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Hydrogen is not the answer. This decision will eventually be seen as a colossal mistake. If they plan to use solar photovoltaic to make hydrogen, then it's mu

Hydrogen is not the answer. This decision will eventually be seen as a colossal mistake. If they plan to use solar photovoltaic to make hydrogen, then it's much more efficient to just use the electricity directly, without going through hydrogen. They will end up making brown hydrogen and won't admit it, doing absolutely nothing to help the climate catastrophe--but they will be able to claim in public that they are.

jl6 4y ago
Renewables->electrolysis->hydrogen->ammonia could be a viable energy storage and transport system, regardless of efficiency, as long as it can be made cheap enough. Not all energy demand is easy to run a wire to, and those demands will be willing to pay the cost of inefficiency as long as the absolute price is bearable.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
uthinter 4y ago
It is just one of the legs of diversification. India is also investing heavily into Na-ion batteries. It already has swathes of solar farms and twenty two working nuclear reactors and 13 more in the pipeline .
- ncmncm 4y ago
  India will regret the money wasted on the nukes, and mothball them as they turn out to be unable to find bids for power at a price they can afford to offer. Some will be kept operating at a loss for a while, as ego props.
pfdietz 4y ago
You are repeating a common, but very flawed and invalid, argument there. Yes, batteries are more efficient than power-to-hydrogen-to-power. But the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge-discharge cycles of the storage system over its economic lifespan. For diurnal storage, you'd be correct, hydrogen is a poor choice. But diurnal storage is only one storage use case. For other storage use cases, such as seasonal storage, or backup against rare prolonged outages of renewable sources, there are relatively few charge/discharge cycles. For those uses, hydrogen is vastly superior to batteries. The argument that hydrogen would imply use of fossil fuels is nonsense. Fossil fuels are going to have to be kept in the ground in general by punishing legal sanction. What makes production of hydrogen somehow immune to that?
- ben_w 4y ago
  The best thing hydrogen has going for it is that it’s easy to scale up without needing significant increases in mining and processing various minerals. If you are willing to increase mining, and want the cheapest solution, and you can ignore or solve geopolitics, the “best” solution is neither hydrogen or batteries, it’s to make a several square meter cross-section HVDC loops around the planet, because nighttime winter is never more than 20 Mm from daytime summer and the losses are low enough that it is still worthwhile. But: you probably still want hydrogen and batteries for the vehicles, and vehicles use so much power that solving transport almost automatically gives you enough used parts to build the storage capacity for the electricity grid, and that even with batteries (and over-provisioning PV, which is fine because of how cheap it is), there would be enough storage for winter.
  - WJW 4y ago
    > and you can ignore or solve geopolitics That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :) I agree though, in a thousand years there will be a worldwide electricity grid that takes care of the "big picture" energy flows; hydrogen will be created as needed to serve as chemical feedstock to make eg plastics or hydrocarbons for specialized purposes. That or we kill ourselves in the meantime, but since killing everyone is in nobody's best interest I don't think that'll happen. Hopefully.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      > That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :) Indeed! It's one of many reasons that "the best" isn't always the real best. I'm extremely optimistic about technology, but not so about politics.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > several square meter cross-section HVDC loops Let's take one half-way around the world. That's 1 sq m * 20000 km = 20000000 m^3. Let's take aluminum because it's cheap. 2.7 tons/cubic meter = 54 Mt. Multiply by price: $2444 x 54M = $132B for just the wire. That's $16.5 per capita. But you also need insulators, labor, machinery, design, and so on.
radicalbyte 4y ago
I'm not sure - I could see both India and Australia become massive energy exporters if they make proper use of their available resources. In which case Hydrogen makes sense.
adamredwoods 4y ago
From the article they're already using brown hydrogen: >> Almost all of this demand came from oil refining and industrial sectors, mainly for production of ammonia and methane. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels for these applications results in close to 900 MT CO2 emissions per year, according to IEA data. Oil refiners are largest consumers (40 MT). The gas they use is usually produced onsite by either steam methane reforming, separated from by-product gases through petrochemical processes or sourced externally as merchant hydrogen. Since use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining is not economically viable yet, refiners are trying to move to carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies to lower carbon footprint. In this process, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide formed during the ‘coal to hydrogen’ process are trapped and stored in an environmentally sustainable manner. Estimates say use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining rose from 250 KT in 2019 to more than 300 KT in 2020, and based on the current pipeline of projects, 1.2-1.4 MT low-carbon hydrogen is likely to be used in refining by 2030.

jl6 4y ago

Renewables->electrolysis->hydrogen->ammonia could be a viable energy storage and transport system, regardless of efficiency, as long as it can be made cheap enough. Not all energy demand is easy to run a wire to, and those demands will be willing to pay the cost of inefficiency as long as the absolute price is bearable.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

uthinter 4y ago

It is just one of the legs of diversification. India is also investing heavily into Na-ion batteries. It already has swathes of solar farms and twenty two working nuclear reactors and 13 more in the pipeline .

ncmncm 4y ago
India will regret the money wasted on the nukes, and mothball them as they turn out to be unable to find bids for power at a price they can afford to offer. Some will be kept operating at a loss for a while, as ego props.

pfdietz 4y ago

You are repeating a common, but very flawed and invalid, argument there. Yes, batteries are more efficient than power-to-hydrogen-to-power. But the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge-discharge cycles of the storage system over its economic lifespan. For diurnal storage, you'd be correct, hydrogen is a poor choice. But diurnal storage is only one storage use case. For other storage use cases, such as seasonal storage, or backup against rare prolonged outages of renewable sources, there are relatively few charge/discharge cycles. For those uses, hydrogen is vastly superior to batteries. The argument that hydrogen would imply use of fossil fuels is nonsense. Fossil fuels are going to have to be kept in the ground in general by punishing legal sanction. What makes production of hydrogen somehow immune to that?

ben_w 4y ago
The best thing hydrogen has going for it is that it’s easy to scale up without needing significant increases in mining and processing various minerals. If you are willing to increase mining, and want the cheapest solution, and you can ignore or solve geopolitics, the “best” solution is neither hydrogen or batteries, it’s to make a several square meter cross-section HVDC loops around the planet, because nighttime winter is never more than 20 Mm from daytime summer and the losses are low enough that it is still worthwhile. But: you probably still want hydrogen and batteries for the vehicles, and vehicles use so much power that solving transport almost automatically gives you enough used parts to build the storage capacity for the electricity grid, and that even with batteries (and over-provisioning PV, which is fine because of how cheap it is), there would be enough storage for winter.
- WJW 4y ago
  > and you can ignore or solve geopolitics That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :) I agree though, in a thousand years there will be a worldwide electricity grid that takes care of the "big picture" energy flows; hydrogen will be created as needed to serve as chemical feedstock to make eg plastics or hydrocarbons for specialized purposes. That or we kill ourselves in the meantime, but since killing everyone is in nobody's best interest I don't think that'll happen. Hopefully.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :) Indeed! It's one of many reasons that "the best" isn't always the real best. I'm extremely optimistic about technology, but not so about politics.
- danuker 4y ago
  > several square meter cross-section HVDC loops Let's take one half-way around the world. That's 1 sq m * 20000 km = 20000000 m^3. Let's take aluminum because it's cheap. 2.7 tons/cubic meter = 54 Mt. Multiply by price: $2444 x 54M = $132B for just the wire. That's $16.5 per capita. But you also need insulators, labor, machinery, design, and so on.

radicalbyte 4y ago

I'm not sure - I could see both India and Australia become massive energy exporters if they make proper use of their available resources. In which case Hydrogen makes sense.

adamredwoods 4y ago

From the article they're already using brown hydrogen: >> Almost all of this demand came from oil refining and industrial sectors, mainly for production of ammonia and methane. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels for these applications results in close to 900 MT CO2 emissions per year, according to IEA data. Oil refiners are largest consumers (40 MT). The gas they use is usually produced onsite by either steam methane reforming, separated from by-product gases through petrochemical processes or sourced externally as merchant hydrogen. Since use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining is not economically viable yet, refiners are trying to move to carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies to lower carbon footprint. In this process, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide formed during the ‘coal to hydrogen’ process are trapped and stored in an environmentally sustainable manner. Estimates say use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining rose from 250 KT in 2019 to more than 300 KT in 2020, and based on the current pipeline of projects, 1.2-1.4 MT low-carbon hydrogen is likely to be used in refining by 2030.