Addressing Global Water Supply, Drinking Water, Water Pollution, and Power Demands All by Using Hydrogen Fuel Power Plants and Fuel Cells and Optional SMRs

Paper: Addressing Global Water Supply, Drinking Water, Water Pollution, and Power Demands By Using Modular Hydrogen Fuel Power Plants and Fuel Cells, with Optional Increased Scaling With Small Modular Reactors.

Hawke Robinson (W.A. Hawkes-Robinson)
Originally written while I was a student at Eastern Washington University, this was a paper I wrote for the Introduction to Geology course. I was taking at the time: March 9th, 2013

OVERVIEW

This essay addresses potential solutions to many of the issues related to exponentially growing global and regional  water resources and energy needs.

Technologies, markets, and needs may finally have found solutions sufficient to addressing the needs of the world to find a means to efficiently clean polluted water, and supply sufficient energy without pollution and other negative effects, and even create water from scratch by using the aforementioned generated power. If realized, it would effectively make use of the formula

2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + Energy 

to efficiently, effectively, and scalably create fresh water from scratch.

Effectively Scaling Water & Energy Demands for Regional & Global Demand

Though, due to many countries (especially the USA) have many bans and bureaucracies interfering with implementation, these approaches do not yet immediately have the ability scale to address the much larger consumption of non-saline water by agriculture, it does potentially address, right away (if agencies, people, and organizations will stop their bans) the critical clean drinking water supply issues for many countries and regions, while at the same time addressing critical electrical power needs so critical for the advancement of any modern society.

Over time the scale could be increased to actually address purifying water sufficiently as supplement to agriculture as well.

Water Creation for Hi-density Populations - India

India suffers an estimated 1,500 deaths per day due to contaminated water (Vieru, 2008). Some current projects underway include, among other multi-pronged approaches, a solution to use hydrogen fuel cell power plants to generate power from processing waste water and as a by-product also clean drinking water (Czernik, 2007).

Water Creation for Extraplanar Solutions - Lunar Base

I first stumbled across this when I was looking up information I heard on the Science Channel relating to plans attempting to create water for the moon base project, by shipping up hydrogen to the moon, and then using home appliances and solar energy to mix the elements (O2) in the Lunar soil with the Hydrogen (H) to create water (Atkinson, 2008).

Water Creation for Low-density Environments - Navajo Reservation

While the hydrogen fuel-cell plants, and water creation technologies will be useful in high-population density areas, less expensive solutions have also been developed using solar power for water purification for very dispersed rural communities like the Navajo in the Four Corners area of the U.S. (Allen, 2012)

The Core Chemistry Plus Energy Principles for Creating Water

The final piece that makes all of this come together, to solve so many fundamental issues regarding water, are the recent breakthroughs at the University of Illinois to create water from scratch. They do this basically by (using energy) for combining hydrogen and oxygen together to create pure water.

This formula has been known for a few centuries, but only the recent breakthroughs using various inexpensive elements, compounds, and technologies cobined with aluminum compounds (Kloeppel, 2007), further energized by combining with the aforementioned hydrogen fuel cell energy systems, and efficiency breakthroughs at Purdue University (Singh, 2012), may finally make possible affordable, efficient, safe, and ecologically friendly sets of systems to address the water demands of the near term, and long term, for future demands of clean drinking water.

Energy Demands

Fuel cell power plants have the advantages of have no moving or rotating components like many other systems such as wind and fossil-fuel systems, so they tend to be noiseless, and of course do not have the ecological impact of fossil-fuel systems.

These affordable, modular, and potentially portable systems can be setup in specific regions, reducing the additional expense, burden, and loss from long-distance power transmission lines. This further increases the already 55% efficient system (compared to the 30% efficiency of conventional thermal-powered systems) (Sen, 2013) by reducing the loss from transmission.

These systems are modular and can already range from 5kW to over 2MW, with the potential to add additional systems easily and inexpensively to meet future growing demands as needed.

While other “renewable” energy sources currently being adopted, such as solar, wind, hydro-electric, ocean wave kinetics, geothermal, and biomass can potentially provide clean electricity, these sources tend to be highly variable in their availability and power generated, struggle to scale, struggle to "break even" financially, and struggle to have means of storing excesss capacity during off-peak to be available during high-peak demand times. So they also require energy storage or hybrid systems to adjust to daily and seasonal variance in demand.

Modular Hydrogen Fuel Cell Generator & Storage Systems Solving Water & Energy Needs

The hydrogen-fuel-cell systems do not suffer from any of these issues, and so are able to provide continuous power to reliably meet varying demands. For those squeamish about nuclear (fission or fusion) energy, Hydrogen fuel cells create water as their primary byproduct when hydrogen gas H2 combines with oxygen O2 from the air, producing electricity, heat, and pure water.

This particular chain of solutions addresses the following:
• Clean water supply
• Decreasing dependency on foreign petroleum supplies
• Decreased localized pollution from coal-based systems
• Decreased global pollution from petroleum-based systems
• Decreased risks from nuclear-based systems (though these are mostly distorted, especially for modern modular portable "stackable" fail-safe systems growing in popularity globally).
• Decreased impact on river ecological systems by reducing dependency on hydro-electric systems
• Can become highly scalable for different levels of demand and multi-use in a small physical
foot print, unlike large banks of solar or wind systems.
• Consistent energy supply, rather than the regional, daily, and weather-affected water, wind, and solar power systems.

A further addition to the chain for even larger capacity scaling, in countries and locales willing to drop the misinformation of the 1970s anti-nuclear movements (based on 1950s technologies), and adopt the modern safe small portable nuclear systems small modular reactor (SMR) type systems, combined with the energy storage and distribution capabilities of modular hydrogen fuel cell (MHFC) systems, can use the nuclear power's steam generation to create their own hydrogen to close the energy and water loop, through methods like thermochemical cycles, high-temperature electrolysis (splitting water with heat & electricity,) or by supplying heat for steam-methane pyrolysis reforming, using a reactor's heat and power for zero-emission hydrogen. Though some SMR models have some efficiency issues in their early versions, combining SMR + MHFC, combined with sufficient economies of scale, these issues would mostly likely be quickly addressed as well.

References

Allen, Lee, “Seeking Water From the Sun: Documentary Profiles Solar Water-Purification Program on Navajo Nation”, July 8th, (2012)
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/seeking-water-from-the-sun%3A-documentary-profiles-solar-water-purification-program-on-navajo-nation-121675

Atkinson, Nancy, “Extracting Water From the Moon With Basic Home Appliances”, Universe Today, October 6th, 2008
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/10/06/extracting-water-from-the-moon-with-basic-home-appliances/

Christopherson, Robert W., Elemental Ecosystems, 7th Edition (2013)

Czernik, Evans, & French, “Hydrogen from biomass-production by steam reforming of biomass
pyrolysis oil”, Catalysis Today, Volume 129, Issues 3–4, December 15th, (2007), Pages 265–268,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920586107005305

Kloeppel, James E., “Scientists Discover New Way To Make Water”, October 31, (2007)
http://news.illinois.edu/news/07/1031water.html

Singh, Timon, “Purdue University Students Turn Ordinary Saltwater into Hydrogen Power and Drinking Water” May 4th (2011)
http://inhabitat.com/purdue-university-students-turn-ordinary-saltwater-into-hydrogen-power-and-drinking-water/

Vieru, Tudor, “Hydrogen Fuel Cells Used to Make Water”, November 3, 2008
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Hydrogen-Fuel-Cells-Used-To-Make-Water-97008.shtml

Additional Resources

Battery University – The Miniature Fuel Cell - http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/the_miniature_fuel_cell
NREL – National Renewable Energy Laboratory - http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_production_delivery.html
Fuel Cell by Arnab Sen - Viewed March 9th, 2013 - http://www.academia.edu/1619271/Fuel_cell
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor