4 ms·

Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of research. In practice it remains a FUD/policy distraction by petroleum interests to develop an en

Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of research. In practice it remains a FUD/policy distraction by petroleum interests to develop an energy ecosystem that is reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable (and profitable) future. This is research that falls into the former category, but it's presence and other "green hydrogen" headlines in the news feed is due to the influence of the latter. The economics of solar/wind/battery are and will be the driver of primary carbon reduction for the next decade, likely two decades. Practical hydrogen has the same issue new nuclear has: what price target? LCOE and many other measures of solar/wind/battery have fallen at 10 percent or more per year for the last decade, and while "who knows" when that exponential curve tails off, looking at the scale of what's needed, forthcoming techs like perovskites and forthcoming production of sodium ion / LFP / LMFP and the prototypes of Lithium Sulfur / Solid State in batteries, there is likely another decade of improvement at those rates. So like "new nuclear", sure, keep up the research, and if price competitive applications can compete with sodium ion batteries (which I think will be a killer app in grid storage based on the materials and gravimetric densities), sure, but I think these techs will be kind of like magnetic RAM vs DRAM: it simply missed the boat of the economies of scale rampup, and now has to wait for that curve to stabilize before anything competitive can crop up. For hydrogen to be practical in any green form in large scale requires a huge development in generation (which this is), storage, transport, and infrastructure. Fundamentally that hydrogen creation/transport/storage/delivery infrastructure, which is 99.99999% unbuilt, competes with the existing power grid, which likely has TRILLIONS of dollars in accumulated investment and will receive likely another trillion or two globally over the next two years to adapt to dirt cheap solar and wind, to say nothing of what will be invested in home / commercial distributed solar generation and battery storage which hydrogen is not applicable. Big Oil had a chance when the Bush Administration was talking about hydrogen circa 2003. But the fat cats sat on their hats, and Tesla and solar/wind left them in their dust. The only ones really pushing hydrogen are those and Toyota, who perplexingly missed the EV boat despite releasing hybrids in 1997 and should have been providing an entire product line of PHEVs by 2005 that pushed the entire industry towards PHEVs for all consumer transport by 2015. We'd be immune to OPEC and russia if that had happened, and 70-80% of daily miles would be electric with no range anxiety.

wedn3sday 4y ago
> The economics of solar/wind/battery are ... Its always been my impression that the only practical use of hydrogen is as a pseudo battery to buffer energy from renewable sources. No need for expensive/dangerous transmission or fueling infrastructure if the hydrogen is stored in the same place it was generated, and then passed through a fuel cell to turn it back into juice when demand increases.
- kotlin2 4y ago
  You can also use green hydrogen in place of blue hydrogen, e.g. when making ammonia.
tuatoru 4y ago
Electrolysis at scale has to happen for green hydrogen to replace coking coal in iron smelting/steelmaking (~9% of global carbon emissions)[1] and to replace steam reformation of fossil methane for making ammonia, for fertilizer (~1%). Those applications don't require an elaborate transport infrastructure; just that the plants be located near large PV farms or vice versa. Why write "trillions" in capital letters? Is it supposed to be impressive? A trillion dollars is one percent of global GDP. Oil, fossil gas, and coal extraction cost 5 TRILLION dollars a year, and the infrastructure for their use (vehicles, boilers, etc.) cost TRILLIONS more. And that's just to offset depreciation. 1. An alternative to using hydrogen for iron smelting is direct electrolysis of molten iron ore, but that is at early research stages. It can't be rolled out globally in the next four decades; development will take longer than that.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Because current investment in hydrogen infrastructure is likely ONE MILLIONTH of that ... or more. As in it is so far behind that there is no feasible way to catch up. But mostly ecause numbers with lots of zeros are important to keep in mind.
  - tuatoru 4y ago
    If it's growing at tenfold per year, that's only six years' growth. I don't know what the actual growth rate is, but I don't think there's cause for concern, except to coal miners. Edit: there aren't any material limitations. The current hotness is proton-exchange membrane technology; the coming thing is solid oxide electrolysis (promises lower cost); the century-old technology (that has been ignored for most of that time, so hasn't been properly cost-optimised) is alkaline electrolysis using caustic potash or caustic soda. Alkaline is slightly higher cost, but as I said no significant effort has been put into it for a while. There is no way we can ever run out of sodium.

wedn3sday 4y ago

> The economics of solar/wind/battery are ... Its always been my impression that the only practical use of hydrogen is as a pseudo battery to buffer energy from renewable sources. No need for expensive/dangerous transmission or fueling infrastructure if the hydrogen is stored in the same place it was generated, and then passed through a fuel cell to turn it back into juice when demand increases.

kotlin2 4y ago
You can also use green hydrogen in place of blue hydrogen, e.g. when making ammonia.

tuatoru 4y ago

Electrolysis at scale has to happen for green hydrogen to replace coking coal in iron smelting/steelmaking (~9% of global carbon emissions)[1] and to replace steam reformation of fossil methane for making ammonia, for fertilizer (~1%). Those applications don't require an elaborate transport infrastructure; just that the plants be located near large PV farms or vice versa. Why write "trillions" in capital letters? Is it supposed to be impressive? A trillion dollars is one percent of global GDP. Oil, fossil gas, and coal extraction cost 5 TRILLION dollars a year, and the infrastructure for their use (vehicles, boilers, etc.) cost TRILLIONS more. And that's just to offset depreciation. 1. An alternative to using hydrogen for iron smelting is direct electrolysis of molten iron ore, but that is at early research stages. It can't be rolled out globally in the next four decades; development will take longer than that.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Because current investment in hydrogen infrastructure is likely ONE MILLIONTH of that ... or more. As in it is so far behind that there is no feasible way to catch up. But mostly ecause numbers with lots of zeros are important to keep in mind.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  If it's growing at tenfold per year, that's only six years' growth. I don't know what the actual growth rate is, but I don't think there's cause for concern, except to coal miners. Edit: there aren't any material limitations. The current hotness is proton-exchange membrane technology; the coming thing is solid oxide electrolysis (promises lower cost); the century-old technology (that has been ignored for most of that time, so hasn't been properly cost-optimised) is alkaline electrolysis using caustic potash or caustic soda. Alkaline is slightly higher cost, but as I said no significant effort has been put into it for a while. There is no way we can ever run out of sodium.