Cleantech Update

Feathered fuel tank soaks up hydrogen by Chris Spitzer, The Oregonian Friday June 26, 2009, 8:43 PM The gas tank of the future may be full of chicken feathers. Engineers have discovered a way to store large amounts of hydrogen fuel using carbonized downy fluff, which could help pave the way to clean, green cars. A practical hydrogen car has been elusive for decades. Before the announcement this week by University of Delaware engineers, a nonstop trip from Portland to Eugene in a hydrogen car would need a tank bigger than 100 gallons to store liquid or gaseous fuel, even under high pressure. Treated chicken feathers work like a sponge. They soak up large amounts of hydrogen and hold it in a small space so the tank can be a conventional size and the fuel won't need to held under dangerously high pressures. Hydrogen creates only water vapor when it burns, unlike gasoline that emits carbon dioxide, a culprit in climate change. "It's the most energy-rich material we have,"...

The hydrogen economy is a proposed method of deriving the energy needed for motive power (cars, boats, airplanes), buildings or portable electronics, by reacting hydrogen (H2) with oxygen , the hydrogen having been generated by a number of possible methods, including the electrolysis of water . If the energy used to split the water were obtained from renewable or Nuclear power sources, and not from burning carbon-based fossil fuels , a hydrogen economy would greatly reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and therefore play a major role in tackling global warming . Countries without oil, but with renewable energy resources, could use a combination of renewable energy and hydrogen instead of fuels derived from petroleum , which are becoming scarcer , to achieve energy independence . In the context of a hydrogen economy, hydrogen is an energy carrier , not a primary energy source (see nuclear fusion for an entirely separate discussion of using hydrogen isotopes as an atomic energy s...

The following excellent article was originally published on 18 November, 2008. By the Institue fur Kraft Fahr Zuge in Aachen, Germany. It is such an accurate and complete summary of my own research that I present it. The only difference I would have is an editors note I added near the bottom. I disagree that this technology is 4 years away from major market penetration. I believe it is imminent. -Editor The Rest Published in the Road2 hy .com . The application of Fuel Cell and Hydrogen technologies to the industrial and commercial markets takes the form of co-generation or tri -generation systems . Systems available today have total powers in the range 100kW to 2-3MW (higher power, modular, systems are possible but have not been installed) and produce electricity, heating and, sometimes, cooling. Most quoted efficiencies are 70-80% overall and 45-50% electrical, suggesting that co-generation using Fuel Cells will yield significant reductions in GHG emissions. In developed countrie...