3 ms·
I love your approach but I think that you've made a mistake. $70.00 of electricity at $0.13/kWh is 538 kWh, or 1937 MJ. Hydrogen has a higher heating value of 1
by philipkglass 5y ago
I love your approach but I think that you've made a mistake. $70.00 of electricity at $0.13/kWh is 538 kWh, or 1937 MJ. Hydrogen has a higher heating value of 142 MJ/kg. If you could actually get 36 kg of electrolytic hydrogen from 538 kWh of electricity, that's getting 5112 MJ of chemical energy from 1937 MJ of electrical energy. That can't be done. At first I thought maybe I was overlooking some consumable electrodes in the scheme, but it appears not.
Rule of thumb for electrolytic water splitting is 50 kWh per kg of hydrogen. That would mean about 0.29 as much H2 as estimated in the blog post. If you scale all salable products by 0.29 (not sure if that's sensible since I haven't identified the root error) it would still yield $142 of products from $70 of electricity. And good news there is that industrial scale electricity can be had for well under $0.13/kWh.