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      Can we drill for hydrogen? New find suggests additional geological source.

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 23 February - 18:16 · 1 minute

    Image of apartment buildings with mine tailings behind them, and green hills behind those.

    Enlarge / Mining operations start right at the edge of Bulqizë, Albania. (credit: Wikimedia Commons )

    “The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

    The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.

    Greenish energy source

    Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.

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      Retail H2 stations close in California while H2 heavy trucking expands

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 12 February - 17:30

    An employee handles a pump at a hydrogen refueling point at a Royal Dutch Shell Plc gas station in Berlin, Germany, on Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021.

    Enlarge (credit: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    Shell has closed all seven of its retail hydrogen filling stations in California, according to Hydrogen Insight . Now, the energy company will just operate a trio of hydrogen stations for heavy-duty vehicles like class 8 drayage trucks or garbage trucks. It's further confirmation that while hydrogen has a role as a clean fuel for transportation, that will not involve passenger cars, at least not any time soon.

    Shell piloted its first California retail hydrogen station in a 2008 pilot program in Los Angeles. In 2011, it built its first pipeline-fed hydrogen station in Torrance—conveniently near Toyota's then-HQ. Six years later, Shell revealed plans for more hydrogen stations in the state, funded in part by grants from the California Energy Commission.

    Things started to look a bit more ambitious with "Project Neptune," which would see Shell build out 48 new hydrogen stations in California and upgrade a pair of existing sites. Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai all agreed to help fund the project, which also obtained a $40 million, five-year grant from the CEC.

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      French drillers may have stumbled upon a mammoth hydrogen deposit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 20 September, 2023 - 18:30 · 1 minute

    Image of a vertical metal frame surrounded by equipment.

    Enlarge / The site of the borehole where hydrogen deposits have been found. (credit: Joey Ingelhart )

    On the outskirts of the small town of Folschviller in eastern France stand three nondescript sheds. One of these temporary structures has recently become a hive of activity due to a continuous stream of visitors, including scientists, journalists, and the public.

    The shed sits above a borehole first drilled in 2006 and houses a gas measurement system called SysMoG, which was originally developed to determine the underground methane concentration. While the device did detect almost pure methane (99 percent) at a depth of 650 meters, probing further down, the borehole resulted in an unexpected and surprising discovery: hydrogen in high concentration. “At 1,100 meters, the concentration of dissolved hydrogen is 14 percent. At 3,000 meters, the estimated concentration could be as high as 90 percent,” Jacques Pironon, director of research at GeoRessources lab at the Université de Lorraine, said.

    Based on the estimates of methane resources and the concentration of hydrogen detected so far, scientists have conjectured that the Lorraine region in eastern France, of which Folschviller is a part, could contain 46 million tons of white—or naturally produced—hydrogen. That would make it one of the world’s largest known hydrogen deposits.

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      Hydrogen-powered planes almost ready for takeoff

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 9 August, 2023 - 19:04 · 1 minute

    Graphic of a commercial air craft with an additional engine attached to the body.

    Enlarge / Airbus will be testing hydrogen power on a commercial airliner modified to carry an additional engine. (credit: Airbus )

    A complete hydrogen fuel cell powertrain assembly occupied the pride of place in the pavilion of Beyond Aero at the recently concluded Paris Air Show. That a fuel cell system was the Toulouse-based startup’s centerpiece at the biennial aero event is an indication of the steps being taken by a range of companies, from startups to multinational corporations, toward realizing the goal of using hydrogen as fuel in the aviation sector.

    “This 85 kilowatt subscale demonstrator was successfully tested a few months ago. Even though in its current form, it serves only ultralight aviation, the successful test of the powertrain is a crucial step in our technical development path for designing and building a business aircraft,” Beyond Aero co-founder Hugo Tarlé told Ars Technica.

    Tarlé said that the business aircraft would have a range of 800 nautical miles and will be powered by a 1 MW powertrain. “For generating this power, there won’t be one big megawatt fuel cell. Instead, it will be multiple fuel cells. It will be based on the same technical choices that we made on the subscale demonstrator—i.e. gaseous hydrogen, fuel cell, hybridization of batteries and electric motors."

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      Synthetic gasoline promises neutral emissions—but the math doesn’t work

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 5 May, 2023 - 10:45 · 1 minute

    Synthetic gasoline promises neutral emissions—but the math doesn’t work

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    Synthetic fuel promises to put gasoline back in our future. Motorsport will be using it in 2026, and European Union law is using it as a stay of execution for the combustion engine. Advertising promises that a future without fossil fuels doesn't need to be one without gasoline. But burning petrochemicals, wherever they come from, is still burning petrochemicals, and synthetic fuels come at a cost their supporters aren't talking about.

    We live in perilous times. The annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has become blunter with every edition. The sixth, published this March , described the steps we need to take to "secure a livable future." Not a good future filled with an abundance of resources and biodiversity, just a survivable one. We're in this situation because we've spent the better part of two centuries digging up fossil fuels and burning them, putting carbon and other greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere and causing significant global warming.

    But even though there's a domino effect to climate change—drought breeds drought as the land cooks and water seeps into the sea, for instance—mathematically, there is still time to act.

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      Mixing diesel and hydrogen provides big cuts in emissions

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 December, 2022 - 15:15

    Image of a large engine.

    Enlarge / Diesel engines can be modified to burn a diesel-hydrogen mix. (credit: DjelicS )

    A team of engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney has figured out a way to run a diesel engine on a mix of diesel and hydrogen, dramatically lowering its emissions.

    Why do we even need a diesel-hydrogen hybrid engine when there are already many great electric vehicles available? EVs are definitely great for households, but they still don’t match heavy diesel engines’ performance in some contexts, such as mining, long-distance transportation, power generation, and agriculture.

    At present, there are 26,000 trains in the US that run on diesel, and there are potentially millions of trucks, generators, and other industry-grade equipment that require diesel to deliver optimum performance. It might take decades for EV technology to replace diesel engines in such industries. While it’s easy for a normal person to sell an old car and buy a new EV, such changes come at a high cost to industries.

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      New device can make hydrogen when dunked in salt water

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 30 November, 2022 - 21:55

    Image of a hydrogen symbol inside a mesh of linked molecules.

    Enlarge / The right membrane can make hydrogen production much easier. (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko )

    With renewable energy becoming cheaper, there's a growing impetus to find ways of economically storing it. Batteries can handle short-term fluxes in production but may not be able to handle longer-term shortfalls or seasonal changes in power output. Hydrogen is one of several options being considered that has the potential to serve as a longer-term bridge between periods of high renewable productivity.

    But hydrogen comes with its own issues. Obtaining it by splitting water is pretty inefficient, energy-wise, and storing it for long periods can be challenging . Most hydrogen-producing catalysts also work best with pure water—not necessarily an item that's easy to obtain as climate change is boosting the intensity of droughts.

    A group of researchers based in China has now developed a device that can output hydrogen when starting with seawater—in fact, the device needs to be sitting in seawater to work. The key concept for getting it to work will be familiar to anyone who understands how most waterproof clothing works.

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