this video is sponsored by lomi for decades hydrogen power has held enormous promise as an
alternative to fossil fuels after all who wouldn't want an energy source made from the most abundant
element in the universe whose only byproduct is water yet here we are in 2022 and hydrogen still
hasn't lived up to its potential but a new hydrogen breakthrough may finally give this
promising fuel source its chance to shine even though it may not look particularly pretty this
innovative hydrogen paste boasts energy densities that give lithium ion batteries a serious run for
their money will we soon see this goop powering cars planes the grid let's dive in as a fuel
source hydrogen is sort of like dr jekyll and mr hyde it has many attractive features for one
it's the most abundant element in the universe ranking number one on the periodic table well
that isn't because of the abundance it's just the first element with an atomic weight of one anyway
you get my point and this matters because when it comes to sustainable energy resource availability
is a pretty critical factor lithium for example is the 33rd most abundant element but not only is
hydrogen incredibly abundant with a small caveat which we'll get into in a bit it's also incredibly
clean as fuel and electrochemical process it combines with oxygen producing electricity
leaving nothing but pure water as a byproduct but hydrogen has a dark side too first while it is
indeed the most abundant element in the universe in its purest form it tends to drift off planet
and into space the hydrogen that gets left here on earth tends to form very strong bonds with other
elements there are a few ways to extract pure hydrogen but this is where the green footprint
tends to get a bit muddy one of the most popular methods of extracting hydrogen is called steam
methane reforming essentially burning methane gas at high pressures and temperatures to separate the
hydrogen from the carbon elements there are two main problems here the first is that the process
itself is very energy intensive and two the end result still produces carbon emissions yeah
not looking so hot after all the greener method for extracting hydrogen is called electrolysis
this involves running electric currents through water separating the water molecules into hydrogen
and oxygen the problem here is that it still requires loads of electricity and tons of water
studies revealed that electrolysis loses about 30 percent of its energy from the splitting process
itself then another 26 percent from transporting the hydrogen in the fuel station leaving only
about half the initial energy before the hydrogen even makes its way into your vehicle
then there's transportation hydrogen typically has to either be stored on site where it's extracted
or shipped around in huge pressurized tanks with no real infrastructure for fueling hydrogen cells
the technology just hasn't taken off as some have anticipated we've covered more about the drawbacks
of hydrogen in previous videos which you can check out here but hydrogen may still have its moment to
shine thanks to this yeah it may not look pretty but according to its creators at the fraunhofer
institute in germany this grey goop may solve many of hydrogen power's biggest issues it's
called power paste and it's made by combining hydrogen and magnesium with metal salts and a
compound called ester formed by reaction between alcohol and acid the two elements are combined at
around 662 degrees fahrenheit at five to six times atmospheric pressures to form magnesium hydride
but before i tell you about this breakthrough compound i have to tell you about the most
remarkable little appliance i've seen in years this is lomi a ridiculously cool beautiful kitchen
electric composter if you do any amount of cooking i'm sure you're familiar with this food scraps
from vegetables fruit even coffee grounds and egg shells this isn't trash it's the basis for future
plant food but usually it takes months to break down but with lomi you can take this and turn it
into nutrient-rich dirt in just hours using lumi twice a week can reduce your waste footprint by
50 percent it has three modes in eco mode which uses just around one kilo hour of energy and takes
three to five hours use grow mode and in 16 to 20 hours you have nutrient-rich dirt that's perfect
to turn back around and add to a garden or a house plant there's even a low me approved mode which
can break down loamy-approved bioplastics whether you live in a small studio apartment or a farm
convert your food scraps quickly into dirt with low meat i've had mine for over a month and i
still get a kick out of seeing the results every morning use my link links dot pella dot earth
slash two bit to check out this revolutionary new product today huge thanks to lomi and to you
for supporting the companies that support the show the result is this energy dense gray goop
which the company says could be easily stored and shipped inside cartridges at room temperatures and
remain completely stable until it reaches about 482 degrees fahrenheit about 250 degrees celsius
so no need to worry about fuel cells exploding in a parking lot on a hot summer day pretty cool
to release the energy a plunger releases the paste into a chamber where it reacts with water at a
controlled rate where it's then converted into electricity around a proton exchange membrane
one major benefit of the technology is that it resolves the storage and transportation
issue the pace boasts an energy density equal to a 700 bar tank of hydrogen of the same weight this
cartridge system could also make refueling much more practical the developers imagine drivers
simply being able to pull out into a service station and swapping out their old cartridge
for a new one they even suggest that power pace could be supplied via standard fuel lines
with relatively inexpensive equipment what really makes this a huge breakthrough though is its
energy density power paste has a specific energy around 10 times greater than lithium ion batteries
what would that look like in the real world a long range tesla model 3 battery weighs around
1060 pounds with a capacity of roughly 75 kilowatt hours which has a usable range of about 300 miles
a traditional eight and a half gallon hydrogen fuel tank typically carries enough fuel for
about 400 miles of range weighing roughly about 76 pounds a cartridge of the same weight using
power pace could theoretically push your range to about 3 000 kilometers that would take you from
san diego to seattle and still leave you with a thousand more kilometers remaining for the average
commuter that would mean needing to fuel about one time a month now while power pace boasts really
high energy density it stumbles a bit when it comes to efficiency kind of like gasoline actually
lithium ion batteries are the efficiency champions running at around 95 percent efficiency meaning
nearly every kilowatt hour stored in the battery gets converted into usable energy moving your
car forward gasoline is notoriously inefficient at around 17 to 35 percent efficiency so after
factoring in the chemical transformations and waste heat you're only using less than a third
of your tank to move your car traditional hydrogen fuel sits at around 60 efficiency how does power
pay stack up right now the developers say it maintains an efficiency rate of about 50 percent
which is significantly higher than gasoline but still quite a bit behind lithium on batteries and
traditional hydrogen fuel cells so is that case closed on the economic viability of power paste
well what does the data say so let's say it takes around 80 kilo hours to fully charge a 75 kilowatt
battery there can be some energy leakage and other inefficiencies right now at the time of
this video in san diego electricity costs roughly 34 cents per kilowatt so roughly 28 dollars to
fully charge your tesla assuming you don't have home solar or off-rate time of use billing periods
so 28 is about 271 miles that comes in at around 10 cents per mile with the average daily commute
in america sitting around 41 miles you need to fully charge roughly four times in a month
bring that total monthly cost to about a hundred and twelve dollars hydrogen fuel costs roughly
sixteen dollars a gallon here in san diego so our eight and a half gallon tank cost about a hundred
and thirty dollars to fill up if you can go about 400 miles 130 that comes out to roughly 33 cents
per mile so now let's take a look at a power pace fuel cell which remember has 10 times the energy
density of the lithium ion battery which means our similarly weighted fuel cell gives us 475 kilo
hours of sweet gray goop under the hood as of this video there are no hard numbers on how much these
fuel cartridges would cost let alone service fees or anything else but let's assume for now that
the cost per kilowatt hour is comparable to the cost of residential energy 35 cents per kilowatt
hour so this swap now cost about 166 dollars but remember the paste only has a 50 efficiency rating
so that 475 kilowatt hours we end up actually only getting about 237 kilowatt hours worth of usable
energy if 75 kilowatt hours got us 437 kilometers of distance about 6.7 kilometers per kilowatt hour
then even a 50 efficiency the power pace can take us 1600 kilometers which still comes out to about
10 cents per kilometer which is about half the cost of traditional hydrogen but still twice
as much as lithium ion so yeah as of right now evs still make way more sense for the typical consumer
not only is electricity cheaper even with historically high prices it's still plentiful
and don't forget with a battery ev you can just recharge at home and if you use home solar
you can basically eliminate the cost of refueling altogether while hydrogen is abundant to refill
your car would still require swapping out your old cartridge for a new one meaning you'd have to be
someone's customer beholden to prices and supply chain issues which we all know can be a huge
problem evs just don't face that problem even with 10 times less range evs will still come out on top
for most average consumers so maybe the average commuter car will continue to be a battery
electric and not hydrogen but what about other major co2 emitters like airplanes where weight
is a bigger factor than cost aerial vehicles could be a potential application since current battery
technology is far too heavy for planes to use and still maintain efficiency and cost effectiveness
using power pace with higher energy densities could still make sense if it's lighter than
batteries and cheaper than standard fossil fuel it would be a win-win in fact the developers of power
paste see a future in which their lightweight energy dense sludge could power things like drones
underwater vehicles medical devices and portable outdoor camping equipment or backup generators
but the two biggest applications i think would be aircraft and large cargo shipping vessels which
both currently use a lot of petroleum and don't have an equivalent yet in the battery world then
there's possible grid level applications as well say an offshore wind farm with a steady supply of
seawater to refuel electric ships now there are still a handful of questions surrounding power
paste namely what happens to the byproducts after all since we're no longer using pure hydrogen we
no longer get pure water at the end it's possible that the leftover magnesium and metal salts could
be recycled though that would involve developing some kind of infrastructure that doesn't exist yet
how economically viable is it to produce the paste is it environmentally friendly so the production
recycling life cycle questions i think are one of the big things that i'm thinking about that remain
unanswered will power paste finally allow hydrogen energy to catch up to battery technology or is it
yet another pipe dream should we even be looking into hydrogen breakthroughs at all especially with
more and more advanced battery technology proving to be so efficient sound off in the comments below
all right that's a look at this cool new breakthrough hydrant is one of those things
i want to love but there's so many challenges with it being so small being so tiny and abundant it's
very hard to keep and compress but this paste does seem pretty promising it would solve a
lot of the problems that i think hydrogen has been plagued with for years for decades really
but what do you guys think check our other videos we have some other stuff we think you're going to
love and as always i'm ricky with davinci we'll catch you guys next week