Plasma Kinetics May Revolutionize Hydrogen Storage for EVs
autoevolution.com
autoevolution.com
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.
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" :(
This is in the running for the least apt analogy I have ever heard.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brEm4mEizns
"This BANNED Technology Could Push Hydrogen Cars Over BEVs" by E for Electric
A few links:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/04/plasma-kinetics-light-...
I'm skeptical too, could not find any data on this stuff.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
Assuming that the tech is good enough to compete with BEV, that is.
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.