Over this past weekend I decided to read my review copy of “The Hydrogen Society … more than just a Vision?” by Arno A. Evers which had been sent to me gratis from overseas.
This is not like other books about hydrogen that serve as primers to the newly informed public. This is a more in-depth look at how to create hydrogen renewable and why fuel cell cars make sense.
Right now, according to Evers 45 million tons of hydrogen is produced each year generating sales worth around $28 billion USD. Most of this is used in the refinement of crude oil into gasoline. Ninety-six percent of the hydrogen production in the world involves the steam reformation of natural gas, which itself is not as clean as using renewable energy.
Evers talks about Germany company ENERTRAG which is the world’s largest independent renewable energy only utility using wind (400 turbines), solar and hydrogen to produce one billion kWh of electricity annually which is enough to power one million homes.
But critics to a hydrogen produced via brute force electrolysis often point out that the inefficiencies of this process. They say, why not use the electricity from solar panels and wind turbines and store it in traditional or leading edge batteries?
Mr. Evers also says there is a better way to produce hydrogen from renewable energy without using electricity. He advocates for processes like photoelectrochemical hydrogen, biological photolytic hydrogen, and conversion of biomass and wastes into hydrogen. Mr. Evers even talks about solar thermal water splitting as a more efficient method of creating hydrogen.
But the top solution that his book advocates for is direct solar hydrogen production. Evers mentions the Hydrosol project as exciting new technology in this field. According to the Hydrosol website, “… the participating research team has developed an innovative solar reactor for the production of hydrogen from the splitting of steam using solar energy, constructed from special refractory ceramic thin-wall, multi-channeled (honeycomb) monoliths optimized to absorb solar radiation and coated with highly active oxygen ‘trapping’/water-splitting materials (based on doped oxides exhibiting redox behavior).
“The ‘proof-of-concept’ of the technology has been demonstrated beyond any doubt in a pilot scale solar reactor designed, built and operating at the DLR solar furnace facility in Cologne (Germany), continuously producing ‘solar hydrogen’”.
This direct solar to hydrogen production can be used in power plants or the hydrogen can be sold and piped to various fueling stations local to the plant to be used in fuel cell cars.
The book can be found on Amazon.com and more information and Mr. Evers and his theories can be found on the Hydrogen Ambassadors website.
I understand that solar to hydrogen may work and work well, but is this needed? Special ceramic reactor sounds expensive. The RET concept
which is essentially using geothermal energy or waste heat from power
plants seems sufficient to produce hydrogen on the large scale. The
problem with solar to hydrogen (until we can establish space based
solar reactors) is that the sun does not always shine. If the ceramic
structure has to be replaced after 100 cycles, that may be somewhat expensive.
Places like the Artic Circle where the sun shines for 24 hours during parts of the year might be ideal for solar to hydrogen technology. However, piping hydrogen gas is probably a mistake considering how far the Artic Circle is from most people who will need the hydrogen. Solar to hydrogen technology where there is sun 24 hours a day combined with plasma kinetics laser metal hydrides would be very interesting. Imagine building large ocean going barges where the ceramic reactor is on deck and below deck there is the plasma kinetics system on a massive scale. Perhaps a barge could carry
a ton or two of metal hydride disks, enough for perhaps 10 fuel cell vehicles.
If the hydrogen gas is mixed with methane, piping it becomes much easier.
Capturing methane that the ocean is releasing would be good for the environment. Piping natural gas over large distances actually does make
sense even though natural gas is a fossil fuel. Even if the natural gas is
merely a carrier for the hydrogen, that lowers the cost per mile of the
pipeline. The ocean is likely to release enough methane indefinitely
that there should be enough to use methane as a carrier for hydrogen.
Every time something dies in the ocean, that marine animal or plant decomposes.
Where will this technology work best? In desert areas? At $500k or more
per mile to build a hydrogen pipeline, pipelines are not cheap. Most desert areas are hardly what I’d call the center of civilization.