Is this another hydrogen vehicle scam?

[PraAnan]

Hi everyone,

Just came across this article today and it piqued my interest. I'm not at all an expert in this field but it seems too good to be true so I wanted to see what you thought.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-envi...drogen-fuel-technology-economy-hytech-storage

They seem to have come up with a super efficient electrolyzer, a much better hydride for storing the hydrogen and a retrofit to convert a petrol / diesel engine to run on hydrogen. To me, even one of these would be a billion dollar idea so it seems weird that this company hasn't been mentioned in any other place apart from the Vox article.

Thanks for reading.

 

[.Scott]

They seem to have come up with a super efficient electrolyzer, a much better hydride for storing the hydrogen and a retrofit to convert a petrol / diesel engine to run on hydrogen.

They are looking for carbon-free energy solutions - so they are not neccesarily looking to beat gasoline or diesel in price. They are more in competition with electric cars.
They are using hydrogen as the way to store the energy.
The problem with hydrogen has always been the inefficiency in separating the hydrogen from H2O. Their solution is this device - supposedly "three-times as efficient" (I am highly skeptical). They make and market it. It is the equivalent of the battery charging station.

 

[DrClaude]

There is nothing in the article that appeared implausible to me. There is the usual commercial hype, but nothing that appeared too spectacular.

 

[Vanadium 50]

If Vox told me my mother loved me, I wouldn't believe them without checking it out. The article appears to be a commercial puff piece. In such pieces, it's impossible to separate what's really going on from marketing talk. Find a technical piece from a reliable source and we'll talk.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

They are looking for carbon-free energy solutions - so they are not neccesarily looking to beat gasoline or diesel in price. They are more in competition with electric cars.

It is important to not that hydrogen is not really a carbon-free energy solution. Hydrogen is produced either from steam reformation of natural gas (which produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct) or from electrolysis (which uses electricity that is, for the most part, produced from fossil fuel-burning power plants. For the same reason, electric cars are also not carbon free). A carbon-free electrical grid powered by nuclear or renewables is a prerequisite for hydrogen to be a carbon-free solution.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars could potentially be more energy efficient than gasoline-powered cars (thus reducing carbon emissions), but electric cars will likely provide greater efficiency because they do not have the added electrolysis step.

 

[Eric Bretschneider]

Of course it has to be true. Anyone without a background in catalysis could easily develop electrocatalysts that are 3-4x more efficient than anything that dozens of teams of experienced scientists/engineers, each with annual budgets north of $10 million.

It would also be trivial for the same person to remix polymer exchange membranes to make something better than anyone has ever seen (how do you remix a polymer?).

Most of all you read it on the internet - it has to be true!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which seems to be lacking here.

 

[russ_watters]

There is nothing in the article that appeared implausible to me. There is the usual commercial hype, but nothing that appeared too spectacular.

Agreed. The business cases they outline are truly laughable, but then businesses don't have to obey the laws of physics. All he needs is a few investors who don't demand seeing the back-up for his economic analysis and he can get a billion dollars in funding, making him rich even if his business fails.

Remember Bloom Boxes? No? Exactly.

 

[Hrethric]

"Johnson boasts that his electrolyzer can produce hydrogen at about three or four times the rate of electrolyzers with similar footprints, using about a third the electrical current." --> this is impossible. Two electrons to reduce to protons to one hydrogen molecule - that's how it works. Also they ways they say they improved their electrolyzer are laughable.

 

[gleem]

See this article
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/car-technology/a19609371/ultra-low-emissions-diesel-hydrogen/

Apparently the independent Swiss testing lab SGS verified a 27% fuel savings on a FedEx truck. Road test are underway in the Seattle area. Nothing is said about the proprietary electrolysis process "breakthrough".

 

[Hrethric]

I know it works - it's a relatively simple switchover (spark plugs, ECU, tanks/connectors) - there's a company in Vancouver called Hydra Energy that does it as well. To me there's an open question of hydrogen embrittlement, but a bigger question of why we'd use hydrogen to burn it vs go for a fuel cell vehicle at double or more the energy efficiency per molecule used.

 

[gleem]

Don't currently available FCs have some issues like not being as efficient as one would like, having a slow response in meeting high current demands as when accelerating, poor life expectancy, the problem of just storing hydrogen and of course the current problem of producing hydrogen on an industrial scale, cleanly and efficiently? Granted new experimental FCs may not have these issues..

 

[Hrethric]

There's a lot to answer there. Weather and geography will play a key role for light vehicles, with tiny, non-flying vehicles like scooters always being better with batteries, while anything large SUV or greater will ultimately go fuel cells - the DOE earlier this year ~30% lower cost for SUVs and there are practical limits on larger systems like highway weight limits and the diminishing cost of balance of plant that make fuel cells make more sense.

In practical use you're at 55-65% energy efficiency, and experimental systems won't improve on that significantly. Generator systems can recover heat, so combined stationary systems are very high efficiency - serves a different use-case than batteries. The efficiency is scoped into expectation (1 kg is roughly equivalent to 4L of gas in an FCV - wheras with this co and Hydra I'd expect just over half that) and in general it's not as big a deal as the EV proponents make it out to be since batteries end up using a fair amount of energy car heating and/or battery cooling, while fuel cells can cold start or operate in really hot weather without losing capacity. FCVs can ramp to max power quickly, but peak power determines system size, which isn't ideal because repeat unit cost is relatively high; systems now address the acceleration issue by using larger batteries and supercaps - still a fraction of what a BEV would have - which also allows for regenerative braking.

Lifetime has improved significantly in the past decade or so due to additives (radical scrubbers, today typically Cerium nanoparticles), but that's the major area future material development is trying to address. For consumer automobiles the lifetime is fine (equivalent or greater than an 'ecoboost' engine I saw in one presentation), and for large vehicles stacks last up to an order of magnitude longer (FCVs are happiest when in consistent use) and replacement becomes a part of the maintenance cycle.

Hydrogen storage has a few solutions thanks to the composites work that Boeing pioneered with their systems - cost of the tank is a bit excessive but not seen as a scale problem per se. High pressure seems the way to go, and physisorbed or chemisorbed solutions will help improve the volumetric and energy efficiency of this - still active research, but a lot of candidates like cryo have been culled from the herd so even the focus is promising.

As far as electrolysis - again, we're close but with the low "traditional alkaline systems" are good enough for now, decently efficient and adaptable thanks to Zirfon separator (90's, a NL R&D centre licensed to AGFA) and are going in at the 100 MW scale in several countries in Europe - most of the new capacity going in is electrolysis, and we're at 5% renewables today up from 1% in 2012 according to the presentations I've seen - not bad for a $120B market - and use in fuel cells make the value proposition proportionally better because these require CO scrubbing, which isn't innately present in hydrogen out of electrolysis, and there's also a premium for pressure if you can get it - traditional systems operate at relatively low pressures, but the coming breakthrough is anion-exchange membrane based electrolyzers (AEM-WEs) - these fit the much smaller form factor of acidic PEM-based systems (~1/10th the active area) that can generate high-purity hydrogen at high pressure (I've seen claims up to 300 bar) without the requirements for Pt and Ti that drive more than half the system cost at scale.

 

[Bystander]

hydrogen on an industrial scale, cleanly and efficiently?

Sulfur, commodity spec. 4 ppb as H₂S, Chem. E. "rule of thumb" that O(m) in purity equals O(m) in expense, all say "Scam."