Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power
news.umich.edu
news.umich.edu
Is anything like that on the horizon? Or do all of these liquid fuel synthesis options require industrial pressures/volumes/input electricity so as to forever be out of reach from residential synthesis?
Also, you can't run your house on an efficient house + solar over the 2-6 months the sun isn't in the right place (in the sky) for very long or when your panels are covered in snow for a week.
An efficient house gets you to the table and is a multiplier, but long term energy storage is also really important for lots of people.
Hydrogen, though, that stuff's tough. I think 99% of Hydrogen advocates don't understand just how nasty the stuff is.
The chain of events is "once in a gazillion century storm wipes power to huge region; millions of households are stuck without power, power company can't go out and fix all the broken things for weeks/months, many people have their houses wrecked by frozen pipes / die from running poorly improvised heat systems"
The round trip energy storage with batteries is pretty good but not terribly cheap at scale. The round trip into hydrogen, theoretically, seems pretty good but the actual "nuance" in the equation is basically a bunch of dragons waiting to eat you and everyone who ever loved you. Anyone selling a "power into hydrogen" thing is probably actually selling a "turn natural gas into hydrogen and sell that hydrogen to hippies" thing.
Maybe if you can figure out how to stick a carbon or two or three onto those hydrogens you'd be in business, but it's hard to get those carbons.
Anyhow, this is a hard problem. People have gotten used to hydrocarbons which are basically magic given their stability and energy density.
Or maybe you stick three hydrogen atoms to one nitrogen atom and have ammonia.
It's pretty obvious that the single most important reason why the vast majority of machines/engines runs on hydro _carbons_ instead of hydro nitrogens, is that hydrocarbons have been humanity's most important energy source for centuries.
So it makes sense, everything is geared towards them.
But for the future, ammonia appears to be a much better choice, because nitrogen is readily available and the only thing that's missing is matured tech that runs on ammonia. Fuel cells, engines, ...
IIRC there are already container ships being built that run on ammonia.
I contend that the unsexy combination of solar, a bidirectional grid connection, and an emergency diesel generator is more efficient and environmentally friendly than any existing system involving hydrogen or batteries.
We would need a gigantic store for heating our house, because for 4-5 months a year, we are generating less electricity than we need. Something on the order of 15MW of storage.
We could certainly our home's thermal efficiency, though this would be complex. We could also add more panels, but then we'd be overproducing by even more during the summer.
For context, I live in the cloudy-ish south of Australia, and have similar problems with our solar power in winter. However, we still produce reasonable amounts of power through the day, and our total winter shortfall is only about 500 kwh, once offset against the daily production.
So for us, 500kwh -> 2080.8 MJ -> 462.4 litres of storage required (assuming 4.5 MJ / litre and ignoring round trip losses), which seems an entirely reasonable for local storage, safety aspects not withstanding.
Implicit in your assumption is that the grid is reliable, always on, not subject to geopolitical or climate risks, etc. "Inefficiently" converting solar power into otherwise portable fuel might be a feature rather than a bug for those living in conditions where the central grid is often unreliable. Before the past few years, I'd say that would generally be countries in the global south, but we've seen a lot more grid instability even in the US as of late.
Hydrogen (Water + Electricity): There are many containerized electrolysers
Ammonia (Air + Electricity): https://www.nitricity.co/
Methane (Air + Electricity): https://terraformindustries.com/
Also what's the purpose of the ethanol (the rest are not useful, esp. hydrogen which has to be stored somewhere, ammonia is rather dangerous)? I can imagine making vodka alike - but beyond that, using internal combustion engine to burn it means an extremely very low efficiency to conserve enegy. The energy density is there but the efficiency is not.
Ethanol - easier to synthesize than gasoline (which is a complicated mixture of hydrocarbons). It has ~2/3 energy density of gasoline, which I do not think is horrible. I believe it is also less volatile and easier to store long-term.
Animals like goats and pigs can produce a lot of dung that will turbocharge that quite a bit.
A little searching yields stuff like: https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/renewable...
The low tech route is far cheaper and easier at small scale if you want to make combustible fuel.
However the storage tanks are quite small. I would prefer if they made the hydrogen production and storage separate, so you could save up hydrogen in the summer to use in the winter.
If these metal hydride storage is used similar to how changeable batteries are used, it is conceivable that you could drive up to a place like a fuel station just to change out your metal hydride storage in a matter of a couple of minutes and perhaps even get additional supplementary units packed at the back of the vehicle if they intend to go on a long journey.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.6161...
There has also been recent advances in using Boron Nitride for storage - a perfectly safe chemical.
https://www.geelongmanufacturingcouncil.com.au/2022/07/innov...
Hydrogen at scale is going to look more like a means to export sunlight energy from equatorial climes (Australia, Sahel, etc) to Europe, the northern US, Canada as required.
Efficiencies dictate the most likely roll out is large central generation of electricity and dispersal via the existing electrical grid system.
In a similar view individual per apartment solar panels make little sense, panels should be built into entire buildings .. across roofs and across any required parking structures, etc.
Agree, hydrogen storage is not something you do as easily as say piling up some fire wood.
On the other hand, it's totally possible to do at home and it is being done. Hydrogen can be stored in regular gas cylinders. See the realized projects from Home Power Solutions [1].
If these cylinders are located outside, explosions should be rather unlikely due to ventilation.
There's also a recent HN topic [2] about it, but without any comments yet.
Hydro is pretty cheap , does not mean it’s fit for home.
Here the best scenario is similar to Singapore - Australia or UK - Morocco remote solar grid.
This innovation is very interesting compared to Water- Hydrogene electrolysis that is a bit expensive and needs metals that are going to become difficult to source in the coming decades.
Gallium is quiet abundant from my understanding.
If that's really all you want, you can get a 9 year old to put together some kitchen waste and art supplies to achieve this.
That's how I did it at that age.
I did use a battery though, so you might want to check the wiring and add a voltage divider, but those are also easy to build even without understanding.
And I have no idea if you even can, let alone should, just pour gaseous hydrogen into, for example, a gas heater's fuel input pipe.
But actually making hydrogen is utterly trivial.
For the second, you probably want a methanol, methane or ammonia output and they all require high temperatures or exotic materials.
Also conceptually related (small-scale): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32694644
But indeed, no, this just doesn't work. Best available efficiency for round-trip electrolytic fuel production / electricity generation is 40% or so, meaning that those roof panels wouldn't be enough anyway. (Also there's the problem of having every home store a winter's worth of pressurized hydrogen or whatever on-premises. Yikes.) It's not worth it.
Home solar is attractive because unlike most infrastructure it scales down really well and is actually feasible to do at the level of an individual user. But, like most infrastructure, seasonal power management is a grid-wide problem and needs to be solved at the utility level. There are plenty of tricks available there that homeowners don't have access to.
Such a system would be unlikely to ever payback for itself. Not deluding myself on that one.
FWIW: net metering seems like "trash tier" precisely because that summer PV excess really is mostly wasted (this is true for big panel farms too). The utilities were taking a huge haircut on the old 1:1 billing that California just rolled back. It wasn't sustainable.
What to do in the winter? If the answer is "use the grid", then we just kick the can to someone else, who will probably use fossil fuels to provide the energy. The basic problem remains - solar/wind are intermittent and fluctuating.
However until zero kWh is generated from fossil fuels in summer, solar/wind and battery is a massive gain, even if gas is still used for 2 months a year.
Efficiency is irrelevant. The only thing that matter is cost and feasibility. The cost of energy from solar is ~$0.02/kwh and sometimes even $0.00/kwh (when the grid curtails production). Even with 30% efficiency each kwh retrieved from storage will cost a record-low of $0.06/kwh (3-10 times lower than the consumer price).
The biggest factor here is the capex and ease-of-use of the equipment. Not the energy input cost.
One common issue with all these concepts doing electrolysis at the collector is how do you gather the hydrogen. Rigging PV modules together with wires is much more practical than hooking hydrogen emitters together with tubing or pipes.
It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It's of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being "cheap" sounds dishonest if you're far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.
Multiple candidates were developed and trialled in parallel with ramping out mass production, storage and shipping.
Some of this was wasted effort, some of it was useful regardless of which candidates made the final vaccine cut.
The end result was dramatically compressed rollout times.
Right now the world has a billionare or two with negotiated contracts to deliver green (not blue) hydrogen (eg: to Germany) at a scale that significantly increases world hydrogen production within a 5-10 year time frame.
Already the industrial elements are being built for transport, end use, power collection sites, etc.
This activity makes the possibily of dropping in better methods of hydrogen spliting as they are developed feasible in a shorter time frame than otherwise thought possible.
On a side node, you can already add Hydrogen to your home. There is a startup in Berlin, DE which sells complete systems for home: solar roof, heat pump, electrolysis device, bottles and ventilation system.
During summer you fill the bottles with H2 and during winter you consume it.
I'm not affiliated with them. The price before Corona for the whole system was around 65k Euro and now around 100k Euro.
https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ Picea is the name
Do you know what the capacity of a single system is? Could one unit be shared between multiple residential units?
World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year.
How did "cheap" get into this?
Annual Gallium usage includes a substantial amount of reclaimed material from electronics which isn't counted as production against reserve.
> World primary low-purity gallium production capacity in 2021 was estimated to be 774,000 kilograms per year; high-purity refined gallium production capacity, 325,000 kilograms per year; and secondary high-purity gallium production capacity, 273,000 kilograms per year. [1]
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-gallium.pd...
[2] http://strategic-metal.com/products/gallium/gallium-price/
( Similar story with inidium )
Indium is one of the least abundant elements.
In the entire Solar System it is less abundant than gold.
In the crust of the Earth, it is less depleted than most other metals with high electronegativity (like silver and gold), so the result is that here indium has about the same abundance as silver.
Indium is completely irreplaceable in LEDs and in high-speed power transistors. The future demand for these two applications alone is severely constrained by the existing indium reserves (e.g. replacing all light bulbs and laptop/phone chargers and computer PSUs, in the entire world, with more efficient modern types would need a lot of indium).
Because of that, extreme efforts are needed to find substitutes for indium in its other applications, like for the computer displays, all of which currently use transparent electrodes made of doped indium oxide.
It is very undesirable to find new applications that would consume more of the scarce indium.
Sure, so in the crust it's as common as silver.
But that, the mean average, is hardly what matters- there won't be much in beach sand, but find the right copper-porphyry deposit and it's there as common as gallium ~50ppm.
It's also a prime example of why the world needs to better recycle electonic waste, indium-tin oxide (ITO) thin film displays from the tip are a better source of indium than chewing through a million tonne of Cu-porphyry.
Even so, because the total amount of indium in the Earth's crust is about 200 times less than that of gallium, and they are concentrated by similar geochemical processes, it is likely that the ratio between their exploitable reserves is about the same.
In any case there is no doubt that the exploitable reserves of indium are much less than for almost all other chemical elements, the main exception being most of the so-called "precious" metals, about which everyone is aware that they are rare.
Unlike most other really rare chemical elements indium is needed in equipment present in each modern home and business, even if in minute quantities.
Because of this, indium is on the top of the list with chemical elements for which it is required to find substitutes in their current applications, otherwise in the future the supply will not satisfy the demand, and for which new applications should be avoided.
Ahh, reasoning ("likely that").
And yet, empirically, Gallium and Indium are found in similar porphyry-type mineral deposits at similar ppm concentrations .. despite being both rare and hard to find elsewhere (with indium being more or less as common as silver in the crust).
I get it - I have a strong math background and can understand your "reasoning" from the concentrations .. but then I spent a decade or so in exploration geophysics and then did the back end of a fairly authoritive global scale mineral resource database which changed my outlook on things somewhat.
I also have a shovel handling bob cat driving view of what it's like to mine in excess of 800 million tonnes of reserve depoit per annum and a production engineer level overview of various post processing circuits to extract concentrates for further processing.
See "On the current and future availability of gallium":
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
Ergo there's 50 tonnes of gallium per million tonne of bauxite, or 5,000 tonne of gallium in the annual 102 million tonne per annum bauxite production of Australia (alone).
These 5,000 tonne exceeds the current global demand for raw pure gallium by a factor of ten .. so it's not the demand for aluminum or zinc that's limiting global gallium production.
> the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores.
(ie potential max supply estimate as by product from mining other minerals)
This is almost double the current demand. Other industry reports are more optimistic than the source cited here in wikipedia but as a ballpark it'll do.
The wikipedia article has a decent description of one facet of the rare earth problem, that these elements are always bound up with other elements and are only economically feasible as by products.
The other great issue is the flip side of the same issue; they are bound to other elements and must be chemically seperated after mechanical pre processing .. and this can be lengthy, expensive, and leave acres of toxic waste to deal with.
More methods are always good though and hopefully the barriers to commercialising this method (or one of the others) have workarounds.
For everything else, you need a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks, not hours. You also need to transport it. And you need to stabilize the energy output not to be entirely dependent on whether the sun shines. That's why hydrogen might be a good energy reservoir.
My Tesla Model S does that pretty efficiently. And for static batteries there are plenty of alternatives that don't use difficult to source elements.
> You also need to transport it.
We have a grid to do that already, with HVDC interconnects we can even sell it to places where the sun is not shining.
So, that makes shipping or trucking around hydrogen spectacularly uneconomical. Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite. Mainly for things like fertilizer production. Moving hydrogen around at scale is an unsolved problem. Gas pipes (after they are re-enforced) could work of course. But some of it would leak. And hydrogen mixed with air is not a good thing to have in your house.
The same property also makes using hydrogen as a fuel in planes or shipping unpractical: most of your plane/ship would be taken up by the enormous volume of hydrogen you'd need to move it around.
Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is a good reference here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
In it he organizes different use cases by their economical value. Things like road transport and domestic heating are at the bottom of the scale (i.e. you could do it but it would be very inefficient and costly). Near the top are some of the more realistic things, some of which are already being done.
Instead of moving hydrogen to where you implement those use cases (e.g. steel making), it would be more practical/logical to move the use case to where you can produce the hydrogen the cheapest. The bigger the energy need, the higher the savings. You basically compete on energy cost.
Use isn't that expensive, fuel cells do exist.
The problem with green hydrogen (made with electricity) is the inefficiency.
It's only good for storage when you have already filled every battery and pumped hydro storage you have and are still making an excess. Electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity conversion is so hilariously inefficient that even petrol engines can beat it.
But my comparison was about the fact that petrol engines convert only 20-30% of the energy in the fuel to actual motion - everything else is lost in friction and output as heat.
Toyota had a prototype engine that went up all the way to 35-37% efficiency, but it didn't make it to production.
Modern electric engines are 90-95% efficient.
Hyrdogen has about 80% losses from electricity to wheels. When 55kWh of electricity is used to generate hydrogen and that is used in a Toyota Mirai to move the car, only 11kWh ends up at the wheels.
If you do that same with a Hyundai Ioniq 5, all 55kWh (minus some transfer losses) get to the wheels.
Yeah, I don't have one of those in the garage unfortunately. I do have space for one of these though https://newatlas.com/energy/lavo-home-hydrogen-battery-stora...
The best bet are still batteries, albeit the current incarnation of LiXXX (e.g. LiFePO4) are still not there. Even storing energy in batteries poses multiple conversions of electricity that goes to 92-95% efficiency.
Ammonia transport and storage is far more likely.
In Michael Liebreich’s Keynote Speech at World Hydrogen Congress 2022[0] he speaks about the problems of shipping hydrogen. you get around 1% of loss PER DAY (0.1% for LNG). And because of the huge tanks the energy capacity is 1/4 of a comparable LNG carrier. The economics just don't make sense.
[0] Michael Liebreich’s Keynote Speech at World Hydrogen Congress 2022 (16:00 mark about)
...and he didn't know of any better ways of transporting H2 than liquid form.
If it would be "pretty easy" to absorb it to oils, I'm sure that would've been tried already.
the industry's goal seems to be hydrogen->ammonia - transport - ammonia->hydrogen, because ammonia is orders of magnitude easier to transport.
Also true, as soon as one hits high volumes nothing beats liquified gas or pipelines.
is a bit of an understatement.
Consider that a household LNG gas cyclinder (propane if you're central north american I guess) is typically built to contain between 100 and 200 psi whereas hydrogen requires high pressure tanks to contain between 5,000–10,000 psi.
That's a factor of 50 difference in required containment pressure capability.
[1] https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/published-pap...
[2] https://www.lbf.fraunhofer.de/en/projects/hydrogen-cyclic-st...
No one really knows how our existing natural gas infrastructure will cope with hydrogen
https://hydeploy.co.uk/app/uploads/2018/02/HYDEPLOY-FOURTH-O...
https://hydeploy.co.uk/app/uploads/2018/02/21935_CADENT_HYDE...
This isn't black-and-white. Leakage is a disadvantage, as it is for fossil fuels (natural gas, oil, coal,...). Other technologies have other problems: windmills kill birds and bats! Pumped storage kills fish! Dams cause methane leaks! It is important to quantify how much of a problem those disadvantages really are.
https://theconversation.com/dont-rush-into-a-hydrogen-econom...
https://agage.mit.edu/publications/global-environmental-impa...
more skeptically, given that green hydrogen remains a pipe dream, it's both a useful delaying tactic for switching to electricity and furthering investment in fossil fuels, which must stay in the ground if we are to have any hope of staying below 1.5c.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-fossil-fuels-incompatible-wi...
Yes there are many delaying tactic for switching to electricity (the promise of "synthetic fuel" for example, to power existing gas cars). But using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels is needed anyway, for example for ammonia production and steel manufacturing. So I don't understand why you think hydrogen will delay the switch to electricity.
It's time to change this stereotype. Humanity tries to reduce its greenhouse gases emissions, and CO2 is not the biggest problem.