Hydrogen fuel will never contribute to a sustainable world

[4dsc]

At last weekends Lucerne Fuel Cell Conference, which is a highly respected technical conference, Ulf Bossel, the organizer, made a pretty signinficant announcement: the European PEMFC Forum series will not be continued because hydrogen fuel will never contribute to a sustainable world. Instead they will focus on phosphoric acid fuel cells, molten carbonate fuel cells and solid oxide fuel cells which "can meet the challenges of a sustainable future".

http://www.energybulletin.net/18120.html

[benburch]

1. Bingo!

I've been saying this forever.

We need to abandon the battery-powered EV as well as it too is not green or sustainable due to the toxic wastes from its batteries.

We urgently need to invest in electric light rail commuter systems that reach into the neighborhood.

We urgently need to invest in flywheel energy storage for automobiles and local delivery trucks.

[4dsc]

2. We urgently need to conserve...

Have you noticed that lack of noise about "conservation"?? Its deafening..

[benburch]

3. Amen.

Even if we do, with the lack of political leadership we have, it will not be enough to save most of us. I believe that 2/3 of the human race will be gone within a century.

[NNadir]

4. The limits of hydrogen do not rule out other chemical energy storage

technologies.

Personally I think that energy storage by chemical means is superior to any other option. While I might agree about some of your argument about batteries, I don't agree entirely agree with you about whether they are sustainable under some conditions.

The E&E poster Skids, with whom I frequently disagree on many subjects, has gone a long way toward persuading me that some battery technologies are risk minimized and of practical worth.

I don't know of any plan anywhere to industrialize large flywheels for automotive use. I would imagine that they are fairly dangerous in the case where a bearing fails either through accident or wear.

Hydrogen fueled transportation devices are a silly concept, but the concept of synthetic fuels either in internal combustion engines, on line reformer/fuel cells, or direct chemical fuel cells is not ridiculous by any stretch.

Somehow or another, people have focused on hydrogen, mostly because of the only thing that recommends it: Water is the combustion project. The insistence on the pure water combustion product is silly however. However except on space craft, an esoteric application, the use of pure hydrogen as an energy storage medium is practically nonexistent, Governor Hydrogen Hummer Schwartzenegger's system notwithstanding.

However hydrogen as a fuel intermediate has almost a century of industrial scale practice. It is well understood and is a key technology of the modern refinery industry. An an intermediate hydrogen can be expected to play a critical role. In this debate the task of environmentalists as I see it, is not to claim that hydrogen technology is useless but rather to argue about how the hydrogen should be made. The only sustainable path will require that it comes almost exclusively from nuclear energy and renewable energy and not from coal, even acknowledging that the production of hydrogen from coal has been proved many times on an industrial scale.

Another key technology that is required is the separation of carbon dioxide - also an area of active research. We may need to adopt, for the short run, some of the "sequestering" approaches for the immediate recovery of carbon dioxide - sequestering being pretty much an unworkable idea.

For instance, we could in theory situate nuclear power plants or renewable plants (like wind plants) close to existing coal plants. There we could hydrogenate the carbon dioxide recovered for use for as transportation or energy storage fuels for peak needs use. In such a way we could eliminate the need for oil. In effect this is a recycling scheme for carbon dioxide meaning that we have a "twice through" strategy for carbon dioxide use. This would give us a small amount of breathing room while we work to completely phase out fossil fuels, something that should be humanity's focus.

For the long term, we know that carbon dioxide can be removed from air and reduced into a form of chemical energy because plants have been doing exactly this for billions of years. They use sunlight, but we should be able to use any form of sustainable energy, including nuclear and renewables, to effect an equilibrium driven concentration scheme. Therefore we need, as in the case of aircraft, an industrial mimetic of a naturally observable biological phenomena. This is hardly an insurmountable task. It is doable in the right intellectual, environmental, and economic milieu. Much of the groundwork has already been accomplished and it is largely a matter of political will.

As for "peak oil," the sooner we're done with oil, the better. It is a far too dangerous fuel. About the only benefit I see from the age of oil is that it gave us an opportunity to explore fuel chemistry by providing an example of stored solar energy. Playing with oil has allowed us to enter the golden age of chemistry, but enough is enough.

Let's be clear on another thing: The key to conservation - which is certainly no panacea in itself since many conservation schemes involve replacing old stuff with new stuff in a kind of pointless exercise in consumerism -is population control. They key to ethical population control in turn, as always, involves the traditional liberal agenda: Respect for women, access to decent child health care, respect and appreciation of the rights of our gay citizens, education, the elimination of racism, the creation of a secular based society... etc.

[benburch]

6. More on flywheel systems;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/02/ldquoextremerdq.html

http://www.hybridcars.com/flywheels.html

http://www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/documents/pdf/231590.pdf

So, yes, flywheel storage has been actively developed for automobiles since the 1950s. Magnetic bearings are very unlikely to fail in service, and composite flywheels are very unlikely to delaminate and become bombs. Certainly less likely than many advanced battery systems, which are downright dangerous especially in a crash. And there is nothing whatsoever in a flywheel that is at all an issue in terms of green recycling. In my mind, it is an ideal solution, especially when part of a plug-in hybrid system with a Stirling-cycle engine which can burn almost any liquid or gas fuel.

[NNadir]

7. I never knew that buses operated with flywheels.

Thanks, that is interesting.

However the Wikipedia link isn't that comforting when it notes this:

Flywheels are not affected by temperature changes as are chemical batteries, nor do they suffer from memory effect. Moreover, they are not as limited in the amount of energy they can hold. They are also less potentially damaging to the environment, being made of largely inert or benign materials. Another advantage of flywheels is that by a simple measurement of the rotation speed it is possible to know the exact amount of energy stored. However, use of flywheel accumulators is currently hampered by the danger of explosive shattering of the massive wheel due to overload.

One of the primary limits to flywheel design is the tensile strength of the material used for the rotor. Generally speaking, the stronger the disc, the faster it may be spun, and the more energy the system can store. When the tensile strength of a flywheel is exceeded the flywheel will shatter, releasing all of its stored energy at once; this is commonly referred to as "flywheel explosion" since wheel fragments can reach kinetic energy comparable to that of a bullet. Consequently, traditional flywheel systems require strong containment vessels as a safety precaution, which increases the total mass of the device. Fortunately, composite materials tend to disintegrate quickly once broken, and so instead of large chunks of high-velocity shrapnel one simply gets a containment vessel filled with red-hot sand (still, many customers of modern flywheel power storage systems prefer to have them embedded in the ground to halt any material that might escape the containment vessel). Gulia's tape flywheels did not require a heavy container and reportedly could be rewound and reused after a tape fracture.

When used in vehicles, flywheels also act as gyroscopes, since their angular momentum is typically of a similar order of magnitude as the forces acting on the moving vehicle. This property may be detrimental to the vehicle's handling characteristics while turning. On the other hand, this property could be utilised to improve stability in curves. Two externally joined flywheels spinning synchronously in opposite directions would have a total angular momentum of zero and no gyroscopic effect.

It may be true that materials science advances make this type of system attractive. However, I'm not all that concerned about the use of batteries and/or small oxygenated carbon fuels derived from sustainable. Clearly though, I'm not as familiar with flywheels as you are. I'm not sure I'd buy one, but given the nature of the situation as it exists, I can't say I'd oppose such systems.

[benburch]

8. A containment system can be constructed much like a kevlar vest.

It doesn't need to be elaborate or heavy.

[jpak]

5. I disagree

Hydrogen will contribute to a sustainable future as a storage medium for renewable power systems.

Hydrogen fuel cells (and hydrogen-fueled CHP turbines) will be used to buffer and manage renewable power electrical grids.

http://www.hydro.com/en/our_business/oil_energy/new_energy/hydrogen/winds_change.html

http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/trinidad.html

http://www.ieahia.org/pdfs/chapter11.pdf

http://www.risoe.dk/rispubl/nei/33030-0034.pdf

On the other hand, Hydrogen Cars??????

Nonsense.