Biden Attempts Climate-friendly Hydrogen Tax Plan by Jael Holtzman
December 22, 2023
Introduction:
(Axios) The Biden administration on Friday released its attempt at a climate-friendly approach to using the tax code to boost hydrogen fuel production.
Why it matters: Administration officials seek to address the irony that, without sufficient guardrails on curbing energy use in producing hydrogen, a boom in the new business could actually undermine progress on reducing carbon emissions.
• Industries that have sought looser restrictions so they can easily get in on the hydrogen market — like nuclear energy and hydropower — may miss out on the credit.
Driving the news: The Treasury Department released proposed, and highly anticipated, guidance for the hydrogen credit created through the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden's signature climate law.
• The guidance says companies making hydrogen fuel can only claim the credit if they adhere to a requirement that they rely on relatively new low-emission energy — a mandate that the industry has fought.
• Companies must also stick to geographic and time-based restraints on how their hydrogen production sucks energy from the power grid.
• The approach is similar to European regulators' attempt at restraining hydrogen energy use.
• White House climate czar John Podesta said Thursday these were "important environmental safeguards" engineered to avoid negative climate impacts.
A group of researchers from the Technion Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering has presented a new technology for producing green hydrogen using renewable energy. Their breakthrough was recently published in Nature Materials.
The novel technology embodies significant advantages compared to other processes for producing green hydrogen, and its development into a commercial technology is likely to reduce the costs and accelerate the use of green hydrogen as a clean, sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.
Using hydrogen as a fuel instead of coal, gasoline, and "natural" gas will reduce the use of these fuels and greenhouse gas emissions from various sources, including transportation, the production of materials and chemicals, and industrial heating. Unlike these fuels, which emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they combust in the air, hydrogen produces water and is therefore considered a clean fuel.
However, the most common way to produce hydrogen involves using natural gas (or coal) and the process emits large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—thereby canceling out its advantages as a green, sustainable alternative for fossil fuels. In 2022, global consumption of hydrogen stood at approximately 95 million tons—a quantity suitable for improving various fuel products, and especially to produce ammonia, which is needed for manufacturing agricultural fertilizers.
Groundbreaking Discovery May Enables Cost-effective and Eco-friendly Green Hydrogen Production January 22, 2024
Introduction:
(Eurekalert) A breakthrough technology has been developed that enables the production of green hydrogen in a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly manner, bringing us closer to a carbon-neutral society by replacing expensive precious metal catalysts.
Led by Professor Jungki Ryu in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST and Professor Dong-Hwa Seo from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST, a joint research team has successfully developed a bifunctional water electrolysis catalyst for the high-efficiency and stable production of high-purity green hydrogen.
The newly-developed catalyst exhibits exceptional durability even in highly corrosive acidic environments. By utilizing ruthenium, silicon, and tungsten (RuSiW), the catalyst is more cost-effective compared to conventional platinum (Pt) or iridium (Ir) catalysts. Furthermore, it emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases, making it an eco-friendly alternative.
Water electrolysis is a cutting-edge technology that produces hydrogen through the process of electrolyzing water. It is considered a key technology for achieving a carbon-neutral society as it enables the production of environmentally friendly hydrogen without carbon emissions.
The research team focused on finding alternatives to precious metal catalysts like platinum and iridium, which exhibit stability in acidic conditions. Ruthenium has gained attention as an eco-friendly metal due to its relatively low production cost and significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to platinum and iridium. However, it faced challenges in commercialization due to its lower catalytic activity compared to platinum and lower stability compared to iridium.
Yamaha's world-first hydrogen outboard unveiled on prototype boat
By C.C. Weiss
February 14, 2024
Yamaha previously announced it would show its prototype hydrogen-combustion outboard motor at the 2024 Miami International Boat Show, and it's gone the extra mile in bringing a prototype boat and fuel delivery system to go along with it. Yamaha calls its new hydrogen V8 outboard a world first for the recreational boating industry and has partnered up with Roush and Regulator Marine to install it into a working boat that will begin testing in a few months.
In developing its hydrogen outboard prototype, Yamaha adapted the technology it has used for land-based hydrogen combustion engines, including the one it installed on the Drive H2 golf cart concept revealed last month at the PGA Show. In this case, it created a hydrogen version of its flagship XTO outboard, an offshore V8 offering 425- and 450-hp ratings, the most powerful in Yamaha's outboard lineup. Yamaha has not released output specs for the hydrogen version, so we're not sure how close it comes to joining the gas XTO at the top of the Yamaha outboard family.
Ultra-high density hydrogen storage holds twice as much as liquid H2
By Paul McClure
February 20, 2024
A nanoporous material that holds hydrogen at twice the density of cryogenic liquid H2 could address the challenges of large-scale liquid and gas storage that have held this clean fuel back.
Hydrogen is finding plenty of applications as a clean fuel – in trucking and commercial vehicles, short range aviation and shipping, for example, where it carries considerably more energy per weight and volume than lithium batteries and can deliver superior range figures and quick refueling. You can burn it more or less like gasoline, or run it through a fuel cell to generate electric power.
It has the highest energy per mass of any fuel, but it's a pain to store. Keep it in gas tanks and you'll need some 700 atmospheres' worth of compression. Keep it as a liquid, and you'll need to maintain cryogenic temperatures just 20 degrees above absolute zero. And even when squashed into a supercooled liquid, it might be lightweight, but it takes up a surprising and inconvenient amount of volume, making it both energy-hungry and tough to package where space is an issue.
Now, Korean researchers say they've created a material that stores hydrogen at double the density of its cryogenic liquid form. “Our innovative material represents a paradigm shift in the realm of hydrogen storage, offering a compelling alternative to traditional approaches,” said Hyunchul Oh, from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), lead author on this new research.
As a molecule, hydrogen can physically adsorb into a porous material in a process called physisorption. Highly porous materials have previously demonstrated the ability to store a large amount of hydrogen per unit mass, but they've struggled to store a lot of energy within a small volume.
A cluster of five hydrogen molecules (purple and red) occupying a pore in the material
Clean airliners: Megawatt-scale liquid H2 powertrain comes to life
By Loz Blain
March 03, 2024
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/megawatt- ... -aviation/
Universal Hydrogen is already flying the world's largest hydrogen airliner – and now the company has started testing swappable liquid hydrogen fuel modules that'll radically boost the range of clean passenger aircraft operations slated for 2026.
Decarbonizing aviation is challenging; you need to carry a lot of energy in the lightest possible form, and it's very hard to compete with jet fuel on that metric. Batteries are currently abysmal, so the last few years have seen a furious pace of development in the hydrogen space, generally taking hydrogen on board as a compressed gas, then running it through a fuel cell to power electric propellers.
Gaseous hydrogen might get your aircraft roughly double the range that a battery can, and that unlocks short-range regional flights with zero emissions. Universal is at the absolute bleeding edge here – last year, the company flew the largest hydrogen fuel cell-powered aircraft ever built, by a country mile. You can see Lightning McClean, a converted Dash-8 airliner, take its first flight in the video below.
Evolution-capable AI Promotes Green Hydrogen Production Using More Abundant Chemical Elements March 1, 2024
Introduction:
(Eurekalert) 1. A NIMS research team has developed an AI technique capable of expediting the identification of materials with desirable characteristics. Using this technique, the team was able to discover high-performance water electrolyzer electrode materials free of platinum-group elements—substances previously thought to be indispensable in water electrolysis. These materials may be used to reduce the cost of large-scale production of green hydrogen—a next-generation energy source.
2. Large-scale production of green hydrogen using water electrolyzers is a viable means of achieving carbon neutrality. Currently available water electrolyzers rely on expensive, scarce platinum-group elements as their main electrocatalyst components to accelerate the slow oxygen evolution reaction (OER)—an electrolytic water reaction that can produce hydrogen. To address this issue, research is underway to develop platinum-group-free, cheaper OER electrocatalysts composed of relatively abundant chemical elements compatible with large-scale green hydrogen production. However, identifying the optimum chemical compositions of such electrocatalysts from an infinitely large number of possible combinations had been found to be enormously costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Researchers in Sweden unveiled a new concept for producing hydrogen energy more efficiently, splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen without the dangerous risk of mixing the two gases.
Developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the new method decouples the standard electrolysis process for producing hydrogen gas, which splits water molecules by applying an electric current. In contrast with prevailing systems, it produces the resulting oxygen and hydrogen gases separately rather than simultaneously in the same cell, where they need to be separated by membrane barriers
That separation eliminates the possibility of the gases mixing with the risk of explosions, says researcher Esteban Toledo, a Ph.D. student at KTH who co-authored the paper published today in Science Advances along with Joydeep Dutta, professor of applied physics at KTH. It also eliminates the need for rare Earth metals.
The two researchers patented the system, and a company, Caplyzer AB, was formed through KTH Innovation to scale the technology.
Scientists develop bifunctional catalyst performance enhancement technology to lower the cost of hydrogen production https://techxplore.com/news/2024-03-sci ... rogen.html
by National Research Council of Science and Technology
Researchers have developed a methodology to improve the reversibility and durability of electrodes using bifunctional platinum-nickel alloy catalysts with an octahedral structure that exhibits both oxygen reduction and generation reactions. The study is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
Bifunctional catalysts are a new generation of catalysts that simultaneously produce hydrogen and oxygen from water using a single catalyst.
Currently, electrochemical systems such as water electrolysis technology and CCU (carbon dioxide capture and utilization) utilize separate catalysts for both electrodes, resulting in a high unit cost of hydrogen production. Bifunctional catalysts that can be synthesized in a single production process are attracting attention as a technology that can reduce production costs and increase the economic efficiency of electrochemical energy conversion technologies.
Fuel-cell train travels more than 1,700 miles on one tank of hydrogen
By Paul Ridden
March 27, 2024
A hydrogen fuel-cell passenger train developed by Swiss rail vehicle maker Stadler Rail has achieved a new Guinness World Record, traveling for almost two days around the clock for a distance of 1,741.7 miles.
Efforts to clean up dirty trains are already well underway, with heavy investment in electrifying networks around the world as well as rolling out battery-electric locomotives such as the FLXDrive, the Blues train and the Flirt Akku.
That last example is made by Stadler Rail AG, and managed to achieve a Guinness World Record in 2021 for the longest per-charge battery-only journey of 224 km (~140 miles), on a route between Berlin and Warnemünde during a freezing local winter – not bad for a train that was designed with an operational per-charge range of 80 km.
