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freeflight | 2 years ago

> I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing.

This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.

As the fossil fuel reliance doesn't only extend to the energy sector, but also manufacturing industries, where hydrocarbons, as a resource, are responsible for pretty much everything that defines modern life. [0]

> Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise

The infrastructure is expensive, but it's also the only existing energy infrastructure which can realistically be retooled for renewable replacement through green hydrogen.

Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].

It's a dimension to this way too few people have on their radar, as most of the public debate is solely centered on electricity generation from fossil fuels, when that's actually the easiest problem to fix with renewables.

But the dependencies on fossil fuels as manufacturing resource, fixing those is a much bigger and involved task than making electricity grids green and renewable.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products...

[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...

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realusername|2 years ago

> This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.

Gas cannot be considered for a transition because of it's very high emissions, diplomatic issues and high infrastructure costs. It's a very polluting tech which should stay back in the 20th century along petrol. The stability problems of renewables must be solved first to be adopted, in a better way, burning fossil fuels when they do not work ain't one.

> Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].

The whole cycle has disastrous efficiency with 70% loss, as it is now, hydrogen storage isn't that useful until we invent some better tech. There's some use for it of course but that's not a large scale solution by any means.

_hypx|2 years ago

The accusation of hydrogen having bad efficiency is just something BEV companies came up with. It is basically marketing FUD. A more realistic analysis will show that there is very little difference between using hydrogen and direct electrification strategies. This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.