Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power

https://news.umich.edu/cheap-sustainable-hydrogen-through-solar-power/

by gricardo99 • 4 years ago

112 122 4 years ago

news.umich.edu

hannob• 4 years ago

Having seen too many such announcements about promising green technologies, I tend to ask a few questions when seeing something like this. One of them is what state a technology is in (early research, announcement, small prototype, industrial scale prototype).

It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It's of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being "cheap" sounds dishonest if you're far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.

defrost10• 4 years ago

COVID saw some interesting procedral changes - massive industrial scale parallelism.

Multiple candidates were developed and trialled in parallel with ramping out mass production, storage and shipping.

Some of this was wasted effort, some of it was useful regardless of which candidates made the final vaccine cut.

The end result was dramatically compressed rollout times.

Right now the world has a billionare or two with negotiated contracts to deliver green (not blue) hydrogen (eg: to Germany) at a scale that significantly increases world hydrogen production within a 5-10 year time frame.

Already the industrial elements are being built for transport, end use, power collection sites, etc.

This activity makes the possibily of dropping in better methods of hydrogen spliting as they are developed feasible in a shorter time frame than otherwise thought possible.

uluyol• 4 years ago

Unless it says otherwise, it's generally safe to assume that an article put out of a university is in the early research phase.

natch• 4 years ago

Is hydrogen cheap to transport, cheap to store, and cheap to use though? I thought making it was only a small part of the problems with hydrogen.

defrost10• 4 years ago

Hydrogen is a small slippery hard to contain gas molecule.

Ammonia transport and storage is far more likely.

fsh5• 4 years ago

Hydrogen is not at all hard to contain. Just put it in a gas bottle. The real issue is the very low density which makes the tanks rather large.

thomasmg3• 4 years ago

You can add hydrogen to natural gas (using existing pipelines and storage), and so slowly replace that. No changes to existing infrastructure needed up to maybe 20% I think.

youngtaff• 4 years ago

You can but there are concerns about hydrogen being a smaller molecule so we’d get increased leakage (with knock on effects)

No one really knows how our existing natural gas infrastructure will cope with hydrogen

fungi• 4 years ago

hydrogen worsens the impact of methane in the atmosphere and as such simply pumping hydrogen through existing infrastructure sounds pretty dangerous.

https://theconversation.com/dont-rush-into-a-hydrogen-econom...

https://agage.mit.edu/publications/global-environmental-impa...

more skeptically, given that green hydrogen remains a pipe dream, it's both a useful delaying tactic for switching to electricity and furthering investment in fossil fuels, which must stay in the ground if we are to have any hope of staying below 1.5c.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-fossil-fuels-incompatible-wi...

kennywinker• 4 years ago

I mean, this doesn’t have to go into cars / be distributed widely… it could just used to time-shift solar energy to night time by burning it on-site. Which means you only need to solve the storage problem.

adrianN5• 4 years ago

Which is already solved: salt caverns work well.

xxs2• 4 years ago

I doubt even 15% efficiency would be there; along with massive maintenance/size issues. Solar is cheap and easy when it comes to maintenance, effectively no moving parts. Internal combustion (or a gas turbine) is a whole new development... and there is the storage.

The best bet are still batteries, albeit the current incarnation of LiXXX (e.g. LiFePO4) are still not there. Even storing energy in batteries poses multiple conversions of electricity that goes to 92-95% efficiency.

theshrike795• 4 years ago

No, too many losses. Same problem with storage.

Use isn't that expensive, fuel cells do exist.

The problem with green hydrogen (made with electricity) is the inefficiency.

It's only good for storage when you have already filled every battery and pumped hydro storage you have and are still making an excess. Electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity conversion is so hilariously inefficient that even petrol engines can beat it.

skrebbel• 4 years ago

I don’t understand that comparison. You can’t use electricity to make petrol, right?

_hypx3• 4 years ago

No petrol engine can match a fuel cell on efficiency. Especially once you realize the existence of refining losses.

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

I refer you to the current documentary on Netflix called _Glass Onion_ that examines this problem.

fsh5• 4 years ago

While I really like the movie, the hydrogen technology part and its dangers are entirely fictional.

thinkcontext2• 4 years ago

I never understand why people are so obsessed with the problems of using hydrogen for transport. We use millions of tons of it for making fertilizer and other industrial processes. We could potentially expand industrial uses to include steel and replacing methane in high heat applications.

Animats• 4 years ago

"The catalyst is made of indium gallium nitride nanostructures, grown onto a silicon surface."

World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year.

How did "cheap" get into this?

defrost10• 4 years ago

Production is driven by demand and will very likely expand now that prices are rising again, just as production doubled back between 2011-2014 when last the price/kg rose [2] as it has in recent times.

Annual Gallium usage includes a substantial amount of reclaimed material from electronics which isn't counted as production against reserve.

World primary low-purity gallium production capacity in 2021 was estimated to be 774,000 kilograms per year; high-purity refined gallium production capacity, 325,000 kilograms per year; and secondary high-purity gallium production capacity, 273,000 kilograms per year. [1]

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-gallium.pd...

[2] http://strategic-metal.com/products/gallium/gallium-price/

( Similar story with inidium )

Schroedingersat6• 4 years ago

Most rare elements are extracted primarily as side products. Scaling production directly is very difficult without demand for the co-occuring minerals.

adrian_b2• 4 years ago

The indium story is not similar.

Indium is one of the least abundant elements.

In the entire Solar System it is less abundant than gold.

In the crust of the Earth, it is less depleted than most other metals with high electronegativity (like silver and gold), so the result is that here indium has about the same abundance as silver.

Indium is completely irreplaceable in LEDs and in high-speed power transistors. The future demand for these two applications alone is severely constrained by the existing indium reserves (e.g. replacing all light bulbs and laptop/phone chargers and computer PSUs, in the entire world, with more efficient modern types would need a lot of indium).

Because of that, extreme efforts are needed to find substitutes for indium in its other applications, like for the computer displays, all of which currently use transparent electrodes made of doped indium oxide.

It is very undesirable to find new applications that would consume more of the scarce indium.

imtringued• 4 years ago

You do realize that the substrate is made out of silicon and that the thickness of the indium gallium nitride layer is only a few micrometers?

Schroedingersat6• 4 years ago

If you're looking at square kilometers of something made of indium you need to be talking nanometers not microns. Hence why it's just barely not a critical mineral for PV and why CIGS was a non-starter.

DubiousPusher2• 4 years ago

Is it just me or has it been like 18 months of one supposedly "game changing" hydrogen catalyst after another? I'm not trying to be cynical. It just seems the science press is awash in results from one research project after another in this area and I find it very difficult to rank which ones have any credible chance of utility.

bamboozled• 4 years ago

I'm also sick of 18 months worth of negative comments about how hydrogen is a waste of time...

DubiousPusher2• 4 years ago

Agreed. I neither said that, nor think that.

adrianN5• 4 years ago

The truth is that we can already produce hydrogen at like 80% efficiency with PEM electrolysis. There is not much "game changing" left, except for improving cost.

fbdab1034• 4 years ago

I am waiting for the day when there is an affordable (<$5k? <$10k as an absolute maximum) residential system that can run on home solar and produce ethanol/hydrogen/ammonia/whatever combustible fuel from excess electricity. Round trip efficiency can be horrible, so long as the system is low maintenance and can be configured to run exclusively off of spare generation.

Is anything like that on the horizon? Or do all of these liquid fuel synthesis options require industrial pressures/volumes/input electricity so as to forever be out of reach from residential synthesis?

ben_w• 4 years ago

combustible fuel from excess electricity. Round trip efficiency can be horrible

If that's really all you want, you can get a 9 year old to put together some kitchen waste and art supplies to achieve this.

That's how I did it at that age.

I did use a battery though, so you might want to check the wiring and add a voltage divider, but those are also easy to build even without understanding.

And I have no idea if you even can, let alone should, just pour gaseous hydrogen into, for example, a gas heater's fuel input pipe.

But actually making hydrogen is utterly trivial.

Schroedingersat6• 4 years ago

Low maintenance, safe, compact, and high enough output is a different story.

For the second, you probably want a methanol, methane or ammonia output and they all require high temperatures or exotic materials.

asien• 4 years ago

In my opinion you are mistaken , affordability does not mean home appliance.

Hydro is pretty cheap , does not mean it’s fit for home.

Here the best scenario is similar to Singapore - Australia or UK - Morocco remote solar grid.

This innovation is very interesting compared to Water- Hydrogene electrolysis that is a bit expensive and needs metals that are going to become difficult to source in the coming decades.

Gallium is quiet abundant from my understanding.

35mm• 4 years ago

This is currently the Lavo hydrogen electrolysis product for home use [1]

However the storage tanks are quite small. I would prefer if they made the hydrogen production and storage separate, so you could save up hydrogen in the summer to use in the winter.

[1] https://www.lavo.com.au/

miahi• 4 years ago

Hydrogen storage is not something that you really want to do at home, especially in "saving up" quantities. It is quite happy to explode, you need tremendous pressures and low temperatures for efficient storage, and also hard to contain (many "normal" materials are permeable to hydrogen). [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety

xxs2• 4 years ago

10k is an absolutely wishful thinking - 10k is just the low end of a bog standard geothermal pump.

Also what's the purpose of the ethanol (the rest are not useful, esp. hydrogen which has to be stored somewhere, ammonia is rather dangerous)? I can imagine making vodka alike - but beyond that, using internal combustion engine to burn it means an extremely very low efficiency to conserve enegy. The energy density is there but the efficiency is not.

fbdab1034• 4 years ago

Heh. Yeah, I was thinking that any kind of home synthesis operation was unlikely to offer a financial payback. Hence the low aspirational cost, but you are right that figure is laughably low.

Ethanol - easier to synthesize than gasoline (which is a complicated mixture of hydrocarbons). It has ~2/3 energy density of gasoline, which I do not think is horrible. I believe it is also less volatile and easier to store long-term.

Pigalowda• 4 years ago

Couldn't it just burn off excess hydrogen? It would just be H20 byproduct.

jacquesm• 4 years ago

If you do and you're my neighbor please wait with switching it on until I can move away.

yummypaint2• 4 years ago

You can effectively accomplish the same thing from an environmental perspective by running your house as efficiently as possible. If you already have home solar, you are reducing the amount of carbon put into the air by power plants. Since CO2 molecules are indistinguishable from each other, that carbon reduction could just as well have come from burning renewable synthetic fuel made at home. If you have a big solar setup and sell excess back to the grid, that carbon reduction will be larger than if you used the same energy to inefficiently synthesize fuel.

cduzz2• 4 years ago

You can't operate a car / tractor / hot air balloon with just an efficient house.

Also, you can't run your house on an efficient house + solar over the 2-6 months the sun isn't in the right place (in the sky) for very long or when your panels are covered in snow for a week.

An efficient house gets you to the table and is a multiplier, but long term energy storage is also really important for lots of people.

Hydrogen, though, that stuff's tough. I think 99% of Hydrogen advocates don't understand just how nasty the stuff is.

yowlingcat• 4 years ago

This is all correct with the caveat around how you want your "features" to be defined and how you want your "bugs" to be defined. Most notably, that's around the grid.

Implicit in your assumption is that the grid is reliable, always on, not subject to geopolitical or climate risks, etc. "Inefficiently" converting solar power into otherwise portable fuel might be a feature rather than a bug for those living in conditions where the central grid is often unreliable. Before the past few years, I'd say that would generally be countries in the global south, but we've seen a lot more grid instability even in the US as of late.

michpoch• 4 years ago

I think the closest to what you need would be some sort of pico hydro with pumped storage.

midasuni3• 4 years ago

Why not just a 20kWh battery for energy time shifting. Or are you looking to sell the hydrogen?

noogle2• 4 years ago

This will last less than a day.

What to do in the winter? If the answer is "use the grid", then we just kick the can to someone else, who will probably use fossil fuels to provide the energy. The basic problem remains - solar/wind are intermittent and fluctuating.

ajross2• 4 years ago

The commenter's goal is presumably season-shifting, which is two orders of magnitude off from feasible battery capacity. In most areas in the US, a full-roof solar system will produce enough energy in aggregate to power the home's use year-round, but there's no way to get all those summertime watt-hours into the lines in winter when the panels are dark.

But indeed, no, this just doesn't work. Best available efficiency for round-trip electrolytic fuel production / electricity generation is 40% or so, meaning that those roof panels wouldn't be enough anyway. (Also there's the problem of having every home store a winter's worth of pressurized hydrogen or whatever on-premises. Yikes.) It's not worth it.

Home solar is attractive because unlike most infrastructure it scales down really well and is actually feasible to do at the level of an individual user. But, like most infrastructure, seasonal power management is a grid-wide problem and needs to be solved at the utility level. There are plenty of tricks available there that homeowners don't have access to.

api• 4 years ago

A composter costs very little and can product a decent amount of methane.

Animals like goats and pigs can produce a lot of dung that will turbocharge that quite a bit.

A little searching yields stuff like: https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/renewable...

The low tech route is far cheaper and easier at small scale if you want to make combustible fuel.

brilee• 4 years ago

Just use the grid, they can move energy through time a lot more efficiently than you can ever hope to do. https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/

natmaka• 4 years ago

Even the grid's may benefit from green hydrogen, without any major overhaul: https://www.ge.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydrogen-fuele...

Also conceptually related (small-scale): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32694644

kseistrup• 4 years ago

There are also things like MAGFLY that stores electricity (from e.g. solar panels) as kinetic energy in flywheels:

- https://www.flywheel.dk/

- https://wattsuppower.com/flywheel/

conradev• 4 years ago

It’s just a matter of cost. Cost savings will come from improved efficiency and manufacturing innovation. You can make a lot of electrofuels in a distributed way:

Hydrogen (Water + Electricity): There are many containerized electrolysers

Ammonia (Air + Electricity): https://www.nitricity.co/

Methane (Air + Electricity): https://terraformindustries.com/

pstuart• 4 years ago

Looks promising!

ephbit3• 4 years ago

This [1] comment mentions https://homepowersolutions.de/

There's also a recent HN topic [2] about it, but without any comments yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34298804

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302276

kwhitefoot2• 4 years ago

Unless you need hydrogen for a capability that only hydrogen has it is much more efficient to use solar electricity either directly or to charge batteries.

mrleinad• 4 years ago

In those parts of the globe where it makes sense to use solar, and during the day, yes.

For everything else, you need a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks, not hours. You also need to transport it. And you need to stabilize the energy output not to be entirely dependent on whether the sun shines. That's why hydrogen might be a good energy reservoir.

kwhitefoot2• 4 years ago

a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks,

My Tesla Model S does that pretty efficiently. And for static batteries there are plenty of alternatives that don't use difficult to source elements.

You also need to transport it.

We have a grid to do that already, with HVDC interconnects we can even sell it to places where the sun is not shining.

jillesvangurp3• 4 years ago

Yes hydrogen is has a pretty terrible volumetric energy density. In gas form stored at 200 bar, you'd need about 18 truckloads to math the amount of fuel in a single truck load of petrol. In liquid form stored at a few degrees above zero it gets a bit better. It's "only" 2.5 times less dense than lng. Of course cooling and keeping the gas at that temperature is not free. It takes energy. And as it heats up, you have to boil some of it off. So, it doesn't store that well for longer time in liquid form.

So, that makes shipping or trucking around hydrogen spectacularly uneconomical. Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite. Mainly for things like fertilizer production. Moving hydrogen around at scale is an unsolved problem. Gas pipes (after they are re-enforced) could work of course. But some of it would leak. And hydrogen mixed with air is not a good thing to have in your house.

The same property also makes using hydrogen as a fuel in planes or shipping unpractical: most of your plane/ship would be taken up by the enormous volume of hydrogen you'd need to move it around.

Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is a good reference here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

In it he organizes different use cases by their economical value. Things like road transport and domestic heating are at the bottom of the scale (i.e. you could do it but it would be very inefficient and costly). Near the top are some of the more realistic things, some of which are already being done.

Instead of moving hydrogen to where you implement those use cases (e.g. steel making), it would be more practical/logical to move the use case to where you can produce the hydrogen the cheapest. The bigger the energy need, the higher the savings. You basically compete on energy cost.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

The bet seems to on the cost/tradeoffs of producing batteries vs producing hydrogen generators. If at some point producing hydrogen generators can become more affordable and sustainable than batteries (especially from countries will low rare earth resources) it would be a win for them.

EugeneOZ2• 4 years ago

As humanity tries to reduce its carbon emissions

It's time to change this stereotype. Humanity tries to reduce its greenhouse gases emissions, and CO2 is not the biggest problem.

EugeneOZ2• 4 years ago

Dear downvoters, read the facts and numbers: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emission...

cyri• 4 years ago

Impressive idea. Hope they get a better efficiency factor.

On a side node, you can already add Hydrogen to your home. There is a startup in Berlin, DE which sells complete systems for home: solar roof, heat pump, electrolysis device, bottles and ventilation system.

During summer you fill the bottles with H2 and during winter you consume it.

I'm not affiliated with them. The price before Corona for the whole system was around 65k Euro and now around 100k Euro.

https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ Picea is the name

oezi• 4 years ago

Nice! So it seems demand is so high they can increase their prices.

Do you know what the capacity of a single system is? Could one unit be shared between multiple residential units?

pfdietz• 4 years ago

If I understand correctly, this is producing hydrogen and oxygen mixed together. This is useless. It's also overall less efficient that commercial PV cells driving commercial electrolysers.

One common issue with all these concepts doing electrolysis at the collector is how do you gather the hydrogen. Rigging PV modules together with wires is much more practical than hooking hydrogen emitters together with tubing or pipes.

daneel_w• 4 years ago

Cheap and sustainable in your lab, neither once it hits the market.

surume• 4 years ago

Would we use these like regular existing solar panels on our rooftops? And does 10x efficiency mean that we could harvest 10x the power of what existing solar panels provide?

jonnycomputer• 4 years ago

I do wonder about the potential of converting excess summer-time rooftop solar energy into storable liquid fuels of some sort (e.g. methanol) for winter-time heating.

tomtomistaken2• 4 years ago

Burning hydrogen will still create a lot of NOx. Not recommended for places where people live.

otterley• 4 years ago

I think the idea is to use it as a fuel in a fuel cell, not to use it as a combustion fuel.

tomtomistaken2• 4 years ago

I don’t think so. Hydrogen is being burned the old fashioned way.[1]

[1]https://www.cleanegroup.org/hydrogen-hype-in-the-air/

rexspex• 4 years ago

I am doubtful that this scales. Main concern is the cost in materials, fuel, and electricity in manufacturing large lenses. Sure, it seems that there are large increases in efficiency when generating hydrogen.. But not really once you take into account the cost of generating the infrared.

Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power

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