I wish I got to do fun little projects like this at my job. Anyway, this proof of concept shows that hydrogen would be a great alternative to propane and natural gas for cooking. Hat tip to @hypx@mastodon.social.
Fun project! But replacing gas with hydrogen seems really tricky. Hydrogen is much harder to transport without leaks because it’s such a tiny molecule. Electric seems better than trying to still burn hydrogen.
The best way to store and transport hydrogen is to combine it with carbon so that it becomes a convenient liquid fuel. As a bonus, then you don’t even need fuel cells to make electricity from it, but can instead simply burn it in something called an “internal combustion engine”
This is just synthetic fossil fuel with extra steps. Lol.
Exactly.
Hydrogen is mostly a greenwashing scam; it isn’t any better than what we already have.
Nah, combustion engine is just one step up from the steam engine, such a wasteful technology, should long be in a museum.
First thing i think about in using a hydrogen-carbon fuel, is fuel cell (no better word for “Brennstoffzelle”?) to create electricity. Next up a steam turbine.
we do call them fuel cells
As Toyota has demonstrated (and speaking from my own experience), it’s not that tricky. As for cooking with the stuff, sometimes you just need portability and/or a flame. Electric is a poor choice in those cases.
Just need to waste a ton of energy extracting it then liquifying it then hoping that transport doesn’t face any issues (and I mean, considering our track record with petrol which doesn’t corrode everything it touches I sure as hell wouldn’t worry about it [/s if it wasn’t clear]) and then fill up your personal car that could have simply been powered by electricity from the beginning…
Also, ever heard of energy density? Because hydrogen won’t win prizes on that front!
Wait wait wait, you’re telling me that taking electricity, sending it along wires, generating hydrogen with it via hydrolysis, packaging it, compressing it to an extreme degree, physically transporting it, putting it in pumps, pumping it into your car, then doing reverse hydrolysis to charge a battery that then powers an electric motor…
Is less efficient than sending electricity along some wires to your car battery, to then drive an electric motor?
I’m shocked!
Portability is hard for hydrogen since you hadn’t liquify it without huge pressures and cryogenic temps, so you need big tanks. But cooking stoves does seem like a pretty good use case.
Compress it to 10,000psi and it gets portable enough.
As I said, huge pressures. You’ll need super heavy or super exotic tanks.
What’s so exotic about a composite pressure vessel? They’re already used in scuba and paintball.
Scuba tanks only go up to 5.5ksi. I think you’d need more like composite over wrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) for 10ksi. Those are relatively new even in spaceflight. SpaceX discovered some new physics when their AMOS-6 mission exploded on the launch pad in 2016 due to oxygen freezing inside the composite layers.
Here’s some more info on carbon fiber tanks vs COPVs https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/taibc7/in_our_experience_copv_gainpain_flattens_out/
I think the experts who believes in this technology know a bit more than you and me who only read a few wiki pages.
If money is going into this, they also have a believable plan. But big oil certainly want you to think otherwise.
Huh? It’s big oil and the like who are pushing hydrogen over electricity.
And the problem with hydrogen is largely to do with the laws of physics, so it’s unlikely to change soon.
I don’t understand this suspicion. It’s easier to burn fossil fuels for electricity than to reform them into hydrogen.
But they can still sell hydrogen, they can’t really sell solar panels. Even encouraging people to keep burning things (like hydrogen) benefits gas since it slows down electric alternatives to gas heating.
They don’t have to sell hydrogen or solar panels. They’ll just keep selling fuel to power plants.
Well yeah but they know their days of selling that are numbered, at least for lots of markets. If they can get people onto hydrogen they’ve got more money coming in for decades.
Their days aren’t numbered until governments actually say so. In the meantime, non-GHG emitting sources supply less than half of the world’s electricity as is, nevermind the hypothetical demand of a predominantly electrified vehicle fleet.
Governments and markets are saying so.
That’s an appeal to authority fallacy if I’ve ever seen one.
They’re doing proof of concepts, not mass production. They’re at best answering is it possible, not is it a viable alternative.
Tons of experts believe the only way hydrogen based transportation makes sense is by using it to fuel heavy transport right at the source instead of trying to transport it via pipeline.
Yup. Produce it with wind or solar at the warehouse, then load it onto trucks or forklifts or whatever. It’s a nice little closed ecosystem.
Electric is far more efficient too, thus cheaper. Electricity you can transit over distance over wire and generate however you like. We’ve done it a long time, far and wide.
Turning electricity into hydrogen, distributing it, and then turning it back into electricity to move a vehicle, is so wasteful/expensive.
Just use a big battery.
For some applications like spacecraft where weight is critical, it does make sense to use hydrogen fuel cells as a battery. But usually it doesn’t make sense.
Certainly not the way we lunch right now. The energy used, that focused, in that short a time, is insane.
