In a diary published last week that received 762 recs and 572 comments, there was a great deal of excitement about a supposed "breakthrough" by MIT chemistry professor, Daniel Nocera, that according to the MIT press release "could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source..."
This hyperbole was picked up by both blogs and the Traditional Media, which then ran headlines like Sunny Forecast For Fuel Cells, MIT develops solar storage "nirvana": energy crisis solved? and Solar Energy, All Night Long. It didn't help that Nocera himself is responsible for the "Nirvana" quote.
The fact is that Nocera's discovery has been way overblown. While it does represent an improvement in the process of making hydrogen fuel, it is not a miracle cure.
Unfortunately, far too many people, perhaps because they find the problems overwhelming, have decided to avoid thinking seriously about the looming catastrophe posed by Climaticide and the energy crisis, preferring instead a faith-based approach rooted in fantasy and silver-bullet thinking, which in this case are synonymous with "hydrogen". The media with it's love of headline blaring "breakthroughs" and "major discoveries", and its unwillingness to do serious research before publishing, only makes the situation worse.
As Dr. Joseph Romm, former head of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, writes, the real question in all of this is:
...who needs a major step towards hydrogen?
Romm's recent post at his blog, Climate Progress, is must reading for anyone interested in the sober truth about the significance of Nocera's new electrolysis technique. (I also recommend that anyone interested in hydrogen read Romm's excellent book on the topic: The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Planet.
For most people hydrogen is a magic word, that implies easy, unlimited, clean fuel. The reality is that hydrogen is far from easy. In fact, easier, more efficient alternatives are already commercially available, such as Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) also known as solar thermal power. Hydrogen is simply unnecessary. Check out these two links, also by Romm, here and here.
People are often confused about what hydrogen is and what it is not. Hydrogen is NOT a source of energy, rather it is a carrier of energy, like electricity. Since hydrogen does not exist on the earth naturally as a gas, it must be extracted from some other substance such as water via electrolysis, before it can be used to store energy. It is very important to remember that it takes energy to extract hydrogen. Keep that in mind as we look at how hydrogen is extracted and then recombined, in an electrochemical process in a fuel cell, with oxygen to release electricity.
According to Wikipedia:
Electrolysis of water is the decomposition of water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen gas (H2) due to an electric current being passed through the water. [emphasis--JR]
This was first done around 1800 by William Nicholsonand Anthony Carlisle. Yet, many of the news reports talk about the invention of a method to separate oxygen and hydrogen from water as if this were something never done before. In reality, students have been doing this forever at their middle- and high-school science fairs. This should give you some sense of how relatively simple the basic process is. (I have an engineer friend who did just such an experiment in middle school? What did he learn? That it took a lot of energy input to get a small amount of energy output.)
Once one has separated the hydrogen atoms (which have only a single proton) from the oxygen atoms, the hydrogen can be introduced into a fuel cell, which, again according to Wikipedia, is:
...an electrochemical conversion device. It produces electricity from fuel (on the anode side) and an oxidant (on the cathode side), which react in the presence of an electrolyte. The reactants flow into the cell, and the reaction products flow out of it, while the electrolyte remains within it. Fuel cells can operate virtually continuously as long as the necessary flows are maintained.
There are many kinds of fuel cells, but the kind that Nocera is talking about is a PEM fuel cell.
Nocera's discovery has to do with the electrolysis part of this process. If he is correct, he has found a way to more cheaply perform the electrolysis of water into oxygen by using a catalyst of cobalt and phosphate instead of platinum which is very expensive. Cobalt costs $2.25 an ounce and phosphate $.05 an ounce while platinum costs $1,700 to $2,000 an ounce. However:
Another catalyst generates the hydrogen. And none of the reports tell us anything about a "breakthrough" in this regard.
Platinum is also required for electricity generation in the fuel cell, but according to Scientific American:
Chemist Bjorn Winther-Jensen of Monash University in Australia and his colleagues addressed that problem by developing new electrodes for fuel cells made from a special conducting polymer, that costs around $57 per counce.
All of these financial savings are theoretical at this point, and there are still a number of technological issues to be worked out, including the fact the the oxygen making process is too slow until someone invents a different electrode but, still, it all looks promising, right?
Maybe cheaper electrolysis and cheaper fuel cells will mean clean, abundant energy for all, someday... But there is still Joe Romms question:
... who needs a major step towards hydrogen?
Romm again:
[In the voice of Jon Stewart] Oh press release from my beloved alma mater, why do you mock me? Who exactly is going to buy this electrolyzer, plus a home hydrogen storage system, plus an expensive fuel cell — for the sole purpose of taking valuable zero-carbon peak electricity and throwing more than half of it away in the round trip, all for the luxury of having nighttime power which we can buy for virtually nothing on the grid. Why not just run your friggin’ electric car on cheap wind power that blows mainly at night? [emphasis-JR]
What does Romm mean about "throwing more than half of it away?" Well, it turns out that the entire electrolysis-fuel cell process is extremely energy inefficient. Check out this linkto compare the efficiency of fuel cell vehicles vs. electric vehicles. You will see that by the time the whole electrolysis-fuel cell process is completed, only 23 kwh of power is delivered to the vehicle out of the 100 kwh that went into powering the process. By comparison an electric vehicle receives 69 kwh of power (3 times as much) from the same initial 100. Notice also that electrolysis is only 75% efficient and the fuel cell is only 50% efficient. Even if you remove some of the steps to account for a stationary site, use of hydrogen is very inefficient by comparison with direct use of the electricity.
Nocera might have made the process of operating an electrolyzer cheaper, but you still must buy the electrolzyer, the fuel cell and the storage tank to run the system. How much will that cost? At this point no one knows:
...we have no idea if it’s cheap because they don’t have anything near a commercial prototype (indeed, they have not even solve [sic] all of the scientific challenges).
And there's the safety question:
I’ll keep my PV panels for peak power and in a few years buy a plug-in (and lease the battery) and run it on nighttime wind and not have to waste money on a household fuel cell — which are currently wildly expensive — while trying to convince my neighbors and my local zoning board that generating and storing hydrogen in my home is not an unsafe, industrial activity that should require massive ventilation, blow-out walls, and a 50-foot clearance between my house and any neighboring buildings.
In short, Dr. Nocera has done something interesting. But, it is not the only game in town. Nor is it the best one. In the long run perhaps it will prove useful, but it is my suspicion that by the time that "artificial photosynthesis" (which this process isn't really--that is just more hype--what it really is is cheaper electrolysis) is ready for the market we will already be getting most of our power from Concentrated Solar Power and wind.