David Hume’s ‘Treatise On Human Nature’, in his words, “fell stillborn from the press”. I felt similar to how he must’ve felt yesterday about the fact that my stats didn’t record that anyone at all read yesterday’s post. Even so, a fair portion of what I write on here isn’t composed with an eye to a large readership as to stop myself from going on and on online by posting a link to things I’ve written on the topic. If I find that I’m saying the same thing repeatedly, I sometimes just write it up once and for all to save a bit of time, effort and boredom. I doubt anyone actually follows the links, but posting them gets the irritation out of my system.
So today’s post, which may not be read today, is supposed to finish off yesterday’s. There were a few things which came up as questions in my mind which I didn’t feel informed enough to cover. Today, then, I’ll be talking about hydrogen as a fuel, our government’s energy policy and the ethics of batteries. Here we go.
The way I understand it, hydrogen is chiefly useful as, in a sense, a means of storing power. Note that this may not be the reality, simply how I think it works. Although it’s technically a fuel, it’s produced as I understand it by the electrolysis of water and then stored as a metal hydride from which it’s slowly released and burnt, becoming water vapour again in the process. This means that whatever means of producing the electricity to split the oxidane (dihydrogen monoxide) molecules is used is the real point. It’s as if hydrogen, or rather the metal hydride, is a battery used to take that energy and use it elsewhere. As I’m typing this, I’m aware that palladium, and possibly some other metals, are able to absorb and store hydrogen for future use, so maybe that’s done as well. I’m writing this knowing very little about this use of hydrogen. I also wonder if the water vapour released from combustion would contribute significantly to global warming if this were done on a large scale, but I’m aware that hydrocarbons also produce it when they’re burnt, so maybe this is not the main point. One advantage to burning hydrogen is that it’s a lot cleaner than coal, oil and natural gas, which generate sulphur dioxide when burnt as well as carbon dioxide and soot.
That’s how I thought it worked. It isn’t reality, apparently, and I’ll come to that in a bit. Hydrogen is unusual because per mass it’s twice as efficient as petrol but per volume at atmospheric pressure it’s thousands of times less efficient. Filling a car up with a litre of petrol means a mass of around seven hundred grammes. Seven hundred grammes of hydrogen is 642 litres. Therefore, if it’s stored as the gas it needs to be pressurised to something like seven hundred times that of atmospheric pressure (bars) at sea level, which means vehicles running on hydrogen end up heavier than petrol cars due to having a hefty heavily reinforced tank containing the gas. Nor is ordinary metal okay for doing this because of the nature of hydrogen. Consisting of the smallest atoms, hydrogen atoms pass into materials very easily, although molecules cause a different problem known as high temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA). This reduces the flexibility of the metals and causes them to crack. Consequently hydrogen storage tanks have to be coated internally with something which prevents this, which makes them expensive to manufacture. Hydrogen at seven hundred bars is about a sixth the efficiency of petrol, and this is in a heavier vehicle making it still less so. All the pipelines and vessels used to move around and store hydrogen face the same problem if they are at approximate room temperature. Although this could be addressed by warming the hydrogen, with the obvious risks of explosion and inflammability as well as energy use, this leads to hydrogen becoming more atomic and reacting with carbon in steel to form methane, which unlike hydrogen cannot pass through the steel and once again causes cracking.
Hydrogen sources and extraction methods are colour-coded. Quite rarely, deposits of hydrogen can be found in a similar way to fossil fuel gas. This is white hydrogen and can be mined the same way as the more widespread gas deposits used as fuel. It should also be noted that Jupiter is a vast store of hydrogen which could theoretically be used, although it would either have to be transported or used in situ. It can also be extracted from coal (black), lignite (young coal, brown), and methane (grey). All of these are pretty obviously silly because they’re direct use of fossil fuels, which we’re supposed to be avoiding, except for methane which could be from biomasse or fire ice but isn’t. These methods are not clean anyway as they tend to leak, and they are mainly promoted by oil companies which want us to carry on using their products. Blue hydrogen combines methane extraction with carbon capture and is about one percent of production. All of these methods have about the same emissions as more conventional gas burning because carbon capture takes energy.
There is, though, green hydrogen, which is electrolysis of water using renewable energy. This does actually suffer from the intermitten power source problem mentioned yesterday, so discussing this is substantially linked to the general issue of battery manufacture and use. Finally, there is pink hydrogen, which uses nuclear power. As well as the resources used for actual production, infrastructure is needed too. So the thing I assumed at the start of this bit is actually green hydrogen and is not the usual method for extracting it.
Although it seems fair to assume that a car running on hydrogen simply burns hydrogen in pistons like a petrol car burns petrol aerosol, this is not what happens. Piston engines could be designed to run on hydrogen. However, piston engines are in any case only thirty percent efficient and burning hydrogen in them produces nitrogen oxide emissions because of the pressure and heat, which are one of the types of gases which make petrol engines bad in the first place. The lower efficiency of hydrogen compared to petrol makes the poor efficiency of the internal combustion engine more problematic than it would be were it just burning petrol.
What actually happens in a hydrogen vehicle is basically that a fuel cell is used to generate electricity to run an electric motor, like an electric vehicle but with an extra stage. Fuel cells were invented in the 1950s CE and are popular in spacecraft because they can generate electricity and provide drinking water. They work by placing a membrane made of platinum and iridium between a feed of hydrogen and one of oxygen. When the hydrogen crosses the membrane, it becomes positively charged and gives up electrons which can then be used to run an electric current, then combines with oxygen on the other side to form water. This slower, more controlled method is far more efficient than a hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine.
There are a few problems with this. Notable among them is the rarity and cost of platinum and iridium. The main sources of these metals are Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia, so there is the usual issue of the metals not being available locally and some kind of ethical chain of accountability being very long and prone to being obscured unless you’re actually in Afrika south of the Sahara or Russia itself. Moreover, the water produced by fuel cells needs to be kept warm so as not to damage the fuel cell by freezing, so hydrogen-powered vehicles are either unfeasible or less efficient anywhere the temperature drops below freezing.
Only a dozen hydrogen-powered cars were sold in Britain in 2021, and four dozen buses. There were more buses in Germany but when there were problems with the hydrogen plant, they couldn’t be used. One vehicle in four thousand is currently hydrogen-powered, and as I said, hydrogen-powered cars are really just electric cars whose “batteries” are fuelled by hydrogen. As it stands, they don’t reduce emissions. Things might change a bit if metal hydrides are used to store hydrogen, but the fact remains that hydrogen is really just a way of getting electricity from the place it’s obtained to the vehicles’ internal workings. It’s electric at both ends and hydrogen is just between the two.
Okay, so that’s hydrogen. Now for the ethics of batteries.
The first thing to say about this is that much is made of the intermittent nature of solar and wind power sources. This is because of the ongoing problem of the absence of a way of storing electricity efficiently. I’m not convinced that it’s really that much of a problem here in Britain with our wind and solar power, the latter whereof does function to some extent in overcast conditions. I just wonder if there hasn’t been enough development of facilities which store electricity in batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. There is a domestic solution involving a power wall, which is a large battery kept in a house storing unused generated power, either from local renewable methods or the grid at low-cost times, i.e. at night. This is a personal solution rather than a collective one though. I just wonder.
Lithium ion batteries are a bit of a kludge. There is an issue with them exploding and causing fires when they drop below a certain level of charge, which has been addressed by including a chip which detects when this happens and closes them down. This gives them a shelf life and means that devices with built-in batteries of this kind need to be periodically recharged even if not currently in use, because the chip itself draws some power which can take it below this threshold and permanently disable the battery. It seems odd to me that lithium batteries are so heavy, suggesting that they’re not just straightforward lithium batteries, which of course they aren’t: they’re lithium ion batteries.
Lithium is unusually electropositive, meaning that it avidly loses an electron. This is the electron on the outside orbital of the lithium atom. Lithium atoms are intercalated between sheets of graphene, single-atom layers of graphite, and repel their outer electrons, which pass along a copper conductor into whatever the battery is powering. The lithium ions are then attracted from within the graphite across a semipermeable layer and a liquid electrolyte into the other layer, which contains a cobalt oxide. Electrons flow through an aluminium conductor to this side, meaning that a current flows through the circuit the battery is supplying power to. When the battery is recharged, electrons are pulled back into the graphite side, attracting the lithium ions back and neutralising them. The semipermeable membrane separates these two sides, preventing fire or an explosion. As the battery ages, SEI – Solid Electrolyte Interphase – forms preventing the flow of lithium ions, and cobalt (II) oxide and lithium oxide form permanently. This is why the capacity of lithium ion batteries reduces over time. This process is of course somewhat reminiscent of a fuel cell’s operation.
A lithium ion battery is a rolled or folded arrangement of several layers, including copper, graphite/lithium, the electrolyte, the semipermeable membrane, the cobalt compound and aluminium.
Considering this design from an environmental perspective, it’s a composite, making it difficult to recycle. It has several layers which cannot be easily separated in bulk. It suffers from entropy too, but what doesn’t? A big issue with it, though, is where the lithium comes from.
I used to wonder why there isn’t more lithium. Hydrogen constitutes something like 74% of the mass of baryonic matter and helium twenty-four percent. Lithium, which is the third element, might be expected to be the third most common element, but it is actually quite rare. It is in fact only about as common as tellurium. This is because although a lot of lithium was produced soon after the Big Bang, there aren’t many processes which produce it apart from that and it’s relatively easily destroyed inside stars. As has already been mentioned, lithium tries really hard to give up its outer electron, so it’s always found in compounds on Earth. It’s also one of the alkali metals along with sodiumand potassium, so it tends to be found where they are as its reactions are somewhat similar, but in much smaller amounts. In the past, lithium has mainly been extracted from two minerals called spodumene and lepidolite, and sourced from Russia, followed by Zimbabwe, China, Canada and Portugal, all of which were way behind. A lot of lithium is from the salt flats of Bolivia and Chile’s Atacama Desert – sodium chloride is, as you might suppose, associated with smaller amounts of lithium. Unsurprisingly, indigenous populations are adversely affected by the extraction of the metal and it uses up a lot of fresh water, which is particularly problematic in a desert where it doesn’t rain for centuries at a time (and has lots of seagulls nesting, but that’s another story). The growth in lithium demand in the past three decades has been enormous. Forty percent of the planet’s output is consumed by China. Most electric vehicle batteries are made in China. This yet again makes much of the global economy dependent on China and means that it could place the same kind of stranglehold on them as Russia has on oil supplies if someone does something they don’t like. This puts a lot of pressure on the South American sources. The alternative might be to develop a battery based on a more abundant resource, and this may in fact be happening in the form of sodium ion batteries.
Obviously sodium is extremely abundant on this planet and many others. They have no explosion risk and have been developed since the ’70s, but were abandoned when lithium ion batteries started to take off. Their energy density is lower. I should explain this. Energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a given volume. This means that these batteries take up more space and are heavier than lithium ion ones, making them less suitable for vehicles but more so for domestic and grid energy storage. They have no cobalt, removing the ethical problem therewith which I haven’t mentioned yet. Instead, they have a variety of designs, including a carbon anode and alloy cathode made from nickel, manganese, magnesium, titanium and oxygen. Another design makes extensive use of Prussian blue, a well-established pigment which has been made for more than three centuries. The batteries can be recharged more times than lithium ones and they work well at a wider temperature range, from -20 to +60°C. However, I have a bit of a nagging doubt about them because Elon Musk is involved and a lot of his stuff is overhyped trash, so I’m just hoping they have a life outside his fantasy world.
I’ve kind of skipped over cobalt here, so I’ll go back to it now. Seventy percent of cobalt originates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where things are, to say the least, not good. War has destroyed the ability to farm safely due to looting, sexual assault and other forms of violence, and consequently many women now work in mining. Due to lack of education, most women and men are not aware that women can work legally in the mines and women are therefore expected to engage in transactional sex to gain access to employment. I am absolutely not a SWERF. Even so, the 25% of women who are sex workers in mining towns might well be able to live happier lives and be productive in different ways if they weren’t doing that, and they need to have greater career flexibility. Forty percent of women have to trade sex to have their basic needs met. The collapse of mining tunnels is a regular occurrence in the country, bringing with it many injuries and deaths, even of teenagers working in the mines. Accompanying that are the health hazards associated with cobalt mining, which are unsurprisingly respiratory issues from the dust and also gastrointestinal and cardiac disease. This is the usual situation of the rich countries in the world exporting their exploitation to the former colonies so that Black people can suffer and die to prop up White people’s lifestyles. And yes, I absolutely am guilty of this, typing this as I am on a laptop powered by lithium ion batteries, as is my mobile, tablet and Walkman. Some families have banded together in the country to prosecute Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Tesla for their roles in the injuries and deaths of their children. It will be very surprising if they win, and even if they do I can’t see it making any difference.
And this is my fault. I did try to get a refurbished mobile ‘phone the last time I replaced my old one (which was not a smart ‘phone incidentally but did contain a lithium ion battery), but due to lack of diligence I ended up accidentally buying a new one. The shop I went into sold both new and refurbished devices and I mistook a new one for a used one. Now you might say that my responsibility is diffused by the number of other people who are complicit in this exploitation, but there are also a lot of people being exploited so that doesn’t work as an argument. But wallowing in guilt and shame can substitute for doing something about it, so I’ll move on.
That leaves me with HM govt’s energy policy, bearing in mind that this same policy will doubtless be pursued by the fake Labour administration we’re probably about to vote in next year. I’m used to talking about nuclear energy policy and am quite well-informed about that. The Tories held Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday, much to everyone’s surprise, probably partly due to the electorate’s hatred of Green policies, and consequently they plan to double down on their plan which will wipe out the human race, it being an obvious vote winner. Seriously though, I don’t understand what the motivation is, either for the policy makers or the voters. Perhaps if they were also child-free, it would make sense, because then it would be an «après moi le déluge» type thing.
Okay, so we’re paying a lot more for energy per household nowadays. This is because 40% of our electricity is generated by gas-fired power stations and also 85% of domestic boilers. Gas prices went up due to a rise in demand associated with the pandemic, then the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. It can be addressed by improving energy efficiency, such as with insulation and heat pumps, and the installation of solar panels and other forms of renewable energy such as heat turbines. This would also help us achieve Net Zero. The question of what has not been done is also important. In the 1970s, the UK was a world leader in wave power. Thatcher trashed that. Solar panels need to be on roofs rather than in fields, since they are usually just sitting there unoccupied. Helical wind turbines take up less space than windmill-style ones. Scotland can be self-sufficient in wind power. I am interested in knowing what’s happened with storing electricity in lithium and sodium ion batteries to address this apparently intermittent supply caused by renewables, and also in how tidal and wave power could be intermittent when Cynthia constantly orbits our planet. There is a strong tendency for governments to point out that we are in a situation now and the time for action was years ago. Well, what’s happening now we need to address then? Also, we’ve clearly been beholden to theocracies in the Middle East for decades, leading to us letting them get away with atrocities, and fighting wars against them because they’ve got the oil. Self-sufficiency in energy would very plainly stop this. Maybe there’s a reason why they don’t want to stop it?
Bats and birds are killed by wind turbines. Set against this can be the deaths caused by climate change and the processes whereby fossil fuels are mined, transported and used in power stations, and although I don’t know figures it’s unlikely to be as many as those processes kill. Wind turbines aren’t even as significant a cause of death as domestic cats. The high figure for dinosaurian deaths in the US is 234 000 – it may be much lower. This compares to four billion (short scale) killed by cats, sevenety-two million by pesticides, sixty million by cars, 174 million by power lines and a billion by cars. But every death is the end of the world for the deceased organism and we are as culpable for these deaths as we would be if we went out and shot them, so prevention is still important. Sea birds tend to learn to avoid wind turbines, so that helps. Bats are also casualties, with 600 000 deaths a year in this way caused by pockets of air near the windmill blades which rupture the lungs due to high pressur. White nose syndrome, a fungal infection, kills millions in North America. The problem can be dealt with by keeping turbines at least two kilometres from high bird population areas, the use of ultrasonic sources to disrupt bat sonar, which in fact doesn’t do so but leads to them avoiding the turbines, painting the turbines purple, which repels both prey insects and vertebrates, using ultraviolet light to illuminate the blades at light so they don’t mistake their supporting poles for trees, making the blades shorter and increasing their height, shutting down turbines to allow flocks of animals to fly through the areas by detecting early strikes and/or weather RADAR, which picks them up anyway. Helical wind turbines needn’t be steered, operate at low wind speeds, are quieter, have fewer moving parts, are more suitable for residential areas and therefore microgeneration, are safer for human workers because they’re shorter, can be scaled down to domestic use, cheaper, more easily installed and, crucially, less risky to bats and birds. However, they also have more drag and suffer from the greate turbulence near the ground, which may lead to needing more maintenance.
I’ll just briefly address tidal power. It damages marine environments and life. Other problems include high cost and presumably, and this is a guess, they’re more suitable for islands than continental countries, even those which are not landlocked or lack significantly tidal bodies of water. The British Isles are, however, rather suitable.
So to recap, and suggesting possible feedback, I think I did okay on the hydrogen power thing and the batteries but I still feel rather vague about government energy policy. That’s it really. No pics today apparently.
A Box Of Chocolates 