Silver Science - Hydrogen from Waste

No. When a company starts writing itself £M contracts for itself then I grow skeptical. However I wish these guys luck, they are going to need it.

For those interested, here's extracts for a case study I did for a company recently, If they were to use an electrolyser instead of the NZC system (note new company name for this project btw) they would need a 2MW grid connection.

Waste case study small pdf..pdf

Quote from gerold.s

i have also read a news article about "Austin Electric Essex UK" in Austrian newspaper and their alleged innovation of the Aluminium-air battery.

It isn't exactly new, and they don't tell thew whole story. This is an aluminium-carbon-oxygen battery, I have built them myself. In fact on YTube you can find lots of videos about them. The are only telling half the story, best use of these so far has been in underwater drones, that use the ocean itself as an electrolyte. But these are not really batteries, because they are not re-chargeable at all. When it is dead you have to dismantle it, throw out everything but the casing and replace the electrodes etc.. The mess that's left after doing this is difficult to recycle.

Nice article about the German approach to hydrogen in the Times today.

Britain is missing out on hydrogen — the most promising new green technology Simon Nixon Thursday June 11 2020, 12.01am, The Times

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art…dc664ac2e4ef80ca98aa83ea7

Another article about my more conventional lab work:-

https://www.techforimpact.asia…-aluminium-dust-valuable/

Aluminium is one of the most easily recycled materials. In fact, one estimate suggests that 75% of all the aluminum ever produced is still in use.

Even so, huge quantities go to waste. Mostly, it’s the stuff that ends up on the factory floor: can trimmings, grinder dust, turnings and chopped wire. And often, a large factory will produce tons of it every day.

“It’s the final waste. It’s like a dust. And it does contain some aluminium but it’s no longer valuable to recycle,” said Khalid Bahsoon, an independent recycling and waste management consultant.

Hi rubycarat

We are always looking for support, but right now I'm mostly concentrating on building a pilot plant/demonstrator in the UK. I have already built the biggest reactor we can handle in the lab, which produces about 22,000 litres of hydrogen a day - which is a relatively trivial. The scale up I am designing will produce around 1,000,000 litres a day,, which is enough to power a Toyota Mirai hydrogen car over half-way around the world.

Managing a long range collaboration at this stage (and in the current travel avoidance thing) would be very difficult. I am talking with interested parties in the UK an Europe, but right now everybody is very nervous about doing even mundane stuff, let alone being bold adopters of something new. So, thanks for the suggestion, keep your guys on ice for a little while and we'll see what can be done.

Quote from Zephir_AWT

During dissolution of aluminium in water most of heat gets released by forming aluminium hydroxides, only minor part gets utilized for hydrogen generation. It's energetically quite wasteful process.

As for purity of resulting hydroxides, nearly all forms of technical aluminum are contaminated by iron, copper, magnesium etc. One can find pure aluminium only in foils of capacitors.

Not so. The total energy output of the process is 8MWh/tonne. 11% of the weight of aluminium used ends up as hydrogen gas, energy content 4MW/h, the other 4MWh is process heat, Every ton of aluminium processed is transformed into 2.9 tons of hydroxide. The energy production cost of hydroxide by strip-mining bauxite and processing is around 15MW/h tonne. Since the UK has no indigenous source of aluminates we import a total of around 200,000 tons a year of all kinds. If we were to process just the 90,000 tons of low-grade scrap this is currently landfilled (official figure) using my process into 261,000 tons of low-to-no carbon aluminates we would reduce mining, processing, pollution, red-mud dumping, etc, saving around 40 GW/h of energy in the process. The UK would be not only self-sufficient in a strategic raw material but become exporters. The process itself -which is zero-emissions - would produce approximately 10,000 tons of H2 and 3.6 GW/h of process heat.

As for the argument about 'all aluminium should be re-smelted' the kind of scrap I like yields only 75% on re-smelting, and is usually smelted 3x to make it back into usable high-grade ingots, producing toxic 'dross' in the process and taking around 3MW/h per tonne overall. That's why it gets landfilled.

The process I have developed removes a lot of the impurities you mention by solubilising them. These soluble impurities - the hydroxide is not very soluble under the conditions of this method - are recycled back through the system in with the catalysed process water until they are there in sufficient quantities to be worth separating as assets in their own right. Another process I have developed as part of this project.

The whole aluminium business is very complex, and I have taken advice from some leading authorities in the business on the economic, ecological and energy implications of this process. Once they have studied the data and worked it out for themselves, they are both surprised and supportive. There is more to this than a superficial knowledge of chemistry would suggest.

Hi Cydonia

Actually recovering the waste is the good point. The way the numbers work out the hydrogen is very very cheap. The alumina is what makes the money because there is a huge market for it 'as is'. The figures in terms of return on investment are very good in fact, so good that if I told you what they were you would think I was lying. But here's an example.. One of my plants could produce local hydrogen for €3 euros a kg and be profitable. The pump price of electrolytic hydrogen - the only way to make it locally in the absence of a national hydrogen gas grid is €14 per kg. The real profit lies in the hydroxides. They are worth 5X as much as the scrap.

@cydonia/

Using primary aluminium from a high-grade smelter and grinding it into small pieces is exactly the mistake everybody else looking at this process has made. Or should I say, one of the many mistakes. Peure Al powder is €2000/tonne. Small particle scrap is €200. That's what makes the difference, and also what you need to tweak the process to do..

Quote from Zephir_AWT

. Why England simply wouldn't buy pure alumina used for primary aluminium production?

We currently do. 200,000 tons of alumina and aluminates a year Price has nothing to do with energy content. Price has to do with cost of production and demand.