Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Fueling Stations - S...

Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Fueling Stations

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• Re:

  George Olah (Nobel Laureate) invented a catalyst to easily convert CO2 plus water to methanol and set up a seaside demo unit with solar panels to run the thing.

  He was very bullish on methanol fuel cells and using existing gas station infrastructure for distribution.

  The Total State made sure that such projects can't get funding. Too many people with too much to lose. Only the 99% would benefit. Hydrogen projects are a fig leaf to pretend that "we tried fuel cells, they didn't work."

  Embrittlement makes in i

  • Re:

    Methanol is a fairly problematic fuel even compared to gasoline. It shares the hygroscopicity problem with ethanol, and it also is easily absorbed through the skin and can cause blindness, CNS damage, and death (though the first two are much more likely in that context.)

    • Re:

      [citation needed] on how methanol is toxic when you casually splash yourself with it. Wikipedia lists 10 mL (ingested) as dose when problems start, to absorb that much through skin you'd pretty much have to take a bath in it.
      
      Plus, you get several hours to administer the antidote, and results are usually good.

      • Plus, you get several hours to administer the antidote, and results are usually good.

        And, turns out the antidote to methanol poisoning is: ethanol.

        Seriously. If you accidentally ingest methanol, the best thing to do is to get drunk as fast as possible.

        • Re:

          It's amazing how much resistance AI models have to verify this claim. But it finally computed that for a 200 lbs male, you'd need to take 7 shots of vodka (5.7 oz) to counter the immediate effects of methanol poisoning.

      • Re:

        Differently than Ethanol, Methanol is classified in the GHS hazard statements H301+H311+H331: Toxic if swallowed, in contact with skin or if inhaled.

        Ethanol just gets classified (same as Methanol) as H225: Highly flammable liquid and vapour.

    • Re:

      The "dangers" of methanol are WAY overstated. It used to be most commonly encountered by older children for flying model airplanes (a mixture of mostly methanol with nitromethane and castor oil).. It didn't prove to be much of a hazard. It can also be found in a wood fire (though much of it vaporizes and burns).

      It's not like gasoline (even lead free) is benign.

  • Are there better sources for this story, the best I could find was this and even still talks about in terms of research projects:

    The direct methanol fuel cell is currently too expensive to be used in passenger cars. Its high cost comes mainly from the platinum and ruthenium used as catalysts. Prakash and others are developing a variety of approaches to reduce the amount of catalyst needed: making the catalyst more active, increasing its surface area, and using nanoscale methods. When this technology matures, Erickson believes it might replace the hydrogen fuel cell. “An inexpensive, high-power direct methanol fuel cell is the Holy Grail,” he says.

    https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]

    https://cordis.europa.eu/proje... [europa.eu]

    Now I don't disagree this is worth investigating but the lack of funding for this, wouldn't that be more of an example of a market/investment failure? Looks like they are moving ahead with a phase 2 production plant but according to the 2nd link the first plant operating in notoriously energy excessive Iceland produced 4/kt a year.

    I'm not exactly ready to go pointing fingers towards "Total State" conspiracies just yet, especially when it makes total sense why the market forces would move towards BEV over alternative liquid fuels, alternative liquid fuels require massive amount of cheap abundant electricity and we just don't have that yet

  • Re:

    Nonsense.

    If there was any way to get a profit from this process then companies would be using it right now.

    • Re:

      You are obviously not familiar with 'making the market'. There is initial investment into creating a market - sometimes this fails, actually it happens a lot. You see it right now with the AI stuff, and all the blockchain crap before that, and every iteration over the years of the 'next big thing'.

      Doing so with fuel cells and the fuel for same is actually pretty expensive, same as the Musk plan with his Teslas. People start believing in inevitability/necessity and then your market is made. This one didn

      • Re:

        But that's the thing: Olah doesn't have to create a methanol market, there already is a robust one. He just has to start producing and selling. If he can't compete on price, he'll have to compete on being green and that seems like an easy sell right now.

        If you want to do the reverse, start selling methanol fuel cells, I'm sure there are a ton of market applications. I wouldn't necessarily start with vehicles. I'd perhaps start with backup power supplies. Yes, you've bringing a new type of product to market

  • Re:

    Efficiency and input energy costs?

    Solar power from the sky may be free. But there is a significant capital cost involved with capturing it. More so if high temperatures are required.

    • Re:

      Any time I see somebody claim that a process is environmentally friendly because it can be powered by solar electricity, I just think "how is that different from just injecting that solar electricity directly into the grid?" You can't just take an energy-intensive process and slap "solar powered" on it and claim that that makes it environmentally friendly. You need to consider any energy-intensive process in the context of the actual source mix of electricity generation in the region.

      • Re:

        One problem with solar and the grid is the grid may not be able to handle it. I have 12kW of panels feeding 10kW of inverters and a home base load of 1kW. So at peak, several hour a day during the current summer months, I have 9kW surplus. Right now my local grid can handle 4.5kW before the house goes over voltage. It varies with the best I can get being about 7kW feed in. This of course reflects that the rural grid I'm connected to needs upgraded.
        
        I'm not a fan hydrogen for small vehicles such as ca

        • Re:

          I'm not really suggesting injecting small amounts of solar into the grid at a large number of ingress points, as it could be easier to manage that by building out dedicated solar plants if necessary. I'm just trying to say that it's silly to say that some process is solar powered when it's ultimately still just electric and not connecting solar panels to the grid doesn't change the fact that it's consuming a lot of electricity. Somebody might say "a hydrogen fuel cell car can be environmentally friendly bec

      • Re:

        It could very well be environmentally friendly. Just not economical.

        If it's an easily throttable process, then it can accept variable solar/wind inputs. While the grid might not be able to. That sort of thing, IMO, is the ideal application.

      • Re:

        All true. I think the same thing when someone says "hydrogen powered this" or "ethanol powered that". There's another story posted today about converting CO2 to aviation fuel. That's interesting because no one has a plausible suggestion how to make long range electrical passenger planes at any sort of reasonable price.

        In terms of vehicles, that's my original point about hydrogen seeming to be a dead end. Like it or not, the industry has largely decided batteries are a better approach than fuel cells so ther

  • The cost to get enough CO2 directly from the atmosphere, where it is famously concentrated around 410 ppm, is exorbitant. Thus you would need other sources of CO2 with much higher concentrations, e.g. directly at furnaces or other streams of CO2. Additionally, Methanol has a higher chemical energy content than CO2 and H2O, thus whatever catalyst you are using, you have to add that amount of energy to get Methanol out of CO2 and H2O. All the catalyst does is lowering the activation energy, but it does not suddenly helps to violate the First Law of Thermodynamics.

    Currently, the price for 1 kilogram of CO2 is about $5. While water is comparatively cheap, Methanol as a fuel will be not, especially if it is supposed to be made from atmospheric CO2, and you have to have a very cheap source of energy to create the Methanol.

    In general, energy from synthetic Methanol (or any other types of synthetic fuel) will cost about 3-5 times the amount electric energy costs. It will only be viable where direct electric power is out of question.

    • Re:

      OTOH, CO2 is a by-product of the industrial gas industry.

  • This is something I know about directly, and you’re wrong. The state didn’t kill direct methanol fuel cells - they just turned out to be a pretty sub-par energy source for a variety of technical reasons. The US put a significant amount of research money into them trying to make them work. They just werent good enough.

    
    
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]–25%25).

  • Re:

    Funny. There was another article posted an hour ago about exactly that. I expect it's much harder to do at scale and at a reasonable price than Olah expects. We'll see. If he succeeds, that will be quite interesting.

    That's one possibility. The other is that it's harder to do that it seems. If Olah really has a plausible process and business case, I'm sure there's someone who will fund a plant. He doesn't have to convince every investor, he just as to find one.

• Re:

  Conventional batteries have found niches, where they can't compete with fossil fuel they mostly are non solutions entirely. Take away fossil fuel and you are left with no solutions.

  Hydrogen is for net zero.

  • Re: More uncertain future?

    Hydrogen isn't net zero, not today. We mostly make it from methane and I assume thar leads to venting CO2.

    I can imagine that nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, and (fracked) geothermal might eventually replace fossil fuels. Maybe. And it doesn't sound cheap.

  • Re:

    Hydrogen is a failure every where it has been tried, even spacecraft are moving away from it. Fueling station problems that aren't going away, fuel cell problems, often contamination that leaves hydrogen powered buses in the yard half the time and bus companies getting rid of them as soon as the government funds stop. As well as the well known storage, metal britlement etc problems.
    Much better to make other types of fuel for the situations such as flying where a liquid fuel is ideal. Even methane created w

• Re:

  Really? The only problem most people care about with batteries ia time to charge, pretty sure hydrogen is better at that. I can buy two wireless headphones increase i need them longer than the charge and I do, but can't do that with a car. I didn't use smartphones much until they could last well over a day of heavy use.

  • Re:

    > Really? The only problem most people who have no personal experience with EV ownership care about with batteries ia time to charge

    Fixed that for you...

      > I can buy two wireless headphones increase i need them longer than the charge and I do, but can't do that with a car

    How many hours a day do you drive?
    =Smidge=

    • Re:

      So you buy expensive things and then determine that they don't work for you? You expect me to take that seriously?
      
      That's the wrong question. The correct question is how many hours a day might i need to drive in the future and the answer is i don't know. I have had situations occur where i have had to drive 12 hour days so i would be wise to have a car that can do it.

      • Re:

        I have had situations where I need to transport a piano across the country. By your logic, it would be wise for me to own a moving truck.

        Or I could, you know, rent a car when I'm doing something two or three standard deviations from my normal behavior like most people do.

• Re:

  If fuel cells made sense as a power source for road vehicles, someone would have figured it out by now (the technology has been around since the 60s if not earlier).

  They make great electrical power sources for spacecraft (NASA has used them since the 60s) but they can't beat either internal combustion or batteries as a power source for road vehicles.

• • I don't think energy is the problem. Fuel IS energy, bound densely in a transportable and storable form. You either get it from a natural reserve (like oil) or you have to make it yourself some other way, by inputting the energy to be stored, and that will ALWAYS involve collection, concentration, and conversion of energy, and that will never be "cheap", because ultimately all "cheap" means is "not requiring a lot of energy". And as we're finally coming to terms with, you can't just keep relying on conveniently collected, concentrated, and packaged energy laying around just waiting to be picked up.

    When it comes right down to it, we may NEVER find a more convenient and energy-dense form of fuel than gasoline. (or other hydrocarbons) We could be working harder on technology to create gasoline (or some other form of hydrocarbon) from other sources of energy, but the biggest complaint I see is that it's too expensive to make. IE it requires more energy input. But it creates a more energy-dense fuel, that's easier to transport. But the public doesn't see it as a "good value" yet because there's still a lot of hydrocarbons just lying around to be picked up. That's changing of course, but it's going to be awhile before it reaches the tipping point,

    Most chemical fuels are things that can be stored and later combined with oxygen (burned) to release energy. You could even say that the energy isn't in the gasoline or the hydrogen, it's in the oxygen in the air that's the actual fuel, and all we're carrying around is the catalyst to harvest the energy out of the air. Hydrogen is the best thing to combine with oxygen for energy release, and it's he hydrogen in the hydrocarbon that we're using. (but then we have that pesky carbon to get rid of, and we choose to release it into the air as CO2 instead of say, storing or recycling it, because it's more convenient)

    But that carbon is very useful in increasing energy density by tying that hydrogen down so we can store it as a liquid instead of as a gas. We just traded problems, we got rid of the pesky carbon, but now we have to store our fuel as a gas. It really wasn't a very good trade-off, just look at all the problems that hydrogen has that gasoline lacks.

    Getting back to your comment though, hydrogen generation by hydrolysis has NEVER been "cheap" because you're storing just about the maximum amount of energy by splitting hydrogen from water. It will ALWAYS take a lot of energy input because that's what you're doing - concentrating and packaging energy. Energy IS the product. The problem boils down to exactly two things: (1) find an abundant source of energy, and (2) reduce inefficiencies in the packing process. That's it, just those two things. Solar is a no-brainer for power but the middle east is naturally using their oil to do it. That's not a long-term solution of course. As for efficiency, we're already pretty good at that, there's not a lot less to optimize.

    So what that means is it's NOT going to get "cheaper", because we're nearing the theoretical max. It only LOOKS like we might be able to get the cost down because of how expensive it currently is. The requirement for energy input is NOT negotiable. So almost all of hydrogen's production cost is a fixed-cost, that can never be reduced.

    In summary, hydrogen will NEVER be a "cheap" source of energy. It's already very close to its theoretical lowest "price". All that can happen now is the cost of production of OTHER fuels will continue to rise, making hydrogen look better.

  • • Re:

      Those are weird fluke events that rarely happen. Assuming that free energy will be available is not a reasonable basis for a national energy policy.

      The surpluses are local and transient and will fade as we improve the grid with more HVDC lines. Rather than use supply spikes for hydrogen, they can be used to top off BEVs.

    • Re:

      The electricity costs more than the hydrogen you're selling.

    • Electrolysis is quite energy intensive, even if you limited yourself to the brief periods of electricity surplus. No, It's even cheaper to produce hydrogen from methane with Steam methane reforming (SMR). Because of this, most hydrogen is not "green". And the industry has failed to secure the same government protections that other technologies have received. We're all-in on EVs now, for better or worse.

      • And the [hydrogen] industry has failed to secure the same government protections that other technologies have received. We're all-in on EVs now, for better or worse.

        I'd almost say the opposite; hydrogen has gotten way too much support from the government. Because of the density and storage problems, it really is not practical for vehicles, but the government keeps supporting it.

        • Re:

          Density and storage are a problem with EVs as well on vehicle. Hydrogen has faster refueling times and currently longer range. The problems of storage at a hydrogen refilling station parallel the problems that EV charging stations have with electrical capacity and grid infrastructure. A pressurized hydrogen tank takes some good materials science to make it lightweight and safe. But the same could be said of an EV's battery pack.

          Speaking in the long term, I think EV is the most flexible option. Electricity i

          • Re:

            Hydrogen only has fast fueling times that BEV in a handful of very specific cases. Firstly ig you can charge where you park, as most BEV owners can, then the charging time is effectively measured in seconds. Hydrogen fueling time is measured in minutes but does no factor in the time it takes to drive to one. In my case it is 6+ hours each way. There are promises that will only be 45 minutes each way in future, but currently that is just vaporware.
            
            The theoretical advantage would be on road trips. If

    • Re:

      Electrolysis isn't cheap. Even if you have fluke market swings that allow you to take advantage of free electricity the up front cost of an electrolyser and the risk of operating it is incredibly high, to say nothing of the utilities around it such as water RO plants needed to get pure water into the things.

      Total Cost of Ownership matters including construction and risk.

    • Re:

      Electrolysis fails the "cheap" proviso, because it is extremely energy intensive.

      At present the only economical way to generate hydrogen at anything larger than benchtop scale is steam reformation of natural gas, which in fact produces the majority of the world's commercial hydrogen supply. This unfortunately generates one CO2 molecule for every four H2 molecules generated. Hydrogen produced this way is called "gray hydrogen" because it's not quite as dirty as hydrogen produced from coal gasification (so c

    • Re:

      That sounds complicated. The cheapest form of hydrogen is "white" or natural hydrogen.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]

      Turns out the stuff is in the ground just waiting to be released by drilling for it. It first turned up by accident in 1921 and till now the result has been to simply plug the wells and move on.