Hydrogen fuel breakthrough in Queensland could fire up massive new export market

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Remember that military use is not driven by economics. If hydrogen is needed for fuel cells to power something for a military purpose, it will be generated the best way regardless of costs. For consumers, this is a losing proposition.

a reply to: pteridine


I've already posted about HyperSolar and their device that uses sunlight and custom made nanoparticles to split water.

Well, they are playing Monopoly right now and buying Marvin's Garden and associated real estate...

“This patent protects our key technology,” commented HyperSolar’s CEO Tim Young. “With the grant from the European patent office along with existing grants from Australia and the US, and notice of allowance in China, HyperSolar has taken major steps to protect its intellectual property that has the potential to provide widespread access to low-cost green hydrogen to the largest markets in the world. The nanoparticle solar cell is highly-efficient, ultra-thin and light-weight. This enables versatile applications of the solar hydrogen production device from small to large scale.”

globenewswire.com, March 13, 2019 - HyperSolar to Receive European Patent for Its Renewable Hydrogen Production Nanotechnology.

At least somebody is making a move!

I think it is small steps like this (I have been following graphene production this way) that are indicative where things are headed rather than the news articles making major announcements.

That being said, looks like HyperSolar is about to announce their target "1,000 hours of continuous operation... we are taking orders in a couple months" sometime this year (provided by TEOT's oft wrong predictions about major announcements).

Hydrogen Fuel from Seawater.........

Existing water-splitting methods rely on highly purified water, which is a precious resource and costly to produce. To overcome this Issue, Stanford researchers have devised a way to generate hydrogen fuelusing solar power, electrodes and saltwater from San Francisco Bay. They demonstrate a new way of separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity.

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: Karthikaqpt

They also figured out how to coat one of the sides that tends to corrode when in contact with sea water.

That is cool news! Thanks for posting!

Here is another that goes back to ammonia production (which can be a method to store and ship hydrogen gas, per OP)

m.phys.org...

Sorry, on mobile, but phys.org has a story up, “Inert Nitrogen Forced to React With Itself”. Using only cold temperatures and pressure they demo that it can be done at a decent conversion rate.

They want it want it for medical purposes but ammonia precursor would be a good use too as they do not cut the N-N bonds.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Sounds good, lets hope it comes into being.

The problem is that according to a doco I watched and other information i cam across, the oil industry has owned and or controlled the alternative energy since its inception.

Many genuine new and effective technologies have been invented but one way or another the oil industry ensures the research is stopped and we hear nothing further from them.

From what Ive learned the oil industry also invests in technology they know wont work in the long run and the solar industry was given as an example of this.

The purpose of backing developments they know wont work is to drain, bleed and dishearten as many supporters as possible, particularly those in high places, so as to kill off further funding and to see the continuance of the oil industry as the only alternative we have, at least and until the worlds reserves are exhausted.

After that then, miraculously a new super technology will then emerge just in time to save all our arses.

a reply to: Azureblue


Hydrogen production is ramping up, nowhere near petro-chemical levels, but look at the number plants being opened.

To help meet this growing need, the public and private sector are devoting resources into research, development, and large-scale deployment of both conventional and renewable hydrogen generation. The U.S. Department of Energy launched its H2@Scale initiative to bring together the National Laboratories, industry, utilities and other stakeholders to advance wide-scale hydrogen production, storage, and utilisation for both the stationary and transportation sectors. Industrial gas companies are investing heavily in both new and expanded facilities in the U.S., including a $150 million world-scale liquid hydrogen production plant by Air Liquide in the Western U.S.; two new liquid hydrogen production plants in Texas and California by Air Products; a new hydrogen production facility in Delaware from the Linde Group; and a $40 million expansion to a United Hydrogen plant in Tennessee.

openaccessgovernment.org, Feb. 2019 - Hydrogen: An energy powerhouse with unlimited potential.

Here is a news announcement that did not make the list:
wdsu.com, Feb. 28, 2019 - Industrial gas company to build one of largest hydrogen plants in US in Louisiana.

Praxair has a long term contract to become operational in 2021. It is not the green hydrogen, it is from petroleum, it shows demand growing.

While not a Tesoro station on your block, it shows a growing use/demand of hydrogen as a fuel source.

Also, the hydrogen fueled semi maker, Nikola, has purchased land in Phoenix to build a plant. They roll on down the highway, making hydrogen as they go, or they can pull over and refuel.

Speaking of making hydrogen on an as-needed basis, from mining.com: Scientists find new way to power electric cars using cobalt.

No need for b1tchin' high tech tanks to hold hydrogen, just create it as you go. It produces CO2 in the hydrolysis phase, but as a home brewer, they have tanks in various sizes to hold CO2. And cobalt is cheaper than platinum!

And still research continues. Out of San Diego State, sandiegometro.com: SDSU researcher comes step closer to harnessing power of hydrogen as reliable, inexpensive fuel.

They have figured out how to specifically create a catalyst, molecule by molecule, which is cool in itself! They are using molybdenum and nickel instead platinum as active site. They also used solar power to power the process using waste water. That sounds like a win-win, get hydrogen as a fuel, clean the water, and get clean water out!

Little by little this is happening. All that is needed now is a "duck and cover" hit!

Yeah, Big Oil probably has spent big money on this already and would be able to "switch over" to save themselves but the point is to move away from hydrocarbons as the sole source of vehicle propulsion. And as OP covered it, this happening in places other than the US.

BBC has an article up about the Orkney Islands in Scotland. They went "green" around the islands putting up wind turbines and even a current/wave one! They thought they could use the energy they needed and sell their excess back to the grid and supplement their income. The grid operators would actually cut them off!! Not needing any more electricity at the moment, the grid operators would simply close the spigot. Not having any storage the Orkney community needed something to do with their excess renewable electricity.

They chose hydrogen evolution through hydrolysis. That was 2016 when they decided to switch.

BBC.com (US), Future, March 26, 2019 - How Hydrogen is Transforming These Tiny Scottish Isles.

The story details the ups and downs of switching from diesel and gasoline to hydrogen fuel cells. But they did more than just cars. They are building a car/passenger ferry, heating a school, and supplementing the grid when wind slows down.

Since the wind turbines are community owned, as are the hydrogen plants, everybody gets to benefit with free ferry rides! And they are keeping residents local as their hydrogen economy starts locals are finding newly created positions instead of pumping marine diesel from one of the islands (used to be primary source of income).

Lots of lessons to learn on hearing their story! Like, have a mechanic that can fix HFC vehicles! And know how your vehicle works so you know what to look out for. Mostly, this takes more time if done piecemeal like the legal pot thing in the US (we really need some kind of planning which is what I hope the H2@Scale folks are doing).

Interesting that once they got off oil, the whole community got some pay back! And shocking to hear the percentage of wind power that was going unused!

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
BBC has an article up about the Orkney Islands in Scotland. They went "green" around the islands putting up wind turbines and even a current/wave one! They thought they could use the energy they needed and sell their excess back to the grid and supplement their income.

the uk government have stated that housing built after 2025, will not utilise the currently used gas
for central heating systems nox emissions
the policy may at the moment be open to feasibility studies into method and sources and i do hope
this becomes the preferred energy source. if the islanders create agri-tunnels, any co2 could be utilised,
trapping heat will be useful for the polytunnels in such a harsh changeable climate. more scope for
a larger variety of vegetables, fruits and crops similar to bananas grown in Iceland assisted by hydrothermal.


f.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

"Since the wind turbines are community owned, as are the hydrogen plants, everybody gets to benefit with free ferry rides! And they are keeping residents local as their hydrogen economy starts locals are finding newly created positions instead of pumping marine diesel from one of the islands (used to be primary source of income). "

how long will it take for the oil industry to move in and take over the 'community owned' hydrogen plants. Not only do the oil companies own the oil industry they are also moving in on the water ownership and supply industry (water is the new oil) how long would it all remain in public hands???

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

"Since the wind turbines are community owned, as are the hydrogen plants, everybody gets to benefit with free ferry rides! And they are keeping residents local as their hydrogen economy starts locals are finding newly created positions instead of pumping marine diesel from one of the islands (used to be primary source of income). "

how long will it take for the oil industry to move in and take over the 'community owned' hydrogen plants. Not only do the oil companies own the oil industry they are also moving in on the water ownership and supply industry (water is the new oil) how long would it all remain in public hands???

Back on page one (or two) someone asked about just using ammonia as a fuel.

Well, it seems that somebody in Denmark is thinking the same way!

Denmark has wind turbines on one side and hydro on the other. They have a country wide grid that literally crisscrosses Denmark. Right smack dab in the middle is where research is going on both hydrogen evolution and ammonia production. The ammonia is not thought of as a product for fertilizer but as a combustible.

Our purpose in producing ammonia is precisely that it can be burned as a liquid fuel. In the original application of the project, it was intended to prove ammonia as a liquid fuel by rebuilding a ships combustion engine to operate on ammonia. It’s quite a revolutionary feat to manage that. Very high-efficiency is desired, so there are still a number of lab experiments to be carried out that will reveal how close we can get to theoretical limits of ammonia production, and we therefore have to divide the application into several stages. The application we have been granted now will be used to prove a radical energy-efficient production of ammonia only on the basis of electricity, water and air. When this is in place, we will build engines that prove that we have found the Egg of Columbus, and finally have a carbon free solution for heavy traffic (ships, trains and the like). We will also show that ammonia can be converted back to electricity using fuel cells in this project. It can be done incredibly energy-efficient, but we do it first and foremost to show the potential of ammonia as an energy carrier, and not so much to revolutionize electricity production in general.

-Christian Dannesboe, Phd. student, Aarhus University

cleantechnica.com - The Potential Of Ammonia As Carbon-Free Fuel — Major New Research Project At The University Of Aarhus.

(I had to look it up! "Egg of Columbus - a brilliant idea or discovery that seems simple or easy after the fact").

They plan on using renewable, air, and water to make ammonia to use as shipping fuel in retrofitted ship engines!

How's that for sticking it to the man?!

Besides fuel, they said ammonia from non-hydrocarbon sources using renewables could open a whole new market of organic foods (same source).

Ammonia, hydrogen, and renewables seems to be a subject of deep interest in multiple countries.

We have talked about Haber-Bosch process before. Here is news on a major new breakthrough with that process. First, a revisit of how "cracking methane" works...

The furnace at the heart of a conventional reformer contains over 100 reactor tubes, each more than 10 m long and loaded with a nickel catalyst. The reformer generates 6.6–9.3 metric tons (t) of CO2 for every metric ton of hydrogen created, and 17–41% of that CO2 comes from fuel combustion. The process is responsible for about half the world’s annual production of 60 million t of hydrogen, used in petroleum refining and in the production of ammonia and methanol.

It is also hugely inefficient. The poor thermal conductivity of the reactor tubes and catalyst means that temperatures drop sharply toward the center of the tubes, stalling the reaction and forming carbon as a by-product. The temperature gradient across the tube can also cause thermal stresses that shorten reactor lifetime.

Now the breakthrough:

In contrast, electrical heating keeps the temperature fairly constant across the tube and catalyst. The prototype reformer uses a single tube of iron-chromium-aluminum alloy 0.5 m long and 6 mm wide, with a 130 µm thick internal coating of porous zirconia impregnated with nickel. An alternating current running through the tube heats it up to 800 °C, exploiting the same kind of resistance heating used in incandescent light-bulb filaments. Fed a mixture of methane, water, and a dash of hydrogen, it produces almost 1 m3 of syngas per hour. “It’s very good research by a very good team,” says Guy B. Marin at Ghent University, who models and designs industrial chemical processes, and was not involved in the work. “Haldor Topsoe is a world leader in this field, so the fact they are considering this alternative way of providing heat to the process is significant.” Mortensen and his colleagues found that about 20% of the nickel’s active catalytic sites were involved in the reforming reaction, far more than the 3-5% catalyst utilization of a conventional reactor. “That’s a huge improvement,” Mortensen says. The system also uses a lot less nickel than a comparable gas-fired reformer and curbs carbon-forming side reactions.

The researchers calculate that if their system were scaled up, a 5-m3 unit could achieve the same hydrogen production as a 1,100-m3 conventional steam-methane reformer. They are now planning a demonstration-scale unit. The potential savings of building much smaller reformers could make this a big hit, Marin says: “That’s the key to innovation in our industry: Can you introduce a new technology on a small scale without losing money?”

Chemical & Engineering News (cen.acs.org) - Electrified reactor could slash climate impact of industrial hydrogen production.

A step up to a cleaner method for hydrogen and ammonia production! Smaller usually means "more efficient" and less of an environmental impact. They said "if all reformers were converted to this method it would shave off 1% global CO2 emissions" (same source).

Also making the news in the past couple days

Largest carbon capture, sequestration project produces ammonia.

Over in West Terre Haute, Indiana, a company has purchased a gasification plant and is converting it over to an anhydrous ammonia production plant that will sequester nearly 100% of its produced CO2 7,000 feet below ground (same source).

Little by little, the old messy, "just get her done" methods are going to be replaced with cleaner methods. Heck, why sequester the CO2? Use it to turn a SCO2 turbine to make electricity, sell that, then sequester it! Better yet, convert the CO2 over to calcium carbonate. Sell that to concrete manufacturers then what ever is left over, then sequester. It would go something like this: make ammonia, capture CO2 from plant, turn a SCO2 turbine, make electricity and convert CO2 to calcium carbonate, sell to concrete makers and sell any left over electricity, sell any CO2 to any purchasers, then, sequester CO2 underground.

Telling ya'll. Once somebody figures out that they can make money from out of the air there is going to be a war!

Back in OP, the major announcement IMO, was the membrane that converts ammonia to hydrogen for use in a hydrogen fuel cell. There were a few comments on skipping hydrogen altogether and just using the ammonia.

Well, since we are trying all option on cleaner burning fuel and sustainable fuel from renewable sources, somebody is doing just that: burning a combination of hydrogen and ammonia, straight ammonia, and/or ammonia boosted fuel in a single engine!

Today (June 18, 2019) at the first National Hydrogen Mobility Innovation Conference in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Hydrofuel announced a commercial demonstration of diesel fueled generators and trucks converted to run on NH3 fuel.

Over the course of 3 years, two diesel fueled generators and transport trucks will be converted to use Hydrofuel ammonia fuel.

The generators and transport trucks to be converted will be provided by TFX International, a Toronto-based company.

These generators and trucks will use Hydrofuel Inc.’s, Ammonia Solutions aftermarket multi-fuels engine retrofit systems for low emission combination of diesel and ammonia fuel, as well as zero emission hydrogen oxygen assisted NH3 fuel.

hydrogenfuelnews.com, 18 June, 2019 - Diesel fuel generators and trucks to be powered by cleaner NH3 fuel.

Only a few trucks will be equipped with these multi-fuel engines but if it proves their case that it is economic to do this then they may scale up. There is mention of other pilot programs in the UK, EU, and Japan all investigating the use of NH3 as a fuel (they missed Australia! Although they are looking at ammonia as a transport method rather than a straight up fuel).

Seems that energy storage is also interested in hydrogen/ammonia as a way to store renewable energy (among others, including thermal storage in either direction, really cold, or really hot... saw one the other day using lava rocks as the energy storage from wind turbines!) as a longer term solution.

We'll have to wait and see how this works out!

A team at the University of Delaware has demonstrated a direct ammonia fuel cell (DAFC) prototype with a peak power density of 135 mW cm-2 at 80 ˚C. The DAFC employs an ammonia-tolerant precious-metal-free cathode catalyst (Acta 4020) and a high-temperature-stable hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM). A paper on the work is published in the journal Joule.

The Delaware team identified two key factors for achieving high DAFC performance: the use of a PGM-free cathode catalyst of zero ammonia oxidation reaction (AOR) activity and an hydroxide exchange membranes (HEM) which is highly stable at 80 ˚C or higher.

greencarcongress.com, July 31, 2019 - U Delaware team develops prototype efficient direct ammonia fuel cell for transportation.

Without using OP's membrane to convert ammonia to hydrogen for use in hydrogen fuel cell, they have created a prototype that is all housed in one engine! It creates hydrogen from the ammonia, then passes it off hydroxide exchange membrane to generate electricity.

It seems like the idea is going around. To have a prototype built is one thing but the study went a bit further and describes various paths to ammonia generation (energy sources) and attempts to describe a zero emission pipeline which would be a good thing as they concede that, at the very least, methanol would have to be used instead of gasoline, so they do not completely kill off the ICE.

And if that wasn't enough...

Engineers at Lehigh University are the first to apply a single enzyme biomineralization process to develop a catalyst that uses the energy of trapped sunlight to divide water molecules to create hydrogen. The synthesis process is carried out at room temperature and under ambient pressure, solving the scalability and sustainability challenges of formerly reported techniques.

AZOCleantech.com, Aug. 5, 2019 - Innovative Solar-Powered Route to Production of Hydrogen Fuel.

Another non-precious metal entrant that can split water at ambient conditions to generate hydrogen.