AliSaket

As an engineer I can attest that it is also useful for quick calculations and illustrations, especially at the concept stage. We also ran process “simulations” in it for fun, but of course something like SciLab would be better suited for it. The possibility to simultaneously work in the same spreadsheet was also a godsend during lock-downs.

Ah ja, dies ist ein weiteres Kapitel des internationalen Rechts - insbesondere Menschenrechte - als Wahlbuffet. Man bedient sich wann und wo es gerade passt und lässt links liegen, worauf man gerade keine Lust hat. Nennt sich Rechtsstaat. \s

Yes these are all good and valid arguments as a bridge technology used when we can’t meet demands through other, already availabe, often better suited technologies. With the power structures today though, it often gets pushed as the ONLY future. Which is what I’m pushing back against. We should use it where it makes sense, not where it serves some particular interest group to consolidate power to the detriment of us all. I mean H2-cars? Really?

no dispute there. The thing is, it wasn’t advertised like that. It was advertised as: Here’s this scientifically sound tool to measure your impact and judge what you can do. Which in and of itself wouldn’t be a bad thing if it wasn’t burying the lead.

The main problem with Hydrogen is the efficiency. If we want to get off fossil fuels, we need to talk about primary energy, not only the electricity consumed today. That alone means that we need multiple of the electric production (the physicist in me shudders at that word) of what we have today.

So instead of the finite resource of oil or gas, there’s a bottleneck in energy production and its infrastructure, which means that we need to be efficient with the energy we have. With Hydrogen, you first need energy for Hydrolysis, then cool it down and pressurize it which uses a lot of energy. And then converting it back in the fuel cell to usable electric energy is again lossy. On a good day that’s an overall efficiency of about 30% (which is around the peak efficiency of the combustion itself in modern ICEs). A good LiPo Battery (which comes with its own problems, and for industrial applications energy density is less of a problem) has a roundtrip efficiency of 98%. So you’d need triple the production infrastructure (PV, wind mills, geothermal, etc.) for your storage, if you’d do everything with H2 compared to everything with batteries.

Which means, that if there aren’t major breakthroughs, like a totally different technology (e.g. photosensitive bacteria) to produce H2 at a multiple of the efficiency of today’s tech, then H2 and E-Fuels in general have to be reserved for the applications, where energy and power density are un-negotionable (like airplanes, some construction equipment, or for some agricultural applications).

I’d add an overlapping step sponsored by BP in 2004: “Climate Change is real, and here’s a calculator to show you, that we have nothing to do with it.”

For the uninitiated: The Carbon Footprint Calculator was introduced by BP in 2004 as what can only be described as a successful attempt to shift attention and blame to the general public.

Was in der Diskussion etwas verloren geht, ist diese Paralleljustiz namens “Schiedsgerichte”, wodurch sich Konzerne versuchen aus der Verantwortung zu stehlen oder geltendes Recht auszuhebeln, um sich Vorteile zu verschaffen. Es sind eben diese, welche auch in Freihandelsabkommen mit den USA auch dem Rest der Welt aufgedrückt werden (Siehe dazu bspw. die Kontroverse um TTIP und CETA und das darin enthaltene Investitionschiedsverfahren).