Is anything like that on the horizon? Or do all of these liquid fuel synthesis options require industrial pressures/volumes/input electricity so as to forever be out of reach from residential synthesis?
Also, you can't run your house on an efficient house + solar over the 2-6 months the sun isn't in the right place (in the sky) for very long or when your panels are covered in snow for a week.
An efficient house gets you to the table and is a multiplier, but long term energy storage is also really important for lots of people.
Hydrogen, though, that stuff's tough. I think 99% of Hydrogen advocates don't understand just how nasty the stuff is.
Implicit in your assumption is that the grid is reliable, always on, not subject to geopolitical or climate risks, etc. "Inefficiently" converting solar power into otherwise portable fuel might be a feature rather than a bug for those living in conditions where the central grid is often unreliable. Before the past few years, I'd say that would generally be countries in the global south, but we've seen a lot more grid instability even in the US as of late.
Hydrogen (Water + Electricity): There are many containerized electrolysers
Ammonia (Air + Electricity): https://www.nitricity.co/
Methane (Air + Electricity): https://terraformindustries.com/
Also what's the purpose of the ethanol (the rest are not useful, esp. hydrogen which has to be stored somewhere, ammonia is rather dangerous)? I can imagine making vodka alike - but beyond that, using internal combustion engine to burn it means an extremely very low efficiency to conserve enegy. The energy density is there but the efficiency is not.
Ethanol - easier to synthesize than gasoline (which is a complicated mixture of hydrocarbons). It has ~2/3 energy density of gasoline, which I do not think is horrible. I believe it is also less volatile and easier to store long-term.
Animals like goats and pigs can produce a lot of dung that will turbocharge that quite a bit.
A little searching yields stuff like: https://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-living/renewable...
The low tech route is far cheaper and easier at small scale if you want to make combustible fuel.
However the storage tanks are quite small. I would prefer if they made the hydrogen production and storage separate, so you could save up hydrogen in the summer to use in the winter.
There's also a recent HN topic [2] about it, but without any comments yet.
Hydro is pretty cheap , does not mean it’s fit for home.
Here the best scenario is similar to Singapore - Australia or UK - Morocco remote solar grid.
This innovation is very interesting compared to Water- Hydrogene electrolysis that is a bit expensive and needs metals that are going to become difficult to source in the coming decades.
Gallium is quiet abundant from my understanding.
If that's really all you want, you can get a 9 year old to put together some kitchen waste and art supplies to achieve this.
That's how I did it at that age.
I did use a battery though, so you might want to check the wiring and add a voltage divider, but those are also easy to build even without understanding.
And I have no idea if you even can, let alone should, just pour gaseous hydrogen into, for example, a gas heater's fuel input pipe.
But actually making hydrogen is utterly trivial.
For the second, you probably want a methanol, methane or ammonia output and they all require high temperatures or exotic materials.
Also conceptually related (small-scale): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32694644
But indeed, no, this just doesn't work. Best available efficiency for round-trip electrolytic fuel production / electricity generation is 40% or so, meaning that those roof panels wouldn't be enough anyway. (Also there's the problem of having every home store a winter's worth of pressurized hydrogen or whatever on-premises. Yikes.) It's not worth it.
Home solar is attractive because unlike most infrastructure it scales down really well and is actually feasible to do at the level of an individual user. But, like most infrastructure, seasonal power management is a grid-wide problem and needs to be solved at the utility level. There are plenty of tricks available there that homeowners don't have access to.
What to do in the winter? If the answer is "use the grid", then we just kick the can to someone else, who will probably use fossil fuels to provide the energy. The basic problem remains - solar/wind are intermittent and fluctuating.
Use isn't that expensive, fuel cells do exist.
The problem with green hydrogen (made with electricity) is the inefficiency.
It's only good for storage when you have already filled every battery and pumped hydro storage you have and are still making an excess. Electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity conversion is so hilariously inefficient that even petrol engines can beat it.
The best bet are still batteries, albeit the current incarnation of LiXXX (e.g. LiFePO4) are still not there. Even storing energy in batteries poses multiple conversions of electricity that goes to 92-95% efficiency.
Ammonia transport and storage is far more likely.
No one really knows how our existing natural gas infrastructure will cope with hydrogen
https://theconversation.com/dont-rush-into-a-hydrogen-econom...
https://agage.mit.edu/publications/global-environmental-impa...
more skeptically, given that green hydrogen remains a pipe dream, it's both a useful delaying tactic for switching to electricity and furthering investment in fossil fuels, which must stay in the ground if we are to have any hope of staying below 1.5c.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/new-fossil-fuels-incompatible-wi...
World gallium production is 400 tons a year. World indum production is 70 tons a year.
How did "cheap" get into this?
Annual Gallium usage includes a substantial amount of reclaimed material from electronics which isn't counted as production against reserve.
> World primary low-purity gallium production capacity in 2021 was estimated to be 774,000 kilograms per year; high-purity refined gallium production capacity, 325,000 kilograms per year; and secondary high-purity gallium production capacity, 273,000 kilograms per year. [1]
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-gallium.pd...
[2] http://strategic-metal.com/products/gallium/gallium-price/
( Similar story with inidium )
Indium is one of the least abundant elements.
In the entire Solar System it is less abundant than gold.
In the crust of the Earth, it is less depleted than most other metals with high electronegativity (like silver and gold), so the result is that here indium has about the same abundance as silver.
Indium is completely irreplaceable in LEDs and in high-speed power transistors. The future demand for these two applications alone is severely constrained by the existing indium reserves (e.g. replacing all light bulbs and laptop/phone chargers and computer PSUs, in the entire world, with more efficient modern types would need a lot of indium).
Because of that, extreme efforts are needed to find substitutes for indium in its other applications, like for the computer displays, all of which currently use transparent electrodes made of doped indium oxide.
It is very undesirable to find new applications that would consume more of the scarce indium.
For everything else, you need a way to store the energy that can be measured in weeks, not hours. You also need to transport it. And you need to stabilize the energy output not to be entirely dependent on whether the sun shines. That's why hydrogen might be a good energy reservoir.
My Tesla Model S does that pretty efficiently. And for static batteries there are plenty of alternatives that don't use difficult to source elements.
> You also need to transport it.
We have a grid to do that already, with HVDC interconnects we can even sell it to places where the sun is not shining.
So, that makes shipping or trucking around hydrogen spectacularly uneconomical. Most hydrogen produced today is used onsite. Mainly for things like fertilizer production. Moving hydrogen around at scale is an unsolved problem. Gas pipes (after they are re-enforced) could work of course. But some of it would leak. And hydrogen mixed with air is not a good thing to have in your house.
The same property also makes using hydrogen as a fuel in planes or shipping unpractical: most of your plane/ship would be taken up by the enormous volume of hydrogen you'd need to move it around.
Michael Liebreich's hydrogen ladder is a good reference here. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
In it he organizes different use cases by their economical value. Things like road transport and domestic heating are at the bottom of the scale (i.e. you could do it but it would be very inefficient and costly). Near the top are some of the more realistic things, some of which are already being done.
Instead of moving hydrogen to where you implement those use cases (e.g. steel making), it would be more practical/logical to move the use case to where you can produce the hydrogen the cheapest. The bigger the energy need, the higher the savings. You basically compete on energy cost.
It is not really clear from the article what the scale and state of this technology is, but at least from the pictures this looks like small and very early stages. It's of course a good thing to do early research, but already pitching that with claims about it being "cheap" sounds dishonest if you're far away from a working, industrial-scale prototype.
Multiple candidates were developed and trialled in parallel with ramping out mass production, storage and shipping.
Some of this was wasted effort, some of it was useful regardless of which candidates made the final vaccine cut.
The end result was dramatically compressed rollout times.
Right now the world has a billionare or two with negotiated contracts to deliver green (not blue) hydrogen (eg: to Germany) at a scale that significantly increases world hydrogen production within a 5-10 year time frame.
Already the industrial elements are being built for transport, end use, power collection sites, etc.
This activity makes the possibily of dropping in better methods of hydrogen spliting as they are developed feasible in a shorter time frame than otherwise thought possible.
On a side node, you can already add Hydrogen to your home. There is a startup in Berlin, DE which sells complete systems for home: solar roof, heat pump, electrolysis device, bottles and ventilation system.
During summer you fill the bottles with H2 and during winter you consume it.
I'm not affiliated with them. The price before Corona for the whole system was around 65k Euro and now around 100k Euro.
https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product/ Picea is the name
Do you know what the capacity of a single system is? Could one unit be shared between multiple residential units?
It's time to change this stereotype. Humanity tries to reduce its greenhouse gases emissions, and CO2 is not the biggest problem.
One common issue with all these concepts doing electrolysis at the collector is how do you gather the hydrogen. Rigging PV modules together with wires is much more practical than hooking hydrogen emitters together with tubing or pipes.
