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New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

sciencedaily.com

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Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#71

Post by toast0 »

pfdietz wrote: post #48
UltraSane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen is simply a really bad fuel for cars. It is hard to transport and store liquid hydrogen

They'd use compressed gaseous hydrogen, but that has its own problems.

Yep... Anyone who looked at how CNG cars went in the US and was like yep, let's do that but with a gas that's harder to transport and store and has no existing network, had to know it wouldn't work out very well.

CNG fleet vehicles work out for many fleets; especially those that have vehicle depots where fueling happens.

I haven't looked into detail for the hydrogen cars, but I wonder if they made the same kinds of designs with regard to the fuel tanks. On pressurized fuel vehicles, the tanks expire after 15-20 years; on most CNG cars, the tanks take a lot of labor to replace, so most vehicles will expire when their tank does; I suspect the same for the hydrogen cars. Fleet vehicles tend to do a lot of miles, so a time based tank expiration is less of a problem.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#72

Post by chupasaurus »

hobofan wrote: post #35
voxadam wrote: post #13

You just know that engineers and management in Toyota's delusional hydrogen division are salivating.

They are not delusional. Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs, and in order to prevent a gap in the market where EV-first competitors can steal market share from them, they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars. There they have a head start via some latent research and more reuse of ICE car platforms. I'm sure the hydrogen division is well aware that the…

> Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs ... they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars

Production of Toyota Prius started 28 years ago.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#73

Post by pfdietz »

m4rtink wrote: post #59
pfdietz wrote: post #50

A problem I'd have with seawater electrolysis is production of undesirable chlorine compounds: hypochlorite or elemental chlorine. Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.

Don't they also react also with about anything else ? I would be a bit worried what else "gets eaten" if something as reactive as chlorine is released into the atmosphere on a wider scale.

They'd also react with other hydrocarbons, also extracting hydrogen atoms. But that's ok too -- those hydrocarbons act as sinks for hydroxyl radicals, reducing the rate of methane destruction.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#74

Post by pfdietz »

NortySpock wrote: post #69
pfdietz wrote: post #50

A problem I'd have with seawater electrolysis is production of undesirable chlorine compounds: hypochlorite or elemental chlorine. Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.

If we're talking seawater already, why not dilute it with seawater down near the ocean floor and have it react with some rocks or something? Why put chlorine gas directly into the atmosphere?

To destroy methane, which is a strong greenhouse gas.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#75

Post by adrian_b »

foobarbecue wrote: post #33
adrian_b wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries. For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but it can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which are suitable for long term energy storage or for aerospace transportation. Even with abundant and cheap dihydrogen, using it for e…

How does this refute the comment you replied to? That comment was implying that Toyota Mirai et al are ill-advised, so seems like your "nope" should be a "yep."

I agree that it was not the best introduction when that would be seen from the perspective of "ill-advised" companies.

What I meant is that for rational companies there would be no reason to be happy about this development, because it does not solve any of the problems that prevent free hydrogen for being suitable for energy storage, especially in vehicles.

It is not the cost of generating hydrogen that makes uncompetitive the cars with hydrogen, but difficulties in its storage and transportation.

Most of the energy used by living beings also passes through splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, but the hydrogen is never stored as such, but it is immediately used for synthesizing reduced carbon compounds, which are suitable for long storage and easy to carry by mobile beings. This has been proven in practice for billions of years as a suitable solution for long term energy storage.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#76

Post by hcknwscommenter »

smusamashah wrote: post #3

> That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it. > "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current know…

Will be interesting to see if, in hindsight, there are clues to this in the preexisting literature that we just hadn't quite recognized.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#77

Post by Brian_K_White »

briandw wrote: post #67

I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries. I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

I truly do not understand the fixation with trying to use batteries in applications that really need a fuel.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#78

Post by craftkiller »

boppo1 wrote: post #53
voxadam wrote: post #13

You just know that engineers and management in Toyota's delusional hydrogen division are salivating.

Can anyone give me a semi-technical reason on why the hydrogen division are delusional? I'm actually convinced of it "osmotically", but I just don't know enough about it. I've got chem 101 behind me but otherwise I'm a finance & tech guy. It would be nice to actually understand why it can't be done though.

Assuming we're talking about cars/trucks, one major reason hydrogen doesn't make sense is efficiency: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/OrLRA/s1/efficiency-compar...

If we manage to get enough solar such that energy essentially becomes infinite then the inefficiency would no longer matter. Otherwise, it would only make sense in vehicles that require high energy density like airplanes.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#79

Post by Tuna-Fish »

briandw wrote: post #67

I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries. I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

In a lot of places in the world, the marginal cost of electricity is zero, if your capital costs are low enough to only purchase when there is excess wind.

The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.

Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.

Re: New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

#80

Post by fisherjeff »

briandw wrote: post #67

I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries. I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

Well green hydrogen is also a necessity if you want to make carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.
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