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Well, also that green hydrogen is a drop in replacement for blue/grey hydrogen. The hard part is building all the infrastructure. If we can build the infrastruc

Well, also that green hydrogen is a drop in replacement for blue/grey hydrogen. The hard part is building all the infrastructure. If we can build the infrastructure on blue/grey and then gradually transition to green over time, it's an easier feat than waiting until we have economical green hydrogen before starting to build.

Robotbeat 5y ago
Except we already HAVE massive demand for blue/gray hydrogen (for fertilizer and steel), and the infrastructure for electric vehicles (cars, trains, and trucks) is FAR cheaper than it is for hydrogen. It doesn’t make sense to invest in expensive dead-end infrastructure when we know it is fundamentally, significantly less efficient from a physics standpoint.
- diarrhea 5y ago
  Efficiency is not a huge concern when highly fluctuating energy from renewable sources is involved. You either have zero efficiency because it goes to waste for lack of storage, or some efficiency through hydrogen (electrolysis).
  - ben_w 5y ago
    The options are not {hydrogen, waste}, they are {batteries, thermal storage, pumped hydroelectric, Sabatier process methane[0], …, hydrogen, waste}. [0] I’m not a civil engineer and I can’t estimate the costs of upgrading existing methane pipes to cope with hydrogen, but people write about it being a thing, so this may or may not be better than pure hydrogen even if it’s less energy efficient; but the point is there are many options not just two
    - diarrhea 5y ago
      Not wrong! However: - batteries: not available large-scale - thermal storage: potentially terribly inefficient (but as I said, yes it's at least something!) - pumped hydroelectric: where I'm from, only available to a tiny fraction of the country - Sabatier process methane: that's a possibility I guess, more inefficient though My point being, yes you're right, there's many more storage solutions, but hydrogen seems to trump most. Might as well use that as much as possible. > [0] I’m not a civil engineer and I can’t estimate the costs of upgrading existing methane pipes to cope with hydrogen, but people write about it being a thing The issue is also that the recipients would need to deal with the pure hydrogen they're getting. Residential boilers for natural gas can't, for example. New models are required.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        The deal with hydrogen is that electrolyzers cost a lot of money & round trip efficiency is bad anyway, so you’ll want battery storage for daily cycling and a combination of solar, wind, and good distribution. A small amount of curtailment is fine, in fact most power plants don’t operate 24/7 even when fuel is cheap, and you could consider that “curtailment,” too, but it’s just accepted that it’s okay to idle a power plant if it’s output isn’t needed (the only difference with solar and wind is their fuel is free). But once you use batteries and good distribution, there isn’t much curtailment needed. Hydrogen electrolyzers just using “free” electricity 5% of the time is crazy expensive… it’s 20 times as expensive (from a capital standpoint) as running 24/7. And all of this is fine until we get to ~95% clean/renewable grids. Maybe at that point it’d be worth using hydrogen fir seasonal storage. But even then, you’ll still have some curtailment because otherwise your electrolyzer is too expensive. Check out https://model.energy https://model.energy for how this would work.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
That's more or less the pitch of the oil industry. And they seem to be very successful in getting billions in subsidy to do it. That's on top of the subsidies they are getting to exploit fossil fuels. The problem is that this is just green washing their "lets put more co2" in the atmosphere strategy for an other few decades. Because that's exactly what this is. It legitimizes that strategy and they are lobbying hard for this. Nevertheless, transitioning grey hydrogen to blue hydrogen is probably a good thing. There's a lot of demand for hydrogen already in various industrial applications that are currently mostly using grey hydrogen. And transitioning more of our industry to hydrogen is key to de-carbonizing it. So, whether we like it or not, the hydrogen market is going to grow a lot in the next decades and it is probably going to be mostly blue+grey hydrogen for the foreseeable future produced by oil and gas companies and only little bits of green hydrogen. The problem with green hydrogen is that it is magnitudes more expensive than blue hydrogen, which in turn is more expensive than the grey variety. Green hydrogen requires renewable energy and green hydrogen is just not a particularly efficient application of that energy as you need rather a lot of it. A kilo of hydrogen is the equivalent of about 33 kwh. The market price of hydrogen varies wildly depending on how it is produced, transported and stored. The green variety is about 7$ per kilo. Or about 21 cents per kwh. Grey hydrogen (the dirty stuff) is about a dollar in the best cases. That's still about 3 cents per kwh. Grid prices for renewables vary widely but in the areas most likely to get involved with green hydrogen (i.e. middle east) they are between 1 and 2 cents per kwh for some recent renewable setups. So that's a factor of 3-21x depending on how you look at it. Blue hydrogen is somewhere in the bottom of that range.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It’s worse than that. 1kg of hydrogen may be 33kWh from a heating value perspective, but it only gets you like 60 miles of range in a car like a Mirai. Compared to a Model 3, which gets 4 miles per kWh, that puts the hydrogen at roughly 15kWh of useful energy. Also, the automotive price of hydrogen is about $13-16/kg in the only place with hydrogen fueling stations in the US, ie Southern California.
  - throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago

Robotbeat 5y ago

Except we already HAVE massive demand for blue/gray hydrogen (for fertilizer and steel), and the infrastructure for electric vehicles (cars, trains, and trucks) is FAR cheaper than it is for hydrogen. It doesn’t make sense to invest in expensive dead-end infrastructure when we know it is fundamentally, significantly less efficient from a physics standpoint.

diarrhea 5y ago
Efficiency is not a huge concern when highly fluctuating energy from renewable sources is involved. You either have zero efficiency because it goes to waste for lack of storage, or some efficiency through hydrogen (electrolysis).
- ben_w 5y ago
  The options are not {hydrogen, waste}, they are {batteries, thermal storage, pumped hydroelectric, Sabatier process methane[0], …, hydrogen, waste}. [0] I’m not a civil engineer and I can’t estimate the costs of upgrading existing methane pipes to cope with hydrogen, but people write about it being a thing, so this may or may not be better than pure hydrogen even if it’s less energy efficient; but the point is there are many options not just two
  - diarrhea 5y ago
    Not wrong! However: - batteries: not available large-scale - thermal storage: potentially terribly inefficient (but as I said, yes it's at least something!) - pumped hydroelectric: where I'm from, only available to a tiny fraction of the country - Sabatier process methane: that's a possibility I guess, more inefficient though My point being, yes you're right, there's many more storage solutions, but hydrogen seems to trump most. Might as well use that as much as possible. > [0] I’m not a civil engineer and I can’t estimate the costs of upgrading existing methane pipes to cope with hydrogen, but people write about it being a thing The issue is also that the recipients would need to deal with the pure hydrogen they're getting. Residential boilers for natural gas can't, for example. New models are required.
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      The deal with hydrogen is that electrolyzers cost a lot of money & round trip efficiency is bad anyway, so you’ll want battery storage for daily cycling and a combination of solar, wind, and good distribution. A small amount of curtailment is fine, in fact most power plants don’t operate 24/7 even when fuel is cheap, and you could consider that “curtailment,” too, but it’s just accepted that it’s okay to idle a power plant if it’s output isn’t needed (the only difference with solar and wind is their fuel is free). But once you use batteries and good distribution, there isn’t much curtailment needed. Hydrogen electrolyzers just using “free” electricity 5% of the time is crazy expensive… it’s 20 times as expensive (from a capital standpoint) as running 24/7. And all of this is fine until we get to ~95% clean/renewable grids. Maybe at that point it’d be worth using hydrogen fir seasonal storage. But even then, you’ll still have some curtailment because otherwise your electrolyzer is too expensive. Check out https://model.energy https://model.energy for how this would work.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

That's more or less the pitch of the oil industry. And they seem to be very successful in getting billions in subsidy to do it. That's on top of the subsidies they are getting to exploit fossil fuels. The problem is that this is just green washing their "lets put more co2" in the atmosphere strategy for an other few decades. Because that's exactly what this is. It legitimizes that strategy and they are lobbying hard for this. Nevertheless, transitioning grey hydrogen to blue hydrogen is probably a good thing. There's a lot of demand for hydrogen already in various industrial applications that are currently mostly using grey hydrogen. And transitioning more of our industry to hydrogen is key to de-carbonizing it. So, whether we like it or not, the hydrogen market is going to grow a lot in the next decades and it is probably going to be mostly blue+grey hydrogen for the foreseeable future produced by oil and gas companies and only little bits of green hydrogen. The problem with green hydrogen is that it is magnitudes more expensive than blue hydrogen, which in turn is more expensive than the grey variety. Green hydrogen requires renewable energy and green hydrogen is just not a particularly efficient application of that energy as you need rather a lot of it. A kilo of hydrogen is the equivalent of about 33 kwh. The market price of hydrogen varies wildly depending on how it is produced, transported and stored. The green variety is about 7$ per kilo. Or about 21 cents per kwh. Grey hydrogen (the dirty stuff) is about a dollar in the best cases. That's still about 3 cents per kwh. Grid prices for renewables vary widely but in the areas most likely to get involved with green hydrogen (i.e. middle east) they are between 1 and 2 cents per kwh for some recent renewable setups. So that's a factor of 3-21x depending on how you look at it. Blue hydrogen is somewhere in the bottom of that range.

Robotbeat 5y ago
It’s worse than that. 1kg of hydrogen may be 33kWh from a heating value perspective, but it only gets you like 60 miles of range in a car like a Mirai. Compared to a Model 3, which gets 4 miles per kWh, that puts the hydrogen at roughly 15kWh of useful energy. Also, the automotive price of hydrogen is about $13-16/kg in the only place with hydrogen fueling stations in the US, ie Southern California.
- throwawayzRUU6f 5y ago