Hear me out, so we make a ton of hydrogen for cars, heating, etc. But it takes lots of methane to make hydrogen. So we give oil companies subsidies so they can do more fracking which is how we get the methane in the first place. This will be great for climat cha—wait a minute…
It’s ok because after we have already fully transitioned the grid to renewables, batteries, and pumped hydro in twenty or thirty years, we’ll then be so good at making renewable electricity that we won’t mind using a process that throws half of it away, all so that we can keep going to gas stations instead of just getting electricity delivered to our homes.
Being able to fill up your car in 5 minutes instead of 18 during your occasional road trip is definitely going to win out over being able to fill up at home for a tenth the cost, and people will want to burn hydrogen for heating even though it would be a lot cheaper and more energy efficient to use it in even a basic diesel generator to power a heat pump, because people just love throwing their money away so that the poor oil companies can still have a growing business and it’s not like their is an easy and 98% percent efficient way to deliver power to people’s homes, that would just be ridiculous.
Screw that, we already have plenty of methane from cows. Just shove tubes up their asses and harvest that.
in my ignorance i assumed that we got hydrogen from electrolysis or something
Treating Hydrogen as a fuel is a problem, but it’s an OK storage medium. Putting it next to Bromine or whatever is fine. I think people using it for flight or trucking is a good outcome overall, but yeah unfortunately the oil companies basically ruin all the good things.
Yeah, or maybe for moving container ships. It’s not quite as energy dense as the heavy fuels they’re currently burning, but its only emissions are water vapor, and if we keep building renewable power generation there will be times of negative power prices where producing hydrogen with the excess will make a lot more sense.
Unbridled enthusiasm can be cute to a point, but those hydrogen folks are way beyond that. Yikes.
Look at which corporations are all pro hydrogen. Those hydrogen folks are probably astroturfing.
85%+ of hydrogen production is currently from fossik fuels. While there is a forseeable future where solar and other green energy could be used, an immediate increase in hydrogen production would come 100% from fossil fuel producers.
So yeah, it is currently oil company propaganda from trying to find alternate revenue streams.
Well in theory, it could come from nuclear. That’d be cleaner than fossil fuels.
I won’t discount that possibility, but I think they get sold on a miraculous idea and simply don’t understand the reasons why it’s not a good idea. The more zealous one simply don’t want to believe it’s not the perfect solution.
The niches where it’s useful tend to get pushed out by better batteries over time. We’re already at the point where we don’t need hydrogen for cars and busses. Long haul trucks, construction equipment, and even airplanes are on the horizon. There isn’t much left to bother with hydrogen after that.
“And where does that hydrogen come from, my sweet summer child?”
Much more economical to store the electricity in batteries or pumped hydro than using an electrolyzer, even if you found the electrolyzer for free on the side of the road.
Using hydrogen for steel and fertilizer production are the only feasible use cases for it over the next 100 years at least, if your goal is maximum GHG reduction.
Using hydrogen for steel and fertilizer production are the only feasible use cases for it over the next 100 years at least, if your goal is maximum GHG reduction.
lolnope.
Nuclear. Every day, all day, conventional nuclear power is so much better than trying to invent a hydrogen infrastructure. An expensive infrastructure if it’s going to perform those incredibly important base load purposes like smelting, chemical feedstock production (fertilizers) and concrete production that could be handled by existing infrastructure and nuclear power. I’m not even advocating for small modular reactors (which I think are nifty but ultimately unnecessary).
Hydrogen as energy storage and transport requires cryogenic everything, people don’t realize how expensive and sensitive it is. Ben Rich talks about the Skunkworks program to produce Hydrogen in meaningful quantities for the Suntan program in Skunk Works, and the prospect of large scale hydrogen production (and use on active airfields) terrified people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
Basically, it can be done, but the risks are large without a highly trained workforce and rigid compliance to safety regimes.
Now imagine that but even more widespread :|
Erm, actually…
