Green/Blue Hydrogen

[Overmod]

Bumping this to add something of potential interest:

Maurice Tamman of Reuters, who has interesting credentials, has put together a panel of six people associated with current climate science to answer general questions.  Their responses on Reddit have been marvels of intelligence and common sense.  They have apparently 'committed' to addressing any sensible questions people in the general public may ask, and they appear -- perhaps their selection for this group considered this explicitly -- to be able to explain complex things in clear and concise English.  (I won't lie -- I enjoyed someone finally putting the UN scam in its place... clearly and concisely.)

Five of the scientists can be contacted directly.  Four via Twitter:

Michael Oppenheimer, @ClimateOpp

Corinne le Quere, @clequere

Carlos Duarte, @duarteoceans

Kaveh Madani, @KavehMadani

one via blog

Ken Caldeira, caldeira.wordpress.com

Their models person, Julie Arblaster, gave no independent contact, but I suspect with that last name she would be easy to locate.

[Overmod]

Railway Age article a couple of days ago on the 'supply side' of the issue:

https://www.railwayage.com/mechanical/hydrogen-and-fuel-cells-the-future-of-mobility/

Fascinating that they 'see' the right answers, but still don't 'get it'.  You'd think it would be obvious that energy storage is an essential component of high-horsepower fuel-cell enablement, but they're still talking as if it is a 'competitor' to the hydrogen.  I've seen a number of times what happens when Canadian financiers decide they want 'their' chosen or invested technology to prevail or decide they want to 'own this space' within a short time.  

I also confess that I tremble for the short-term future when I see the phrase 'in tangent with' make it all the way to final Web posting without correction.  Indicates more than a problem with proofreading 'challenge'.

[Erik_Mag]

tree68

I'm far less concerned with the routine handling of hydrogen in daily operation than I am what I'm going to have to deal with when such vehicles are involved in less-than-normal circumstances. 

One of the "fun" aspects of hydrogen is that it has a very broad range of H2/air ratios that will support combustion. OTOH, being the lightest gas, it dissipates very quickly, unlike propane or butane.

The high pressure can be a bit worrisome, ironically the amount of energy needed to compress hydrogen to 10kpsi is several per cent of the energy that can be recovered from said amount of hydrogen.

[charlie hebdo]

Overmod

 

 

charlie hebdo

** alles

 

 

Nicht alles, 'stimmt.

 

And I am well acquainted with at least some of the Princeton researchers.

John Kopasz is one of the people who taught me about PEM and SOFC technology a decade ago.  I was not aware he'd taken up hydrogen sourcing technology, as claimed in that article, but he's certainly well-enough qualified to work in that area without any contribution from me.  I will ask him how he knows you, though.

 

I don't know him. Not my field. 

[MidlandMike]

Overmod

I do not see mention or discussion of the issue of hydrogen embrittlement over time.  Perhaps good design has already worked around this, but we were promised similar good design when ethanol was substituted for MTBE as an oxygenator for gasoline, and sometimes didn't get it.

I had wondered about Hydrogen embrittlement also.  I am familiar with it in sour gas wells that contain hydrogen sulfide.  Special steels help.  I see that the hydrogen tank in the article was made out of carbon fibre, so I wonder if that takes care of the problem.  But maybe the hydrogen system may have a shelf life.

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

** alles

Nicht alles, 'stimmt.

And I am well acquainted with at least some of the Princeton researchers.

John Kopasz is one of the people who taught me about PEM and SOFC technology a decade ago.  I was not aware he'd taken up hydrogen sourcing technology, as claimed in that article, but he's certainly well-enough qualified to work in that area without any contribution from me.  I will ask him how he knows you, though.

[charlie hebdo]

OM: Perhaps you should write to the Argonne scientist or the Princeton researchers to show them your superior knowledge about ** .

 

** alles

[SD70Dude]

Overmod

For example, a common risk of accident is not catastrophic explosion but fire.  Hydrogen fires are intensely hot but the flame is largely invisible.  (I've seen some discussion of using markers in the fuel, doing for vision what mercaptans do in gas for smell, but nothing in the mainstream of consumer hydrogen provision has taken the idea up... as yet.)

Now that is a good idea.  I'm honestly surprised to say that this is the first I've heard of it.  

Will there be problems with the 'colourant' poisoning the fuel cell, the way that lead contaminates catalytic converters?

[tree68]

As one who would be confronted with the results of an incident with any vehicle, it is the unknown that is troubling.  We understand gas and Diesel vehicles as the result of many years of experience.

We're facing the same thing with electric cars.  They can have upwards of 600 volts (depending on the vehicle) stored in those batteries.  We're gaining experience as a community, but we have a way to go.  Be aware of the orange cables...

I'm far less concerned with the routine handling of hydrogen in daily operation than I am what I'm going to have to deal with when such vehicles are involved in less-than-normal circumstances. 

What can I expect when a hydrogen fueled vehicle is broadsided by a loaded dump truck doing highway speeds?  (Rhetorical question)  Suddenly that nice diagram in the article is meaningless.  How to deal with it will again be a learning process.

 

 

[Overmod]

Why would I dispute anything fact-based?  (Although I think the NASA scientist's explanation of the actual Hindenburg accident is still more attractive than the simplified version given here).

The issue is not, and never was, that cars and buses would randomly explode and 'oh, the humanity!' memes crop up.  Any new technology, like the Hydrocarbon Car Company's approach in the 19th Century, works beautifully as engineered and probably as originally built.  We used some of the original wound composite reservoirs decades ago for the Karman transmission, for nitrogen far in excess of 10,000 psi with many repeated duty cycles, and even then fatigue failure was minimal; I'm sure that modern materials science (and perhaps Japanese attention to process quality) has only improved things since then.

The concern is more with situations as the technology ages and people start cutting corners with maintenance.  Gasolene [sic.] as a railroad motorcar fuel and as a quick method of providing electric light for buildings worked beautifully... until the fires started.  Then you started to read about the need to develop safer alternatives, like diesel.  It's cute to equate hydrogen safety with gasoline safety, but the two are very different in the ways they are dangerous and the ways problems can develop.

For example, a common risk of accident is not catastrophic explosion but fire.  Hydrogen fires are intensely hot but the flame is largely invisible.  (I've seen some discussion of using markers in the fuel, doing for vision what mercaptans do in gas for smell, but nothing in the mainstream of consumer hydrogen provision has taken the idea up... as yet.)

I do not see mention or discussion of the issue of hydrogen embrittlement over time.  Perhaps good design has already worked around this, but we were promised similar good design when ethanol was substituted for MTBE as an oxygenator for gasoline, and sometimes didn't get it.

I'm glad to see the proposed rollout of hydrogen stations in the East, and the prospective development of the infrastructure to supply them.  As long as it's OPM going into that development you'll get no complaint from me... and who knows?  In this age of improving CGI the horse might be made to sing.

[charlie hebdo]

Here's a nice article that provides a lot of information.Note that an Argonne Labs scientist is quoted,  though I suppose our resident Jack of all knowledge will dispute if. 

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2852323/heres-why-hydrogen-fueled-cars-arent-little-hindenburgs.html

 

[Overmod]

rrnut282

Have they predicted the net result of adding more water vapor to the atmosphere?  Water vapor is one of, if not the most powerful, of greenhouse gases.   Could this actually create the very man-made global warming it is proposed to combat?

In case you didn't notice, I addressed this earlier, using the lovely pseudoscientific name for water that has already produced so much joy for the science-challenged but ecologically-overconcerned people (cf. http://www.bandhmo.org/) and some of the amusing backlash that attempts to find the 'rationality' of the effort, rather than the skewering of things like ignorance of terminology and appeals to authority that lead to people signing 'ban DHMO now!' petitions and the like, as its primary purpose outside tech-geek humor.)

As in discussions of steam in locomotive cylinders, if water remained behaving like an ideal gas, its concentration in the atmosphere due to additional hydrogen combustion (and its well-understood, very powerful accelerative effect on local greenhouse effect) would be a concern.  But just as with nucleate condensation, water is a two-phase system driven largely by atmospheric and meteorological phenomena, with enormous 'fossil reservoirs' as sources; additional 'combustion exhaust' would enter the hydrological cycle as soon as it cooled, and while it is quite practical to calculate the rise in certain hydrological features, such as nominal sea levels, from prospective scaling up of hydrogen consumption, the actual effect (considering other characteristics of liquid-phase water) would not be that great.  More importantly perhaps, any particular accelerated reuptake of that water into the hydrological cycle would be minimal.

I agree with you, with a little regret, that a "Hindenburg" hydrogen catastrophe would have lawyers galore getting easy money out of many industries so foolish as to engage in it.  Advocates might be wise to quietly push for some modern analogue to Price-Anderson that caps liability for any single hydrogen disaster while recognizing the importance of inherently very dangerous technology in achieving national or global goals.

[rrnut282]

Somehow, I just don't see hydrogen catching on commercially in a scale to be economically viable.  After a few hindenberg-like accidents, the hand-wringers will demand a "safer alternative."  Have they predicted the net result of adding more water vapor to the atmosphere?  Water vapor is one of, if not the most powerful, of greenhouse gases.   Could this actually create the very man-made global warming it is proposed to combat?  

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

These technological  changes involving EVs and hydrogen cell power use are going to accelerate quickly in this decade. 

You missed the word 'here', and the sense of the change being over the next two decades or so without any implication it will only start to 'matter' toward the end of that period.

I have nothing but applause for for-profit entities deciding to make green (or blue) hydrogen to support the developing transit hydrogen infrastructure.  It supports precisely the thing most important to build out and develop to make hydrogen carrier fuel accepted in the marketplace, not just a niche fuel (as it has been for decades here).  

I leave a longer timeframe because I don't see any technological change making hydrogen carrier more cost-effective "soon" than other fuels (carrier or primary) derived from renewable sources.  I continue to watch the technologies with interest, and will assuredly advocate it (as I did for natural gas with the first reports on the technology that became fracking) when the appropriate combination of technology and incentive becomes present.  

Personally, I don't think sequestration costs have radically ballooned since the clean-coal days when the net cost involved about a 23% increase in effective production cost over typical pollution-control electrical generation.  This makes blue hydrogen from some of the typical 'process hydrogenation sources' -- particularly those set up to use nuclear-generation waste heat as part of the process heat involved -- much more important (and less wasteful overall) than electrolytic separation, and functionally zero-carbon if the sequestration is done in a closed process.  While dihydrogen monoxide is one of the more important greenhouse gases, it is not always in the vapor state, and a few megatons of it from fossil sources added to the global water cycle per year is both trivial and likely an insignificant actual accelerant of AGW... perhaps less affective on the teeny-tiny actual scale of meaningful influence here than removing a comparable mass of it from the environment over the same period.

Incidentally, megawatts is not an appropriate unit for the output of a carrier-fuel plant.  (It certainly is for the input, but will look far more impressive when expressed in MWh electricity consumption, not just peak supply capacity)

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

These technological  changes involving EVs and hydrogen cell power use are going to accelerate quickly in this decade. 

You missed the word 'here', and the sense of the change being over the next two decades or so without any implication it will only start to 'matter' toward the end of that period.

I have nothing but applause for for-profit entities deciding to make green (or blue) hydrogen to support the developing transit hydrogen infrastructure.  It supports precisely the thing most important to build out and develop to make hydrogen carrier fuel accepted in the marketplace, not just a niche fuel (as it has been for decades here).  

I leave a longer timeframe because I don't see any technological change making hydrogen carrier more cost-effective "soon" than other fuels (carrier or primary) derived from renewable sources.  I continue to watch the technologies with interest, and will assuredly advocate it (as I did for natural gas with the first reports on the technology that became fracking) when the appropriate combination of technology and incentive becomes present.  

Personally, I don't think sequestration costs have radically ballooned since the clean-coal days when the net cost involved about a 23% increase in effective production cost over typical pollution-control electrical generation.  This makes blue hydrogen from some of the typical 'process hydrogenation sources' -- particularly those set up to use nuclear-generation waste heat as part of the process heat involved -- much more important (and less wasteful overall) than electrolytic separation, and functionally zero-carbon if the sequestration is done in a closed process.  While dihydrogen monoxide is one of the more important greenhouse gases, it is not always in the vapor state, and a few megatons of it from fossil sources added to the global water cycle per year is both trivial and likely an insignificant actual accelerant of AGW... perhaps less so than removing a comparable mass of it from the environment over the same period.

[charlie hebdo]

Decades?   These technological  changes involving EVs and hydrogen cell power use are going to accelerate quickly in this decade. 

For example, from der Spiegel:

 "Hamburg plans major hydrogen production project

 So far, coal power has been produced in Hamburg-Moorburg - from 2025 it should be hydrogen.  The city of Hamburg wants to build one of the largest generation plants in Germany. 

 At the location of the controversial coal-fired power station Hamburg-Moorburg, which went offline after only five years, green hydrogen is to be produced on a large scale in future.

An electrolysis plant powered by electricity from wind power is planned with an output of at least 100 megawatts, as announced by the Hanseatic city and the companies Shell, Vattenfall and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.  A letter of intent had been signed for this purpose.

Obviously another major oil company is looking towards a green future,  for profit,  not just being socially responsible."

[Overmod]

charlie hebdo

Even if natural gas is used,  the carbon can be sequestered. 

They clearly established in the story, and I mentioned in my initial reply, that their business model for 'blue' involved sequestration.  The question was how they intended to do that at the ramped-up aggregate tonnage, in Abu Dhabi.  CO2 is supercritical at about 35atm, which is not "that" much by high-pressure standards, but still requires substantial and non-leaking structure.

There is little point in discussing the 'green' venture there until a production number is provided.  And a cost of providing sufficient renewable electrical energy, with its local commissioning costs and decommissioning allowances, with sufficient connection infrastructure.

Don't ask how much it costs.  Even hydrogen advocates won't say it is cost-effective, even when there is abundant 'excess' electricity (something that has a great many better uses than being employed for high-energy carrier fuel generation or resistance heating).  The gains are social, and are appropriately socially subsidized when used.

There was a fairly involved network of hydrogen 'service-station' supply when I was in California in the mid-Nineties, and I believe there is one today.  For the fuel to be more than a virtue-signaling niche, this would have to be vastly expanded, with capital and safety costs out of proportion to the profitability of the fuel in commerce, and in my opinion this will only occur as a further development of the kind of supply infrastructure that the Europeans are building to support hydrogen trains -- probably starting as a network for hydrogen-powered trucking of various kinds, a reasonable use of the fuel-cell power (compared to diesels and their required multiple-gear operation, especially if the biological danger of nanoparticulates is taken 'mainstream').  Up to now there has not been the availability of sufficient credit to build anywhere near the infrastructure necessary, even if it were highly profitable; it will be interesting to see what forms of financing and incentives are used to achieve it here in the next couple of decades.  

[tree68]

Now that we can make all this pure hydrogen, is there a market for it?  Or is this a "build it and they will come" situation...

And what's the comparable cost to existing fuels?  Right now I can fill up my gasoline -powered pick-up for around $50.  How much will the hydrogen powered replacement cost to fill up?

[charlie hebdo]

Googled: "You can make hydrogen without emitting CO2. The solution is electrolysis powered by renewable energy. There are four major sources for commercial production of hydrogen, three of which require fossil fuels: steam methane reformation (SMR); oxidation; and gasification."

Even if natural gas is used,  the carbon can be sequestered. 

[MidlandMike]

I'll just take their word that it is green.

[Overmod]

MidlandMike

My assumption they are using the solar power to produce electricity for electrolisys to produce hydrogen.  Where does the artiicle say they are reforming it for green hydrogen?

The Masdar project is the 'green hydrogen' and you'll notice they cite neither a production quantity nor a technology for it, other than mentioning that Abu Dhabi has "abundant sunshine".  Adnoc is already producing 300k tons for their process hydrogen, and are ramping this up to the anticipated 500k tons in what may be a rather simple expansion of scale now that there is proven demand (in part through the planned transit distribution infrastructure) for the increase.

This immediately raises the issue of which entities in North America have a comparable level of hydrogen production, and how they might scale natural-gas-based reforming to suit both targets.  A related question is how hydrogenation demand for petrochemical refining is expected to increase (or decrease) over the next few years.

[MidlandMike]

Overmod

 

 

MidlandMike

According to the linked article, they will use solar power to create the green hydrogen.  How is that "derived entirely from fossil (e.g. "blue") sources."

 

 

They're reforming it from gas feedstock.  That's a fossil source, whether or not they successfully sequester the CO2.

 

 

My assumption they are using the solar power to produce electricity for electrolisys to produce hydrogen.  Where does the artiicle say they are reforming it for green hydrogen?

[Overmod]

MidlandMike

According to the linked article, they will use solar power to create the green hydrogen.  How is that "derived entirely from fossil (e.g. "blue") sources."

They're reforming it from gas feedstock.  That's a fossil source, whether or not they successfully sequester the CO2.

[MidlandMike]

Overmod

 

 

Gramp

Is the "smart money" going here?

Oil-Rich Abu Dhabi Targets Hydrogen as Future Export Fuel (msn.com)

 

 

We need go no further than the 'greater fool' theory.  With a little care, I'm sure the necessary fools could be developed, or 'seen coming', to suit.

However, keep in mind no one sane would even mention 'green' hydrogen here, as everything actually described is derived entirely from fossil (e.g. "blue") sources.  As such it would be automatically rejected by a 'zero-carbon initiative' such as Canada's, even if the economics were subsidized or jiggered to make the transportation and distribution practical.  I wonder what excuse will be used to make it 'usable' politically in the European transportation systems with established hydrogen-distribution chain, when the actual justification for the vastly greater costs is seen to be eliminated.  Perhaps they have some plan to use the exotherm to crack a renewable source and peddle that as their 'green' product?

It should also be amusing to see where they sequester or reuse the CO2 from their reforming process.

 

According to the linked article, they will use solar power to create the green hydrogen.  How is that "derived entirely from fossil (e.g. "blue") sources."

[Convicted One]

Overmod

I confess that I understood the 'market' for this middle-Eastern hydrogen to be the aggregate supply chains for the hydrogen trains as they became more and more used in different places, and presumably for similarly larger-scale fleets of vehicles in specialized service that can afford or subsidize the additional maintenance cost and absorb the higher well-to-wheel cost.

I didn't gather that from reading the linked story. Although that might be a practical goal, initially.

But you know the capitalist mantra,  for a market to be truly worthwhile,  it has to be ever-expanding.  Joe Sixpak's land barge HAS to be part of the equation, eventually.

 

FWIW, look here. https://cafcp.org/stationmap

Somebody is buying that stuff retail. And there is that juicy (sarcasm) "Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle" rebate incentive....somebody is buying them

[tree68]

In the late 1960's or so, USAF had hydrogen generators to make the gas for weather balloons.  I worked on rehabbing some, including packing the retort with asbestos.  But that's another story.

The process involved ammonia, heat, and a catalyst (platinum, I think).

The hydrogen came out with enough pressure to fill a weather balloon, but not much more.

The converter was the sized of a filing cabinet, more or less.

I suppose such a device could be used by the home market to make fuel for your hydrogen-powered SUV, if it included a way to pressurize the gas for storage.

The downside is that you need that heat source (1,200 degrees, I think) - which essentially eats up your budget for fuel.

 

[Overmod]

Convicted One

Personally, I don't think that the technology yet exists to make the use of hydrogen practical for personal passenger vehicles.

Note that the technology on the Coradia LINT design is a very long way toward scaling for larger road vehicles, right down into the SUV range and quite possibly smaller, to the extent that parallel hybrids with combustion engines are.  There are "potential" fuel sources with what may be an acceptable level of safety vs. security for some applications -- probably more likely in Europe, or in Singapore, where tight and consistent laws and frequent inspection might become as mainstream as required.

They need to find a way to carry the hydrogen around in "the gas tank" in way that doesn't turn the family cruiser into a Hindenburg.

The aforementioned 'sodium borohydride' does this ... if you can strictly keep water out of the fuel.  The older metal hydride approaches do reasonably well in this respect, too.  I don't see cryonic hydrogen ever being practical in that 'space', and highly-compressed hydrogen has all sorts of little foibles that are hard to impossible to design for cost-effectively on small vehicles.

The real problem is that road vehicles have accidents, and many of those involve significant impact and fire.  In my opinion it is irresponsible to allow high-energy invisible flame with hydrogen's explosive limits around the public where that is a possibility -- and that does include bus accidents.  Regional trains are a much likelier place, and indeed that's where we see it being principally promoted.

I confess that I understood the 'market' for this middle-Eastern hydrogen to be the aggregate supply chains for the hydrogen trains as they became more and more used in different places, and presumably for similarly larger-scale fleets of vehicles in specialized service that can afford or subsidize the additional maintenance cost and absorb the higher well-to-wheel cost.

Wouldn't it be exciting if someone developed a cost-effective catalyst that liberated hydrogen from water? Then, when the hydrogen was burned, it turned back into water...

It sure would!  We've been looking actively for disproof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for hundreds of years!  And there it would be!

I wouldn't hold my breath, though.  The science appears to be very clear about why such a thing won't happen.

On the other hand, there are some very interesting data regarding the generation of sufficient amounts of "HHO" to serve effectively as combustion promotion, through comparatively cheap low-voltage high-amperage dissociation, once you stop looking at 'over-unity' or water-engine type schemes...

[Convicted One]

Personally, I don't think that the technology yet exists to make the use of hydrogen practical for personal passenger vehicles.   They need to find a way to carry the hydrogen around in "the gas tank" in way that doesn't turn the family cruiser into a Hindenberg.

Wouldn't it be exciting if someone developed a cost-effective catalyst that liberated hydrogen from water? Then, when the hydrogen was burned, it turned back into water...

Good luck persuading the oil companies to invest in that technology.  

 

[Overmod]

Gramp

Is the "smart money" going here?

Oil-Rich Abu Dhabi Targets Hydrogen as Future Export Fuel (msn.com)

We need go no further than the 'greater fool' theory.  With a little care, I'm sure the necessary fools could be developed, or 'seen coming', to suit.

However, keep in mind no one sane would even mention 'green' hydrogen here, as everything actually described is derived entirely from fossil (e.g. "blue") sources.  As such it would be automatically rejected by a 'zero-carbon initiative' such as Canada's, even if the economics were subsidized or jiggered to make the transportation and distribution practical.  I wonder what excuse will be used to make it 'usable' politically in the European transportation systems with established hydrogen-distribution chain, when the actual justification for the vastly greater costs is seen to be eliminated.  Perhaps they have some plan to use the exotherm to crack a renewable source and peddle that as their 'green' product?

It should also be amusing to see where they sequester or reuse the CO2 from their reforming process.