Green Options

Trucking is among the most important, yet polluting parts of our environment. Everything everywhere was delivered by a truck, unless you live on a farm. A necessary evil, if you will. Getting truckers on board with the green movement will play an integral part in the widespread acceptance of alternative fuel vehicles. To do that, you’ve got to hit them in the wallet.

Towards that end, last week Vision Industries, with the help of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, unveiled a short haul, hydrogen-powered truck dubbed the Tyrano.

A fuel-cell-powered aircraft set a world record by staying aloft for a whopping 23 hours and 17 minutes on just a single load.

In fact, the unmanned aircraft broke the previous record by double. Of course, the plane was built by the Naval Research Laboratory and not by students from the University of Michigan. Still, those students kept their plane in air for over 10 hours–impressive!

Of course their plane was only $2,500. I am guessing the Navy-built one cost us a whole lot more.

They don’t know how it works, but it does.

A team of researchers at Georgia Tech has developed a new high-tech ceramic material that could make solid oxide fuel cells less costly and less finicky, and much more durable and efficient. The material is called Barium-Zirconium-Cerium-Yttrium-Ytterbuim Oxide. [Ed note: Say that three times fast and you get a gold star.] I don’t know if it’s any less of a tongue twister, but it’s known as BZCYYb for short.

Solid oxide fuel cells are of interest because they can generate energy without the need for an expensive catalyst such as platinum, which is typically used in hydrogen fuel cells. While nanotechnology is enabling the development of hydrogen fuel cells that use less platinum, with BZCYYb the prospects look good for ditching the precious metal entirely in favor of more sustainable technology—if solid oxide systems can be developed in a commercially viable form, that is.

In Taiwan, a new charger technology claims to be able to charge phones without even being plugged into an outlet. That’s because it taps into the power of hydrogen as a fuel source, and is expected to help put Taiwan in the list of purveyor of green technologies.

Scientists from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute recently unveiled a charger powered by hydrogen. According to source, the device can fully charge a phone within a couple of hours, although the amount of hydrogen fuel used for that span of time wasn’t mentioned. Tsau Fanghei of the research team says they “hope the hydrogen-powered device can replace current mobile phone recharge systems in 2012.”

Welcome to another episode of “If college students can do it, why can’t the rest of the world figure it out too?”

An enterprising and organized group of undergraduate and graduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have fitted an old sail boat with a spiffy set of hydrogen fuel cells and plan to run the boat from Manhattan to upstate New York later this month in a “green power” tour of sorts.

I love it when college students do this kind of stuff. Seriously. If I could have stayed in college forever, I would have. Believe me, I tried.

Just this morning, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water approved $190 million for the hydrogen and fuel cell program office which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This action, in effect, restores the program to current year funding levels. Earlier this year, the administration demonstrated its lack of support for the future of hydrogen by pulling programs for hydrogen and fuel cell development. In addition, another $54 million was approved for the SECA program. The full appropriations committee meets tomorrow. This funding is for 2010.

“Congress recognized and embraced the role hydrogen fuels cells and their fuels play in the portfolio of energy technologies for the 21st century,” said Bob Rose, Executive Director for the U.S. Fuel Cell Council. “We hope that the Secretary of Energy (Steven Chu) and his staff embrace this as a spirit of goodwill.”

Hydrogen (H) fuel cell technology could perhaps become the cleanest form of energy, both in terms of generating the gas and in terms of combustion products (which are just heat and water). The biggest problem has been making the process of H generation clean, efficient, and cheap, as the current, main source of H gas is coal.

Lots of college students complete a thesis or final project, but few can claim to have finished something as impressive as the hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle built by Swarthmore College seniors Alex Bell and Andres Pacheco. The enterprising duo built the motorcycle in an attempt to evaluate the viability of a hydrogen economy by studying real-world data— specifically, by testing the efficacy of hydrogen fuel cells, internal combustion, and battery propulsion.

Obihiro University of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine Professor Junichi Takahashi and the Sumitomo Corporation research group (both in Japan) have jointly developed technology to produce hydrogen from cattle dung and urine for use in fuel cells. They say the same can be done with human waste.

The researchers say the process allows for the production of hydrogen without producing unwanted carbon dioxide. Given its potential utility with human waste, the idea also may open pathways to household toilet technology: “toilet generators.”

Honda today revealed an environmentally friendly, three-seat, supercar design study concept called the FC Sport based on Honda’s modular V Flow hydrogen fuel cell stack.

The vehicle builds on the same hydrogen technology being used in the FCX Clarity — Honda’s “production” hydrogen fuel cell vehicle currently being tested in limited release by a couple hundred hand-picked owners in the US, including celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Would owning 1/1000th of a Community Co-op Hydrogen Station be worth $2,000.00 to you? Greg Blencoe, CEO of Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc. thinks it would be, and he’s come up with an ingenious idea that might help “fuel” the hydrogen station infrastructure.