After years in energy research with coal, I scumbled to some colleges' work on hydrogen fuel cell. I attended a week's seminar on hydrogen and fuel cell at a government facility in West Virginia. Apart from the hypes, I was not impressed with the overall efficiency and also the total operation sequence and maintenance.
Good to hear American researchers have been able to use sunlight and water to produce green hydrogen. FYI, China has been producing green hydrogen by the electrolysis of seawater (most abundant natural resource on our planet) using electricity produced by solar and wind energy for the past 1-2 years. Green hydrogen is in mass production in many areas of China, and I understand the cost is as low as 40cents/cubic metre of hydrogen. Green hydrogen is needed for many industrial purposes, rocket fuel in space program, and also in fuel cells used in trucks (50,000 by 2025), buses, trains and possibly shipping. China by the way is the world's biggest producer and consumer of hydrogen.
40 cents per m3 of hydrogen amounts to almost 9$/kg. And that's probably without compression, transportation and profit. Not exactly cheap if you ask me.
@@dirkvornholt2507As hydrogen weighs 0.082 kg/cubic metre, the cost of green hydrogen production if I am correct is about $4.88/kg presently. With improved efficiency and mass production in the future, it's possible the cost could go down further possibly to 1-2 dollars/kg.
@@peterliu8145 - this is the weight per cubic metre at standard temperature and pressure, which is too gasseus to be handled or used due to a very low volumetric energy density of ~0.003kWh/L (3x10^-6 kWh/cubic meter). To be useful it either needs to be liquified (at -253°c) or stored at high pressure often over 1000bar at site (350 to 700bar in vehicles), both processes are quite energy intentive. The current high cost of hydrogen reflects this energy use and handling cost, econmonies of scale will improve the generation but have a lesser impact on the handling and transportation due to the variable and fixed cost elements involved. Production projections estimate $2 to $3 per kg in generation by 2050, plus a further $3 to $5 in processing and distribution costs giving a range of $5 to $8 per kg. Meaning a 400 mile top up (~7kg) tank would cost in the order of $35 to $56.
@@GruffSillyGoat Many thanks for your valuable input. According to your calculations, it would cost between USD35 (35 x 7.75 = HKD271) to USD56 (56 x 7.75 = HKD434) to top up a 400-mile tank. I used to own a Honda 7-seater station wagon in Hong Kong over a year ago (I now own a BYD Atto 3 eV) and it would cost me about HKD800-900 to fill up the tank. So paying HKD271 to HKD434 to fill up the tank is still a significant saving compared to petrol and it's much cleaner and non-polluting. The main drawback is do I want a potentially more explosive and dangerous tank in the back of my car?! Also, cost of running an eV still significantly cheaper than running a hydrogen-powered car.
@peterliu8145 You are right. I'm factor two off because I estimated using H instead of H2. But still, the cost per norm cubic meter is kind of odd and misleading for comparison as hydrogen has a really low density. But it definitely depends on the use case. For replacing methane in pipelines cost per m3 might be suitable.
H2 is best at larger stationary applications. One where the production and use are closely matched w/ minimal storage. Condensing the H2 into liquid is very costly energy wise. Generally speaking, I don't believe it would be useful for long range vehicles, but possible short range applications. Other technologies seem superior for most of these applications.
The key considerations are cost, scalability and reliability. Building a small prototype is easy, but turning this into an affordable large scale product is a different ball game.
Correct, it will likely be cheaper to increase, e.g. area of solar panels than to increase the efficiency of the existing one with an expensive system. In addition, people tend to forget that the materials used in the production of the green energy do not appear out of the thin air in eco friendly way and do not last forever.
Round trip efficiency is important, but also other factors matter. Hydrogen is useful for the chemical industry and can be used as long term (seasonal) energy storage. If you also need heat in winter, the "losses" of a fuel cell can be quite useful.
@@dirkvornholt2507 not if you keep having to replace/maintain storage equipment due to hydrogenation/embrittlement. Still the tech is interesting and there may be non-transportation use cases where it makes sense dunno.
@erktrek I see hydrogen rather as a base chemical. The industry that uses it knows how to handle it. Concerning storage and transport, derived fuels like methanol or ammonia might be a more viable option. For cars, it's probably rather a niche market.
Hydrogen makes no sense because of the efficiency and storage problems. Batteries are far superior and only gettin better every hour. I learned that from you😊😊
@philborer877 Batteries are great for daily storage or up to two weeks. For seasonal storage, we need hydrogen or derived efuels. Batteries are today's solution. Hydrogen is the long-term future solution. It's never either/or, it's a question of what to use when for what.
@@dirkvornholt2507 I hear this line and it makes zero sense. This “batteries are temporary” line. In a short time they will be 99.99% recyclable, pulling power from a variety of sources. More logical would be EVs with hydrogen reserved for say shipping or possibly air travel, but EVs would draw from whatever energy is available. Who in their right mind would want a hydrogen vehicle with all the complexity and worse reliability? What advantage would it possibly bring? Also, of sure where this idea is coming of two weeks, Teslas can go about 60 days or more just sitting in sleep mode.
H2 would still not be good for cars, but we can use hydrogen in so many ways if it was green like this. Steel and concrete could both benefit from inexpensive green hydrogen. Ships are the other use that might be viable; possibly using a hydrogen gas turbine. Aircraft maybe.
Everything will be green in the future. The concept of green hydrogen that is popularly discussed is actually a misconception. The all green portfolio is the genuine theory and thought process.
Yep. U r right. ruclips.net/video/RAEhhYqMEBE/видео.htmlsi=9jZzGtDdRXpzczk6 And I heard of hydrogen diesel too. 700 bar. Big time pressure. Still. People like that there no emissions.
Exactly! The main losses on hydrogen are having to compress it in order to transport and store it. This is exactly why industries that use hydrogen make it on site as needed. Also storage of hydrogen is extremely difficult and expensive due to hydrogen's corrosivity to almost all metals and its ability to escape almost any seal or valve because of its small atomic size. Just look at the leaks Boeing's star liner capsule is having right now at the space station. (the following is a correction as I inadvertently said Starliner was leaking Hydrogen... it's Helium. Thanks to a fellow commenter keeping me straight!) Boeing can't even keep Helium, which is twice as large an atom, from leaking.
Hydrogen cars are still more complicated in comparison to fully electric cars. the fueling process is still less convenient and requires more personel. And you still cannot fuel home made hydrogen. Electric has still advantages.
@@petewright4640 The next very rare element needed for fuelcells is Irridium. I'm told that there is no replacement for that element in the fuelcell membranes.
Hydrogen cars by nature will be simply more dangerous than electric batteries. Toyota's hydrogen race car went up in flames i think last 1 or 2 years ago? Liquefying means the hydrogen will be under pressure and that means the thing is explosive or the tank walls have to be really reinforced. The other thing that makes it suck is that they will need tankers to carry the fuel to refueling stations like current oil tankers. Electric rechargers on the other hand needs you to lay power lines and that's it. Cheap hydrogen as a fuel for certain functions would be great but for cars, it just not up to par.
A cool discovery, for sure; hydrogen has its place. Probably not in mass produced personal cars, but in locomotives, ocean shipping, heavy hauler trucks and large farm equipment, perhaps also aircraft. Or, given the vast quantities of oil still in the ground, just stick with diesel for those applications and keep improving the emissions scrubbing tech.
Not even for heavy transport thanks to maintenance and storage issues. The mining industry around the world seems like they are going to go BEV thanks to the efficiency and lower costs. On a container ship, storing the very leakable hydrogen for long term (based on their months long shipping routes) would be a nightmare safety issue with constant equipment maintenance and safety checking.
Hydrogen fuel cells have many valid uses. Makes an excellent high capacity backup system. During a outage you can power your building with a fuel cell, having more delivered as needed. For cars, the big hurdle is storage. If they can perfect a liquid or powder that easily supplies the hydrogen, this could be a big improvement.
It makes sense for seasonal energy storage and long distance transportation. Like production in desert areas for use in steel production and airplanes. Etc especially if the efficiency goes up to photo voltaic levels.
Green hydrogen would still lose out to BEVs in cars. Energy efficiency still substantially favours keeping electricity as electricity. Yes, it may better enable big/long range trucks and shipping, but Green H2 will do most good in enabling Green Steel from electric furnaces. Just keep it away from cars.
Electricity moves at nine-tenths the speed of light in the grid. Why not use the loss base, the nightly surpluses for example, for considerable profits? By turning routine losses into hydrogen, cash streams become available.
Professor James Tour has a method of breaking down waste plastic into its constituent molecules. The great thing about the process is that the carbon produced is graphene - which is very valuable. So valuable that the hydrogen also produced is essentially free.
@@scottwilliams1623 I was told graphene costs about $1,000 per gram for the highest quality graphene. But I know the Tour process doesn’t produce this quality but a type suitable for strengthening concrete and other materials. However the hydrogen produced is significantly cheaper than green, black, blue or white hydrogen as well as stopping plastics filling up landfill.
If we could get rid of the heavy crude we used to power ships, it would be a major step forward. I agree it's a tried and now dead duck for hydrogen cars . Batteries are developing that fast they are way in front. Why would anyone want to use fuel and pay huge amounts of tax when you can at home from solar and off-peak electricity.
LNG ships are already in use and get rid of much of the polution (leaving only CO2). Way easier to adapt infrastructure where needed. Far more practical and ultimately cheaper than bulk oil rather than vastly more expensive. H2 in shipping will kill any company that tries it in competition with others who don't use it or go the LNG route. Same with long haul trucking.
How would you store and maintain this hydrogen over a months long voyage for a container ship? Liquid H2? Pressurized? What about maintenance on the H2 equipment. Costs seem to high to justify even IF using a cheaply produced hydrogen. See what's happening in the mining industry - they appear to be shifting to BEVs rather than Hydrogen.
Pure hydrogen is impractical for shipping due to the volume required for the hydrogen tanks. Far better is to somehow convert the hydrogen into methanol, ideally using atmospheric carbon. Methanol is a very friendly, easy to store liquid fuel that can be used by fuel cells to efficiently recover the energy. Combined with batteries and electric drives, one could in theory have a completely carbon neutral ship, if the methanol was created using renewables.
Hydrogen is ubiquitous, and there are many ways to make it. The most intriguing prospect that is still a modern mystery is the Royal Navy approach that made prodigious amounts quickly and cheaply in WW I, for the coastal patrol airships. It is great to see another approach emerge. Keep the good news coming, and remember, fuel cell vehicles are indeed electric vehicles, as well.
@@simongross3122 It doesn't matter how much "physics" they discover, HFCBEV will always be inferior to pure BEV for one simple reason; pure BEVs provide a more direct route from energy generation to "fuel in the tank" BEV: generation -> grid -> battery HFC: generation -> grid -> hydrogen -> liquefaction -> transportation -> storage -> fuel cell -> battery Hydrogen will never, ever, ever be as efficient, cheap, or simple as pure battery electric vehicles. Ever. It wouldn't matter if hydrogen production was 100% efficient, the infrastructure alone would make hydrogen more expensive than electricity per mile driven. Hydrogen is a waste of time, money, and brainpower. It's nothing but a boondoggle for politicians to appear to be doing something useful.
@@simongross3122 It doesn't matter how much "physics" they discover, HFCBEV will always be worse than pure BEV for one simple reason; pure BEVs provide a more direct route from energy generation to "fuel in the tank" BEV: generation -> grid -> battery HFC: generation -> grid -> hydrogen -> liquefaction -> transportation -> storage -> fuel cell -> battery Hydrogen will never, ever, ever be as efficient, cheap, or simple as pure battery electric vehicles. Ever. It wouldn't matter if hydrogen production was 100% efficient, the infrastructure alone would make hydrogen more expensive than electricity per mile driven. Hydrogen is a waste of time, money, and brainpower. It's nothing but a boondoggle for politicians to appear to be doing something useful.
This could be used for energy storage. If you can produce hydrogen from water with a photo-catalysis you also produce oxygen in perfect proportions. Store these gasses and run them back through a fuel cell to produce electricity at peak times. Electricity is easier to transport and the infrastructure is already in place. Surplus solar and wind could also be used. The (presumably pure) water from the fuel cell could then be re-cycled through the photo-catalyzation process. Whether this can be done at an industrial scale is another matter.
Hydrogen could be useful for occasions where high energy density is needed, such as transitional airplanes and later long range flights, or for U.S. locomotives, assuming we never upgrade them to the same high speed railways the rest of the world uses. The Tesla Semi has shown that battery electric tractor-trailers work, but for those of you in Australia, the extended demands of long haul land trains might do better with hydrogen once electrolysis gets figured out at scale.
A few questions How clean does the water have to be? How do they separate the hydrogen from the oxygen? How quickley does the material get consumed? How quickly does the water get contaminated and becomes unusable? How hazardous is the contaminated water? All the compression, storage and transport complexity still remains.
Universal Matter has a graphene production process where any plastic can serve as the feedstock and the output is graphene and hydrogen is the byproduct. That’s virtually free hydrogen. That said, it would be best used to fuel convertible natural gas plants like the one in Texas designed by Mitsubishi Electric.
Lesson in economics. There is no "free" hydrogen. Nicola was pushing something similar and they were frauds. Silver is frequently a byproduct of gold mining... do you imagine that they give it away? Once there is a market, there will be a price and the yield will be a drop in the bucket vs large scale use (say 1% of the auto market). I promise you the graphine market is a blip compared to the gasoline market.
I think that there’s a lot of improvements that can be made in this area. It’s under researched. But the storage and transportation with hydrogenation embrittlement I think will be a problem but green ammonia etc are probably better.
I read about multiple sites around the world with geologic hydrogen, some have been drilled, most not. The problem is that it is not possible to extract commercial quantities at rates that a profit can be made. If you have any references to anyone saying that they can extract at high rates, please give me the titles of the paper or blog or anything. I've not been ablate find any.
This was a good video on an important topic. Thank you! Hydrogen is a powerful greenhouse gas that is extremely bulky, explosive, and difficult to store, so it has many downsides. This breakthrough would be super useful replacing carbon in applications like steel production, but I'm sceptical that transportation (even ships) is a good idea. There are too many potential unintended consequences.
The problem with this tec compared to pv is not only higher cost (think of all the pipework to collect the H2 and the expensive ruthenium) but it's far less flexible. Electricity has so many applications and is easy to transport AND if it's needed can also be used to make H2 at similar efficiency as a direct light to H2 process.
Spark technologies (an Australian company), have a working prototype. Fortescue have licensed the patent. Be interesting to see if the development of the US product is similar / unique by comparison.
With solar, energy goes straight into the grid or the battery. With hydrogen it loses energy every step of the way 1 hydrolysis 2 storage 3 compression 4 delivery to hydrogen gas station 5 burning hydrogen for energy Some processes are more efficient, but they never you the energy losses
We presently use an array of fuels for an array of applications. There seems to be a misunderstand that in the future there will no longer be a need for an array of applications using different fuels. Hydrogen is a highly suitable fuel for a number of applications, maybe not for cars due to the challenges of distribution and storage but that does not mean that research and breakthroughs in greener hydrogen generation are not highly valuable.
Making the hydrogen is not the problem. We learned from printer ink that consumables are a trap. Electricity is used for everything so it’s not a special “fuel”.
Sam, Thanks for this video. I'm interested and will ask someone I know about this.. But in no way H2 will be efficient for usage in cars. The main issue is the high pressure tanks for taking eneoug H2 with you for a little of range. Even when it would be possible to create H2 with a near to 100% efficiency the compression (to at least 800 bar) is too costly....Each megajoule energy in the H2 delivered under pressure in a tank will cost another megajoule for the compression. Max efficiency is alread down to 50%... With electrolysis the max efficiency for creatimg H2 is also ca 50%....compressed in the car we are down to 25 % efficiency. A battery is up to 95% (even higher is possible) efficient for storing energy. But in the end of your video you give some places where we can use this H2 with a big win for the environnement. Steel production would be my first target to transfer to h2 instead of the poluting cokes.
Like he said in the video, and most engineers/scientists would agree, hydrogen is unlikely to succeed in the transportation market for many reasons. However, if produced on site with this method, there is a chance it could be used in industrial applications where transportation and storage can be kept to a minimum. I'm not holding my breath though. Even if this method turns out to be cheap and effective it is still a decade or more from realization.
@@secretweapon7764 He may be thinking E-fuels, which is also an unlikely to succeed technology. Fuel cells typically last 7 to 20 years depending on application but are pretty expensive.
The conversation about gas or liquid hydrogen misses the mark if you know about "solid state" hydrogen. Sandy Munro talked about being able to fire a laser at a solid "disc" of hydrogen to convert it to energy. This fuel would be safe enough to power a car. Problems with pressure tanks, transport & distribution go away. Apparently, the Obama Admin classified the technology as secret to prevent it from becoming a power source for missile computers. Sandy said it has since been declassified, but I haven't heard anything about it since that one time.
If hydrogen is ever used for power production it would probably be for grid power plants that have room for the enormous amount of storage that system would need. The infrastructure needed to store and keep hydrogen pressurized needs a lot of real estate.
While hydrogen works and if this method can be bought to scale at a competitive price then it would start to make some sense but for one small problem. Currently there is no distribution chain anywhere and there is nothing in the current system that could be repurposed. The entire storage, compression and retail distribution system would have to be custom built to suite hydrogen from scratch as it simply does not exist at present. With battery EV's the generation and distribution is already there servicing mutable markets, EV's are just another add on for it.
This technology seems an interesting approach, but unless/until it can beat 23% PV efficiency and 80+% electrolyzer efficiency, it's rather a scientific curiosity. The advantage of PV and electrolyzers is also the versatility to either use the electricity directly or make hydrogen. Additionally the infrastructure for electricity already exists and enables the location of electricity production to be decoupled from the location of the electrolyzer. And it has to beat the price of PV which currently is cheaper than window glass.
Thanks for all the insight into Hydrogen. Nikola seems to be making it work.... I wonder if the higher cost of the producing the Hydrogen of offset in other ways with the Hydrogen Trucks Nikola is making and selling. Would be cool to see you do a video on Nikola.
Several questions unanswered here. Main 1, the instant gaseous hydrogen is produced from water, also gaseous oxygen is produced. A) how do you avoid instantaneous recombination, wasting the original separation energy? (This problem kills simple cheap thermal separation of water into h2 and O2.)
There are more efficient methods of energy storage (from cheap low density batteries to pumped hydro/compressed air). The new process might move the needle but they released No numbers. Regards planes, the problem isn't the weight of the fuel, its the weight of the massive fuel tanks and hazards handling H2 at 10,000psi. There are precious few H2 stations in the world, yet explosions at these stations are not unknown. Would be interesting to see what safety specs would look like vs kerosine.
With regard to mobility applications of hydrogen. Why store the hydrogen on board the vehicle, just store the water. And produce the hydrogen at the fuel cell. Is 10,700 milli moles enough to power the fuel and how much power is necessary to run a flash light with the RhO.
Now I have to rethink if I want a very low cost Toyota hydrogen car because here is a means to provide hydrogen without even needing a big company to provide it. The next question is can it be stored or absorbed directly by a hydrogen fuel cell.
We have to see what the government will do with the breakthrough. Are we going to benefit or will a select few be made richer and the people will not benefit? If the cost is the same as gas or diesel, what is the point?
It would take a processing plant the size of L.A. and need to be duplicated on different continents, Also storing hydrogen is dangerous not to mention the flame is invisible.
The rule that applies to hydrogen is use it where you must - use it if you can't use something else. Hydrogen isn't easy to handle or contain. Optimally, you want to produce hydrogen near the place it gets used. Just because this works doesn't mean hydrogen becomes more useful. Nor have the researchers shown that this is a less expensive way of producing green hydrogen than other methods. We still require energy to split the water. Is photocatalysis more efficient, less expensive, more versatile and just better than electrocatalysis or is it just another option to produce green hydrogen?
You know... That energy is better spent directly creating electricity. Not that I'd stop them from doing this kind of research, but still gotta pragmatic about this.
Sam, I think I just found an interesting bit of data. The fuel for a 10 day journey of an ocean freight ship would weigh 4 times as much as a CATL condensed battery with the same amount of energy!
Basic physics is the stumbling block. Separating the hydrogen from the oxygen that makes up water takes more energy than you get back when you recombine them. We simply need to break the laws of physics. No problem.
H2 or derivatives, ammonia, methanol, methane, bio petrol etc may prove better more sustainable solutions in the future with more R&D into fuel cells, storage and fuel transportation. It’s still early days, many new inventions, discoveries and breakthroughs around the corner making it impossible for anyone to predict the future, however we live in exciting times and for now EVs make sense, esp with QuantumScape, CATL Qilin etc.
Not early days at all. None of the above scales (even methanol is more expensive than gas and drives up food prices, produces aldehydes). EVs with current and emerging battery tech is far superior, cleaner, simpler and far more flexible as the energy can be sourced from whatever works best in a given location. The cars themselves are fast becoming cheaper as batt prices fall and use of rare earths/expensive metals drops off. Nat Gas (methane), however, is good for long haul trucking and shipping. This tech is proven. Pig poo methane... not so much. Compost and animal excrement are better used as fertilizer.
No need to transport hydrogen or fuel cars with it. You simply port the hydrogen production directly into a fuel cell stack. Depending on the metres cubed in gas volume that is produced would determine the size of the fuel cell stack. The energy can be sent via the electrical grid. No need to store or transport hydrogen.
And where does all the energy instensive, large and heavy hydrogen pressurising and cooling equipment fit inside the car? Without this a killogram of hydrogen produced would occupy about 1,000 cubic metres. A Mirai has about 5.6kg of hydrogen to power the car for 300 miles, meaning you'd need 5,600 cubic metres volume to store the hydrogen without pressurising it. Hydrogen's energy density by weight (gravimetric density) is 33kWh/kg but volumetric density is tiny at 0.003kWh/L at sea level conditions. The hydrogen generation systems, the smallest ones, occupy a land foot print of about 20 family sized cars parked bumper to bumper in a square. For the Mirai this equipment squeezes the 5.6kg hydrogen down to fit a volume of 85 ltrs, holding the hydrogen at a pressure twice the average depth of the planet's oceans (all held inside 100kg worth of tanks, that are 3 times the volume of the hydrogen being held within).
It doesn’t matter even if you can make green hydrogen, you still have store and transport it after which the energy efficiency is never going to compete with electrons.
What are the costs of the new process vs Red Hydrogen since Red Hydrogen makes a lot of sense for many industrial processes; which is why the Japanese are tinkering with it.
I think you should refer to Sual Griffiths's work around energy processes and you will find that green hydrogen, at present, is only 37% efficient, roughly equivalent to an ICE unit. Even if you can reduce the 17% energy loss from present-day electrolysis you still have to compress it (15% loss), transport (3% loss), fuel cell conversion (40% loss) and then combustion loss of around another 10%. And that doesn't include the safety concerns, security, distribution infrastructure etc. All up, if you want to store power, hydrogen sucks. Battery storage is closer to 95% efficient. Other energy storage forms, such as weight storage or hydro storage like the Snowy Hydro scheme, are much more efficient.....electrify everything transport-wise, hydro is throwing away money and energy if used in transport. Maybe it has a use in some areas but it is currently an inefficient energy storage device (not an energy production device) looking for a problem to solve.
Ocean transport is currently building ships that use ammonia as fuel. This tech could tip the balance towards hydrogen in the future. It can't come to soon! The dirtiest fuels are burned at sea right now.
as always I don't think hydrogen is the way to go, except in a few limited cases as you mentioned, ultimately, if it economical, and possible at scale the market will determine, if hydrogen really makes sense we will see large scale production, but I bet there are some serious catches to be solved not explicitly stated, as they rarely do for lab case studies
Check out Sunhydrogen, just done deal with Honda, and a solar company to make first commercial solar panel that produces hydrogen directly from sunlight and water
If 10% of photons splits off a hydrogen molecule, (and assuming it isn't the highest energy photons) that'd be about 10% of the energy of sunlight converted to energy stored in hydrogen. But a good solar panel can convert about 25% of solar energy to electricity, and using electrolysis at about 80% efficiency, that would effectively be 20% efficient, twice as good. If this system were cheaper than solar panels plus electrolysis hardware, that'd be a plus, but it seems like it'll need twice the area of solar panels, AND it's got to be plumbed to deliver water and collect the hydrogen from a huge area - so likely at least twice the cost per area of solar panels (so net 4x as much cost per unit of energy produced) plus likely to require a LOT more maintenance than solar panels that have no moving parts. Am I missing something here?
Imagine a solar farm that runs a green hydrogen plant that uses the stored hydrogen to power hydrogen turbines to generate power when the solar is off-line.
Why loose 3 times the energy in creating hydrogen from electricity then converting it back to electicity, it is more effective to store the electricity in batteries (flow, sodium or lithium based depending upon need) to be used when needed (at 95%+ efficiency).
@@GruffSillyGoat Cheaper Setup with Application Flexibility. Initial costs are less with the option to use the hydrogen for something other than power.
Or just use the electricity to run a pump and pump water up a hill, when its dark you run it in reverse and make electricity….. oh it already exists, pump storage hydroelectric….
@@silversurfer415 - Hydrogen is more expensive both in upfront capital and ongoing operational costs than battery systems, which is why battery based BESS systems are being deployed en-mass around the world compared to hydrogen. Hydrogen's cost benefits only kick in with static industrial applications where power and waste heat can be utilised.
@@nobilismaximus - unfortunately, not everywhere is suited to pumped hydro as it requires certain geological characteristics to be able to deploy. It is also it's fairly costly and involved lengthy projects to implement due to the scale required to be cost effective.
What about Tony Seba predictions on the last video that he says we will produce far more energy from renewables that we could use. Making hidrogen seems a good application for that excess energy
Does this process rely on pure water, most water contains contaminants, salts, dead fish etc. This may be an issue in the process or in waste disposal.
Before we start fantasizing about any new applications of hydrogen, like transportation, we FIRST need to clean up all old uses of hydrogen. Any Green hydrogen must first be used to replace dirty hydrogen. You can not say "this hydrogen is green for this application" when we are still making other hydrogen in high emissions ways. Make Green/white/pink hydrogen - stop making brown, black, grey, blue hydrogen. After all hydrogen is low emissions, then we will take a serious look at hydrogen transportation and other applications.
The problem is not so much the production of hydrogen although that is troublesome. It's the safe storage and use, that's a nightmare. It is much better to find a way of making safer molecules, easier to use such as methane (CH4), and even better still kerosene (C15H15). A process that extracts CO2 and H2 from seawater and converts these directly to tailor made hydro carbon fuels with looks to be feasible and environmentally sustainable.
So it's a solar cell that produces hydrogen from water without first producing electricity to power electrolysis. If it produces hydrogen less expensively than existing methods of producing hydrogen from natural gas, it can disrupt hydrogen production even if the hydrogen is not used much for transportation. If the hydrogen makes a hydrogen powered vehicle less expensive than a BEV to operate, it can disrupt EVs, but I doubt that I'll live to see it. Unfortunately, this article doesn't even guesstimate the cost of hydrogen produced by the new method.
Here is my first question: Is this new production method cheaper than using solar to electrolyze sea water? IOW, a 100 acre facility doing this, will it cost the same and make more hydrogen than just electrolysis (which can be up to 98% efficient)? Second question: Hydrogen is not dense and is very explosive over a huge range of mixtures with air. Far more dangerous in this regard than gasoline. Third question, can a homeowner put a hydrogen production system on his garage roof for a similar cost to solar with a similar yield? So, is it cheaper, is it less dangerous, is it possible on a unit level where I won't have to buy anything from other people who want to milk my money for the rest of my life? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I hope it is abandoned or left to research until the date when the answer to all three is yes.
Converting sunlight to electricity is far better than creating hydrogen - which is very problematic to store and use, particularly in EVs. Marine usage may be its best role, as alternatives are mostly very unattractive.
Hydrogen will make sense but it doesn't right now, EV's are just coming into their prime after nearly 25 years of production. Hydrogen is the future EV's are the present.
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After years in energy research with coal, I scumbled to some colleges' work on hydrogen fuel cell. I attended a week's seminar on hydrogen and fuel cell at a government facility in West Virginia. Apart from the hypes, I was not impressed with the overall efficiency and also the total operation sequence and maintenance.
Good to hear American researchers have been able to use sunlight and water to produce green hydrogen. FYI, China has been producing green hydrogen by the electrolysis of seawater (most abundant natural resource on our planet) using electricity produced by solar and wind energy for the past 1-2 years. Green hydrogen is in mass production in many areas of China, and I understand the cost is as low as 40cents/cubic metre of hydrogen. Green hydrogen is needed for many industrial purposes, rocket fuel in space program, and also in fuel cells used in trucks (50,000 by 2025), buses, trains and possibly shipping. China by the way is the world's biggest producer and consumer of hydrogen.
40 cents per m3 of hydrogen amounts to almost 9$/kg. And that's probably without compression, transportation and profit. Not exactly cheap if you ask me.
@@dirkvornholt2507As hydrogen weighs 0.082 kg/cubic metre, the cost of green hydrogen production if I am correct is about $4.88/kg presently. With improved efficiency and mass production in the future, it's possible the cost could go down further possibly to 1-2 dollars/kg.
@@peterliu8145 - this is the weight per cubic metre at standard temperature and pressure, which is too gasseus to be handled or used due to a very low volumetric energy density of ~0.003kWh/L (3x10^-6 kWh/cubic meter). To be useful it either needs to be liquified (at -253°c) or stored at high pressure often over 1000bar at site (350 to 700bar in vehicles), both processes are quite energy intentive. The current high cost of hydrogen reflects this energy use and handling cost, econmonies of scale will improve the generation but have a lesser impact on the handling and transportation due to the variable and fixed cost elements involved. Production projections estimate $2 to $3 per kg in generation by 2050, plus a further $3 to $5 in processing and distribution costs giving a range of $5 to $8 per kg. Meaning a 400 mile top up (~7kg) tank would cost in the order of $35 to $56.
@@GruffSillyGoat Many thanks for your valuable input. According to your calculations, it would cost between USD35 (35 x 7.75 = HKD271) to USD56 (56 x 7.75 = HKD434) to top up a 400-mile tank. I used to own a Honda 7-seater station wagon in Hong Kong over a year ago (I now own a BYD Atto 3 eV) and it would cost me about HKD800-900 to fill up the tank. So paying HKD271 to HKD434 to fill up the tank is still a significant saving compared to petrol and it's much cleaner and non-polluting. The main drawback is do I want a potentially more explosive and dangerous tank in the back of my car?! Also, cost of running an eV still significantly cheaper than running a hydrogen-powered car.
@peterliu8145 You are right. I'm factor two off because I estimated using H instead of H2. But still, the cost per norm cubic meter is kind of odd and misleading for comparison as hydrogen has a really low density. But it definitely depends on the use case. For replacing methane in pipelines cost per m3 might be suitable.
H2 is best at larger stationary applications. One where the production and use are closely matched w/ minimal storage.
Condensing the H2 into liquid is very costly energy wise.
Generally speaking, I don't believe it would be useful for long range vehicles, but possible short range applications.
Other technologies seem superior for most of these applications.
The key considerations are cost, scalability and reliability. Building a small prototype is easy, but turning this into an affordable large scale product is a different ball game.
Correct, it will likely be cheaper to increase, e.g. area of solar panels than to increase the efficiency of the existing one with an expensive system. In addition, people tend to forget that the materials used in the production of the green energy do not appear out of the thin air in eco friendly way and do not last forever.
Round trip efficiency. That's all we need to know... to compete with battery storage, it needs to be similar at 85%
Round trip efficiency is important, but also other factors matter. Hydrogen is useful for the chemical industry and can be used as long term (seasonal) energy storage. If you also need heat in winter, the "losses" of a fuel cell can be quite useful.
@@dirkvornholt2507 not if you keep having to replace/maintain storage equipment due to hydrogenation/embrittlement. Still the tech is interesting and there may be non-transportation use cases where it makes sense dunno.
@erktrek I see hydrogen rather as a base chemical. The industry that uses it knows how to handle it. Concerning storage and transport, derived fuels like methanol or ammonia might be a more viable option. For cars, it's probably rather a niche market.
Batteries have lower capacity, and shorter duration. The applications are different, suffice to say.
@@FlameofDemocracy - Depends which type of battery your refering to, flow batteries have high capacity and long duration for example.
Hydrogen makes no sense because of the efficiency and storage problems. Batteries are far superior and only gettin better every hour.
I learned that from you😊😊
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The last line is the killer....
@philborer877 Batteries are great for daily storage or up to two weeks. For seasonal storage, we need hydrogen or derived efuels. Batteries are today's solution. Hydrogen is the long-term future solution. It's never either/or, it's a question of what to use when for what.
@@dirkvornholt2507 I hear this line and it makes zero sense. This “batteries are temporary” line. In a short time they will be 99.99% recyclable, pulling power from a variety of sources. More logical would be EVs with hydrogen reserved for say shipping or possibly air travel, but EVs would draw from whatever energy is available. Who in their right mind would want a hydrogen vehicle with all the complexity and worse reliability? What advantage would it possibly bring? Also, of sure where this idea is coming of two weeks, Teslas can go about 60 days or more just sitting in sleep mode.
Store surplus electricity as hydrogen. It is common sense, as reasonable as having a frig, with a freezer.
H2 would still not be good for cars, but we can use hydrogen in so many ways if it was green like this. Steel and concrete could both benefit from inexpensive green hydrogen. Ships are the other use that might be viable; possibly using a hydrogen gas turbine. Aircraft maybe.
We could convert existing thermal power plants into hydrogen plants for winter use when there's not enough renewable energy.
Nat gas would work better for both aircraft and ships (which already use it).
Everything will be green in the future. The concept of green hydrogen that is popularly discussed is actually a misconception.
The all green portfolio is the genuine theory and thought process.
I literally cannot think of a worse application for hydrogen than in aircraft.
@@phillycheesetake What burns in internal combustion is the hydrogen component. Carbon is expelled as gases, particulates, and solids.
Hydrogen is STILL hopelessly inefficient regardless, you lose 30% liquefying it and fuel cells are another 50%.
Yep. U r right.
ruclips.net/video/RAEhhYqMEBE/видео.htmlsi=9jZzGtDdRXpzczk6
And I heard of hydrogen diesel too. 700 bar. Big time pressure. Still. People like that there no emissions.
The value is in the FUD and stall tactic, not actually being silly enough to try and make it economically competitive
Fred bloggs has been spreading FUD for years now.
Please tell Nikola Motor investors that!! 😂😂
Exactly! The main losses on hydrogen are having to compress it in order to transport and store it.
This is exactly why industries that use hydrogen make it on site as needed.
Also storage of hydrogen is extremely difficult and expensive due to hydrogen's corrosivity to almost all metals and its ability to escape almost any seal or valve because of its small atomic size.
Just look at the leaks Boeing's star liner capsule is having right now at the space station. (the following is a correction as I inadvertently said Starliner was leaking Hydrogen... it's Helium. Thanks to a fellow commenter keeping me straight!)
Boeing can't even keep Helium, which is twice as large an atom, from leaking.
Hydrogen cars are still more complicated in comparison to fully electric cars. the fueling process is still less convenient and requires more personel. And you still cannot fuel home made hydrogen. Electric has still advantages.
I don't understand your comment
@@doriangray6985 it's pretty simple though...
I agree. Even if hydrogen was free at the point of production it wouldn't make sense.
Ruthenium is rare and therefore expensive. So no go for large scale application.
@@petewright4640 The next very rare element needed for fuelcells is Irridium.
I'm told that there is no replacement for that element in the fuelcell membranes.
Nicely balanced report. Well done, Sam! 🎉😊
SunHydrogen makes green hydrogen using just sunlight and water.
Hydrogen cars by nature will be simply more dangerous than electric batteries. Toyota's hydrogen race car went up in flames i think last 1 or 2 years ago?
Liquefying means the hydrogen will be under pressure and that means the thing is explosive or the tank walls have to be really reinforced. The other thing that makes it suck is that they will need tankers to carry the fuel to refueling stations like current oil tankers. Electric rechargers on the other hand needs you to lay power lines and that's it.
Cheap hydrogen as a fuel for certain functions would be great but for cars, it just not up to par.
A cool discovery, for sure; hydrogen has its place. Probably not in mass produced personal cars, but in locomotives, ocean shipping, heavy hauler trucks and large farm equipment, perhaps also aircraft. Or, given the vast quantities of oil still in the ground, just stick with diesel for those applications and keep improving the emissions scrubbing tech.
Not even for heavy transport thanks to maintenance and storage issues. The mining industry around the world seems like they are going to go BEV thanks to the efficiency and lower costs. On a container ship, storing the very leakable hydrogen for long term (based on their months long shipping routes) would be a nightmare safety issue with constant equipment maintenance and safety checking.
Hydrogen fuel cells have many valid uses. Makes an excellent high capacity backup system. During a outage you can power your building with a fuel cell, having more delivered as needed. For cars, the big hurdle is storage. If they can perfect a liquid or powder that easily supplies the hydrogen, this could be a big improvement.
It makes sense for seasonal energy storage and long distance transportation. Like production in desert areas for use in steel production and airplanes. Etc especially if the efficiency goes up to photo voltaic levels.
Very cool. I'd love to see clean green ships 🚢
Green hydrogen would still lose out to BEVs in cars. Energy efficiency still substantially favours keeping electricity as electricity. Yes, it may better enable big/long range trucks and shipping, but Green H2 will do most good in enabling Green Steel from electric furnaces. Just keep it away from cars.
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Electricity moves at nine-tenths the speed of light in the grid. Why not use the loss base, the nightly surpluses for example, for considerable profits?
By turning routine losses into hydrogen, cash streams become available.
Glad to hear you could actually change your mind. That's the most surprising part of this development.
Professor James Tour has a method of breaking down waste plastic into its constituent molecules. The great thing about the process is that the carbon produced is graphene - which is very valuable. So valuable that the hydrogen also produced is essentially free.
Actually Graphene is not as expensive and valuable as you might think, I know because I work in a company who uses Graphene
@@scottwilliams1623 I was told graphene costs about $1,000 per gram for the highest quality graphene. But I know the Tour process doesn’t produce this quality but a type suitable for strengthening concrete and other materials. However the hydrogen produced is significantly cheaper than green, black, blue or white hydrogen as well as stopping plastics filling up landfill.
@@johnfrancis4401 not nearly that expensive as far as I know.
If we could get rid of the heavy crude we used to power ships, it would be a major step forward. I agree it's a tried and now dead duck for hydrogen cars . Batteries are developing that fast they are way in front. Why would anyone want to use fuel and pay huge amounts of tax when you can at home from solar and off-peak electricity.
LNG ships are already in use and get rid of much of the polution (leaving only CO2). Way easier to adapt infrastructure where needed. Far more practical and ultimately cheaper than bulk oil rather than vastly more expensive.
H2 in shipping will kill any company that tries it in competition with others who don't use it or go the LNG route.
Same with long haul trucking.
How would you store and maintain this hydrogen over a months long voyage for a container ship? Liquid H2? Pressurized? What about maintenance on the H2 equipment. Costs seem to high to justify even IF using a cheaply produced hydrogen. See what's happening in the mining industry - they appear to be shifting to BEVs rather than Hydrogen.
Pure hydrogen is impractical for shipping due to the volume required for the hydrogen tanks. Far better is to somehow convert the hydrogen into methanol, ideally using atmospheric carbon. Methanol is a very friendly, easy to store liquid fuel that can be used by fuel cells to efficiently recover the energy. Combined with batteries and electric drives, one could in theory have a completely carbon neutral ship, if the methanol was created using renewables.
Hydrogen is ubiquitous, and there are many ways to make it. The most intriguing prospect that is still a modern mystery is the Royal Navy approach that made prodigious amounts quickly and cheaply in WW I, for the coastal patrol airships.
It is great to see another approach emerge.
Keep the good news coming, and remember, fuel cell vehicles are indeed electric vehicles, as well.
How about electric driven oil tankers
Have they changed physics? 😂
No. Just discovered more of it.
@@simongross3122 I didn't realize physics was a quantity! :)
@@mb-3faze Interesting. Not a quantity, but can it be measured nonetheless?
@@simongross3122 It doesn't matter how much "physics" they discover, HFCBEV will always be inferior to pure BEV for one simple reason; pure BEVs provide a more direct route from energy generation to "fuel in the tank"
BEV: generation -> grid -> battery
HFC: generation -> grid -> hydrogen -> liquefaction -> transportation -> storage -> fuel cell -> battery
Hydrogen will never, ever, ever be as efficient, cheap, or simple as pure battery electric vehicles. Ever. It wouldn't matter if hydrogen production was 100% efficient, the infrastructure alone would make hydrogen more expensive than electricity per mile driven.
Hydrogen is a waste of time, money, and brainpower. It's nothing but a boondoggle for politicians to appear to be doing something useful.
@@simongross3122 It doesn't matter how much "physics" they discover, HFCBEV will always be worse than pure BEV for one simple reason; pure BEVs provide a more direct route from energy generation to "fuel in the tank"
BEV: generation -> grid -> battery
HFC: generation -> grid -> hydrogen -> liquefaction -> transportation -> storage -> fuel cell -> battery
Hydrogen will never, ever, ever be as efficient, cheap, or simple as pure battery electric vehicles. Ever. It wouldn't matter if hydrogen production was 100% efficient, the infrastructure alone would make hydrogen more expensive than electricity per mile driven.
Hydrogen is a waste of time, money, and brainpower. It's nothing but a boondoggle for politicians to appear to be doing something useful.
Let your neighbors in America know when that solar installation company starts business here.
I live in California, and don't have solar yet.
This could be used for energy storage. If you can produce hydrogen from water with a photo-catalysis you also produce oxygen in perfect proportions. Store these gasses and run them back through a fuel cell to produce electricity at peak times. Electricity is easier to transport and the infrastructure is already in place. Surplus solar and wind could also be used. The (presumably pure) water from the fuel cell could then be re-cycled through the photo-catalyzation process. Whether this can be done at an industrial scale is another matter.
Hydrogen could be useful for occasions where high energy density is needed, such as transitional airplanes and later long range flights, or for U.S. locomotives, assuming we never upgrade them to the same high speed railways the rest of the world uses. The Tesla Semi has shown that battery electric tractor-trailers work, but for those of you in Australia, the extended demands of long haul land trains might do better with hydrogen once electrolysis gets figured out at scale.
A few questions
How clean does the water have to be?
How do they separate the hydrogen from the oxygen?
How quickley does the material get consumed?
How quickly does the water get contaminated and becomes unusable?
How hazardous is the contaminated water?
All the compression, storage and transport complexity still remains.
When I worked on merchant ships we burned Bunker C, the leftovers after gasoline, kerosene, and diesel are removed from crude oil. Nasty stuff.
Universal Matter has a graphene production process where any plastic can serve as the feedstock and the output is graphene and hydrogen is the byproduct. That’s virtually free hydrogen.
That said, it would be best used to fuel convertible natural gas plants like the one in Texas designed by Mitsubishi Electric.
Lesson in economics. There is no "free" hydrogen. Nicola was pushing something similar and they were frauds.
Silver is frequently a byproduct of gold mining... do you imagine that they give it away?
Once there is a market, there will be a price and the yield will be a drop in the bucket vs large scale use (say 1% of the auto market). I promise you the graphine market is a blip compared to the gasoline market.
Universal Matter could be a solution to plastic waste
I think that there’s a lot of improvements that can be made in this area. It’s under researched.
But the storage and transportation with hydrogenation embrittlement I think will be a problem but green ammonia etc are probably better.
Sam, my friend, Hydrogen will NEVER make sense for vehicles, there is a storage problem. Thanks for what you do my friend 😊
You can just drill for it ! Mr flip flop Viking knows this as it is happening in Australia..! Natural hydrogen. 😮
@@lesliecarter4295 source?
I read about multiple sites around the world with geologic hydrogen, some have been drilled, most not. The problem is that it is not possible to extract commercial quantities at rates that a profit can be made. If you have any references to anyone saying that they can extract at high rates, please give me the titles of the paper or blog or anything. I've not been ablate find any.
Sounds good, would like to see hydrogen as part of the mix.
Thank you.
This was a good video on an important topic. Thank you!
Hydrogen is a powerful greenhouse gas that is extremely bulky, explosive, and difficult to store, so it has many downsides. This breakthrough would be super useful replacing carbon in applications like steel production, but I'm sceptical that transportation (even ships) is a good idea. There are too many potential unintended consequences.
The problem with this tec compared to pv is not only higher cost (think of all the pipework to collect the H2 and the expensive ruthenium) but it's far less flexible. Electricity has so many applications and is easy to transport AND if it's needed can also be used to make H2 at similar efficiency as a direct light to H2 process.
Spark technologies (an Australian company), have a working prototype. Fortescue have licensed the patent. Be interesting to see if the development of the US product is similar / unique by comparison.
With solar, energy goes straight into the grid or the battery. With hydrogen it loses energy every step of the way
1 hydrolysis
2 storage
3 compression
4 delivery to hydrogen gas station
5 burning hydrogen for energy
Some processes are more efficient, but they never you the energy losses
We presently use an array of fuels for an array of applications. There seems to be a misunderstand that in the future there will no longer be a need for an array of applications using different fuels. Hydrogen is a highly suitable fuel for a number of applications, maybe not for cars due to the challenges of distribution and storage but that does not mean that research and breakthroughs in greener hydrogen generation are not highly valuable.
Making the hydrogen is not the problem. We learned from printer ink that consumables are a trap. Electricity is used for everything so it’s not a special “fuel”.
Sam,
Thanks for this video. I'm interested and will ask someone I know about this..
But in no way H2 will be efficient for usage in cars.
The main issue is the high pressure tanks for taking eneoug H2 with you for a little of range.
Even when it would be possible to create H2 with a near to 100% efficiency the compression (to at least 800 bar) is too costly....Each megajoule energy in the H2 delivered under pressure in a tank will cost another megajoule for the compression.
Max efficiency is alread down to 50%...
With electrolysis the max efficiency for creatimg H2 is also ca 50%....compressed in the car we are down to 25 % efficiency.
A battery is up to 95% (even higher is possible) efficient for storing energy.
But in the end of your video you give some places where we can use this H2 with a big win for the environnement. Steel production would be my first target to transfer to h2 instead of the poluting cokes.
Viking
Remember the big problems Storage and Transport. Hydrogen engines run on high pressure, very short engine life.
Wayne
Like he said in the video, and most engineers/scientists would agree, hydrogen is unlikely to succeed in the transportation market for many reasons. However, if produced on site with this method, there is a chance it could be used in industrial applications where transportation and storage can be kept to a minimum. I'm not holding my breath though. Even if this method turns out to be cheap and effective it is still a decade or more from realization.
fuel cell engines are electric. Hydrogen has many problems, but that's not one of them.
@@secretweapon7764 He may be thinking E-fuels, which is also an unlikely to succeed technology. Fuel cells typically last 7 to 20 years depending on application but are pretty expensive.
The conversation about gas or liquid hydrogen misses the mark if you know about "solid state" hydrogen. Sandy Munro talked about being able to fire a laser at a solid "disc" of hydrogen to convert it to energy. This fuel would be safe enough to power a car. Problems with pressure tanks, transport & distribution go away. Apparently, the Obama Admin classified the technology as secret to prevent it from becoming a power source for missile computers. Sandy said it has since been declassified, but I haven't heard anything about it since that one time.
If hydrogen is ever used for power production it would probably be for grid power plants that have room for the enormous amount of storage that system would need. The infrastructure needed to store and keep hydrogen pressurized needs a lot of real estate.
While hydrogen works and if this method can be bought to scale at a competitive price then it would start to make some sense but for one small problem. Currently there is no distribution chain anywhere and there is nothing in the current system that could be repurposed.
The entire storage, compression and retail distribution system would have to be custom built to suite hydrogen from scratch as it simply does not exist at present.
With battery EV's the generation and distribution is already there servicing mutable markets, EV's are just another add on for it.
This technology seems an interesting approach, but unless/until it can beat 23% PV efficiency and 80+% electrolyzer efficiency, it's rather a scientific curiosity. The advantage of PV and electrolyzers is also the versatility to either use the electricity directly or make hydrogen. Additionally the infrastructure for electricity already exists and enables the location of electricity production to be decoupled from the location of the electrolyzer.
And it has to beat the price of PV which currently is cheaper than window glass.
Another pivot for Hydrogen now? 🤔
Thanks for all the insight into Hydrogen. Nikola seems to be making it work.... I wonder if the higher cost of the producing the Hydrogen of offset in other ways with the Hydrogen Trucks Nikola is making and selling. Would be cool to see you do a video on Nikola.
Several questions unanswered here. Main 1, the instant gaseous hydrogen is produced from water, also gaseous oxygen is produced. A) how do you avoid instantaneous recombination, wasting the original separation energy? (This problem kills simple cheap thermal separation of water into h2 and O2.)
Hydrogen can be good for energy storage as well as plane fuel.
@@Rainbowhawk1993 Methane will be the lightest molecule used for planes, likeliest is kerosene for long haul and all electric up to 400 miles.
There are more efficient methods of energy storage (from cheap low density batteries to pumped hydro/compressed air).
The new process might move the needle but they released No numbers.
Regards planes, the problem isn't the weight of the fuel, its the weight of the massive fuel tanks and hazards handling H2 at 10,000psi. There are precious few H2 stations in the world, yet explosions at these stations are not unknown.
Would be interesting to see what safety specs would look like vs kerosine.
Having solar and charging at home there is no way I ever want to pay to pump fuel of any kind ever again! Jets and ships might make sense though.
This is the most practical but the liquid transport is still too costly.
Oregon State University for several years has also been working on wave generators that produce power from the waves !
The issue is scaling this up into something useful. Place this next to an existing power plant and see if it can out produce it.
With regard to mobility applications of hydrogen. Why store the hydrogen on board the vehicle, just store the water. And produce the hydrogen at the fuel cell. Is 10,700 milli moles enough to power the fuel and how much power is necessary to run a flash light with the RhO.
Now I have to rethink if I want a very low cost Toyota hydrogen car because here is a means to provide hydrogen without even needing a big company to provide it. The next question is can it be stored or absorbed directly by a hydrogen fuel cell.
We have to see what the government will do with the breakthrough. Are we going to benefit or will a select few be made richer and the people will not benefit? If the cost is the same as gas or diesel, what is the point?
It would take a processing plant the size of L.A. and need to be duplicated on different continents, Also storing hydrogen is dangerous not to mention the flame is invisible.
The rule that applies to hydrogen is use it where you must - use it if you can't use something else. Hydrogen isn't easy to handle or contain. Optimally, you want to produce hydrogen near the place it gets used.
Just because this works doesn't mean hydrogen becomes more useful. Nor have the researchers shown that this is a less expensive way of producing green hydrogen than other methods. We still require energy to split the water. Is photocatalysis more efficient, less expensive, more versatile and just better than electrocatalysis or is it just another option to produce green hydrogen?
Don't forget about the yacht industry...and airplanes.
Good for very long range airplanes
The best way to use it would be in the form of a range extender
You know... That energy is better spent directly creating electricity.
Not that I'd stop them from doing this kind of research, but still gotta pragmatic about this.
Sam, I think I just found an interesting bit of data. The fuel for a 10 day journey of an ocean freight ship would weigh 4 times as much as a CATL condensed battery with the same amount of energy!
Add to that the dangers posed by storing leaky hydrogen and the costs and effort required to maintain the support equipment.
Hydrogen would work very well in decarbonising industries like steel. We just need to stop mentioning it in the context of vehicles.
The ideal car of future is a H2 Strong Hybrid with 100+ miles range via Battery
All "green hydrogen" should be used to replace hydrogen made with the HB method. Excess solar could be used for this
Using sunlight heated water can make it more efficient.
Keep us informed about this Andrew Forest just gave up on it can we make it cheap enough
At the moment a Unicorn process - let’s see in 10 to 20 years one fossil fuels become too expensive.
Hydrogen costing $1.50 per Kg? In California they sell it for $36.00 per Kg! to refuel your Toyota Mirai
Something is not computing
Basic physics is the stumbling block. Separating the hydrogen from the oxygen that makes up water takes more energy than you get back when you recombine them. We simply need to break the laws of physics. No problem.
H2 or derivatives, ammonia, methanol, methane, bio petrol etc may prove better more sustainable solutions in the future with more R&D into fuel cells, storage and fuel transportation. It’s still early days, many new inventions, discoveries and breakthroughs around the corner making it impossible for anyone to predict the future, however we live in exciting times and for now EVs make sense, esp with QuantumScape, CATL Qilin etc.
Not early days at all. None of the above scales (even methanol is more expensive than gas and drives up food prices, produces aldehydes).
EVs with current and emerging battery tech is far superior, cleaner, simpler and far more flexible as the energy can be sourced from whatever works best in a given location. The cars themselves are fast becoming cheaper as batt prices fall and use of rare earths/expensive metals drops off.
Nat Gas (methane), however, is good for long haul trucking and shipping. This tech is proven. Pig poo methane... not so much. Compost and animal excrement are better used as fertilizer.
Maybe it could be stored as liquid alkaline on a ship isn't a company working on that in Australia?
No need to transport hydrogen or fuel cars with it. You simply port the hydrogen production directly into a fuel cell stack. Depending on the metres cubed in gas volume that is produced would determine the size of the fuel cell stack. The energy can be sent via the electrical grid. No need to store or transport hydrogen.
And where does all the energy instensive, large and heavy hydrogen pressurising and cooling equipment fit inside the car? Without this a killogram of hydrogen produced would occupy about 1,000 cubic metres. A Mirai has about 5.6kg of hydrogen to power the car for 300 miles, meaning you'd need 5,600 cubic metres volume to store the hydrogen without pressurising it. Hydrogen's energy density by weight (gravimetric density) is 33kWh/kg but volumetric density is tiny at 0.003kWh/L at sea level conditions.
The hydrogen generation systems, the smallest ones, occupy a land foot print of about 20 family sized cars parked bumper to bumper in a square. For the Mirai this equipment squeezes the 5.6kg hydrogen down to fit a volume of 85 ltrs, holding the hydrogen at a pressure twice the average depth of the planet's oceans (all held inside 100kg worth of tanks, that are 3 times the volume of the hydrogen being held within).
@@GruffSillyGoat stupid
It doesn’t matter even if you can make green hydrogen, you still have store and transport it after which the energy efficiency is never going to compete with electrons.
What are the costs of the new process vs Red Hydrogen since Red Hydrogen makes a lot of sense for many industrial processes; which is why the Japanese are tinkering with it.
I think you should refer to Sual Griffiths's work around energy processes and you will find that green hydrogen, at present, is only 37% efficient, roughly equivalent to an ICE unit. Even if you can reduce the 17% energy loss from present-day electrolysis you still have to compress it (15% loss), transport (3% loss), fuel cell conversion (40% loss) and then combustion loss of around another 10%. And that doesn't include the safety concerns, security, distribution infrastructure etc. All up, if you want to store power, hydrogen sucks. Battery storage is closer to 95% efficient. Other energy storage forms, such as weight storage or hydro storage like the Snowy Hydro scheme, are much more efficient.....electrify everything transport-wise, hydro is throwing away money and energy if used in transport. Maybe it has a use in some areas but it is currently an inefficient energy storage device (not an energy production device) looking for a problem to solve.
Ocean transport is currently building ships that use ammonia as fuel.
This tech could tip the balance towards hydrogen in the future.
It can't come to soon!
The dirtiest fuels are burned at sea right now.
@@docwatson1134 ammonia is hopeless, it’s worse than hydrogen.
as always I don't think hydrogen is the way to go, except in a few limited cases as you mentioned, ultimately, if it economical, and possible at scale the market will determine, if hydrogen really makes sense we will see large scale production, but I bet there are some serious catches to be solved not explicitly stated, as they rarely do for lab case studies
Check out Sunhydrogen, just done deal with Honda, and a solar company to make first commercial solar panel that produces hydrogen directly from sunlight and water
The more renewable forms of energy production the better.
If it works all good cheers mate
If 10% of photons splits off a hydrogen molecule, (and assuming it isn't the highest energy photons) that'd be about 10% of the energy of sunlight converted to energy stored in hydrogen.
But a good solar panel can convert about 25% of solar energy to electricity, and using electrolysis at about 80% efficiency, that would effectively be 20% efficient, twice as good.
If this system were cheaper than solar panels plus electrolysis hardware, that'd be a plus, but it seems like it'll need twice the area of solar panels, AND it's got to be plumbed to deliver water and collect the hydrogen from a huge area - so likely at least twice the cost per area of solar panels (so net 4x as much cost per unit of energy produced) plus likely to require a LOT more maintenance than solar panels that have no moving parts.
Am I missing something here?
Wasn’t the storage the biggest issue thought? Not to mention efficiency.
End of Bevangelist ideology. Sam has to pivot on hydrogen . Already pivoting on solid state.. 😂😂
A little quiz for you: Who changes colours more quickly than a chameleon? 😁😁😁
Imagine a solar farm that runs a green hydrogen plant that uses the stored hydrogen to power hydrogen turbines to generate power when the solar is off-line.
Why loose 3 times the energy in creating hydrogen from electricity then converting it back to electicity, it is more effective to store the electricity in batteries (flow, sodium or lithium based depending upon need) to be used when needed (at 95%+ efficiency).
@@GruffSillyGoat Cheaper Setup with Application Flexibility. Initial costs are less with the option to use the hydrogen for something other than power.
Or just use the electricity to run a pump and pump water up a hill, when its dark you run it in reverse and make electricity….. oh it already exists, pump storage hydroelectric….
@@silversurfer415 - Hydrogen is more expensive both in upfront capital and ongoing operational costs than battery systems, which is why battery based BESS systems are being deployed en-mass around the world compared to hydrogen. Hydrogen's cost benefits only kick in with static industrial applications where power and waste heat can be utilised.
@@nobilismaximus - unfortunately, not everywhere is suited to pumped hydro as it requires certain geological characteristics to be able to deploy. It is also it's fairly costly and involved lengthy projects to implement due to the scale required to be cost effective.
What about Tony Seba predictions on the last video that he says we will produce far more energy from renewables that we could use. Making hidrogen seems a good application for that excess energy
Does this process rely on pure water, most water contains contaminants, salts, dead fish etc. This may be an issue in the process or in waste disposal.
Very interesting
Before we start fantasizing about any new applications of hydrogen, like transportation, we FIRST need to clean up all old uses of hydrogen.
Any Green hydrogen must first be used to replace dirty hydrogen.
You can not say "this hydrogen is green for this application" when we are still making other hydrogen in high emissions ways.
Make Green/white/pink hydrogen - stop making brown, black, grey, blue hydrogen.
After all hydrogen is low emissions, then we will take a serious look at hydrogen transportation and other applications.
The problem is not so much the production of hydrogen although that is troublesome. It's the safe storage and use, that's a nightmare. It is much better to find a way of making safer molecules, easier to use such as methane (CH4), and even better still kerosene (C15H15). A process that extracts CO2 and H2 from seawater and converts these directly to tailor made hydro carbon fuels with looks to be feasible and environmentally sustainable.
Hydrogen has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline. So, a 300 HP gasoline engine becomes a 100 HP hydrogen engine.
The only truly safe way to use hydrogen for energy storage is to put it in a local tank and using it o generate electricity and move the electricity.
Hydrogen solves the wrong problem. Hydrogen is a fuel. Electrification eliminates fuel. No fuel needed.
So it's a solar cell that produces hydrogen from water without first producing electricity to power electrolysis. If it produces hydrogen less expensively than existing methods of producing hydrogen from natural gas, it can disrupt hydrogen production even if the hydrogen is not used much for transportation. If the hydrogen makes a hydrogen powered vehicle less expensive than a BEV to operate, it can disrupt EVs, but I doubt that I'll live to see it. Unfortunately, this article doesn't even guesstimate the cost of hydrogen produced by the new method.
Here is my first question: Is this new production method cheaper than using solar to electrolyze sea water? IOW, a 100 acre facility doing this, will it cost the same and make more hydrogen than just electrolysis (which can be up to 98% efficient)? Second question: Hydrogen is not dense and is very explosive over a huge range of mixtures with air. Far more dangerous in this regard than gasoline. Third question, can a homeowner put a hydrogen production system on his garage roof for a similar cost to solar with a similar yield? So, is it cheaper, is it less dangerous, is it possible on a unit level where I won't have to buy anything from other people who want to milk my money for the rest of my life? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I hope it is abandoned or left to research until the date when the answer to all three is yes.
Converting sunlight to electricity is far better than creating hydrogen - which is very problematic to store and use, particularly in EVs. Marine usage may be its best role, as alternatives are mostly very unattractive.
Hydrogen will make sense but it doesn't right now, EV's are just coming into their prime after nearly 25 years of production. Hydrogen is the future EV's are the present.
Hydrogen might be better for air travel, steel production, and other limited applications.