MIT design would harness 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel
MIT design would harness 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel
MIT engineers designed a system that can efficiently produce “solar thermochemical hydrogen.” It harnesses the sun’s heat to split water and generate hydrogen — a clean fuel that emits no greenhouse gas emissions.
The impact of real, clean, cheap hydrogen would be substantial. I hope they can scale this quickly and it doesn’t remain vaporware like everything else hydrogen related.
Storing hydrogen is a bitch. It readily ionizes and the H+ ion is just a single proton. It gets inside metal lattices easily, finds a stray atom to combine there and boom - suddenly it's 100 times the size it was. That's what's called hydrogen pitting.
So right now, if hydrogen storage was good and cheap, we could use hydrogen as a battery for supply regulated energy sources (solar, wind) and burn it in a turbine to generate electricity and water. You don't even need the storage to be mobile or miniaturized for that. And even that isn't a reality.
So I'll perk up when news of a cheap reliable hydrogen storage technology comes around.
Personally, I think methanation may be promising, since you can use the existing infrastructure.
Just leave it as water, then drop small pellets of lithium in as necessary. Sodium works, too, and is more abundant/available than lithium, but maybe tougher to control safely. (The rest of that group is just too reactive, unless you can find a way to use the exothermic reaction for something other than an uncontrolled fire or even explosion.)
Mostly kidding, but only because I can't imagine smarter people than I haven't ruled it out for very good reasons. And while I'm on the topic, running a condenser on the exhaust will capture the water vapour, which is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas.
Hmmm. I've seen a few references to Toyota supposedly having a prototype system for generating hydrogen from water on board cars. I've dismissed that as just the latest water powered flavour of the month. You don't suppose...
Hydrogen is a nightmare to store and requires a lot of energy to compress. If you try to store it in a metal container, it will seap through the metal, turn the metal brittle, and explode it. Storage is the reason we aren't all using it right now