What is Hydrogen Fuel?

on

 

Hydrogen fuel

Hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe and the most abundant, so on paper, hydrogen fuel has a lot going for it. Although it rarely exists on its own on Earth, it can be produced using clean energy to split essentially inexhaustible water molecules, producing only oxygen as a by-product.

However, 96 per cent of hydrogen today is made directly from fossil fuels – mostly natural gas, followed by coal and then oil. This overwhelmingly uses a process known as steam reformation that releases carbon dioxide.

Humanity produces around 70 million tonnes of hydrogen each year, mainly for use in making ammonia fertiliser and chemicals such as methanol, and to remove impurities during oil refining. Proponents of using hydrogen as a clean fuel think it could soon also play a vital role in decarbonising other sectors, including lorries, aviation, and heavy industry.

Hydrogen acts as a chemical energy carrier, rather like oil or gas, that can be piped or transported to where it is needed. It stores three times as much energy per unit of mass as conventional petrol, and when it “burns” in air – releasing that stored energy – it simply combines with oxygen to produce water again.

Different types of hydrogen production are labelled by colour. “Grey” hydrogen is made from fossil fuels using steam reformation. It costs about $1 a kilogram. “Blue” hydrogen also uses fossil fuels but captures and stores the CO2. Blue is about $2 per kilogram at the cheapest. Finally, there is “green” hydrogen, produced by water electrolysis running off renewable energy. For the most part, this costs upwards of $4 a kilogram.

There is a live debate in hydrogen technology over which production methods will win out. Green is the lowest carbon approach, because blue typically captures 85 to 90 per cent of the CO2 at best. While 10-15 per cent of lost CO2 emissions may not sound like a lot, it could have significant climate change ramifications if production is scaled up. Advocates of blue hydrogen contend it will play a key role because it is so much cheaper than green hydrogen.



Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/definition/hydrogen-fuel/#ixzz6xl7CVx8N

Comments

Post a Comment

Trending Now

Image

'Ring of fire' Solar Eclipse 2021

  Northern and eastern sections of North America will experience a weird and dramatic event next Thursday (June 10).  A partial  solar eclipse  will be visible, and for many, it will more or less coincide with sunrise. Only for places north of a line running roughly from Churchill, Manitoba, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, will the entire eclipse be visible from start to finish after the sun rises. Elsewhere, depending on where you are, if your sky is clear toward the east-northeast, the rising sun will appear slightly dented, deeply crescent shaped, or even ring shaped.  Across a swath of central and eastern Canada — encompassing the provinces of western and northern Ontario and a slice of northwest Quebec, as well as eastern Nunavut, Canada's newest territory — viewers living within a path averaging about 390 miles (630 kilometers) wide will have a front-row seat to witness the rare and exciting spectacle of an annular or  "ring of fire" solar eclipse .  Because the moon will
Image

It takes a wood to raise a tree

  Growing up in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, I often grieved that their beauty — sky-high Douglas firs, rustling alders, sword ferns draped across the slopes — was born of a brutal battle for light, water and nutrients. So I thought. In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard made the cover of  Nature  with the discovery of a subterranean lace of tree roots and fungal filaments, or hyphae, in British Columbia ( S. Simard  et al. Nature   388 , 579–582; 1997 ). It was “a network as brilliant as a Persian rug”, she recalls in her memoir  Finding the Mother Tree  — a network through which multiple tree species were exchanging carbon. The trees were cooperating. The discovery of this fungal network, or ‘wood wide web’, as it came to be known, upended a dominant scientific narrative — that competition is the primary force shaping forests. Forest ecology is instead a much more nuanced dance, in which species sometimes fight and sometimes get along. This calls into question the way that m