Perhaps most revolutionary is Abson’s claim that, soon, he could teach anyone to make their own fuel cell within two weeks, something that could completely democratise the energy industry. Little wonder, he contends, the sector views him as a threat. “It leaves the establishment out of the picture,” says Abson, who studied philosophy and Taoist Chinese poetry at university. “The Government doesn’t like it. How do you tax it?”
It’s teaching someone how to make a fuel cell efficient enough to be useful that is difficult.
The question, of course, is if this technology is so marvellous, why is it not being widely used already? One of the biggest problems, says Abson, is getting through to the right people. The “dolts” who pass information on to the decision-makers, he claims, are either corrupt, stupid or afraid. “There is a Chinese wall between the Civil Service and the ministers. The Civil Service doesn’t want to change policy. They know what they know, and they act as a block to any information getting through.”
Lots and lots of work has been done on fuel cells. I can think of at least two, large, listed companies based upon them. I’m less than certain I would believe all of these stories that is….
“who studied philosophy and Taoist Chinese poetry at university.”
So, it’s BS
“We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.”
Never mind the tech of fuel cells, they are not going to give anyone energy independence. My question is ‘If we had Doc Brown’s Mr Fusion, a coffee-maker sized machine which could turn household waste into electricity, would we be allowed to have one in our houses?’ My guess is the government’s answer would be ‘No’..
Given the way we’ve shut down most of our oil refineries and the heroic environmentalists who’ve so nobly prevented us for drilling for oil, I’m sure the Aussie government would be only too pleased to follow suit.
I’ve often wondered how much old technology we currently use would ever be allowed loose on the public these days. Cars definitely not. Giving normal people control over a powerful machine, with no government control over what they might do with it? Certainly not! Guns obviously are already either banned or strictly controlled. AC electricity? Its very dangerous, would they allow it in domestic properties these days? Probably restricted to large commercial premises only. Mass powered flight? I doubt the State would want the masses to be able to traverse the world for the cost of a few weeks wages.
The Original Jim, I’ve said the same thing about trams in Melbourne. If you put it forward now, we’re going to have 40 tonne vehicles trundling around on suburban streets, tracks installed and maintained, and overhead wires everywhere, you’d get laughed out of the room.
Don’t get me wrong, since I moved away they’re one of the things I miss, but I doubt you could get it up now as a greenfield proposal.
Anyway, where does one get the hydrogen ?
Most abundant element in the planet it may be, but not normally in a usable form.
And don’t say ‘second hand Zeppelins’.
That’s a lovely idea. Will have to use it sometime.
Zeppelins were quite good at converting hydrogen into its combustion products, as I recall. There’s a lesson there. Hat-tip to Led Zeppelin 1.
I have long, long, argued that we can have a distributed system. Solar to electrolysis of water, store the H2, run that back through a fuel cell to gain dispatchable power. Fortunately, the fuel cell can also be used to do the electolysis.
The chemistry of this works, undoubtedly. It would need to be local because transport of H2 is a nightmare. We’re not going to even pipe it around. But the basic analogy is that the H2/fuel cell is the battery in the solar system. And, yes, to repeat, it would and does work.
Now, whether it works economically is another matter. But if solar continues to get cheaper than yes, I think it would.Well, at some price it would, whether solar will get that cheap?
The National Grid’s Project Union intends to create a 1,500 mile hydrogen “grid”. They also “intend” to store hydrogen in salt caverns. Using gas turbines to recover it as electricity is much better using fuel cells.
Solar in the uk is not a good solution as our solar irradiance is very low in winter, so it needs much more solar panels which means its expensive and takes up a lot of land. It does make sense for sunnier climes. It could even be cheaper to make the hydrogen in sunny places then go to the expense of liquifying it and shipping it here even though the round trip efficiency is poor.
The real sell is that if we have installed enough renewables to meet winter electricity demand in “poor” conditions (at enormous cost) we will have massive overcapacity at other times where making hydrogen is a sensible way to use the unneeded electricity.
The telling statistic is that most pure-play or heavy electrolyzer-focused companies are currently struggling despite hyped expectations for the future.
Would it not be more accurate if it was named “Project Unicorn”?
Solar irradiance is relatively low (compared to SW USA or Andalucía or the Maghreb) at northerly latitudes all year round. And it’s out of sync with domestic demand which peaks in winter (for heating) rather than summer (for aircon). Apart from that, it’s a great solution.
Transport of H2 is a nightmare, and storage is too. Which is why most of the H2 that we burn is combined with C in various forms so that it’s easier to store.
People object to the C being oxidized, though I suspect that they also object to the H2. Or very quickly would, since the real object is to make energy more expensive, and people poorer as the desired end.
They will once a ton of water vapor is being discharged into the air.
It’s a worse GHG than co2 and you’ll be humidifying already very humid places;)
Water vapour is indeed a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It does however have the tendency to turn into clouds which have more of a cooling effect.
Does the Synhelion thing make more sense, where the hydrogen is converted to kerosene, then you ship the kerosene? The problem with solar in the UK as AndyF says is that it doesn’t perform that well, but you do it in Spain, convert it and ship it, maybe it does.
I know they power a few things, but it’s not as cheap, yet. Some businesses (like Swiss Air) like the green credentials of it.
F-T it up, yes that makes sense. Porsche are doing it from wind power in Tierra del Fuego….
Hydrogen as an energy transfer medium is grossly expensive. If Miliband isn’t killing your economy fast enough for you, adding some hydrogen will help. It will NEVER be economically feasible.
If you have that much solar then you don’t really need H2 though. Slap up a battery wall in each building to cover overnight and electric cars everywhere.
The you just use FF for long haul.
Get a block of ice and an extremely tiny chisel….
Behind every “shady forces” story, you normally find that there’s a problem with the technology. Like it’s not good enough, no-one wants it, too expensive.
People said all this about the GM EV1 car, that Big Oil stopped it. The truth is, it only did 55-100 mile range, which is crap.
If someone cracked nuclear fusion tomorrow, you can bet that the petrostates would fight it, but they simply wouldn’t be able to win. They would be throwing resources at it, while the fusion industry would be sapping customers from them and gradually becoming more powerful. Same with the church vs the printing press, the luddites vs the mills, typesetters vs phototypesetting machines.
Ah, but they’d only need to nobble a far smaller section of society, the liberal-Left who control everything in the West. If they could make the Western Establishment believe that nuclear fusion was racist or sexist or Islamophobic, then it would never get off the drawing board, here at least. Because no one is going to be building a fusion power plant in their shed. So while there might be hundreds of millions of willing customers, they don’t get to vote with their feet if the practical implementation of the technology is strangled at birth. After all if the Establishment can be convinced about the existence of the female penis, then they can be convinced of anything.
The establishment is not that powerful. The church was the establishment, the aristocratic land owners were the establishment. They aren’t now. They are subject to technological changes which shift power and new establishments are created.
“After all if the Establishment can be conviced about the existence of the female penis, then they can be convinced of anything.”
Which is really some nonsense that gets us saying “WTF” but has almost zero effect anywhere outside of the establishment. The main effect of the tranny thing is some low value academics doing feminist studies got kicked out for some other low value academics, and a small number of teenagers got their goolies chopped off. The latter are tragic cases but in the grand scheme of 70 million people doesn’t demonstrate huge power of the establishment in this area.
Noppe. They’re actually effecting cultural change. Talk to teenagers and girls in their 20s. They’re all signed up.
“The establishment is not that powerful.”
Really? I think the existence of Net Zero and mass immigration would suggest otherwise. Neither have anywhere near the support of 50%+ of the population, yet we still have them.
Now look at how well the Conservatives are polling compared to Reform.
Like our host remarked, it’s already quite feasible, and for the more technically inclined relatively easy to set up a solar/fuel cell setup to generate an [x] amount of energy.
Now the Real Questions….
What are the electrodes/catalists made of, and how robust are they?
And how *expensive* are they?
At what temperature do you have the thing running?
If you’re going to store hydrogen… How do you deal with the inevitable enbrittlement of whatever metal part it comes into contact with?
What’s the replacement/maintenance schedule, and what are the damage mitigations against , rather volatile…., hydrogen leaks?
And most of all…. If it’s that simple, revolutionary, and world-altering….
Why hasn’t he just dropped it into the Internet Wild West as Open Source information?
If it does actually work as advertised, there would be no stopping it, because millions of tinkerers would give it a shot… No-one would be able to contain it..
Guess we’ll have to wait for that Thesis… If it ever materialises……
Well, the reason I know about this is because the “best” of the solid oxide fuel cells uses scandium. As Bloom Energy uses – they’re now the major global consumer in fact.
yeah… but their stuff runs hot… 600-700K range…
Which in turn requires a decent heat sink, especially since the entire process is still quite exothermic….
Mind.. at those temperatures you can also play around with ferrosalt batteries ( which work in the same temperature range ) and the like and then bleed off to either heating or some other form of recuperative heat exchanger.
But a setup like that is not small. It actually benefits frm scaling up, to a point.
Definitely not something you can set up in your backyard.
Why would you store the H, and not just combine it with atmospheric CO2?
So you could still use the fuel cell to power your chemical plant, but you’d put water and sunbeams in at one end, and get petrol out at the other. We already know how to both transport that, and how to put it to use. Carbon-neutral too!
Mother Nature does… We call it “sugar” , “cellulose” ( well…that’s really just more sugar…) , and “fat” ( which is basically just a way to solidify and store diesel/kerosene by tying it to glycerol ).
Thing is… that takes a fair bit of energy because you’re working against the entropy gradient.
Which means that by including this step, you’re lowering the overal efficiency of the process compared to using H2 directly. Especially when you plan to do this onsite.
The H2 storage doesn’t actually have to be large or particularly cryogenic or high-pressure for use onsite.. It just has to contain enough to act as a buffer..
But H2 does as H2 does… which is embrittle metal…
Mind… Nothing stops you from producing either methanol or ethanol in places where *that* is more economically feasible, then transporting that in bulk and using that..
But then , according to the GreenTards, you are *still* producing the Dreaded CO2, so they start wailing and screaming..
And no….pointing out to them that that CO2 has been taken out of the very atmosphere they are worrying about doesn’t work…
They treat *any* source of man-made CO2 as “New Production”, and being Man Made it is SuperDangerousDisastrous, as compared to all-natural CO2 produced by trees, volcanoes, rock weathering, and wildebeasts….
Because they’re that kind of idiots…
And Airbus witters that hydrogen 100-seat airliners are feasible. EU, just give us more subsidy for further research, please…
The problem with hydrogen is that you either have to cool it to liquify it or store it compressed in strong and impracticably heavy bottles. Hydrogen is very low density. Although its energy to weight ratio is brilliant, its energy to volume ratio is terrible. You need very big tanks to store it so in all probability that 100-seat airliner ends up about the size of an A380
So they use an A380, remove all the proles’ seats, and just leave business class for our government / NGO lords & masters to fly to that ‘important environmental conference’.
The problem is, they wouldn’t see that as one.
This kind of fatuous shit comes up every now and then. Car engines that will run on water and never need maintenance …
It appeals particularly to people who seek spiritual satisfaction – socialists, that sort of loony.
You meet them over the years.
Quite so. And hucksters, too.
There’s a particular sort of person who seems to come along with a scheme like this from time to time.
Many moons ago, I used to write the occasonal column with an engineering focus for an agricultural magazine. The editors sent me to see a man who had a sure-fire and dead-simple scheme to make diesel fuel from cow manure using anaerobic bacteria. Good idea, no?
Well, his scheme had settling ponds, and distribution channels, and an anaerobic digester, and tanks and valves and processes until Hell wouldn’t have it. I guesstimated that his proposed pilot plant would cover two or three acres of ground. And all this to make perhaps 10 gallons of diesel-like fuel (it needed additives even when finished) per day.
It did make diesel fuel from cow manure, that much was true. But when asked about the economics of his process, he just laughed the question away – the money doesn’t matter to me, he said (as though I had suggested that he was looking to get rich off the idea), this can save the world! I’m convinced there’s a subset of true-believers whose thinking concentrates solely on outputs and who honestly think that costs and inputs don’t matter – if the result is positive, then there are no negatives.
llater,
llamas
Interesting anecdote. Some people misunderstand “free”. cf. Mad Milliband and windmills.
…concentrates solely on outputs and who honestly think that costs and inputs don’t matter – if the result is positive, then there are no negatives.
That attitude is common in the public sector…
“I’m convinced there’s a subset of true-believers whose thinking concentrates solely on outputs and who honestly think that costs and inputs don’t matter – if the result is positive, then there are no negatives.”
The costs and inputs matter, but it’s *their* costs and inputs, how they perceive it. If Mr Cow Manure Diesel got a government grant to set up his pilot, paid by the government to demonstrate it, his perceived input cost is 0 and his perceived output cost is 10 gallons of fuel.
Like people in the rail industry who go on about how great is it are running trains. Government throws money at running trains. If the government told them to transport people, and here’s £1m and keep what’s left over, they’d run a bus. The cost of a bus is far less than a train, and they get more money for hookers and blow.
there’s a subset of true-believers whose thinking concentrates solely on outputs and who honestly think that costs and inputs don’t matter
In the UK they’re called the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (don’t laugh!)
“How do you deal with the inevitable enbrittlement of whatever metal part it comes into contact with?”
Maybe magnesium. The magnesium alloy used for jet engine thrust reversers is heat treated in H2. Something that wasn’t the case when I did Metallurgy in the 60’s, then it was H2=evil for all metals.
Surprised to hear that. I thought magnesium is one of those metals that really burns readily and brightly. Wouldn’t have thought it could have survived in that environment.
It’s likely amount of H2. Rather like adding carbon to iron to make steel – the right amount is good, too much or too little is not.
I don’t know if you can extrapolate a certain amount of H2 exposure, once, at controlled temperature and pressure, with storing large amounts of it for years on end.
Airbus has said its near-term hydrogen tank structures for commercial aircraft will most likely be metal, while it is also developing composite/carbon-fibre tank options as a longer-term possibility. I would expect composite in some form to be the only long-term solution otherwise the airframe simply won’t last long enough.
It’s all pi in the sky, anyway.
Gamecock has an Abson fuel cell in a closet, next to his 100 mpg carburetor and his SMR.
Getting hydrogen supply to your house will take a little longer.
Got a stupid idea? Claim a conspiracy theory, and investors will flock to it.
Abson can teach you to make a fuel cell for a fuel that is not available. Claim industry is agin’ it! What sort of inverter do you use? How do you throttle the system to match needs?
It’s all happy horseshit. Which is why it is in the Entertainment section.
Claim a conspiracy theory, and investors will flock to it.
So, after all, Gamecock believes that conspiracy theories exist…
No. Don’t be silly. ‘Conspiracy’ as an adjective adds nothing meaningful. So a ‘conspiracy theory’ is a theory that somebody doesn’t like, so they label it ‘conspiracy’ as a pejorative.
In US, it is remarkable how many theories labeled by the commies as ‘conspiracy’ theories turn out to be true. So much so that the right in USA translates ‘conspiracy theory’ as “probably true theory.”
You could argue that ‘conspiracy theory’ is a shorter way of saying ‘Things that the Left are up to that they would prefer the Right didn’t find out about’.
A conspiracy theory is much more than a theory somebody doesn’t like. It is an explanation of events or situations that alleges a secret, malicious plot by powerful actors, rather than accepting the established or official narrative. These theories often suggest nothing happens by accident and that evidence against the theory is part of a cover-up. But, occasionally, conspiracy theories can even be true…
The one that I believe is true is the Mortal Error one, that after Oswald shot at JFK, the secret service agent in the car behind picked up his rifle, Oswald shoots again, the car behind speeds up, causing the secret service agent to accidentally pull the trigger.
The conspiracy arises because no-one wants to ruin a secret service agent’s life for accidentally killing the president. Everyone thinks this is a bad idea. So they all collude to say that Oswald acted alone.
Does it run on astrophage?
I was going to guess phlogiston.
Gamecock wrote “Claim a conspiracy theory, and investors will flock to it . . . ” and I think there’s a lot if truth to that. There’s a section of the population that’s convinced that ‘they’ are only successful because ‘they’ have access to secret skills, powers and methods that ‘they’ hide from the rest of us, and we only have to crack those secrets to be just as rich and successful as ‘they’ are. Just look at all the Youtube videos proclaiming ‘Learn the secrets of (XYZ) that They don’t want you to know!’ The ‘sovereign citizen’ believers are another subset of this worldview.
llater,
llamas
They’re right. Were basic economics taught at school, “they” would have a lot less power.
Is it OK to put it next to my backyard iron smelter?
It takes two weeks to read a book?
When I was teaching at the School of Signals in ’88 I had to pick up the odds and sods issues, for want of a better phrase. Amongst them was fuel cells which were starting to become a thing because they promised high density portable power, very useful for special forces. There were the usual claims about how it was going to transform the world.
That was 30 years ago and still no sign of the revolution.
…and had it actually been militarily useful it would be in use right now. There’s your proof.
A Bacon fuel cell did go to the moon, didn’t it?
(Insofar as you believe that anyone went to the moon. Which I still incline to though with decreasing certainty.)
Note for BiS: you are required to dismiss it as crap, BiS; it came from Cambridge.
I’ve never received a satisfactory reply to the question ” So if we never went to the moon how did the laser reflector left by Apollo 11 get there”?
Moon men!
I’ve never seen a satisfactory reply to “The Russians would have known and revealed it to the world.” However my certainty takes a little knock by wondering why it’s been more than 50 years and nobody else claims to have been to the moon. Hardly conclusive, mind.
No one could figure out how to monetize it.
No-one went to the South Pole between 1912 and 1956. Ok, the Moon has now gone longer than 44 years unvisited, but . . .I wonder what the record is.
If there’s nowt to learn by sending a human and you’ve got robots, then why bother sending a person.
Topical joke: why hasn’t a Muslim nation been to the Moon – because there’s no-one there to take it from.
We should start a rumour that you can claim massive lunar benefits. They’ll all be ditching the dinghies and lashing rockets together.
They should have no problems getting there too, what with all the rocket scientists among their numbers………