of losses compared to the equivalent hydrogen chain. So as long we do not have more than 100% reneweable electricity generation, we should be very concerned about the efficiency of our energy usage.
Did you read the full article? It's in there - he developed a new Titanium electrode to improve the efficiency ond reduce the footprint of the electrolysis hardware and he also developed a new hydride (with a weak H2 bond to support release of H2 using waste heat) for greatly improved energy density. The specific values are in the article; maybe someone nicer than me will do more work to pull that for you.
I rechecked the article, and I could not find any specific values in there. Care to point them out to me?
I could only find some hand-wavy statements about a somewhat improved electrolysis device, but no numbers about its efficiency. Nor what those "hydrides" supposed to be.
As do fuel cells and H2 tanks - H2 is quite aggressive to the materials. But most importantly, the charge-discharge cycle of a battery is about 90% efficient, which beats hydrogen easily. And with quickly dropping battery prices they even become feasible for large-scale storage, see the Australian battery built by Tesla.
Depends on the li-ion. There are chemistries out there right now that are good for 20,000 cycles like LTO. And a substantial amount of li-ion research is extending cycle life.
It doesn't matter how good hydrogen becomes. Battery tech will continue to improve faster than hydrogen tech. H2 will never catch up.
What would you use the hydrogen plant for? For the same amount of solar energy, a Tesla is going about 3x further than a Mirai, and a heat pump would provide much more heat your house.
Open fuel cells storage can be much cheaper than battery based storage. You can store energy for a long period, paying by the maximum power, not storage capacity.
That said, molten salt cells look way more promising than hydrogen.
Mirai is one of the first production HFC vehicles, well below what's feasible. Total solar energy is not really a constraint, refueling time and amount of stored energy are.
Total solar energy is a constraint, as someone has to pay for the cells and to have space to set them up. If you want to power your own car, don't you think it makes a difference whether you need 1x or 3x the area covered with solar cells?
The DOE goal for cost of distributed / dispensed hydrogen is $4/kgH2.
Cost of centralized production is estimated at half that even with electrolysis. I find it suspicious that there aren't any specific production cost estimates cited; just vague comparisons to unspecified existing technologies.
Also, methane is a far better source of hydrogen than water (less energy required to break down the molecule for the yield of twice as much hydrogen). Steam-methane reforming (95% of industrial hydrogen production) gets you hydrogen from both methane and water, but is a huge CO2 emitter (9-10 kgCO2/kgH2).
I'm personally a big proponent of thermal decomposition of methane [3]. Theoretical energy consumption is only 1.29 kWh/kgH2. if you can use a non-emitting source of energy, there's no CO2 emission. Carbon falls out as a solid and capture and sequestration is free. If you can make a valuable carbon (e.g. graphene) along the way, then you're set and there's no way electrolysis will ever be competitive.
One thing about methane, though, is that it's a nonrenewable fuel. Unless you're talking about it as a storage intermediary (for example, if it's synthesized from CO2 and H2O using renewable energy).
I'd really (honestly) like for all this to be true, but the innovations here are that Johnson figured out some secret sauce in the electrolyzer's electrocatalyzer mix, and some more secret sauce in the fuel cell's hydrides. It's possible this happened, but I'm pretty skeptical.
Most counterarguments related to Hydrogen refer to the poor efficiency of converting (electric) energy to Hydrogen and back.
True, directly using that electric energy from wind or solar is definitely the best option.
However, that is not always possible, since there is no place to consume, transport or store that electric energy.
Furthermore, scrapping all ICE vehicles for BEVs is most likely the end goal. But replacing the worldwide fleet of vehicles will take decades.
HyTech seems to be on to something for these two scenarios.
If for instance you can capture some of the excess solar and wind energy in a metal hydride for some hours, weeks, or even months, you will on a larger scale reduce the load of the electric grid.
And if some of that Hydrogen can be burnt instead of Diesel, the car or truck in your driveway is both cleaner and less dependant on fossil fuels.
I really don't understand why the debate on H2 is so focused on electrolysis. Even today, 95% of all hydrogen is produced not by electrolysis, but from natural gas through steam methane reforming (SMR).
SMRs can be easily scaled up to meet all H2 demand, and they are easily fitted with carbon capture technology (since it's a single large emission point). Then you have zero-emission H2 in quantities as large as oil and gas today.
I'm entirely convinced it will be the future, and that we'll never be able to scale pure BEVs beyond 10-15% of all cars in any large country, simply due to electricity production and distribution constraints.
The problem with nifty solutions to removing carbon from raw fuels resulting in carbon free hydrogen, is the best engineering solution to the remainder of the task list of transport, store, and burn the resulting carbon-free hydrogen, is to modify the hydrogen by synthesize up some carbon containing hydrocarbons to make some delicious hyper optimized liquid fuels, which coincidentally we have massive infrastructure to use.
Not as snarky as might sound. Given infinite fusion energy via the real thing or solar panels, truly pure synthetic fuel opens up some interesting ideas WRT catalysts and efficient burn designs to squeek out another percent or two of performance. Inherently zero (not low, but ZERO) sulfur diesel is interesting, for example. And no one says the carbon thats added has to come from underground; go harvest some trees that sucked the carbon right out of the air, then when you put it back in the air after a couple months of storage, nothing bad happened.
You can burn anhydrous ammonia in a regular ICE. If we adopt GP's hypothesis that energy is cheap, then it's also cheap to turn H2 into NH3. We already have a robust infrastructure for the manufacture, storage, and transportation of liquid anhydrous ammonia. It does present some dangers to human safety, but so does any fuel.
If cars ever run on hydrogen in significant numbers, they'll actually be running on ammonia.
> the best engineering solution to the remainder of the task list of transport, store, and burn the resulting carbon-free hydrogen, is to modify the hydrogen by synthesize up some carbon containing hydrocarbons
If that's the case, it's equally true for H2 from renewables, no?
And I don't think it's true. LPG vehicles today are common enough, and they've solved very similar transport and distribution problems.
Easier, sure. But Tupolev built and flew 100 flights with the Tu-155, a cryogenic H2 fueled narrow-body airliner, in the 1980s. So it's very far from impossible, it's just a matter of time IMO. Currently aviation is pushing biofuels to kick the can down the road, but they can't do that forever.
For a hydrogen based infrastructure we need 3x as much electricity than for one which directly uses electricity via batteries. You cannot use hydrogen in cars already built - unless you want to sacrifice your rear passenger row for an add-on tank (H2-tanks are quite bulky). So it is new cars anyway. Making them directly electric is the way more efficient way.
If you have excess electric capacity, I think there are more convenient things to produce, such as aluminum. It lasts forever, it's easy to transport, producing it is very energy-intensive, and there's a constant demand. E.g., aluminum is a big industry in Iceland thanks to its cheap geothermal/hydro energy.
Hydrogen does have a lot of problems which other commenters here point out.
But if HyTech is to be believed, some of these problems are solved. Probably their most significant claim, is hydride storage at ordinary temperature / pressure with safe, practical, cost effectiveness in recovering that stored energy.
HyTech doesn't solve the main problem with hydrogen - that there isn't any available as fuel, and it takes more energy to extract the hydrogen than you get back from burning it or even using it in a fuel cell.
The idea of injecting small amounts of hydrogen into a combustion engine to improve fuel economy is not new, but congrats if they can bring that concept to market. That would be a win, but is not the same as hydrogen as a primary fuel.
No one cares about the efficiency of the tiny battery in your phone. But if charging and discharging a Tesla used twice as much energy as burning gasoline directly then people would probably care.
At some level of inefficiency, an energy solution can indeed become useless at scale.
That depends though on a bunch of factors including base price of electricity, renewable potential and how easily hydrogen can be shipped.
There are a few developed countries I can think of that have vast renewable capacity but the distances between the optimum location for renewables make it impractical at present.
Also modern nuclear plants are an option if you want to produce vast amounts of electricity with a smaller carbon footprint than coal/gas.
The hydrogen fuel pathway has already been solved, and much more elegantly.
Hydrogen produced by direct, catalytic hydrolysis from sunlight, in water, is taken up by microbes in the water that absorb CO2 and excrete hydrocarbons -- oil -- that floats to the surface, and is directly usable in existing fuel tanks and engines, no further processing needed.
Hydrogen has hard risks, and high costs. Density. Corrosion. Tunneling/leaking. A new trillion-dollar distribution infrastructure to replace the fluid-version we use for petrol.
What about methanol? We can convert hydrogen to hydrocarbon. Liquid is dense, much less dangerous, less acidic, less leaky, and our current trillion-dollar infrastructure already uses it as a substantial additive.
Is it in common use as such? Meaning 92 octane is 88 buffered with methanol? If it’s just in those little octane booster bottles, I would not consider that a “substantial additive“ in the context of the trillion dollar petroleum industry.
> There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis; which account for 48%, 30% 18% and 4% of the world’s hydrogen production respectively.
And due to the inefficiency of the components, it is a very bad battery. That is the main problem, as attractive it would be to produce hydrogen via solar.
But wait, a "tall, rangy, blond, inveterate maker and builder whose eyes light up when he talks engineering" claims he's solved all efficiency and and storage problems with super-secret technology. Incidentally, he's also the CEO of the company and probably paying for the piece:
>To date, most hydride fluids have been less energy dense than compressed hydrogen, and far short of fossil fuels. They weigh too much for the energy they provide. Johnson thinks he’s cracked both problems. He won’t reveal the details of the hydrides involved, but he’s got the power-to-weight ratio high enough to beat lithium-ion batteries (which are very heavy) and the hydride bond weak enough that it can be broken using only the redirected waste heat from the engine (no added heat or pressure required).
I'm curious about his early career in video compression.
I'm thinking of a friend whose first job was working with a video compression startup whose secret algorithm was to hide ethernet cables inside the power cord.
I think we should be skeptical. That said there are some points in the article that indicate there may something more than fluff. Let the early adopters try some retrofits themselves and we shall see whether the results are there related to battery performance.
"Johnson boasts that his electrolyzer can produce hydrogen at about three or four times the rate of electrolyzers with similar footprints, using about a third the electrical current. That represents a stepwise drop in costs."
Three or four times? Current efficiencies are 65-70% for larger plants.[1] There's a theoretical maximum here; it takes a known amount of energy to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. This isn't magic or perpetual motion. Electrolysis is energetically uphill. You can get most of the energy back recombining oxygen and hydrogen in a fuel cell or by combustion.
The "with similar footprints" is very suspicious. His demo unit is small. Little electrolyzers are known to be inefficient. Industrial units are bigger and more efficient.
As an emissions control measure, it might work out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...