hydrogen boat with UK fuel cell completes testing

[ditchcrawler]

1 hour ago, cuthound said:

 

It not been there for several years now.

I went passed when they were taking it away 23 Sep 2021 with the aid of a petrol generator 

 

[agg221]

I have been contemplating whether to contribute to this thread or not.

 

On the one hand, I believe I am exceptionally well qualified to comment on the technology, address some of the preconceptions which are based on frequently repeated mis-information and detail the rationale behind government sponsored projects of this type.

On the other hand, there is no point wasting my time on what are inevitably long and time-consuming posts to write if people do not actually want to read them but just want an outlet to express their preconceptions. There are times when this forum reminds me of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets, in which case I will just leave people to it and get on with my day, making bits of boat furniture and a chimney chain, which would be a much better use of my time.

 

Alec

[IanD]

24 minutes ago, agg221 said:

I have been contemplating whether to contribute to this thread or not.

 

On the one hand, I believe I am exceptionally well qualified to comment on the technology, address some of the preconceptions which are based on frequently repeated mis-information and detail the rationale behind government sponsored projects of this type.

On the other hand, there is no point wasting my time on what are inevitably long and time-consuming posts to write if people do not actually want to read them but just want an outlet to express their preconceptions. There are times when this forum reminds me of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets, in which case I will just leave people to it and get on with my day, making bits of boat furniture and a chimney chain, which would be a much better use of my time.

 

Alec

 

Alec, I don't think there's any doubt that the hydrogen fuel cell technology works and is capable of doing what is claimed -- just like nuclear-powered ships and gas-turbine powered cars.

 

The problem is that as far as I can see there's no practical and affordable way now or in the future of applying it to the UK canals. If you think there is, I'd genuinely like to hear how you think this could work 🙂

 

To avoid any doubt, I also understand very well how these technologies work, and also what infrastructure is needed to support them -- and how governments and companies sometimes dump lots of money and effort into projects that are interesting -- which is fine, knowledge is good! -- but have little hope of ever being rolled out into the real world, even though it's often claimed otherwise.

 

Quite apart from the issues of where the fuel comes from -- because if it uses renewable energy (hooray, green hydrogen!) it's basically acting as an extremely inefficient battery, wasting more than half of that scarce energy (boo, not green!) -- there are major costs and difficulties with distribution and storage of hydrogen, both and land and onboard a vessel or vehicle, and these aren't easily fixed because they're caused by the nature of the beast. There may well be niche applications for hydrogen where energy density matters much more than cost (aviation, military, vehicle fleet with centralised refuelling) but these are very unlikely to include canal boats or cars.

Edited January 13 by IanD

[Stilllearning]

Hmmm, here I am, the putative chap on the Clapham omnibus, thinking about hydrogen as a fuel.

To use it, first it has to be isolated from whatever compound it is at present a part of, using a lot of energy. 

Secondly it has to be purified, compressed and stored, using more energy.

Thirdly delivered to a hopefully very nearby end user, using more energy.

By this point I suspect that the energy in the hydrogen is less than the amount used to get it to the point of use.

Electricity does on the face of it seem a much more sensible power source.

[IanD]

22 minutes ago, Stilllearning said:

Hmmm, here I am, the putative chap on the Clapham omnibus, thinking about hydrogen as a fuel.

To use it, first it has to be isolated from whatever compound it is at present a part of, using a lot of energy. 

Secondly it has to be purified, compressed and stored, using more energy.

Thirdly delivered to a hopefully very nearby end user, using more energy.

By this point I suspect that the energy in the hydrogen is less than the amount used to get it to the point of use.

Electricity does on the face of it seem a much more sensible power source.

https://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/Web_sites/02-03/hydrogen_economy/Round Trip Efficiency.htm

 

"Renewable power sources give a final hydrogen Roundtrip Efficiency of 32.03%.

 

Areas of improvement

The first area of improvement lies with the electrolysis unit. The amount of energy currently required to produce 1 Nm3 of hydrogen is 4.6 kWh. However it is theoretically possible to have 100% efficiency, that is 3.5kWh per Nm3 of hydrogen. But this would be very difficult to achieve and predictions are that a value of 3.7 kWh per Nm3 of hydrogen is a more realistic goal. This raises the production efficiency to around 91.03%.

Another area where real progress could be made is in the hydrogen fuel cell. Currently fuel cells are 50% efficient in converting hydrogen to electrical energy, but it assumed that this efficiency could rise to 60%.

If these improvements were applied, the roundtrip efficiency would then be 48.69% using renewable energy"

 

So right now using "green" hydrogen takes about 3x as much energy input as using the renewable energy to charge batteries. In the best case in the future (not achived yet!) this could drop to about 2x.

 

So you're right, today the wasted energy is about 2x the usable energy, and the best that could be done in future is making it 1x... 😞

 

 

Edited January 13 by IanD

[agg221]

48 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

Alec, I don't think there's any doubt that the hydrogen fuel cell technology works and is capable of doing what is claimed -- just like nuclear-powered ships and gas-turbine powered cars.

 

The problem is that as far as I can see there's no practical and affordable way now or in the future of applying it to the UK canals. If you think there is, I'd genuinely like to hear how you think this could work 🙂

 

To avoid any doubt, I also understand very well how these technologies work, and also what infrastructure is needed to support them -- and how governments and companies sometimes dump lots of money and effort into projects that are interesting -- which is fine, knowledge is good! -- but have little hope of ever being rolled out into the real world, even though it's often claimed otherwise.

 

Quite apart from the issues of where the fuel comes from -- because if it uses renewable energy (hooray, green hydrogen!) it's basically acting as an extremely inefficient battery, wasting more than half of that scarce energy (boo, not green!) -- there are major costs and difficulties with distribution and storage of hydrogen, both and land and onboard a vessel or vehicle, and these aren't easily fixed because they're caused by the nature of the beast. There may well be niche applications for hydrogen where energy density matters much more than cost (aviation, military, vehicle fleet with centralised refuelling) but these are very unlikely to include canal boats or cars.

Ian, the question below is not meant as a 'mine's bigger than yours' contest, or to pick holes, but try this:

 

Describe the mechanism of transport of hydrogen through materials, with particular reference to common pipeline materials.

 

I can do this - I would be interested to see your answer.

 

What I am getting at here is that the devil is in the detail, and I know the detail. Do you? If not, I would assert that the gaps in your knowledge will mean you are not sufficiently aware of the issues to avoid making invalid assumptions, particularly with regard to weighting of factors, which leads to incorrect conclusions.

 

Alec

[IanD]

1 hour ago, agg221 said:

Ian, the question below is not meant as a 'mine's bigger than yours' contest, or to pick holes, but try this:

 

Describe the mechanism of transport of hydrogen through materials, with particular reference to common pipeline materials.

 

I can do this - I would be interested to see your answer.

 

What I am getting at here is that the devil is in the detail, and I know the detail. Do you? If not, I would assert that the gaps in your knowledge will mean you are not sufficiently aware of the issues to avoid making invalid assumptions, particularly with regard to weighting of factors, which leads to incorrect conclusions.

 

Alec

 

Of course pipeline materials which are suitable for hydrogen do exist, but a lot of the existing gas pipelines are not, they are too permeable to small molecules -- and there are also difficulties with leakage at valves, connectors, refuelling stations, all of which need expensive precision manufacture and materials. But all this could be done in theory, if it was done on a massive scale and with a huge amount of investment.

 

However building a hydrogen pipeline distribution network suitable for the canals is utterly impractical on cost grounds unless there's already a countrywide one being built for other applications, which is *extremely* unlikely -- the most likely means of distribution to the few hydrogen filling stations that may be built in places like airports and fleet depots is tankers, if this ever happens at all.

 

Or distribute the electricity to them and do the generation there, which also only works with large electrolysis systems because small ones cost far too much relative to their capacity, you need economies of scale to make this have any chance of being feasible. Even then, unless "green" hydrogen becomes used on a large scale the costs would almost certainly be *far* too high per end user.

 

As I keep saying the problem -- for fuel cells, tanks, pipelines, storage -- is *not* technical, like building rockets all this *can* be done. The problem is that the economics for doing it simply don't work, not for cars, and even more so not for canal boats... :-(

Edited January 13 by IanD

[agg221]

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

Of course pipeline materials which are suitable for hydrogen do exist, but a lot of the existing gas pipelines are not, they are too permeable to small molecules -- and there are also difficulties with leakage at valves, connectors, refuelling stations, all of which need expensive precision manufacture and materials. But all this could be done in theory, if it was done on a massive scale and with a huge amount of investment.

 

I have quoted you directly. Not wishing to be rude, but this indicates that you fundamentally do not understand hydrogen transport. I am happy to comment on it, but not to have an argument about it - it has to start from facts. To illustrate my point, when towns gas was in use, why did both the hydrogen and the carbon monoxide reach intended destination, rather than the hydrogen being lost en-route? Why is bottled hydrogen supplied by the likes of BOC and Air Products transported in conventional steel gas cylinders, using conventional valves and fittings, without issues arising?

 

Alec

Edited January 13 by agg221

[IanD]

5 minutes ago, agg221 said:

 

I have quoted you directly. Not wishing to be rude, but this indicates that you fundamentally do not understand hydrogen transport.

 

Alec

 

Please stop trying to pick holes in the pipelines, because that's irrelevant 😉

 

The problem is not the technology of pipelines or hydrogen transport or fuels cells or hydrogen/hydride tanks or anything else, it's the economics -- the construction costs of both distribution systems (especially for relatively low total use spread over a wide area) and storage and fuel cells, and the killer fact that the end result is to waste between half and two-thirds of the "green" energy put in.

Edited January 13 by IanD

[agg221]

1 minute ago, IanD said:

 

Please stop trying to pick holes in the pipelines, because that's irrelevant 😉

 

The problem is not the technology of pipelines or hydrogen transport or fuels cells or hydrogen/hydride tanks or anything else, it's the economics -- the construction costs of both distribution systems (especially for relatively low total use spread over a wide area) and storage and fuel cells, and the killer fact that the end result is to waste between half and two-thirds of the "green" energy put in.

I disagree. The thread above makes several erroneous statements about the difficulty and cost associated with hydrogen.

 

It is extremely easy to take the 'it will never work' path, supported by false evidence. What actually matters is whether if you strip away the falsehoods, misconceptions etc you have a viable technology, and where that technology would then be viable. If you leave all the false barriers in place you end up with an inevitable conclusion; if you remove them, you may or may not.

 

I have deliberately tested whether the route this thread would go down is to argue even without the facts in place. The answer is yes. Therefore there is no point that I can see in providing facts, since this is an argument based on preconceptions rather than rational logic.

 

Alec

[IanD]

14 minutes ago, agg221 said:

I disagree. The thread above makes several erroneous statements about the difficulty and cost associated with hydrogen.

 

It is extremely easy to take the 'it will never work' path, supported by false evidence. What actually matters is whether if you strip away the falsehoods, misconceptions etc you have a viable technology, and where that technology would then be viable. If you leave all the false barriers in place you end up with an inevitable conclusion; if you remove them, you may or may not.

 

I have deliberately tested whether the route this thread would go down is to argue even without the facts in place. The answer is yes. Therefore there is no point that I can see in providing facts, since this is an argument based on preconceptions rather than rational logic.

 

Alec

 

So provide some facts which show that a hydrogen/fuel-cell boat could make economic sense in future (it obviously doesn't now, but that was an experimental one-off), and a hydrogen distribution network/method which does the same (for either cars or canal boats), and doesn't waste inordinate amounts of energy -- for example, see the analysis I provided a link to.

 

There's plenty of analysis out there which shows exactly the opposite is true -- which might just possibly be why hydrogen is not in wide use already, and there are no credible plans to do this -- so I await your information with great interest. You're the one who seems to be claiming against all this evidence that it can all work, so it's down to you to show why everyone else is wrong. Not technically, but economically.

 

I'd especially like to know how you've found a way round the laws of thermodynamics which are the fundamental reason for the terrible end-to-end efficiency of hydrogen-based transport... 🙂

Edited January 13 by IanD

[Tony Brooks]

13 minutes ago, agg221 said:

I disagree. The thread above makes several erroneous statements about the difficulty and cost associated with hydrogen.

 

It is extremely easy to take the 'it will never work' path, supported by false evidence. What actually matters is whether if you strip away the falsehoods, misconceptions etc you have a viable technology, and where that technology would then be viable. If you leave all the false barriers in place you end up with an inevitable conclusion; if you remove them, you may or may not.

 

I have deliberately tested whether the route this thread would go down is to argue even without the facts in place. The answer is yes. Therefore there is no point that I can see in providing facts, since this is an argument based on preconceptions rather than rational logic.

 

Alec

 

Well, thank you - not, for not stating your position for those of us who want more information so we can form our own opinion. Until proven otherwise, your actual level of expertise is left open to question and your posts might be viewed as simply argumentative.

[IanD]

3 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

 

Well, thank you - not, for not stating your position for those of us who want more information so we can form our own opinion. Until proven otherwise, your actual level of expertise is left open to question and your posts might be viewed as simply argumentative.

 

[MtB]

I listened all the way to the end and they said nothing at all about hydrogen electrolysis...!

[agg221]

Just now, Tony Brooks said:

 

Well, thank you - not, for not stating your position for those of us who want more information so we can form our own opinion. Until proven otherwise, your actual level of expertise is left open to question and your posts might be viewed as simply argumentative.

Tony, I am not trying to be argumentative, explicitly the opposite, but Ian has decided to argue despite clearly not understanding the fundamental basis on which some aspects of the relevant technology are dependent and I am not prepared to be drawn into a pointless argument which is not based on fact. I probably feel about it in rather the same way as you do about the Liquid Moly poster.

 

Alec

 

[IanD]

4 hours ago, agg221 said:

Tony, I am not trying to be argumentative, explicitly the opposite, but Ian has decided to argue despite clearly not understanding the fundamental basis on which some aspects of the relevant technology are dependent and I am not prepared to be drawn into a pointless argument which is not based on fact. I probably feel about it in rather the same way as you do about the Liquid Moly poster.

 

Alec

 

Alec -- as I've now said multiple times but you keep ignoring, this is *nothing* to do with hydrogen fuel cell technology or distribution... 😞

 

There is no *technical* obstacle to having a network of hydrogen pipelines (or tankers) across the UK -- or even along the canals -- and using these to power fuel cells on cars or boats, narrow or wide. All the technology to do all this exists and has done for many years, in the same way as nuclear power has. I'm not arguing with you about this, I'm agreeing, because it's a fact. If it was all being built by NASA and cost was no object, we could have all this tomorrow.

 

However there is no realistic chance of this ever making economic or emissions sense for cars, and even less so for canal boats, due to the costs/practicalities involved and the fundamentally lousy overall efficiency.

 

What is your response to this statement, rather than trying to repeatedly divert the discussion back to technical issues which are not relevent or even disputed?

 

4 hours ago, MtB said:

I listened all the way to the end and they said nothing at all about hydrogen electrolysis...!

They didn't need to, the underlying laws of physics and thermodynamics are kind of equivalent. It's a great song though... 😉

Edited January 13 by IanD

[Ronaldo47]

7 hours ago, agg221 said:

To illustrate my point, when towns gas was in use, why did both the hydrogen and the carbon monoxide reach intended destination, rather than the hydrogen being lost en-route? 

Town gas was usually produced locally ( hence the name Town Gas?) in numerous relatively small gas works and distributed short distances at a  lower pressure than natural gas, so loss of hydrogen by leakage or diffusion  would have been less of a problem. There was no national gas network before the UK's conversion to natural gas, as there had been no need for one. Conversely, the national natural gas network was constructed  to transfer natural gas distances of  hundreds of miles, originally from a single storage terminal.

 

It is seldom remembered today that the original plan, devised by the former North Thames Gas Board,  was to import cheap natural gas in liquified form from Algeria, using a fleet of  tankers, to a terminal on Canvey Island in Essex, from which pipelines would extend via London  to the Midlands  and the North. Provision was made for a prospective second terminal on the Mersey for importing liquified natural gas from the USA. My late father used to work for North Thames Gas, and I still have a copy of an edition of the NTG staff magazine that describes and illustrates the scheme as originally conceived in some detail.

 

While the gas grid was still under construction, North Sea Gas was discovered, so the gas grid had to be redesigned to provide East-West connections from the East Coast gas  terminals to join the originally-planned North-South pipelines.

 

Unless Hydrogen is to be generated locally like town gas used to be, which seems unlikely as I understand the proposals are to do it near the sources of cheap electric energy to avoid putting strain on the electricity grid, Hydrogen would need to be tranported over much longer distances and at higher pressures than the Hydrogen-containing town gas ever was. 

 

 

 

Edited January 14 by Ronaldo47
typos

[agg221]

45 minutes ago, Ronaldo47 said:

Town gas was usually produced locally ( hence the name Town Gas?) in numerous relatively small gas works and distributed at a  lower pressure than natural gas, so loss of hydrogen by leakage or diffusion  would have been less of a problem. There was no national gas network before the UK's conversion to natural gas, as there had been no need for one. Conversely, the national natural gas network was constructed  to transfer natural gas distances of  hundreds of miles.

 

It is seldom remembered today that the original plan, devised by the former North Thames Gas Board,  was to import cheap natural gas in liquified form from Algeria, using a fleet of  tankers, to a terminal on Canvey Island in Essex, from which pipelines would extend via London  to the Midlands  and the North. Provision was made for a prospective second terminal on the Mersey for importing liquified natural gas from the USA. My late father used to work for North Thames Gas, and I still have a copy if an edition of the NTG staff magazine that describes and illustrates the scheme as originally conceived in some detail.

 

While the gas grid was still under construction, North Sea Gas was discovered, so the gas grid had to be redesigned to provide East-West connections from the East Coast gas  terminals to join the originally-planned North-South pipelines.

 

Unless Hydrogen is to be generated locally like town gas used to be, which seems unlikely as I understand the proposals are to do it near the sources of cheap electric energy to avoid putting strain on the electricity grid, Hydrogen would need to be tranported over much longer distances and at higher pressures than the Hydrogen-containing town gas ever was. 

 

 

 

The pressure difference is potentially a major component as you have identified. It's worth breaking this down though. The grid divides into three main components, National Transmission System (NTS), Local Transmission System (LTS) and the low pressure network. Most of the low pressure network has now been replaced with the familiar yellow polyethylene pipe but there are still some sections in cast iron. Within the working pressure of a few mbar positive pressure the permeation rate through the polyethylene is not notably different for a given pressure between hydrogen and methane, so the changes to that part of the network do not present an issue. The issue of mechanical joints drying out has been mentioned above but this has been addressed pragmatically for use in methane by sloshing buckets of ethylene glycol into the network which lie in pools at the lowest point and the vapour is transported in the gas stream, keeping the hemp fibres swollen. The same approach works for hydrogen. There is however a technical issue with running pure hydrogen through cast iron which did not arise with towns gas and means that either cast iron sections would need to be replaced or there would need to be a deliberate addition made to prevent the issue arising. These would have different cost implications.

 

The question mark lies over the NTS and LTS. These are not only used for transport; they are also used for storage by pressure cycling. Parts of the LTS do date back to towns gas in areas where gasworks were remote from centres of population (notably there is one between the outskirts of Edinburgh and the centre). This does give some data about behaviour but there are knowledge gaps, particularly around pure hydrogen. It is not that the LTS and NTS pipelines cannot be used for transmission of hydrogen, more that the limits of concentration vs. pressure have not been quantified yet. This is a major exercise because the testing has to generate fatigue curves which is slow (and the better it performs the longer it takes), there are limits to acceleration factors and there are only about 10 machines in the UK which can do it (there are also a few in the US). The machines have to run in a representative environment which means high pressure hydrogen and the HSE has recently placed significant additional restrictions on operation which means the machines are very challenging to design and build. A particular issue is that one of the restrictions is allowable volume, but for test specimens to be valid they have to be of a certain size and getting the two to be mutually compatible is a huge challenge, although it has been achieved for everything asked of it so far.

 

Once the first pass data has been generated it will define allowable operational pressure on the LTS and NTS, which will feed into use-cases. The data will have a major bearing on the financial viability of certain use-cases as if the existing grid cannot support any reasonable level of distribution that would place a further major financial barrier in the way of adoption since an entire new distribution network would be needed, whereas if it can operate at something near current pressures with no ill effects that this barrier will not arise. There is a possible intermediate position where transmission is not an issue but achieving the higher pressures needed for storage is a problem, in which case there would be a cost associated with local storage (bring back the gasometers...?) and another possible solution is to operate at a safe percentage during a transition period, but that opens a whole other can of worms around the way the other gas(es) in the mix work to achieve safe operation and are also acceptable in the context of safety. Ironically, on purely technical grounds, the best gas to mix with hydrogen to avoid issues with pipelines would be carbon monoxide, which coincidentally is why the original cast iron pipes were fine in towns gas.

 

Alec

Edited January 14 by agg221

[Tony Brooks]

Thanks Agg221

 

So the takeaway I get from that is that at present Hydrogen in the gas network is not a viable option at present and the more infrastructure that has to be built the less viable it becomes. I think that is pretty much what IanD suggests.

 

I also note that you have not mentioned the refuelling problems that seem to have been found in, I think, experimental German trains. This may make things very difficult to use hydrogen for transport purposes. It seems an unknown, but anecdotally, a large number of people are scared of hydrogen, hence the reported pushback for areas selected for experimentally supplying hydrogen to homes via the gas network. That might be the major problem to overcome.

[MtB]

1 hour ago, Tony Brooks said:

It seems an unknown, but anecdotally, a large number of people are scared of hydrogen, hence the reported pushback for areas selected for experimentally supplying hydrogen to homes via the gas network. That might be the major problem to overcome.

 

 

I think there is still a strong public awareness of what happened to this, especially in older people:

 

 

 

[Tony Brooks]

3 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

 

I think there is still a strong public awareness of what happened to this, especially in older people:

 

 

 

 

I think that you are correct, plus the name Hydrogen Bomb (which has little to do with hydrogen gas). This may turn out to be the biggest problem with widespread use of hydrogen.

[john.k]

I seem to recall Town gas is a mans name .......anyhoo,200 odd years ago ,white water gas (the common H2 and CO mix)  was introduced from the USA ,and as workmen wernt familiar with CO ,many deaths resulted....there were calls for the gas to be banned ,and for the promoters to be strung up for mass murder........As we all know ,that didnt happen ,and the economic imperative won the day 

[ditchcrawler]

22 minutes ago, Tony Brooks said:

 

I think that you are correct, plus the name Hydrogen Bomb (which has little to do with hydrogen gas). This may turn out to be the biggest problem with widespread use of hydrogen.

A bit like Lithium in batteries for boats 

[BoatinglifeupNorth]

2 hours ago, Tony Brooks said:

Thanks Agg221

 

So the takeaway I get from that is that at present Hydrogen in the gas network is not a viable option at present and the more infrastructure that has to be built the less viable it becomes. I think that is pretty much what IanD suggests.

I think most people worked that one out after the first few posts of the thread😉

[ditchcrawler]

I wonder if JCB are still following this path