Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you could use convention ICEs and get comparable overall efficiencies. For them transport and delivery is a solved problem.
Hydrogen fuel cells are clean where you use them. But so are batteries. Inner cities could be kept cleaner using either. Inner city traffic is mostly short range, so batteries are at an advantage.
Batteries have a rare earth problem. But so do Hydrogen fuel cells. There is work to reduce it for both technologies.
Hydrogen fuel cells have a problem with varying loads. You would use additional batteries in cars to supply peak demand when accelerating or store braking energy. For comparable weight, range, and price you could replace all hydrogen technology with more batteries. Those bigger batteries would also wear out slower because the power demand per cell is lower.
So, when would hydrogen make sense? I think only if you don't care for efficiency. When you have so much electrical power that it costs you nothing and is available at least a few hours every night. Hydrogen would do well in a combination with large scale nuclear fission/fusion. It could take decades until we get there if we ever go that route.
I see that, as batteries become less and less expensive, the niche where Hydrogen could have good advantage is getting smaller and smaller. However you twist and turn it, either oil&gas or batteries have the advantage.
Many of the things you're saying aren't correct, see my other comment (sibling to yours) for references.
Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. Since the former two are bursty, overcapacity in them leads to cheap excess energy at times, which needs to be stored.
Which storage method is the best depends on multiple factors, particularly on the duration of storage, capacity required and frequency of charging/discharging.
Batteries are great for relatively short term storage, but for long term, seasonal storage, hydrogen and pumped hydro are the options we have. Pumped hydro capacity is limited, and the cost of hydrogen production and storage is coming down. So that's where hydrogen makes sense: Long term, high capacity storage.
Hydrogen makes sense in industrial applications (steel, chemistry, e.g. ammonia production). Electricity often isn’t even an option there (same with aviation).
I think people tend to be too blinded in their focus on cars here? I don’t think hydrogen cars make much sense. Batteries all the way – but that doesn’t mean that hydrogen is without merit for other applications.
And if you want to replace all greenhouse gases in industrial applications with green hydrogen you still need a shitton of hydrogen (since, yeah, it’s inefficient – but if it’s the most efficient greenhouse-neutral way to get there – what choice is there?), so that’s not something you can just improvise. You need to tackle it head-on.
That’s why I fear people being stubbornly focused on cars. Even if not a single car will ever use hydrogen ever we could still need a lot of green hydrogen for other purposes if we want to be greenhouse-neutra.
And batteries have a scaling problem - hydrogen complements them nicely for long term storage. When energy is free, make hydrogen and store it in a tank (or in a salt cavern, as the article describes).
There are other ways of generating electricity apart from electrolysis. For example, from food waste through yeast and other methods. Yes, there is some energy being used but you are talking about material which would go waste anyway:
First: Energy density
The primary advantage of hydrogen is energy density. Though Li Ion and other technologies have improved considerably, they are no where near the energy density of fossil fuel technologies and therefore vehicles which use these batteries will have to carry huge weight of batteries to get better range. With Hydrogen that is not a problem.
All production issues aside, aviation makes sense to me. Planes are only filling at known stops, the weight is superior to our best batteries, and the transition from fossil fuel to hydrogen jets should be easy.
As for as long haul trucks, I can kinda see it, maybe, still a lot of storage, production, efficiency issues. Weight isn’t nearly the same concern as it is for aviation.
>You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss.
When wouldn't it be at a loss? That's just physics. Hydrogen fuel cells aren't a source of energy in and of themselves, they're just a storage medium, like any other battery. And the act of filling them will never by 100% efficient because nothing is, so there will always be loss.
Electricity has a transmission problem though - there are some parts of the world with lots of clean energy, which we can't fully take advantage of because we can't transport electricity that far. Hydrogen allows us to use that clean energy to power cars in other parts of the world, since you can produce hydrogen in those places and then ship it to places without much clean energy. Also you can presumably stop and start hydrogen production as electricity demand changes (ex. Only produce it on sunny windy days where there is excess electricity) allowing you to shift the demand curve more easily than with electric cars.
The problem you're missing is cost of production: A hydrogen car fundamentally should cost no more than gasoline powered car, and will have a similar range. With batteries, you'll always be limited in range to some extend, and cost reductions have failed to reduce them to anything like a Toyota Corolla type of car.
Batteries don't have a rare earth metal problem, they have a normal metal problem. You need a lot of raw materials to make them, and it's plausible that this will never scale to point where everything can run on batteries.
I think they also make sense in cases where battery charge time is prohibitive or where you have a very long and constant load without the option for recharging. City buses, firetrucks, container ships and tankers come to mind. Though hopefully we won't need the latter much longer...
I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic.
Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1].
The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down exponentially [2]. A combination of Li-Ion battery (short-term), pumped hydro (medium-term) and hydrogen (long-term, i.e. seasonal) storage is probably how to smooth out the burstiness of renewable energy production eventually [3].
When green hydrogen infrastructure is commonplace, the hydrogen can also be used to make synthetic jet fuel and feedstocks for the chemical industry.
I used to drive a hydrogen car once in a while a few years ago. It was nice to fill the car in a few minutes and get about 300km of range, but that was it.
With the hydrogen you have so few refueling stations, they are very expensive, that range anxiety is a thing. To not improve things, reliability is very poor. My work had a hydrogen refueling station on its parking. It was often broken and actually a bit scary to walk past it. They eventually removed it, which was a good call. Another hydrogen station sharing the same design exploded a few months later. The hydrogen car sales dropped from not much to virtually zero since in the country.
So to resume, hydrogen cars are expensive, refueling stations are expensive, the energy is expensive.
Electric cars with large batteries are a much better solution to hydrogen cars IMHO. You can charge everywhere, the eletric grid is very will developped, the energy is cheap. The cars are also much more powerful thanks to the large batteries pack, it's useless but it feels nice.
The issue of charging was also there with BEVs, until Tesla straight up built a huge network of superchargers. The players in hydrogen say they will do the same. But for personal vehicles, hydrogen won't math out, it's greatest advantage is its energy density for trucks.
It's for long range trucks that we will see hydrogen first. Green hydrogen will act as energy storage, big renewables grids can dump excess into green hydrogen and thus avoid curtailment. Then, you replace heavy duty trucks, which need to be able to not have heavy batteries, with fuel cell trucks, and you build out 1000 large hydrogen stations across the transit network.
Hydrogen may never be competitive with batteries for intermittently used passenger cars, but not all vehicles are intermittently used passenger cars. There is a lot of evidence that hydrogen can be competitive and potentially superior for vehicles which are used all day long, like taxis, delivery vehicles, etc.. And for continuous high power applications like maritime and aviation, batteries are so far from a realistic possibility that at best they are research projects. Batteries might work for ultra low range applications of trucking, like LTL and local delivery, but a lot of useful hauling capacity is given up by hauling batteries around.
And you always have full (trip) range every morning with an EV. Yes, filling up in 5 minutes is better than 20. Never needing to fill up is even better.
Maybe the way forward for the hydrogen power is to tackle the power storage in the grid first. Yes, I know that it is not very efficient, but few solutions there are efficient and we need some solution if we are going to increase reliance on solar and wind. Maybe while hydrogen energy storage will take its place in the grid, the technologies will get developed further, up to theoretically a point where a hydrogen-based car will make more sense realistically. (For example availability of hydrogen itself, the price and the number of stations around will be more allowing of it.)
I feel like the draw of hydrogen as a fuel source is that it doesn't disturb the current power structure which is based on control of oil and gas supplies. Countries have to constantly import oil and gas to power their transport networks. That requires those countries to pay in dollars (usually). Control that and you have them by the nose.
Electrification completely upends that. A country that is self sufficient in energy can tell other countries to take a hike.
> Electric cars with large batteries are a much better solution to hydrogen cars IMHO.
Electric cars are still very dangerous when they catch fire though. And the fires are very difficult to control. Especially in multistorey (or underground) car parks. And even more so if there are multiple EVs parked next to eachother.
When you consider the energy required to produce lithium ion batteries they are actually worse than fuel cells from an emissions perspective:
“As an example, a 100kWh battery will give a potential range of 250 miles and, in order to produce that battery, it will take around 20 tonnes of CO2,” he said. “A typical battery lasts for 150,000 miles, so that equates to around 83g/km of CO2. Then, when you take into account charging over that same distance, the same battery car will deliver 124g/km of CO2 over its lifetime.”
By comparison, Auto Express says that a recent study found that a Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car produces around 120g/km of CO2 over its lifetime when the manufacturing process is taken into account. But if hydrogen were to be produced by renewable energy, that figure could be reduced significantly.”
This article looks like a fine discussion about the economics of hydrogen production, but unless I've missed something it skips over the immense storage difficulty.
Hydrogen is a difficult thing to manage in quantity. Its density is fantastically low, so storing it in gas form requires absurd pressures -- an inherent risk to any vehicle. Storing it in liquid form goes a long way towards solving the density/pressure problem, but now the system must have a full cryogenic process to keep the hydrogen liquified. (Worse yet: over time hydrogen embrittles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement) metals, making storage even more complicated)
This isn't much different than the problems faced by rockets, and it's why liquid hydrogen is not considered a 'storable propellant' for long-duration flight.
In a zero-net-carbon economy, residual demand for high power density may still have to be filled by some kind of bio-derived or synthetic hydrocarbon.
We don't need to rely on metals for hydrogen storage...composites work just fine. And for use cases like maritime and aviation power systems, cryogenic storage isn't necessary. At all. Because even with simple styrofoam insulation, consumption rates vastly exceed evaporation rates.
1. The only hydrogen produced from electricity is ecological. Carbon capture doesn’t work today.
2. The hydrogen from electricity is expensive, though as wind and solar get exponential cheaper, we will end up with spikes excess cheap electricity (negative prices today or disconnecting plants). It makes sense to produce hydrogen during those spikes.
3. Cars on hydrogen don’t make sense at all. The massive cost of infrastructure plus batteries are superior and getting better on that front.
4. Hydrogen from electricity can replace the first reformation from natural gas.
5. Next promising use cases are industrial heating, such as steel production (instead of coal).
6. Least profitable, but still plausible, uses hydrogen as long-term energy storage and mixing it with natural gas.
7. I wonder whether generating hydrogen from seawater and getting back freshwater would improve the economics of this form of energy storage.
> It makes sense to produce hydrogen during those spikes.
I'm not sure that it necessarily does. If you're only producing during those peak periods of electrical output then your you're going to have a lot of hydrogen producing equipment sitting idle at other times.
I wish I'd stop hearing about Hydrogen as a fuel source. It's not. It's just a battery, and should simply be compared to other types of batteries, like Li-Ion. Maybe Hydrogen fuel cells are better batteries, maybe not.
But it's still just a battery, and needs to be charged from the electric power grid (by using the electricity to separate hydrogen from water), just like any other battery would.
The defining difference between fuel-cells and batteries is that fuel-cells don’t need to be “recharged” as in running an electrochemical reaction in reverse, they just need you to change the fuel.
Lots of comments on this thread that reveal folks are up to date with the state of hydrogen infrastructure c. 2017. It's changing really fast as billions of dollars are poured into R&D and pilot projects. For example, storage and transport:
EV owner here. Why would I want to drive to a fueling station when I can fuel up at home with electricity? And from a maintenance level, ev’s have substantially fewer parts and almost zero maintenance, whereas hydrogen perpetuates the ICE-engine paradigm... frequent oil changes, many moving parts, lots of service costs at the dealership. The economics of H2 may be different at the commercial scale, but we use a Chevy Bolt in a far northern climate and get nearly 200 miles of range in the winter. The future is already here, and H2 missed the consumer vehicle bandwagon.
I think article missed a really large sector which uses coal and produces millions of tons of co2 each year, That is cement industry. Heating clinker to produce cement is energy intensive long process, where big investments towards technology for using Hydrogen can be fruitful.
Following Musk's thinking... i'd really like to see that energy density volume vs mass chart adjusted for average vehicle weight. i.e see the total system, engine, storage components and fuel converter etc.
On that graph, compared to petrol, liquid hydrogen appears to be about 4x larger by volume but interestingly only 2/5ths of the weight.
The electric motors are lighter sure, but then what about the mass and volume of the compressed storage tank and the fuel cell itself? difficult to know if it starts to gain on IC engine again. lots of questions that make that graph feel pretty meaningless.
Hydrogen, to put it simply is a battery, not a fuel, and a relatively poor battery at that. For all the money dumped into it and the amount of research that has been done BEV is now generally considered the way forward. It also doesn't suffer from the problem that Hydrogen tends to go FOOF when you least expect it, and there isn't the pesky problem of Hydrogen embrittlement to deal with.
Hydrogen is sexy but alcohol matches our existing context better.
Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture farms is different from mass ethanol production.
You can ferment anything that has starch or sugar, the leftovers from the distillation can be composted or fed to livestock. Most existing internal combustion engines can be modified to use alcohol fuel. And it's carbon-neutral.
The article didn't touch on this at all, so has anyone heard updates on attempts at doing in-vehicle hydrogen production from water and some sort of reactant? It's been years since I saw something on it, but if I recall, it used some pellets made of certain metals that react with the water to produce hydrogen. You'd fill the tank with water, and after some number of fill ups you'd also need to replenish the pellets which could be sent off for recycling.
Hydrogen production is almost entirely produced from fossil fuels currently. Its not really a low carbon energy source unless electrolysis can be made much more efficient.
Its a shame this article didn't examine the production side of hydrogen.
I don't think most people consider it an energy source, more so a battery or storage medium. And cheaper storage is an important part of the renewables story because local supply can be unpredictable.
A recent report [1] looked at the efficiencies of generating hydrogen at a waste water treatment plant to lower production costs. The WWTP provides the water and uses the oxygen that is also produced by electrolysis to increase the efficiency of the biological treatment process vs air. Some of the electricity for the electrolysis can also be sourced from biogas produced by the WWTP.
If you want an hydrogen-powered car, buy a Toyota Mirai. They've been on sale in California since 2016. There are a few hydrogen stations where you can fill it. 5 minute refuel, about 300 mile range. (400 miles in the 2021 model.) The first three years of hydrogen are included with the vehicle purchase. Vehicle price about US$60K. (Expected to be higher for the 2021 model.)
Something practical not mentioned here is that the proton exchange membrane in fuel cells generally degrade in a few years and need to be replaced. This is a major expense. Degradation is accelerated if the hydrogen (fuel) or oxygen (from environment) are not pure.
I think the charts are saying roughly a litre of lithium battery has 1kwh, a litre of liquid hydrogen 3kw and a litre of petrol 10kw. By 2050 your litre of green hydrogen might cost 10 cents to make or 3c per kWh.
[+] [-] threatripper|5 years ago|reply
Hydrogen fuel cells are clean where you use them. But so are batteries. Inner cities could be kept cleaner using either. Inner city traffic is mostly short range, so batteries are at an advantage.
Batteries have a rare earth problem. But so do Hydrogen fuel cells. There is work to reduce it for both technologies.
Hydrogen fuel cells have a problem with varying loads. You would use additional batteries in cars to supply peak demand when accelerating or store braking energy. For comparable weight, range, and price you could replace all hydrogen technology with more batteries. Those bigger batteries would also wear out slower because the power demand per cell is lower.
So, when would hydrogen make sense? I think only if you don't care for efficiency. When you have so much electrical power that it costs you nothing and is available at least a few hours every night. Hydrogen would do well in a combination with large scale nuclear fission/fusion. It could take decades until we get there if we ever go that route.
I see that, as batteries become less and less expensive, the niche where Hydrogen could have good advantage is getting smaller and smaller. However you twist and turn it, either oil&gas or batteries have the advantage.
[+] [-] atombender|5 years ago|reply
https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/hydrogen-vs-electric--volksw...
This image (don't know the source), which includes oil and coal, is also a good visualization:
https://i.imgur.com/Wuhnlvu.png
Even simpler:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DPkaz0nX4AAcr_v.jpg
[+] [-] svara|5 years ago|reply
Nuclear is not cheap compared to photovoltaics, wind and hydro. Since the former two are bursty, overcapacity in them leads to cheap excess energy at times, which needs to be stored.
Which storage method is the best depends on multiple factors, particularly on the duration of storage, capacity required and frequency of charging/discharging.
Batteries are great for relatively short term storage, but for long term, seasonal storage, hydrogen and pumped hydro are the options we have. Pumped hydro capacity is limited, and the cost of hydrogen production and storage is coming down. So that's where hydrogen makes sense: Long term, high capacity storage.
[+] [-] arrrg|5 years ago|reply
I think people tend to be too blinded in their focus on cars here? I don’t think hydrogen cars make much sense. Batteries all the way – but that doesn’t mean that hydrogen is without merit for other applications.
And if you want to replace all greenhouse gases in industrial applications with green hydrogen you still need a shitton of hydrogen (since, yeah, it’s inefficient – but if it’s the most efficient greenhouse-neutral way to get there – what choice is there?), so that’s not something you can just improvise. You need to tackle it head-on.
That’s why I fear people being stubbornly focused on cars. Even if not a single car will ever use hydrogen ever we could still need a lot of green hydrogen for other purposes if we want to be greenhouse-neutra.
[+] [-] unchocked|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkphilip|5 years ago|reply
https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/a-simplified-way-to-turn-foo...
First: Energy density The primary advantage of hydrogen is energy density. Though Li Ion and other technologies have improved considerably, they are no where near the energy density of fossil fuel technologies and therefore vehicles which use these batteries will have to carry huge weight of batteries to get better range. With Hydrogen that is not a problem.
Second: Storage There has been huge advances in the safe storage of hydrogen - from the use of nanoporous carbon for storage https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100200711...
to the use of LOHCs (Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers) that is aromatic liquids to store hydrogen instead of storing it as gas or liquid hydrogen: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrogen-storage-get...
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|5 years ago|reply
All production issues aside, aviation makes sense to me. Planes are only filling at known stops, the weight is superior to our best batteries, and the transition from fossil fuel to hydrogen jets should be easy.
As for as long haul trucks, I can kinda see it, maybe, still a lot of storage, production, efficiency issues. Weight isn’t nearly the same concern as it is for aviation.
For cars, yea, I don’t see it.
[+] [-] SmokeyHamster|5 years ago|reply
When wouldn't it be at a loss? That's just physics. Hydrogen fuel cells aren't a source of energy in and of themselves, they're just a storage medium, like any other battery. And the act of filling them will never by 100% efficient because nothing is, so there will always be loss.
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hypx|5 years ago|reply
Batteries don't have a rare earth metal problem, they have a normal metal problem. You need a lot of raw materials to make them, and it's plausible that this will never scale to point where everything can run on batteries.
[+] [-] lejboua|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_mueller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|5 years ago|reply
NiMH batteries do, but who is using those?
[+] [-] cultofmetatron|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svara|5 years ago|reply
Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1].
The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down exponentially [2]. A combination of Li-Ion battery (short-term), pumped hydro (medium-term) and hydrogen (long-term, i.e. seasonal) storage is probably how to smooth out the burstiness of renewable energy production eventually [3].
When green hydrogen infrastructure is commonplace, the hydrogen can also be used to make synthetic jet fuel and feedstocks for the chemical industry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017110/figures/1?pro...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
[+] [-] speedgoose|5 years ago|reply
With the hydrogen you have so few refueling stations, they are very expensive, that range anxiety is a thing. To not improve things, reliability is very poor. My work had a hydrogen refueling station on its parking. It was often broken and actually a bit scary to walk past it. They eventually removed it, which was a good call. Another hydrogen station sharing the same design exploded a few months later. The hydrogen car sales dropped from not much to virtually zero since in the country.
So to resume, hydrogen cars are expensive, refueling stations are expensive, the energy is expensive.
Electric cars with large batteries are a much better solution to hydrogen cars IMHO. You can charge everywhere, the eletric grid is very will developped, the energy is cheap. The cars are also much more powerful thanks to the large batteries pack, it's useless but it feels nice.
[+] [-] Dumblydorr|5 years ago|reply
It's for long range trucks that we will see hydrogen first. Green hydrogen will act as energy storage, big renewables grids can dump excess into green hydrogen and thus avoid curtailment. Then, you replace heavy duty trucks, which need to be able to not have heavy batteries, with fuel cell trucks, and you build out 1000 large hydrogen stations across the transit network.
[+] [-] svara|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksaints|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hwillis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|5 years ago|reply
Electrification completely upends that. A country that is self sufficient in energy can tell other countries to take a hike.
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
Electric cars are still very dangerous when they catch fire though. And the fires are very difficult to control. Especially in multistorey (or underground) car parks. And even more so if there are multiple EVs parked next to eachother.
[+] [-] jasonlaramburu|5 years ago|reply
“As an example, a 100kWh battery will give a potential range of 250 miles and, in order to produce that battery, it will take around 20 tonnes of CO2,” he said. “A typical battery lasts for 150,000 miles, so that equates to around 83g/km of CO2. Then, when you take into account charging over that same distance, the same battery car will deliver 124g/km of CO2 over its lifetime.”
By comparison, Auto Express says that a recent study found that a Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car produces around 120g/km of CO2 over its lifetime when the manufacturing process is taken into account. But if hydrogen were to be produced by renewable energy, that figure could be reduced significantly.”
Source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/electric-cars/101196/hydrogen-fuel...
[+] [-] Majromax|5 years ago|reply
Hydrogen is a difficult thing to manage in quantity. Its density is fantastically low, so storing it in gas form requires absurd pressures -- an inherent risk to any vehicle. Storing it in liquid form goes a long way towards solving the density/pressure problem, but now the system must have a full cryogenic process to keep the hydrogen liquified. (Worse yet: over time hydrogen embrittles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement) metals, making storage even more complicated)
This isn't much different than the problems faced by rockets, and it's why liquid hydrogen is not considered a 'storable propellant' for long-duration flight.
In a zero-net-carbon economy, residual demand for high power density may still have to be filled by some kind of bio-derived or synthetic hydrocarbon.
[+] [-] darksaints|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|5 years ago|reply
Edit: this video had a good overview of the various production methods, including on-site at the fuel station https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY
[+] [-] mcot2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jakozaur|5 years ago|reply
1. The only hydrogen produced from electricity is ecological. Carbon capture doesn’t work today.
2. The hydrogen from electricity is expensive, though as wind and solar get exponential cheaper, we will end up with spikes excess cheap electricity (negative prices today or disconnecting plants). It makes sense to produce hydrogen during those spikes.
3. Cars on hydrogen don’t make sense at all. The massive cost of infrastructure plus batteries are superior and getting better on that front.
4. Hydrogen from electricity can replace the first reformation from natural gas.
5. Next promising use cases are industrial heating, such as steel production (instead of coal).
6. Least profitable, but still plausible, uses hydrogen as long-term energy storage and mixing it with natural gas.
7. I wonder whether generating hydrogen from seawater and getting back freshwater would improve the economics of this form of energy storage.
[+] [-] postingawayonhn|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure that it necessarily does. If you're only producing during those peak periods of electrical output then your you're going to have a lot of hydrogen producing equipment sitting idle at other times.
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
(1 kg of hydrogen would make a few gallons of water)
[+] [-] harg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdavis6890|5 years ago|reply
But it's still just a battery, and needs to be charged from the electric power grid (by using the electricity to separate hydrogen from water), just like any other battery would.
[+] [-] boublepop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spenrose|5 years ago|reply
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2020/6/17/renewables-p...
Lots of comments on this thread that reveal folks are up to date with the state of hydrogen infrastructure c. 2017. It's changing really fast as billions of dollars are poured into R&D and pilot projects. For example, storage and transport:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-hydrogen-chiyoda-cor...
Siemens has pledged to make turbines that run on 100% hydrogen by 2030: https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/stories/energy/hyd...
Hydrogen trains: https://www.snam.it/en/Media/Press-releases/Agreement_Alstom...
Hydrogen in steelmaking: https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
I could post 15 more. Our collective priors were well-grounded just a couple years ago, but it is time for a big update.
[+] [-] superklondike|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jitendrac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomxor|5 years ago|reply
On that graph, compared to petrol, liquid hydrogen appears to be about 4x larger by volume but interestingly only 2/5ths of the weight.
The electric motors are lighter sure, but then what about the mass and volume of the compressed storage tank and the fuel cell itself? difficult to know if it starts to gain on IC engine again. lots of questions that make that graph feel pretty meaningless.
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
Small-scale alcohol fuel production integrated into regenerative agriculture farms is different from mass ethanol production.
You can ferment anything that has starch or sugar, the leftovers from the distillation can be composted or fed to livestock. Most existing internal combustion engines can be modified to use alcohol fuel. And it's carbon-neutral.
[+] [-] goda90|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I found an article about this. It appears to have been developed by the military and has been licensed out for more development: https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-h2-power-hydrogen-fuel-s...
[+] [-] admax88q|5 years ago|reply
Its a shame this article didn't examine the production side of hydrogen.
[+] [-] hnick|5 years ago|reply
I saw this article earlier today along those lines: https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/alchemy-of...
Supposedly this stores hydrogen metal hydrides cheaper than lithium batteries, whatever that means, but I'm not qualified to judge.
[+] [-] reyoz|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.jacobs.com/sites/default/files/2020-06/jacobs-ya...
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
Total US sales in 2019: 1502.
It's just not selling.
[+] [-] mrtnmcc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gandalfian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] willis936|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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