Not enough attention is being paid to Japan's contrarian "red hydrogen" strategy.
This entails using a novel helium cooled fission reactor to generate very hot (950C, 1750F) process heat that is then fed into an Sulphur-Iodine cycle hydrogen plant to create very cheap hydrogen without any feedstock but air and water.
Beyond fuel, hydrogen can be used to replace coal in iron smelting, Haber-Bosch fertilizer, and other chemical processes that require hydrogen made today via fossil fuels.
They already have a 30MW pilot reactor in operation, and are just about to turn on the S-I hydrogen plant. Could be a very interesting addition to global energy mix.
Yeah, a chemical cycle involving vaporizing and decomposing sulfuric acid at 850 C is totally credible. Yes, let's avoid turbines and instead make our equipment out of ... tantalum? /s
The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of this cycle is 50% (and likely will be lower). This is not much better than making electricity with the reactor and driving electrolysers. And when the levelized cost of energy from renewables is very low (especially for the surplus energy that could be fed into electrolysers as needed) it's hard to see how this scheme competes. Yes, it doesn't have turbines, but it does have all sorts of high temperature chemical reactors that must survive corrosive conditions.
Last year I read the following post regarding the application of hydrogen on ground transportation, simple and insightful. It basically explains why it doesn't make sense to use it for that particular application.
What this article does not address is however the solar problem of producing too much in the summer and too little in the winter. Using the solar energy from summer to produce hydrogen to use in the winter or at night sounds like a complete solution to me.
Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.
This isn't a good argument to be honest. Sure, it won't save the climate, this is a problem of energy generation. We will always need more than yesterday so we need to look at how we can generate it.
The main disadvantage of hydrogen is that it is very difficult to store. It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything. The efficiencies of energy conversion of hydrogen are quite good for that matter.
But BEV (how the author calls them) have major disadvantages as well. Infrastructure needs are unfulfilled, the recycling is maintenance intensive, ...
It is still more environmental friendly to drive that 10 year old used tincan than to buy a new electric car. Advantage here is that you don't have local polution, much cleaner city air etc.
But neither hydrogen cars nor BEV will save the climate.
That comes from a person named Michael Liebreich who is a British conservative politician that also founded Bloomberg's New Energy Finance. I listen to his podcast where he interviews people in the industry. He also has a nuclear physics background. In other word, he knows a thing or two about both the science and economics in this space; very well informed person.
He's been very critical of the mindless arguing for a hydrogen economy making the point that there are a few very fundamental issues with hydrogen in terms of cost and physics (e.g. second law of thermo dynamics) that you can't just wave away that people tend to gloss over.
Not that he's against hydrogen per se. It's just that burning it is a pretty dumb idea from a cost and efficiency point of view.
Green Hydrogen is just about to take off, and make lots of money and headlines, so it'll be important to not let that success be hijacked and diverted into areas where it's not helpful.
Not a very useful article, and it's weak on technical details.
Hydrogen is a poor storage medium for energy for numerous reasons, such as steel embrittlement (it requires expensive special alloys for storage or transport under pressure).
Hence, hydrogen-from-water is applicable where it can be generated and used immediately. There are three obvious industrial applications in cleantech:
Ammonia production for fertilizer using atmospheric N2.
Direct iron reduction for steel production, i.e. reduction of iron ore.
Methane and jet fuel production utilizing atmospheric CO2 as the carbon source.
In particular, steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen should be eliminated as a hydrogen source, as the fossil CO2 produced is then released to the atmosphere.
Hydrogen has potential to be better than BEV. Do you know how much money went to BEV and it might be written away if hydrogen fuel cells turns out to be viable?
Hydrogen production is a way for excess electricity from nuclear power to be stored. Is it the best way? In some circumstances it may be.
At the consumer level, when I read about the dangers of lithium batteries catching fire, hydrogen sounds like a better option especially if a vehicle is design to disperse the hydrogen away from the passengers when an accident occurs. Some vehicles have you riding on the lithium battery pack.
Now add tunnels to the mix and consider a lithium battery fire in a tunnel with toxic fumes and the need to add 24 times the amount of water used to put out a ICE fire.
EV batteries are very safe. Yes there are incidents, but there's fewer as automakers learn to make safer packs.
We had a fire in a big parking garage here in Norway. Already many EVs here and not a single battery pack caught fire even though the car interiors burned. Our fire departments probably have the most experience with EVs anywhere in the world, and they consider them generally safe and not hard to deal with when trained for it.
Funny you should mention tunnels, it was recently found that millions could be saved on ventilation on a future tunnel project because there's such a high share of EVs now. There's a tunnel nearby that's very often closed because there's a steep grade and there's always some ICE truck that overheats and catches fire. With EVs that won't be an issue.
Meanwhile, a hydrogen station blew up just a few km from my house. Incredibly loud explosion. Yeah, I think hydrogen cars and stations can be made safe with engineering. Just like Li-ion. But it is fundamentally unsafe. It easily leaks through fittings if they aren't tightened with just the right torque. And when you get the right hydrogen/oxygen mixture it borderline self-ignites.
Many cars are moving to LiFePo as it's cheaper and good enough for most. It's much safer still. Solid state batteries will also be perfectly safe.
In my area hydrogen fuel is ~ $20/kg, and 1 kg ~ 1 gallon of gas.
The high pressure hydrogen tanks are bulky, expensive and have a lifetime.
I think a comparison to CNG is in order.
For a long time there was a push for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, and many were made. There were ford pickup trucks and police cars, honda had a CNG accord. CNG is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen - CH4. With a little fiddling, it can be used directly in a gasoline engine. You still need a catalytic converter because the high temperature combustion creates smog (NO)
Natural gas was more widely available (it comes out of the ground), and costs were usually less or at worst similar to gasoline.
The vehicles had storage tanks ~ 3000 psi (much lower than hydrogen). They were bulky and usually took up the entire trunk of a vehicle. The tanks also have a lifetime.
They kind of worked, but just the same, they needed subsidies to survive. Now they are basically all gone.
Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?
Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are:
- x2 cheaper travel expenses
- less harmful emissions
Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?
> Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?
There are many fleets which use natural gas. Municipal buses, city garbage trucks, etc. There, they only need to build up one (private) CNG refueling station in the city.
With a passenger car, you need to plan your trip to find public CNG fueling stations along the route where you need them.
The boom in natural gas production is a recent occurrence. Go back a couple decades and natural gas was far more expensive. Back then, propane was the obvious alternative to gasoline for vehicles, until the price for propane spiked and natural gas fell.
But more importantly, CNG is only a half-step forward, still leaving us dependent on a single fossil fuel. Battery electric vehicles are far more practical thanks to being easy to (slow-)charge almost anywhere, getting us off of fossil fuels entirely, reducing mechanical complexity/maintenance, and being far more efficient (burning the same amount of natural gas in a power plant to charge your BEV will give you far more range than burning it in your converted car engine).
- First of all, there is no natural gas fuel standard
- Safety, there are no safety standards. If there were, tanks often used in other places, such an upgraded would be more expensive
- Rolling out refueling over the whole of the US/Europe would be difficult. Most places in Europe don't have these cars.
A better and safer alternative to natural gas would be methanol. And because of the US ethanol policy, the US already has a surprising amount of Flex Fuel Vehicles.
If you could have a bunch of fuel standards for ethanol/methanol and a vehicle standard for those fuels, depending on the price, people could buy different mixes.
Converting gas to methanol is fairly efficient and can be done directly at gas production sites, sometimes with gas that would be vented instead. But there isn't a big market for methanol right now.
In China such standards do exist M20 and so on. However sadly there methanol vehicles usually use methanol made by coal.
The US would have had much lower fuel cost if they had a strategy of methanol and ethanol at the same time, and require all vehicle to be FFV. Standardizing M20/E20, M50/E50 fuels for example.
However all of this is now no longer very useful as car market is rapidly switching to electric.
For some trucks using generated fuel might be useful. Dimethyl ether would be great for long range trucks and ships rather then hydrogen.
On lose power and internal space on the conversion.
The US car market does not seem very concerned with economical ROI, so any argument based on costs is useless. The emissions part seems to hold for some people, but electric cars already won here.
Even here on South America gas is getting out of fashion, replaced by electricity. The costs are still high enough that there is a large market remaining, but it is constantly decreasing.
There are not enough places to fill a natural gas car. I know of a few, if you buy a natural gas car you plan all trips around filling up - and a lot of trips you have to reject.
For every public natural gas pump I know of, I know of 50 public EV chargers. Plus in the worst case you can plug an EV into a regular outlet (overnight you can get enough range to get someplace with a faster charger).
You would need several scientific breakthroughs to make hydrogen economically viable for transportation. It's expensive to generate, it embrittles storage containers, is highly flammable, and there's no existing infrastructure that you can piggy back off of. Right now it is a dead end.
You can try to be as rational and logical, but in the end, it's not going to matter. The problem is hydrogen as a fuel is marketable, so it's going to be very overhyped because it's going to make a lot of money for investors. You only have to look at what happened with cryptocurrencies to get an idea of what's coming, maybe not as extreme, but no doubt it's going to happen. Furthermore, with the tech industry entering a recession with mass layoffs, investors are looking for their next target, which appears to be green and renewable energy technologies. This is even more true thank to the many government grants and tax breaks for renewable energy.
So sit back and enjoy the s%$#show while startups and entrepreneurs pitch the most ridiculous applications for hydrogen fuel and get flooded with billions of dollars.
The only advantage of hydrogen is that contrary to electricity, you can't easily produce and store it by yourself, and thus is more easily taxable. Also, because all the infrastructure need to be created from scratch, there is no big player yet and there is potential to make a lot of money.
The editorial seemingly misses some other issues with hydrogen production. Other issues I've seen are:
- Water availability for hydrogen production: a recent article I saw was "Green hydrogen revolution risks dying of thirst" https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolut... - touches on water availability in South Australia, and areas depending on desalination
- Energy availability for hydrogen production: Recently heard Europe would still have to import hydrogen ( e.g. Germany would have to import 70% of hydrogen ) : https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 - The Great Simplification interview between Nate Hagens & Sebastian Heitmann
Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen.
A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric ton. There's about 111 kilograms of hydrogen in a metric ton of water.
Even assuming only 50% of that ends up as saleable hydrogen, you're still talking less than 3c of desalination cost for every kg of hydrogen you produce. The other thing to keep in mind here is that hydrogen production occur only at places and at times where energy is very cheap, so the energy inputs to the desal plant should also be very cheap, pushing down the cost of desalination.
Underhyping methane emissions already makes junk sciences irony someone elses problem. You'll get high blood pressure if you take a grain of salt with everything they spew :p
Hydrogen scaled is what makes diversification so much fun in the 21st century. Scale up or scale down?
If we look at the excess energy generation with solar when batteries are full, that excess can be converted to hydrogen production with very little additional cost.
On a timeline, it may take a few months to stockpile enough hydrogen to install new hydrogen powered equipment to take advantage of it, but nobody has hyped what to do with excess solar power production.
Wind turbines have their dump load too. Same concept with after a few months of stockpiling hydrogen with excess power generation, a usable amount of hydrogen becomes available.
We expect most renewables such as solar and wind to produce for decades. All of that excess solves a lot of the energy equation.
Hydrogen scales perfectly with some applications outside of metropolitan areas. They indicated that it was only $8 million for this project. That ROI happens fast.
We crack heavy fractions of oil apart to make more useful ones for plastics and other chemical feedstocks and that leaves us so much ethane, propane, and butane that we flare it off as waste gas.
You can run vehicles on that, and extract useful work from that heat.
We're not going to slow down the amount of plastic we make any time soon.
The electrolysis boom that is being talked about now is mainly about replacing fossil-fuel derived hydrogen with green hydrogen for industrial processes, not about using hydrogen to store energy or replace fuels other than special cases such as very high temperature flames.
We need technologies to store electricity generated by renewables. If anyone has a better idea than hydrogen to do this in a scalable way, congratulations, you made the world a better place.
I mean the simplest one is gravity; the most scalable version of that is pumping water up into a reservoir behind a hydroelectric power plant. There's others that propose heavy trains going uphill or weights down a hole, but that doesn't scale very well and has additional maintenance costs.
But yeah, that would be electrical into mechanical energy (pumps), the cost would be flowing water up against gravity. Of course, it also requires a source of water downhill and a reservoir uphill. I was going to quip about Lake Mead being empty, but that would be huge distances to cover. Maybe something close to sea, or else a purpose built closed loop system.
If you are gone make hydrogen, just right there turn it into methanol and use and transport that around.
Or just make airplane fuel right on sight.
But the problem with all those theories is that investing in electricity consuming plants that will only have a very low utilization is generally not a great plan.
Maybe not trying to build your whole grid out of renewables would be the better plan.
Given how annoying H+ ions are to handle, rather than sticking them together as H2 it may be easier to leave them in the electrolyte from whence they came, in the form of a "battery".
Unless there's some magic breakthrough in catalytic chemistry for water electrolysis, the capital cost of all the platinum required is going to be a problem.
>The EU is also under pressure from industry to water down the definition of green hydrogen
This is the key issue. There is nothing wrong with truly green hydrogen made with truly excess electricity. The article rightly praises the Biden administrations sensible policies which incentivize zero-emissions hydrogen.
This and windgas (synthesized methane) seem to be the best candidates for seasonal storage although both still with major issues - embrittlememt/needing CO2.
We have cheap green power (solar/wind), cheap green short to medium term storage (pumped hydro and lithium batteries) but this only gets us to 97%:
[+] [-] nickpinkston|3 years ago|reply
This entails using a novel helium cooled fission reactor to generate very hot (950C, 1750F) process heat that is then fed into an Sulphur-Iodine cycle hydrogen plant to create very cheap hydrogen without any feedstock but air and water.
Beyond fuel, hydrogen can be used to replace coal in iron smelting, Haber-Bosch fertilizer, and other chemical processes that require hydrogen made today via fossil fuels.
They already have a 30MW pilot reactor in operation, and are just about to turn on the S-I hydrogen plant. Could be a very interesting addition to global energy mix.
Strategy: https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...
Reactor: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-coo...
S-I Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
Video (hypey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho
[+] [-] pfdietz|3 years ago|reply
The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of this cycle is 50% (and likely will be lower). This is not much better than making electricity with the reactor and driving electrolysers. And when the levelized cost of energy from renewables is very low (especially for the surplus energy that could be fed into electrolysers as needed) it's hard to see how this scheme competes. Yes, it doesn't have turbines, but it does have all sorts of high temperature chemical reactors that must survive corrosive conditions.
[+] [-] jandrese|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcampbell1|3 years ago|reply
“A novel nuclear reactor which operates just below the temperature where our most exotic alloys mechanically fail”.
[+] [-] squaredot|3 years ago|reply
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
[+] [-] rapsey|3 years ago|reply
Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
The main disadvantage of hydrogen is that it is very difficult to store. It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything. The efficiencies of energy conversion of hydrogen are quite good for that matter.
But BEV (how the author calls them) have major disadvantages as well. Infrastructure needs are unfulfilled, the recycling is maintenance intensive, ...
It is still more environmental friendly to drive that 10 year old used tincan than to buy a new electric car. Advantage here is that you don't have local polution, much cleaner city air etc.
But neither hydrogen cars nor BEV will save the climate.
[+] [-] patall|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
[+] [-] Symmetry|3 years ago|reply
Hydrogen in the creation of fertilizer? An absolute necessity, we need a good source of green hydrogen to run the Haber-Bosch process.
Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it.
Hydrogen for long-haul trucking? Maybe, maybe not.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
He's been very critical of the mindless arguing for a hydrogen economy making the point that there are a few very fundamental issues with hydrogen in terms of cost and physics (e.g. second law of thermo dynamics) that you can't just wave away that people tend to gloss over.
Not that he's against hydrogen per se. It's just that burning it is a pretty dumb idea from a cost and efficiency point of view.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|3 years ago|reply
https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/
[+] [-] moffkalast|3 years ago|reply
I don't understand why this is under B while cars are under G. Is that not a type of car? Or are we talking building sized mining dumptrucks?
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|3 years ago|reply
https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/
Green Hydrogen is just about to take off, and make lots of money and headlines, so it'll be important to not let that success be hijacked and diverted into areas where it's not helpful.
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
Hydrogen is a poor storage medium for energy for numerous reasons, such as steel embrittlement (it requires expensive special alloys for storage or transport under pressure).
Hence, hydrogen-from-water is applicable where it can be generated and used immediately. There are three obvious industrial applications in cleantech:
Ammonia production for fertilizer using atmospheric N2.
Direct iron reduction for steel production, i.e. reduction of iron ore.
Methane and jet fuel production utilizing atmospheric CO2 as the carbon source.
In particular, steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen should be eliminated as a hydrogen source, as the fossil CO2 produced is then released to the atmosphere.
[+] [-] bamboozled|3 years ago|reply
Same for these hyrdogen powered trains in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p...
Both those things are in production, so is hydrogen really hyped? Just beginning ?
Edit: How does this car get around "the storage problem" of Hydrogen?
[+] [-] TheLoafOfBread|3 years ago|reply
Better make some negative PR towards hydrogen.
[+] [-] freedude|3 years ago|reply
At the consumer level, when I read about the dangers of lithium batteries catching fire, hydrogen sounds like a better option especially if a vehicle is design to disperse the hydrogen away from the passengers when an accident occurs. Some vehicles have you riding on the lithium battery pack.
Now add tunnels to the mix and consider a lithium battery fire in a tunnel with toxic fumes and the need to add 24 times the amount of water used to put out a ICE fire.
[+] [-] audunw|3 years ago|reply
We had a fire in a big parking garage here in Norway. Already many EVs here and not a single battery pack caught fire even though the car interiors burned. Our fire departments probably have the most experience with EVs anywhere in the world, and they consider them generally safe and not hard to deal with when trained for it.
Funny you should mention tunnels, it was recently found that millions could be saved on ventilation on a future tunnel project because there's such a high share of EVs now. There's a tunnel nearby that's very often closed because there's a steep grade and there's always some ICE truck that overheats and catches fire. With EVs that won't be an issue.
Meanwhile, a hydrogen station blew up just a few km from my house. Incredibly loud explosion. Yeah, I think hydrogen cars and stations can be made safe with engineering. Just like Li-ion. But it is fundamentally unsafe. It easily leaks through fittings if they aren't tightened with just the right torque. And when you get the right hydrogen/oxygen mixture it borderline self-ignites.
Many cars are moving to LiFePo as it's cheaper and good enough for most. It's much safer still. Solid state batteries will also be perfectly safe.
[+] [-] m463|3 years ago|reply
In my area hydrogen fuel is ~ $20/kg, and 1 kg ~ 1 gallon of gas. The high pressure hydrogen tanks are bulky, expensive and have a lifetime.
I think a comparison to CNG is in order.
For a long time there was a push for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, and many were made. There were ford pickup trucks and police cars, honda had a CNG accord. CNG is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen - CH4. With a little fiddling, it can be used directly in a gasoline engine. You still need a catalytic converter because the high temperature combustion creates smog (NO)
Natural gas was more widely available (it comes out of the ground), and costs were usually less or at worst similar to gasoline.
The vehicles had storage tanks ~ 3000 psi (much lower than hydrogen). They were bulky and usually took up the entire trunk of a vehicle. The tanks also have a lifetime.
They kind of worked, but just the same, they needed subsidies to survive. Now they are basically all gone.
[+] [-] 10241024|3 years ago|reply
Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are:
- x2 cheaper travel expenses
- less harmful emissions
Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?
[+] [-] axiolite|3 years ago|reply
There are many fleets which use natural gas. Municipal buses, city garbage trucks, etc. There, they only need to build up one (private) CNG refueling station in the city.
With a passenger car, you need to plan your trip to find public CNG fueling stations along the route where you need them.
The boom in natural gas production is a recent occurrence. Go back a couple decades and natural gas was far more expensive. Back then, propane was the obvious alternative to gasoline for vehicles, until the price for propane spiked and natural gas fell.
But more importantly, CNG is only a half-step forward, still leaving us dependent on a single fossil fuel. Battery electric vehicles are far more practical thanks to being easy to (slow-)charge almost anywhere, getting us off of fossil fuels entirely, reducing mechanical complexity/maintenance, and being far more efficient (burning the same amount of natural gas in a power plant to charge your BEV will give you far more range than burning it in your converted car engine).
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
- First of all, there is no natural gas fuel standard
- Safety, there are no safety standards. If there were, tanks often used in other places, such an upgraded would be more expensive
- Rolling out refueling over the whole of the US/Europe would be difficult. Most places in Europe don't have these cars.
A better and safer alternative to natural gas would be methanol. And because of the US ethanol policy, the US already has a surprising amount of Flex Fuel Vehicles.
If you could have a bunch of fuel standards for ethanol/methanol and a vehicle standard for those fuels, depending on the price, people could buy different mixes.
Converting gas to methanol is fairly efficient and can be done directly at gas production sites, sometimes with gas that would be vented instead. But there isn't a big market for methanol right now.
In China such standards do exist M20 and so on. However sadly there methanol vehicles usually use methanol made by coal.
The US would have had much lower fuel cost if they had a strategy of methanol and ethanol at the same time, and require all vehicle to be FFV. Standardizing M20/E20, M50/E50 fuels for example.
However all of this is now no longer very useful as car market is rapidly switching to electric.
For some trucks using generated fuel might be useful. Dimethyl ether would be great for long range trucks and ships rather then hydrogen.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|3 years ago|reply
The US car market does not seem very concerned with economical ROI, so any argument based on costs is useless. The emissions part seems to hold for some people, but electric cars already won here.
Even here on South America gas is getting out of fashion, replaced by electricity. The costs are still high enough that there is a large market remaining, but it is constantly decreasing.
[+] [-] bluGill|3 years ago|reply
For every public natural gas pump I know of, I know of 50 public EV chargers. Plus in the worst case you can plug an EV into a regular outlet (overnight you can get enough range to get someplace with a faster charger).
[+] [-] MrMan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg_bot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waselighis|3 years ago|reply
So sit back and enjoy the s%$#show while startups and entrepreneurs pitch the most ridiculous applications for hydrogen fuel and get flooded with billions of dollars.
[+] [-] y04nn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered_|3 years ago|reply
- Water availability for hydrogen production: a recent article I saw was "Green hydrogen revolution risks dying of thirst" https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolut... - touches on water availability in South Australia, and areas depending on desalination
- Energy availability for hydrogen production: Recently heard Europe would still have to import hydrogen ( e.g. Germany would have to import 70% of hydrogen ) : https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 - The Great Simplification interview between Nate Hagens & Sebastian Heitmann
[+] [-] rgmerk|3 years ago|reply
Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen.
A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric ton. There's about 111 kilograms of hydrogen in a metric ton of water.
Even assuming only 50% of that ends up as saleable hydrogen, you're still talking less than 3c of desalination cost for every kg of hydrogen you produce. The other thing to keep in mind here is that hydrogen production occur only at places and at times where energy is very cheap, so the energy inputs to the desal plant should also be very cheap, pushing down the cost of desalination.
[+] [-] hacknat|3 years ago|reply
Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?
[+] [-] lob_it|3 years ago|reply
Hydrogen scaled is what makes diversification so much fun in the 21st century. Scale up or scale down?
If we look at the excess energy generation with solar when batteries are full, that excess can be converted to hydrogen production with very little additional cost.
On a timeline, it may take a few months to stockpile enough hydrogen to install new hydrogen powered equipment to take advantage of it, but nobody has hyped what to do with excess solar power production.
Wind turbines have their dump load too. Same concept with after a few months of stockpiling hydrogen with excess power generation, a usable amount of hydrogen becomes available.
We expect most renewables such as solar and wind to produce for decades. All of that excess solves a lot of the energy equation.
Hydrogen scales perfectly with some applications outside of metropolitan areas. They indicated that it was only $8 million for this project. That ROI happens fast.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-l...
Hype is not sustainable :)
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
You can run vehicles on that, and extract useful work from that heat.
We're not going to slow down the amount of plastic we make any time soon.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|3 years ago|reply
But yeah, that would be electrical into mechanical energy (pumps), the cost would be flowing water up against gravity. Of course, it also requires a source of water downhill and a reservoir uphill. I was going to quip about Lake Mead being empty, but that would be huge distances to cover. Maybe something close to sea, or else a purpose built closed loop system.
[+] [-] panick21_|3 years ago|reply
https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/
If you are gone make hydrogen, just right there turn it into methanol and use and transport that around.
Or just make airplane fuel right on sight.
But the problem with all those theories is that investing in electricity consuming plants that will only have a very low utilization is generally not a great plan.
Maybe not trying to build your whole grid out of renewables would be the better plan.
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
Unless there's some magic breakthrough in catalytic chemistry for water electrolysis, the capital cost of all the platinum required is going to be a problem.
[+] [-] mberning|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elil17|3 years ago|reply
This is the key issue. There is nothing wrong with truly green hydrogen made with truly excess electricity. The article rightly praises the Biden administrations sensible policies which incentivize zero-emissions hydrogen.
[+] [-] pydry|3 years ago|reply
We have cheap green power (solar/wind), cheap green short to medium term storage (pumped hydro and lithium batteries) but this only gets us to 97%:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...