Nanoparticles could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline:
The hydrogen economy is getting a shot in the arm from a start-up that says its nanoparticle coatings could make hydrogen easy to produce at home from distilled water, and ultimately bring the cost of hydrogen fuel cells in line with that of fossil fuels.
QuantumSphere Inc. says it has perfected the manufacture of highly reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings that could up the efficiency of electrolysis, the technique that generates hydrogen from water. Moreover, the coatings could also eliminate the need for expensive metals like platinum in hydrogen fuel cells.
Boasting 1,000 times the surface area of traditional materials, the coatings can be used to retrofit existing electrolysers to increase their efficiency to 85 percent–exceeding the Department of Energy’s goal for 2010 by 10 percent. The scheme holds the promise of 96 percent efficiency by the time cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells hit automobile showrooms, according to the Santa Ana, Calif., company.
“Instead of switching 170,000 gas stations over to hydrogen, using our electrodes could enable consumers to make their own hydrogen, either in the garage or right on the vehicle,” said Kevin Maloney, president, chief executive officer and co-founder of QuantumSphere. “Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car.”
Here we go again.
The 85% conversion factor would indeed be a major advance, and 96%, if it ever happens, would be truly remarkable. But the real question, of course, is how much difference could it make? Once again, let me refer to one of the people who’s done the most detailed analysis of hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells for use in transportation, Ulf Bossel.
In Bossel’s paper “Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense?” (12 pages, 459KB PDF), published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in October 2006, he includes an energy analysis of using renewable electricity to power hydrogen fuel cell vehicles vs. battery electric vehicles, neatly summarized in a flow chart on page 1835. In each case, Bossel begins with 100kWh of renewable energy, and then walks the reader through all the steps and losses of energy to turn that into energy actually propelling the vehicle down the road.
For hydrogen fuel cells, he shows:
For a BEV, we have:
Notice that Bossel is generous and assumes that we have industrial scale electrolysis at 75%. But if we boost that number to the 85% figure in the article, the net energy delivered in the hydrogen fuel cell analysis is 26kWh. Assuming we do manage to invent and scale up a 96% efficient electrolysis technology, it get us only 29.4kWh.
Put another way, if the hydrogen fuel cell were 100% efficient, something not even the most fervent hydrogen supporter would claim is on the horizon, it would get us to about 58.8kWh at the wheel, still less than the EV can deliver.
The bottom line remains the same: Hydrogen fuel cells need several technological breakthroughs to reach even the base model Bossel uses in his analysis, and even then they’re nowhere competitive with EV’s, especially in a world where there will be an ever higher premium placed on low- or no-CO2-emitting electricity generation.
(Let me save some of you the time and effort of writing to say that EV’s aren’t yet perfected. That’s inarguably true, and I would never make that claim. But the only thing stopping plug-in hybrids and then 100% EV’s is the cost of the batteries. We know how to make these platforms deliver more than adequate performance characteristics; it’s purely a matter of driving the price of the batteries down far enough to make them economically viable. Compared to the multiple hurdles hydrogen fuel cells face as a transportation technology, I think it’s clear that PHEV’s and EV’s have an enormous advantage that will only grow as we (finally) get serious about reducing CO2 emissions from transportation and electricity generation.)
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