And Thus, The Hydrogen Economy Is (Probably) Born
The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has hit the Holy Grail of commercial, vehicle hydrogen power: A stable chemical medium that can store hydrogen and release it on demand to feed a fuel cell.
Dubbed “POWERPASTE”, it’s a magnesium hydride paste that can be mixed with water to release hydrogen into a fuel cell system. The paste and water together have an energy density far greater than a tank of hydrogen sitting at 700 Bar (about 10,000 psi), and you don’t need the heavy tank.
So if I am remembering my chemistry correctly, Magnesium Hydride (H2Mg) and water (H2O) react to form 2 H2 & MgO. The 2 hydrogen molecules head off to the fuel cell to mix with free oxygen and form water (which heads out the tail pipe), and the MgO is your waste product. So how terrible is MgO? Well, it’s in almost every antacid you eat (tums, rolaids, etc.) and a lot of laxatives, etc., so not terrible at all. I suspect that filling stations would want to recover it for recycling, but an accidental spill would not be nearly as dangerous as a gasoline/diesel spill.
Anyway, it’s pretty damn cool.
Very interesting, storage has been a big issue with hydrogen, so this would be big. Ill admit I’m still a bit sceptical of Hydrogen though. At some point the energy density of batters is going to run right past it, and electricity needs much less new infrastructure.Report
Yes, batteries could get an energy density that exceeds this. But we still have two problems with batteries, one being electrode degradation, and the other being disposal/recycling.
We’ve made strides on density and electrode health, but disposal still remains an ugly, and often ignored issue.Report
That’s a fair point, if the Mg(OH)2 can be readily collected and recycled, that might be the thing that pushes this over the line.Report
That’s really interesting.Report
But the big question is cost. What’s it gonna cost to mass product this magnesium paste and hydrogen. Obviously an absolute ton of electricity. The article says it’s manufactured under high pressure so that’s even more power.Report
That’s the thing, “hydrogen economy” is a bit of a misnomer. There isn’t any free hydrogen that can be mined, so hydrogen fuel cells / storage tanks is more like a form of battery technology, since you need a bunch of electricity to make the hydrogen.
So the real question is, how well does this stack up against battery manufacturing in terms of energy cost, storage efficiency and energy density.
What make this so interesting is that not only is it easy to store (moving gasses long distances is a pain the backside at the best of times, and Hydrogen is not the best of times), but half the hydrogen comes from the water, which cuts down the amount of hydrogen you actually need to make.Report
@North – I saw one estimate that has it at about $6/KWh to charge the paste (materials and energy cost), but that was a rough estimate. If you are making the stuff at scale, the cost probably goes down a lot. Also, Fraunhofer was doing some material refining to the powder and including additives to improve the storage, so I suspect manufacturers would want to recover the spent fuel for recharging.
To be honest, it’s more expensive than petroleum fuels, but as we all know, fossil fuels include a lot of externalities that are not factored into the costs. I’d want to see a full accounting of the costs of extraction, refining, and externalities (pollution, cleanup of spills, etc.).
@James K – As I mention above, it’s not just energy density, but also recharge rates, battery mass, battery life, and disposal/recycling. The slurry can be refilled very quickly, while even the best batteries still need a while to charge. Charge rates would not be much of an issue if I could stop by a filling station and swap out a spent battery for a fresh one, but battery weight would need to come way down.
And yes, it’s not really a hydrogen economy, it’s just a way to store energy that is carbon neutral.Report
Also to add into the cost accounting – war/violence/health over resource rights and extraction. Look at all the political haw being made over drilling rights in the US. Magnesium is fecking everywhere and if it’s rechargeable, the need to constantly mine for more of it will be vastly less than for oil (and given it’s presence in antacids, waste water treatment plants could run a side line extracting it from sewage).Report
“To be honest, it’s more expensive than petroleum fuels, but as we all know, fossil fuels include a lot of externalities that are not factored into the costs.”
And I have often wondered whether the reason the externalities of fossil fuels are not factored into the cost is because there are no good options. It’s not much use to add carbon taxes into fuel cost if there’s literally no other choice!Report
As much as I’d like to see such an accounting of the externalities of fossil fuels, I very rarely trust those accountings precisely because it is hard as hell to do and it’s rife with value injections that satisfy the priors of whoever is running the numbers.Report
$6/kWh for fuel plus the cost of a 100-kW class hydrogen fuel cell? Versus $0.07/kWh for off-peak electricity at my house plus a battery pack? Seems like a high price to pay for range.Report
What is the cost of the battery, plus it’s life, plus the cost of disposal? When we can make a lightweight battery with a huge energy density, fast charging, and near infinite life (no electrode degradation) that can be easily and safely disposed or recycled*, we will truly be done with portable fuels. Until then…
Also, this is emerging tech, costs always come down. Having a way to store hydrogen at STP that can easily be released in a controlled manner in a non-toxic medium with an energy density that exceeds pressurized gas is a BFD.Report
TTBOMK, the best battery packs are less than a third the cost of the cheapest fuel cell stacks, both prices decreasing at about the same rate. There is an active market for reuse of at least the Nissan Leaf battery packs in home storage systems (and in Europe, stacks of the packs to provide emergency back up power in other facilities). In Japan, Nissan and Toyota have learned that most of the time that a pack has lost capacity, it’s only a few cells, and are building cheaper “used” replacement packs out of the cells that don’t have any problems. Recycling processes are getting much better. Better battery chemistries continue to be developed. The magnesium paste has the “advantage” that it’s competing with other early-stage technologies, not ones that have been in broad use and improved for 25 years.Report
Yes, batteries are getting better. But in a lot of ways, the improvements needed are not going to come from incremental improvements, but from serious shifts in how batteries are done.
I’ve got a bunch of the more recent battery research sitting in a folder. I’ll find some time to go over it and see what is coming.Report
I’ll leave it where I always do: today’s battery technology is good enough to handle >95% of all trips, the necessary charging network for those trips is already in place, and we don’t have time to wait another decade or three. Americans will just have to get used to not buying cars based on their 5% most extreme trips.Report
It’s not really about that, though. It’s about batteries still having serious issues with regard to cost, lifespan, and end of life issues.
We can’t trade toxic spills and air pollution for landfills full of toxic spent batteries waiting until we can figure out how to recycle them.
Likewise, I can expect a gas motor to last me close to 200K miles before needing a major overhaul, but the best batteries are still getting about 8 years before they need replacing, with a cost being equivalent to a major engine overhaul.
Admittedly, I have no idea how long a fuel cell will last before it needs replacing or an overhaul, so that alone may prevent fuel cells from being a competitive option for vehicles (still might be competitive for emergency power for homes, etc.).
But this still all ignores that we have a stable, non-toxic, easy to transport medium for hydrogen, which is yea!Report
How to put this politely? The battle’s over. Global new battery-electric vehicle sales in 2020: 3.2M. Giant global auto companies that have fully committed to battery-electric as the future: VW Group and GM. Major economies committed to batteries not going in landfills: EU and Japan. Cross-company charging standards? Check. Magnesium slurry fuel cells are an interesting thing that might find other applications. For cars, follow battery tech: cheaper materials, increased energy density, easier recycling, 80% full charge in five minutes. Although I have to admit, I’m not particularly eager to stand next to a cable carrying 480V DC at the current density to do that kind of charging.Report
Right now, Texas is showing a key problem with automotive battery technology – power delivery.
All those electric cars will require a grid with the power available on demand to charge cars at any given time. I don’t think we have that, and I don’t think we are on track to get that. Perhaps if we were to push home rooftop solar everywhere, or local community windmills (I could see a bunch of windmills sitting at the top of the ridge my neighborhood is on feeding power directly to us), or otherwise update the grid, to reduce demand.
This slurry, on the other hand, could be produced off-peak and stored.
Kinda on a related note, thanks to COVID, the whole world is coming to understand one of the failure points of LEAN & JIT production.Report
Try buying a major appliance these days.Report
Hell, last April we decided to buy an upright freezer for the garage. The first order we placed, they ran out of stock and had to cancel the order. Took another 2 months to find an alternate and get it delivered.Report
The obvious snarky thing to say is that the flip side of “four million Texans lost power” is that “25 million Texans didn’t.” The problem is not uniformly distributed.
The less snarky thing to say is that if enough of those households had Nissan Leafs with the 62 kWh battery pack and 240V charging arrangements, with a little bit of extra power electronics most of the residents could still be running their homes off the car batteries.
In our new digs my wife and I are using about 11 kWh per day. Cut that even moderately and the car battery could keep us running for five or six days. Given my druthers, rather than a tiny wind turbine or solar on our small roof, I’d take the 62 kWh battery (that I need for the car anyway) charged with off-peak electricity.Report
This article suggests that the grid has enough capacity for an all electric fleet.
Caveat – It has the capacity, if everyone is charging their cars off-peak.
Given how often large parts of the grid are getting knocked offline due to extreme weather events, and how it seems like every effort to update the grid is met with budget or environmental resistance, I think the folks in that article are being overly optimistic. Not so much with regard to capacity, but with regard to delivery.
Sure, if every powerplant was making power, we’d have plenty. But I doubt we could reliably get the power to where it needs to go. At least not without a fair amount of upgrades to the grid itself.
On the flip side, perhaps if everyone had a battery EV, public pressure to upgrade the grid would overcome any resistance.Report
The bottom line is that we have the technologies to solve 90-95% of the problem in hand. (“But my car has to have 350-mile range on 10-minute notice” is in the 5-10%.) There are things that would be nice to have, that we don’t have (yet), but their absence doesn’t make the technical problem unsolvable. Whether fission is necessary is an interesting question; but there’s no question that it exists.
It’s a matter of politics and capital.Report
Politics and Capital. There are lots of problems that could easily be solved with appropriate politics and sufficient capital. I’m worried too much capital is invested in older tech and that is going to hamper the advances you are expecting.
Here’s what I know of battery technology for EVs. Lion batteries are king, they have decent energy density, and can have good recharge rates, but they are expensive as hell, toxic to get rid of, have electrode degradation issues, and are prone to catch fire (where is Lithium on the PTE again?). I’ve seen promising advances regarding the electrode issue, which would at least improve battery life, if such advances make it through testing and get adopted by the battery makers, but there is still the serious issues of replacing the battery pack being on par (costwise) with replacing the powerplant of an IC vehicle.
As it stands, I might have to replace the powerplant in my Highlander at around 200K miles. I know I’d have to replace the batteries in a Prius at around 100K miles. So not only do I have to drop the cost of a new powerplant into my car at 100K, but somebody has to do something with that battery, and even though they can be recycled. As of last year, less than 5% of Lion batteries are recycled.
Now, I’ve also seen lots of exciting advances in other types of batteries (just because I don’t have time for Tech Tuesday anymore, doesn’t mean I stopped reading). Printable Silver oxide batteries with 10x the energy density of Lion, zinc-air batteries, seawater batteries, etc., so I’m optimistic we will have something better than Lion, on all fronts, before too long here.
My concerns are that car makers have tied themselves to Lion in such a way that should something better show up, they will be very slow to adopt it.
As for the grid, I’m not sure the politics or capital are anywhere close to improving the grid to where it needs to be to efficiently support an all EV fleet. But if you tell me I’m wrong, I’ll take your word for it.
A final thought, regarding the slurry. Something like the slurry and a small fuel cell could be added as a range booster for an EV.Report
The EU and Japan say recycling the batteries is a solved problem, it’s just that the plant costs a billion dollars. GM has indicated that they will pop the billion to recycle their batteries in the US.
Unless you’re in the 5-10%, your 200k mile battery pack today will be replaced 15 years from now. At half the price? A third? I believe the current exponential decline is more than 10% per year.
And if the political class and the capital class say we don’t get a 21st century grid, we don’t. But it’s not a technical problem.Report
Yes, recycling is a solved problem, I didn’t suggest that it wasn’t. But no one is doing it. Perhaps GM will, but I haven’t heard about them breaking ground on such a facility yet. Handing out PR about it isn’t the same as laying the foundation.
As of April of this year, the average EV battery pack is expected to need replacing at about 65K miles. Some go up to 100K. Most are covered by warranty if the pack fails (for various definitions of ‘fail’), but if it’s not covered, it’s still a cost of about $5K-$10K.
You may very well be right, that battery EV is where it’s going, and if GM follows through, that will be a huge driver. But I think it’s a bit early to claim that it’s a done deal. The tech still isn’t there (even if it is a solved problem*), so it remains ripe for disruption.
*History is full of solved problems that never took off thanks to entrenched interests preventing disruption.Report
If the Lordestown EV guys are successful in getting their truck into fleet service for companies and the government (their initial market) this may all change quickly.Report
I like the in wheel motors. I am interested in how they are tackling the suspension issues and durability issues that are inherent in that approach.
Similar battery tech to a Tesla.
I like the option of a work truck with plugs for power tools.
And it doesn’t look goofy like the Tesla truck.Report
They are supposedly running Baja this year so we will seeReport
Oh yes! I hadn’t even considered the storage implications. This stuff would be a huge book for solar and wind economies because during glut energy periods you would just manufacture paste and then when the sun goes down or the wind dies you fire up a big hydrogen powered turbine. Very exciting!Report
OK, I got the reaction wrong, it’s this:
MgH2 + 2 H2O → 2 H2 + Mg(OH)2
Which is Magnesium hydroxide, which is Milk of Magnesium.Report
This is literally being able to catch lightning in a bottle.
Batteries like this make stuff like wind viable.Report
wind – when grid tied – is already viable. Look at all the wind farms going in all over the country. Lapses in wind can be made up by solar, geothermal storage, nuclear, and even burning fossil fuels. It would be nifty to see residences all converted to locally installed hydrogen fuel cell power plants, but we are some steps from that.Report
Tell that to the residents of Cali.
And wind doesn’t work everywhere. Nor do solar. Talk to me about living with days of overcast and no sun. About temps in near freezing for weeks on end with no sun, no wind.
No one is going to put up a Nuke plant ever again.Report
Fusion is just 10 years away.Report
30 years for fusion-generated electricity that’s somewhere close to competitive on price. It’s a universal constant.Report
Eh, we can already bottle lightning. We have a number of ways to store power for base load. Pumped hydro, molten salts, etc.
This is more about transportability and ease of commercial (end user) use.Report
Lightning in a bottle if the bottle is the size of a football field (and about as easy to move) is less useful than a bottle you can put into a wheelbarrow.Report
It’s interesting to read that it requires water to function. Water is pretty heavy! And I wonder what level of purity they’re assuming (or, rather, what effect impurities have on the process.)
People have suggested that the next resource wars will be less about petroleum and more about fresh water, and maybe this is how that’s going to happen.Report
DoD is on record for 2 defense quadrennial reviews (I think) as saying they are planning for regional fresh water rights conflicts.Report
Reading the quadrennial reviews and comparing those assumptions to many of the claims made by the Republican Party is entertaining these days.
My son’s girlfriend works at NOAA and NCAR doing a bunch of evaluation work on climate models. When the Trump administration announced big future cutbacks — as I understand it, they couldn’t do it immediately because much of the money was already obligated in multi-year contracts, but I may not have understood her description of that accurately — DOD showed up with “long-term weather studies” money to keep efforts going.Report
I wonder if I know her. the NOAA climate community is not that big, and the NCAR relationship is run through my part of NOAA . . . .Report
Partial name dropping seems harmless. M. S. Bukovsky, for whom Bukovsky regions are named. I always nag her about what I should be reading on the North American Monsoon.Report
Ugh. We can’t get enough fresh water for California. Add the rest of the world to that?Report
Just need to start putting these in.Report
Well, we just have to get them compliant with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).Report
On the plus side, it’s water in, water out. You could put a water trap on the exhaust and recycle the water right back into the water tank.Report
Great, now tell me how this will work in cars. Swap out a new pack for the old? That’s the only way I see it being viable. Taking 30 mins to “fill up” a electric car is laughable-or whatever the alleged speed is for Tesla’s speed charger.
I’m still waiting for a response to my challenge: give me a renewable energy source that’s 90% as efficient as petroleum, takes @ the same about time to refuel, and allows me to go 600 miles on a “tank” and has maint costs for the vehicle at equal to or less than an ICE–for the near price of existing ICE vehicles. I’ll buy it.Report
I’m thinking yeah, you’d swap out packs.
Petroleum isn’t very efficient. IC engines are only able to extract about 30% of the energy from gas, and that is when being operated in the most efficient manner. Most of the energy is lost as waste heat. This is why hybrids were initially attractive, because you could run the small engine in a very efficient manner, but even then, you were still only extracting maybe 40% of the energy (probably less).
Fuel cells start at 40% and go up to about 60%.
Also, the bulk of cars have a range of about 300-400 miles on a tank. 600 miles is a ridiculous benchmark.
I’d have to research maintenance costs for a fuel cell.Report
its even simpler then that for electrics – just put in rapid charging stations at all interstate rest stops. They are usually no more then 50 miles apart, have a ton of parking spaces and are heavily grid tied. With smart technology you can probably speed charging time to lower then 30 minutes and then a car is on its way. generate the electricity wherever and however you want.Report
This is factoring in the 50-70% loss in transmission of electricity, too, right? One of the advantages of ICE is that once you have the fuel created, you can move it very inexpensively relative to the amount of energy you are transporting. Electrical Grid suffers the issue of huge loss over long transmission distances.
One way around this is to decentralize more of the electrical generation to at site and use natgas/methane, which is very low energy to transport long distances once you have the infrastructure in place. The newer fuel cell tech is far more effective at point of use in terms of energy capture than traditional power grid to end user.Report
Average transmission loss on the electric grid is 5-7%, not 50-70.Report
I don’t know where you get the idea that 600 miles on a tank is ridiculous. I get that currently in my 2012 vehicle. It’s actually something like 650ish, depending upon how much I want to let the needle drop to “0” on the dashboard before I stop.
Last Labor Day I drove to some family in SC. When I pulled into the driveway I had 600+ miles on the trip odometer and still had fuel in the tank.Report
The average range of an all gas (not hybrid) vehicle is 300-400 miles on a standard tank. Standard tanks range from 10-20 gallons. If you have a vehicle that has close to a 20 gallon tank and gets close to 30 mpg, you can get 600 highway miles. Highway miles are the most efficient (constant speed in a high gear).
Most vehicles that can easily average 30 MPG on the highway are not fitted with 20 gallon tanks. My Subaru can get better than 30 MPG on the highway, but my tank is only 13 gallons. My Highlander has a 17 gallon tank, but is lucky to get 25 on the highway.
So, what are you driving?Report
Well, I’ve got a VX Passat DIESEL It’s got @ 18 gallons for a tank, and I get 30+ MPG on mixed driving.Report
Diesel != gasoline And that is a bigger than normal tank for a car that size. Ergo, your vehicle is far out on the right side of the bell curve.Report
Yeah, I didn’t realize the tank was large until I looked it up. But it’s a 2012, so that may also be a factor. Another factor may be that sedans aren’t really made anymore. Everyone wants SUIVs. Regardless of weather it’s outside the norm, why would I even consider owning something worse?Report
Why would we build transportation and energy policy around your outlier of car?Report
To be fair to Damon, I don’t think he realized his car was that much of an outlier.
And to reiterate Br. Cain, people are going to have to buy cars based upon the 95% case, and not the 5% case (how many guys own a truck for that occasional day when they have to carry something big or help a friend move?).Report
Gee….a vehicle that gets above average MPG and the technology is currently existing vs a new technology, new infrastructure, not to mention the dirty ness of battery manufacturing. Gee, why would we ever consider something already in the hand vs something that will take billions of investment. What a CRAZY idea.Report
Because, as Oscar noted, you are on the very small tail end of a very big bell curve. There would be MORE disruption economically trying to recreate your specifics for everyone else then creating specifics that you will eventually move towards because of market availability.
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You do realize that my vehicle is a 2012 model year. That the technology has been in existence for decades and my fuel economy, regardless of tank size is better than gas? My car ALREADY gets better mph than existing CAFE standards.
How would there be MORE disruption? We have the fuel, we have the technology. We already have the infrastructure. NONE of that is is place for any other fuel source except gas.Report
The press release indicates that the paste is fluid and can be pumped, so it could conceivably be pumped into a tank like gasoline or diesel.Report
That was my question how does manipulating the viscosity change the end goal here, cause that is going to be the devil in the detail here.Report
It’s recovering the spent fuel that is a trick. That’s why I think you’d want a canister or something. Maybe we’d finally have a use for all those oversized plastic protein powder jars.Report
I wonder fi you could have an emptying station to go along with the filling station, and recover it that way?Report
Right now, the very non-viscous fuel is basically dumped into a tank, and the contents of that tank are pumped out and lost to the atmosphere once the energy is extracted.
With a slurry tank, you’d need something closer to the waste tank system of an RV. It’s doable, but it might be easier to just have a cartridge that resembles a tube of caulk, or grease. You grab a tube and mount it in a holder that is fitted with a plunger. The plunger feeds into a reaction chamber, where the water is added and the H2 is extracted. As new slurry is pushed in, the spent fuel is pushed out into an empty tube. At the filling station, you take the tube of spent fuel and place it in a spent fuel receptacle, that is either recharged in situ, or sent off to be recharged.
If you can load a tube of caulk, you can refuel your car.Report
There’s going to be a minor trade involved in cleaning parts.
You remember when guys talked about cleaning carburetors? Something like that.
“This is a carburetor, Bobby. Take it apart, put it back together, and repeat that until you’re normal.”Report
I cleaned and rebuilt so many carburetors back in the day (before EFI became the norm).Report