However, because hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of resources, regional or even local hydrogen production can maximize use of local resources and minimize distribution challenges. There are tradeoffs between centralized and distributed production to consider. Producing hydrogen centrally in large plants cuts production costs but boosts distribution costs. Producing hydrogen at the point of end-use—at fueling stations, for example—cuts distribution costs but increases production costs because of the cost to construct on-site production capabilities.
Government and industry research and development projects are overcoming the barriers to efficient hydrogen distribution. More Hydrogen Publications All Publications. More in this section Hydrogen Production and Distribution Although abundant on earth as an element, hydrogen is almost always found as part of another compound, such as water H 2 O or methane CH 4 , and it must be separated into pure hydrogen H 2 for use in fuel cell electric vehicles.
Production Hydrogen can be produced from diverse, domestic resources, including fossil fuels, biomass, and water electrolysis with electricity.
Several hydrogen production methods are in development: High-Temperature Water Splitting : High temperatures generated by solar concentrators or nuclear reactors drive chemical reactions that split water to produce hydrogen.
Distribution Most hydrogen used in the United States is produced at or close to where it is used—typically at large industrial sites. Currently, hydrogen is distributed through three methods: Pipeline: This is the least-expensive way to deliver large volumes of hydrogen, but the capacity is limited because only about 1, miles of pipelines for hydrogen delivery are currently available in the United States.
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It has become clear in recent years that some kind of zero-carbon, storable, combustible fuel is, if not essential to total decarbonization of the energy system, at the very least extremely helpful. About 95 percent of global hydrogen production is done through steam methane reforming SMR , blasting natural gas with high-temperature, high-pressure steam.
This is an energy-intensive process that requires fossil fuel inputs and leaves behind a waste stream of carbon dioxide, so it is of limited use for decarbonizing the energy system. If electrolysis is run by zero-carbon renewable electricity, the resulting hydrogen is a zero-carbon fuel.
That solves the carbon problem, but there are others. The resulting hydrogen has to be stored, either by compressing it as a gas with big pumps or by weakly bonding it to something else and storing it as a liquid. That gas or liquid will require a distribution infrastructure. Finally, the hydrogen has to be extracted from storage and converted back to energy, either by burning it or putting it through a fuel cell.
By that time, the amount of energy invested in the process exceeds what can be gotten back out by a wide margin. The useful services hydrogen provides cannot compensate for the energy and money it takes to produce and use it. At least not to date. As recently as the late s, most energy experts had written hydrogen off. Two things have changed since then. To address climate change, the world has effectively agreed to decarbonize the energy system entirely within the century. That has triggered intense investigation into the tools needed to build a zero-carbon system.
But large-scale electrification is a daunting task. There are lots and lots of existing applications that run on combustable liquid fuels. In addition to virtually all transportation, think of the millions and millions of buildings across the world heated by oil or natural gas. Much transportation can be electrified, and all those furnaces can theoretically be replaced with electric alternatives like heat pumps, but doing all that in the time remaining to decarbonize is a truly monumental task.
The UK is experimenting with heating homes with hydrogen ; Norway will ban all use of fuel oil for home heating by Also, if variable renewable energy sun and wind is to provide most or all of our energy, we will need some way to store that energy for when the sun and wind are falling short. We will need not just second-by-second or hourly storage which batteries can plausibly provide , but daily, monthly, or yearly storage for which batteries are not well-suited to ensure against longer-term variations in sun and wind.
It sure would be nice if we could store a lot of reserve energy as a stable, liquid fuel. In sum, the need, combined with the innovation, may finally mean that market-viable products are at hand. Johnson is tall, rangy, and blond, an inveterate maker and builder whose eyes light up when he talks engineering.
After attending Seattle Pacific University, he spent the first 10 years of his year career in video compression. But a stint in Norway, working with Innovation Norway on hydrogen energy storage, gave him the hydrogen bug.
He has since become a true believer. It begins with the electrolyzer, which pulls the hydrogen out of the water. Suspended roughly in the center is a small titanium plate coated with a bespoke mix of electrocatalysts optimized to pull hydrogen and oxygen apart. The gases rise off the plate in a continuous stream of bubbles. Johnson boasts that his electrolyzer can produce hydrogen at about three or four times the rate of electrolyzers with similar footprints, using about a third the electrical current.
That represents a stepwise drop in costs. The HHO mix lends intensity to the combustion, allowing the fuel to burn more completely, generating more oomph and less pollution. The ICA system can technically work on any internal combustion engine, but to begin with, HyTech is targeting the dirtiest engines with the fastest return on investment, namely diesel engines — in vehicles like trucks, delivery vans, buses, and forklifts, but also big, stationary diesel generators, which still provide backup and even primary power by the millions across the world.
All those diesel engines produce carcinogenic smoke containing particulate pollution soot and nitrogen oxides NOx , which are hell on human health.
States and cities around the world are cracking down on diesel air pollution. But the diesel particulate filters DPFs that screen out particulates are expensive, a maintenance hassle, and must be replaced frequently. Aerospace firm Airbus believes hydrogen holds more promise for decarbonising planes than batteries because of the energy it can store by weight. By modifying their existing internal combustion engines, they say they could use hydrogen to fuel their planes.
One stumbling block any hydrogen energy revolution faces is storage and transport. Hydrogen molecules are so small they can leak out of containers, meaning pipe networks previously used for methane may have to be upgraded before they are fit for hydrogen.
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