Think Ansari X Prize. The goal: a 500 horsepower hydrogen powered motor pulling an 18,000 pound semi trailer from coast to coast. The main obstacle: making it over the Rockies. Until carbon nanotubes are manufactured on a large scale, the most likely candidate is a lithium slurry, but it does have downsides: no free lunch, alas. More below the fold, but may require some chemistry to make sense.
Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic won him this check, the Raymond
Orteig $25,000 prize for the first nonstop flight between New York and
Paris.
The Ansari X Prize paid Burt Rutan 10 million dollars to build a
gorgeous little spaceship.
DARPA paid Stanford University 2 million dollars for winning the
2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
The Democrats
could do worse than run as the Party of Science, considering the
Republicans and their patently irrational opposition to progress, on so many fronts.
Forget the little battery-powered runaround cars, just for now.
Forget the hybrids, and the expensive solid battery/hydrogen
vehicles. Until we've got an pure hydrogen engine capable of
generating 500 horsepower, and a meaningful fueling infrastructure, the
conversion simply won't work. Hydrogen power will take over
eventually, given enough pain and suffering, but until we've got the
freight system running on hydrogen, at an acceptable price point, our
economy will always be vulnerable to the geopolitical vagaries of
petroleum.
I propose a 100 million dollar prize offered for the first 500
horsepower hydrogen motor to pull a standard loaded semi trailer from
coast to coast. Put some real economic muscle into the
proposition.
IMHO, (
donning Dr. Bunsen Burner
disguise ) it's pretty straightforward. Pull into the fuel
station, pump in fuel, add distilled water to it, hydrogen gas is
released. The hydrogen is either fed to an internal combustion
engine or to fuel cells. When you're out of fuel, pull into the
gas station, pump out your old depleted fuel and fill up again.
The fuel is recycled by heating it, hydrogen gas is added again, and
the cycle completes.
Metal hydrides can store 1-2% of their own weight in hydrogen, and any
impurities in the hydrogen are left behind, reducing capacity. Under
heat, this can be brought as high as 5-7%.
Carbon nanotubes,
however, are capable of storing up to 65% their own weight in hydrogen.
That's a huge number, of all the hydrogen storage techniques, I would
guess CNT tanks to be the most promising.
Even today, metal
hydrides are not the prime choice. You can store slurried Lithium
Hydride (LiH) that is nearly 25% hydrogen by weight dry, less in the
slurry but still significantly more than can be stored in a metal
hydride tank. The lithium slurry is reacted with water to give Lithium
Hydroxide and Hydrogen. The Lithium Hydroxide can be stored and
reprocessed into lithium hydride fairly easily
cite
The chemistry of lithium slurry, and a far more detailed explanation of
lithium slurry technology can be found at
SafeHydrogen.com
The down sides; lithium slurries are heavy. Reprocessing
lithium requires heat. Furthermore, lithium slurry requires a
pure carbon sink to extract the lithium impurities: think slag
from refining. Coal fired plants eject huge amounts of
particulate carbon, they seem to be candidate for pure carbon recapture.
The Pie in the Sky is carbon nanotubes. Downside: terribly
expensive to make. But, as with all technology of this sort, economies
of scale and
improved
manufacturing technology will bring the nanotube within the range
of affordability.
2.2.4.
Carbon nanostructures The discovery at the beginning of the last
decade of new forms of carbon aggregation with basic particle size in
the nanoscale range has opened up a variety of scientific and
technological speculations and investigations about their potential
applications. Fullerenes, carbon onions, carbon nanotubes and
nanofibres, along with activated carbon, have been developed and
proposed also for the storage of hydrogen, through the adsorption at
low pressure of compressed hydrogen. This method has been considered as
the substantial breakthrough, long awaited, for significantly improving
the volumetric and gravimetric energy density of hydrogen storage
systems.
...
These materials can adsorb significant amounts of hydrogen at room
temperature, but research is still needed to better understand the way
they work, to develop reproducible production techniques and to
confirm, to a certain extent, contrasting experimental results. Carbon
nanostructures have been tested at various operating conditions with
pressures from a few bars up to some hundreds of bars, temperature
ranging between 80 and 800 K, with percentage of hydrogen adsorption in
weight varying from a few percent up to an incredible 60%.
cite
If you've made it this far, and have not succumbed to the soporific
effects of citations, nor yet consigned me to the tinfoil hat brigade,
I am grateful. Solomon said
without
a vision, the people perish. I sincerely believe a
Democratic candidate who ran on a platform of science and energy
independence could bring out the best and brightest to vie for a great
prize: the goal - to get a 500 horsepower motor to pull 18,000 pounds
of freight from coast to coast on hydrogen power.