7 ms·
The Hydrogen Hoax (2007)
- garmaine 7y ago2007.
- phkahler 7y agoYesterday: Germany Turns to Hydrogen in Quest for Clean Energy Economy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602407 It's 2019 and this is still going on.
- rasz 7y agoGerman bit is still part of the great scam. Their green biomass fuel plants are co-firing wood pellets(sourced from chopped forests) together with brown coal in order to whitewash coal power plant into carbon neutral biomass plant.
- heisenbit 7y agoThis scam nation has today produced between 6-9 GW which is roughly between 12 and 18 percent of the total consumption with wind and water. You are right to pick on brown coal where use has not decreased much but other coal and fossil fuels have. For current information on Germany's energy mix see https://www.agora-energiewende.de/ https://www.agora-energiewende.de/
- macspoofing 7y agoStill true today. It'll still be true in 2050.
- ccsalvesen 7y agoJune 2019: https://www.autoblog.com/2019/06/12/norway-hydrogen-station-explodes-toyota-hyundai-halt-sales/ https://www.autoblog.com/2019/06/12/norway-hydrogen-station-... We heard the explosion 7km away.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoAnd yet nobody was hurt. What do you think the outcome had been if a petrol station went up like that?
- mktmkr 7y agoConsidering the number of such stations, explosions are rather rare, although one did recently explode in the USA. It turns out to be difficult to get a decent explosion out of bulk liquid petrol. Even setting it on fire is not as easy as some think. Try it with liquid diesel, practically inert. What you really need for a good time is empty petrol tanks.
- cjbenedikt 7y agoIt wouldn't even had made it into the media
- ccsalvesen 7y agoIf it exploded; the outcome would have been pretty much the same, but i'm probably wrong. I assume the amount of KJ is about the same; hydrogen will blow up much faster and much more violent. Petrol tend to "wooooof" into an fireball and expell a lot of the energy in the fire afterwards. A leak in the petrol tanks at a station won't cause explosions in itself, it causes polluted ground water. Not to mention it's quite hard to get petrol to blow up, you need a pretty specific mix of fuel and air. Hydrogen pretty much blows up no matter what if there is a leak.
- advertising 7y agoScroll to bottom to see it’s a piece pushing for ethanol flex-fuel
- macspoofing 7y agoSo what? All their criticisms of hydrogen are 100% accurate.
- nickbauman 7y agoHyrodgen can play a huge role in energy storage in a green economy. Creating and storing hydrogen for later use, like when a solar farm is idle at night; as it likely has a surplus during the day, is a common problem with all energy grids.
- Symmetry 7y agoOf course it can play a role in energy storage in a green economy. But the piece outlines a number of disadvantages it has versus other forms of energy storage. An electrolysis-fuel cell round trip is only around 33% efficient and the capital costs are pretty high. If you want grid storage batteries, potential energy storage, or all sorts of things work better. If you need a fuel you can synthesize from the air for a vehicle that can't use batteries then ethanol or methane are better bets from a storage perspective.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoI think the big boost for hydrogen this time around will be production from natural gas with carbon storage. It allows us to decouple how quickly we wind down natural gas production from how quickly we decarbonize, and that is a killer solution.
- Symmetry 7y agoOk, if we can produce hydrogen from natural gas without letting the carbon out that would actually be interesting.
- techlands 7y agoI miss this old "Desktop Friendly" website design
- cjbenedikt 7y agoToo many people commenting who have absolutely no idea nor knowledge about how hydrogen works or anything related to it. Plus: the old "efficiency" argument should go out of the window altogether and be replaced by an "environmental impact" argument.
- KibbutzDalia 7y agoI think using hydrogen as an energy store for excess solar and wind generated electricity may pencil put as these methods get more efficient.
- reidacdc 7y agoI think the article's issues with hydrogen as a small-vehicle fuel have mostly been borne out -- one thing that seems to have happened since 2007 is that battery technology has gotten a lot better, and electric cars are proving to be a practical solution for a lot of use-cases. But the article seem to condemn Hydrogen as any part of any zero-carbon economy because of this, as though any energy medium unsuitable for cars is automatically disqualified entirely from the green economy. I can imagine other use-cases where Hydrogen actually works well. In large vehicles, for example, where a heavy reinforced tank isn't as much of a liability, like maybe a locomotive. The use of hydrogen as an energy-storage medium for large stationary power plants also seems reasonable, maybe a solar power plant could split water when sunlight is abundant, and recombine it in the fuel-cell when energy-demand is high, using hydrogen storage to bridge the gap. Or, similarly, a nuclear plant could split water at an efficient, steady "base-load" rate, and recombine it at different rates to match demand. Viewed as an industrial-scale energy-storage medium, it makes more sense. It still has to compete with other industrial-scale energy storage media, but it's a very different landscape from vehicle fuels.
- pfdietz 7y agoHydrogen storage in underground caverns is not only feasible, it's actually practiced in several places around the world. Hydrogen's place is for rare times when renewables or short term storage can't do it. This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market, the part nuclear fans seem to harp on (even though nuclear would be terrible for filling it also.) For such rare uses fuel cells would be inappropriate; gas turbines would be better (even if the round trip efficiency were lousy.)
- lazyguy 7y agoHydrogen is only useful as 'short term storage' of energy. So whether or not Hydrogen is useful really boils down to whether or not hydrogen is a superior source of energy storage versus Lithium batteries, compressed air, flywheels or whatever. > This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market It's not the 'last 10-20% of the electrical power market'. What renewables like solar and wind can't cover, without effective energy storage, is 100% of the power requirements 30-40% of the time. Solar only works when the sun is shining. Wind mills only work when the wind is blowing at a appropriate speed. Unless you produce a massive excess of energy and then store it somewhere then neither of these two technologies can ever replace traditional power generation. The best you can can achieve otherwise is to have solar power during the bright hours of the day and then massive number of natural gas turbines to pick up the slack the rest of the time. Traditional power generation plants are a poor match with renewable because they can't vary their output quick enough to match the wildly variable capacity of solar and wind. So the important part of the question is whether or not hydrogen is a useful mechanism to store the energy. And so far it has not been.
- scottlocklin 7y agoZubrin is not an honest interlocutor in this issue, though the basic message is probably sound. Examples of his dishonesty: 1) The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product. 2) The delivery argument: this doesn't even begin to make sense. Straw man argument where he claims it couldn't be delivered efficiently in the domains he suggests. It is harder to deliver hydrogen than hydrocarbons, but the numbers he quotes are just garbage. 3) Limiting the vehicle storage to compressed gas (muh hindenberg) and cryo. No serious people really talk about this to my knowledge. Metal hydrides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...) are the way hydrogen probably would be transported in a hydrogen economy. It's still less efficient volumetrically than hydrocarbons, but then so is everything else. The argument that it must be as dense as hydrocarbons is just goalposting. People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. At least at one point, the envisioned hydrogen economy was you just retrofit hydride "gas tanks" to existing internal combustion machines. If you can make everything else work, that's a fairly reasonable thing to do. Which is probably why Zubrin never mentions it. 4) Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. I think this is Zubrin's biggest fear. His goalposting about fuel cell efficiency is silly: so what if they're not more efficient on some measurement than an ideal diesel motor? They don't smell as bad either. Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
- Carpetsmoker 7y agoWait, are you telling me that someone who complains about backwards Islamic cultures and government wasting money before he even starts addressing his main point is not completely fair and impartial?! Colour me surprised. The use of emotional language and pejoratives almost had me convinced it was a genuine science article! (Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).
- curtis 7y agoIt's pretty clear that hydrogen-powered automobiles are not going to be a thing -- electric batteries work very well for that use case. There are some cases where I think hydrogen might still work better than the alternatives. The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft. However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable. It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.
- nradov 7y agoThe additional costs related to cryonics, aerodynamic drag, safety issues, and material embrittlement mean that liquid hydrogen will never be a viable commercial aviation fuel. It seems attractive in theory but ends up being totally impractical when you get into real world details. The way forward is absolutely going to be battery power for short flights and synthetic liquid hydrocarbons for longer distances.
- kortex 7y agoTotally agree. Airliners have a fuel fraction (fuel wt / total wt at takeoff) around 50%. Half the gross weight of the entire system is fuel. And that's with liquid, room-temp, atmospheric pressure fuel that's easy to transfer and can fit into every liquid-tight nook and cranny. Furthermore, you can pump it around for weight trim. I don't see hydrogen in any form, including hydrides, meeting these criteria. Not to mention, the entire distribution infrastructure is tooled out for liquid hydrocarbons. Synfuel is expensive compared to fossil fuel, but not dramatically so. You're currently looking at ~$0.64/L for FF jet fuel, ~$0.95/L for biodiesels, and $1.15/L for fully synthetic fuels eg Fischer-Tropsch. https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/192/2018/01/Bann-Seamus-Endres-2016-17.pdf https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/192/2018/01/Bann-Seamus-...
- cjensen 7y agoAre we just going to ignore the fact that hydrogen cars exist now in California, they work, the fuel is affordable, and the efficiency is fine? Hydrogen is useful as a solve for the energy storage problem in green energy. For example, excess solar energy can be stored as hydrogen fuel. Also this solves the "fuel quickly" problem for people who need to drive long distances.
- nradov 7y agoYes we should ignore those. They are compliance vehicles sold only to satisfy CARB rules and are not otherwise economically viable. Most of the hydrogen is created from natural gas, which means zero reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Yes in theory hydrogen could be created by electrolysis with renewable energy, but the efficiency is so low as to make it pointless.