UNESCO joins Energy Observer, the first hydrogen ship

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by schakel, Feb 23, 2017.

  1. Ilan Voyager
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    Ilan Voyager Senior Member

    For the ignorant people, UNESCO does not spend one cent. It's just a institutional partnership. So do not complain without knowing a **** of what you talking about.. Please do not act like Trumpy Tricky Trumpo the ignoramus and the great shame of the occidental world, and emperor of the tweet. Use your brains, not the Pavlov reflexes instilled by Fox News.
    Do not cry about taxpayers, it's privately funded but with technical help of the CEA. It's the job of the CEA, which has been created for research and this kind of help. In Europe, technical partnership with public institutions is normal. That's called social solidarity where all the members of a society participate in function of their contribution capacity to the well being of the whole society. There is a thing called ethics...That works also for health, education and a few other things. Its also efficient contrary to the neo-liberal belief., there are many examples.
    A lot of very qualified guys are in the project. A good sign.
    I do remember all the critics, mainly Yankee, about Solar Impulse....we have seen the result.
    The boat is a proof of concept to get rid of the weakness of most the electric systems which need storage of power; the batteries..
    The batteries have a lot of inconveniences. Poor ratio power/weight, using rare metals in short supply, very dirty to make and more very dirty to recycle.And very expensive. Plus a detail, the Chinese have most of the world reserves of these rare metals. All the batteries using cheap materials are not enough performant.
    Barreries are horrendously heavy, expensive and unsustainable.
    So for some applications a possible solution is to get rid of the batteries and to produce hydrogen as power medium of storage. There are some difficulties; electrolysis of water uses a lot of energy, and hydrogen is not easy to store.
    The goal is to have electrolysis cells as efficient as possible, as cheap as possible with a good reliability, and to be able to store the hydrogen without spending a prohibitive amount of energy like compressors and high pressure cylinders, with an acceptable volume of the storage.
    All that does not mean that the whole system has to be highly efficient, it means only that the system has to be enough efficient to be viable. It's not a subtlety of semantics, it's the main point.
    As some pointed judiciously, the cost of the project is nothing compared to a America Cup or a seasom of F1, or even the price of a footballer. And it's investment for the future whatever the results.
    The destiny of the catamaran Tag Hauer/Enxa designed by Nigel Irens is more extraordinary than fiction...It ¡s a proof also of the quality of the work done in 1983 by Canadair.
     
  2. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    Sounds nice.
    How about some details?
    Right now it's all advertising copy.
     
  3. IronPrice
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    IronPrice Senior Member

    For safe(r) storage what about ammonia?

    While ammonia isn't intrinsically safe: -
    - You will smell it if there is a leak; and
    - It doesn't burn easily in air; and
    - If there is a spill ammonia can be flushed away with seawater and metabolised by marine micro-organisms
    - Ammonia is widely available as bulk product.

    There was some recent coverage of conversion of hydrogen to and from ammonia for safer shipping. I believe it's Australian technology.

    See this page.

    I have no idea how deployable the membrane technology is.
     
  4. rwatson
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    rwatson Senior Member

    Sounds pretty exciting stuff
    ""Ammonia is a very nice way of transporting hydrogen from point A to point B — be it from Australia to Japan, for example — because it actually has a higher hydrogen density than liquid hydrogen.""
     
  5. schakel
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    schakel environmental project Msc

    I believe this graph represents the state of the art with ligth batteries:
    [​IMG]
    A Lithium Polymer gives the best value for money when it comes to capacity/weight ratio according to this graph.
     
  6. rwatson
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    rwatson Senior Member

    Hydrogen has 200 times the energy density of batteries
     
  7. schakel
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    schakel environmental project Msc

  8. schakel
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    schakel environmental project Msc

    I had the impression batteries and hydrogen are on a parallel path of energy containment for the future.
     
  9. FAST FRED
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    FAST FRED Senior Member

    The UN demands the USA pay 28% of its bloated budget, going by population it should be 1 / 20 of that.

    "Investing in research and development of Carbon Dioxide zero emmision energy resources is usefull. It prevents global warming."

    Global warming is a great concept , when considering the planet is in an ice age .

    A few inches of water in Miami in 100 years is easier to handle than 2 miles of ice on NYC or Chicago.

    Considering the time spans involved , we are like fruit flys seeing it warm up in the AM and cool off in the PM, a big deal for us but world wide a snoozer.
     
  10. rwatson
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    rwatson Senior Member

    Years ago, a friend of mine said "One days we will all be driving electric cars. They are so much more efficient, there is no doubt"

    Hydrogen fuel cells are much more energy dense, take a fraction of the time to "recharge", and can use the service station model of fuel delivery, instead of 6 hours on a public parking bay.

    I'm happy to predict that Hydrogen Fuel cells are going to be the next major power provider of electric vehicles.
     
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  11. IronPrice
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    IronPrice Senior Member

    Diesel is 13,000 Wh/kg and 9,000 Wh/L.

    Shows the gulf between batteries and liquid fuels (at the moment) ...
     
  12. IronPrice
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    IronPrice Senior Member

    The barrier at the moment is cost effective production and distribution of hydrogen.

    People have played around with ammonia fuel cells in the past, I don't know where that ended up. Ammonia is distributed and stored in volume, quite cheaply right now.
     
  13. upchurchmr
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    upchurchmr Senior Member

    So with the chart above LI-ionC = 450 Wh/l with Diesel =6000WH/L

    Thanks for the information.

    Hydrogen better work.

    Wake me when this Boat shows actual numbers

    What I'd like to see is WH/$.

    Cause I believe cleaver men can demonstrate anything with enough money. Except practicality.
     
  14. groper
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    groper Senior Member

    Don't forget - whilst hydrogen may have a huge energy density advantage to the best battery we have today - you must remember that that is only part of the equation. We must also consider the round trip efficiency of creating the hydrogen and putting it into liquid storage. For lithium batteries we are approaching close to 90% real world round trip efficiency meaning we only loose 10% of what we generated in the first place - not bad.

    What is the round trip efficiency of hydrogen?

    How much does the apparatus which produces and stores the hydrogen weigh compared to a battery and charging apparatus?

    Generating the energy in the first place is a big problem on a boat due to the limited area available for things like solar panels, wind turbines etc... so its not going to help us much if we loose a huge amount of energy in the conversion process - there will be nothing left to store if weve already consumed it all.
    So - the problem on boats is largely a generation capacity problem rather than a storage problem, when we are talking about renewable energy solutions...
     

  15. Ilan Voyager
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    Ilan Voyager Senior Member

    Ammonia is an interesting source of hydrogen, ammonia engines have been made, but I doubt it's useful as a storage medium to release and store this gas. That's more for hydrures Hydrogen storage - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage.
     
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