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It is not what?  A good guess?

I already said catalysts only speed up reactions.

The efficiency has nothing to do with the catalysis, efficiency only measures the amount of useable energy you get versus the amount of waste heat. They didn't say how efficiently the water was produced in the reaction.  They didn't even say how much energy they stored in the catalyst.  It's all a big mystery.  That's why the claim is suspect.  Until those things are revealed, you won't know where they are, only that they say they have a candidate for the process.

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The legendary German automaker  Porche has decided the future of the 911 is Hydrogen.  Or maybe alcohol or ammonia.  OOr some kind f potpourri mixture of a basket of fuels.  Together mostly with fuel cells rather than combusttion for the most part, although combustion in some applications.

I'm wondering if they could work up an engine that uses Ammonium Nitrate?  You, know, the stuff we make BOMBS from.     GREAT energy density!  Problem of course is it's a solid state material.  I'.m thinking perhaps a slurry of nanopparticles, which would add another high tech buzzword into the mix here.  Or maybe ammonium perchlorate.  That's used as a solid rocket propellant and might be great for Private Jets.

Wait.  Forget the  jets and go straight to Private Space Planes!  Unfortunately, the recent 1st test flight by another German compnay crashed on takeoff, but that hasn't deterred them  from going to the next model.  Werner von Braun would not give up.



https://newatlas.com/aircraft/polaris-mira-test-flight-crash/

All we need is to think outside the box, I'm sure we can come up with something.

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/evs-porsche-hydrogen/2029/

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Well, despite the low energy density, Airbus and the Europeans apparently feel Liquid Hydrogen will work for them as Aviation fuel.

It is conceivable in Europe, since most of the routes are quite short. About the longest is London-Athens at 3.5 hours.  The Regional Jets in the FSoA fly similar distances.  If these routes were convverted to liquid H, and FFs were restricted to the long trans-oceanic flights, that would probably cut CO₂ emmissions by 70% or more.

You wouldn't be able to fly non-stop NY-LA anymore, you'd have to refuel in Chicago or St. Louis, but that's not too huge a drop in speed and wouldn't affect commerce that much.

Anyhow, they wouldn't be doing this if the couldn't use it at all.

https://simpleflying.com/airbus-european-hydrogen-refueling/

Airbus Leading European Hydrogen Refueling Project

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Well, Toyota seems to have solved the problem of where to store all the Hydrogen for your EV Happy Motoring without giving up any passenger space or cargo capacity.  They just dropped high pressure tanks under the whole fucking chassis!



What could possibly go wrong? lol.  Don't worry, Toyota has a very good safety record. 

https://www.ecoticias.com/en/japan-california-hydrogen-tesla-evs/2228/

The ultimate futuristic end to EVs: Japan chooses this U.S. state to outperform Tesla

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MOAR Hydrogen Hoopla in CA!

EcoNewz is apparently the main propaganda organ for Green Hydrogen.  Prior to the H push, I don't ever remember seeing this website before.  Now it appears every day in my Google Newz summary.  This of course because I click the links, so I get still more off them.  Since there is no Paywall, I can actually read more than just the headline.  Very smooth propaganda method.

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https://www.ecoticias.com/en/new-energy-hydrogen-us/2269/

U.S. starts producing new energy: largest plant ever built and 3 tons per day

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Despite the Negative Waves regarding the low energy density of Hydrogen making it unsuitable for use as a transportation fuel, SwRI has in fact built a Hydrogen fueled, ICE powered tractor utilizing a modified Cummins engine designed for running on NG.

As with the Toyota car that gets around the problem of where to put all the tanks you need to hold the H underneath the car on the chassis,  the tractor has all the tanks strapped onto the cab like a backpack.  Looks like a standard Freightliner tractor was used for the prototype.



So, it appears that this actually CAN be done.  Beyond building enough renewable energy plants and getting the H refueling hardware into the main truckstops on the interstate, there's no major technical hurdle that needs to be overcome to make this work.  It just remains to be seen if they can produce enough Green Hydrogen, distribute the pumps and storage tanks and replace the current FF powered fleet at a cost that people can afford to pay for the products being shipped fast enough to keep this vital system from collapsing as the FFs become scarce and expensive.

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/swris-heavy-duty-hydrogen-engine

SwRI's heavy-duty hydrogen engine offers 2,025 Nm torque with ultra-low emissions

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At least in trucking, the H power transition has made an official commercial beginning in South Korea.  That's a pretty big step towards demonstrating its feasibility in this area of the transportation energy problem, which is one of the biggest problem areas in making the transition to renewable energy.

The other main important question is how rapidly the production of Green Hydrogen can be scaled up to meet the demand of replacing the Millions of gallons of diesel burned each year to move our food from farm to table and toys from Amazon distribution center to living room entertainment center.  China has gone a long way toward producing the mega quantities of Solar PV panels needed, however they're not all deployed nor are they all hooked up to Hydrolysis plants that can take millions of gallons of water and turn it into millions of gallons of liquid H, which is how it probably will leave the factory as then used to fill compressed gas H tanks at truckstops.  At some point NG pipelines may be converted to carry H instead, but in the beginning I suspect it will mostly be moved in bulk as a liquid.

The FSoA is well behind China in both solar PV total generating capacity as well as in production of green H.  Currently, the cost of H in the FSoA is quadruple what it is coming in at over in Asia, and then even the cheaper Asian price is higher than the cost of diesel.  So inevitably, if this transition moves forward it's going to raise transportation costs until such time as the cost of the H is brought down significantly.

The transition is likely to have many supply-demand imbalances which will also vary by region and country and will depend a lot on how subsidies are sprinkled out and how the financing is done.  That is likely to be a major political football in the energy and transportation industries.

However, despite all the obvious problems, it's a hopium-full break from the usual Star Trek ideas that get floated every day for replacing FFs, the technology all exists and the only question is how much Green H can be produced how fast?  They will need a LOT of it to completely substitute for Diesel in all the trucks driving on the Eisenhower Interstate every day.  How much time they have before there are substantial shortfalls in diesel supply is a known unknown.  The countdown has begun.

https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/commercial-sales-of-hydrogen-engine-trucks-will-begin-this-year-followed-by-exponential-growth-analyst/2-1-1656234

Commercial sales of hydrogen-engine trucks will begin this year, followed by exponential growth: analyst

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The argument that Hydrogen can't be used for aviation is now in dispute.  This eVTOL plane supposedly does 320 mph and has an 1150 mile range.  It flies at 21,000 feet, slightly under the 30,000 ft for most long flights bur still well above the weather in most cases.

It's Private Jet size for Billionaires, but I see no reason it wouldn't scale up for commercial passenger flights.  Actually, bigger planes have better volume/surface area ratio and can use heavier structural materials than smaller ones.

Calling it a "Jet" is a misnomer, because it uses electrically power fans, not direct propulsion from hot gas as a real jet engine does, but that's really irrelevant.  It flies at a fast enough speed to do NY-St Louis in under 3 hours and St.Louis-Denver in 2.5 hrs and Denver-LA 2.5 also.  So, 8 hrs, plus you don't need a landing strip.  The lack of sufficient range to do transatlantic and transpacific flights though makes its overall commercial viability outlook poor.  Looks like mainly a toy for billionaires.

I find this still to be questionable, because along with a dozen photos of the plane and 2 videos showing engineers in meetings, there was no video of the plane in action.  I also wonder how well all those little fans would work in a heavy rain?  BMW is a reputable companyy though, so that gives it a little extra credibility.

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/global-unveiling-sirius-ceo-jet-hydrogen-electric/

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Now for the opposite argument, which uses basic physics and math to demonstrate why Hydrogen is a EPIC FAILURE as aviation fuel.  It does it well, and definitely with the current aircraft used by the aviation industry, you can kiss off H as direct fuel for keeping the Billionaire Private Jets airborne.

However, this doesn't necessarily mean being grounded for good, if you're rich enough.  I see two possible solutions to the problem.

I mentioned one a while back, which is to switch from Jet engines to Rocket engines utilizing Solid Fuel propellant like the old Space Shuttle.  Ammonium Nitrate, also used for Fertilizer and making Bombs is used for solid rocket fuel.  This can be synthesized by taking Nitrogen and hydrogenating it over a catalyst to make Ammonia, then combining that with Nitrates created by oxidizing Nitrogen.  All these synthetic reactions require the input of gobs of energy, but this (in theory) could be sourced from renewable power generation.

The other is taking biologically sourced carbon compounds, such as Wood Gas or Ethanol, hydrogenating them and polymerizing up the carbon chain to 5-7 atoms and using pentane-hexane-heptane as your jet fuel.  This produces CO₂ when burned, but it's carbon neutral since the carbon comes from plants you grow to make the wood gas or alcohol.

This whole process would be very expensive and the fuel would cost a bundle, but this is irrelevant to Elon's $56B pay package.  Also explains why Elon & Jeff have Rocket companies, they need them to build their Private Rockets.

You however can kiss off your vacations in Hawaii, unless you have time to sail there.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/01/another-day-another-hydrogen-transportation-firm-plummets-to-earth/

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I've been wondering when this type of catalyst would be developed and made economically viable.  This provides a means to make Green Hydrogen useful as an aviation fuel as well as using atmospheric CO₂ as the carbon source, thus making a closed loop with net zero carbon emmisions, as long as the electricity is produced by renewable carbon-free methods.

Developing the right catalyst is just the first step of course, they also need to produce the hydrogen cheap enough and be able to filter the CO₂ from the atmosphere and combine it with the H to make Methane (CH₄), which would also require electrical energy input for the reaction to go forward.  Finally, they would need to use the methane to produce longer carbon chain liquid synthetic fuel, another endothermic reaction.  At the end of this process you get your Jet Fuel.  Very expensive jet fuel.  Still chump change for Elon Musk and other Private Jet owners though.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/catalyst-co2-methane-clean-energy

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