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Hydrogen’s moment is here at last?
- zz865 5y agoI love the idea of hydrogen, batteries seem toxic to me, to be able to crack water and then burn it later (or use in a fuel cell) seems much more natural. One thing though if released Hydrogen will escape the earth's atmosphere right? Seems kinda risky to slowly lose all our water...
- jvanderbot 5y agoEscaped hydrogen will probably turn to water fairly rapidly. And by that I mean it will explode.
- fphhotchips 5y agoDepends on the environment that you're in. In an enclosed space: yeah. In open air, unlikely, because the density difference means it rises (and disperses) quickly.
- pfdietz 5y agoIn open air the halflife of hydrogen to oxidation is just a few years, which is much faster than the timescale for hydrogen to be convected up to the homopause.
- fphhotchips 5y agoSome quick research indicates that while we won't lose our water per se, there are potentially other issues along that line of thinking: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/hydrogen-economy-might-impactearths-stratosphere-study-shows-722 https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/hydrogen-economy-might-im... (2003) Edit: you might be thinking of helium, which is inert, and so I believe does escape the atmosphere more easily.
- Ratalala 5y agoHydrogen escapes the atmosphere because it is extremely light and the planet's gravity cannot hold on to it.
- jhgb 5y agoThat just means you've invented a new fancy way to combat rising oceans! (No, in reality, we have nowhere near the power to make appreciable amounts of hydrogen escape. Even if you electrolyzed water continuously with 2.5 TW of power, which is roughly global average electricity generation, you'd lose something like 4 cubic kilometers of water per year. The Earth meanwhile has over a billion cubic kilometers of water in its oceans, so you'd need over 250 million years to make them disappear.)
- pfdietz 5y agoOnly if the hydrogen is very high up. Hydrogen released at ground level will almost entirely be oxidized before it can get that high.
- zz865 5y agoYes Helium is the other gas that does this too - but Hydrogen is lighter than Helium.
- elihu 5y agoBatteries vary a lot. Lithium iron phosphate seems pretty reasonable to me: they're made of lithium, iron, copper, aluminum, plastic, fertilizer, carbon, and probably a few more things I'm not aware of. Nothing particularly toxic or hard to recycle, and they tend to have very good longevity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
- simonh 5y agoHydrogen escape from our atmosphere is diffusion limited, so this isn't a concern. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_escape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_escape
- pfdietz 5y agoHydrogen released into the atmosphere will mostly be turned to water by oxidation with OH radicals before it can escape. This is not entirely a good thing, as an OH radical consumed by reaction with hydrogen will not be available to react with methane -- and we want that methane scrubbed out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
- hsolatges 5y agoHijacking the Recovery Through Hydrogen: How fossil fuel lobbying is siphoning Covid recovery funds https://corporateeurope.org/en/2021/07/hijacking-recovery-through-hydrogen https://corporateeurope.org/en/2021/07/hijacking-recovery-th...
- Manuel_D 5y agoHydrogen is useful as a fuel for things that demand high energy density relative to mass. Like air travel. But its use for energy storage is much more limited. Actually producing , storing, and converting the hydrogen back into electricity is much more expensive than just producing the electricity when it's in demand.
- oenetan 5y agohttps://archive.is/mpoqH https://archive.is/mpoqH
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hughes 5y agoI'm no expert on hydrogen, but the paragraph before the paywall kicks in doesn't sound great: > Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy like oil or coal. It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery. It has to be manufactured. Low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and nuclear power can be used to separate water (H2O) into its constituents of oxygen and hydrogen. This is inefficient and expensive, but costs are falling. Hydrogen can also be made from dirty fossil fuels but this emits a lot of pollution unless it is coupled with technologies that capture carbon and sequester it. Hydrogen is flammable and bulky compared with many fuels. The implacable laws of thermodynamics mean that converting primary energy into hydrogen and then hydrogen into usable power leads to waste. Does it get any better below the fold?
- yuppie_scum 5y agoThe Economist is excellent.
- jessaustin 5y agoIf you want to read the whole thing, just turn off javascript and reload the page. TFA is pretty silly, without much in the way of convincing detail. I laughed out loud when they proposed piping hydrogen directly into homes. Hydrogen enthusiasts pretend like they're just months away from solving the various threats that hydrogen poses to safety. Those problems will never be solved, but it doesn't matter. The real barrier to hydrogen energy storage and transport is that we don't yet have the capacity to create hydrogen in sufficient quantity from renewable energy. As soon as that capacity issue is solved, serious people will start using hydrogen in its safer, well-understood form: liquid anhydrous ammonia. Pieces like TFA that don't mention that are just fluff.
- pengaru 5y agoIsn't it trivial to turn water into hydrogen via electrolysis? Why not just store excess renewable electricity that way, local to wherever that power is being generated in underground pressure vessels or something, venting the oxygen produced to the atmosphere? Then when the wind isn't blowing, or sun isn't shining, burn the hydrogen to run something resembling a conventional natural gas generator... Don't bother transporting this stuff anywhere, produce it onsite, burn it onsite. Couldn't you also capture the exhaust of the hydrogen combustion to recharge the input electrolysis water?
- roenxi 5y agoI find it eternally confusing how the narrative is "this change is because of climate change" and not "this change is because we are running out of oil". Oil hasn't been consistently cheap since 2003, it is only going to get more expensive. We've consistently been using more of the stuff than gets discovered since the 1980s. There is only one way the story ends.
- eppp 5y agoYou could see the price decline if electric vehicles replaced the ice vehicles fast enough. That, however, seems unlikely to happen.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 5y agoI don't have a crystal ball, but if the demand for oil drops I'd expect prices to hold steady or rise. The economies of scale do a lot for big extraction operations.
- onethought 5y agoI’m always blown away by how inefficient drilling, refining, transporting oil is compared to solar panel to battery. Even if you include the energy used to make the battery and panels… it’s a 1-off thing vs an everyday thing.
- coderenegade 5y agoMarkets don't optimize for efficiency, they optimize for cost and scalability. Efficiency is only useful as a proxy for cost, but it isn't strictly true that a more efficient process is cheaper than the less efficient alternative.
- onethought 5y ago
- anonporridge 5y agoI can't wait for the bitcoin lightning network to be integrated into news sites so I can just pay $0.05 worth of sats to read the article without having an account and subscription for every damn publisher.
- tsol 5y agoIs there some reason to think they're interested in that? Seems like allowing one time purchases of articles for 10 cents through PayPal or something similar would be even easier, but the haven't done so(that I've seen). It seems like they're more interested in trying to get subscribers than single time readers
- hlieberman 5y agoYou already don't have to, no buttcoin needed. https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/h-2-s-hope-and-hype/bnl-economist-20211008-bb91a790a97 https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/h-2-s-hope-and-hype/bnl-... -- $0.49 for this article.
- dang 5y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28805964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28805964.
- Datagenerator 5y agoBitcoin Cash is the one which continued to use onchain cheap transactions like it was invented and intended to be used.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- spurgu 5y agoWait, what is this article about? Unless there's been a major breakthrough recently (which the article doesn't seem to mention from quickly skimming through) hydrogen is impractically expensive to produce. Whenever that changes (by an order of magnitude) it'll make a huge difference but at this point it's more or less pointless if/when you consider the externalities.
- kumarvvr 5y ago> impractically expensive to produce Unless the energy input for production is from solar or wind. Hydrogen is a great battery and can form a good storage solution for wind and solar.
- BobbyJo 5y agoThe cost doesn't come from energy requirements. It comes from materials. Hydrogen corrodes or escapes most things.
- jacquesm 5y agoAnd embrittles a lot of others. And if you want to use fuel cell tech membrane fouling is yet another problem to deal with.
- kumarvvr 5y agoMy understanding is expensive material for hydrogen production was to increase the efficiency of the system (because energy is costly and not from renewable sources). With the proliferation of installed solar capacity, and availability of low cost renewable energy, the economics of H2 production allow for use of lower efficient systems, with focus on reducing exotic materials in the system.
- glogla 5y agoSolar makes up 2 % or world electricity. Wind 5 %. Coal and natural gas together make up 61 %. Where is this solar capacity? Where is this available low cost renewable energy? We are decades away from making the renewables our main electricity source if there were massive investment into it, meanwhile we are building new coal and gas plants instead. And the electricity demand is still going up. Even if things go way better than anyone can predict, we will never have enough energy to throw it away on inefficient hydrogen, not in a lifetime of anyone currently on Hacker News. The whole H2 hype is just shilling for oil and gas, whether the people perpetuating it know it or not.
- screye 5y ago> It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable. > Last, hydrogen can be used as a material to store and transport energy in bulk. Renewable grids struggle when the wind dies or it is dark. Batteries can help, but if renewable power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored cheaply for long periods and converted to electricity on demand. A power plant in Utah plans to store the gas in caverns to supply California. Sunny and windy places that lack transmission links can export clean energy as hydrogen. Sounds like the answer is yes. My main question is how does it scale safely? An acre full of pressurized hydrogen sounds like a Port of Beirut moment waiting to happen.
- jhgb 5y ago> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable. To a large part is doesn't even need to. Even just the need for non-fossil chemical feedstock is so high that shaving the peaks of oversized generator fleet is enough to contribute to most of grid balancing. Just for ammonia synthesis at current global consumption levels you'll need hundreds of gigawatts of average power to generate the feedstock hydrogen.
- ashtonkem 5y ago> and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable. Thorium reactors remain an insufficiently explored option here.
- nuerow 5y ago> Thorium reactors remain an insufficiently explored option here. I'm no expert in nuclear power, but it's my understanding that Thorium reactors aren't that much safer due to the higher gamma radiation emissions, and Thorium reactors are far more expensive to build and operate to the point that they are not cost-effective, let alone profitable.
- animal_spirits 5y agoCan someone tell me if the person reading the story is an AI? I think it is but can't be sure.
- protomyth 5y agoAirBus certainly believes so https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zeroe.html https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zer...
- Zenst 5y agoI was pondering given the rise in natural gas prices globally, how much effort would be involved for some uses to use hydrogen instead. Certainly be good use of the off-peak spare capacity type issues with electricity production. Cost wise compared to a therm of natural gas (a therm of natural gas is about 2kg's) then hydrogen starts to become viable on price alone. Now if your able to tap excess electricity production to produce that hydrogen, then you start to become more competitive as an alternative.
- mdale 5y agoIs it cheeper to compress air / nitrogen into liquid that can be expanded or more effective to run electrolysis on water to get hydrogen and oxygen and burn that ( when needed) ?
- cheradenine_uk 5y agoI can't read all of the article because paywall, but H2 is a very very bad solution for heating and transport, but could have applications elsewhere. Paul Martin is very good on this subject. Check out https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-paul-martin/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-p... and the associated artcles (paticularly on heating). Sadly it's likely the Economist Journos have been captured for a nice long lunch by the 'big oil' proponents of blue hydrogen as a "transitional" technology (which, not co-incidentally, keeps them in business and doesn't turn all their pipelines into stranded assets).
- glenvdb 5y agoYou can get around many paywalls with 12ft.io https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/10/09/hydrogens-moment-is-here-at-last https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...
- bamboozled 5y agoI don't know if this is constructive but here goes: Petroleum probably wasn't a great application for a lot of applications either, especially considering the by-product is Co2, oil spills etc; However, we've used it for hundreds / thousands of years in many different ways and it's been ok. I don't know how long we're going to wait, but we need to using petroleum tomorrow, and be very very pragmatic about it.
- chaz6 5y agoIn order to replace natural gas with 100% hydrogen the entire transmission and distribution network would need to be replaced as it needs to run at different pressures. In the UK we are starting to trial blended gas. I do not think we can afford the cost to go full hydrogen yet.
- ehnto 5y agoIs there a sensible way to transmit as a blended gas and seperate out the hydrogen on the other side? Never actually burning the transmission medium.
- diarrhea 5y agoThere's research on this: https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2021/april-2021/green-hydrogen-transportation-in-the-natural-gas-grid.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2021/april-...
- maliker 5y agoHydrogen used for energy storage on the electric grid is mentioned in the article, but I’m fairly skeptical of this becoming economically viable. Hydrogen storage costs and losses over time are currently very similar to those in battery energy storage. But batteries are dropping in price very quickly and the component technologies for hydrogen storage (electrolysis, containment, turbines/fuel cells) are dropping much more slowly. So I suspect batteries will win this market and not hydrogen. The place where hydrogen might be helpful on the grid is injecting hydrogen into the natural gas pipeline and generation systems. That way the generation and storage (line packing, tanks) come from existing infrastructure. However there are limits on how much can be added (5% of the mix usually), some unanswered questions about what it will do to the equipment, and the likelihood that this infrastructure will be shut down in the late stages of decarbonization.
- twic 5y ago> However there are limits on how much can be added (5% of the mix usually) I think exploitation of this avenue very much depends on increasing or removing that limit, for example: https://hydeploy.co.uk/about/news/hydeploy-and-the-road-to-100-hydrogen/ https://hydeploy.co.uk/about/news/hydeploy-and-the-road-to-1... https://www.theengineer.co.uk/hydeploy-keele-hydrogen-co2/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/hydeploy-keele-hydrogen-co2/ There's a fun fact in there, although specific to the UK (possibly the whole EU): > Furthermore, any appliance produced after 1993 which is required to conform to the gas appliances directive has already been tested on 23% Hydrogen
- maliker 5y agoI agree adapting the natural gas infrastructure to hydrogen could have big benefits. There might also be a place for ammonia storage/transport here. It's a denser fuel, which gives it some transportation applications (creating a bigger market), and it's easier to store.
- nichyoung 5y agoIt doesn’t seem very likely that hydrogen can compete against batteries for short duration storage. But storing electricity for weeks or months (to meet unusual peaks in demand or troughs in supply) is a very different market. Today, natural gas (or where there isn’t a gas grid, oil) peaking plant wins in this market, but that isn’t an option when people plan for a truly zero carbon grid. All the models I can remember seeing for that situation need hydrogen storage or carbon capture - and carbon capture looks likely to be even more expensive than hydrogen. If renewables and electrolysis get cheap enough, hydrogen might even beat oil and gas here on cost.
- sadness3 5y agoIf a headline ends with a question mark, you can reliably answer, "no", and save yourself the trouble of reading it.
- lamontcg 5y agoBetteridge's law of headlines does seem to apply strongly here.
- peter303 5y agoHydrogen can be either fuel cell or modified internal combustion. Fuel cells are more economic for larger vehicles like trucks, ships, planes than cars. Fuels cell systems have potentially lower maintenance costs due to fewer parts.
- gargalatas 5y agoHydrogen is a technology that never became a thing. Impractical to use at the moment and it doesnt offer anything more that todays lithium batteries after all. Green hydrogen is also a myth.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe enormous amount of hydrogen made each year would like a word with you. Just replacing this is a massive market for green hydrogen. And it's a vital market -- the current world population could scarcely be fed without artificially fixed nitrogen by the Haber-Bosch process, which is the major use of that hydrogen.
- peter303 5y agoI saw a documentary a few years back analyzing why hydrogen vehicles havent caught on yet. All the major auto companies had working fuel cells of internal combustion prototypes for 20 years. One villain was Obamas energy secretary Steven Chu who emphasized battery R&D at the expense of alternatives. The other was was Elon Musk who denigrated every alternative to electric vehicles, whether there was merit or not. I dont know how valid these arguments are. I believe the documentary was called At War with the Dinosaurs.
- xyzzy21 5y agoNo. Infrastructure is the problem. If you though charge stations for EV were a problem, hydrogen is 1000x worse (and harder to solve). Hydrogen is a bitch to control - generally do you NOT and never are able. We only have to look at the trouble (and costs) that NASA has had and continues to have to spend to manage hydrogen without major injury or accidents. Hydrogen that escapes into the air ALSO is an ozone destroyer like freon is. Leaks are far more inevitable than with even natural gas. And for that reason you CAN NOT use natural gas pipes to transport hydrogen (some ignorant yahoos have claimed that as a plan).