Solar Hydrogen,  cost effective, Large Scale replacement for petroleum based fuels using Today's technology.

By Joseph Ellsworth  800-635-8745 - XDOBS.COM LLC
Question for environmentalists?     If you had a choice between trading of 1% off the land in the USA mostly deserts and desolated areas in exchange:
  • For completely eliminating the use of  petroleum based gasoline and Diesel for transportation.
  • Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by over 85%
  • Completely eliminate emissions of  the components of acid rain
  • Completely eliminate  particulate emissions from cars.   
  • Eliminate the need to import any petroleum for fuel.
  • The desert land does have some sensitive species that could be impacted but the reduction of pollution would salvage a lot more species.
  • Provide the federal and state governments with new revenue sufficient to replace the majority of income tax. 
What would your answer be?

EEDRT can provide this solution and we feel that the net environmental and economic  trade offs are well worth the investment.  

As  mentioned in the article "Where are the Hydrogen Mines?"   the energy cost of producing hydrogen is horrendous and then transporting it  can also be costly.   There are less intensive energy strategies that use natural gas to produce hydrogen but that is just prolonging the problem since we would still be Dependant on fossil fuel based products.

This paper shows how less than 1% of the total land space in the USA could produce enough solar hydrogen to completely replace the entire USA oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.    By using our patent pending solar thermal to  hydrogen conversion process and bypassing electricity we reduce  total land requirements by 50%  to  0.05% of the USA land area.     There would be incredible political  and economic hurtles  to bring this vision to pass  but the  benefits would be well worth the cost. 
 
Our  technology  EEDRT  includes efficient and massively scalable solar thermal turbines.  These turbines can be re tasked to produce the electricity needed to split hydrogen from water or we can use the solar thermal heat to directly split the water with a 300% efficiency boost.   They can be delivered the scale needed to solve the hydrogen production problem.

Ability to scale is critical

EEDRT is different from photo voltaic cells because it can be massively scaled using simple components such as aluminum and glass and does not require large quantities of high grade silicon or ultra clean manufacturing facilities.   

The big problem with producing hydrogen from water is that it requires massive amounts of power and to produce a meaningful amount  using PVT (Photo Voltaic) panels would use up so much high grade silicon that it would drive prices through the roof.    EEDRT was specifically designed to use commodity products that can easily be purchased by the ton  and which are available around the world.

Neighborhood Hydrogen Facilities

We could produce hydrogen directly from water using a large number of smaller neighborhood  hydrogen generation stations which completely eliminates the problem of hauling it.  For the most part we only need to get enough hydrogen on board a given vehicle to give it a 60 mile range so a fuel cell or even tank  is feasible for even small vehicles.    

In many settings this may be the  best strategy but each acre worth of collectors only produces 72KG per day so for a 600 home sub division where each commuter is consuming 2 gallons of gas per day we we would need roughly 16 acres worth of collectors to meet local demand.    

In highly populated areas where the requisite land is not available it will be necessary to produce the hydrogen at a remote location and deliver it to where it needs to be consumed by pipe, truck or train.   Delivery by pipe is the most efficient and natural gas pipelines can be re tasked for that purpose.

Hydrogen by the Acre

Our EEDRT  collectors receive in the range of  6 to 8 kWh per square meter per day  or  24,281kWh per acre.    We can conservatively convert this thermal energy to electricity at 15% efficiency which gives us 3,642kWh per  acre worth of electricity  we can use to operate the electrolizers.   This could be a bit higher as you go south and lower as you go north.
 
Current Electrolysis conversion units produce  produce 1KG of hydrogen using  50KWh worth of electricity with some claiming 20% higher while the hydrogen.com FAQ claims 45KWh per KG.    This gives us a production rate of 72KG per acre per day or 29,930KG per acre per year.    At a market rate of $3.00 per KG it gives us a per acre production value of $89,790
 
1KG of hydrogen has roughly the same energy content as  1 gallon of gas so we can use a  1 to 1 substitution of 1KG of hydrogen to replace 1 gallon of gas.   It takes more than 1 gallon of oil to produce a gallon of gas but ignore that difference.

Hydrogen from the Barren Desert

The West Utah desert contains Dugway proving grounds a military facility with 800,000 acres of desert land that would be ideal for solar hydrogen production.   This amount of land could produce 58,214,732 KG  of hydrogen a day and Dugway only represents only 0.6% of the 190,000 square miles the Great Basin Desert.  This equivalent to 1.06 million barrels.     Utah has 82,144 square miles so Dugway represents 1.5% of the total land area in Utah.  

Less than 2% of the land area in Utah could easily produce sufficient hydrogen offset over 5% of the total USA oil consumption.    

How much land to completely replace the Oil 

In the USA we consume 20 million barrels of oil per day  so the 1.06 million barrels of solar hydrogen we could produce at dugway  represents 1/18th of the amount of land needed to produce a sufficient  amount of hydrogen to completely replace the Oil.           Ultimately we would need  15 million acres to produce sufficient solar hydrogen  to completely replace the 20 million barrels of oil.       15  million acres which represents  0.6% of the total land space in the USA or  30% of the land in Utah.

Less than 1% of the total land space in the USA is capable of producing a sufficient amount of Hydrogen  to completely replace the 20 million barrels of oil consumed by the USA every day.

If  the deployment  was spread across several of the western states such as  UT, Idaho, Colorado,  Texas, AZ, Nevada, and new Mexico the land requirements would be less than 5% per  state  and there is plenty of desert land to use for this purpose.  
 The environmentalist may be concerned about using  that much land but when the alternative is mass pollution and global warming which could destroy our coastal cities it would be a viable trade off.

The local residents may initially complain but if the local state government is allowed to tax the hydrogen exported from the state they will rapidly loose their objections especially in the western states where the revenue is badly needed.  In addition once those states realized how much capital would be spend in state during the construction phase they would be competing for the opportunity.

We can also use the ocean

There are  hundreds of thousands of square miles of unused  ocean surface  which could be put to work for this purpose.      The production facilities would be square miles in diameter and could be kept in the very deep water away from the coast  where their environmental impact would be minimal.       It would require more engineering to develop  floating islands capable of  withstanding the ocean storms but it is within our capability.


A option for reducing land use by 50%

Electrolizers are the most common way of splitting water to produce hydrogen however it is also possible to use heat to do the same job.     Recent research funded by the DOE has illustrated the ability of utilizing heat to directly crack the hydrogen from from water using a variety of chemical cycles such as sulfur iodine and Zinc Oxide.       The minimum cracking temperatures run from 1,200 to 1,640F depending on the chemical cycle used.   Direct conversion without chemical assist starts at about 2,600F and reaches maximum efficiency at  5840F.     The efficiency of conversion at 5840 can theoretically reach 90% however this has not been demonstrated and at that temperature it is expensive to find materials that do not melt.    

Using solar heat can be more energy efficient to produce water splitting because the high temperatures can be directly utilizes skipping several conversion steps.    In fact total efficiencies of 31% are possible with a direct heat system while a Photovoltaic system combined with an electrolysis unit will top out 3 times lower at 9% to 11%.      

The easiest way to deploy this process in large scale is to use  our patent pending ellsworth process to directly produces the required air flow and can easily produce 1,640F using parabolic concentrators.    This is an ideal range for the use of the Zinc Oxide process and when paired with our turbines the process will provide sufficient auxiliary power to operate compressors and other equipment. 

Our special trough design is intended for high volume production and extreme toughness.   The Ellsworth process utilizes the expansion of the air in the collectors along with some proprietary valves to drive our main turbines.    Our patent pending version of the heat generation and transport system delivers the hot air directly to the processing chamber where it can drive the conversion process.      

An advantage of the Zinc Oxide approach is that it overcomes one of the major issues with hydrogen which is how to transport it in sufficient density to get obtain reasonable densities.  The Zinc oxide process can be transported in the metal powder form and used to dynamically generate the hydrogen as needed when used up it can be returned and regenerated.

We must modify the materials the troughs are constructed from to withstand the extra heat which is relatively easy.   Only the collectors them selfs must withstand the full 1650F while the concentrator  runs at a much lower temperature.  

Using current market solar concentrators it is possible to achieve 2000F with a theoretical maximum of 9,932F   At 1,640F the conversion process is 43% efficient.   Many of the Solar trough fields are reporting in excess of 73% efficiency so we could see solar to hydrogen conversion efficiency in the range of  31%  (73% * 43%).    In contrast the best Silicon Photo Voltaic systems convert  provide 18% efficiency and the best electrolysis units are operating at 50% to 70% efficiency which gives a net efficiency of  9%. (18% * 50%) 

The direct solar thermal chemical mechanism is capable of efficiencies 3.4 times better than the PV based systems.  In addition the solar thermal system utilizes a much less expensive collector and has no complicated on sight wiring for high amperage DC current or inverters so the installed cost is roughly 1/4 that of PV based systems which is closer to 1/5  when the cost of the electrolyzer is figured in.

Direct conversion without of a chemical assist requires temperatures of about  5,500F to reach it's optimal efficiency and the solar collector losses increase dramatically at this temperature range.   It may well be worth investing in this process over the thermal chemical approach because once it is well understood the theoretical efficiencies could approach 90% so even if  the higher temperatures decreased collector efficiency to 50% it would still give a gross efficiency of  45% which is a 14% improvement over the best we expect from the thermo chemical strategy.  The main problem with this operating range is the materials science needed to cope with the  5500F.      One last point is that the heat based approach does not require any caustic electrolyzer fluids,  does not need any replacement chemicals,   Does not require any sacrificial anodes and can be made nearly maintenance free which the electrolyzer strategy simply can not match.


See: 

Contrast to Nuclear power produced hydrogen

In the article "Bush, Iraq and the Hydrogen economy" John dizzard indicates that the current government stance of using Nuclear power will require 4,000 new nuclear reactors an incredible amount of uranium and will still leave us in a position of having to import elements like Helium.    

 John indicated that it would ultimately add up to 1,500 billion dollars to install the required  number of reactors and that does not include fuel costs or the long term disposal costs for the spent fuel.      In addition these are a new generation of nuclear reactor and they have not factored in the cost of environmental appeals and other disruptions so the end cost is quite likely to be 2 times higher. 

We figured it would require 15 million acres to produce a sufficient amount of hydrogen using  EEDRT  so if we increase this to 20 million just to be safe then we could afford to spend  $75,000 per acre for the the land and equipment to make the solar hydrogen.    

A rough estimate would put the EEDRT + Electrolyzer at a somewhat higher cost but with large enough volumes this could come down.  In addition  EEDRT doesn't have any nuclear fallout risk in the event of an accident and doesn't have any nuclear disposal costs it may be cost competitive at current cost levels once those risks are factored in.

Reference: