NW is poised for hydrogen fuel role

NW is poised for hydrogen fuel role Region promoted as uniquely able to help wean world from petroleum power
By TOM PAULSON SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
In a bid for some of the Bush administration's $1.2 billion promised funding to develop hydrogen-powered cars, the former head of the Bonneville Power Administration yesterday unveiled at a Seattle conference an ambitious proposal to make the Pacific Northwest "the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen."
At the same meeting, one of the most influential thinkers at the alternative and environmental end of the energy policy debate agreed that the Northwest is uniquely poised to become a world leader in helping make the "hydrogen transition" away from petroleum-based transportation fuels.
"This region is the most suited of any place in North America to move rapidly toward hydrogen," said Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colo., an Oxford University-educated physicist, a frequent critic of current energy policies and one of the world's leading lights in matters of alternative energy.
"We're already the Saudi Arabia of water," said Jack Robertson, who retired from BPA in 1999 and formed the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. "Because of the Columbia River, the Northwest can produce hydrogen cheaper, faster and cleaner than anyone else in the world."
Robertson and Lovins were two speakers at a conference on "Hydrogen Production and Northwest Transportation" sponsored by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. The national lab is a leader in the development of fuel cell technology and other technologies aimed at reducing the nation's energy dependence on imported oil.
Hydrogen power is based on the use of chemical "fuel cells" that can tap the energy (electricity and heat) produced from the chemical transformation of hydrogen and oxygen into water. Hydrogen power holds the promise of a cleaner and renewable energy resource.
"It's clean, renewable and it doesn't come from an unstable part of the world," Robertson said. To put this region's advantage in perspective, he noted that for a person standing on the banks of the Columbia River, enough hydrogen in the river water passes by in just one second to fuel 600,000 passenger cars for 24 hours.
At the meeting, Robertson was rallying support for a proposal he's calling the Northwest Hydrogen Initiative. The basic idea is to use off-peak hydropower to generate cheap hydrogen fuel that would run a fleet of vehicles within five years, contribute to the city of Seattle's future energy needs and launch the beginnings of a hydrogen production-distribution system that could become a model for the rest of the world. Robertson hopes to garner enough public and private interest in the proposal to submit it to the Bush administration for funding.
"Basically, we're trying to develop the energy system of the future," said Mike Lawrence, associate director for energy science at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The two biggest hurdles for hydrogen fuel today, Lawrence said, are the relatively high costs of the fuel cells and figuring out how to create an efficient system for producing and distributing this new fuel.
Lovins has been pushing the hydrogen-fueled car idea for more than a decade. The Rocky Mountain Institute has spun off a company, called Hypercar Inc., to promote to automakers its design of an extremely lightweight, carbon-based vehicle that aims to make hydrogen an attractive, economical fuel right now. He said some of the big automakers have shown interest now that the Bush administration appears willing to put some money into developing a hydrogen-powered car.
"Unfortunately, the administration has created the impression among environmentalists that this is just a way of distracting people from pursuing (current) hydrogen technology," Lovins said. "It could either be a triumph or a bust."
But no matter what the Bush administration hopes to achieve with its so-called "Freedom Car" initiative, he predicted that hydrogen fuel ultimately would replace petroleum for a variety of reasons.
"For one thing, it should be clear to everyone by now that our oil dependency is contrary to our economic and national security interests," Lovins said. But despite such policy influences, he said the marketplace is already pushing us toward what he calls the "hydrogen transition." Dupont, British Petroleum and other major corporations, Lovins said, already are looking at alternative energies simply because they are looking cheaper.
Eventually, he said, petroleum's direct and indirect costs will make it so unattractive that we won't have to run out of oil before we stop using it as our primary energy resource.
"Somebody once said, 'The stone age didn't end because the world ran out of stones,' " Lovins said. "The oil endgame has started. We are already entering the hydrogen era."
Making a hydrogen-powered vehicle is not the problem. They already exist. The trick will be getting the pure hydrogen out of the water cheaply enough to compete in price against gasoline. That's the advantage the Northwest has now over everyone, according to Robertson. Using off-peak hydropower, he thinks he can produce hydrogen fuel right now for about $2 a gallon.
"We are very close with the existing technology," he said. "We're not talking about inventing anything new."
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattlepi.com
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/126980_car17.html

"lkgeo1" wrote in message
Cheap Hydrogen Fuel GE says its new machine could make the hydrogen economy affordable, by slashing the cost of water-splitting technology.
By David Talbot
Among the many daunting challenges to replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen is how to make hydrogen cheaply in ways that don't pollute the environment. Splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from energy sources such as wind turbines is one possibility -- but it's still far too expensive to be widely practical.

Now researchers at GE say they've come up with a prototype version of an easy-to-manufacture apparatus that they believe could lead to a commercial machine able to produce hydrogen via electrolysis for about $3 per kilogram -- a quantity roughly comparable to a gallon of gasoline -- down from today's $8 per kilogram. That could make it economically practical for future fuel-cell vehicles that run on hydrogen.
Electrolyzers are fairly simple technologies: water is mixed with potassium hydroxide electrolyte and made to flow past a stack of electrodes. Electricity causes the water molecules to split into hydrogen and oxygen gases, which bubble out of the solution. The chemistry makes a good high-school science experiment -- but commercial-scale quantities of hydrogen are extracted far more cheaply from natural gas.
The core problem in improving electrolyzers for hydrogen manufacture is not how to improve the fundamental conversion efficiency, says Richard Bourgeois, an electrolysis project leader at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. "You can only make it so much more efficient; there isn't a lot you can do. So we've attacked the capital costs," he says.
Today's electrolyzers are made of metal plates bolted together manually, with gaskets between them, and the whole unit is typically housed in a chamber made of the same metals used in the electrodes, says Bourgeois. The materials are expensive and assembly requires costly labor.
Bourgeois' research team came up with a way to make future electrolyzers largely out of plastic. They used a GE plastic called Noryl that is extremely resistant to the highly alkaline potassium hydroxide. And because the plastic is easy to form and join, manufacturing an electrolyzer is relatively cheap.
Inside the plastic housing, metal electrodes still do the same job. But because GE is using less electrode material, the reactivity of the electrodes' surfaces is improved. To do this, the researchers borrowed a spray-coating process -- normally used to apply coatings for parts on jet engines -- to coat the electrodes with a proprietary nickel-based catalyst with a large surface area.
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GE has demonstrated the technology in a prototype, and is now building a larger production module -- one that can produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen per hour -- for testing in its labs later this year. A machine of that scale could be attached to small electricity sources to produce hydrogen on the side. The technology also has the potential to be massively scaled up to create a hydrogen gas station.
GE's new electrolyzer could be ready for production in a few years. "You can talk about transitioning to a hydrogen economy, but really these things don't move unless the economics are there," Bourgeois says. "This takes enough capital cost out of the whole electrolyzer system, so when you buy this and amortize it over so many years, you compete with gasoline."
Paul Bakke, an electrical engineer and program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy in Golden, CO, says a cheap electrolyzer could be a key component of the future hydrogen economy. "As far as I know, GE is the only one who has tried to tackle this problem," he says. "Assuming GE is successful in being able to produce these things with a high level of reliability and low cost, it will break through the barrier that has traditionally been there for electrolyzers -- namely, the capital cost barrier."
Bakke adds: "I would say it's an important piece; it may not be the only way to make hydrogen, but it's an important piece. Natural-gas reforming may be a near-term bridge, but in order to get away from the environmental concerns, we will have to go to electrolysis, derived from wind turbines and solar panels and so forth."
Home page image courtesy of GE. GE's bench-top electrolyzer prototype for hydrogen production
http://www.h2fc.com/news.html
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Yeah, fill up you tank from the garden hose.
So where do you get the free electricity? From the free nuclear plants? Or possibly the free wind farms? Why not use the electric directly, rather than put a lossy conversion between things? Or perhaps, convince algae to grow it?. *get* *real!*

"Steve Young" <bowtieATbrightdslDOTnet> wrote in news:6qydnbzHpfX9XLvZ4p2dnA@bright.net:

Yeah, fill up you tank from the garden hose.

No. The electrolizer would be ground based.

So where do you get the free electricity?

Nobody said anything about free electricity. And the article clearly mentioned at least two sources: Wind farms and solar.

From the free nuclear plants? Or possibly the free wind farms?

That's one option. Although I don't recall "free" as being a requirment of the process.

Why not use the electric directly, rather than put a lossy conversion between things?

Because hydrogen has a much higher energy density than any battery and therefor works better a a fuel for cars. Because wind is a variable and fickle source. Because solar is not available 24 hours a day.

Or perhaps, convince algae to grow it?.

Could do that to. But we are a nation of engineers, not biologists Technology will always get more attention and funding.

*get* *real!*

Well, I'm not pinning my hopes on a hydrogen future. But if they can make it work, more power to them.