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I think we're going to see a diversification in energy storage and power delivery systems for different applications. There's lots of uses for hydrogen beyond r

I think we're going to see a diversification in energy storage and power delivery systems for different applications. There's lots of uses for hydrogen beyond running your passenger car. It's a feedstock into a lot of chemistry (hydrogenating food, making fertilizer, reducing ores) as well as various high temperature processes. It looks like you can blend it at some modest proportion into existing natural gas infrastructure to lighten its environmental burden somewhat. Closer to my personal sphere, I'd be interested in using it for longer-term energy storage. It'd be amazing to be able to have some onsite high pressure or even cryogenic storage of hydrogen to be able to store a summer solar surplus for use in the winter. And yes, that's in addition to batteries to handle short term (hours up to maybe a week) of generation/load mismatches. I'd probably want to turn some back into electricity, but I'd be happy to simply burn a bunch too.

smegger001 6y ago
>Closer to my personal sphere, I'd be interested in using it for longer-term energy storage. It'd be amazing to be able to have some onsite high pressure or even cryogenic storage of hydrogen to be able to store a summer solar surplus for use in the winter. Hydrogen really doesn't like to be stored though. It also ruins any storage vessel it is kept in long term. You see Hydrogen is the smallest atom, small enough to fit between atoms of other materiel. and it will work its way through materials and sometimes bonding with the material sometimes just escaping, this creates a spoilage of the materiel the holding vessel is made of resulting in hydrogen embrittlement, creation of cracks and voids inside the metal, About the only materiel we believe to be immune are carbon fullerenes and graphene. Which we have had problems producing at scale. as for cryonic storing it you are just adding another energy cost to they system because you are spending more energy still to chill the hydrogen >It looks like you can blend it at some modest proportion into existing natural gas infrastructure to lighten its environmental burden somewhat. and this makes less since. You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas.
- zbrozek 6y ago
  > Hydrogen really doesn't like to be stored though. It also ruins any storage vessel it is kept in long term. It's true that it's the smallest atom, but it's not the smallest molecule. Helium is more prone to escapement since it's not diatomic. Doing a bit of research it looks like aluminum is actually a fine container for pressurized hydrogen (low permeation rates, low embrittlement). You do need to reinforce it (e.g., composite wrapping) if you want to go to high pressures. >and this makes less since. FYI, s/since/sense I think you're over-indexing on efficiency. That's not the only metric that influences success. Suppose that we have an overabundance of intermittent sources of electricity (e.g., wind and solar). Right now there's not much you can do to store it. Batteries are great for smoothing demand over hours or days, but they're quite far from smoothing demand over weeks or months. So if you're able to cheaply overproduce electricity, it doesn't really matter if your storage process is not particularly efficient. Even at fairly low efficiencies, it's more useful than throwing it away so long as the capital cost of the conversion equipment is low enough to tolerate the intermittency. As for the cryogenic storage adding an additional efficiency hit - yes, correct. But there's an intercept of marginal cost, storage density, and efficiency where it will be economical to do it. The technology question is if we can deliver that intercept at a lower total cost than other alternatives. One thing that's really attractive about hydrogen is that the costs are not the processed media. Batteries are full of expensive to mine and refine materials and their storage capacity is more-or-less directly tied to the quantities of used materials. With hydrogen production the media are water and space, both of which are almost free in many contexts. Vehicles aren't really one of them because volume is precious, but for stationary applications it's a completely different story.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >and this makes less since. >You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas. I think you are missing something or are lacking in creativity. By this logic we shouldn't use batteries either because the energy you get out of the batteries is always less than the energy you put in. Also, where are you introducing additional natural gas? It's merely meant to be used as a temporary storage technology to allow a greater renewable share. To be more blunt. Investments into storage technologies allow more renewables to be introduced into an electric grid. Nobody cares about the efficiency because that was never the goal in the first place. The goal is reducing the usage of fossil fuels to an absolute minimum and that means using less natural gas, despite the inefficiency.

smegger001 6y ago

>Closer to my personal sphere, I'd be interested in using it for longer-term energy storage. It'd be amazing to be able to have some onsite high pressure or even cryogenic storage of hydrogen to be able to store a summer solar surplus for use in the winter. Hydrogen really doesn't like to be stored though. It also ruins any storage vessel it is kept in long term. You see Hydrogen is the smallest atom, small enough to fit between atoms of other materiel. and it will work its way through materials and sometimes bonding with the material sometimes just escaping, this creates a spoilage of the materiel the holding vessel is made of resulting in hydrogen embrittlement, creation of cracks and voids inside the metal, About the only materiel we believe to be immune are carbon fullerenes and graphene. Which we have had problems producing at scale. as for cryonic storing it you are just adding another energy cost to they system because you are spending more energy still to chill the hydrogen >It looks like you can blend it at some modest proportion into existing natural gas infrastructure to lighten its environmental burden somewhat. and this makes less since. You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas.

zbrozek 6y ago
> Hydrogen really doesn't like to be stored though. It also ruins any storage vessel it is kept in long term. It's true that it's the smallest atom, but it's not the smallest molecule. Helium is more prone to escapement since it's not diatomic. Doing a bit of research it looks like aluminum is actually a fine container for pressurized hydrogen (low permeation rates, low embrittlement). You do need to reinforce it (e.g., composite wrapping) if you want to go to high pressures. >and this makes less since. FYI, s/since/sense I think you're over-indexing on efficiency. That's not the only metric that influences success. Suppose that we have an overabundance of intermittent sources of electricity (e.g., wind and solar). Right now there's not much you can do to store it. Batteries are great for smoothing demand over hours or days, but they're quite far from smoothing demand over weeks or months. So if you're able to cheaply overproduce electricity, it doesn't really matter if your storage process is not particularly efficient. Even at fairly low efficiencies, it's more useful than throwing it away so long as the capital cost of the conversion equipment is low enough to tolerate the intermittency. As for the cryogenic storage adding an additional efficiency hit - yes, correct. But there's an intercept of marginal cost, storage density, and efficiency where it will be economical to do it. The technology question is if we can deliver that intercept at a lower total cost than other alternatives. One thing that's really attractive about hydrogen is that the costs are not the processed media. Batteries are full of expensive to mine and refine materials and their storage capacity is more-or-less directly tied to the quantities of used materials. With hydrogen production the media are water and space, both of which are almost free in many contexts. Vehicles aren't really one of them because volume is precious, but for stationary applications it's a completely different story.
imtringued 6y ago
>and this makes less since. >You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas. I think you are missing something or are lacking in creativity. By this logic we shouldn't use batteries either because the energy you get out of the batteries is always less than the energy you put in. Also, where are you introducing additional natural gas? It's merely meant to be used as a temporary storage technology to allow a greater renewable share. To be more blunt. Investments into storage technologies allow more renewables to be introduced into an electric grid. Nobody cares about the efficiency because that was never the goal in the first place. The goal is reducing the usage of fossil fuels to an absolute minimum and that means using less natural gas, despite the inefficiency.