https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.
Energy density. For the fuel alone, volumetrically. Altogether, massively as well.
By weight, hydrogen and oxygen creates 20x more chemical energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries [1]. (It's comparable to gasoline and air.) By volume, uncompressed, it has far less. Once compressed, we have to take into account the weight of the containment tanks, the weight of the fuel cell and the energy lost in converting hydrogen to electricity, an output batteries directly provide, a combination which negates that specific energy advantage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refere...
* Hydrogen is very light but takes up quite a lot of volume so it needs to be either liquified or compressed to very high pressures (and even then it's considerably bulkier than, say, natural gas). * The resulting storage tanks are heavy and add bulk. * The fuel cell to convert the hydrogen to electricity adds weight that a battery system doesn't have (the storage is the converter). * The energy density of lithium-ion batteries doesn't have to match hydrogen or gasoline, it just has to be good enough. For most light vehicle applications, we're getting pretty close to that point (though possibly not if you're planning to use a truck to tow things).
For heavy transport, the balance changes because big tanks are more mass-efficient than smaller ones, and the sheer mass of batteries currently required for long-haul trucking seriously cuts into the cargo that can be legally carried with road mass limits. That's why there's interest in hydrogen-fuelled trucks.
For hydrogen-fuelled planes, a similar argument applies with current and reasonably foreseeable battery technology you can't build an airliner with a useful carrying capacity and range. However, the bulk of hydrogen tanks required for a plane with intercontinental range is still a big problem. That's why you see all these unconventional body design concepts for hydrogen-fuelled planes - you need lots of room to store the hydrogen and still give a useful passenger load.
To power the grid from excess solar, you need a hydrogen-burning generator at the site of the electrolysis plant.
Why does this keep coming up? Who cares about this specific point? If there is demand, people will build the fuel stations, like we did with gas and oil?
I get there are other harder problems with Hydrogen, but worrying about infrastructure seems strange?
Hydrogen infrastructure, if what we're talking about is on the scale of current ICE cars, can't "organically" compete, and won't "organically" develop. It has no chance without a massive government investment/buy-in on a decade long scale. It needs huge investment for each of the big IFs I outlined above.
Look at the cost curves of solar / wind / batteries for the last 10 years, and consider that there are numerous technologies about to be rolled out that will improve those at the same or better rate and the overall industrial scaleout / economies of scale isn't close to being done.
Hydrogen is marketed these days with "hey it will cost X and that is (theoretically / lies damn lies and accounting) competitive with wind/solar/batteries (which exist and we KNOW what they cost) price today.
But there is absolutely no chance of hydrogen being cost competitive in general power transmission/carrier, transportation, etc in 10-15 years. Heck in 5 years it likely won't.
So the hydrogen people are praying that their lobbying + fortune would produce some boondoggle subsidy to build this out, and then the government would limp it along due to the sunk cost fallacy.
Also, recognize that lots of grid load is more flexible than you think. Running smelters and foundries preferentially in the summer is a very doable thing.
> Earth's commercial and affordable phosphorus reserves are expected to be depleted in 50–100 years and peak phosphorus to be reached in approximately 2030.
Lithium used to be cheap. Is not anymore. Phosphate will go same route. That's the whole point.
The marginal cost for lithium is about 1/10th of the current price, so the price of lithium will eventually fall.
Of course "eventually" could be a long time away...
The price of extracting a ton of lithium from the ground may be the same, but it's not enough to keep up with demand. Which is why the cost of lithium on the market is skyrocketing.
The people that had the guts to invest in lithium production in the middle of Covid when the price was in the tank, are currently harvesting that lithium and getting a massive payday.
Price will come back down.
So you'd absolutely expect Li supply to grow along with demand and push prices down due to economies of scale. And that's exactly what we're seeing.
[1] Basically, go find a salt deposit -- that's a dried up ocean, which is the best concentrator we can find for Lithium compounds.
Edit: LegionMammal has the right words, demand curve.
No, but electrical grids can efficiently transport energy across continent-scale distances, so it doesn't really matter. It's true, that stored hydrogen only needs to beat "electricity from the nearest dam" and not local generator numbers, but that's still a tall order.
I mean there is a shit ton of land available in say Spain for solar+hydro plants. No matter the lower efficiency, you could build enough to power Europe.
The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa - https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o
One of the difficult problems with extremely large solar projects is the infrastructure to move the power. In a lot of these cases, the space to build solar is large areas of land that no one uses... which means that there's not much infrastructure to build the solar power plants, and then not much infrastructure to move that power back to places where people live.
Yes, there's a lot of land that could be used for solar. Moving the enough power to power all of Spain (or all of Europe) based on solar requires some very impressive transmission lines.
While the economic efficiency of massively distributing your solar collection across residential and commercial buildings is less than a grid scale, at the same time you get far more resilience with all the buildings having local energy generating capacity in disaster situations. It also alleviates the total amount of energy the grid needs to transport (especially for home/business charging of EV vehicles), so grid development/maintenance costs will stay sane.
Not that grid scale isn't important. Heat pumps, home geothermal, residential solar, grid solar, wind, battery storage, pumped hydro storage, and whatever else works will be necessary. Hopefully synthetic fuels / algae fuels / aluminum air batteries / next gen nuclear / grid geothermal can also all contribute.
That doesn't matter. E.g. in Europe most natural location for pump storage are already used as such. I guess you could build some in Asia, I am not sure. We would just have to trust russia to transport our electricty back and forth. Good idea /sarcasm
It's doable, but it requires that production capacity has been overbuilt and turns all the roles at the foundry into seasonal work.
For seasonal storage, efficiency is 365x less important than for diurnal storage. Minimizing capital cost is the primary concern.
People talk about hydrogen for transportation because you can refuel quickly, using expensive fuels is already the norm, and it’s much lighter than batteries. But, it’s so expensive, inefficient, and difficult to store that there needs to be vast technical progresses before it’s viable. Hydrogen would be fairly viable if it was 1/4 as expensive, fuel cells cost 1/4th as much, and the energy density was 4x as high by volume. At which point we could start scaling producing, but batteries are viable today and we are already scaling production.
Also, moving lithium around releases negligible CO2, an EV battery only needs 15 pounds of lithium and lasts 25 years. You can work out the exact number based on specific origin and destinations but it’s on the order of driving an ICE 1 to 10 miles. Which shouldn’t be surprising because boats are very efficient, lithium is light, and cars weigh a lot.
Lithium comes from a lot of places. The largest Lithium exporter in the world today is Australia. Multiple South American countries are also towards the top of the list.
A lot of lithium "mining" is digging up desert salt deposits or skimming salt brines from salt lakes. Some of that still isn't "perfectly" environmentally friendly, but compared to extracting most any other sort of mineral it is one of the environmentally friendliest we extract.
Lithium is the third element on the periodic table and the third most common element in the universe. Admittedly a lot of the planet's Lithium is in compounds/salts that sometimes need to be chemically broken down and that has more environmental impacts than the mining processes. So there is that, admittedly. But a lot of it is electrolytic just like the "advantageous" hydrogen processes people seem to love.
Lithium is not a rare or heavy mineral. It's the next fatter cousin of Hydrogen.
> How do we get rid of old batteries?
Recycling. Plenty of companies have already answered this question. Lithium is highly reclaimable from all existing Lithium-based battery formulations.
Hydrogen is: 70% Gibbs Free Energy Efficiency, 70% electrolysis efficiency, 50% fuel cell efficiency, 93% compression efficiency = 23% round trip efficiency.
You don’t want gas turbines anywhere near the grid. It is a terrible strategic choice besides the obvious ecological effect.
Also, from a strategic perspective burning domestic natural gas and burning natural gas from a different country are very different things. Europe becoming dependent on Russian natural gas was stupid, but America burning it’s domestic natural gas is mostly just an environmental issue.
"In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 65-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#:~:text=in....
… so long as you don’t count the 1kWh of photosynthesis that was done by a bunch of ancient plankton to rip CO2 molecules apart and build hydrocarbons instead.
It competes with battery technology/economics, which is in roughly a 10% year on year improvement curve, a curve that will have to flatten at some point but has been doing 10% for better than a decade and with 140 wh/kg sodium ion / 200 wh/kg LFP / emerging solid state + lithium sulfur techs will probably continue.
So if hydrogen is claiming:
- IF we resolve the research barriers and core engineering to a basic state - IF we invest billions/trillions in infrastructure - IF that is built in 10 years (which would be a miraculous human achievement)
... THEN we ... might ... in theory ... be price competitive with the current day grid + batteries.
OK, what about a world where batteries are half or a third of the cost in 10 years, which is what the long term trends suggest with year-on-year improvements?
All the nuclear and hydrogen stories are being hyped hard over the last couple years, because those behind those technologies aren't stupid and see the curves in alternative energy and storage and EVs: economic armageddon at an industry wide level for the nuclear, oil/gas, and others.
The coal industry was a preview for their industries. They know it's a losing battle, but like other fading industries, the execs hold on tooth and nail to get their bonuses/retirement/payouts. The organizations have real economic inertia, and investing in things that slow down the transition allows the companies to make more money longer.
At least the economics of wind/solar/batteries are working so strongly in favor of a transition. Otherwise write the requiem for the human race.
Imagine a truck stop where you can have 10-15 semi trucks filling up 300 gallon tanks every 5 minutes. We're talking megawatt-hours of energy to every roadside fuel station. And there are in excess of 10 million semi-trucks and over 40,000 truck stops in the USA. This isn't even getting into more demanding applications, like aviation, where the energy demands are an order of magnitude greater (The electrical equivalent of fueling a single Boeing 747 with 65,000 gallons of JET-A in under an hour is ludicrous)
Unless you build hundreds of nuclear reactors, invent superconducting power lines, come up with battery technology that's 100 years in the future, or tell everyone that the 21st century is cancelled, this is all impossible for the grid. At least on paper, hydrogen can solve this problem if we can figure out how to generate, store and transport it properly.
2) beauty with electric drivetrains is that virtually ANY sort of power generation. If we're talking a bunch of recharge sites in the midwest, you'll power them with windmills/solar that are right next door. In the south and southwest, solar farms right next door. Or some hydroelectric. Or some geothermal. You don't need to rely on the grid for everything.
3) tractor trailers can use a swappable battery system easily. You already see it in action when you see UPS trucks pulling multiple trailers. You have a trailer that's a battery (or a generator if you can figure out carbon neutral generation or hydrogen in god knows when), but you DON'T need to fast-charge everything. So a tractor trailer pulls in, unhitches spent battery trailer, and hitches up and plugs in a pre-charged one. The trailer battery can also be shaped to function like an aerodynamic rear foil to increase the overall efficiency, and maybe even function as a stabilizing rear drive motor. Better battery tech comes in? You don't need to worry about replacing the batteries in the tractor, you just phase in and out the trailer batteries.
4) aviation will be on synthfuels for long-haul trips for the foreseeable future, even I will admit that. But short hop commuter flights will absolutely be electrified, the "fuel cost" savings will guarantee that, especially once carbon taxes finally are enacted.
This could also potentially increase order and predictability on the roads-- vehicles have to stay in lane and move only at designated turning points in order to maximize use of the grid supply. Autonomous vehicles could use the wires as an effective feeler to make sure they're staying on a defined road.
Yes, it technically doesn't fix aviation, but if we can avoid solving an already solved problem, maybe it frees up some better minds to look at that. TBH, I could imagine a lot of aviation being displaced by better high-speed rail options, hopefully getting to the point where it's less of a critical emissions concern.
Anyway, for the numbers those 40,000 truck stops aren’t all filling up 15 semi trucks at a time. Also, a topical refueling stop takes 20-30 minutes.
A truck can generally travel around 2,100 miles on a full tank of gas. On average per day your looking at less than 500 kWh per truck. Gasoline contains more energy but engines are not very efficient and not every truck is traveling 11 hours at highway speed per day.
Call it ~500 kWh/24 hours and the average load is 21kW * 10 million trucks = 210 GW or roughly 6MW per truck stop, but electrified roads are far more efficient and remove the need for truck stops or excessive batteries.
Either way we are talking about is a lot of power but hydrogen makes this much much worse.
You're forgetting that internal combustion engines waste most of the energy in fuel as heat. Car/truck engines are about 35% efficient at the best. I'm not sure what it is for airplanes, but turbines are well-known to be horribly inefficient, much much worse than piston engines; they're only used in airplanes because the power-to-weight ratio is so much better.
We have no idea what batteries may be possible in the future. It may be a decade or a hundred years, but one day that may very well be possible.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/largest-electri...
This isn't going to disrupt any kind of airline traffic. Battery energy density needs to improve by at least an order of magnitude - probably two - before it has any significant aerospace application outside of drones.
Regional planes that only travel 30 minutes to an hour and do so cheaper and more efficiently than gas/diesel equivalent planes can still massively disrupt the big passenger airlines. It used to be that the airlines had a wider mixture of 30 minute/1 hour flights on smaller commuter planes to smaller "regional" airports before the economies of scale of jet engines pushed everything bigger (fewer flights below 1 hour in distance; more "hub-and-spokes" centralization; etc). A return of cheap, efficient short 9 or so passenger commuter flights could massively disrupt today's passenger airlines and their logistics, not just tomorrow's.
If electric efficiencies also manage to scale to the bigger flights, who knows what will happen, but it is something to watch that there's already practical disruption implications even before scaling it up that big.
Labor costs are a non issue because the flights are so short. 2 hours of labor from people making 90k split 9 ways is 10$.
And of course scaling up makes aircraft more efficient so you could get a slightly longer range from a 50 or 200 seat variant.
The reasonable target with current technology and fuel reserves seems to be about 300 miles, which covers a surprising fraction of all trips.
Scaling up would make it more efficient, but batteries' limitations prevent larger planes. Hence, why more energy dense fuels are required.
Today because of fuel cost economics.
The earlier point remains that if that economics flips and rather than doing 3 hour-ish flights of 50-100 people between modest "hubs" you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades.
(In some cases you light them back up because earlier periods of passenger flight did have less hub-and-spoke/deep centralization and a lot more airports and airfields overall than are in operation today.)
I'm not sure it is going to happen, but I wouldn't underestimate the potential there either just because it doesn't look like the status quo. That's kind of the definition of "disruption".
And my point is that this isn't going to be remotely possible without order-of-magnitude improvements in battery technology. The economics of a 9 seater aircraft flying 30 minutes in what a car can cover in an hour is just terrible. Remember, that plane was flying slowly and didn't even climb over 2,500 feet. With no passenger load either, probably. The amount of energy it'd take to carry a load with passengers in a 30 to 1 hour flight at normal cruising speed is vastly greater than what is capable with batteries.
The existing lithium ion batteries are already approaching or exceeding 50%. Just like how there's only so much energy you can get out of a kilogram of gasoline, there's only so much energy you can store in a kilogram of a lithium battery (different chemistries like LiFePo have different thermodynamic limits, but they all have a hard physical limit). A battery powered plane would have to have a different battery chemistry, the thermodynamics of the best battery chemistry we know of is too constrained. "Pick a new chemistry" is way easier said than done. Why haven't we just picked a new combustible fuel chemistry that doesn't emit greenhouse gases?
And in a sense, you're right that battery powered planes are the future: hydrogen is that new battery chemistry. The energy density by mass and volume of compressed or liquid H2 is much greater than lithium batteries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...
Anyway, your comparing hydrogen ignoring the loss factor of engines, and the weight of fuel tanks so the useful energy density is much lower. “High-pressure tanks weigh much more than the hydrogen they can hold. The hydrogen may be around 5.7% of the total mass,[19] giving just 6.8 MJ per kg total mass for the LHV” At an overly generous hypothetical engine efficiency of * 50% that’s ~= 3.4 MJ per kg.
New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries. Aluminum isn’t quite up to the hype, but it is very promising for aircraft.
No, you read the chart wrong: Hydrogen gas at atmospheric pressure - as in not compressed - has worse energy density by volume. Hydrogen at 700 bar has ~5x the energy per liter than lithium ion batteries at liquid hydrogen 10x. And all of these have energy densities by mass that are 100x better than lithium ion battery or more.
> New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries.
Such as? You gave the example of aluminum, but as you point out they have problems that inhibit practical use: namely corrosion of electrolytes. The point remains: lithium ion is the best battery chemistry we've yet found and even it is far, far from up to the task of powering an aircraft.
Why would a plane need a pilot at all? Make it fully autonomous and be done with it. Teslarize all the things! Harr! :-)
Hydrogen critics also say "just overbuild the renewables instead". Apparently, dropping excess power on the floor giving an efficiency of its use of ZERO is to be preferred to making hydrogen with it at efficiency great than zero.
Hydrogen might work as a kind of black swan protection, but storing hydrogen for very long periods isn’t cheap or easy. Hydrogen embrittlement is a problem.
At best it might fit the edge case that current reserve natural gas power plants do. But, that’s such a tiny percentage of annual demand we could just use natural gas without significant global warming concerns. I am fine with a 99.95% green grid, at that point many other issues need to be addressed.
Yes, it fits edge cases -- but it has an outsized effect on the cost of a 100% renewable grid. Trying to cover black swan events with batteries or overprovisioning would be much more expensive. Optimizing baseload output in Germany using historical weather data and 2030 estimated cost figures for PV, wind, batteries and hydrogen, including hydrogen cuts the cost of the system in half.
Isn’t efficiency kind of irrelevant when the energy you are storing - i.e. that of the sun - is essentially free?
You would need to do a comparison across many different strategies. For instance, compare against the cost of energy per kilowatt hour in winter from fossil fuels (ideally also factoring in the costs to the environment). And compare against solar energy, collected in summer, stored using different mediums.
Against batteries, hydrogen, in spite of all the conversions and the compression needed, would be dirt cheap.
If the surplus is 24% for 3 months and you can capture 1/8th of it that’s only 3% for 3 months which is quite a bit of energy but is only useful if the deficit is actually 3% and nobody want’s to build a grid that close to failure simply because weather can make a larger difference than 3%. Which means you don’t get to used your equipment to generate electricity every year.
Don’t get me wrong hydrogen works in preparation for black swan events, but seasonal demand is much better dealt with by saving hydroelectric power for much of the year.
You need something else for those hours/days/week(s).
The main disadvantage of hydrogen is that it is very difficult to store. It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything. The efficiencies of energy conversion of hydrogen are quite good for that matter.
But BEV (how the author calls them) have major disadvantages as well. Infrastructure needs are unfulfilled, the recycling is maintenance intensive, ...
It is still more environmental friendly to drive that 10 year old used tincan than to buy a new electric car. Advantage here is that you don't have local polution, much cleaner city air etc.
But neither hydrogen cars nor BEV will save the climate.
But infrastructure is currently being built out for that. There are very few places in the US (lower 48) that you can't drive a BEV to and back. For some of the remote ones you will need to plan your route around chargers, but you can get just about anywhere. For more dense areas you can just wait until your battery is getting low to start looking. It isn't like gas where you can wait until you are "running on fumes" before starting to look for a charger, but it isn't a big deal.
Hydrogen is far behind - maybe it will be built, maybe it won't, I won't predict the future. What I can tell you is if you buy a hydrogen car today you will have to buy the place to fill it at the same time, and you have to assume you will never go out of range.
Problem is there is very little incentive for anyone to invest in energy infrastructure. That is a problem affecting EVs, but also a problem that needs to be solved anyway.
No it isn't, what do you base this on? Production of a new electric van takes a limited amount of CO2, and the CO2 saved while driving it compensates for that within a couple of years. I don't know how this rumor still persists.
https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore
Note the customisation options that let you choose a state for the electricity mix, miles driven per year and so on.
There is no savings to be had by waiting to convert to an EV, the total emissions are always going to be higher if you drive the polluting car rather than switching today.
Note the "choose a state" and compare Wyoming or West Virginia for a regular hybrid car (e.g. Prius or Insight) to an EV... and that is quite different than if you pull up California, Oregon, or Washington.
In WY and WV, the plugin hybrids have a larger carbon footprint than a regular ICE hybrid car (Prius or Insight).
Youd need to commit to keeping the car for over a decade while only doing 3000 miles per year, then blowing it up out of spite to fail that.
You really have to consider all the variables, ie grid carbon intensity, miles driven and car manufacturing. People seem to get focused on one of the variables in the carbon lifecycle.
The total carbon is still gonna be higher than not doing all that travel
I have been able to avoid travelling by car[0], but I have the luck of being in a city with good public transport and local-sized shops, so there are 5 tram stops (and several bus stops and a suburban rail station) and 8 supermarkets closer to me than the gap between the middles of Apple's south car park and their duck pond.
And back in Cambridgeshire, roads were quiet enough I was comfortable commuting (and shopping) by bike.
Not everyone is in such a well-designed place.
[0] I don't own a car, and the last time I was behind a wheel was, I think, 2017.
of course the plain numbers might make sense on paper but not on the real world.
Of course you can then make argument that they aren't doing enough mileage to justify having their own car in the first place.
Since I live where the electric grid is already at the limit, my options to install a charger are limited as well. I could use 230V 16A to maybe charge it very slowly...
Batteries also degrade with age and we will have to see how a used car market will look like. I have a car for luxury only since my work is a few hundred meters away.
If you buy a new car anyway, an EV would be a good choice provided you have the means to charge it. Many people in the cities don't have that option. But it wouldn't be too helpful if you replace your current car just for the sake of it.
^Average annual KMs driven by Europeans is 12k, Americans average 15k Miles a year.
https://short-fact.com/how-many-miles-does-the-average-europ...
200Wh/Mi -> 200 * 1500 -> 300,000Wh required -> 300,000 / 365 * 24 -> 35W charger needed.
> It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything.
The people currently most serious about the immediate expansion of green hydrogen supplies (by a significant factor over current global production) are not looking at storing hydrogen for export | transport | storage, they're looking at ammonia - three hydrogen and a nitrogen.
eg:
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/forrest-promises-to-convert-firs...