A Light-powered Catalyst Could Be Key For Hydrogen Economy (phys.org) 80
"Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy," the University announced this week.
"Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel...." The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth's atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn't require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs....
"This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants," said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.
"Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel...." The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth's atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn't require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs....
"This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants," said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.
Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This is only a solution to a limited set of cases where batteries or direct grid connections are not possible:
https://www.ammoniaenergy.org/... [ammoniaenergy.org]
At the outset, we must acknowledge the paper's title: "Ammonia as a Renewable Energy Transportation Media." The authors are quite clear that, relative to making ammonia, using renewable electricity directly "would clearly be far more efficient" given the distribution losses of only "less than 10%" in most electrical grids. CSIRO makes a similar case for directly charging electric vehicles because "losses during charging ... are typically significantly less than 20%."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Solution for Global Warning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad that producing ammonia in the first place releases plenty of greenhouse gases ...
Yup. Ammonia is mostly made (inefficiently) from methane.
We currently have a big ammonia shortage since Ukraine and Russia were major exporters.
Manufacturing fertilizer from fuel and then burning the fertilizer makes little sense.
The "hydrogen economy" was FUD spread by GWB and others to delay BEVs. That battle is over. The fossil fuel industry lost.
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. Ethanol (as produced in the US from corn) is a horribly inefficient fuel and a waste of time and resources- just like hydrogen.
Pork pork spam and pork (Score:2)
It's main purpose (ethanol from corn) is the production of pork - specifically pork-barrel politics for farmers votes.
Re: (Score:2)
The technology is being commercialized. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/syzygy-plasmonics-raises-76-million-series-c-led-by-carbon-direct-capital-to-accelerate-delivery-of-low-carbon-hydrogen-technology-301679977.html
Full disclosure, I build reactors for Syzygy.
Re: (Score:1)
Just look at the UK. Their housing stock is antiquated and can't even deal with current climate conditions any more. Drafty, poorly insulated, overheats in summer and freezes in winter. One "solution" is to add some hydrogen to the natural gas mix - but this requires digging up the piping, much of it old and already decrepit, that will leak like a sie
Re: (Score:1)
Shhhh! You're ruining the narrative.
I've got a competing idea, making hydrogen from unicorn farts. There's only one small issue which I'm sure we'll resolve.
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:4, Interesting)
This could solve aircraft issues without reverting back to noisy and slow prop planes. It could also solve the issue of backup power. And dont you dare suggest batteries for backup power, lest you out your lack of engineering knowledge of the situation to the world. Diesel generators solve the power demand when power goes out for more than a few hours. Like hospitals and data centers.
A real example: In 2020 some fanatic blew up an RV near ATT in nashville. Because they switched off diesel to natural gas for ther generators, and the explosion forced a shutoff of natural gas for several city blocks; the entire 4 state region was completely without cell service. As far north as indiana suffered from a disruption of power. A disruption that, had they kept their diesel generators, would have been avoided.
Backup generators are way more critical than you realize. Hydrogen is going to be the only green option for this if we stop making diesel or mining natural gas. Try not to poo poo discoveries that help solve the aircraft and backup generator issues just because you feel they threaten your solar panel investments. Free solar is always going to be cheaper than transporting ammonia. But the portability and storage of ammonia is significant for some applications.
Bloodpressure? (Score:2)
OP wrote
> This is only a solution to a limited set of cases where batteries or direct grid connections are not possible
You wrote:
> You obviously never worked anywhere critical where diesel generator backups are needed.
> Backup generators are way more critical than you realize.
You are building a straw man, the influence of backup generators on climate change is completely irrelevant, it’s immeasurable.
Re: (Score:2)
Backup generators are a minuscule rounding error when it comes to climate concerns and the production of ammonia for use in backup generators would actually cause _more_ climate concerns, not fewer.
> And dont you dare suggest batteries for backup power, lest you out your lack of engineering knowledge of the situation to the world. Diesel generators solve the power demand when power goes out for more than a few hours. Like hospitals and data centers.
You can scale a battery bank to last as long as you want
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are going to need something to run these generators on
I have a backup generator that normally runs on natural gas,
but any natgas generator can run on propane just as well.
There is no shortage of propane.
Re: (Score:2)
If we're not talking about a lot of ammonia that needs to be generated (presuming that if it's "rounding error" for climate change we're not talking about massive amounts of fuel used annually for this) then this seems like a potentially useful way to build backup generators that burn ammonia
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Solution for Global Warning? (Score:5, Informative)
20% of the worlds energy is used by the Haber Process, making me think that this is just a bad way to waste power.
I think it's really cool, but I don't see how it is a better solution than just using methane directly.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey, I made ammonia without the haber process when I was in the service. I put my sweaty workout clothes in the dirty clothes bag at the end of my bunk, and by the end of the week, opened that puppy up and ammonia, no mistaking it. Harness that...
Re: (Score:1)
Funny thing, I was thinking about getting ammonia from piss, and/or nitrogen-fixing plant cycles (legumes).
Re:Solution for Global Warning? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was thinking about getting ammonia from piss
That's where it came from before the Haber process [wikipedia.org] in 1905.
WW1 was a horrific war because armies could manufacture all the nitrates they wanted rather than harvesting seepage from manure piles.
Re: (Score:3)
And storage would be a problem. Ammonia is both caustic and hazardous in its concentrated form. In many countries it is classified as an extremely hazardous substance, and is subject to strict reporting requirements by facilities which produce, store, or use it in significant quantities.
Hazardous Substances and reporting quantities [ecfr.gov]
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Dear me, if only there was another way to make ammonia!
This is a solution for the case where you have lots of electrical energy but you need a compact way of storing it.
Re: (Score:3)
20% of the worlds energy is used by the Haber Process, making me think that this is just a bad way to waste power.
So 20% of the worlds energy production is used to create Ammonia?
Something makes no sense here ...
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Whats your plan for backup generators for hospitals and data centers?
Still use diesel?
No, use propane. Much cleaner burning.
Re: (Score:2)
I would simply use Diesel, to piss him off and his stupid attitude ...
Fertilizer production (Score:3)
20% of the worlds energy is used by the Haber Process, making me think that this is just a bad way to waste power.
So 20% of the worlds energy production is used to create Ammonia?
Something makes no sense here ...
The actual value is 5%. Worldwide, about 5% of the world's energy production goes into making ammonia.
One or two of the percents comes from the natural gas feedstock, reformed with steam to make hydrogen. The rest goes into the Haber process, which is a well known energy hog. About half a million joules of energy is used to make 1 mole of ammonia.
Yes, that's the correct number: half a million joules of energy to make 1 mole of ammonia.
Ammonia is used worldwide as fertilizer. There are no geologic deposits,
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that's the correct number: half a million joules of energy to make 1 mole of ammonia.
Makes no sense.
Converting nitrogen into ammonia is an exothermic reaction.
If that was true, it would not cost energy to make it, but you would yield free energy when making it.
If you could figure out how to do it more easily than the Haber process, it would reduce the world energy consumption and net you a Nobel prize.
Not sure if that makes any sense regarding the rest of your post.
Re: Solution for Global Warning? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is what I'm talking about! Man has always been able to engineer their way out of calamitous conditions. Or at least greatly mitigate their effects.
The hardest part of a solution for global warming is getting it to all dissolve.
Interesting by useless (Score:3)
"This reaction, which is driven with light-emitting diodes, may be competitive with thermal catalysts used in this hydrogen carrier system."
The two interesting words there are "competitive", which usually is a euphemism for "costs more than the competition, but not much more" and "may" which is a euphemism for "it's not YET, but hey, with more funding..."
Since Hydrogen as a storage system absolutely doesn't make sense (takes a lot of energy to make, produces less usable energy in the whole process than simple battery storage), this would only really be of interests to system which really want to use hydrogen -- essentially smelting systems.
But it sounds like thermal is a better way to go on an energy basis (for NOW/quite some time at least) based on the above weasel words.
Maybe some form of solar method could be useful here, but I think smelting plants are 24x7, so what would you do at night? Buy/run two systems? Thermal at night, and solar during the day?
Re: (Score:3)
"Michael Liebreich" is a good name to search for when you want a reasonable estimation of what Hydrogen is good for an what it's not.
Hydrogen propganda (Score:2)
Hydrogen is not "clean burning fuel"... it's the result of fossil fuel production.
Please don't astroturf for the fossil fuel industry here.
Re: (Score:1)
Hydrogen is not "clean burning fuel"... it's the result of fossil fuel production.
I think you forgot to say "usually" or "typically" before "the result of fossil fuel production."
There are green ways to make hydrogen. But making it from fossil fuels is usually "cheaper" if you don't count the environmental impact.
Re:Hydrogen propganda (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen is not "clean burning fuel"... it's the result of fossil fuel production.
Please don't astroturf for the fossil fuel industry here.
There are many types of hydrogen production. Who are you astroturfing for by suggesting they are all the same?
https://www.nationalgrid.com/s... [nationalgrid.com]
And in any case, even H2 produced with fossil fuels will help develop infrastructure that can then be easily replaced with other forms in the future. Like natural gas it is a bridge to a suite of alternative energy solutions that are not going to happen overnight.
Re: (Score:3)
There are many types of hydrogen production.
Yes, but the production processes fall into two categories:
1. Filthy.
2. Ridiculously inefficient and expensive.
Re: (Score:3)
Or you can just complain. Nobody cares.
Re: (Score:2)
He probably isn't an astroturfer. He's just one of the typical humans who can't think about changing more than one thing at a time.
Isn't ammonia expensive to produce energy wise? (Score:5, Interesting)
This feels like taking sugar and extracting hydrogen from it. Yeah, you can do that, but you're wasting a lot of the energy held in the original bonds.
I'd rather figure out a way to turn explosives into little controlled explosions to cause thrust. Then we can toss a block of C4 into our vehicle and it'll dilute, move, and explode the fuel as needed.
Really, figuring out how to NOT use energy is the biggest tool for us. Changing how we waste tons of energy moving everything around (grow something in South America, then ship it to Thailand to package, then ship it to the US for sale) would be the best solution in the end.
Or just not creating all the crap nobody really wants or cares about. Start making effective, custom solutions. Figure out how to fairly and efficiently move items that aren't useful (pants that won't fit me) to the people who want it (someone who just lost weight, or ripped their old pants). Why isn't there a way to measure size, color, thickness, etc of products? I mean a place I could go to, not "buy this huge 3D scanner".
Anyway, yep...you found a way to waste the energy stored in ammonia to get hydrogen gas from it. Congrats.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh it's much worse, most ammonia found on earth is the product of the Haber-Bosch process, which uses N2 from the air, and a hydrogen source, usually natural gas. So why not skip a few steps and get hydrogen from natural gas? Not too mention your C4 idea will require the manufacture of nitric acid, which requires? You guessed it, ammonia!
Really, figuring o
Re: (Score:2)
So why not skip a few steps and get hydrogen from natural gas?
Transport and storage. The idea is to make ammonia, which is energy dense and doesn't require high pressure storage, then convert it to hydrogen at the point of use.
This doesn't make hydrogen an effective approach to energy transport and use: there are still too many inefficiencies in the various transformations for it to be more efficient than the alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
There is much more infrastructure to move around natural gas (i.e. mostly methane) than ammonia.
Methane energy density per kg is about 2.5 higher than ammonia. The only problem with methane is that it requires -162 C to keep liquid while ammonia requires only -34 C. Ammonia si much worse for your health than methane in gaseous form. Methane is dangerous in the liquid form mostly due to low temperature. Ammonia is dangerous in the liquid form since it is extremely hydrophilic. It will pull water out of your
Re: (Score:2)
There are many colors of hydrogen, a rainbow of them, depending on how it's made.
We know of blue hydrogen (hydrogen derived from fossil fuels), green hydrogen, but there are other colors as well to describe where the hydrogen originates, including hydrogen that's just... there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I am not sure what your point is, because I was discussing efficiency, not availability.
Referring to the video, where he talks about "Gold Hydrogen", I will simply quote the video at about 5:13: "Gold Hydrogen is very rare".
Re: (Score:2)
we can toss a block of C4 into our vehicle
C4 is primarily hexogen, also known as RDX [wikipedia.org].
Hexogen is relatively expensive and energy-intensive to manufacture.
A hundred kg in every car would destroy a city in a chain reaction the first time there was a garage fire.
Using it as fuel makes no sense.
Hexogen trivia: Paraffin-stabilized RDX is used to implode the plutonium cores in nuclear weapons, including "Fat Man", the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, no. C4 is an extremely stable explosive, and in a fire, it just burns.
You need to actually use a blasting cap ti set it off.
Explosives are tricky business, and stable explosives are desired because they don't have a tendency of going off.
Unstable explosives like TNT can go off just by looking at it funny - even worse, they decompose making the whole thing able to go off with an unfortunate bum
Re: (Score:1)
Alert! Alert! Nationalist / Protectionist Bullshit Detected!
Red Flags Detected:
1 - Simple solution to complex problem
2 - Imaginary inefficiencies
3 - Assumes non-existent technology
4 - Assumes unrealistic gains
5 - Blames ordinary consumers for problems caused by multinational corporations
[more]
Re: (Score:1)
Little controlled explosions to cause thrust. Oh, the internal combustion engine.
Nope. (Score:1)
And where does the ammonia come from? (Score:2)
Natural gas, using the Haber process! To make hydrogen, you need to pump lots of NH4 ;)
100% efficiency is not enough. (Score:1)
Re:100% efficiency is not enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the whole point of this story is that they get density by storing the hydrogen in anhydrous ammonia.
That solves the problem of "Imagine driving the car where 3/4 of the space is the fuel tank" by replacing it with "Imagine driving the car where the fuel tank is a chemical weapon".
Re: (Score:1)
You can buy large tanks of ammonia at your local farm store. It's the most common fertilizer on the planet. You probably need to raise your standards for "chemical weapon" quite a bit.
Re: (Score:2)
That being said I would not qualify ammonia as a chemical weapon either.
Re: (Score:2)
No. Anhydrous ammonia is used for fertilizer, as a brief Google search would have told you. The first hit: https://www.mda.state.mn.us/pe... [state.mn.us]
You can get hydrous ammonia at the grocery store. At least where I live, most people have a bottle under their sink for cleaning.
Anhydrous ammonia is mildly dangerous, not really much more so than gasoline, although in somewhat different ways.
Re: (Score:2)
Hydrogen just doesn't hold enough energy/density. It doesn't matter if the efficiency is 100%. Imagine driving the car where 3/4 of the space is the fuel tank. That's how much hydrogen you need to be equivalent to EV and gas. And that's without any equipment to contain it.
Toyota Mirai has a range of 312 miles and seems to be a perfectly normal car, including the "equipment to contain it".
https://www.toyota.com/mirai/ [toyota.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Of course Toyota will do their best to make it work, they've already long passed the "sunk costs" phase with hydrogen and can't go back without losing face.
Lots of large transport truck manufacturers are moving toward hydrogen vehicles too. As those become more popular they will help build out the distribution infrastructure that can be taken advantage of by cars and other equipment as well.
Battery fanbois love to hate on Toyota, but I suspect none of the are nearly as smart. After near 25 years of building the Prius, BEVs will be easy. Good on them for not getting tunnel vision and exploring the alternatives as well.
This is actually about storage and transport (Score:4, Insightful)
Storing and transporting hydrogen is expensive, difficult and dangerous. Storing ammonia is a lot better. Thing pf powering ships, for example. Of course this only makes sense if the ammonia is _not_ produced using the Haber-Bosch process, but something that does not use fossil fuels as input. I believe we have had several stories about that here already.
Re: (Score:2)
It is not illegal to burn vegetable oil in a tractor.
Farmers are generally exempt from fuel taxes since their machinery is not driving on public roads.
Untaxed fuel is dyed [wikipedia.org] to distinguish it from "normal" fuel.
It's a serious crime to drive on public roads with "purple gas" (which is actually red).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently making and transporting methane is a lot more difficult than making ammonia, at least making it with renewable energy and no fossiles involved. One point may be that ammonia liquifies at -33C, while natural gas needs -161C. That probably means you can store ammonia relatively easy in liquid form, while it is a lot harder for natural gas. Specific heat seems to be about the same for both, which means if you start at 20C, you need to cool off and (pump in again later) about 4 times the heat for met
Solar (Score:2)
Any process you can power electrically can be light-powered.
An improvement, I guess (Score:5, Interesting)
While that sounds like a good thing I remain skeptical. What are the end to end losses like for clean ammonia production? What is the cost per km when used for transport or $/kWh for power generation? In my case I have a BEV charged at home for free from solar panels. It is hard to compete with free. For land transport it is hard see anything betting overhead electric power for trains and batteries for road vehicles. Maybe this would make EV long aircraft and ships viable?
Great idea, and there are other paths... (Score:2)
Something I had run across recently is a number of other more advanced options for hydrogen generation - including using nuclear power either to power electrolysis, or also using high temperature reactors [youtube.com] to create hydrogen more directly.
Ammonia isn't a sustainable substance at all =/ (Score:2)
Just read the description how ammonia is artificially made :
Natural gas molecules are reduced to carbon and hydrogen.
The hydrogen is then purified and reacted with nitrogen to produce ammonia.
So
Re: (Score:2)
The usual disconnected silliness (Score:3)
First we make ammonia. I rely on Wikipedia for how this is currently done:
"A typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas, liquified petroleum gas, or petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen. The method for producing hydrogen from hydrocarbons is known as steam reforming.[6] The hydrogen is then combined with nitrogen to produce ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process."
Later on we find that about 30% of world ammonia is made by China out of coal. One of China's many great contributions to tackling global warming.
OK, so for two thirds of ammonia production we produce hydrogen from gas or oil, then we use the hydrogen to make ammonia...
For the rest we use coal to make it. Then what?
Now we are going to extract the hydrogen, which two thirds of the time we just put into the ammonia. The piece describes a cheap possible process for doing this.
This is supposed to have some kind of effect on global warming, by reducing CO2 emissions. Its supposed to do this by making the hydrogen in the ammonia easier to transport. Then you do the extraction process nearer to the point of use than its generation. So the process is, make hydrogen, put it into ammonia, move the ammonia to where you need the hydrogen, then extract and use the hydrogen.
If we were all on the Titanic after she had met the iceberg, these guys would be trying to make the crew listen to an exciting discovery they had made, to do with using a different kind of gas in the lifebelts, if only such a gas was available and could be got into the lifebelts.
The correct response to these stupidities is to require the authors specify just what has to be done, on what scale globally, which countries have to do how much of it, how much reduction in emissions the program would deliver, and how much lessening of warming would result.
Ok... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Funding will continue on inefficient methods of storing energy as long as they involve fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, more and more people will buy EVs, just to peeve the oil companies.
Maybe... (Score:2)
People spend a lot of time trying to make the flow one-way. If ammonia can be distributed through existing major pipelines then that's logical but if not, choose an easier-to-handle carrier, even if it means collecting recyclable waste at every refueling. Trucks ships, and trains might as well carry stuff back to factories. Only pipelines are one-way distribution systems.