If you follow the world of clean energy, you will probably have read all about the so-called hydrogen future and the hydrogen economy. The gas can easily be made from water by electrolysis from green solar electricity, contains a lot of stored energy which is clean to recover, and seems like the solution to many of our green energy woes. Sadly the reality doesn’t quite match up as hydrogen is difficult to store and transport, so thus far our hydrogen cars haven’t quite arrived. That hasn’t stopped researchers looking at hydrogen solutions though, and a team from ETH Zurich might just have found a solution to storing hydrogen. They’re using it to reduce iron oxide to iron, which can easily release the hydrogen by oxidation with water.
Their reactor is simplicity itself, a large stainless steel tank filled with powdered iron ore. Pump hydrogen into it and the iron oxide in the ore becomes water and iron which forms the storage medium, and retrieve the hydrogen later by piping steam through the mixture. Hydrogen generated in the summer using solar power can then be released in the winter months. Of course it’s not perfectly efficient, and a significant quantity of energy is lost in heat, but if the heat is recovered and used elsewhere that effect can be mitigated. The hope is that their university might be benefiting from a pilot plant in the coming years, and then perhaps elsewhere those hydrogen grids and cars might become a reality. We can hope.
Meanwhile, in the past we’ve looked at a not quite so green plan for a hydrogen grid.
Hang on, this ends up storing the hydrogen as water? That means you’ll need to put just as much energy in again as you used during the initial electrolysis (ok maybe the presence of iron decreases this amount by a little) to make the hydrogen? Looks like this is storing hydrogen alright, but it isn’t really hydrogen you want to store, it is the potential energy which the hydrogen represents. If you store it as water, that energy is gone. Better, I think to have hydrogen pumps at every petrol station, with an electrical supply (nuclear powered, reliable, base load) to electrolyse hydrogen as it gets pumped in to cars. In the car, store a relatively small quantity of hydrogen under pressure or whatever other easily liberated means of storage is available (pores in a nanolattice something like that?). But bulk storage should be un-necessary, generate the hydrogen when you need it and trust constant nuclear rather than renewables (always giving power when you don’t need it, never when you do) to provide electricity to make than hydrogen on demand.
No no no. You start with iron, you pour water on it to get the hydrogen out, leaving you with a pile of iron oxide. Then to store the electricity you merely run that thru the iron oxide to get a nice lump of shiny iron. And repeat.
Now the uneducated layman might say “wait, isn’t that just rusting & arc smelting” and also “isn’t that a stupid idea”, but they just don’t understand sophisticated technology.
Needs more blockchain.
Lol sounds about right. The desperation!
Basically reversing what green steel companies aim to do. They call it hydrogen reduction of iron oxides (i.e iron ore). Uses an enormous amount of electricity and hydrogen. With steel it’s the lesser of two evils. But only because the coal fired alternative pollutes like a motherf…. Green steel will produce 95% less carbon emissions.
And this thing will dot it’s best to reverse it :P
Yep, that’s it. Well, they do both.
You get hydrogen from watering the hot iron, then you get water back by pumping hydrogen thru the molten rust, and we melt the rust using hydrogen as well aka green steel. Of course no-one actually does that, but anyway hooray for the hydrogen economy.
Where that hydrogen comes from after you’ve used the initial lot in fuel cells to make electricity no-one mentions… oh wait, solar powered electrolysis. Right then. Um, can’t we just skip the whole iron/rust thing and just do that instead?
Dear Lord… Bob, just stop typing. You’re trying really hard to sound smarter than you are and it shows. Just quit while you’re not so far behind… Ffs.
Really dude? Show me how dumb I am.
It’s an iron-air battery. It’s a very old idea and not hard to understand. Iron / iron oxide redox, aka Fe + H2O FeO + H2, you run the hydrogen thru a fuel cell to get electricity.
Where the energy for the redox comes from is conveniently not mentioned or downplayed, hence dumb idea once you factor that in.
I’m going to start my own scam with aluminium-air batteries, same crap idea only far better energy density.
Not a lump. I it will be a very fine powder. I think That gives the surface area required. Note that the fine iron powder will react very quickly with oxygen so it is like a version of the thermite.
You don’t get iron powder out of an iron smelter. How do you think the iron oxide is converted back to iron?
No, it’s not storing as water and you don’t need electrolysis, but pyrolysis.
To store energy, you convert iron oxide and hydrogen into pure iron and water. To release energy, you heat the mixture, iron reacts with water and produce iron oxide and hydrogen. And they use raw, unprocessed iron ore straight from a mine, without needing any pre-processing.
It’s more a seasonal storage system than a common battery: you use the summer to charge up the system with photovoltaics and discharge back in the winter. Efficiency is pretty low: they say around 60% (lab conditions), so real world would be less than that.
I would not say that this solved the hydrogen storage issue, it’s another way to store with some advantages, some drawbacks, and I doubt we will see a family minivan driving around with a ton or two of iron and water on the trunk driving kids to school.
This doesn’t solve hydrogen storage as it’s not practical for the places you want to consume hydrogen, but it might be a good grid-level seasonal storage, if the power density (per kg, per m3, and per dollar) are good enough.
Imagine it for a fueling station. The vehicles have their own concerns, but generating and storing fuel at a depot is a separate issue.
The whole concept is designed to be as expensive and complicated and crummy as possible, because it’s not supposed to work. It’s supposed to be a millstone around your neck and remove people’s freedom of movement
I’m just going to close this window and pretend I never saw it. Good luck with that.
Right. But it can function as a seasonal battery. Charge it by providing hydrogen, discharge by having it produce hydrogen.
One of the problems with say producing h2 in summer and using it in winter is that H2 is difficult to store for long periods. Maybe this is even more efficient than a big tank under pressure. The hydrogen would leak like mad… for short term storage a pressurized tank might be ok…
The hydrogen is produced on demand. You pour water over hot iron, so H2O + Fe gives you H2 + FeO.
You smelt the rust back into iron and do it all over again. (You add hydrogen to get the oxygen out of the rust, replacing the carbon that is normally used. This tech doesn’t actually exist in the real world either, btw.)
If you’re thinking “wait, that’s sounds rather inefficient, cumbersome and stupid…”, join the club.
The summary is of course written to HaD’s usual standard: a quick skim of the article and slap up a few words with no comprehension in sight.
Thank you so much for such a nice clarification!
I think you understood the process wrong, because is piping with steam in the the powder ore, and not pumping steam into the powder ore ! Pay attention!
This is not novel.
I read about a similar study using iron oxide waste from steel plants a few years ago. I was expecting this to be a follow up study.
Also, surely the whole point of energy storage is you shouldn’t need to do much to get the energy out again. Having to produce and supply hot steam takes a lot of energy. Sounds to me like hydrogen, whilst very suitable for vehicles if there were the will do build large scale infrastructure, because on a vehcile scale we’ve got good-enough (clearly not perfect) storage options, can’t work for grid scale storage. Needing to supply hot steam to unlock your hydrogen is clearly not an option in a vehcile, you’d need a huge, heavy, energy hungry extra system to generate that hot steam. For vehicles this is a non-starter, and for the grid, your only good long term option is nuclear, it makes much more sense to just choose the right energy source in the first place, rather than try to work around the serious limitation (intermittancy) of renewables.
Nuclear power plants generate electricity by using superheated steam from the reactor to drive turbines. After passing through the turbines, this steam is cooled in a condenser, usually by water from a nearby source like a lake. The cooling process involves transferring heat from the steam to the cooling water, which is then returned to the environment at a slightly warmer temperature. Since we are already creating electricity, the electrolysis would be powered by the nuclear power plant.
Given that nuclear reactors already produce large amounts of steam, you could, in theory, divert some of it to a process that reverses chemical hydrogen storage, using the reactor to generate both electricity and hydrogen. This would involve using the steam’s energy to drive a hydrogen-releasing production process, potentially increasing the overall efficiency and utility of the reactor.
But nuclear power also produces a lot of electricity too, so why bother with the complexity of the hydrogen to start with?
All thermal power plants “waste” copious amounts of heat, and for a large plant, getting rid of it is a major engineering problem in its own right. Making productive use of that heat is all upside, and doesn’t cut into electric power production.
Heating buildings is one obvious option, but it’s logistically difficult, and you still need cooling options for summertime.
It’s much preferable to use the heat for a 24/7 industrial process, like desalination, or cottonization of bast fibers. Since the power input has zero or negative cost, it works for processes that otherwise wouldn’t make economic sense, like this hydrogen storage scheme.
(Hydrogen power in general is highly suspect, as it’s often a cynical ploy by the fossil fuel lobby. But to the extent that hydrgen needs to be stored, this idea is not ridiculous)
For heating buildings you take away the steam at the 130°C level, which costs you the low pressure step of the turbine (which outputs steam at about 30..35°C) and a bunch of efficiency. So you always need the cooling equipment for all the steam going into the low pressure step, not only in summer time.
Nuclear reactors cannot be ramped up and down to follow load changes. But nuclear power plants cost too much and take too long to build. The utilities are not contracting to have new nukes built. They are building new solar and wind like mad!
Because cheaper & faster to implement solutions are better for profit especially when they come with subsidies and sort timescale from break ground to $$$$.
now you have to store the steam as well as demand is fluctual and supply is continuous.
Nuclear (fission) is insane, from a biological perspective, but Quaise will substitute nicely.
Unfortunately a perfectly stable power source is as much of a hassle and a waste as an intermittent one. Grids don’t have a constant draw, so some power needs to be available on demand, whether that is from hydro-electric, chemical (fossil fuels, biomass or, possibly, hydrogen), or relatively fast discharge energy storage (batteries, capacitors, and kinetic storage).
However, in terms of creating hydrogen, I agree that a fairly stable energy source and “on demand energy” is probably about the best solution. The next best is probably some way of storing the hydrogen as hydrocarbons without a “biomass” intermediate, since that is the answer nature/evolution landed on that clearly stores well, uses commonly available stuff, and would be a way to lock in some of that atmospheric carbon that is currently troubling us… at least for a while (obviously assuming we manage to get more than enough energy overall from sources other than fossil fuels and our only issue is storage and maybe transport of that excess), remembering that this excess only has to be locally true to the point that the inefficiency of conversion is less than the inefficiency of transmission to a place that doesn’t have excess before supplementing with hydrocarbon fuel based power generation.
Mainly this should reduce hydrogen embrittlement but it’s also nice as a widely proven fuel, with well developed and widely established processes (hydrogen reformation) to retrieve pure hydrogen if desired. Of course, this is basically the same idea as water storage, except it has the advantage of already being the defacto means of storing chemical energy for many applications.
If not cars, why not use hydrogen to power rail trains and go back to steam engines and make them hydrogen hybrids?!
I never got what’s the appeal of hydrogen. Its hard to store, inefficient to produce, transport and take energy out of it and extremely explosive. Why investing so much on it? Replacing batteries?
The appeal is to oil industry to put people’s attention elsewhere instead of focusing on batteries. It is poised to solve the long refueling time for BEV (and that’s not a great issue for the majority of BEV usage anyway).
So people think hydrogen is just around the corner, so they don’t get a BEV and keep their ICE vehicles while they wait to turn the corner…
Meantime the oil companies keep making hydrogen the way they’ve always been doing – from natural gas (sometimes oil or even coal).
Most of it goes to making ammonia / fertiliser / Haber–Bosch and all that. I’ve nothing against finding better ways to produce hydrogen, but the idea of using it as a fuel is rather dumb.
As for vehicles, the “range anxiety” FUD is working leading to more people buying hybrids rather than EVs.
Ammonia as storage.
Why bother when we have EVs. Use the ammonia for fertiliser.
That is just plain BS. For cars i don’t see hydrogen to make much sense, but for bigger machines, trucks and such, it can. Also for housing, which seems to be the point in this article anyways, etc.
Like personally, living so up north, i don’t see solar panels benefitting me, until i can store the energy during summer for use in the winter. Now there are limitations in all techs to store that energy, but i need it to be affortable enough for me to install the solar system, have it produce enough energy to store and to be able to store that energy. Obviously i’d rather it to be safe (btw there was a local study of how 90% of solar panel installations are faulty. Note that not all faults are dangerous like setting the building on fire, but still), affordable, long lasting and environmently safe, safely disposable etc. If this helps to make it possible, then the better, don’t you think?
There are so many other problems with BEV, which you conveniently ignore in your conspiracy theory. Just because you are in one cult, does not mean everyone else are in another opposing cult.
Nobody is in the real world anymore, we long ago all moved into opposing cults. That is the whole character of the 21st century
As you start with BS, then your comments are the same.
Wow, such an eloquent reply and so much substance. You must be proud. So not BS at all.
Solar still benefits you because transmission lines exists. We don’t build oil refineries all over the place, we build pipelines, same idea.
I was of the impression that we’ll over 100 years ago ,Henry Ford developed a hydrogen powered car,(saw it at the Henry Ford museum),and it split the elements in a specific compression engine,does anyone else no history?
And we tried that again in the 70’s (oil crisis and all that).
Aside from the usual hassle about hydrogen being a major PITA to deal with, hydrogen burning engines spat out a lot of nitric oxides and given this was also the era of “acid rain” the idea was shelved.
It’s probably due to be re-invented.
The appeal is that some weird spooky rich people continue to pump an enormous amount of money into pushing it on everybody, same as most idiotic things in the world today
Is not any of this! Renewable energy like wind and solar can be stored in large quantity, even if less efficient than other methods ! Batteries are a short term solution, for immediate use, but the process described is long term use in a chip way for storage purposes!
Same way that moving to synthetic fuels (which can be carbon netural) doesn’t help anyone dig stuff out of the ground and make you have to buy everything over again when you could just carry on with the car you have burning green fuel which has been possible since the 1930s but not profitable enough for anyone to continue research at large scale.
Because it hasn’t got any carbon in it, and it’s an inescapable foundational part of all chemistry. If you want energy out of some kind of biomatter, whether recently grown or fossil, then if you’re not getting the energy from the carbon you’re getting it from the hydrogen. Plus, while they aren’t good enough for me to love the idea of using electrolysis and fuel cells as if they were batteries, the hydrogen fuel cells are still better developed than fuel cells for other things. It’s also a bit weird to call it explosive, because while you can get a shockwave at certain ratios, it’s not very strong, just fast, and it’s busy floating upwards the whole time. And most of the time it’s deflagration like in a car’s engine.
Now if you mean specifically storing hydrogen as a gas, I don’t think that’s currently reasonable and I think the round trip efficiency needs to be better for electrolysis to work. But the processes that turn methane into carbon powder and hydrogen are alright, even if the better value product is ammonia in that case, which is just as carbon-free. It’s entirely possible that someone comes up with a viable option for producing hydrogen on demand by stealing it from hydrocarbons or something, without burning the carbon portion, and that ends up being useful. Or something like this with metals, but I don’t think this particular one is very good; they need just as much hydrogen as input for their storage.
This needs voids in the pile to work. How many charge/discharge cycles before the pile is just an impenetrable brick of rust at the bottom of the container? You might be able ($$$) to carefully craft the pile from iron balls that maintain the voids but just dumping a bunch of iron ore into a steel shell won’t stay operational for long.
Considering this gets charged in summer with surplus solarpower to be discharged in winter, I don’t know if this is really the biggest issue.
Yeah and the volumetric efficiency would be lousy. Article says 50% energy recovery, with plans to try to recover that waste heat. I bet that figure’s not counting the heat required to keep these tanks from freezing and cracking open in the winter
Why would they? In the tanks doesn’t contain water. It’s only there when it’s charging (to convert rust into shiny iron) and discharging (to convert shiny iron to rust). But, as usual, the lab efficiency is theoretical.
Is the electricity 2x more expensive in winter ? If not, that doesn’t make any economical sense. If yes, is taking this huge space to store iron the best use of the space (compared to, wood or food)? In their study, they said it would required 1 sq. meter per Swiss citizen to cancel their winter electricity consumption, but I doubt it’s the case.
Oh look, it’s this https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/ scam, I mean world-changing technology again.
We already have a crap energy storage based on iron, it’s called a nickel-iron battery. By crap I mean only 50% efficient and the self-discharge is horrendous, but on the plus side easily lasts 50 years and is pretty safe. Been around forever, Thomas Edison built EVs with them.
Still better than this bollocks.
Springer press news: No can do, Bob et al.
So given this is 60% efficient (as per the article), and doesn’t appear to have any self discharge, it’s massively better than iron-nickel batteries.
the NiFe battery takes in and releases electricity directly, where does the hydrogen come from and what’s it used for? The conversion losses add up…
It’d be about max 50% overall at scale (not this scale, because thermal loss percentages drop with size), based on typical electrolysis/fuel cell with heat recapture and numbers in the article.
The advantages here are the low cost/extremely high overall volumetric energy density: the scaled-up numbers they note would be ~1.6 MWh/m^3, which is about 30x higher than the volumetric energy density of lithium-ion batteries.
There’s no hydrogen, it’s just a normal rechargeable battery.
I need to make a system like this and find out how much hydrogen can be stored and how many cycles can I manage to get out the system ! Definitely a project worth to try!
The 60% figure comes from the press release and seems to refer to H2 generation generally. Authors say it took their prototype 424 kWh heating to release 237 kWh hydrogen (supp info p. 43). It took 1408 kWh to store it beforehand. This excludes H2 generation and utilization.
They claim theoretical eff could be 78%.
It does have self-discharge. After smelting the rust back into iron, you need to keep that iron hot for when you pour the water over it to get hydrogen.
And 60% efficient, lol. More like 6%.
This is a seriously stupid idea,
I can see that this could have some advantages.
It will not deplete on its own, so good for seasonal storage.
How much do we need?
Let’s estimate: 1kWh electricity (1.6kWh chemically) stored as hydrogen is 42g of hydrogen. Assume FeO, so you will need one Fe for every H2 released. Atomic mass/2 results in 28*42g = 1.2kg of iron. And about 650g of water.
That sounds rather good, LiIon is around 0.2-0.3 kWh per kg.
At <100€ per tonne of iron, that should be cheap. (if that really works with non pure stuff)
Now we need to get the hydrogen back out. I read that you might need to heat the iron to 1000deg C. 450kj or 0.2 kWh
And turn 0.65g of water into steam. I don’t know the temperatures, but I found 1555kJ or about 0.45 kWh (ouch, here goes the efficiency!)
Next is Capex. Currently, nobody wants to pay for an electrolysis plant that operatures only intermittently. But this would only make sense for charging with excess electricity, and keep it powered off half the year + at night. Feasible?
How many charge cycles? Maintenance?
Maybe someone can correct my numbers…
Maybe you meant 0.65 kg of water.
The biggest concern with this story is they knew about that reaction decades or centuries ago.
You missed the energy needed to convert the FeO to Fe, which is about a million joules per kg / 0.25kWh.
You also need to get that initial hydrogen to pull out the oxygen from somewhere.
There is a way to increase the efficiency of electrolysis (at scale) by using ultrasound on the plates, the extra mechanical energy forces smaller bubbles to form, be releases from the plates, and move away from the plate freeing up area faster that can be used to create more bubbles faster. The electrolysis cell does draw slightly more current at the same voltage, but the overall effect is a slightly higher efficiency (I can not remember the exact number, do a search on “electrolysis ultrasound” in your search engine of choice).
I kind of wonder could this effect be used on the storage tanks to generate more hydrogen faster. I do think that it would decrease efficiency a bit, but having the option to increase the peak power output per hour from the storage tank could be a useful feature
Hydrogen isn’t a “green” alternative. Hydrogen requires substantially more energy to create, store, transport and utilize than it produces. A hydrogen car consumes 3 times more than a standard EV. It will always be more environmentally friendly to use battery operated EVs over Hydrogen operated EVs. This is just a way to keep ppl hooked on fueling stations and oil companies (who have a multiple billion dollar interest in hydrogen). The only potential for hydrogen as a fuel is in fusion and that is a still far away.
I’m always amused that people forget “hydrogen” cars are electric.
EV: Solar –> power line —> car battery –> motor.
H2: Solar –> electrolysis –> compress –> transport –> fuel tank –> car fuel tank –> fuel cell –> motor.
Gosh, I wonder which is more efficient and far less hassle.
Best comment so far.
Not true, there’s research on H2 combustion engines
Yeah, for the past 100 years. What does that tell you?
synthetic fuel – since it uses all the existing infrastructure and doesn’t mean mining toxic stuff unlike EV & oil.
You should go and read the article, it’s not about cars. Here’s an excerpt:
“One way to minimise the need for imports and gas-fired power plants in winter is to produce hydrogen from cheap solar power in summer, which could then be converted into electricity in winter.”
People are not “hooked on fueling stations.” They can charge their EV at home from a wall outlet or a dryer outlet.
He said hydrogen cars require fueling stations, not EVs.
Hydrogen is everywhere. That’s the allure.
No. Water is produced but the energy is recovered from the iron by reoxidizing (burning) it again. The water is just a byproduct. Essentially the cycle goes like this: solar –> electricity –> hydrogen. Hydrogen “unburns” the iron ore which takes the oxygen off of the iron ore (rust) and produces –> pure iron and water (hydrogen + oxygen) and heat (which should be recovered). Then steam is later pushed through the pure iron to turn it back to rust (burned iron) and heat (which should be recovered)
I think you’ve replied to the wrong comment, but the hydrogen doesn’t “unburn” the rust, it’s essentially “green steel” smelting.
You melt the rust (over 1300C or whatever). Normally you pump carbon into the molten iron to remove the oxygen but hydrogen works too and out pops your iron.
Now you might think, “wait, doesn’t it take a lot of energy to smelt the rust into iron” but remember we ignore trivial stuff like that because “world changing tech, bro!”
Hydrogen is a disaster as a new green fuel.
Nobody, not a single person has included the costs of compressing the gas for convenient storage and shipping. It outweighs the energy in the fuel lol.
Then there’s the energy in the gas, it’s very low as a single H-H bond.
Working on internal combustion engines using hydrogen, any misfire or problem leaving excess fuel causes an explosion. The engine’s intake manifold, cylinder head blow right off. It’s a totally unforgiving fuel, has the lowest ignition energy of all gases.
Funny the vendor blamed the ECU software for the engines exploding, no it was not a glitch.
A valve running too hot and igniting the fuel on the intake stroke, and boom the intake manifold launches. Good luck with that.
There is one reason and one reason only to waste H2 in ICE instead of fuel cells:
To make exhaust noise to force pedestrians and cyclists into ever larger vehicles.
Two other industries have a co interest in this, oil and fast food.
All three industries are just as sociopathic as the cigarette industry and many many times larger.
The hydrogen, just like other fuels, is directly injected into the cylinders. There is only one explosion on the down stroke of the power cycle.
No-one does hydrogen ICE. They’re all fuel cells.
Yeah someone makes one occasionally, they once again find you can’t just convert a normal engine, the engine ends up being twice the price, small engines don’t work and they produce nitrogen oxides.
“Then there’s the energy in the gas, it’s very low as a single H-H bond.”
Uhh, what? We’re going to be breaking that bond to do something else with the hydrogen atoms, so if it really had very little energy in it, that would be to our benefit. Unfortunately it’s not that weak, just weaker than the O-H bonds we form in water.
So that is where the undersea methane deposits came from.
Where do we get the steam from?
Coal-fired boilers, of course!
Wouldn’t this setup be similar to the sand battery? And might the sand battery be more efficient in the long run?
Basically sort of. You need to keep the iron hot until you need the hydrogen, so yeah, you’re just storing heat.
Since the density of iron is way higher than sand it would work better using that way. Of course a sand battery is far simpler so here we have yet another dumb idea doomed to fail.
I’d probably take that iron and make a gravity battery out of it instead.
The solution to every problem using hydrogen for energy storage (NOT as an “energy source”) boils down to “inject more energy (from somewhere) into the system”. That’s the problem with hydrogen. Nothing to see here.
Oh, I thought they were going to store it in the holes in Swiss cheese.
Why oh why dont we use that solar energy to create ammonia. As I understand it you can pretty much detonate it easilly from its liquid form. During the war it was used as a replacement fuel for public transport with minimal alterations to a standard engine.
Now the drawback was the loss in power however with modern day engineering surely there is a way to make up for this.
Oh, and there are NO carbon dioxide emissions from ammonia.
Ammonia is pretty nasty stuff. You’re better off using that ammonia to make fertiliser, and stick with EVs for transport.
That’s pretty much where all current hydrogen production goes (if you ignore oil refining).
This technology is for a long term storage, months as opposed to days or hours that other technologies provide, such as hydrogen adsorption or conversion to ammonia, or hedrogenation of organic materials
like everyone else here i’m skeptical about hydrogen hype. though i once bought some hydrogenated drinking water because sometimes it’s fun to do the stupid thing. but i’m not clear on something.
why isn’t it used for grid-level storage? if you don’t need to throttle it over quite so wide a range like a car, and you don’t need to transport it, and you don’t care how big it is, and you don’t mind a large stationary facility with all sorts of specialized equipment, isn’t hydrogen pretty much at its best in that situation? why isn’t that good enough to be competitive with gosh darn lithium ion battery farms?
Efficiency, lithium batteries are extremely efficient compared to converting hydrogen to and from other things, and we’ve nearly mined or found and are preparing to mine all the lithium we will ever need for the next 40 years, lithium and the other metals in batteries don’t become useless at the end of the batteries life it’s the separators that allow the flow of electrons that ware out 👍
As far as efficiency goes, lithium batteries are king. If you put 100 units of energy in, you get 95 back, Nothing else comes close.
Hydro is about 70%, lead acid cells maybe 60%. Solar –> hydrogen is 20% on a good day.
The real world of course decides what is “best” after cost, safety, longevity etc are considered.
Hydrogen is a pipe dream because it offers no real advantages over what we already have. All the worlds hydrogen comes from fossil fuels (eg methane), there’s no point using that hydrogen as grid-level storage since we might as well use the methane in a gas power plant. And these days gas power stations are generally used as backup anyway.
Using solar/wind to make hydrogen to then put thru a fuel cell (or generator) to make electricity is a bit silly considering we might as well us that power to charge some lithium batteries instead.
Remember folks the oil industry needs to put doubts in the minds of potential EV buyers so in the wake of Toyota’s Hydrogen failure they need to breath a bit of life back it to the mith that hydrogen will be the next source of fuel for transport 👍
as a question, if you can turn iron ore into iron and water by pumping Hydrogen through it, is this more or less effective that smelting Iron ore into wrought iron?
That’s not how it works. You heat up the iron (say to 500C) and pour water over it. The water splits into hydrogen & oxygen, the oxygen reacts with the iron creating rust, and you store the hydrogen.
Then you smelt the rust giving you back the iron, and repeat. The energy to heat the iron and then later smelt it is somewhat ignored (solar is free!). The idea is to keep the iron hot until it’s needed (like a sand battery) reducing power needs.
It IS an iron smelter. But solar powered so yay.
So one of earths dirtiest industries, the steel industry, extracts iron ore (Iron oxides, rust if you will). Uses coal to create steel. Now some genius want’s to reverse the process and call it environmental?
And, if you use solar to reverse the process. Isn’t that just the process behind green steel extraction?
Yeah, it’s rust –> iron –> rust etc and somehow usable electricity suddenly appears.
Green steel has 2 parts. The first is melting the iron ore with green electricity (solar, wind, hydrogen) rather than fossil fuels, the second is pumping hydrogen rather carbon thru the iron to remove the oxygen thus reducing CO2.
Either would be a nice achievement for steel production but as energy storage you wonder what they’re been smoking.
(Last I heard was methane is split into carbon monoxide & hydrogen, those are then pumped thru the iron to remove the oxygen. The idea is to use only green hydrogen, which of course doesn’t exist.)
My understanding of currently used low pressure storage of hydrogen for fuel cells is we aren’t very far away from having a substrate and tank capable of powering a car sized fuel cells with hydrogen. There are already utility grade hydrogen fuel cell backup power supplies in cell towers all across the world. I think currently it’s some form of molybdenum mixture that’s used in those.
USA is liitle bit far:
https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/08/06/offshore-wind-federal-grant-new-england
Jadoo…Aluminum Hydride powder in their cylinders. Technology was there, but was a bit lackluster.
How about natural hydrogen formed in ultramaffic rocks which are now being developed and researched in countries like Spain and the Philippines?