Wash. state hydrogen production project

[Fun CH]

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/hy ... r4-YNatJqQ

I think when you look at the facts of clean hydrogen and the proposed rules, its the fuel of the future. Soon I hope.

Hydrogen fuel cell technology has been with us since 1842. Hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells allowed us to walk on the moon.

[Rideback]

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/hy ... r4-YNatJqQ

[Fun CH]

You can continue to argue that H is some benign, innocuous element.

I'm not making that argument.

I have to vent the hydrogen that I produce or else it can concentrate and explode or it's a danger to breathe as hydrogen sulfide.

But I don't live in fear of it because I follow established safety protocols.

But seriously Jim you tend to respond emotionally about everything here just look at your Donald Trump posts and the derogatory language you've directed towards others here including me. That's all emotion. Use your big boy facts.

[just-jim]

.
I didnt mention the Hindenburg. I was relating a comment my father made, probably 30+ years ago. No, Im not an expert. But he was.

It’s always so charming when you presume to tell me how I vote, what I believe….or what ‘emotional’ reaction i might have had to something I never referred to. Must be nice to be all seeing and all knowing….prolly oughta start calling you Mandrake or Oz, I guess.

Natural gas is lighter than air, doesn’t pool on the ground or contaminate things, either. Calling H ‘non-toxic’ is like comparing it to gasoline….it is meaningless hyperbole. You can continue to argue that H is some benign, innocuous element. It isnt.

There is good reasons why vehicles filled with gases - including H - display special makings, have to stop a RR tracks, cant be driven by folks without a special license, etc etc etc. It is BECAUSE they are inherently dangerous.

There are some pretty serious accidents with H and you dont even have to look very far, either: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety

Also:

“Hydrogen possesses the NFPA 704's highest rating of 4 on the flammability scale because it is flammable when mixed even in small amounts with ordinary air; ignition can occur at a volumetric ratio of hydrogen to air as low as 4% due to the oxygen in the air and the simplicity and chemical properties of the reaction. However, hydrogen has no rating for innate hazard for reactivity or toxicity. The storage and use of hydrogen poses unique challenges due to its ease of leaking as a gaseous fuel, low-energy ignition, wide range of combustible fuel-air mixtures, buoyancy, and its ability to embrittle metals that must be accounted for to ensure safe operation.”

“Firefighters don't seem to have a problem fighting alcohol fires. So not an issue”…and “stored in steel tanks” means you have not a clue what you are talking about. As does dismissing what firefighters do. I don’t expect you might understand all that- it’s fire stuff.

Again: H is a ‘pump and dump’ stock market ploy - a ‘long con’ in grifter terms. Caveat emptor. You have drunk the kool-aid, evidently. If you buy into this stuff – Mister Coffee has some Fusion stock to sell you. And maybe I can interest you in a Bridge?
.

[Fun CH]

"……said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline."

Comparing the danger of Hydrogen to gasoline a pretty low bar, indeed. It’s sort of like saying ‘well, if you are gonna do injectable drugs…heroin is safer than fentanyl’.
.

and yet your not the expert. the Hindenburg blew up, you saw that newsreal film and you obviously had an emotional reaction which you based your opinion. Get over it.

"Way back in 1937, the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg was destroyed in a fiery spectacle. Flash forward 85 years, and a few folks insist on dragging us into comment threads about the doomed airship. Apparently, the disaster is ample evidence to not be pursuing a hydrogen economy."

https://itm-power.com/blogs/how-the-hin ... d-hydrogen


"Unlike gasoline, hydrogen will not pool on the ground, potentially contaminating water sources and soil, or creating a catastrophe if ignited. Fossil fuels pose significant health and environmental safety threats when leaked, spilled, or combusted. Hydrogen leaks are non-toxic, this is in steep contrast to other fuels.Jul 18, 2022
https://fuelcellsworks.com › news
Why Hydrogen Is Safer Than You Might Think"

[PAL]

Proposal stage. Humans are always grasping.

[Rideback]

https://content.govdelivery.com/account ... ns/37ffff4

DOE Announces $59 Million to Advance the National Clean Hydrogen Strategy
The Department of Energy (DOE) today released a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) for up to $59 million to accelerate the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) of affordable clean-hydrogen technologies. Projects supported by this funding will reduce the cost and improve the performance of critical elements of hydrogen infrastructure, demonstrate innovative end-use applications for clean hydrogen, and streamline and improve processes essential to the efficient, timely, and equitable deployment of clean hydrogen technologies. Achieving these goals will support the vision embodied in the U.S. National Clean Hydrogen Strategy and Roadmap of affordable clean hydrogen for a net-zero carbon future and a sustainable, resilient, and equitable economy.

DOE's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) will administer this FOA, which focuses on: advancing fueling infrastructure for medium- and heavy-duty (MD/HD) vehicles and other heavy transportation applications; developing and demonstrating hydrogen-based zero-emissions equipment for seaport facilities; addressing key challenges to siting, permitting, and installation; and improving community engagement and outreach to support environmental justice (EJ) and ensure equitable deployment of clean hydrogen systems. By improving key technologies, spurring deployment, and helping industry achieve economies of scale, activities funded by this FOA will support and reinforce the long-term viability of DOE's Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs (H2Hubs) and other commercial-scale hydrogen installations. Activities to be funded by this FOA on permitting, siting, and EJ also align with key priorities of the Hydrogen Interagency Task Force as pursued by its "Infrastructure, Siting, and Permitting" working group and "Workforce, Equity, and Justice" crosscutting team.

This FOA will fund projects under the following topic areas:

Topic 1: Components for Hydrogen Fueling of Medium- and Heavy-Duty (MD/HD) Vehicles. This topic seeks proposals to develop advanced components that will enable gaseous and/or liquid hydrogen fueling at refueling stations for MD/HD hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Topic 2: Standardized Hydrogen Refueling Station of the Future. This topic seeks proposals to develop and demonstrate a low-cost, standardized, and replicable advanced hydrogen fueling station of the future—one that can meet the needs of commercial-scale MD/HD truck fueling.
Topic 3: Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Powered Port Equipment. This topic seeks proposals to design, develop, and demonstrate hydrogen fuel cell port applications, such as cargo-handling equipment or systems for providing shore power to docked vessels.
Topic 4: Enabling Permitting and Safety for Hydrogen Deployment. This topic seeks proposals to help determine the primary challenges to siting, permitting, and installation across the value chain from hydrogen production through end-use, and to help identify opportunities to address them.
Topic 5: Equitable Hydrogen Technology Community Engagement. This topic seeks proposals to improve the capacity of DOE and DOE-funded projects to conduct effective community-engagement activities. Funded projects will conduct direct engagement with a disadvantaged community to gain better understanding of their concerns and provide them with important information about hydrogen and related technologies, as well as develop lessons learned and best practices on Community Benefits Plans. This topic is being coordinated across offices within DOE, including Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, Nuclear Energy, Environmental Justice and Equity, and the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
For all topic areas, HFTO envisions awarding financial assistance awards in the form of cooperative agreements with periods of performance ranging from approximately two to four years. DOE encourages applicant teams that include stakeholders within academia, industry, and national laboratories across multiple technical disciplines. Teams are also encouraged to include representation from diverse entities such as minority-serving institutions.

DOE is compiling a teaming partner list to facilitate the formation of project teams for this FOA. This list will allow organizations that may wish to participate on a project to express their interest to other applicants and explore potential partnerships. The list will be regularly updated to reflect new teaming partners who provide their organizational information.

[just-jim]

"……said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline."

Comparing the danger of Hydrogen to gasoline a pretty low bar, indeed. It’s sort of like saying ‘well, if you are gonna do injectable drugs…heroin is safer than fentanyl’.
.

[Fun CH]

.
AND - biggest joke of all - it’s made from petroleum. Oh - and look up the Hindenburg.

Hydrogen fuel can be made from water.

Article from 2014

"Here's why hydrogen-fueled cars aren't little Hindenburgs"

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2 ... burgs.html

"The hydrogen fuel cell tanks in the Toyota Mirai are pressurized up to 10,000 psi, and hydrogen is 16 times lighter than air. So, if a tank were punctured or otherwise compromised, the hydrogen gas would instantaneously dissipate into the atmosphere, Hartline said."

"In fact, in the case of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg, most of the fire was fueled by diesel fuel for the airship's engines and a flammable lacquer coating on the outside of the dirigible."

"John Kopasz, a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory who performs research on hydrogen gas production, said that while there are inherent dangers with any combustible fuel, hydrogen fuel is safer than gasoline."

EV Battery fire

download.jpeg (17.89 KiB) Viewed 2258 times

[mister_coffee]

...
It’s smoke and mirrors. A good stock market ‘pump and dump’, maybe?
...

That and fusion power. Don't even get me started.

[PAL]

Somebody better tell Jay.

[just-jim]

.
My Chemical Engineer father spent his whole career in petroleum drilling, designing pipelines, storage and handling facilities. He was very much a renegade - realizing long ago we needed to transition away from oil.

But he’d just laugh and laugh and laugh when people brought up hydrogen as a large scale substitute for oil.

He used to say ‘It’s unstable to handle and store, inefficient as hell, corrosive, has a poor storage capability compared to other fuels. It takes unique piping, valves and storage. AND - biggest joke of all - it’s made from petroleum. Oh - and look up the Hindenburg.

It’s smoke and mirrors. A good stock market ‘pump and dump’, maybe?
.

[PAL]

Practical - yes.
If:

you have a place to fill up nearby - a hydrogen pump at a fuel station
you don’t mind paying $7–10/kg which gives you the range of a gallon of fuel
you don’t mind that the car is a very expensive machine with lithium-ion batteries inside the same as battery-EVs - some people think hydrogen cars have hydrogen engines - they don't.
you don't mind that the green hydrogen cycle, which produces green hydrogen from renewable energy, wastes 80% of the energy (instead of just 20% wasted using battery-powered vehicles)
you don’t mind that some hydrogen you fill up on will have come from fossil fuels and involve CO2 release when manufactured
you don’t mind that it is an electric car that you cannot charge at home or at public chargers
Then yes, it is practical.

You would need a hydrogen fuel station as frequently as you presently have gas/petrol stations now. A hydrogen car’s range is about 300 miles. Existing fuel stations would be the only sites where it would be permissible to place hydrogen-filling equipment and tanks. The typical costs of a hydrogen pump are around $1million.

If this level of infrastructure does not exist, then the hydrogen car will not be, like the battery-EV, a little more difficult to take on a long trip due to longer charging times and availability of working chargers, it will be impossible to take on a long trip, as you will not be able to fill up to drive home again. There is no dual-fuel option.

Do you know what would make the hydrogen car really practical?

Equipping it with a charging port, the same as an EV and fitting a slightly bigger lithium battery. Now you could charge it anywhere. This will be much cheaper, as hydrogen is a synthetic fuel it will always be more expensive than fossil fuels per mile, you have to make it, at great expense of energy.* A low-powered charger, available to the public, costs around $500 to fit. I have one outside of my house. A rapid high-power charger costs around $25000 to install. Thats just 40 times cheaper than a hydrogen pump. Electricity is already available everywhere.

The problem with fitting a charging port to a hydrogen car is that very few people would bother to go fill it up with hydrogen. It’s more expensive and inconvenient to do so. So the manufacturers will never do this, it's ideologically against their beliefs. If the demand for hydrogen is never high enough, it will be impossible to install all of the hydrogen pumps required and people will not buy the cars, the idea will never get started. Electric cars work because you can charge them at home using a wall outlet.

Hydrogen sounds cool and it’s easy to hype it up but it's near-impossible to make it work and far too expensive.

For some strange reason, some people seem opposed to battery EVs when they do work and there are already 10 million of them in the world and sales are growing at 40% per annum.

Hydrogen cars number around 10000–20000 with sales tanking.

*Fossil fuels come with energy built in, that's why they are so useful, even if they are harmful.

For a more extensive discussion see this link for pros and cons. Some of the people are scientists.
https://www.quora.com/Are-hydrogen-cars ... -be-needed

And while you're at it, look into what the COP28 is up to.

[mister_coffee]

High pressure hydrogen fires are a different beast from an ethanol or methanol fire. They burn at much higher temperatures for one thing.

Yes, properly treated steel can be protected against hydrogen embrittlement. But all of the existing infrastructure of pipelines and storage that we might otherwise be able to use would have to be rebuilt from scratch. The factories that make all of the stuff would also have to be rebuilt.

While hydrogen has an excellent mass to energy ratio, with any practical storage system the overall energy to volume ratio is very poor. And when you take into account the weight of a large and heavy fuel tank the practical challenge of building a long-range hydrogen vehicle is daunting.

Most hydrogen used as an industrial chemical is reformed from natural gas, which emits CO2. The storage issues with hydrogen are so daunting that often H2 is manufactured at the site that needs it to because storing and distributing methane is much easier than doing the same with hydrogen.

Leakage losses from stored gaseous or liquid hydrogen exceed charge loss rates from existing battery technology. In some cases by orders of magnitude.

Using electrolysis to make hydrogen is 70-80 percent efficient. I note that simply charging Lithium batteries is 85 to 95 percent efficient (larger batteries are generally more efficient). Other processes that might be more efficient (mostly either bioengineered processes or using a specially designed nuclear power plant) are untested at scale (or sometimes not tested at all).

The only place where hydrogen fuel even might remotely make sense is with some hypothetical future aircraft that were fueled by liquid hydrogen. Although for my money I'd bet on a biodiesel (probably a salt-water algae based biodiesel) to replace jet fuel. Last I checked in the early 2010s they were estimating that algae biodiesel would be cost-competitive at about $8 per Freedom Gallon. Which isn't that far from what diesel (which is what jet fuel really is, plus or minus some additives) has recently cost. So I imagine that technology is more doable and scalable for less capital investment and much less risk than hydrogen.

The other place biodiesel is a likely huge win is intercontinental shipping. Although about 40 percent of that is hauling fossil fuels so we only need to replace about sixty percent of the consumption. Although I note that when I say "biodiesel" I am not talking about the stuff made from used cooking oil.

[Fun CH]

More energy is used to produce it than what it puts out.

That doesn't matter. You would be making a fuel to drive a car or truck (or fuel for fuel cell) from an energy source that you can't use to drive a car like solar cells or a nuclear reactor.

Less driving, less flying here and there, less fossil fuel use, is what is needed.

That's not going to happen anytime soon.

[PAL]

Different element with the sun involved. The sun knows how to handle it. Humans may not. More energy is used to produce it than what it puts out. And possibly same with EV's.
Less driving, less flying here and there, less fossil fuel use, is what is needed.

[Fun CH]

I suspect heat might be an indication of fire. Firefighters don't seem to have a problem fighting alcohol fires. So not an issue.

Hydrogen is stored in steel tanks, so not an issue. And why would weight be an issue anyway with a clean renewable fuel that and water is the combustion byproduct?

Unfortunately EV batteries are a toxic mess along with the impact of mining the materials that go into it. When an EV a battery leaks and catches fire it gives off highly toxic gases.

When I'm trucking my honey bees back home from California it's 16 hours and 850 MI. Electric vehicles just don't cut it on range or the environment as they are only as clean as the fuel that goes into charging the batteries.

If hydrogen is good enough for the sun to burn it's good enough for me.

[mister_coffee]

I note that when hydrogen burns the flame is very nearly invisible. So ask a firefighter how they'd fight a fire when they can't see the flames.

My own opinion is that hydrogen is a very inefficient energy storage medium. There are also a lot of fairly daunting issues around the safe handling and storage of hydrogen that would need to be solved before its use was practical.

Just one to think about. Hydrogen is very reactive and reacts chemically in Not Good Ways with common materials like aluminum that you'd probably want to make a fuel tank out of. Look up "hydrogen embrittlement". As a bonus hydrogen can leak through a lot of materials (again like aluminum) even as it damages them.

[PAL]

Here is one link, not from here.
https://today.usc.edu/why-hydrogen-fuel ... l%20energy.

Another
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_production.html

[PAL]

Hi Chrys,
It's on this BB somewhere that has the links about hydrogen I believe. I'll do a search and see what I can find.

[Chrys]

Remember the push for Wash. to invest in hydrogen production? That was a few years ago, and it now looks like things might actually be happening. The pitch by the state to E. Wash. voters was that the dams excess energy production might be able to be used to produce hydrogen. Here's the latest on it that I could find: https://washingtonstatestandard.com/202 ... rogen-hub/ Anyone know of more recent developments? The hydrogen projects may get a kick in the pants now that Tesla (Elon Musk) has flipped and appears to be supporting the use of hydrogen as fuel.

Chrystal Perrow