Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey, they're in Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, John than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? You know? I read an interesting article from the Imperial College in London about how researchers at that college had developed an alternative catalyst for technologies like fuel cells, potentially opening the door to making that tech much more affordable, and I thought it might be good to do a tech stuff tidbits about fuel cells, specifically hydrogen fuel cells, and to talk about that specific development with catalysts as well. So first, what the heck is a fuel cell? Well, in some ways it's very similar to a battery. Batteries and fuel cells both rely upon chemical reactions that create an output of electricity. So with batteries, you've got yourself a closed system, right. All the chemicals are contained within the battery, and what's in the battery stays in the battery unless you get a battery leak, in which case you really need to take care of that because battery acid can be nasty stuff. But yeah, the chemical reactions inside the battery will eventually slow down and ultimately stop as there will not be enough reactive elements remaining in the battery for the reaction to continue in the battery goes dead. Rechargeable batteries can reverse those reactions, and recharging is really just the opposite of discharging, So instead of having electric current flowing out of the battery, you make electric current flow into the battery, and this reverses those chemical reactions, so you end up with the original reactive elements inside the battery. Eventually, even rechargeable batteries go dead because you ever really reverse all of the chemical reactions, some stuff ends up becoming alert, and over time, more and more of those chemicals become inert, until your battery just isn't putting up very much juice and ultimately will be useless. But what about fuel cells, Well, a fuel cell is different from a battery because you refuel a fuel cell, you've got your reactive elements that are inside the fuel cell and the reactions that they go through release electricity. But in the process the fuel is spent, it is converted into something else, and once that happens, you have to add more fuel to the fuel cell and the process can continue. But let's get a little more detailed. So, the type of fuel cells that we frequently talk about when we discuss stuff like fuel cell powered vehicles, for example, are a type called polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells. Now, this is just one of many different kinds of fuel cells. Uh, there are a lot of different ones that are good for specific types of applications. However, we're gonna focus on this because it's the type that the average person might encounter should fuel cell vehicles become more of a thing in the future. And to be clear, they're a thing right now. There are fuel cell vehicles out there, some of you might even drive one, I don't know, but they're not common. So with these fuel cells, you have several components. You've got a polymer electrolyte membrane. That's what gives this type of fuel cell its name. And let's break down what that means. All right, So membrane, I think we pretty much all have a handle on that, right, It's a thin boundary between two things. And an electrolyte is a material that contains ions. Ions are charged atoms, So you're talking about atoms that either have more protons than they have electrons, so they would be positively charged. Because protons carry a positive charge, electrons carry and negative. If you have the same number, then the opposite charges neutralize each other. It's a neutrally charged atom. So an ion has to have either more protons than electrons, or more electrons than it has protons. In that case, you would have a negatively charged ion. UM. A polymer is a long chain molecule. Plastics are a type of polymer um, and there are lots of naturally occurring polymers, including some naturally occurring plastics, though we don't really think of natural plastics when we use the word plastic. Now. I mentioned that the membrane acts as a boundary, Well what is it a boundary for? It acts as a barrier between the two sides of the fuel cell. You can think of it as like a gateway, if you will. So, on one side, which is the cathode side of the fuel cell, you have oxygen. On the other side, the anode side of the fuel cell, you have of hydrogen. Hydrogen happens to be the most plentiful element in our universe. However, it's also highly reactive. It bonds with other elements readily, so readily. In fact, that pretty much we only find hydrogen informs where it has bonded with something else. So when hydrogen bonds with oxygen, we get water H two O, you know, two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, and then things get all splichy splashy. So in a fuel cell, the hydrogen quote unquote wants to bond with the oxygen and form water. But you've got this pesky membrane that acts kind of like a bouncer in a club, and this bouncer doesn't want any neutral glum hydrogen atoms coming in. You know, a hydrogen atom. A standard hydrogen atom consists of a single proton and a single electron. Well, that's positive neck of charge cancels each other out. You've gotta neutrally charged atom. The membranes like, sorry, we only want positive folks in here, so you can't come in. And the bouncer definitely doesn't want any negative nancies coming in, so no negativity. So the only way it will let a hydrogen atom pass through the membrane is if the hydrogen atom chucks it's one electron and becomes a hydrogen ion, also known as a proton. Because again, the hydrogen atom is it consists of a single proton and a single electron. So if a hydrogen atom gets rid of its electron, it is a hydrogen ion. It's also a proton. Now, once it is free of its electron, the hydrogen atom can just waltz right on by the bouncer and pass over to the oxygen side. We we will just call that club oxygen on the other side of the membrane. But here's the thing. Chucking an electron isn't so simple, right, Like, typically we would have to pour energy into the system to start stripping electrons away, because we would excite an electron so that it would move further out from the nucleus of the atom until you could make it go do something. So, the hydrogen atom cannot just shed an electron all by itself. It needs a catalyst. Now, if you remember from your chemistry, a catalyst is something that facilitates a chemical reaction. The catalyst itself isn't getting like, it's not part of the reaction in the sense of it is undergoing a change. It can increase the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any significant or permanent change, and We'll touch on the catalyst issue in a moment, because that's the key of the research I was talking about the beginning of the episode. So the hydrogen, with the help of this catalyst, sheds an electron and becomes a proton, a positively charged particle, and then it can pass through the membrane. Now, electrons have a negative charge, and negatively charged particles repel other negatively charged particles. We know this right, Like charge repels like opposite charges attract, So that means the electrons are attracted to the positively charged particles that are on the other side of the membrane. So the electrons quote unquote want to get through the membrane and rejoin the positively charged hydrogen at ions aka the protons on the other side. But that pesky bouncer won't let the electrons through. It will not let that happen. So the electrons are not on the guest list. They aren't allowed inside. But if you were to provide a pathway like a circuit for the electrons to pass through so that they could ultimately rejoin the positively charged ions that are on the other side, like, they may have to go a much further distance and they might have to do some work. Well, they're still gonna jump at the chance. So this is how you make electrons go and power something. You have electricity right the flow of electrons, and then ultimately they can make their way over to club oxygen. They're just going through like a side door as opposed to the front door. And this is how fuel cells supply electricity, although we you know, don't actually use the analogy of a bouncer in a club. So the electrons that have been shed by hydrogen will flow into a circuit and ultimately join up with the oxygen atoms and the hydrogen ions all over in club oxygen. Once the electrons get there, well then they can zip on over to those hydrogen ions, and you have hydrogen atoms mixing with oxygen atoms, so you get water molecules. This means that in one of these fuel cells, your fuel consists of hydrogen and oxygen, your output is electricity, and your waste is water vapor. And that's one of the big reasons fuel cells come up in discussions of green energy because they do not produce carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide emissions, at least not if you're using pure hydrogen as fuel. More on that in a bit, so they just produce electricity and water. Like a car that's powered by a fuel cell that's using pure oxygen and pure hydrogen wouldn't give off any emissions other than water vapor. All right, When we come back, I'll get into a little more detail about some of the challenges of fuel cells and explain why they aren't everywhere right now. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, so fuel cells work. There are fuel cell vehicles out there today, though there are not a lot of them. So why aren't fuel cells more popular? If all you need is the most common element that's in the universe on one side, and oxygen in the other, and if you can just essentially scoop up oxygen from our atmosphere, why aren't we all using fuel cell vehicles. There are a few big reasons, and one is that fuel cells have an ideal operating temperature. Your average polymer electro light membrane fuel cell best operates it around eighty degrees celsius or a hundred seventy six degrees fahrenheit, which is pretty toasty, and it means that in really cold regions it could take a while to warm up the fuel cell to a temperature that's high enough to generate enough electricity to do whatever it is you want to do. You might be familiar like batteries don't operate as quickly in very cold temperatures, meaning you get less electricity out of a battery. You get, uh, electricity that may not be enough for you to do whatever it is you need to do. If you've ever picked up a flashlight that was sitting in a freezing room and turn it on, you I be like wow that the light is really weak from this, and then over time, as the flash light warms up, the light gets stronger. The same sort of thing can happen with fuel cells. Like you, you could have a slower chemical reaction at lower temperatures, and if it's slow enough, it might not be enough to do what you need it to do, like power and electric motor for example. Now, for another reason why fuel cells aren't everywhere, Uh, they deteriorate over time, so you do have to replace them occasionally. And then we get to what's a really big drawback. They are expensive, and they are expensive because of the catalyst. See the typical catalyst used in these types of fuel cells is made of platinum. That's a very rare, very expensive metal. And even though you only need a relatively small amount of platinum per fuel cell, that requirement really drives up the price significantly. In fact, according to the researchers that Imperial College London, about six of a fuel cells cost comes from the platinum that's used for the catalyst. That's why the work done by those researchers could be transformative. The researchers were able to create a catalyst using iron instead of platinum. Now, iron isn't scarce at all. The Earth is lousy with the stuff. Iron is plentiful, and if we could use iron as a catalyst material instead of platinum, that would bring the price of fuel cells way down. And let's talk a little bit about what those researchers did. They took iron atoms and they embedded singular iron atoms within a matrix of carbon, so they had, you know, multiple iron atoms in the matrix total, but they would in each atom was kind of its own little individual part in that section of the matrix. This is where we can talk about something that's really interesting and it's also a little counterintuitive because we're familiar with the way how iron works on moss. Meaning if you've got a whole bunch of iron atoms together forming say a chunk of iron, we know how iron will behave, right. It's on this classic system. However, when you get down to an individual iron atom, you're now diving down to the nanoscale. Actually you're diving down to the atomic scale, which is even smaller than the nano scale. Once you start hitting the nanoscale, stuff starts to behave in an entirely different way than the way we are used to it on the macro scale, and it can in fact be really bizarre um on the nano scale, even though you're talking about unimaginable tiny particles, those particles have way more surface area per unit of mass than what you would find at the macro level, and that means that more of the material can come into contact with other stuff by unit of mass, and the materials behaviors can change. One of those behaviors is that material reels can become better catalysts at the nano scale or the atomic scale. The researchers said that they're iron catalyst, and a carbon matrix was able to perform as a good substitute for platinum, and that it has performance that is quote unquote approaching platinum. So it sounds as if the iron catalysts perhaps isn't quite as effective as platinum, but the tradeoff in price could more than make up for the decline in performance. But performance is just one part of the issue. Another one is durability. That's something that the researchers are working on now, trying to make the iron solution as durable as platinum catalysts. Otherwise you would have to replace the catalyst more frequently, which would eat into the cost savings of iron. Right if you have to replace it more frequently than you would with a platinum catalyst, then the benefits start to that that get that that span of benefits begins to narrow, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Plus, it becomes a hassle if you have to frequently get your fuel cells serviced or replaced. Now, if the team can make the iron catalysts stability match that of platinum, the breakthrough could lead to a revolution and fuel cell technology. However, there is still one more thing we have to talk about, and that's hydrogen itself. So, as I mentioned, it's the most plentiful stuff in the universe, but it also tends to bond with other elements really easily, and that's the tricky bit. To get at hydrogen, we typically have to exert energy to do it. We can't just go and collect hydrogen pure hydrogen on its own. It's almost always bonded to something else, So we have to find a way to break those chemical bonds that hold hydrogen to whatever it happens to be bonded with. Well, when you start to look at fuel cells from an energy ecosystem point of view, you have to start asking tough questions like do you have to spend more energy to get the hydrogen then you are getting out of using it in a fuel cell? And how are you getting at the hydrogen? Is it as efficient as it can be? Is it environmentally friendly because some of the ways we get hydrogen is definitely not environmentally friendly. In fact, the primary way we get hydrogen is we collected as a byproduct from natural gas processing and and natural gas is a fossil fuel. So if we assume that that's how we're gonna keep getting hydrogen, it means we're presuming that we're going to continue to depend on fossil fuels, and that is an issue, right. It means that we're still doing something that itself is environmentally harmful. We can use hydrogen without breaking those bonds in some forms of hydrocarbon gases, but that would mean that we would actually have emissions beyond just water vapor. It might include carbon monoxide for example. So you know, you could have fuel cells that use hydrogen that's in a mixture of something else, like a hydrocarbon gas, but you have down downsides to that as well. There are other ways we can get hydrogen that don't involve fossil fuels. One way is just to do what fuel cells do, but in reverse. So remember with fuel cells, we take hydrogen and oxygen and using that membrane and a catalyst, we get electricity and water vapor as byproducts of the chemical reaction. But then if you were to take water and pass an electrical current through the water, you would break the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen and you would get O two and H two gases. But again that means you have to expend energy in order to release the hydrogen and oxygen. If you're expending the same amount of energy as you would be getting out of the fuel cells. You're not really seeing a benefit here, really, you're just shifting where the load is. One way to approach this is by using renewable energy sources to create the electrical current you need to break those molecular bonds in a process is called electrolysis. Anyway, harvesting hydrogen presents its own big challenges. Yes, the use of hydrogen and fuel cells is clean energy, but getting at the hydrogen might not be so clean. There's always a catch still. With the possibility of fuel cells becoming more economically feasible, that could encourage more r and d into how we can collect hydrogen in a more environmentally conscious way. And who knows, maybe we'll get that hydrogen economy that folks were talking about nearly twenty years ago. And that's it. Protect Stuff Tidbits. Hope you enjoyed this. I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey, they're in Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host, John than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? You know? I read an interesting article from the Imperial College in London about how researchers at that college had developed an alternative catalyst for technologies like fuel cells, potentially opening the door to making that tech much more affordable, and I thought it might be good to do a tech stuff tidbits about fuel cells, specifically hydrogen fuel cells, and to talk about that specific development with catalysts as well. So first, what the heck is a fuel cell? Well, in some ways it's very similar to a battery. Batteries and fuel cells both rely upon chemical reactions that create an output of electricity. So with batteries, you've got yourself a closed system, right. All the chemicals are contained within the battery, and what's in the battery stays in the battery unless you get a battery leak, in which case you really need to take care of that because battery acid can be nasty stuff. But yeah, the chemical reactions inside the battery will eventually slow down and ultimately stop as there will not be enough reactive elements remaining in the battery for the reaction to continue in the battery goes dead. Rechargeable batteries can reverse those reactions, and recharging is really just the opposite of discharging, So instead of having electric current flowing out of the battery, you make electric current flow into the battery, and this reverses those chemical reactions, so you end up with the original reactive elements inside the battery. Eventually, even rechargeable batteries go dead because you ever really reverse all of the chemical reactions, some stuff ends up becoming alert, and over time, more and more of those chemicals become inert, until your battery just isn't putting up very much juice and ultimately will be useless. But what about fuel cells, Well, a fuel cell is different from a battery because you refuel a fuel cell, you've got your reactive elements that are inside the fuel cell and the reactions that they go through release electricity. But in the process the fuel is spent, it is converted into something else, and once that happens, you have to add more fuel to the fuel cell and the process can continue. But let's get a little more detailed. So, the type of fuel cells that we frequently talk about when we discuss stuff like fuel cell powered vehicles, for example, are a type called polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells. Now, this is just one of many different kinds of fuel cells. Uh, there are a lot of different ones that are good for specific types of applications. However, we're gonna focus on this because it's the type that the average person might encounter should fuel cell vehicles become more of a thing in the future. And to be clear, they're a thing right now. There are fuel cell vehicles out there, some of you might even drive one, I don't know, but they're not common. So with these fuel cells, you have several components. You've got a polymer electrolyte membrane. That's what gives this type of fuel cell its name. And let's break down what that means. All right, So membrane, I think we pretty much all have a handle on that, right, It's a thin boundary between two things. And an electrolyte is a material that contains ions. Ions are charged atoms, So you're talking about atoms that either have more protons than they have electrons, so they would be positively charged. Because protons carry a positive charge, electrons carry and negative. If you have the same number, then the opposite charges neutralize each other. It's a neutrally charged atom. So an ion has to have either more protons than electrons, or more electrons than it has protons. In that case, you would have a negatively charged ion. UM. A polymer is a long chain molecule. Plastics are a type of polymer um, and there are lots of naturally occurring polymers, including some naturally occurring plastics, though we don't really think of natural plastics when we use the word plastic. Now. I mentioned that the membrane acts as a boundary, Well what is it a boundary for? It acts as a barrier between the two sides of the fuel cell. You can think of it as like a gateway, if you will. So, on one side, which is the cathode side of the fuel cell, you have oxygen. On the other side, the anode side of the fuel cell, you have of hydrogen. Hydrogen happens to be the most plentiful element in our universe. However, it's also highly reactive. It bonds with other elements readily, so readily. In fact, that pretty much we only find hydrogen informs where it has bonded with something else. So when hydrogen bonds with oxygen, we get water H two O, you know, two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, and then things get all splichy splashy. So in a fuel cell, the hydrogen quote unquote wants to bond with the oxygen and form water. But you've got this pesky membrane that acts kind of like a bouncer in a club, and this bouncer doesn't want any neutral glum hydrogen atoms coming in. You know, a hydrogen atom. A standard hydrogen atom consists of a single proton and a single electron. Well, that's positive neck of charge cancels each other out. You've gotta neutrally charged atom. The membranes like, sorry, we only want positive folks in here, so you can't come in. And the bouncer definitely doesn't want any negative nancies coming in, so no negativity. So the only way it will let a hydrogen atom pass through the membrane is if the hydrogen atom chucks it's one electron and becomes a hydrogen ion, also known as a proton. Because again, the hydrogen atom is it consists of a single proton and a single electron. So if a hydrogen atom gets rid of its electron, it is a hydrogen ion. It's also a proton. Now, once it is free of its electron, the hydrogen atom can just waltz right on by the bouncer and pass over to the oxygen side. We we will just call that club oxygen on the other side of the membrane. But here's the thing. Chucking an electron isn't so simple, right, Like, typically we would have to pour energy into the system to start stripping electrons away, because we would excite an electron so that it would move further out from the nucleus of the atom until you could make it go do something. So, the hydrogen atom cannot just shed an electron all by itself. It needs a catalyst. Now, if you remember from your chemistry, a catalyst is something that facilitates a chemical reaction. The catalyst itself isn't getting like, it's not part of the reaction in the sense of it is undergoing a change. It can increase the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any significant or permanent change, and We'll touch on the catalyst issue in a moment, because that's the key of the research I was talking about the beginning of the episode. So the hydrogen, with the help of this catalyst, sheds an electron and becomes a proton, a positively charged particle, and then it can pass through the membrane. Now, electrons have a negative charge, and negatively charged particles repel other negatively charged particles. We know this right, Like charge repels like opposite charges attract, So that means the electrons are attracted to the positively charged particles that are on the other side of the membrane. So the electrons quote unquote want to get through the membrane and rejoin the positively charged hydrogen at ions aka the protons on the other side. But that pesky bouncer won't let the electrons through. It will not let that happen. So the electrons are not on the guest list. They aren't allowed inside. But if you were to provide a pathway like a circuit for the electrons to pass through so that they could ultimately rejoin the positively charged ions that are on the other side, like, they may have to go a much further distance and they might have to do some work. Well, they're still gonna jump at the chance. So this is how you make electrons go and power something. You have electricity right the flow of electrons, and then ultimately they can make their way over to club oxygen. They're just going through like a side door as opposed to the front door. And this is how fuel cells supply electricity, although we you know, don't actually use the analogy of a bouncer in a club. So the electrons that have been shed by hydrogen will flow into a circuit and ultimately join up with the oxygen atoms and the hydrogen ions all over in club oxygen. Once the electrons get there, well then they can zip on over to those hydrogen ions, and you have hydrogen atoms mixing with oxygen atoms, so you get water molecules. This means that in one of these fuel cells, your fuel consists of hydrogen and oxygen, your output is electricity, and your waste is water vapor. And that's one of the big reasons fuel cells come up in discussions of green energy because they do not produce carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide emissions, at least not if you're using pure hydrogen as fuel. More on that in a bit, so they just produce electricity and water. Like a car that's powered by a fuel cell that's using pure oxygen and pure hydrogen wouldn't give off any emissions other than water vapor. All right, When we come back, I'll get into a little more detail about some of the challenges of fuel cells and explain why they aren't everywhere right now. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, so fuel cells work. There are fuel cell vehicles out there today, though there are not a lot of them. So why aren't fuel cells more popular? If all you need is the most common element that's in the universe on one side, and oxygen in the other, and if you can just essentially scoop up oxygen from our atmosphere, why aren't we all using fuel cell vehicles. There are a few big reasons, and one is that fuel cells have an ideal operating temperature. Your average polymer electro light membrane fuel cell best operates it around eighty degrees celsius or a hundred seventy six degrees fahrenheit, which is pretty toasty, and it means that in really cold regions it could take a while to warm up the fuel cell to a temperature that's high enough to generate enough electricity to do whatever it is you want to do. You might be familiar like batteries don't operate as quickly in very cold temperatures, meaning you get less electricity out of a battery. You get, uh, electricity that may not be enough for you to do whatever it is you need to do. If you've ever picked up a flashlight that was sitting in a freezing room and turn it on, you I be like wow that the light is really weak from this, and then over time, as the flash light warms up, the light gets stronger. The same sort of thing can happen with fuel cells. Like you, you could have a slower chemical reaction at lower temperatures, and if it's slow enough, it might not be enough to do what you need it to do, like power and electric motor for example. Now, for another reason why fuel cells aren't everywhere, Uh, they deteriorate over time, so you do have to replace them occasionally. And then we get to what's a really big drawback. They are expensive, and they are expensive because of the catalyst. See the typical catalyst used in these types of fuel cells is made of platinum. That's a very rare, very expensive metal. And even though you only need a relatively small amount of platinum per fuel cell, that requirement really drives up the price significantly. In fact, according to the researchers that Imperial College London, about six of a fuel cells cost comes from the platinum that's used for the catalyst. That's why the work done by those researchers could be transformative. The researchers were able to create a catalyst using iron instead of platinum. Now, iron isn't scarce at all. The Earth is lousy with the stuff. Iron is plentiful, and if we could use iron as a catalyst material instead of platinum, that would bring the price of fuel cells way down. And let's talk a little bit about what those researchers did. They took iron atoms and they embedded singular iron atoms within a matrix of carbon, so they had, you know, multiple iron atoms in the matrix total, but they would in each atom was kind of its own little individual part in that section of the matrix. This is where we can talk about something that's really interesting and it's also a little counterintuitive because we're familiar with the way how iron works on moss. Meaning if you've got a whole bunch of iron atoms together forming say a chunk of iron, we know how iron will behave, right. It's on this classic system. However, when you get down to an individual iron atom, you're now diving down to the nanoscale. Actually you're diving down to the atomic scale, which is even smaller than the nano scale. Once you start hitting the nanoscale, stuff starts to behave in an entirely different way than the way we are used to it on the macro scale, and it can in fact be really bizarre um on the nano scale, even though you're talking about unimaginable tiny particles, those particles have way more surface area per unit of mass than what you would find at the macro level, and that means that more of the material can come into contact with other stuff by unit of mass, and the materials behaviors can change. One of those behaviors is that material reels can become better catalysts at the nano scale or the atomic scale. The researchers said that they're iron catalyst, and a carbon matrix was able to perform as a good substitute for platinum, and that it has performance that is quote unquote approaching platinum. So it sounds as if the iron catalysts perhaps isn't quite as effective as platinum, but the tradeoff in price could more than make up for the decline in performance. But performance is just one part of the issue. Another one is durability. That's something that the researchers are working on now, trying to make the iron solution as durable as platinum catalysts. Otherwise you would have to replace the catalyst more frequently, which would eat into the cost savings of iron. Right if you have to replace it more frequently than you would with a platinum catalyst, then the benefits start to that that get that that span of benefits begins to narrow, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Plus, it becomes a hassle if you have to frequently get your fuel cells serviced or replaced. Now, if the team can make the iron catalysts stability match that of platinum, the breakthrough could lead to a revolution and fuel cell technology. However, there is still one more thing we have to talk about, and that's hydrogen itself. So, as I mentioned, it's the most plentiful stuff in the universe, but it also tends to bond with other elements really easily, and that's the tricky bit. To get at hydrogen, we typically have to exert energy to do it. We can't just go and collect hydrogen pure hydrogen on its own. It's almost always bonded to something else, So we have to find a way to break those chemical bonds that hold hydrogen to whatever it happens to be bonded with. Well, when you start to look at fuel cells from an energy ecosystem point of view, you have to start asking tough questions like do you have to spend more energy to get the hydrogen then you are getting out of using it in a fuel cell? And how are you getting at the hydrogen? Is it as efficient as it can be? Is it environmentally friendly because some of the ways we get hydrogen is definitely not environmentally friendly. In fact, the primary way we get hydrogen is we collected as a byproduct from natural gas processing and and natural gas is a fossil fuel. So if we assume that that's how we're gonna keep getting hydrogen, it means we're presuming that we're going to continue to depend on fossil fuels, and that is an issue, right. It means that we're still doing something that itself is environmentally harmful. We can use hydrogen without breaking those bonds in some forms of hydrocarbon gases, but that would mean that we would actually have emissions beyond just water vapor. It might include carbon monoxide for example. So you know, you could have fuel cells that use hydrogen that's in a mixture of something else, like a hydrocarbon gas, but you have down downsides to that as well. There are other ways we can get hydrogen that don't involve fossil fuels. One way is just to do what fuel cells do, but in reverse. So remember with fuel cells, we take hydrogen and oxygen and using that membrane and a catalyst, we get electricity and water vapor as byproducts of the chemical reaction. But then if you were to take water and pass an electrical current through the water, you would break the molecular bonds between hydrogen and oxygen and you would get O two and H two gases. But again that means you have to expend energy in order to release the hydrogen and oxygen. If you're expending the same amount of energy as you would be getting out of the fuel cells. You're not really seeing a benefit here, really, you're just shifting where the load is. One way to approach this is by using renewable energy sources to create the electrical current you need to break those molecular bonds in a process is called electrolysis. Anyway, harvesting hydrogen presents its own big challenges. Yes, the use of hydrogen and fuel cells is clean energy, but getting at the hydrogen might not be so clean. There's always a catch still. With the possibility of fuel cells becoming more economically feasible, that could encourage more r and d into how we can collect hydrogen in a more environmentally conscious way. And who knows, maybe we'll get that hydrogen economy that folks were talking about nearly twenty years ago. And that's it. Protect Stuff Tidbits. Hope you enjoyed this. I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Two