What's different about this Christmas Parade Float? Answer below the Orange Omnilepticon.
While the news on Climate Change is getting more urgent all the time, the good news is that getting off Big Carbon continues to make progress. While it doesn't get a lot of attention, things are happening that are sowing the seeds for real change at a systemic level - IF they are followed up. One of the things to watch is hydrogen. There are products in the pipeline that could contribute in a real way.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
If you want to know what's up with the parade float in the picture above, take a look at the sign.
Cool, huh? And it's silent - none of the racket of a portable gasoline powered generator.
Hydrogen is getting more attention these days as a carbon-free fuel; you can put it in a fuel cell to generate electricity, or burn it directly without creating anything except H2O.
Plug Power has been working to establish a market for its fuel cell technology and is making progress. While fuel cells can run on a variety of fuels, hydrogen has that advantage that the only waste product is water. As reducing carbon emissions becomes an increasingly unavoidable necessity, generating power with hydrogen is getting more attention. Unlike wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, it's usable in portable applications and can be also used as a
dispatchable power supply. It's not without drawbacks - but more on that below.
Hitting The Road
A major source of carbon emissions in the United States comes from motor vehicles. Higher fuel efficiency standards help, as do alternatives like electric vehicles. Indeed, the Tesla Model S is developing a devoted fan base. (One notable example here.) The two wheel crowd is looking at going electric as well. (Want an electric Harley? Maybe - and police might be in the market as well.)
But, leaving aside the advantages of electric vehicles for the moment, 2 drawbacks remain. They are only as good as the batteries that store power. There's a constraint on how big electric vehicles can get, before the weight of the batteries they need starts to encroach on the payload capacity; electric semis are not on the horizon just yet. The other drawback is the range/recharging issue; how far can they go before needing to be recharged, and how long will it take? There's a lot of battery research devoted to cracking those issues of weight, capacity, and recharge time. Pushing it too hard can lead to big problems.
And, there's one issue both electric and hydrogen powered vehicles need to address: how much carbon is needed to produce the electricity for those batteries or generate the hydrogen fuel? Hydrogen can be made by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis; another method is to crack it out of natural gas and other hydrocarbons. Hydrogen from electricity is only as clean as the source of electricity, and hydrogen from fossil fuels well... But then, electric vehicles are only as green as their source of electricity as well - and anything that makes carbon-free electricity more affordable helps both!
However the numbers work out, hydrogen powered cars are starting to get some serious attention. The New York Times had a recent article on how hydrogen cars are making a comeback. The case is spelled out here:
The combustion of one gallon of gasoline releases almost 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. In 2012, some 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide were discharged by cars and trucks in the United States, or more than a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Concerns about climate change are intensifying discussions about alternatives to gasoline and diesel engines.
Battery electric cars and fuel cell cars are, at their cores, both electric cars with the inherent advantages of electric motors — jack rabbit acceleration, near silence and zero tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases.
The difference is where the electricity comes from.
Instead of storing their charge in batteries, the fuel cells in hydrogen cars are miniature power plants, generating a flow of electricity in the chemical reaction of combining hydrogen and oxygen into water. The oxygen comes from the air; the hydrogen, compressed at 10,000 pounds per square inch, is stored in tanks.
There are big name automakers getting into hydrogen vehicles - and some not so big. Here's
a fascinating proposal from England, via the BBC:
A hydrogen-powered electric car under development in Wales is bringing more than just a C02-free powertrain to the table. Riversimple founder and chief engineer Hugo Spowers and his team are striving to upend the business model of making and selling – not to mention owning – cars.
“Disruptive technology can only work if it comes with a new business model,” says Spowers, who, in addition to being an entrepreneur, is a lifelong motorsport enthusiast, having fielded a private team in the 1980s. “When someone comes up with a radical new idea, the conversation always turns to why it can’t be done. And generally speaking, many of those reasons are true. But if you’re prepared to throw out the whole context and start again from scratch, all the reasons why something can’t be done just fall away.”
Users of the Welsh vehicle would not own it, but would pay a monthly usage fee that would cover all of the operating costs (service, fuel, monthly mileage, etc.) The vehicles wold eventually be 'resold' to the company for refurbishment, reclamation, recycling, etc. It's not just about emissions - it's also about sustainability.
The Bigger Picture
Hydrogen cars could make a huge difference in addressing carbon emissions - and as a secondary effect, would facilitate the creation of a hydrogen economy. As with electric cars and the need for recharging solutions, hydrogen vehicles would need places to refuel. Some of those sources could be surprising. As per the NY Times article cited above,
...A hydrogen station in Fountain Valley, about 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, is in front of a wastewater treatment plant, because the hydrogen comes from human waste.
After bacteria digest what has been flushed down toilets to produce a mix of carbon dioxide and methane, the gases are cleaned up and fed to a different type of fuel cell that produces electricity, heat and hydrogen, and the hydrogen is piped to the pump.
That demonstration project, producing about 200 pounds of hydrogen a day, helps fulfill California’s mandate that a third of the hydrogen for cars come from renewable sources.
Plug Power is developing complete solutions for its fuel cell powered vehicles, such as
this system for airport tugs.
LATHAM, N.Y. – November 18, 2014 – Plug Power Inc. (NASDAQ: PLUG), a leader in providing clean, reliable energy products, has successfully completed installation of its first GenFuel hydrogen infrastructure for the ground support equipment (GSE) market at the Memphis Airport.
This GenFuel infrastructure deployment includes a standard hydrogen storage tank, compression system, fuel pipelines, and Plug Power’s first outdoor GenFuel hydrogen dispensers that will be used for a 15-truck fleet of airport tuggers powered by Plug Power fuel cells.
The outdoor hydrogen dispenser varies from its indoor counterpart by providing an all-weather enclosure capable of protecting the equipment from harsh elements that can be experienced on an airport tarmac such as rain, snow, direct sun, high winds and extreme temperatures.
Similar to the GenFuel experience at other customer sites, the Memphis truck drivers will simply pull their GSE vehicles up to the dispenser and personally refuel in just three to four minutes.
Scientific American just ran a three part series looking at how hydrogen just might be the fuel of the future.
Part 1 looks at the vehicle market, the growth of supporting infrastructure, and the unappreciated role hydrogen is already playing.
About 9 million metric tons of hydrogen is already produced in the United States each year, predominantly to refine petroleum, treat metals, process foods and make household products. Most hydrogen is produced and used on-site at industrial facilities. But a significant portion is produced regionally and delivered by truck or pipeline to more distant users.
"[Hydrogen] is used in so many things, and we're not aware of it," said Chris White, communications director at the California Fuel Cell Partnership, a public-private organization aimed at advancing the FCV market. "And we're not aware that there's an existing distribution system right now. You probably pass a hydrogen tanker on the road and don't even realize."
Part 2 looks at the potential connection between hydrogen and the possibilities in sewage treatment. It references the plant mentioned in the
NY Times article, with its use of tri-generation.
The system runs on anaerobically digested biogas from the Orange County Sanitation District's municipal wastewater treatment plant. A 300-kilowatt-hour molten carbonate fuel cell uses the biogas to produce heat, electricity and hydrogen—making it a "tri-generation" system.
Hydrogen produced by the fuel cell is captured, compressed and sent to an on-site public hydrogen filling station for fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) to use. The energy station produces approximately 100 kilograms of renewable hydrogen per day, which is enough to fuel up to 50 cars.
Not every place has enough sewage to make setting up such systems practical - but there are other ways to make hydrogen. As Part 2 points out:
"I think one of the biggest benefits that hydrogen has is that it can be produced locally from local resources," said Chris White, communications director at the California Fuel Cell Partnership. "So if you are in a place where there's a hydrogen refinery already using natural gas, you have that. If you're in a really water-rich state like Washington and Oregon, you can make a lot of hydrogen from electrolysis. If you're a state that's really rich in agricultural waste, like California, you can make it from that."
Of course, the end game is to get carbon out of the system, and
Part 3 gets into that. Electrolysis - given a carbon-free source of electric current - is the cleanest way to produce hydrogen, and
the costs of wind and solar are becoming competitive with fossil fuels. Further,
carbon taxes could change the picture even more. And, there is a momentum shift driven by recognition that
things can't continue as they have.
The final part of the Scientific American series on hydrogen notes that hydrogen has potential uses that would complement an energy economy using wind and solar. This commentary from Scientific American notes that a Texas project to add battery storage to part of the electrical grid has the effect of not only providing a way to store power (as say excess from wind or solar), it can also meet sudden surges in demand, reducing the need for long-distance transmission or increasing local generation capacity. Hydrogen can be used in the same way.
In California, where renewable energy makes up 20 percent of retail electricity sales, an overproduction of solar and wind during the middle of the day forced the state to dump 19 gigawatt-hours of prepurchased renewable energy last year. Electrolyzers could effectively serve as energy storage by using that excess generation to make renewable hydrogen.
Like a battery, electrolysis is dispatchable, which means the system can rapidly adjust its power flow to stabilize electricity demand and supply on the grid. According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory research, electrolyzers are able to respond fast enough to offer utilities demand response and frequency regulation services.
The revenue from energy market participation isn't nearly enough to recuperate the original investment in a renewable hydrogen project. However, electrolysis systems that offer ancillary services and sell hydrogen fuel are more economically competitive.
The advantage of using hydrogen over batteries is that it can provide megawatt-hours of energy storage for days or even weeks at a time. Scaling batteries up to that power level would be prohibitively expensive. Pumped hydro is another large-scale energy storage technology but requires a reservoir of water on a hill and abundant water supplies.
There's a further way to use hydrogen:
...European countries are keenly exploring the opportunity to store renewably generated electricity as hydrogen in the existing natural gas pipeline.
The process, known as power-to-gas, inserts hydrogen generated by electrolysis directly into the natural gas pipeline system. Using electrolysis in this way avoids wasting valuable excess renewable energy but doesn't require a fuel cell car or stationary fuel cell to use the hydrogen directly.
Natural gas blended with renewable hydrogen also produces less emissions than regular natural gas when used at a power plant or as a transport fuel. The existing natural gas network can support roughly 10 percent hydrogen before requiring alterations.
The big advantage carbon-based fuels have had up to this time is the costs of exploiting them have largely been ignored save where they became too obvious to ignore, i.e. events like
the killer fogs of London. Now that the global consequences of a carbon economy are becoming too big to ignore, alternatives like hydrogen could become a viable part of the solution. A brighter future for hydrogen just might be brighter for all of us.
UPDATE: I'm getting a fair amount of pushback from those who vigorously reject hydrogen. You can find my response here, in comments.