Definitely skeptical, how does shining a laser on a material allow it to store vast quantities of hydrogen at high density?
How much does the storage media weigh per kg of hydrogen stored?
Why would the US government block this in 2008? Sounds very conspiracy theorist.
Minimum even if it has the storage density, it says 150 cycles before it soaks with deuterium, which means it's losing hydrogen to the "Cassette" and the whole thing has to be recycled.
Still doesn't solve the efficiency issues of creating hydrogen with electricity and using in a fuel cell vs just charging a battery, but could definitely have applications if it truly can store at that density.
Even if this was true (and as comments are already saying skepticism is clearly warranted here) frankly I just don't see it mattering. Hydrogen in vehicles is a complete dead end. Maybe, maybe if the industry had seriously pursued it decades earlier it could have gained traction. But at this point any theoretical benefits look exactly like the theoretical benefits of so many other technologies and designs that got crushed by raw economics. As classic HN-related example would be x86 vs all the other various ISAs in the 80s and 90s. x86 wasn't the best, and as we've seen from ARM I don't think it can be said that's entirely meaningless, in theory the same investment in another ISA might have yielded better results. But it simply didn't matter, because there wasn't the same investment and would never have been given the platform effects involved. And "good enough" plus enough capital expenditure was plenty to power through everything else until a complete environment shift disrupted it.
By the same token, the main issue with batteries is range. But BEVs are coming that will push 500 miles, and from basic theory and lab work batteries have plenty ceiling. The difference between the perfect theoretical lithium based design and present ones is something like an order of magnitude, so even if we never do more than a fraction of that we could still see BEVs pushing 1000 miles at the high end. So that factor just isn't going to be a deciding issue vs all the supporting infrastructure needed.
And it is there that BEVs obliterate any other solution by riding on the same core energy infrastructure as nearly every single other piece of mass market advanced human technology which has long since gone electric. There are something on the order of 150000 fueling stations in the US. Converting all of those and all the infra supporting them to hydrogen would cost hundreds of billions if not trillion+. But with BEVs, almost all of that can be sunk into the grid instead. With that kind of investment not just local improvements but buried HVDC backbones or even super conducting continental, potentially even intercontinental backbones is on the table. And the thing is that all that investment, and all the opportunities opened up by everyone having enormous distributed energy packs that they can lean on in a variety of ways beyond just driving, benefits and can be amortized across pretty much the entire economy directly.
That's an economic steam roller if ever we've seen one. So any advantages hydrogen might in principle have alongside the many, many nasty difficulties of dealing with it will end up the same was as advantages Alpha or POWER might have had. Electrification, which abstracts and in turn offers enormous flexibility for power generation, distribution, and usage, is just too economically compelling the instant it becomes minimally feasible. The ultimate network effect.
I'm a happy BEV owner but I'm usually in the camp that hydrogen fuel cells (HFC) probably make sense in some circumstances (ships, cargo, large plane, etc). But your argument of network effects for BEV is one I hadn't considered and really strengthens BEV's case and pushes HFC use cases, in my brain, into further usually-unpragmatic-territory.
Just a heads up, I don't have an horse on this race, or better yet, if I had to place my bet I'd go for BEVs at least for the common car.
With that said, I wonder if there will be room for two or more standards (like you have diesel, petrol GPL) - despite the technology being similar on the current standards (with internal combustion engine of some sort)?
I'm asking this because for example the EU is pushing for Hydrogen with an emphasis of it's application for transportation (for cars, but probably more for airplanes and ships). It's not like they aren't investing in BEVs since they are also pushing for a network of charging stations.
That's a good question. Diesel was kept around because diesel engines are better suited to hauling heavy loads than gasoline engines are, but I'm not seeing an equivalent niche for hydrogen unless the bulk and weight of the storage systems can be dropped to a point where they're viable for aircraft.
The huge problem with BEVs vs fossil fuels is weight. That's mostly irrelevant for personal cars, but it's a showstopper for freight. I have no idea if hydrogen is any better, but batteries can only approach the energy storage capacity of fossil fuels at the theoretical limits of what is possible (and certainly not with Li).
This is one of the reasons why I don't believe global warming can be addressed without accepting significant economic contraction: it's impossible to transport the amount of goods we transport today without burning fossil fuels.
How much heavier is a nuclear reactor than a tank full + engine? Sure, the nuclear fuel itself is extraordinarily energy packed, but the actual plant needs large amounts of water and shielding to actually be used.
For terrestrial, power generation can be nuclear, but you can't power a truck with a nuclear reactor, nor can you power it from the grid while on the highway - at least not without turning all trucks into electric trolleys and electrifying all long-distance highway infrastructure.
Leaving only the other issues with hydrogen (inefficiency of generation, awkwardness of transport compared with electricity, so-so generation efficiency, low power output.)
More than 95% of hydrogen is produced by steam reforming fossil fuel. Articles hyping it for EVs are likely funded by the fossil fuel industry or traditional ICE vehicle manufacturers.
It's too bad because I think this tech could be a great way for hydrogen to be used in many of these applications.
However, this definitely has the stench of "big oil company trying to pretend they're going green by hyping / buying companies that actually boost fossil fuel usage, even though they could be carbon neutral" :(
There is no naturally occurring source of Hydrogen. It can only be produced at industrial scale by cracking it from carbon fuel (usually CNG). If a viable pathway was created to produce it via electrolysis with sustainable energy, you’d be 10x better off (in terms of overall efficiency and carbon footprint) by putting that energy in a battery. STOP
TRYING TO MAKE HFCS HAPPEN. They’re a carbon scam!
Ok cool now compress and store and transport it after you spend $10 trillion on the infrastructure to do that at planet scale. Or, send electricity into batteries over wires which already exist. Like, come on. You have to choose which energy innovator to back and you go with Tesla or the people pushing hydrogen (Shell, Exxon)?
A big advantage of that method is that the same tech works for sequestering lots of carbon. At the current state of the art though, I don't think it's a given that it'll be cheaper than green hydrogen.
Hydrogen storage may have always been a problem, but it has never been the problem. Efficiency of conversion is. Until someone either comes up with a much better way to generate hydrogen or lithium becomes a thousand times more expensive, BEVs are superior to hydrogen vehicles and they're getting more superior every day.
Compression/liquefaction doesn't really have an efficiency. It is just a dead loss of energy. So you really need to know the assumptions to know what the 90%/65% is of.
I suspect it is the same for the other percentages thrown around on that diagram. ... and why doesn't the H2 vehicle do regenerative braking?
Any loss means efficiency below 100%. If it takes 1kwh of electricity to compress 10 kWh of hydrogen (assuming 100% conversion back into electricity in the fuel cell, which its not) then your efficiency is 90%.
This is applied to all steps, electrolysis, compression, transport, and fuel cell conversion back to electricity.
Current fuel cells cannot put out enough burst power to acceleration nor can they accept electricity in reverse to generate hydrogen so all current fuel cell vehicles use a traction battery that is charged by the fuel cell, they are basically series hybrids. They also typically have lower acceleration because the small traction battery + fuel cell cannot supply as much power as a much larger full EV battery.
Regenerative braking works for electric cars because it is super easy to convert movement into electric energy. This isn't true for most other sources of energy H2 and petrol included. Reversing combustion is kind of hard and takes up big chunk of the linked graph.
Fuel cells are crappy in that the reaction isn't reversible. Where Batteries and electric motors are nearly fully reversible. And fuel cells are only efficient when compared to heat engines. But subpar when compared to batteries.
There are criteria other than efficiency though. What's the environmenal impact of a hydrogen fuel cell versus a rechargeable battery with a comparable range? Doesn't making a battery require mining a ton of metals? How efficient is the recycling of spent batteries? And on the other hand, how long does a hydrogen fuel cell last?
My point was that the environmental impact encompasses more than just the energy usage. What I wanted to get at with my questions was "what's the ratio of bad stuff produced per kilometer driven for hydrogen and for batteries?"
How much more mining is needed to produce a battery pack than a fuel cell? How much more waste metal is there? Are there any chemical pollutants in either system?
Both systems are going to have different ratios between Bad Stuff and efficiency and my unqualified guess is that hydrogen _might_ be better.
> What I wanted to get at with my questions was "what's the ratio of bad stuff produced per kilometer driven for hydrogen and for batteries?"
Right. When comparing objects of similar complexity, cost of the object is generally pretty proportional to bad-stuff-produced, with exceptions for unpriced externalities (carbon emissions being a big one, and mining or refining in low-responsibility jurisdictions being another). The carbon emissions of battery pack manufacturing are small[1] relative to lifetime emissions from an ICE car, not totally sure for FCEV.
> Both systems are going to have different ratios between Bad Stuff and efficiency and my unqualified guess is that hydrogen _might_ be better.
I couldn't find anything specific to FCEV, but my gut instinct is that FCEV would be dramatically worse - hydrogen is reformed from natural gas, necessarily entailing carbon emissions. If you're going to release the CO2 from natural gas anyway, might as well do it by burning in a high-efficiency turbine and use the energy to charge your BEV at high end-to-end efficiency. Or if you're going to consider "green" hydrogen, might as well use the renewable energy to directly charge a battery, at 3x higher efficiency.
But storage is the main problem with efficiency. The fuel cell itself is pretty efficient. (The linked article offers very little actual information on the efficiency of these discs however, which isn't a good sign.)
Well, of course. If you have a battery, then use the battery. Many practical uses keep a complementary battery for extra capacity for this reason. But the use cases are different.
A fuel cell is efficient compared to pretty much every other form of generating electricity from energy stored in a fuel that we know of.
The point is if you have electricity then converting to hydrogen, compressing transporting and turning back into electricity in a fuel cell is much less efficient than just charging a battery.
Why would you do that? You could argue energy density, but looking at current fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai shows the have only a slim advantage in range dues to the weight of the fuel cells, high pressure tanks and tractions batteries and extra structure to protect the tanks.
Energy density is indeed it. Not much to argue about, it carries several times more energy per weight than any battery, and is several times cheaper too. The Mirai is a proof of concept, not a typical use case.
Efficiency has never been the problem. Cost has always been the driving factor behind technology adoption, and the highest efficiency solutions are rarely the cheapest.
BEVs are winning at the momemy not because they're efficient, but because the cost/benefit is finally coming out ahead due to advances in battery technology.
But BEVs don't fully cover all use cases. It is telling that the first commercial truck manufacturer to release a full electric truck has also invested billions into hydrogen. BEVs can certainly handle a lot of usecases, but continuous usage at high power levels isn't one of them, even at theoretical energy densities.
It takes massive amounts of energy to generate the hydrogen if you split it from water. If you break it out of methane, it also take a lot of energy and secondary product is a lot of CO2. Then it takes more energy to compress the H2. for all that, it’s not clear that there are other significant benefits over batteries for most applications.
This doesn't replace fuel cells, fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity, these things store hydrogen for the fuel cells to use. They replace 10,000 psi hydrogen tanks.
Moreover, it is not just the weight budget of storage
>>The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy.
To compare to battery storage, one needs to compare both the storage and electrical conversion solution, so in this case, is the [weight of the storage cassette] + [weight of fuel cell making electricity] less than [weight of batteries yielding same KWh of electricity]?
If they can make that work, they are on to something. I hope they are, but we really need to know the full picture.
I couldn't find any technical description of the material they are using, and this sentence is very weird.
> The material deteriorates due to the formation of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. When the light shines in the material, it does not release deuterium, and the material gets “soaked” with it as time goes by.
Are they saying that the device transform normal Hydrogen into Deuterium? My guess is that they don't want to say it, the problem is that the small amount of Deuterium mixed with normal Hydrogen accumulates and cause problem. Anyway, it's a sloppy weird sentence.
Also, it is possible that the system somehow acts differently on Deuterium and normal Hydrogen, but it would be very strange. They have very similar properties, and that makes the separation difficult.
It would be nice to read more technical details, because it feels like the tech fluff added to make the project more impressive.
I'm guessing that whatever mechanism is trapping the hydrogen needs more energy to kick deuterium loose because of the mass difference. It'd be interesting to get a closer look at the technology.
That's a possible explanation, but the difference of energy to break the bonds is probably small, so a small increase of the frequency of the light in the laser should fix it.
I suspect they are using some usual high power laser that is available on shelf, so it's not easy to choose the frequency arbitrarily. It's very unlikely that the usual on shelf available laser has the right frequency to remove normal Hydrogen but not Deuterium.
Yeah, bond energy itself is going to be the same regardless of isotope (or at least a negligibly small difference), so my guess is whatever mechanism that is kicking the hydrogen free is relying something more like a kinetic recoil from the photon where the mass is far more relevant. Of course, without being able to take a proper look under the hood at how they're actually storing the hydrogen, this is all rank speculation.
>At first, the discs helped the company to explain the technology: hydrogen would be released when the laser hit it as a compact disc would “release music” when the laser reader hit it.
This is in the running for the least apt analogy I have ever heard.
Why not just combust hydrogen to power an ICE? The Soviet Union had an experimental airliner that did this so it is definitely feasible technologically. Seems much simpler than using fuel cells, which will get expensive if they need to be mass produced because they require expensive catalysts.
The first issue is that you have to make a trade-off between power and producing nitrogen oxides if you're using air. You can get around that with a cat, but then you're back to using expensive catalysts. The engines also can't be as reliable long term as conventional ICEs because hydrogen embrittles and corrodes all metals given enough time. The best you can do is delay things a bit with good alloys and engine design. Knocking/predetonation is also a much difficult problem to solve.
Decades ago, there was some effort to use ceramics for ICE. Fill the forms, sinter it, machine finish the details. It'd be neat to revisit some of those ideas.
Catalytic converters last longer than the catalysts used in fuel cells (fuel cell catalyst is a powder so it is harder to contain).
Hydrogen does embrittle most metals, but it does not affect aluminum at moderate temperatures and pressures. Obviously a piston and cylinder head experience high temperatures and pressures but it would in theory be possible to develop ceramic pistons and heads that can mitigate the embrittlement problem, as a sibling comment mentioned.
Ya. Two more possible "hydrogen" paths are ammonia and methane.
One future perfect scenario, say year 2040, is to generate fuels with the anticipated excess electricity. Colocate some kind of carbon capture next to every wind and solar farm. Use some for fuel. Pump the rest back into the ground.
62 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadHow much does the storage media weigh per kg of hydrogen stored?
Why would the US government block this in 2008? Sounds very conspiracy theorist.
Minimum even if it has the storage density, it says 150 cycles before it soaks with deuterium, which means it's losing hydrogen to the "Cassette" and the whole thing has to be recycled.
Still doesn't solve the efficiency issues of creating hydrogen with electricity and using in a fuel cell vs just charging a battery, but could definitely have applications if it truly can store at that density.
Assuming that the tech is good enough to compete with BEV, that is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns
"This BANNED Technology Could Push Hydrogen Cars Over BEVs" by E for Electric
A few links:
https://plasmakinetics.com/
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-...
I'm skeptical too, could not find any data on this stuff.
By the same token, the main issue with batteries is range. But BEVs are coming that will push 500 miles, and from basic theory and lab work batteries have plenty ceiling. The difference between the perfect theoretical lithium based design and present ones is something like an order of magnitude, so even if we never do more than a fraction of that we could still see BEVs pushing 1000 miles at the high end. So that factor just isn't going to be a deciding issue vs all the supporting infrastructure needed.
And it is there that BEVs obliterate any other solution by riding on the same core energy infrastructure as nearly every single other piece of mass market advanced human technology which has long since gone electric. There are something on the order of 150000 fueling stations in the US. Converting all of those and all the infra supporting them to hydrogen would cost hundreds of billions if not trillion+. But with BEVs, almost all of that can be sunk into the grid instead. With that kind of investment not just local improvements but buried HVDC backbones or even super conducting continental, potentially even intercontinental backbones is on the table. And the thing is that all that investment, and all the opportunities opened up by everyone having enormous distributed energy packs that they can lean on in a variety of ways beyond just driving, benefits and can be amortized across pretty much the entire economy directly.
That's an economic steam roller if ever we've seen one. So any advantages hydrogen might in principle have alongside the many, many nasty difficulties of dealing with it will end up the same was as advantages Alpha or POWER might have had. Electrification, which abstracts and in turn offers enormous flexibility for power generation, distribution, and usage, is just too economically compelling the instant it becomes minimally feasible. The ultimate network effect.
With that said, I wonder if there will be room for two or more standards (like you have diesel, petrol GPL) - despite the technology being similar on the current standards (with internal combustion engine of some sort)?
I'm asking this because for example the EU is pushing for Hydrogen with an emphasis of it's application for transportation (for cars, but probably more for airplanes and ships). It's not like they aren't investing in BEVs since they are also pushing for a network of charging stations.
This is one of the reasons why I don't believe global warming can be addressed without accepting significant economic contraction: it's impossible to transport the amount of goods we transport today without burning fossil fuels.
For terrestrial, power generation can be nuclear, but you can't power a truck with a nuclear reactor, nor can you power it from the grid while on the highway - at least not without turning all trucks into electric trolleys and electrifying all long-distance highway infrastructure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
However, this definitely has the stench of "big oil company trying to pretend they're going green by hyping / buying companies that actually boost fossil fuel usage, even though they could be carbon neutral" :(
> The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy.
I agree that we need scalable electrolysis, but there are people working on that too.
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made...
https://i.imgur.com/4YQfNgQ.jpg
I suspect it is the same for the other percentages thrown around on that diagram. ... and why doesn't the H2 vehicle do regenerative braking?
This is applied to all steps, electrolysis, compression, transport, and fuel cell conversion back to electricity.
Current fuel cells cannot put out enough burst power to acceleration nor can they accept electricity in reverse to generate hydrogen so all current fuel cell vehicles use a traction battery that is charged by the fuel cell, they are basically series hybrids. They also typically have lower acceleration because the small traction battery + fuel cell cannot supply as much power as a much larger full EV battery.
Battery-electric vehicles are about 2-3 times more energy efficient than hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, according to VW [0]
> Doesn't making a battery require mining a ton of metals?
Less, actually - a bit under half a tonne of metal in a Tesla battery pack, most of it nickle (as of 5 years ago) [1]
> How efficient is the recycling of spent batteries?
Roughly 92% [2] and improving. A car purchased today would have its battery recycled in ~10 years, so it'll be higher by then.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/406676/battery-electric-hydrogen-...
[1] https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
[2] https://electrek.co/2021/08/09/tesla-battery-cell-material-r...
How much more mining is needed to produce a battery pack than a fuel cell? How much more waste metal is there? Are there any chemical pollutants in either system?
Both systems are going to have different ratios between Bad Stuff and efficiency and my unqualified guess is that hydrogen _might_ be better.
Right. When comparing objects of similar complexity, cost of the object is generally pretty proportional to bad-stuff-produced, with exceptions for unpriced externalities (carbon emissions being a big one, and mining or refining in low-responsibility jurisdictions being another). The carbon emissions of battery pack manufacturing are small[1] relative to lifetime emissions from an ICE car, not totally sure for FCEV.
> Both systems are going to have different ratios between Bad Stuff and efficiency and my unqualified guess is that hydrogen _might_ be better.
I couldn't find anything specific to FCEV, but my gut instinct is that FCEV would be dramatically worse - hydrogen is reformed from natural gas, necessarily entailing carbon emissions. If you're going to release the CO2 from natural gas anyway, might as well do it by burning in a high-efficiency turbine and use the energy to charge your BEV at high end-to-end efficiency. Or if you're going to consider "green" hydrogen, might as well use the renewable energy to directly charge a battery, at 3x higher efficiency.
[1] https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...
A lithium battery is nearly 100% efficient.
They both run through an inverter and electric motor so those efficiencies are the same.
Efficiency is how much power is put in vs how much you get out.
A fuel cell is efficient compared to pretty much every other form of generating electricity from energy stored in a fuel that we know of.
Why would you do that? You could argue energy density, but looking at current fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai shows the have only a slim advantage in range dues to the weight of the fuel cells, high pressure tanks and tractions batteries and extra structure to protect the tanks.
The electrons in the battery are very light and energy dense but the battery to hold them and return them as useful current is not, same for hydrogen.
What hydrogen fuel cell car is not a proof of concept?
BEVs are winning at the momemy not because they're efficient, but because the cost/benefit is finally coming out ahead due to advances in battery technology.
But BEVs don't fully cover all use cases. It is telling that the first commercial truck manufacturer to release a full electric truck has also invested billions into hydrogen. BEVs can certainly handle a lot of usecases, but continuous usage at high power levels isn't one of them, even at theoretical energy densities.
>>The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy.
To compare to battery storage, one needs to compare both the storage and electrical conversion solution, so in this case, is the [weight of the storage cassette] + [weight of fuel cell making electricity] less than [weight of batteries yielding same KWh of electricity]?
If they can make that work, they are on to something. I hope they are, but we really need to know the full picture.
> The material deteriorates due to the formation of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen. When the light shines in the material, it does not release deuterium, and the material gets “soaked” with it as time goes by.
Are they saying that the device transform normal Hydrogen into Deuterium? My guess is that they don't want to say it, the problem is that the small amount of Deuterium mixed with normal Hydrogen accumulates and cause problem. Anyway, it's a sloppy weird sentence.
Also, it is possible that the system somehow acts differently on Deuterium and normal Hydrogen, but it would be very strange. They have very similar properties, and that makes the separation difficult.
It would be nice to read more technical details, because it feels like the tech fluff added to make the project more impressive.
I suspect they are using some usual high power laser that is available on shelf, so it's not easy to choose the frequency arbitrarily. It's very unlikely that the usual on shelf available laser has the right frequency to remove normal Hydrogen but not Deuterium.
This is in the running for the least apt analogy I have ever heard.
Hydrogen does embrittle most metals, but it does not affect aluminum at moderate temperatures and pressures. Obviously a piston and cylinder head experience high temperatures and pressures but it would in theory be possible to develop ceramic pistons and heads that can mitigate the embrittlement problem, as a sibling comment mentioned.
One future perfect scenario, say year 2040, is to generate fuels with the anticipated excess electricity. Colocate some kind of carbon capture next to every wind and solar farm. Use some for fuel. Pump the rest back into the ground.