 Hydrogen has a bum rap. One spectacular disaster a hundred years ago and nobody wants to be your friend anymore. That all changed in the mid-2000s as we realized that conventional batteries were just not worth it. So we embraced hydrogen. And we didn't all blow up. This is the LowTech Podcast. Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of our new season. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute. Your host for podcast number 75 on January 26th 2024. Welcome to the new year. Coming to you from the LowTech Recording Booth. Thanks for joining us. We're jumping back in our DeLorean Time Machine this week. And going to Cooksville in the year 2100. Today we're diving into our use of hydrogen for home and commercial energy. Don't bother following us on Twitter, X or whatever it's called right now. We don't live there anymore. But you can still like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our website lowtechinstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also you know the spiel about advertising on podcasts. If I'm not doing the ad someone else is getting paid. We put out all of our content for free. But if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community please do consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as three bucks a month through our Patreon page. That's patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. Supporters do get the podcasts a week early so that is something. Another way to support us is to donate your used car. If you're in the US contact us for details. Back in 2020 if I were to have told you that a hydrogen that I have a hydrogen plant and storage in my basement you'd think I'm crazy. That's because of this. Starting to rain again and rain has cracked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it. Just enough to keep it from the person to fly. Get it started. Get it started. Get it started. It's crashing. It's crashing. Terrible. Oh my. Get out of the way please. It's burning, bursting into flames and it's falling on the morning fast and all the folks between the business is terrible. This is the worst of the worst catastrophe in the world. Oh it's like 20 or 400 or 500 feet into the sky. It is a terrific race. Ladies and gentlemen, the smoke and the slaves now and the flame is rising to the ground. Not quite to the morning mass of the humanity. All the fans are just feeding around here. I don't do it. I can't even talk to people. They're all there. I can't talk ladies and gentlemen. Honestly, just laying down mass and smoking ruckus and everybody can't hardly breathe and talking screaming. Lady, I'm sorry. Honestly, I can hardly breathe. I'm going to step inside while I cannot see it. I'm sorry. That's terrible. I can't. I'm going to have to stop for a minute because I have lots of voices and wish I could have ever met her. That is the voice of Herb Morrison famously narrating the collapse and burning of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 in Manchester Township, New Jersey. This is this just one disaster spell the end of long distance airship travel as well as stymie the adoption of hydrogen as a residential and commercial fuel source. And while hydrogen systems can fail catastrophically, we need only to look at archival videos from the 1900s and early 2000s to see the Ben Issue coal mine explosion create oil fires, piper alpha disaster and thousands of smaller accidents to know that any time we have compressed a huge amount of energy into a small volso package, we have to be careful. Unlike however, fossil fuels and nuclear power, the actual use of hydrogen is ecologically benign. Burning hydrogen produces water vapor instead of belching carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that have been sequestered in ancient carbon for millennia. And although water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, hydrogen production uses H2O that was already in circulation, which means it's not contributing new gases to global warming or the atmosphere. It does not produce spent fuel rods or depend on refining uranium out of tons of ore. It does not require dangerous, expensive or complex wells or refineries. Hydrogen is the most abundant element on earth and harnessing the energy needed to bond and unbonded to oxygen has been transformative. All molecules are held together with atomic bonds. Typically, energy is lost when atoms combine into molecules and the reverse is also true when those molecules are cracked apart. Today, we depend on the dividing of water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen to store energy for later use. If you're watching on YouTube, you can see my illustration right here. So from basic chemistry, we know that oxygen is to short to electrons. So it often joins forces with other oxygen atoms to create plain breathable oxygen or O2. Hydrogen is only one electron short of a happy stable existence. So it often pairs up with another hydrogen making H2. Sometimes an oxygen atom also likes to grab two little hydrogen atoms to create our favorite squirt gun ammunition, water or H2O. Just as when two magnets might snap when they combine, creating noise, these three atoms give off energy in the form of heat when they combine together. You might remember this equation from school to H2 plus O2 equals to H2O and energy. This is an equation with a double arrow, which indicates, of course, that the relationship is reversible. By adding energy back into liquid water, it disassociates returning to hydrogen and oxygen gases. That energy is essentially stored in the now disparate components of water. Imagine holding two magnets just apart from one another. The pull towards each other is energy waiting to happen. Let go of one magnet and it moves. A spark gives the hydrogen and oxygen atoms an excuse to blow off their excess energy in the form of a flame as they recombine into water. This back and forth of the hydrogen oxygen water cycle fuels sectors of our economy that need on demand power and or can't be plugged into a stationary power source. But before we get into the end uses, let's look first at how we generate and store this energy. Just as our electricity generation is focused at the point of use, hydrogen production is dispersed and small scale with just a few exceptions. The simplest high gens, which is what we call our hydrogen generators, high gens use excess electricity to create gas through electrolysis shown again in the figure on the screen here, along with its larger scale cousins. So although this is not the most efficient method, it is simple. The dead simplest version is an alkaline electrolyzer. Imagine a drum of water with a plastic divider in either side of the drum is an electrode coated in nickel to the water has been added either potassium hydroxide that's koH sometimes known as caustic potash or sodium hydroxide or NaOH sometimes known as lye. And this is the more common of the two because it can be made at home with ashes and has lots of other uses. Anyway, little bubbles are beating off of each of the electrodes as DC power is fed into the system. The positive anode creates oxygen gas and the negative cathode creates hydrogen gas. The only things that must be brought in for these high or bought in for these high gens are the membrane, which passes ions back and forth but blocks the mixing of the produced gases. Oh, and we also have to buy the nickel plated electrodes, which are formed to create maximum surface area. The downside of this method is that it takes more electric energy to create the gas because it has to phase change the liquid to a gas among other small frictions in the process. It results in only 83% of the energy being converted. But these are the home versions made to just kind of swap up a bit of excess electric power that might otherwise go into a battery on a sunny or windy day. Small shops, factories or drivers with a need of more constant supply of hydrogen had the stepped up version of the home hydrogen instead of a barrel of alkaline water with electrodes suspended in it. These generators have the electrodes held above the surface of the liquid connected to a porous membrane drawing the electrolyte up to contact the electrodes much like a candle draws molten wax up its wick. The water is quickly converted into oxygen hydrogen gases without the underwater bubbles causing what is essentially a traffic jam on the electrodes. This method is much more efficient converting up to 98% of the electric energy. These generators depend on imported parts and dedicated power sources, which vary based on their need factories that function in the day generally use solar power directly. While those that need stored hydrogen for transport use wind or micro hydro for power. Another option for the mid level producers is a photo electro chemical water splitting or a PEC cell a PEC cell is similar to an old fashioned photovoltaic solar solar panel sunlight hits a thin film semiconductor which converts the energy to hydrogen instead of electricity. These semiconductor this semiconductor is housed in a series of vertical tubes with the oxygen generated on one side and the hydrogen on another when mounted vertically or an angle like a solar panel. The gases bubble up for collection. For hydrogen intensive factories or train fueling stations, for example, large scale generation facilities use concentrated solar power to drive chemical reactions or a variety of these systems have been built and tested over the years, but they come down to extremely hot simple reactions taking place at about 3600 degrees Fahrenheit or 2000 Celsius or more complex cooler reactions needing only 1000 degrees Fahrenheit or 500 degrees Celsius. These temperatures are reached by concentrating the sun's rays through two types of collectors. One is parabolic dish collectors that look like long troughs made of a curved mirror entering sunlight is bounced off any location on the mirror to a central collector pipe where the thermochemical reaction takes place. The dish rotates through the day to capture more heat. The second type is the so called eye of Sauron reactor, which relies on a field of mirrors each controlled by a computer to reflect light back to the top of a centrally located tower. The top of the tower is incandescent. Early versions resulted in the immediate immediate fiery death of birds who flew too close to the focal point before reflective deterrents were installed. Most of the tower versions are in open areas west of the Mississippi due to their size. And then there's a final smaller source of hydrogen collected from batteries. When chemical batteries are charged, hydrogen is sometimes produced in the electrolyte. It is used it used to be that this hydrogen was off gas from the batteries, but with the emergence of hydrogen power, it's now collected on purpose. And so let's talk about that collection. Now that we've kind of covered our generation, let's talk about storage. So early on different storage systems were tested. Physical systems compressed the gas into cylinders, froze and compressed it or converted it to a liquid. Another avenue was more chemical in nature, where friendly compounds converted or absorbed H2 for later release, kind of like a sponge. By weight or really better said mass, hydrogen is the densest fuel commonly available. The problem with hydrogen as a fuel is that it's very low energy per volume, especially at room temperature. Unlike gasoline or diesel, which was converted from a dense liquid or to a gas before combustion, hydrogen's boiling point is negative 487 degrees Fahrenheit to 53 Celsius. So storing it as a liquid isn't practical except in space. Chilling hydrogen reduces the volume of the gas in addition to compression. But over time, this idea was phased out because engineers found that the extra step and extra energy use of cooling it not to be worth the amount of space savings. It was just another element to break and need fixing. So just as generation is tailored to the task, storage strategies differ by application. And you can see some of them here if you're watching online. Every stationary system, such as a home, workshop or office, or even a factory has a pressure tank sized to the production capacity. This stores hydrogen at high pressure and must be specifically manufactured carbon reinforced vessels, which look like kind of like a water softener tank from the last century, where space is not really an issue. These are so called low pressure tanks holding hydrogen gas at 5000 psi, which is 350 bar or 34 megapascals. At this pressure, each two liters of hydrogen holds about three kilowatt hours of power. So even a small five gallon or 20 liter tank can hold enough power for a typical house at 2020 levels. That's 30 kilowatt hours. Workshops often use standardized 50 gallon or 200 liter tanks, holding as much as 300 kilowatt hours of energy. And then we have more mobile applications. And these have tanks rated to twice the pressure, holding a bit less than twice the energy per volume. The rule of thumb is that each kilogram or kilogram of hydrogen will drive a small vehicle 100 kilometers. That's about 3.5 pounds for 100 miles. Unfortunately, because it's so light, a large volume is needed to hold a small amount of hydrogen mass. Most vehicles have small tanks holding just six gallons or 25 liters. That's enough for 3.5 pounds or 1.6 kilograms of hydrogen for a range of about 100 miles or 160 kilometers. But that is plenty, since most everybody lives within a short distance of a transit hump. But we'll talk more about that when we get to transportation. Trains, trams and ships use larger storage tanks to move their loads across distances where direct electric connections are scarce like out west or on the ocean. On the other side of the spectrum, tiny fuel cells with just a small amount of storage can power tools, electronics or other equipment similar to how we use rechargeable batteries a century ago. Surprisingly, these tanks and hydrogen use in general are not actually that much more efficient or better than what was available in 2020. But their robustness, reliability and safety have been greatly improved over time. Also, the fact that we use less energy makes it easy to get by with these less efficient or not greatly advanced systems. So luckily, because energy is located at the point of use, large volumes of hydrogen are not transported around the world, as had once been the case with other fuels. As the transition away from fossil fuels is happening, the legacy companies, the fossil fuel companies, tried to convince lawmakers and the public that routing large volumes of hydrogen through erstwhile natural gas pipelines was a viable option. But this idea was quickly dismissed in favor of localized storage. So let's talk about how we use hydrogen today. Much like production and storage, the use of hydrogen is tailored to the size and nature of the end use. For the most part, hydrogen is used to sort excess electricity. So to release energy back to a flow of electrons, we use fuel cells of various sizes. In other cases, direct combustion of hydrogen is called for, but those are fairly rare. So a fuel cell is essentially a reverse electrolysis system. The hydrogens described above use energy to split hydrogen and oxygen apart using electricity. But here electricity is released when the two are combined back together, as shown here on the screen if you're watching us on YouTube. Hydrogen is fed into one side of a membrane electrode assembly. This is just a three layer electron filter. Hydrogen molecules or H2 hit the first layer, which is an anode, the one that oxidizes and gives up electrons. And that hydrogen is split into protons and electrons, but only the protons can pass through the next layer, a polymer electrolyte membrane, kind of a filter. In order to reach the cathode, which is the reducing side where electrons are gained, here they combine with oxygen and electrons to create water, H2O, and heat. Electrical current is produced because the electrons have to take a long way around the membrane where they can be routed through wires and therefore motors, lights, or other electric systems to do a little work along the way. Now if that's too complicated to visualize, just imagine a box. Hydrogen and oxygen go into one side, they're split apart and recombined as water out the other side, with an electrical charge as a byproduct. Fuel cells can be stacked and configured to create whatever voltage is needed for most uses. Many homes and workshops are outfitted with reversible fuel cells that can do both jobs, absorbing electricity to create hydrogen or vice versa. Well, a few specialty fabricators use methanol or alkaline fuel cells that use other inputs in similar systems. Oh, the humanity! That was a slogan used in the mid-2000s as fossil fuel companies tried to fight against the growth of hydrogen as a replacement fuel. Drawing on the Hindenburg disaster illustrated the danger of uncontrolled hydrogen combustion. Never mind that gasoline, kerosene, and natural gas were also responsible for their own fair share of fires and explosions, but in most cases it is more efficient to use hydrogen as a way to store electricity. For example, a fuel cell car gets two times more miles per unit of hydrogen than a hydrogen internal combustion engine. We call it a heist, spelled H-I-C-E, or hydrogen internal combustion engine. Hydrogen combustion is reserved for specialized uses. It works better than electrical systems in extreme cold like we have right now here in Wisconsin, so farther north when snow clearing is needed, Canadian municipalities use hydrogen fuel snow plows. Similarly, backup and cold start heating systems often rely on burning hydrogen to get things up to operating temperature before the fuel cells kick in. So generally, hydrogen is used as a battery alternative to power electrical systems, but because it has been so maligned in the past and requires its own distinct infrastructure, I thought it was worth going over individually. So another gas that we make use of is biogas, which is essentially methane produced today on purpose as opposed to fossil fuel methane, otherwise known as natural gas. We'll talk about how we produce, store, and use this fuel next time. Adios from Cooxville in 2100. That's it for this week. The low-tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and produced by me, Scott Johnson. This episode was recorded in the low-tech recording booth in ice cold, freezing Cooxville, Wisconsin. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtech institute and signing up, or if you have a minute, you could leave a review, share this with a friend. That would be great. Thank you to our Forester and Land Steward level members, Marilyn Skirpon and the Hamsis for their support as always. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music today was Retro Synths off the album Power Pop from Polizina. 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