NW is poised for hydrogen fuel role

 

NW is poised for hydrogen fuel role
Region promoted as uniquely able to help wean world from petroleum
power

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

In a bid for some of the Bush administration's $1.2 billion promised
funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, the former head of the
Bonneville Power Administration yesterday unveiled at a Seattle
conference an ambitious proposal to make the Pacific Northwest "the
Saudi Arabia of hydrogen."

At the same meeting, one of the most influential thinkers at the
alternative and environmental end of the energy policy debate agreed
that the Northwest is uniquely poised to become a world leader in
helping make the "hydrogen transition" away from petroleum-based
transportation fuels.

"This region is the most suited of any place in North America to move
rapidly toward hydrogen," said Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky
Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., an Oxford University-educated
physicist, a frequent critic of current energy policies and one of the
world's leading lights in matters of alternative energy.

"We're already the Saudi Arabia of water," said Jack Robertson, who
retired from BPA in 1999 and formed the Bonneville Environmental
Foundation. "Because of the Columbia River, the Northwest can produce
hydrogen cheaper, faster and cleaner than anyone else in the world."

Robertson and Lovins were two speakers at a conference on "Hydrogen
Production and Northwest Transportation" sponsored by the Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. The national lab is a leader
in the development of fuel cell technology and other technologies aimed
at reducing the nation's energy dependence on imported oil.

Hydrogen power is based on the use of chemical "fuel cells" that can
tap the energy (electricity and heat) produced from the chemical
transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. Hydrogen power holds
the promise of a cleaner and renewable energy resource.

"It's clean, renewable and it doesn't come from an unstable part of the
world," Robertson said. To put this region's advantage in perspective,
he noted that for a person standing on the banks of the Columbia River,
enough hydrogen in the river water passes by in just one second to fuel
600,000 passenger cars for 24 hours.

At the meeting, Robertson was rallying support for a proposal he's
calling the Northwest Hydrogen Initiative. The basic idea is to use
off-peak hydropower to generate cheap hydrogen fuel that would run a
fleet of vehicles within five years, contribute to the city of
Seattle's future energy needs and launch the beginnings of a hydrogen
production-distribution system that could become a model for the rest
of the world. Robertson hopes to garner enough public and private
interest in the proposal to submit it to the Bush administration for
funding.

"Basically, we're trying to develop the energy system of the future,"
said Mike Lawrence, associate director for energy science at the
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The two biggest hurdles for
hydrogen fuel today, Lawrence said, are the relatively high costs of
the fuel cells and figuring out how to create an efficient system for
producing and distributing this new fuel.


Lovins has been pushing the hydrogen-fueled car idea for more than a
decade. The Rocky Mountain Institute has spun off a company, called
Hypercar Inc., to promote to automakers its design of an extremely
lightweight, carbon-based vehicle that aims to make hydrogen an
attractive, economical fuel right now. He said some of the big
automakers have shown interest now that the Bush administration appears
willing to put some money into developing a hydrogen-powered car.

"Unfortunately, the administration has created the impression among
environmentalists that this is just a way of distracting people from
pursuing (current) hydrogen technology," Lovins said. "It could either
be a triumph or a bust."

But no matter what the Bush administration hopes to achieve with its
so-called "Freedom Car" initiative, he predicted that hydrogen fuel
ultimately would replace petroleum for a variety of reasons.

"For one thing, it should be clear to everyone by now that our oil
dependency is contrary to our economic and national security
interests," Lovins said. But despite such policy influences, he said
the marketplace is already pushing us toward what he calls the
"hydrogen transition." Dupont, British Petroleum and other major
corporations, Lovins said, already are looking at alternative energies
simply because they are looking cheaper.

Eventually, he said, petroleum's direct and indirect costs will make it
so unattractive that we won't have to run out of oil before we stop
using it as our primary energy resource.

"Somebody once said, 'The stone age didn't end because the world ran
out of stones,' " Lovins said. "The oil endgame has started. We are
already entering the hydrogen era."

Making a hydrogen-powered vehicle is not the problem. They already
exist. The trick will be getting the pure hydrogen out of the water
cheaply enough to compete in price against gasoline. That's the
advantage the Northwest has now over everyone, according to Robertson.
Using off-peak hydropower, he thinks he can produce hydrogen fuel right
now for about $2 a gallon.

"We are very close with the existing technology," he said. "We're not
talking about inventing anything new."

P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or
tompaulson@seattlepi.com

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/126980_car17.html

 


Cheap Hydrogen Fuel
GE says its new machine could make the hydrogen economy affordable, by
slashing the cost of water-splitting technology.

By David Talbot

Among the many daunting challenges to replacing fossil fuels with
hydrogen is how to make hydrogen cheaply in ways that don't pollute the
environment. Splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using
electricity from energy sources such as wind turbines is one
possibility -- but it's still far too expensive to be widely practical.



Now researchers at GE say they've come up with a prototype version of
an easy-to-manufacture apparatus that they believe could lead to a
commercial machine able to produce hydrogen via electrolysis for about
$3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of
gasoline -- down from today's $8 per kilogram. That could make it
economically practical for future fuel-cell vehicles that run on
hydrogen.


Electrolyzers are fairly simple technologies: water is mixed with
potassium hydroxide electrolyte and made to flow past a stack of
electrodes. Electricity causes the water molecules to split into
hydrogen and oxygen gases, which bubble out of the solution. The
chemistry makes a good high-school science experiment -- but
commercial-scale quantities of hydrogen are extracted far more cheaply
from natural gas.


The core problem in improving electrolyzers for hydrogen manufacture is
not how to improve the fundamental conversion efficiency, says Richard
Bourgeois, an electrolysis project leader at GE Global Research in
Niskayuna, NY. "You can only make it so much more efficient; there
isn't a lot you can do. So we've attacked the capital costs," he says.


Today's electrolyzers are made of metal plates bolted together
manually, with gaskets between them, and the whole unit is typically
housed in a chamber made of the same metals used in the electrodes,
says Bourgeois. The materials are expensive and assembly requires
costly labor.


Bourgeois' research team came up with a way to make future
electrolyzers largely out of plastic. They used a GE plastic called
Noryl that is extremely resistant to the highly alkaline potassium
hydroxide. And because the plastic is easy to form and join,
manufacturing an electrolyzer is relatively cheap.


Inside the plastic housing, metal electrodes still do the same job. But
because GE is using less electrode material, the reactivity of the
electrodes' surfaces is improved. To do this, the researchers borrowed
a spray-coating process -- normally used to apply coatings for parts on
jet engines -- to coat the electrodes with a proprietary nickel-based
catalyst with a large surface area.


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GE has demonstrated the technology in a prototype, and is now building
a larger production module -- one that can produce 1 kilogram of
hydrogen per hour -- for testing in its labs later this year. A machine
of that scale could be attached to small electricity sources to produce
hydrogen on the side. The technology also has the potential to be
massively scaled up to create a hydrogen gas station.


GE's new electrolyzer could be ready for production in a few years.
"You can talk about transitioning to a hydrogen economy, but really
these things don't move unless the economics are there," Bourgeois
says. "This takes enough capital cost out of the whole electrolyzer
system, so when you buy this and amortize it over so many years, you
compete with gasoline."


Paul Bakke, an electrical engineer and program manager at the U.S.
Department of Energy in Golden, CO, says a cheap electrolyzer could be
a key component of the future hydrogen economy. "As far as I know, GE
is the only one who has tried to tackle this problem," he says.
"Assuming GE is successful in being able to produce these things with a
high level of reliability and low cost, it will break through the
barrier that has traditionally been there for electrolyzers -- namely,
the capital cost barrier."


Bakke adds: "I would say it's an important piece; it may not be the
only way to make hydrogen, but it's an important piece. Natural-gas
reforming may be a near-term bridge, but in order to get away from the
environmental concerns, we will have to go to electrolysis, derived
from wind turbines and solar panels and so forth."

Home page image courtesy of GE. GE's bench-top electrolyzer prototype
for hydrogen production

http://www.h2fc.com/news.html

-----------------------------------------------------

Yeah, fill up you tank from the garden hose.

So where do you get the free electricity?
From the free nuclear plants?
Or possibly the free wind farms?
Why not use the electric directly, rather than put a lossy conversion between
things?  Or perhaps, convince algae to grow it?.
*get* *real!*

 

"Steve Young" <bowtieATbrightdslDOTnet> wrote in


No.  The electrolizer would be ground based.


Nobody said anything about free electricity.  And the article
clearly mentioned at least two sources: Wind farms and solar.


That's one option. Although I don't recall "free" as being
a requirment of the process.


Because hydrogen has a much higher energy density than any
battery and therefor works better a a fuel for cars.
Because wind is a variable and fickle source.
Because solar is not available 24 hours a day.


Could do that to.  But we are a nation of engineers, not biologists
Technology will always get more attention and funding.


Well, I'm not pinning my hopes on a hydrogen future.  But if they
can make it work, more power to them.