Hydrogen Myth Busting (Episode 1)

Liquid hydrogen jet aircraft in 1955 and rocket upper stage in 1966 (Source: NASA)

On the topic of hydrogen, there seems to be a great deal of misinformation being circulated. Liquid hydrogen systems in particular are sometimes characterized as being a far-off vision that will require years or decades to deploy. This is complete nonsense. There are no true technology gaps preventing the widespread application of hydrogen systems.

The answer to most questions about hydrogen can be summed up as "it's already been done". Below are some of the hydrogen myths that seem to keep getting regurgitated. I'll discuss more in subsequent myth busting episodes, and do a deeper dive into many of them in later posts.

Myth #1: Liquid Hydrogen Isn't Ready Yet

Large scale liquid hydrogen systems have been in continuous use for nearly sixty years in the space sector for launching spacecraft and vehicles to orbit and beyond. All the required technology and equipment for ground based systems is available off-the-shelf from multiple sources. New applications require good systems engineering not fundamental research.

Most people are very familiar with the large orange External Tank of the Space Shuttle that contained liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the main engines. The giant spherical storage tank at Kennedy Space Center is another familiar image that appears near the top of any liquid hydrogen internet search.

Anyone who watched a launch of the Space Shuttle on television, or any launches of the Ariane V or rockets with a Centaur upper stage, have seen the results of liquid hydrogen systems in action. Production, delivery, storage, fueling, and consumption. Successfully in operation for decades and continuing into the foreseeable future with existing and new launch vehicles.

But the legacy of hydrogen reaches back even further. Hydrogen was the first fuel used in the development of jet engine technology in the 1930s. A liquid hydrogen turbojet engine with afterburner was built and tested in the 1950s; and successful flights of a B-57 jet aircraft with liquid hydrogen were also performed in the 1950s. Myth busted.

Myth #2: Hydrogen Leaks Through Everything

This myth seems to come from people who found hydrogen on the periodic table, noticed that it's the first element and contains only one proton, and are now convinced that nothing can contain it. Variations on this theme include that it can "squeeze" between the molecules of any solid container.

Materials suitable for hydrogen service (compressed gas and liquid) are well known and routinely used. Stainless steel (300 series) and aluminum alloys for tanks, piping, and other components. Various seal materials for valves, ports, and fittings depending on the application. Newer composite and polymer formulations are being developed that do need to be tested, but these materials are not required nor used in existing conventional hydrogen systems.

As proof, compressed hydrogen containers at 700 bar (10,000 psi) have been in storage for over a decade with no measurable loss of pressure. And liquid hydrogen systems are intentionally designed to meet extremely low leakage requirements for safety reasons. Myth busted.

Myth #3: Hydrogen is Too Dangerous

This is a culturally ingrained myth partially based on an 85 year old film of a dirigible in flames. The fact that the outer skin was a highly flammable cotton canvas doped with cellulose acetate butyrate and aluminum powder rarely gets mentioned. A very bad material choice for an application where electrostatic discharges are possible (and even common).

Also not mentioned is that hydrogen burning in daylight is invisible to the eye and conventional cameras. It also produces not smoke or soot. And hydrogen rises at a rate of 20 m/s at ambient temperatures in air. So there is literally no hydrogen in the picture beyond the first two seconds after the skin is breached.

If the Hindenburg had used helium or hot air (or any other lifting gas instead of hydrogen) the result would have been unchanged. The same footage would exist of a dirigible crashing to the ground with visible flames and smoke from the burning skin. It's also interesting to note that there was no detonation or explosion even though the entire containment fabric became engulfed by the advancing flame front characteristic of solid combustion.

The unfortunate use of the term "hydrogen bomb" tied to the frightening images of mushroom clouds caused by thermonuclear weapons detonation is another factor. Nevermind that it's a nuclear fusion process at extremely high temperatures and pressures that has nothing to do with the flammability of hydrogen or its use as a fuel or for energy storage.

In contrast, we seem to have cultural amnesia regarding the millions of accidents and videos involving hydrocarbon explosions, fires, noxious smoke, toxic spills, and so on. Natural gas detonations leveling buildings and city blocks; jet fuel accidents on runways and after in-flight collisions; oil and diesel tanker fires and spills; gasoline fires in vehicles of all types; etc.

I sometimes ask a seemingly simple question when talking with someone who insists hydrogen is too dangerous. Would you rather stand next to a hydrogen storage tank, or one filled with a liquid or gaseous fuel of your choice, while both are being riddled with bullets?

In fairness this is a trick question; the military already tested the hydrogen scenario (sans the bystander) with live rounds and nothing happened. The hydrogen escaped into the atmosphere with no ignition and no environmental impact. Not so lucky if you choose a tank with jet fuel, diesel, kerosene, gasoline, natural gas, or propane.

Of course, there are legitimate safety issues associated with the wide flammability range of hydrogen in air and its low ignition energy. These hazards are addressed with properly designed systems based on well known standards and guidelines that have been developed over many decades.

The biggest safety risks are posed by systems developed by organizations without the appropriate experience that don't follow the proper standards and guidelines. This is a reasonable concern that must be guarded against. So except for unqualified practitioners, myth busted.

Myth #4: Hydrogen Produced from Water is Too Inefficient

The proponents of this myth have moved slightly beyond the periodic table and black and white movies. After pulling out their high school or undergrad introduction to chemistry textbook, they wax eloquently about the binding energy of water and other hand waving arguments.

If you start to inquire about their knowledge of how electrolyzers work, the conversation begins to wane. Alkaline vs proton exchange membrane electrolysis; electrode material options; electrolyte formulations; high pressure and high temperature operations. These topics aren't in their chemistry primer.

Modern electrolyzers have efficiencies in excess of 70% (defined as the higher heating value of the hydrogen produced divided by the electrical energy consumed). These are large scale units that have been commercially available for many years. And they can be operated in-situ at the point of use.

Compare this to the “well-to-wheel” energy efficiency of exploring, discovering, drilling/mining, extracting, refining, and distributing current fossil fuels to their point of use. Myth busted.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation LLC, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems for more than 40 years; and first-of-a-kind liquid, slush and gaseous hydrogen systems since the mid-1980s. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been a cofounder in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to hundreds of organizations. Matt has three patents and more than 50 publications including the Cryogenic Fluid Management report series. More about him can be found here.

Hydrogen: The Infinity Fuel for a Sustainable Future

If aliens of our level of technological advancement landed on earth tomorrow they would be dumbfounded by our energy and fuel infrastructure. Drilling and digging deep holes in the earth attempting to reach ancient deposits of depletable biomatter. Transporting it to distributed facilities for processing and refining, and then again for storage and eventually to the point of use.

Capital intensive exploration to discover new reserves and get them out of the ground or from under the ocean. Geopolitical complications and operational challenges. Ever-present risks to personnel, equipment, and communities. Cumulative damage to air and water resources throughout the infrastructure and during usage. And then wasting the majority of the captured energy due to inherent inefficiencies with systems based on combustion.

What are these humans doing? They have inexhaustible energy available from their sun, wind, ocean, and geothermal sources. This planet has an abundance of water that can be readily split into hydrogen and oxygen using these energy resources, and returned to water form after usage. An endless cycle that can be performed anywhere on the planet at or near the point of use. Why is their energy infrastructure still based on an outdated paradigm from more than 150 years ago?

Sunk Costs and Vested Interests

An assessment of our current global energy infrastructure by those visiting aliens would conclude that it is illogical, unsustainable, and ultimately self-destructive. What made sense in the 1800s with the technology available at that time makes no sense now. What they may not be able to understand is that our world revolves on sunk costs.

In economic theory, sunk costs cannot be recovered and are not to be taken into consideration for decision making. In the real world of business, the first part about being unrecoverable is true. However, if those sunk costs are associated with assets that still produce significant profits, they are most definitely taken into consideration.

In fact, sunk costs can become the primary decision drivers when a business, or even an entire industry sector, is faced with the threat of stranded assets and reduced revenue generation. This is true across all industry sectors, not just energy.

A historical example from the telecommunications industry is the diffusion of cellular technology. In so called developed regions that had a couple hundred years of telecom evolution from telegraph to landlines, cell phones became an overlay infrastructure. By contrast, when developing regions first started building telecom infrastructures they went right to cell phones. No need to lay miles of wire based on old technology.

Why the difference in the diffusion of cellular technology between developed and emerging regions? Sunk costs and vested interests. It will be the same process for hydrogen in the energy sector. Rapid adoption in some regions, and slower diffusion where businesses are still trying to wring the last drop of revenue from their current assets.

We often ask people "you still have a landline?" when they complain about spam calls and the inconvenience of a stationary phone. History will repeat itself as it is apt to do. In the future we'll be asking "you're still burning fossil fuels?".

The Hydrogen Economy is Over a Million Years Old

We already have an energy economy based on hydrogen and always have ever since the first prehistoric human started a fire. Carbon is an undesirable interloper that comes along for the ride in the hydrocarbon fuels that we burn.

Fossil fuels are all hydrocarbons which are various combinations of hydrogen and carbon atoms linked together. In a combustion process, the carbon produces soot, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide as byproducts. The first byproduct can cause lung disease and shorten your life; the second can cause brain damage or kill you; and the last one has become an existential threat to life on our planet.

The next phase of the hydrogen economy will get rid of the carbon and its associated byproducts. We only need the hydrogen. In my next post, we'll do some hydrogen myth busting to show that the path to a carbonless energy infrastructure has already been blazed.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation LLC, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems for more than 40 years; and first-of-a-kind liquid, slush and gaseous hydrogen systems since the mid-1980s. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been a cofounder in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to hundreds of organizations. Matt has three patents and more than 50 publications including the Cryogenic Fluid Management report series. More about him can be found here.

Hydrogen vs Fossil Fuels: The Fight of the Century

    "Huge amounts of uncounted emissions of highly warming greenhouse gas methane are being released by "super-emitters" all over the world, satellite observations reveal. 

    Scientists have only recently worked out how to detect methane emissions from space, but what they have seen since has taken them by surprise. The greenhouse gas, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world. It is frequently released through negligence and improper operations; the emissions, in many cases, are not accounted for in mandatory greenhouse gas inventories. 

    'We see quite a lot of those super-emitters,' Ilse Aben, senior scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (SRON) told Space.com. 'These are large emissions, and we see a lot of them on the global scale — much more than we had expected."

 

Source: "Satellites discover huge amounts of undeclared methane emissions", Tereza Pultarova, Space.com, published Nov 15, 2021. 

The above excerpt, as alarming as it sounds, is only part of the existential threat that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions represent. Every life form on earth is being affected by GHG emissions, and the effects are growing by the day.

We are being stalked by an extinction-level monster of our own making. It has been increasing environmental temperatures, raising sea levels, driving ocean acidification, causing more severe weather patterns, increasing wildfires, worsening droughts in some regions, and giving rise to more flooding in others.

Consider the GHG emissions estimates shown at the top of this post from the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA). 92% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels; and 37% of methane emissions come from coal mining, natural gas and petroleum systems (e.g. leaks). Note that this latter figure is likely much higher due to unreported emissions based on recent satellite data.

But Wait, There’s More

When I was recruited by NASA in 1985 it seemed like a world away from the coal-fired power plant where I had previously worked. I would go on to develop power and propulsion technologies and systems for various rockets, aerospace vehicles, and spacecraft over the next several decades.

However, my first assignment was designing combustion experiments for basic research on the space shuttle. The principal investigator on one of those experiments was an internationally renowned combustion expert from Princeton University. When we started observing unexpected soot formation during one of the tests, he made the following remarks (paraphrased from memory):

"Soot is an interesting topic. There is a soot particle size above which the respiratory system in a healthy person filters it before reaching the lungs. At a smaller size, the soot particle is inhaled into the lungs but can also be exhaled out. Between those two size thresholds are soot particles that don't get filtered and can't be exhaled. These become trapped in the lungs. Diesel soot falls into this category. That's why the exhaust outlets of diesel vehicles are generally positioned so high..."

The casual manner in which he delivered this information stunned me. Stammering in response, I asked "You mean to tell me that diesel soot I've breathed in during my life so far, and all that I'll inhale the rest of my life, may be permanently trapped in my lungs?" "That's right", he matter-of-factly responded.   

We’ve Played This Game Before (Many Times)

Public safety always takes a back seat to profit. It doesn't matter what industry, which company, or who is involved. If there are vested interests making substantial revenue from a product that results in severe health risks, heavy lobbying and campaign contributions will always delay accountability for decades.

It seems to be a consistent pattern of our species that we sacrifice our own collective well being in the name of industrial progress. Asbestos, coal dust, dioxins, lead, mercury, nuclear radiation exposure, oil spills, particulate emissions, PCBs, pharmaceuticals, plastic waste, sulfur emissions, VOCs, … the list goes on and on. GHGs are just another variation on the theme.

Previous cycles of this form of tragedy of the commons have resulted in untold disease and death since the dawn of the industrial revolution. This time, however, the impact is global in reach and catastrophic in consequence for all of us.

In This Corner Weighing in at One Atomic Mass Unit...

After my brief stint in low gravity combustion research, I began developing, testing and deploying liquid hydrogen technologies and systems starting in the mid-1980s. This would become a core part of my career for the next 35 years, and continues to be so.

Most of those liquid hydrogen projects were related to aerospace, defense and energy systems. More recently, this has expanded to transportation vehicles and infrastructure systems. In the early days, the hydrogen community was very concentrated and technically proficient. This has changed considerably in the last few years as mentioned in a previous post.

Transitioning to hydrogen represents one of the fundamental solutions to the GHG emission problem, along with addressing the plethora of public health impacts of fossil fuel usage. Large scale electrolysis plants are coming online at a rapid clip to cleanly produce hydrogen from water using renewable energy resources.

These renewable resources can be from overgeneration capacity; dedicated microgrids; and/or from regions where solar, wind, water, or geothermal energy far exceed the regional electrical demand. The latter case represents a lucrative opportunity for some regions to be primary exporters of hydrogen to the regions with high electrical demand but limited renewable resources (e.g. the recent trade agreement involving Australia exporting liquid hydrogen to Japan).

When hydrogen is fed to a fuel cell for electrical generation, water vapor is the only emission. When burned in a turbine or engine, water vapor and NOx are the only emissions. Note the NOx is a byproduct of all high temperature combustion processes and can be reduced by a variety of methods.

Hydrogen released into water or air readily combines with available oxygen and hydroxides to form water vapor. Preferable to releasing it, however, leaked or vented hydrogen can be used in fuel cells for auxiliary power. It can also be recaptured and compressed or liquefied to minimize waste. If release of hydrogen in air is absolutely necessary for a given system operation, it can also be flared to mitigate unwanted local concentrations.

Made from water with renewable energy. Returned to water in a fuel cell or combustion process. Hydrogen is the infinity fuel for our sustainable future. In future posts, I'll delve more deeply into the details of our shared path to the liquid hydrogen era.

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation LLC, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems for more than 40 years; and first-of-a-kind liquid, slush and gaseous hydrogen systems since the mid-1980s. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been a cofounder in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations. Matt has three patents and more than 50 publications including the Cryogenic Fluid Management report series. More about him can be found here.

LH2 Era Outline for Upcoming Posts

Hydrogen Energy and Renewables Architecture (HyERA)™

Following up on my previous post, below is a draft outline of planned topics to address in upcoming posts on the transition to the liquid hydrogen era. Any feedback or other suggested topics of interest to address are welcome and appreciated: info@moraninnovation.com.

1. Introduction
• The infinity fuel (why hydrogen?)
• Zero plus twenty (why cryogenic liquid?)
• Energy in a bottle (storage, carrier, fuel)
2. Evolution
• Jet engines & aircraft (1930-1960)
• Rocket stages (1960-today)
• Other liquid hydrogen history
3. Fundamentals
• Cryogenics (properties, materials, basics)
• Thermodynamics (temperature and pressure)
• Managing LH2 (production, storage, transfer)
4. State-of-the-Art
• Tankage (vacuum jacket, single wall, insulation)
• Components (valves, piping, sensors)
• Operations (fill, vent, pressurize, drain)
5. Safety
• Hazards (physiological, phase change, ignition)
• Design (best practices, reviews, standards)
• Operations (planning, training, fail safes)
6. Advancements
• New materials (composites, insulation)
• Cryo-refrigeration (zero boil-off, liquefaction)
• Sensors & controls (gauging, leaks, monitor)
7. Applications
• Energy (production, storage, distribution)
• Fuel (land, sea, air, space)
• Heat (industrial, residential, CHP)
8. Systems
• Engineering (model, design, verify & validate)
• Integration (subsystems, interfaces, test)
• Deployment (commission, dynamics, learning)
9. Strategy
• Plan (NGOs, requirements, Conops)
• Develop (innovation, prototyping, trades)
• Launch (IP management, partners, growth)
10. Conclusion
• Summary (takeaways, gaps, path forward)
• Challenges (techno-economic, vested interests)
• Sustainable Future (transition, vision, legacy)

In my next post I'll start to answer the question: Why hydrogen?

Matt Moran is the Managing Member at Moran Innovation LLC, and previous Managing Partner at Isotherm Energy. He's been developing power and propulsion systems for more than 40 years; and first-of-a-kind liquid, slush and gaseous hydrogen systems since the mid-1980s. Matt was also the Sector Manager for Energy & Materials in his last position at NASA where he worked for 31 years. He's been a cofounder in seven technology based start-ups; and provided R&D and engineering support to many industrial, government and research organizations. Matt has three patents and more than 50 publications including the Cryogenic Fluid Management report series. More about him can be found here.