UK hydrogen fuel network grows with new pump on M40

The hydrogen pump at Beaconsfield is the first in Britain to be located 'under the canopy' with the fossil fuels CREDIT: ED ROBINSON 

 

Anew hydrogen pump has been installed at Beaconsfield services on the M40, the second on Britain’s motorway network and the first to be built ‘under the canopy’ at an existing petrol station.

The machine has been supplied to Shell by Sheffield-based energy company ITM Power. It can be used by motorists to refuell hydrogen fuel cell cars such as the Toyota Mirai, Hyundai Nexo andHonda Clarity.

Such cars use a fuel cell to convert hydrogen into electricity, which is then used to turn the wheels. The only emission from this process is pure, drinkable water, making hydrogen fuel cell cars ‘zero emission’ and among the very cleanest on the road.

This is the second hydrogen pump installed by Shell at one of its motorway service stations, but is the first to be among the fossil fuel pumps under the main canopy. At its other site, at Cobham services on the M25, the hydrogen pump is slightly separate from the main refuelling area.

Hydrogen on the M25 brings Britain closer to zero-carbon motoring – we're first to try the new pump

ITM Power CEO Dr. Graham Cooley said: “ITM Power is pleased to open this new hydrogen station in Beaconsfield which is the first to sit on the main forecourt, alongside the petrol and diesel pumps.

“This shows a big step forward in offering Shell customers a clean, green fuel, which is generated on-site, eliminating fuel deliveries.

“We look forward to working alongside Shell to deploy further stations and grow the hydrogen refuelling infrastructure in the UK.”

“We’re delighted to be opening a new refuelling site at Shell Beaconsfield, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to hydrogen as a vital part of the UK’s future transport system,” said Mike Copson, hydrogen business development manager at Shell.

“Bringing hydrogen under the canopy for the first time is a fantastic step towards making it a convenient and viable fuel choice for UK drivers.”

Hydrogen cars are quick to refuel, making them significantly more practical than battery-electric cars for many users CREDIT: ED ROBINSON 

The facility at Beaconsfield can generate hydrogen on-site using water and electricity to make hydrogen gas. This is compressed and can be pumped into cars very quickly; a refuelling time of a couple of minutes is one key advantage of hydrogen fuel cell cars over battery-electric vehicles, which can take hours to be fully charged.

Other benefits include the range, which is significantly better than that of electric cars, as well as the potential ability to generate hydrogen through clean, renewable electrolysis. But there are still barriers that prevent wider uptake among British motorists.

“From a consumer point of view, the two main sticking points are the limited locations where you can refuel and the initial price of the car,” says Mat Watson from independent car buying site Carwow.

“The technology is still in its infancy and it’s more expensive to produce the cars. They require a secure high-pressure fuel tank to store the hydrogen, a fuel cell to convert it into electricity and a battery pack to provide some energy storage, though this is much smaller than the battery packs used for a pure electric car.

“It could be argued that the investment in electric technology has been a bit of a red herring. The infrastructure to support an electric future it is still years away and arguably that time could have been spent in preparing us for a future of carbon neutral, hydrogen powered vehicles.”

Hydrogen | is H2 the fuel of the future?

The Department for Transport has recently released £8.8 million to improve access to hydrogen infrastructure in Britain. The winning consortium, managed by Element Energy and including Shell, ITM Power and car manufacturers Hyundai, Honda and Toyota, will support the growth of refuelling networks in the UK.

Oliver Bishop, General Manager of Hydrogen at Shell, said: “Hydrogen has the potential to become a significant part of the transport mix in a low-carbon future. Central to this success is collaboration between the Government, energy companies, OEMs and technology experts to create the infrastructure to make access to new fuel options viable.

“At Shell, we are delighted to be part of the latest infrastructure funding effort, and to help drive forward the UK’s hydrogen refuelling network.”

single catalyst to produce both , hydrogen and oxygen gas 24 hours a day seven days a week

By Mark Shwartz 

Stanford scientists have developed a cheap and efficient way to extract clean-burning hydrogen fuel from water 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Stanford University scientists have invented a low-cost water splitter that uses a single catalyst to produce both , hydrogen and oxygen gas 24 hours a day seven days a week. 

The device, described in a study published June 23 in "Nature Communications", could provide a renewable source of clean-burning hydrogen fuel for transportation and industry. 

"We have developed a low-voltage, single-catalyst water splitter that continuously generates hydrogen and oxygen for more than 200 hours, an exciting world-record performance," said study co-author Yi Cui, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. 

In an engineering first, Cui and his colleagues used lithium-ion battery technology to create one low-cost catalyst that is capable of driving the entire water-splitting reaction. (See video.) 

"Our group has pioneered the idea of using lithium-ion batteries to search for catalysts," Cui said. "Our hope is that this technique will lead to the discovery of new catalysts for other reactions beyond water splitting." 

Clean hydrogen

Hydrogen has long been promoted as an emissions-free alternative to gasoline. 

Despite its sustainable reputation, most commercial-grade hydrogen is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel that contributes to global warming. As an alternative, scientists have been trying to develop a cheap and efficient way to extract pure hydrogen from water. 

A conventional water-splitting device consists of two electrodes submerged in a water-based electrolyte. A low-voltage current applied to the electrodes drives a catalytic reaction that separates molecules of H2O, releasing bubbles of hydrogen on one electrode and oxygen on the other. 

Each electrode is embedded with a different catalyst, typically platinum and iridium, two rare and costly metals. But in 2014, Stanford chemist Hongjie Dai developed a water splitter made of inexpensive nickel and iron that runs on an ordinary 1.5-volt battery. 

Single catalyst

In the new study, Cui and his colleagues advanced that technology further. 

"Our water splitter is unique because we only use one catalyst, nickel-iron oxide, for both electrodes," said graduate student Haotian Wang, lead author of the study. "This bi-functional catalyst can split water continuously for more than a week with a steady input of just 1.5 volts of electricity. That's an unprecedented water-splitting efficiency of 82 percent at room temperature." 

In conventional water splitters, the hydrogen and oxygen catalysts often require different electrolytes with different pH - one acidic, one alkaline - to remain stable and active. "For practical water splitting, an expensive barrier is needed to separate the two electrolytes, adding to the cost of the device," Wang said. "But our single-catalyst water splitter operates efficiently in one electrolyte with a uniform pH." 

Wang and his colleagues discovered that nickel-iron oxide, which is cheap and easy to produce, is actually more stable than some commercial catalysts made of precious metals. 

"We built a conventional water splitter with two benchmark catalysts, one platinum and one iridium," Wang said. "At first the device only needed 1.56 volts of electricity to split water, but within 30 hours we had to increase the voltage nearly 40 percent. That's a significant loss of efficiency." 

Marriage of batteries, catalysis

To find catalytic material suitable for both electrodes, the Stanford team borrowed a technique used in battery research called lithium-induced electrochemical tuning. The idea is to use lithium ions to chemically break the metal oxide catalyst into smaller and smaller pieces. 

"Breaking down metal oxide into tiny particles increases its surface area and exposes lots of ultra-small, interconnected grain boundaries that become active sites for the water-splitting catalytic reaction," Cui said. "This process creates tiny particles that are strongly connected, so the catalyst has very good electrical conductivity and stability." 

Wang used electrochemical tuning - putting lithium in, taking lithium out - to test the catalytic potential of several metal oxides. 

"Haotian eventually discovered that nickel-iron oxide is a world-record performing material that can catalyze both the hydrogen and the oxygen reaction," Cui said. "No other catalyst can do this with such great performance." 

Using one catalyst made of nickel and iron has significant implications in terms of cost, he added. 

"Not only are the materials cheaper, but having a single catalyst also reduces two sets of capital investment to one," Cui said. "We believe that electrochemical tuning can be used to find new catalysts for other chemical fuels beyond hydrogen. The technique has been used in battery research for many years, but it's a new approach for catalysis. The marriage of these two fields is very powerful." 

Other Stanford co-authors of the study are postdoctoral scholar Hyun-Wook Lee, visiting student Zhiyi Lu and graduate students Yong Deng, Po-Chun Hsu, Yayuan Liu and Dingchang Lin. 

Support was provided by the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship program. 

Source: Stanford

Hidrogen

(Phys.org) - By using solar energy to reversibly attach and detach hydrogen atoms on a 6-carbon ring called benzene, scientists have developed a simple and efficient method to store, transport, and release hydrogen potentially on a large scale. The hydrogen storage problem is currently one of the biggest challenges facing the development of hydrogen as a widespread energy carrier, and the researchers hope that the new strategy may lead to a safe and inexpensive solution to this problem.

The scientists, led by Professor Chao-Jun Li and Associate Professor Zetian Mi at McGill University in Montreal, have published a paper on the new hydrogen storage system in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

As the researchers explain, hydrogen has a very high mass energy density but a very low volumetric energy density. The high mass energy density, which is at least three times higher than that of other chemical fuels, is what makes hydrogen such an attractive energy carrier. However, its low volumetric energy density under ambient conditions makes it difficult to store large amounts of hydrogen in small spaces. To overcome this problem, hydrogen is often stored at high pressures or low temperatures, but these storage methods present their own challenges.

The hydrogen storage system demonstrated in the new paper works under ambient conditions and stores the hydrogen in abundant, lightweight, and inexpensive molecules called hydrocarbons. The researchers demonstrated that six hydrogen atoms can be added to benzene (C6H6) in a "hydrogenation" process that forms cyclohexane (C6H12), which serves as the hydrogen carrier. In the reverse process, cyclohexane is "dehydrogenated" as the six carbons are removed and available for use in energy storage devices and other applications.

This method of storing hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbons is not new, but because the dehydrogenation process requires a large amount of energy to proceed, current versions always require high temperatures to release the hydrogen.

Since performing the reaction at high temperatures is not suitable for practical applications, here the researchers demonstrated that solar energy can be used to drive the dehydrogenation reaction at ambient temperatures. This process involves using platinum-based nanoparticles as photocatalysts. After absorbing incoming photons, the platinum nanoparticles temporarily donate their photoexcited electrons to the cyclohexane molecules, breaking the carbon-hydrogen bonds and releasing the hydrogen atoms without the need for elevated temperatures. 

Tests showed that this photo-driven dehydrogenation process occurs rapidly (within a few seconds), converts 99% of the cyclohexane to benzene, and has a quantum efficiency (H2 produced per photon consumed) of 6.0%, which rivals the current top-performing solar water splitting devices without an external voltage. To start the hydrogenation process, the researchers simply removed the light source, causing the hydrogen atoms to reattach back onto the benzene. Using this method, 97% of the benzene could be converted back to cyclohexane, and the cycle could be repeated.

The researchers expect that this strategy is more suitable for stationary applications - for instance, for storing and transporting energy produced by wind turbines or other alternative energy sources - rather than vehicles because of the fact that it requires sunlight to release the hydrogen. 

"The applications may include the storage and transport of hydrogen generated from other sources, such as water splitting and water electrolysis, using renewable energies (hydro, wind, nuclear, etc.)," Mi told Phys.org.

Taking the next steps forward, McGill University has filed a provisional patent on this technology. In the future, the scientists plan to improve the hydrogen storage system by reducing the amount of platinum required in the photocatalysts and developing other less expensive alternatives.

"Our future research is focused on developing cheaper and more earth-abundant metal catalysts, such as iron, and to further increase the quantum efficiency," Mi said.