H2 from natural gas is more efficient, but obviously creates pollution. Because of the relative efficiency and the prevalence of natural gas in society, most companies have gone to natural gas conversion to hydrogen, as it’s easier to implement, not because it’s greener.
To touch on it, when I’m discussing economics, I’m talking about the discipline of economics, not specifically the economy. The money economy is only concerned with the dollars and cents of everything, economics as a discipline, considers all factors, both in and out, and the adverse effects of everything, both financial and sometimes not financial (since nonfinancial effects can affect the future financial viability of a system).
I’ll be clear, storage isn’t the debate on hydrogen being inefficient. Hydrogen storage is more efficient than most other storage systems. The materials are minimal, a pressure tank with the appropriate seals and safeguards, and the tank can output 100% of the hydrogen that goes into it. There’s no concern with cycle life, as the system can cycle infinitely as long as the structure of the container isn’t compromised. The waste produced when a storage vessel is no longer suitable, is essentially metals that can be fully recycled or otherwise reconstituted into other items without any degradation in the quality of those items, with few exceptions.
The discussion is entirely around how hydrogen is created, and how it is converted back to whatever energy format that is desirable, such as electricity. Coming from electricity, electrolysis is about 70-82% efficient, with 1kg of hydrogen, which has a specific energy density of 143 MJ/kg needing about 50-55 kWh of electricity to create. The most inefficient part of the system is conversation back from hydrogen to electricity, where internal combustion style generators are common (basically a slightly modified natural gas generator), but less efficient than fuel cells. Fuel cells generally have 40-60% efficiency.
Batteries on the other hand have much higher efficiency, but never 100%. Since they’re generally not self regulating, systems for battery management are required. Charge controllers and voltage conversion (or inverters) reduce efficiency further, but generally battery systems are considered to be better than 90% efficient. The downside with battery systems is the relatively short life of the battery and the large amount of waste produced, in comparison with something like hydrogen.
Hydrogen can achieve much higher energy density and the container weighs next to nothing when empty, while batteries weigh approximately the same whether charged or not.
My main argument for hydrogen surrounds the fact that we’re pretty close. 80% efficiency in hydrolysis and 60% on fuel cells, with storage being significantly cheaper on materials and significantly better with cycles, with much less to recycle when the system is replaced or otherwise decommissioned. You can pack a lot more energy in the same volume of space using hydrogen compared to batteries because it can be significantly pressurized to several atmospheres.
There are benefits here that batteries simply cannot match. If we can get the fuel cells and electrolysis to a level that’s comparable to batteries with efficiency, then hydrogen would really become the better option.
With over 8.2 billion people on the planet, we certainly can research all of these options at the same time. Only a very small fraction is even doing the work right now. That number can increase a lot, but we choose to pursue what is financially profitable rather than purely looking towards scientific discovery. Capitalism at work.
If companies can’t sell it, they don’t care. So it doesn’t get done. We should do it anyways because there’s potential here.
There’s two problems with your last post which have to do with physics.
- Fuel Cells and the process of hydrolysis have a limit on their efficiency. Just like with ICEs there isn’t much potential there.
- Between Hydrolysis and the Fuel Cell, there are other lossy processes. Usually the tanks contain pressurized H2 and depending on the usecase even liquid H2. Modern automobile cases use 700-800 bars of pressure. That process is again at around 85% efficiency in a good case. Cooling applications further deteriorate the efficiency and need more energy for storage and/or losses during storage. There are other technologies in research right now, like metal hydride storage, where we’ll have to see what exactly they can do (right now we’re at the stage where we are promised an all-purpose hype, but mostly through the media and not the ones doing the work)
I’m not disputing that capitalism has it’s thumb on the scale; as you’ve written, the synergy to use H2 derived from natural gas is one effect, but it doesn’t stop them from advertising it as green. The physical limits though, one cannot argue with. Their effects would mean a lot more infrastructure that is necessary, with it more materials, which are limited too. Even if possible, we have limited construction capacity, which means that it would take us longer to reach the goal, when time is of the essence. Which leads me to the same conclusion, that where the advantages like power density isn’t absolutely necessary or other solutions are not available, use a better solution.
When speaking to the overall system, there are always inefficiencies with all forms due to the conservation of energy laws.
Similar arguments can be made regarding batteries, as resistance in the wires that connect the cells in a pack together waste power as heat. While overall this may be minimal, the physics provide hard limits here. Unless a superconducting material is made commercially viable without needing to be super cooled, these limits will always be nontrivial.
My entire point is, battery tech has reached a high level of development and there is significantly more we’re trying to achieve with the technology (whether solid state or otherwise), meanwhile, I would argue that hydrogen hasn’t even reached the same level of development as battery technology, yet everyone seems to think it’s a dead end.
It’s hard to argue with the energy density per kg of hydrogen as a material. It’s possibly one of the highest specific potentials of existing technology. What we should be doing is trying to create power from that with as few losses as possible. Fuel cell technology was, in my mind, the first real push in that direction, when it didn’t immediately pay off, we gave up. Meanwhile, alkaline and cadmium based batteries were much worse, but we used them, and continued using them for decades before lithium based batteries became more commercially viable.
I see battery research as looking for the last, most efficient type of battery, while hydrogen isn’t even half way through the possible research we could do on it. Forgetting hydrogen, while it’s in the infancy of the research, for batteries that are very nearly as efficient as physics allows for, to me, is doing ourselves a disservice as a society.
I have no idea what further research into hydrogen will yield. Maybe you’re right and it’s going to go nowhere, maybe not. We don’t know unless we keep trying, same with batteries, same with kinetic storage (flywheel/gravity systems), same with thermal storage… There’s just a lot of material science we can experiment with that wasn’t really something that was possible before now.
I still think it’s worthwhile, clearly you disagree. I appreciate the discussion either way.
Have a good day.