Hydrogen Opportunity & Barriers: transport from OTEC
Thermal Energy Conversion Generates Hydrogen and Oxygen
Ironically, one of the most capital-intensive green energy holds significant hope for achieving one of the low-cost holy grails of alternative energy. OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), as part of its energy production process, generates hydrogen and oxygen.
For the past decade, researchers have focused on two components of developing hydrogen as a viable environmentally friendly fuel for use in everything from automobiles to homes and business. While hydrogen has been produced, using electrolysis, in high school labs for half a century, the process is inefficient on anything but the largest scale, and offered no practical way to store the element.
OTEC system advocates propose to store the hydrogen produced by OTEC facilities as a liquid form, to be stored and used as a transportation fuel. However, to transport from the oceanic OTEC site to the industrialized centers where the hydrogen would be in demand is a costly process. Instead, system developers are exploring the viability of using the hydrogen locally, and, in turn, stimulating local business incubation and development.
As an option, hydrogen produced by OTEC plants could be stored on board, to be used as fuel for electrical energy production during peak demand times. This approach would assist the OTEC plant ship owners in resolving issues of scalability of these huge energy stations, allowing for high demand to be met by supplementary fuelling of generators when OTEC components are unable to meet the demand.
Currently, the OTEC plant ship conversion process involves the same electrolysis as that which each of us used in high school physics, except for a massive increase in size of the apparatus. Under evaluation is a Japanese polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyser (PEM), developed by the Japanese international clean energy network (WE-NET) using hydrogen conversion. This process offers hope for a significantly more cost- efficient method of hydrogen production. Coupled with the hydrogen combustion turbine being developed, hydrogen could easily fuel a secondary electrical generation onboard plant.
In a co-located operating environment like an OTEC plant ship, using and reusing materials and resources provides penultimate environmental responsibility leadership. By minimizing transport costs for co-generated products, by relying on renewable energy sources, by actually helping to reverse climate change impact on ocean currents, and by stimulating economic and social development in the coastal countries in proximity to the OTEC plants, OTEC developers are providing essential protection for the ecology and the economy.
And, ironically, as oxygen produced by hydrogen generation through the OTEC systems is vented into the atmosphere, the hydrogen fuels vehicles and businesses, emitting, in turn, more clean water.
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