Your Questions About Hydrogen Fuels Cells

admin answers:

Well electricity is just the flow of electrons. With that being said,

Hydrogen is pushed through a few steps but basically reacts with a catalyst such as platinum. Which causes hydrogen to bond with the oxygen in the air to create water (h2o) and in the process, electrons are forced to move around the last membrane, through a wire to be captured as electricity.

Multiple fuel cells need to be used in combination to produce any useful amount of electricity, which is done by just “stacking” them together, which is why they call it a fuel cell stack. Fuel cell vehicles use stacks that have many hundreds to even thousands of fuel cells.

admin answers:

Why don’t you make one for yourself?

What are you using the fuel cell for?
What materials do you have to work with?
What skills do you possess to fabricate a fuel cell?
Where will you get your hydrogen?

Sorry not many answers there

admin answers:

The same as anything else.
Maybe more.

It’s not that the fuel cells create the CO2.
The CO2 is created when the hydrogen is produced.
There is no free hydrogen.
The process of creating the hydrogen is energy expensive, and releases quite a bit of CO2.

admin answers:

Only if it’s from biological sources such as from the gasification of biomass.

Of course gasification processes like the pyrolysis of biomass and even the steam reformation of natural gas which is how we currently get hydrogen actually produces two gases, carbon monoxide and hydrogen so a fair bit of the energy of the feedstock is still in the carbon monoxide not in the hydrogen. It would make more sense to put both the carbon monoxide and hydrogen into a pressure vessel under 15 bars of pressure at 300 C and with iron oxide or cobalt oxide catalysts, the result would be gasoline and methane, at 180C more gets converted into liquids such as diesel and heavy waxes instead of to methane but requires more post refining such as hydrocracking due to the greater variety of liquids produced. This is called Fischer Tropsch synthesis.

Essentially, all commercially viable processes to produce hydrogen would be more efficient if they are used to produce gasoline or diesel instead and certainly all commercially viable processes to convert biomass to hydrogen would be better employed to produce gasoline or diesel.

An interesting point is that gasification is the burning of the feedstock in a low oxygen environment producing hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon in the form of charcoal. If you use the charcoal as a soil amendment, it improves the soil far more than composted biomass does because it is more stable than the carbon from compost. That’s why the Terra Preta of the Amazon rain forest is still the most fertile soil known, thousands of years after the natives amended the soil with charcoal. This is known as biochar and is promising to be an effective way of sequestering carbon making the fuel carbon negative. Hence using a regular gasoline car but advocating synthetic fuel from biomass may be the best way to benefit the environment.

The concept of a hydrogen fuel car is simply marketing as it employs the desire to be environmentally friendly as a method to create a market that did not exist previously, the idea behind hydrogen fuel cell cars is to sell more new cars. This is also true of electric vehicles, Flex-Fuel, and Hybrid; they are just marketing brands much as SUV’s, minivans and station wagons were brands that supplanted each other creating an ongoing demand for vehicles and is why tail fins and model years existed. It takes 113 million BTU’s of energy to produce any new car and with hydrogen there’s also the construction of a fuel distribution infrastructure, with such a manufacturing carbon foot print, even the Prius is less eco friendly than a second hand Tercel.

So it may be counter-intuitive but if you want to benefit the environment, just keep driving your gasoline car, fill up on synthetic fuels such as Shell’s GTL which are from Fischer Tropsch reactors and lobby for biomass to liquid and biochar for agricultural use. You can get some lump charcoal to spread around your yard too. If you want to save the jobs of union autoworkers at the expense of the environment then by all means, buy a hydrogen fuel cell, electric, flexfuel, or hybrid car.

admin answers:

It’s hard to say at this point, because right now electric cars are inherently more efficient than hydrogen cars. However, if we can find a cheap and efficient way to extract hydrogen from water, it’s possible that hydrogen fuel cells could become a viable option, and it would be good to diversify our transportation energy sources (instead of relying mainly on electrical energy).

So I would say it’s worth researching, but right now more focus should go into electric vehicles. See the link below for further details.

admin answers:

Hydrogen is a now win situation. It ain’t going to happen.