Water-stabilized hydrogen promises twice the range of gasoline at half the price | Hacker News Reader

Water-stabilized hydrogen promises twice the range of gasoline at half the price

newatlas.com

35 pointsprostoalex28 comments

“When it's fully loaded, the fuel contains about three percent hydrogen and 97 percent supporting material.”

This fuel, which is 97% inert material, is supposed to have energy density comparable to gasoline? Either I’m fundamentally misunderstanding something or this is buulllllshiiiit.

I think it's probably the latter. Unless they are doing fusion or something, there's no way they're getting that kind of density.

Yeah I don't see how it works. Google tells me hydrogen's got ~3x the energy density of gasoline. That's quite a numbers gap.

You can make a lot of that back with the difference in efficiency between an internal combustion engine (theoretical max of 50%, and only under ideal conditions) vs the efficiency of an electric motor (90% or better) and associated losses from the motor controller and the fuel cell.

This fuel is 3% hydrogen and is claimed to achieve 200% the MPG of gasoline.

Hydrogen has 3x the energy so that gets us to 9%.

Let's say hydrogen has 4x the efficiency of turning energy into miles (which I think is a reasonable estimate), so that gets us to 36%.

This stuff may be denser than gasoline. It's 60% water. Let's make the extremely generous assumption that the rest of the stuff occupies no space at all, giving a density of 1.7kg/L. Gasoline is 0.7kg/L, so that's an improvement of 2.4x which gets us to 86%. Still more than a factor of 2 short of the claim.

Maybe they're measuring by weight instead of moles?

They’re measuring by volume, saying a standard size fuel tank would give twice the range with this stuff.

The Toyota Mirai can store 5kg of hydrogen (giving it a 500km range). This system would require about 150kg of inert material to store the same amount of hydrogen. That's only about three times the weight of a full tank of gas and doesn't seem totally impractical. The other claims sound pretty far-fetched though. For twice the range of an ICE car, it would need a much larger tank.

1. https://insideevs.com/toyota-mirai-fuel-cell-sedan-priced-at...

It seems reasonable to assume this stuff has a density similar to water, since it’s mostly water anyway. That means you’d need a 150 liter tank to achieve 500km of range. A typical car has, what, a 40 liter tank? And they’re promising more like 1,200km of range from that size tank.

60% water, so it depends on what the other 37% is

Even if the other 37% takes up no space at all, it still doesn’t come close to adding up.

This company is the successor to Terragenic, which has been around since 2013.[1] Same people. Same claims. Still no demo. Now, with better graphics on the web site.

What they're probably hyping is water-stabilized hydrogen peroxide. Habo, a hydrogen peroxide manufacturer in Shanghai, showed a hydrogen peroxide fueled car in 2004.[2] There's been work on hydrogen peroxide fuel cells.[3][4] So it's sort of possible to do something like this. But the cost and range claims are based on nothing.

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/business/fuel-saving-cars-showcased-i...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/research//stocks/private/snapshot....

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...

[4] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2018/cc/c8cc0...

Sounds vaguely related to this tech - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...

'Direct NaBH4/H2O2 fuel cells'

"A fuel cell (FC) using liquid fuel and oxidizer is under investigation. H2O2 is used in this FC directly at the cathode. Either of two types of reactant, namely a gas-phase hydrogen or an aqueous NaBH4 solution, are utilized as fuel at the anode. Experiments demonstrate that the direct utilization of H2O2 and NaBH4 at the electrodes results in >30% higher voltage output compared to the ordinary H2/O2 FC. Further, the use of this combination of all liquid fuels, provides numerous advantages (ease of storage, reduced pumping requirements, simplified heat removal, etc.) from an operational point of view. This design is inherently compact compared to other cells that use gas phase reactants. Further, regeneration is possible using an electrical input, e.g. from power lines or a solar panel. While the peroxide-based FC is ideally suited for applications such as space power where air is not available and a high energy density fuel is essential, other distributed and mobile power uses are of interest."

Storing energy as hydrogen is much less efficient than storing energy in batteries. The channel Real Engineering explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPheEg-K2qc

But on the plus side, hydrogen fuel cell cars refuel faster than battery electrics. The Hyundai Nexo refuels in 5 minutes for a range of 600+ KMs:

https://www.hyundai.de/Modelle/NEXO.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Nexo

That said, Porsche and BMW are working on a fast charger than can deliver 100km of range in 3 minutes, 80% charge in 15 minutes:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-13/bmw-porsc...

I think battery electrics will win out over hydrogen fuel cell cars in the long run just because more of the infrastructure is already there and it's easier to build out fast charger stations than hydrogen fueling stations. But hydrogen will be part of the mix, maybe more for heavy vehicles than cars.

Time to charge isn't as important as you think. It's more important to have chargers where you're going. This way you don't have to go out of your way to fuel.

For example, imagine if you could charge your car at the grocery store, at a restaurant, at the amusement park, parking garage by a concert, ect, ect.

I never said it was ultra-important. I'm just saying faster chargers are eroding a benefit hydrogen fuel cell cars have over battery electrics.

Battery performance also degrades on time and in rare cases your car can go up flames. A tank stays a tank, you only replace the fuel. If the fuel is compressed hydrogen you're essentially transporting a bomb in the car. Hydrogen also burns with an invisible flame which makes matters worse. If this stuff really exists and is not flamable, then it has some advantages over both batteries and compressed hydrogen.

Yes, but don't underestimate battery development. Semisolid and solid state batteries may become practical options for EVs.

24M, for example, claim a semisolid battery design that's 40% cheaper to produce with better energy density, better safety, and a longer duty cycle than conventional batteries:

http://24-m.com/

https://insideevs.com/24m-raises-22-million-semi-solid-state...

We'll have to see how they go, but if it does work as claimed then it'll be a significant step forward for EVs.

It's mostly claims and organizations raising money for battery reasearch. I've seen lots of such claims for liquid electrolyte zinc or aliminium based flow batteries, but so far little seems to have materialized.

Also battery performance degrades drastically at low temperature, so battery powered EVs are not such a great option in chillier areas.

So far we are still running on battery tech first developed in the '70s with the first battery developed in the early '90s.

> It's just claims and organizations raising money for battery reasearch.

BMW has partnered with Solid Power to develop solid state batteries for their vehicles. It doesn't mean they'll succeed but BMW thinks Solid Power is worth the investment of time and money:

https://companyweek.com/company-profile/solid-power

> Also battery performance degrades drastically at low temperature

Which is an advantage of solid state batteries. Here's some of Toyota's research:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/03/new-lithium-battery-...

It's more than just claims. Someone will develop a viable solid state battery eventually.

You lost me at dispensing spent "fuel" at the gas station, that is a massive infrastructure change. Sorry, no buena.

Not any bigger of a change than electric chargers and that's working very well

The "switch" unit sounds like it's just a chemical catalyst for electrolysis of water into Hydrogen and Oxygen...

Also the catalyst is patented and only made in one country (Israel).

If, as another comment says, it is hydrogen peroxide then the catalyst is probably a variant of something already well known.

There are lots of catalysts, but as it says in the article that it has to be replaced at intervals of something like a year it also has to be cheap, so probably not platinum. There are organic catalysts too and it's not unreasonable to think that there are usable catalysts that would not be covered by a patent; if the process works at all that is.

This sort of reads like an advertisement.

>Using a standard sized fuel tank, the Electriq system would, according to modeling, cost less than half the equivalent gasoline price to fill up, and it would deliver around twice the range, while being completely emissions-free – at least, back to the fuel production plant.

Huge if true, but I'd like to see their methods.

If you read further into the article, there's no chance it will be half the price of gas - if there's any differential the middlemen are going to eat it up.

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