New system retrofits diesel engines to run on 90% hydrogen
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
Not sure what they mean here.
Is it the tech is a couple of month away from being production ready?
Or does it take two months of work effort to retrofit the engine? If so, how many people are working?
The research team hope to be able to commercialize the new system in the next 12 to 24 months and are keen to consult with prospective investors.
Also I'm assuming they're talking about the big mining and farming machines:
[...] it could play a big part in making our carbon footprint much smaller, especially in Australia with all our mining, agriculture and other heavy industries where diesel engines are widely used.
Still, would surely need some gov't incentives one way or another to make a couple of months of work look like a good deal.
The combustible components of wood gas are mostly carbon monoxide with some hydrogen depending on the water content of the wood. Most of it is nitrogen due to wood gas being produced using air.
When I was working at All Power Labs we did exactly this, ran a 150kW Cummins turbo diesel generator off of wood gas. I had the woodgas control unit tell the generator to inject the minimum amount of diesel to idle, then adjusted the power output by adjusting a butterfly valve throttle of stoichiometric mixture of woodgas and air (well, likely lean so that there was added oxygen for the diesel).
I wish more folks were interested in woody biomass gasification. There is a tremendous amount of biomass in the world that could be utilized for power production that will already be burned or composted (releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere).
When I worked there, I tried to shoot for something closer to what you are interested in. I assumed that farmers and forest management groups would want a small gasification unit that could be trailered to a location and used to run chippers, pelletizers and produce heat and hot water for workers, etc.
The 10 and 20 kW power pallets do all this...but were never really as reliable as they need to be for the price point ($35k). Getting them grid tied was a huge expense even though easily doable.
I've been contemplating a smaller ~2kW version that would put out a households amount of electricity and hot water for domestic usage, but I really don't like internal combustion engines, and believe that this is the ideal use case for a Sterling engine generator. Sadly those are impossible to find, and as WhisperGen went out of business I don't believe there are businesses interested in making them available.
Another option I've been toying with is a small gas turbine [2] which should increase reliability and lower maintenance over a piston ICE - which I assume is the reason you don't like ICEs in these applications?. Has APL considered that route?
[1] https://swedishstirling.com/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/micro-gas-t...
The biggest problem with turbines and any internal combustion engine is that your fuel needs to be clean. With woodgas, you often have particulates, or volatile gases that will precipitate out as temperature and pressures fluctuate within the engine. This fine soot and tar gas can cause fouling over time. For this reason, I think externally combusted engines (Stirlings or steam) are the way to go for a small scale simple cogeneration plant.
Unless there is a something I'm missing, it seems that large scale hydrogen production isn't very 'green'.
The problem is, all the people against serious climate action are also against ensuring all new hydrogen production be green hydrogen production. Their argument goes something along the lines of "the cheaper the hydrogen is, the more likely it is to be adopted, so we'll serve the climate better by funding grey/blue hydrogen until green hydrogen drops in price enough for mass adoption."
Which I might halfway believe if they weren't already doing everything they can to stall climate action. These are the people who turfed Turnbull for having too strict a climate policy.
Storage may still be a deal breaker for some applications, but if a handful of the many emerging electrolyser technologies commercialise you'll be looking at green hydrogen from the cheap 10am-2pm solar energy for <$1/kg pretty soon. 50c is an optimistic but somewhat realistic estimate by the 2030s
Being able to mix and match that with fossil fuels on existing infrastructure will cut emissions from those activities by >80% during the warmer months (or year round in the tropics)
Methane also has the advantage that it more or less will never compression ignite, so it can be mixed with the incoming air and then be ignited with a small amount of diesel (“pilot ignited”) or using a spark plug.
But since electrolysis is inefficient, it would require a lot of nuclear energy.
In return you get hydrogen and blue algaea are edible to boot!
Economies of scale are helpful; every house participating, with windows lined with the little things, would increase efficiency.
However we still don't feed everyone from small household gardens.
If I had to survive solely on crops I've grown myself I would perish. Putting aside economies of scale, I am lucky if I manage to grow a couple of decent size tomatoes or a decent carrot (singular). I'd be lucky to grow enough food for a day or week, let alone a season.
Partly this is because I live in an area with bad soil (too close to beach, sandy), and partly because I just seem to be a well meaning plant killer. Would be nice though. I have had some success with growing seedlings in a mini greenhouse, but as soon as they're out in the yard in bigger pots they start to fail.
In any case, I'd be a pretty bad gardener. I'm more valuable to society (and thus my own wallet, too) when employed making computers run slightly better.
In general, subsistence farming has low productivity.
a nuclear plant scales better.
although the system you talk about might already exist and I'm curious to see a prototype.
Cody's Lab has a cheap algae production setup https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=64cEmjtwRgw
They all go back to a central depot every day/night and the amount of pollution their engines put out right next to people every day is staggering. Every time one of them goes by me as a pedestrian makes me gag. Can't imagine what that does to someone's health over a lifetime.
Light rail also doesn't create pm2.5 pollution from tyres.
Also they could have already converted those to CNG or propane if they’d wanted to.
There are specific biological reasons that lead scientists to attribute certain deaths to air pollution. For instance, we know that PM2.5 can be absorbed through the lungs and we've seen that it forms masses in the veins and arteries that can cause heart attacks.
It’s all bad.
I’d suggest that if your speculation is correct, then the American southwest would desperately love be that effect
> Gaseous hydrogen is molecular hydrogen and does not cause embrittlement
This problem seems to occur when you have free H+ ions hanging around, not H2 that is found in liquid and gas used for fuel.
I love my two TDI diesel cars, and I hope that capitalism finds the diversity to satisfy the market for the electric-nonplussed among us.
Do great work for its own sake, but leave greed to the godless.
> "At mining sites, where hydrogen is piped in, we can convert the existing diesel engines that are used to generate power," says Prof. Kook.
> "In terms of applications where the hydrogen fuel would need to be stored and moved around, for example in a truck engine that currently runs purely on diesel, then we would also need to implement a hydrogen storage system to be integrated into our injection system.
Batteries have their limitations, they require specific materials, slow to charge, and difficult to recycle. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe, and just needs to be crested and stored.
We will eventually get to point with solar that we will have excess energy that needs to be used but nothing to consume it. Modern hydrogen electrolysis is about 80% and once the hydrogen is stored, using a hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricity is about 60% efficient. That’s a 48% efficient process which is still better than 0% by letting that energy go unused.
This space has not seen significant innovation because it has not been a major focus. Given a significant political or economic force, we can bring the efficiency up, waste down, and standardize hydrogen containment and pressure systems. Complaining that a solution is inefficient, which has not been innovated on, is small-minded thinking.
There will come a time where we have excess power to burn but the fleeting nature of renewables will require that we store this energy somehow, which I fully believe that hydrogen will play a role in as you are able to create it at a rate proportional to energy you put in, which is more important that efficiency. Batteries will not scale to our needs at more than a micro-grid level. Scaling hydrogen production will bring down the marginal cost of producing each unit.
Remember that current battery tech was not as easy to produce as it is today for precisely the same reasons I am hypothesizing that fuel cell technology will become easier and cheaper to produce and more efficient in its operation so I will just reiterate this from my post:
> Complaining that a solution is inefficient, which has not been innovated on, is small-minded thinking.
It's because hydrogen has some serious problems as a power storage and recuperation medium. To the point where it has already lost. But there's some big reasons why the fossil fuel industry keeps pushing it. So yeah, you will keep seeing the same objections.
If people kept pushing the idea of heating our homes by clapping our hands you would also see the same reasons that won't work brought up.
However, there are quite a few existing Diesel engines in the developing world where the grid isn’t as sorted.
Now, I don’t know if hydrogen distribution would be a bigger challenge than just solving electrical distribution. But it does seem like this is a technology that could have some purpose. I mean, what about retrofitting diesel backup generators?
Grid concerns will likely be one of the factors that determines the energy carrier of the future.
I seriously doubt this. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to work with and also, it has no natural source. It has to be generated from some other energy source.
"Due to its relatively low volumetric energy density, transportation, storage and final delivery to the point of use can be one of the significant costs and energy inefficiencies associated with using hydrogen as an energy carrier." https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/delivery.html
"Natural gas stored at 20.78 MPa (3000 psig) and 21.1°C (70°F) contains five times as much energy as hydrogen stored under the same conditions." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036031...
Battery electric vehicles, by comparison, are vastly more efficient.
Its also completely green.
there is nothing you can do to or with LNG that makes it green, and it's locked behind geographical locations and political lines that are costly and dangerous to work with an be relied upon.
Efficiency needs to be calculated from a clean (green) slate. you cannot evaluate oil/gas in the same way because you're conveniently ignoring the dirtiness and powerbases of it.
Battery has very similar issues with the rare earth problems, but its also no good for things like big aircraft.
There is no silver bullet, batteries/hydrogen/pumped hydro/molten salt etc are all pieces of the puzzle that fit TOGETHER... not in exclusion of each other.
Utterly false. The elements needed for Li-Ion batteries are very much "in abundance" on Earth. Elements like lithium can be extracted from seawater around the world in quantities far in excess of what humans will ever use. It's just a little less economical than current sources.
Which gets us right back to hydrogen! There's no limit on the amount of hydrogen you can make, but YOU CAN'T MAKE IT ECONOMICALLY. Dismissing eminently practical, extremely efficient battery electric vehicles in favor of an insanely impractical, uneconomical, and thoroughly insane hydrogen economy that is going to vastly increase greenhouse gas emissions in the near future is utterly absurd.
> but its also no good for things like big aircraft.
Neither is hydrogen! Not a snowball's chance in hell of a hydrogen 737 or A320. The fuel tanks would need to be vastly too large and too heavy.
Li-Ion is practical for small, short-hop aircraft TODAY. Short-hop aircraft could gradually reduce the need for larger aircraft (e.g. two short hops instead of one non-stop flight), etc.
And there is absolutely potential for battery electric large aircraft in the not-too-distant future. Lower speed, propeller based flight increases efficiency. Flying wing aircraft designs can reduce power consumption by about 1/3rd. And finally, high power battery chemistries like lithium-air[1] actual have the same energy density as gasoline, BUT batteries/motors get ~90% conversion efficiency instead of the measly ~40% conversion efficiency of current turbofans!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium%E2%80%93air_battery
Also, a fuel cell is a battery. In fact, a lithium-air battery is a fuel cell. If you are bringing up lithium-air batteries, you are unwittingly admitting that hydrogen fuel cells are a viable technology for transportation purposes.
Lithium seawater extraction is much more likely than a green hydrogen economy! In practice, it gets more practical as you couple lithium extraction with other processes, like desalination. In fact, if you manage to get hydrogen production from seawater going, extracting Lithium from the byproducts will be quite economical.
> You have swallowed myths and fantasies of your own.
I pointed it out only as a response to your equally absurd statement that hydrogen fuel is "fully renewable and in abundance". Clearly, Lithium fits just as well.
> you are unwittingly admitting that hydrogen fuel cells are a viable technology for transportation purposes.
Certainly not. Fuel cells could certainly become practical for transportation, but HYDROGEN is not, with or without use in a fuel cell, and that's true for the several reasons I've already very clearly outlined.
> Certainly not. Fuel cells could certainly become practical for transportation, but HYDROGEN is not, with or without use in a fuel cell, and that's true for the several reasons I've already very clearly outlined.
That's completely gibberish, and you are utterly contradicting yourself. If you believe "batteries" are future because of efficiency, then you are also admitting that hydrogen fuel cells are just as efficient.
Honestly, given the obvious lie that you swallowed (lithium can be extracted from seawater), it's time reassess your "knowledge." You clearly do not understand the problem(s) at all.
You've pulled that delusion out of thin air. Fuel cells aren't batteries. Li-Ion gets ~90% conversion efficiency while fuel cells may get ~60%.
And with hydrogen that's only if you use it right after you've generated it. As soon as you need to compress and transport it, you're losing a lot more. Batteries charge from the grid, which itself has single-digit percentage losses. Hydrogen fuel cells can't do that, they have tremendous inefficiencies as the Department of Energy quote already stated.
Hydrogen fuel cells are far more expensive and vastly less efficient than batteries. There's absolutely no reason to continue to push the former when the latter is immensely practical and available today.
But you seem to ignore all information that doesn't bode well for your hydrogen dream, so I expect you'll find yet another reason to disregard this as well.
Farewell.
https://www.startupdaily.net/topic/climate-tech/elon-musk-be...
This basically special pleading, and it is pure nonsense. You must accept hydrogen fuel cells as both viable and cost effective if you ever advocate for any type of metal-air battery.
This retrofit will not have the expected effect on man-made atmospheric warming.
Humans in the last 200 years have massively increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by finding carbon buried deep underground and releasing it as CO2 into the air.
Try a better concern trolling line.