38 ms·

Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel

159 points by samizdis 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
H2 Science Coalition is a good source of information on where and how hydrogen makes sense as part of net zero goals: https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ Green Hydrogen is just about to take off, and make lots of money and headlines, so it'll be important to not let that success be hijacked and diverted into areas where it's not helpful.
pg_bot 4y ago
You would need several scientific breakthroughs to make hydrogen economically viable for transportation. It's expensive to generate, it embrittles storage containers, is highly flammable, and there's no existing infrastructure that you can piggy back off of. Right now it is a dead end.
- melling 4y ago
  Only 8500 coal power plants in the world producing 20% of emissions. No miracles needed to replace them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station Replacing a billion gasoline cars is going to take decades
  - mavhc 4y ago
    We should start by not making new gasoline cars, or new coal power stations
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - melling 4y ago
      Electric cars aren’t ready. And absolutely everyone knows that, so why are we bringing it up? We could’ve replaced coal plants two decades ago, however, and reduced emissions by 20% globally
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Electric cars aren’t ready The scaling problems facing battery electrics are dwarfed by those facing hydrogen. They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China.
        pxmpxm 4y ago
        >They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China. Challenge. Where and how are these problems being addressed, other than hoping that people voluntary reduce demand when asked?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Not sure what we are talking about. There are an absolute shit ton of battery factories being build. A huge ramp up in science and research. There is also a huge ramp up in cathode and anode production facilities. All major lithium companies have announced major build out of existing facilities and building new once as well. A major expansion of both natural and synthetic graphite is being done. Cobalt is not expanding as quickly but its getting systematically kicked out from the batteries anyway. In addition to that, LFP batteries reduced the projected demand for nickel from batteries. In addition to that CATL is introducing Sodium batteries as well. So maybe you were not paying attention but there is a gigantic explosion in every part of the battery supply chain happening right now. With major private and public investment. There will still be some shortages of important materials, specially lithium however its certainty being worked on. Of course there are also improvements in safety, reliability and so on. A huge amount of research and development.
        pxmpxm 4y ago
        The gating factor for the scaling issue isn't the battery production (mining externalities notwithstanding), but the infrastructure to support them. Wave your magic wand to will everyone a Tesla, and watch the grid collapse the same instant.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  It won't be for long. Remember, TSMC do chip lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin metal. The metal releases a wavelength of light that is then able to etc ultra precise lines on wafers for chips. That technology really didn't exist anywhere 40 years ago. In many ways the plumbing problems of hydrogen are lower bars to get over. And worrying about a lack of infrastructure is also not a big issue. There's lots of engineer's who'll easily transition out of the LNG industry into great jobs working on these problems.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin What does EUV lithography have to do with hydrogen’s generation expense, embrittlement of metals, flammability and lack of infrastructure?
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      Those are all engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money. I was pointing out that it's pretty common that those types of problems get solved when there's a will. the tide is turning, there's active research into everything you've listed. I'd bet on these problems getting solved.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money You’re comparing semiconductor manufacturing, a domain so concentrated one firm (ASML) produces the world’s cutting-edge instrumentation, and so quick-moving our modern paradigms for growth (Moore’s law to venture capital) emerge from it, to building an international piping and shipping system for a novel fuel that speculatively competes with batteries. Nobody is asking if, given infinite time and resources, these problems could be solved. It’s whether the solution would be competitive with what we have. Unfortunately, this blind optimism is baseline for I’ve seen for hydrogen.
      - bluGill 4y ago
- himinlomax 4y ago
  It's absolutely essential to deal with renewables' intermittency. Of course this wouldn't be a thing if people wisened up and built nuclear plant instead of wasting it on feel-good project with less than 20% of actual capacity (solar in Germany ... lol).
  - pg_bot 4y ago
    It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. Store it in a container and let it expand later and you can turn a turbine. There's no issue from an environmental standpoint since you are converting air to air. You can build a cryobattery literally anywhere on earth with off the shelf components.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      > It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. I dispute this claim.
    - himinlomax 4y ago
      You're assuming that compressing and decompressing air can be done at greater efficiency. That's not that obvious, considering for example that compressing air generates heat that is always lost in the process.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  We will need many scientific breakthroughs for battery to be viable for non-personal transportation. Then there’s industry, construction, agriculture, etc. These areas of the economy are responsible for about 50% of emissions. We need hydrogen. Not for cars, but for everything else.
  - antoinexp 4y ago
    "Not for cars, but for everything else." While I agree with you there are some usages where it does make sense and shouldn't be neglected, it is also worth noticing that the current consensus on Metaculus is an estimate of 6% market shares for those usages in 2030: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/552/fcevs-vs-bevs-what-percentage-of-the-global-electric-transportation-market-excluding-gasoline-hybrids-will-hydrogen-fuel-cell-electric-vehicles-fcevs-be-in-annual-sales-revenues-in-2030/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/552/fcevs-vs-bevs-what-p... [Edit] consensus established in February 2020
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    The only thing we need hydrogen for is for chemical industry. And that is enough demand already for hydrogen production plans. Beyond that you don't need it. Not needed for the waste majority of the things you suggest. And often there are better solution then using hydrogen directly. For remote construction sites, just turn your hydrogen into anther syn fuel like methanol and run a conventional generator to power electric construction methods. Hydrogen will be a niche use-case in all the areas you mentioned. And there are so many more important things to do. For example, for construction, electrified railroads transporting all that gravel around rather then diesel.
- namro 4y ago
  Sustainable transportation is not about which fuel is greener. It's about replacing private with public transportation options as much as possible e.g. planning urban areas prioritizing public transit systems and discouraging private transportation
  - bluGill 4y ago
    That would be nice, but in the US the people leading public transit don't care about good transit. I know they have limited budgets, but they do too many bad and over prices projects to assume anything else.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Yes as is slowly happening in many urban areas throughout the world. Unfortunately, unlike Europe, the US has spent the last 100 years remaking the American urban fabric for the car. It'll take time and lots of capital to change cultural attitudes in the US to make car driving more acceptable. People continue driving in slowly increasing amounts even in well-planned countries like the Netherlands. In the meantime, pushing existing car uses into lower-emitting forms is key. This isn't an either/or.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  So what's going on here: Hydrogen Powered Train in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-passenger-trains-are-now-running-in-germany-180980706/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p... and here: Hydrogen Powered Toyota: https://www.toyota.com/mirai/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
  - pg_bot 4y ago
    Malinvestment
- grogers 4y ago
  You don't need to use it directly for it to play an important role. If you have the green hydrogen you can convert it to methane or ammonia, which have less issues in storage and transport. Methane is already widely used for bus transportation, although extracting CO2 from the air efficiently enough to create methane from the hydrogen is its own issue.
squaredot 4y ago
Last year I read the following post regarding the application of hydrogen on ground transportation, simple and insightful. It basically explains why it doesn't make sense to use it for that particular application. https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hydrogen-for-ground-transportation-and-heating-is-a-bad-idea.html https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
- rapsey 4y ago
  What this article does not address is however the solar problem of producing too much in the summer and too little in the winter. Using the solar energy from summer to produce hydrogen to use in the winter or at night sounds like a complete solution to me. Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.
  - whatwherewhy 4y ago
    Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles?
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles? Energy density. For the fuel alone, volumetrically. Altogether, massively as well.
      - whatwherewhy 4y ago
        Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries? I don't understand why it's not applicable to transport if so.
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries? By weight, hydrogen and oxygen creates 20x more chemical energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries [1]. (It's comparable to gasoline and air.) By volume, uncompressed, it has far less. Once compressed, we have to take into account the weight of the containment tanks, the weight of the fuel cell and the energy lost in converting hydrogen to electricity, an output batteries directly provide, a combination which negates that specific energy advantage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refere...
ksidudwbw 4y ago
Goes back to stockmarket shenanigans. Wether it's Pump and Dump (Nikola), or Short and Tort (Tesla)
jansan 4y ago
We need technologies to store electricity generated by renewables. If anyone has a better idea than hydrogen to do this in a scalable way, congratulations, you made the world a better place.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Given how annoying H+ ions are to handle, rather than sticking them together as H2 it may be easier to leave them in the electrolyte from whence they came, in the form of a "battery". Unless there's some magic breakthrough in catalytic chemistry for water electrolysis, the capital cost of all the platinum required is going to be a problem.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean the simplest one is gravity; the most scalable version of that is pumping water up into a reservoir behind a hydroelectric power plant. There's others that propose heavy trains going uphill or weights down a hole, but that doesn't scale very well and has additional maintenance costs. But yeah, that would be electrical into mechanical energy (pumps), the cost would be flowing water up against gravity. Of course, it also requires a source of water downhill and a reservoir uphill. I was going to quip about Lake Mead being empty, but that would be huge distances to cover. Maybe something close to sea, or else a purpose built closed loop system.
  - jansan 4y ago
    And you think that isn't done already? If every country was like Norway, this would be the way to go. But good look doing this in the Netherlands.
    - reacharavindh 4y ago
      There are plenty of "battery" technologies that are not perfect, but substantially better than Hydrogen(in terms of round trip efficiency) though. Several startups with sound ideas. If only Governments picked them up in war like emergency and threw their capital at it to progress. 1. https://energydome.com https://energydome.com 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 3. https://newatlas.com/energy/china-100mw-compressed-air/ https://newatlas.com/energy/china-100mw-compressed-air/ 4. https://www.hydrostor.ca https://www.hydrostor.ca
mberning 4y ago
Oh no, are wealth transfer schemes are foiled. Can’t have that.
- varispeed 4y ago
  WEF hires over 100k propagandists. No wonder you can't say anything exposing the scheme without fear of being cancelled. The bullying net-zero brigade don't sleep.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    Eh, it's moreso people that have built their persona around some cause and will remain dogmatic about it, not unlike sports fans. For 1980s "environmentalists", nuclear will be always bad, and for 2000s "environmentalists" battery electric vehicles will aways be good ... and actual circumstances are irrelevant.
gadders 4y ago
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
pydry 4y ago
This and windgas (synthesized methane) seem to be the best candidates for seasonal storage although both still with major issues - embrittlememt/needing CO2. We have cheap green power (solar/wind), cheap green short to medium term storage (pumped hydro and lithium batteries) but this only gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
waselighis 4y ago
You can try to be as rational and logical, but in the end, it's not going to matter. The problem is hydrogen as a fuel is marketable, so it's going to be very overhyped because it's going to make a lot of money for investors. You only have to look at what happened with cryptocurrencies to get an idea of what's coming, maybe not as extreme, but no doubt it's going to happen. Furthermore, with the tech industry entering a recession with mass layoffs, investors are looking for their next target, which appears to be green and renewable energy technologies. This is even more true thank to the many government grants and tax breaks for renewable energy. So sit back and enjoy the s%$#show while startups and entrepreneurs pitch the most ridiculous applications for hydrogen fuel and get flooded with billions of dollars.
patall 4y ago
Once again, I think the hydrogen ladder [0] gives a very clear and simple picture of where priorities with regard to hydrogen are. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  Here's another group saying much the same thing in a different way: https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/
- Symmetry 4y ago
  I came here to pose that same thing. Hydrogen in the creation of fertilizer? An absolute necessity, we need a good source of green hydrogen to run the Haber-Bosch process. Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. Hydrogen for long-haul trucking? Maybe, maybe not.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    The problem with that image is it gives no reasoning for its categorization. Putting the use cases on a specific energy and energy density plot would convey that more naturally.
    - sidpatil 4y ago
      Fair point. He does describe his reasoning within the accompanying article though.
  - hannob 4y ago
    > Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. Liebreich has that as a B in the Hydrogen Ladder (for long-term storage).
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. For DIURNAL storage, certainly. For seasonal storage? For backup against rare extended dark/calm periods? There it can make much more sense.
y04nn 4y ago
The only advantage of hydrogen is that contrary to electricity, you can't easily produce and store it by yourself, and thus is more easily taxable. Also, because all the infrastructure need to be created from scratch, there is no big player yet and there is potential to make a lot of money.
- Diggsey 4y ago
  It also has higher energy density. Which is important for some applications.
  - ihaveajob 4y ago
    Indeed, it's the only viable electrification path for aviation.
    - timbit42 4y ago
      Short haul connector flights can be electric.
      - ihaveajob 4y ago
        I'm sure they're viable with limitations, but my understanding is that the weight of the batteries would make those not too practical in general.
        timbit42 4y ago
        That's why they are only practical for short haul connector flights. Longer flights are not practical.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Hydrogen is so incredibly easy to make yourself that I bet the ancient Greeks managed it by accident without knowing what they'd done. This is in part because the actual scientific production of it via electrolysis predates batteries and dynamos, and instead involved generating electricity by rubbing things together, and the ancient Greeks doing this is why electricity is named after their word for amber. Personally, I made it myself at single-digit-years-old with a battery, some wire, two pencils, two jam jars, and two yoghurt pots to stand the jam jars on. Making hydrogen storage systems might not be a DIY option, but making the stuff itself certainly is.
elil17 4y ago
>The EU is also under pressure from industry to water down the definition of green hydrogen This is the key issue. There is nothing wrong with truly green hydrogen made with truly excess electricity. The article rightly praises the Biden administrations sensible policies which incentivize zero-emissions hydrogen.
10241024 4y ago
Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe? Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are: - x2 cheaper travel expenses - less harmful emissions Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?
- MrMan 4y ago
  natural gas emissions are not less harmful
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Can you explain your reasoning? There are a number of reasons that natural gas emissions (after burning) are less harmful. Not least that there is a higher proportion of hydrogen so for a given energy output there are less carbon dioxide emissions.
    - hannob 4y ago
      Methane emissions from incomplete burning, and also from upstream. Methane emissions are an issue with basically all uses of gas that has been underestimated in the past and only in recent years it's more widely recognized how problematic that is. A lot of the "gas is greener than X" messaging from the past is simply no longer true if you consider methane emissions.
      - VBprogrammer 4y ago
        Methane emissions from oil extraction aren't negligible either so it depends on your point of reference. It's almost certainly better to burn methane in a power plant and use BEVs where possible but that's a long way from possible in heavy goods vehicles for example (they will need batteries measured in MWh for a start). There are also many dimensions to emissions, global warming potential is important but from a personal point of view I worry more about the impact on my children's health from the other emissions like particulates, NOx and aromatic hydrocarbons.
robofanatic 4y ago
Does it make sense to invest in a hydrogen powered vehicle company?
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think that depends entirely on what you think will happen to battery prices, and if you mean road vehicles or all vehicles. Because aircraft have extreme energy density requirements, I don't expect chemical[0] batteries to ever replace combustible fuel. If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles; but if you think that battery prices will reduce substantially, then I don't think it does make any sense to invest in hydrogen vehicles. Why? Because although BEVs are (IIRC) a net cost saving over their lifetime, even at current battery cost, the purchase cost is too high for most people (the Sam Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness comes to mind), but if batteries get much cheaper then poor people will also be able to afford them and hydrogen road vehicles won't have a market to serve. [0] There's a whole bunch of interesting storage ideas which right now are basically just sci-fi, but unless you wish to invest a few tens of millions in fundamental research on nuclear isomers or if you can use quantum tricks to dynamically alter phosphorescence half lives from weeks to hours and back, don't.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles; No it doesn't. Electric cars are already beating Hydrogen vehicles on price. And Hydrogen vehicles don't make a profit, they lose lots of money. while Tesla has a 30% automotive margin on their EVs. Also, batteries will certainty get cheaper. Even if the materials don't get cheaper, production and an density improvements will make them cheaper. We know pretty well what standard batteries will look like 5 years from now because the product cycle is so long. And the problem you mention is equally solve by people taking on bigger loans and paying more interest instead of paying for gas.
    - ben_w 4y ago
0xblood 4y ago
>But they are a distraction when it comes to personal vehicles, for which efficient batteries are already available. Stopped reading there
- jkingsbery 4y ago
  Right... I can't say I'm extremely well read in this (so I'd appreciate correction if someone knows better), but it sounds pretty uncontroversial that (1) batteries take a long time to charge, which is not convenient for many applications, (2) the batteries themselves require a lot of minerals whose extraction isn't great for the environment either, but in a different way.
Pxtl 4y ago
I've heard it said that electric cars weren't invented to save the world, but to save the automotive industry. Likewise, hydrogen tech exists to save the natural gas industry.
Proven 4y ago
bamboozled 4y ago
Is this Toyota Mirai (hyped)? https://www.toyota.com/mirai/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/, I mean it's a production car for sale today. Same for these hyrdogen powered trains in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-passenger-trains-are-now-running-in-germany-180980706/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p... Both those things are in production, so is hydrogen really hyped? Just beginning ? Edit: How does this car get around "the storage problem" of Hydrogen?
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Hydrogen has potential to be better than BEV. Do you know how much money went to BEV and it might be written away if hydrogen fuel cells turns out to be viable? Better make some negative PR towards hydrogen.
  - megaman821 4y ago
    So hydrogen isn't popular in cars because of some conspiracy theory, and not the blatantly obvious fact that it takes much more electricity to separate hydrogen from water, super-cool that hydrogen for transport, and turn that hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell, than to just transmit the electricity to a battery.
    - bamboozled 4y ago
      Does it need to be a conspiracy theory though ? I don’t think it’s required. I mean smoking is bad for people, smoking is good ads happened but it want a conspiracy ?
    - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      No conspiracy, hydrogen is slowly getting acceptance because people can't charge their BEVs at home (50% of people in EU lives in apartments) and does not want to wait hours in a queue for public DC chargers. Simply hydrogen will more expensive, but convenient. And people LOVES to pay for convenience. Just look at Apple.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Not a very useful article, and it's weak on technical details. Hydrogen is a poor storage medium for energy for numerous reasons, such as steel embrittlement (it requires expensive special alloys for storage or transport under pressure). Hence, hydrogen-from-water is applicable where it can be generated and used immediately. There are three obvious industrial applications in cleantech: Ammonia production for fertilizer using atmospheric N2. Direct iron reduction for steel production, i.e. reduction of iron ore. Methane and jet fuel production utilizing atmospheric CO2 as the carbon source. In particular, steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen should be eliminated as a hydrogen source, as the fossil CO2 produced is then released to the atmosphere.
nickpinkston 4y ago
Not enough attention is being paid to Japan's contrarian "red hydrogen" strategy. This entails using a novel helium cooled fission reactor to generate very hot (950C, 1750F) process heat that is then fed into an Sulphur-Iodine cycle hydrogen plant to create very cheap hydrogen without any feedstock but air and water. Beyond fuel, hydrogen can be used to replace coal in iron smelting, Haber-Bosch fertilizer, and other chemical processes that require hydrogen made today via fossil fuels. They already have a 30MW pilot reactor in operation, and are just about to turn on the S-I hydrogen plant. Could be a very interesting addition to global energy mix. Strategy: https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-strategy https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str... Reactor: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-cooled-reactor-restarts https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-coo... S-I Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle Video (hypey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho
- jandrese 4y ago
  "Very cheap" is definitely on the "I'll believe it when I see it" category.
  - nickpinkston 4y ago
    Yea, totally. I'm saying it's a strategy, not a reality haha.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    The high cost of Gen 3 nuclear power is largely due to the very large steam turbine and heat exchangers that are required if you are using water as a working fluid, coolant, and moderator. From the 1950s to the 1990s the interest in fast reactors has been in the 60x better fuel economy and reduced waste problem. (e.g. less radioactive than the uranium ore in 1000 years) It was believed back then that a fast reactor coupled to a steam turbine would have a higher capital cost than an LWR. There also was a lot of concern that it takes a lot of uranium or plutonium to form a critical mass and that would be an expense. Recently fast reactors and other high temperature reactor types are of interest because getting rid of the water could allow miniaturizing the whole system and get the cost competitive with natural gas not to mention solar and wind on the days that solar and wind feel like supplying power. The stockpile of plutonium in spent fuel is getting bigger and bigger every day and the public seems entirely uninterested in throwing away 98% of the energy content of the spent fuel away in a place like Yucca Mountain. Thus high-quality fissile material seems a lot less scarce than it did in the EBR I - Superphenix era.
hacknat 4y ago
"nature.com" made me look because I assumed there was a paper behind this. There isn't. This is an editorial. No thanks. Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?
lob_it 4y ago
Underhyping methane emissions already makes junk sciences irony someone elses problem. You'll get high blood pressure if you take a grain of salt with everything they spew :p Hydrogen scaled is what makes diversification so much fun in the 21st century. Scale up or scale down? If we look at the excess energy generation with solar when batteries are full, that excess can be converted to hydrogen production with very little additional cost. On a timeline, it may take a few months to stockpile enough hydrogen to install new hydrogen powered equipment to take advantage of it, but nobody has hyped what to do with excess solar power production. Wind turbines have their dump load too. Same concept with after a few months of stockpiling hydrogen with excess power generation, a usable amount of hydrogen becomes available. We expect most renewables such as solar and wind to produce for decades. All of that excess solves a lot of the energy equation. Hydrogen scales perfectly with some applications outside of metropolitan areas. They indicated that it was only $8 million for this project. That ROI happens fast. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-landmark-trial-to-test-green/101649540 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-l... Hype is not sustainable :)
Animats 4y ago
Nature must have noticed that they've become a joke on energy subjects.
PaulHoule 4y ago
The electrolysis boom that is being talked about now is mainly about replacing fossil-fuel derived hydrogen with green hydrogen for industrial processes, not about using hydrogen to store energy or replace fuels other than special cases such as very high temperature flames.
seltzered_ 4y ago
The editorial seemingly misses some other issues with hydrogen production. Other issues I've seen are: - Water availability for hydrogen production: a recent article I saw was "Green hydrogen revolution risks dying of thirst" https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolution-risks-dying-thirst-2022-10-05/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolut... - touches on water availability in South Australia, and areas depending on desalination - Energy availability for hydrogen production: Recently heard Europe would still have to import hydrogen ( e.g. Germany would have to import 70% of hydrogen ) : https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 - The Great Simplification interview between Nate Hagens & Sebastian Heitmann
- rgmerk 4y ago
  Water availability is a red herring IMO. Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen. A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric ton. There's about 111 kilograms of hydrogen in a metric ton of water. Even assuming only 50% of that ends up as saleable hydrogen, you're still talking less than 3c of desalination cost for every kg of hydrogen you produce. The other thing to keep in mind here is that hydrogen production occur only at places and at times where energy is very cheap, so the energy inputs to the desal plant should also be very cheap, pushing down the cost of desalination.
  - voxelghost 4y ago
    1) The energy cost of the desalination would have to be added to the energy budget of the hydrogen production. 2) The atomic weight ratio of oxygen to hydrogen is something like 16 to 1, even with H2 and O1 you end up with a ratio of 8 to 1, so about 100g hydrogen in weight per kg of water.
    - rgmerk 4y ago
      1) My point is that the actual market cost of desalinated water includes the energy cost - and probably more expensive energy than a dedicated desal plant for hydrogen production would because both run at times and in places where energy is cheap. 2) My calculation above already took the mass fraction into account, and added a generous fudge factor in case not all of the desalinated water can electrolysed and some ends up being wasted.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
We crack heavy fractions of oil apart to make more useful ones for plastics and other chemical feedstocks and that leaves us so much ethane, propane, and butane that we flare it off as waste gas. You can run vehicles on that, and extract useful work from that heat. We're not going to slow down the amount of plastic we make any time soon.
freedude 4y ago
Hydrogen production is a way for excess electricity from nuclear power to be stored. Is it the best way? In some circumstances it may be. At the consumer level, when I read about the dangers of lithium batteries catching fire, hydrogen sounds like a better option especially if a vehicle is design to disperse the hydrogen away from the passengers when an accident occurs. Some vehicles have you riding on the lithium battery pack. Now add tunnels to the mix and consider a lithium battery fire in a tunnel with toxic fumes and the need to add 24 times the amount of water used to put out a ICE fire.
- m463 4y ago
  I think hydrogen vehicles are impractical. In my area hydrogen fuel is ~ $20/kg, and 1 kg ~ 1 gallon of gas. The high pressure hydrogen tanks are bulky, expensive and have a lifetime. I think a comparison to CNG is in order. For a long time there was a push for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, and many were made. There were ford pickup trucks and police cars, honda had a CNG accord. CNG is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen - CH4. With a little fiddling, it can be used directly in a gasoline engine. You still need a catalytic converter because the high temperature combustion creates smog (NO) Natural gas was more widely available (it comes out of the ground), and costs were usually less or at worst similar to gasoline. The vehicles had storage tanks ~ 3000 psi (much lower than hydrogen). They were bulky and usually took up the entire trunk of a vehicle. The tanks also have a lifetime. They kind of worked, but just the same, they needed subsidies to survive. Now they are basically all gone.
- audunw 4y ago
  EV batteries are very safe. Yes there are incidents, but there's fewer as automakers learn to make safer packs. We had a fire in a big parking garage here in Norway. Already many EVs here and not a single battery pack caught fire even though the car interiors burned. Our fire departments probably have the most experience with EVs anywhere in the world, and they consider them generally safe and not hard to deal with when trained for it. Funny you should mention tunnels, it was recently found that millions could be saved on ventilation on a future tunnel project because there's such a high share of EVs now. There's a tunnel nearby that's very often closed because there's a steep grade and there's always some ICE truck that overheats and catches fire. With EVs that won't be an issue. Meanwhile, a hydrogen station blew up just a few km from my house. Incredibly loud explosion. Yeah, I think hydrogen cars and stations can be made safe with engineering. Just like Li-ion. But it is fundamentally unsafe. It easily leaks through fittings if they aren't tightened with just the right torque. And when you get the right hydrogen/oxygen mixture it borderline self-ignites. Many cars are moving to LiFePo as it's cheaper and good enough for most. It's much safer still. Solid state batteries will also be perfectly safe.

159 points by samizdis 4y ago

H2 Science Coalition is a good source of information on where and how hydrogen makes sense as part of net zero goals: https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ Green Hydrogen is just about to take off, and make lots of money and headlines, so it'll be important to not let that success be hijacked and diverted into areas where it's not helpful.

pg_bot 4y ago

You would need several scientific breakthroughs to make hydrogen economically viable for transportation. It's expensive to generate, it embrittles storage containers, is highly flammable, and there's no existing infrastructure that you can piggy back off of. Right now it is a dead end.

melling 4y ago
Only 8500 coal power plants in the world producing 20% of emissions. No miracles needed to replace them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station Replacing a billion gasoline cars is going to take decades
- mavhc 4y ago
  We should start by not making new gasoline cars, or new coal power stations
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - melling 4y ago
    Electric cars aren’t ready. And absolutely everyone knows that, so why are we bringing it up? We could’ve replaced coal plants two decades ago, however, and reduced emissions by 20% globally
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > Electric cars aren’t ready The scaling problems facing battery electrics are dwarfed by those facing hydrogen. They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China.
      - pxmpxm 4y ago
        >They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China. Challenge. Where and how are these problems being addressed, other than hoping that people voluntary reduce demand when asked?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Not sure what we are talking about. There are an absolute shit ton of battery factories being build. A huge ramp up in science and research. There is also a huge ramp up in cathode and anode production facilities. All major lithium companies have announced major build out of existing facilities and building new once as well. A major expansion of both natural and synthetic graphite is being done. Cobalt is not expanding as quickly but its getting systematically kicked out from the batteries anyway. In addition to that, LFP batteries reduced the projected demand for nickel from batteries. In addition to that CATL is introducing Sodium batteries as well. So maybe you were not paying attention but there is a gigantic explosion in every part of the battery supply chain happening right now. With major private and public investment. There will still be some shortages of important materials, specially lithium however its certainty being worked on. Of course there are also improvements in safety, reliability and so on. A huge amount of research and development.
        pxmpxm 4y ago
        The gating factor for the scaling issue isn't the battery production (mining externalities notwithstanding), but the infrastructure to support them. Wave your magic wand to will everyone a Tesla, and watch the grid collapse the same instant.
gonzo41 4y ago
It won't be for long. Remember, TSMC do chip lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin metal. The metal releases a wavelength of light that is then able to etc ultra precise lines on wafers for chips. That technology really didn't exist anywhere 40 years ago. In many ways the plumbing problems of hydrogen are lower bars to get over. And worrying about a lack of infrastructure is also not a big issue. There's lots of engineer's who'll easily transition out of the LNG industry into great jobs working on these problems.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin What does EUV lithography have to do with hydrogen’s generation expense, embrittlement of metals, flammability and lack of infrastructure?
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Those are all engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money. I was pointing out that it's pretty common that those types of problems get solved when there's a will. the tide is turning, there's active research into everything you've listed. I'd bet on these problems getting solved.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money You’re comparing semiconductor manufacturing, a domain so concentrated one firm (ASML) produces the world’s cutting-edge instrumentation, and so quick-moving our modern paradigms for growth (Moore’s law to venture capital) emerge from it, to building an international piping and shipping system for a novel fuel that speculatively competes with batteries. Nobody is asking if, given infinite time and resources, these problems could be solved. It’s whether the solution would be competitive with what we have. Unfortunately, this blind optimism is baseline for I’ve seen for hydrogen.
    - bluGill 4y ago
himinlomax 4y ago
It's absolutely essential to deal with renewables' intermittency. Of course this wouldn't be a thing if people wisened up and built nuclear plant instead of wasting it on feel-good project with less than 20% of actual capacity (solar in Germany ... lol).
- pg_bot 4y ago
  It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. Store it in a container and let it expand later and you can turn a turbine. There's no issue from an environmental standpoint since you are converting air to air. You can build a cryobattery literally anywhere on earth with off the shelf components.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. I dispute this claim.
  - himinlomax 4y ago
    You're assuming that compressing and decompressing air can be done at greater efficiency. That's not that obvious, considering for example that compressing air generates heat that is always lost in the process.
parkingrift 4y ago
We will need many scientific breakthroughs for battery to be viable for non-personal transportation. Then there’s industry, construction, agriculture, etc. These areas of the economy are responsible for about 50% of emissions. We need hydrogen. Not for cars, but for everything else.
- antoinexp 4y ago
  "Not for cars, but for everything else." While I agree with you there are some usages where it does make sense and shouldn't be neglected, it is also worth noticing that the current consensus on Metaculus is an estimate of 6% market shares for those usages in 2030: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/552/fcevs-vs-bevs-what-percentage-of-the-global-electric-transportation-market-excluding-gasoline-hybrids-will-hydrogen-fuel-cell-electric-vehicles-fcevs-be-in-annual-sales-revenues-in-2030/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/552/fcevs-vs-bevs-what-p... [Edit] consensus established in February 2020
- panick21_ 4y ago
  The only thing we need hydrogen for is for chemical industry. And that is enough demand already for hydrogen production plans. Beyond that you don't need it. Not needed for the waste majority of the things you suggest. And often there are better solution then using hydrogen directly. For remote construction sites, just turn your hydrogen into anther syn fuel like methanol and run a conventional generator to power electric construction methods. Hydrogen will be a niche use-case in all the areas you mentioned. And there are so many more important things to do. For example, for construction, electrified railroads transporting all that gravel around rather then diesel.
namro 4y ago
Sustainable transportation is not about which fuel is greener. It's about replacing private with public transportation options as much as possible e.g. planning urban areas prioritizing public transit systems and discouraging private transportation
- bluGill 4y ago
  That would be nice, but in the US the people leading public transit don't care about good transit. I know they have limited budgets, but they do too many bad and over prices projects to assume anything else.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Yes as is slowly happening in many urban areas throughout the world. Unfortunately, unlike Europe, the US has spent the last 100 years remaking the American urban fabric for the car. It'll take time and lots of capital to change cultural attitudes in the US to make car driving more acceptable. People continue driving in slowly increasing amounts even in well-planned countries like the Netherlands. In the meantime, pushing existing car uses into lower-emitting forms is key. This isn't an either/or.
bamboozled 4y ago
So what's going on here: Hydrogen Powered Train in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-passenger-trains-are-now-running-in-germany-180980706/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p... and here: Hydrogen Powered Toyota: https://www.toyota.com/mirai/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
- pg_bot 4y ago
  Malinvestment
grogers 4y ago
You don't need to use it directly for it to play an important role. If you have the green hydrogen you can convert it to methane or ammonia, which have less issues in storage and transport. Methane is already widely used for bus transportation, although extracting CO2 from the air efficiently enough to create methane from the hydrogen is its own issue.

squaredot 4y ago

Last year I read the following post regarding the application of hydrogen on ground transportation, simple and insightful. It basically explains why it doesn't make sense to use it for that particular application. https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hydrogen-for-ground-transportation-and-heating-is-a-bad-idea.html https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...

rapsey 4y ago
What this article does not address is however the solar problem of producing too much in the summer and too little in the winter. Using the solar energy from summer to produce hydrogen to use in the winter or at night sounds like a complete solution to me. Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.
- whatwherewhy 4y ago
  Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles? Energy density. For the fuel alone, volumetrically. Altogether, massively as well.
    - whatwherewhy 4y ago
      Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries? I don't understand why it's not applicable to transport if so.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries? By weight, hydrogen and oxygen creates 20x more chemical energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries [1]. (It's comparable to gasoline and air.) By volume, uncompressed, it has far less. Once compressed, we have to take into account the weight of the containment tanks, the weight of the fuel cell and the energy lost in converting hydrogen to electricity, an output batteries directly provide, a combination which negates that specific energy advantage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refere...

ksidudwbw 4y ago

Goes back to stockmarket shenanigans. Wether it's Pump and Dump (Nikola), or Short and Tort (Tesla)

jansan 4y ago

We need technologies to store electricity generated by renewables. If anyone has a better idea than hydrogen to do this in a scalable way, congratulations, you made the world a better place.

pjc50 4y ago
Given how annoying H+ ions are to handle, rather than sticking them together as H2 it may be easier to leave them in the electrolyte from whence they came, in the form of a "battery". Unless there's some magic breakthrough in catalytic chemistry for water electrolysis, the capital cost of all the platinum required is going to be a problem.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I mean the simplest one is gravity; the most scalable version of that is pumping water up into a reservoir behind a hydroelectric power plant. There's others that propose heavy trains going uphill or weights down a hole, but that doesn't scale very well and has additional maintenance costs. But yeah, that would be electrical into mechanical energy (pumps), the cost would be flowing water up against gravity. Of course, it also requires a source of water downhill and a reservoir uphill. I was going to quip about Lake Mead being empty, but that would be huge distances to cover. Maybe something close to sea, or else a purpose built closed loop system.
- jansan 4y ago
  And you think that isn't done already? If every country was like Norway, this would be the way to go. But good look doing this in the Netherlands.
  - reacharavindh 4y ago
    There are plenty of "battery" technologies that are not perfect, but substantially better than Hydrogen(in terms of round trip efficiency) though. Several startups with sound ideas. If only Governments picked them up in war like emergency and threw their capital at it to progress. 1. https://energydome.com https://energydome.com 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 3. https://newatlas.com/energy/china-100mw-compressed-air/ https://newatlas.com/energy/china-100mw-compressed-air/ 4. https://www.hydrostor.ca https://www.hydrostor.ca

mberning 4y ago

Oh no, are wealth transfer schemes are foiled. Can’t have that.

varispeed 4y ago
WEF hires over 100k propagandists. No wonder you can't say anything exposing the scheme without fear of being cancelled. The bullying net-zero brigade don't sleep.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  Eh, it's moreso people that have built their persona around some cause and will remain dogmatic about it, not unlike sports fans. For 1980s "environmentalists", nuclear will be always bad, and for 2000s "environmentalists" battery electric vehicles will aways be good ... and actual circumstances are irrelevant.

gadders 4y ago

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

pydry 4y ago

This and windgas (synthesized methane) seem to be the best candidates for seasonal storage although both still with major issues - embrittlememt/needing CO2. We have cheap green power (solar/wind), cheap green short to medium term storage (pumped hydro and lithium batteries) but this only gets us to 97%: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

waselighis 4y ago

You can try to be as rational and logical, but in the end, it's not going to matter. The problem is hydrogen as a fuel is marketable, so it's going to be very overhyped because it's going to make a lot of money for investors. You only have to look at what happened with cryptocurrencies to get an idea of what's coming, maybe not as extreme, but no doubt it's going to happen. Furthermore, with the tech industry entering a recession with mass layoffs, investors are looking for their next target, which appears to be green and renewable energy technologies. This is even more true thank to the many government grants and tax breaks for renewable energy. So sit back and enjoy the s%$#show while startups and entrepreneurs pitch the most ridiculous applications for hydrogen fuel and get flooded with billions of dollars.

patall 4y ago

Once again, I think the hydrogen ladder [0] gives a very clear and simple picture of where priorities with regard to hydrogen are. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

bryanlarsen 4y ago
Here's another group saying much the same thing in a different way: https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/ https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/
Symmetry 4y ago
I came here to pose that same thing. Hydrogen in the creation of fertilizer? An absolute necessity, we need a good source of green hydrogen to run the Haber-Bosch process. Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. Hydrogen for long-haul trucking? Maybe, maybe not.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  The problem with that image is it gives no reasoning for its categorization. Putting the use cases on a specific energy and energy density plot would convey that more naturally.
  - sidpatil 4y ago
    Fair point. He does describe his reasoning within the accompanying article though.
- hannob 4y ago
  > Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. Liebreich has that as a B in the Hydrogen Ladder (for long-term storage).
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it. For DIURNAL storage, certainly. For seasonal storage? For backup against rare extended dark/calm periods? There it can make much more sense.

y04nn 4y ago

The only advantage of hydrogen is that contrary to electricity, you can't easily produce and store it by yourself, and thus is more easily taxable. Also, because all the infrastructure need to be created from scratch, there is no big player yet and there is potential to make a lot of money.

Diggsey 4y ago
It also has higher energy density. Which is important for some applications.
- ihaveajob 4y ago
  Indeed, it's the only viable electrification path for aviation.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Short haul connector flights can be electric.
    - ihaveajob 4y ago
      I'm sure they're viable with limitations, but my understanding is that the weight of the batteries would make those not too practical in general.
      - timbit42 4y ago
        That's why they are only practical for short haul connector flights. Longer flights are not practical.
ben_w 4y ago
Hydrogen is so incredibly easy to make yourself that I bet the ancient Greeks managed it by accident without knowing what they'd done. This is in part because the actual scientific production of it via electrolysis predates batteries and dynamos, and instead involved generating electricity by rubbing things together, and the ancient Greeks doing this is why electricity is named after their word for amber. Personally, I made it myself at single-digit-years-old with a battery, some wire, two pencils, two jam jars, and two yoghurt pots to stand the jam jars on. Making hydrogen storage systems might not be a DIY option, but making the stuff itself certainly is.

elil17 4y ago

>The EU is also under pressure from industry to water down the definition of green hydrogen This is the key issue. There is nothing wrong with truly green hydrogen made with truly excess electricity. The article rightly praises the Biden administrations sensible policies which incentivize zero-emissions hydrogen.

10241024 4y ago

Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe? Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are: - x2 cheaper travel expenses - less harmful emissions Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?

MrMan 4y ago
natural gas emissions are not less harmful
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  Can you explain your reasoning? There are a number of reasons that natural gas emissions (after burning) are less harmful. Not least that there is a higher proportion of hydrogen so for a given energy output there are less carbon dioxide emissions.
  - hannob 4y ago
    Methane emissions from incomplete burning, and also from upstream. Methane emissions are an issue with basically all uses of gas that has been underestimated in the past and only in recent years it's more widely recognized how problematic that is. A lot of the "gas is greener than X" messaging from the past is simply no longer true if you consider methane emissions.
    - VBprogrammer 4y ago
      Methane emissions from oil extraction aren't negligible either so it depends on your point of reference. It's almost certainly better to burn methane in a power plant and use BEVs where possible but that's a long way from possible in heavy goods vehicles for example (they will need batteries measured in MWh for a start). There are also many dimensions to emissions, global warming potential is important but from a personal point of view I worry more about the impact on my children's health from the other emissions like particulates, NOx and aromatic hydrocarbons.

robofanatic 4y ago

Does it make sense to invest in a hydrogen powered vehicle company?

ben_w 4y ago
I think that depends entirely on what you think will happen to battery prices, and if you mean road vehicles or all vehicles. Because aircraft have extreme energy density requirements, I don't expect chemical[0] batteries to ever replace combustible fuel. If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles; but if you think that battery prices will reduce substantially, then I don't think it does make any sense to invest in hydrogen vehicles. Why? Because although BEVs are (IIRC) a net cost saving over their lifetime, even at current battery cost, the purchase cost is too high for most people (the Sam Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness comes to mind), but if batteries get much cheaper then poor people will also be able to afford them and hydrogen road vehicles won't have a market to serve. [0] There's a whole bunch of interesting storage ideas which right now are basically just sci-fi, but unless you wish to invest a few tens of millions in fundamental research on nuclear isomers or if you can use quantum tricks to dynamically alter phosphorescence half lives from weeks to hours and back, don't.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  > If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles; No it doesn't. Electric cars are already beating Hydrogen vehicles on price. And Hydrogen vehicles don't make a profit, they lose lots of money. while Tesla has a 30% automotive margin on their EVs. Also, batteries will certainty get cheaper. Even if the materials don't get cheaper, production and an density improvements will make them cheaper. We know pretty well what standard batteries will look like 5 years from now because the product cycle is so long. And the problem you mention is equally solve by people taking on bigger loans and paying more interest instead of paying for gas.
  - ben_w 4y ago

0xblood 4y ago

>But they are a distraction when it comes to personal vehicles, for which efficient batteries are already available. Stopped reading there

jkingsbery 4y ago
Right... I can't say I'm extremely well read in this (so I'd appreciate correction if someone knows better), but it sounds pretty uncontroversial that (1) batteries take a long time to charge, which is not convenient for many applications, (2) the batteries themselves require a lot of minerals whose extraction isn't great for the environment either, but in a different way.

Pxtl 4y ago

I've heard it said that electric cars weren't invented to save the world, but to save the automotive industry. Likewise, hydrogen tech exists to save the natural gas industry.

Proven 4y ago

bamboozled 4y ago

Is this Toyota Mirai (hyped)? https://www.toyota.com/mirai/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/, I mean it's a production car for sale today. Same for these hyrdogen powered trains in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-passenger-trains-are-now-running-in-germany-180980706/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p... Both those things are in production, so is hydrogen really hyped? Just beginning ? Edit: How does this car get around "the storage problem" of Hydrogen?

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Hydrogen has potential to be better than BEV. Do you know how much money went to BEV and it might be written away if hydrogen fuel cells turns out to be viable? Better make some negative PR towards hydrogen.
- megaman821 4y ago
  So hydrogen isn't popular in cars because of some conspiracy theory, and not the blatantly obvious fact that it takes much more electricity to separate hydrogen from water, super-cool that hydrogen for transport, and turn that hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell, than to just transmit the electricity to a battery.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Does it need to be a conspiracy theory though ? I don’t think it’s required. I mean smoking is bad for people, smoking is good ads happened but it want a conspiracy ?
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    No conspiracy, hydrogen is slowly getting acceptance because people can't charge their BEVs at home (50% of people in EU lives in apartments) and does not want to wait hours in a queue for public DC chargers. Simply hydrogen will more expensive, but convenient. And people LOVES to pay for convenience. Just look at Apple.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Not a very useful article, and it's weak on technical details. Hydrogen is a poor storage medium for energy for numerous reasons, such as steel embrittlement (it requires expensive special alloys for storage or transport under pressure). Hence, hydrogen-from-water is applicable where it can be generated and used immediately. There are three obvious industrial applications in cleantech: Ammonia production for fertilizer using atmospheric N2. Direct iron reduction for steel production, i.e. reduction of iron ore. Methane and jet fuel production utilizing atmospheric CO2 as the carbon source. In particular, steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen should be eliminated as a hydrogen source, as the fossil CO2 produced is then released to the atmosphere.

nickpinkston 4y ago

Not enough attention is being paid to Japan's contrarian "red hydrogen" strategy. This entails using a novel helium cooled fission reactor to generate very hot (950C, 1750F) process heat that is then fed into an Sulphur-Iodine cycle hydrogen plant to create very cheap hydrogen without any feedstock but air and water. Beyond fuel, hydrogen can be used to replace coal in iron smelting, Haber-Bosch fertilizer, and other chemical processes that require hydrogen made today via fossil fuels. They already have a 30MW pilot reactor in operation, and are just about to turn on the S-I hydrogen plant. Could be a very interesting addition to global energy mix. Strategy: https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-strategy https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str... Reactor: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-cooled-reactor-restarts https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-coo... S-I Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle Video (hypey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho

jandrese 4y ago
"Very cheap" is definitely on the "I'll believe it when I see it" category.
- nickpinkston 4y ago
  Yea, totally. I'm saying it's a strategy, not a reality haha.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The high cost of Gen 3 nuclear power is largely due to the very large steam turbine and heat exchangers that are required if you are using water as a working fluid, coolant, and moderator. From the 1950s to the 1990s the interest in fast reactors has been in the 60x better fuel economy and reduced waste problem. (e.g. less radioactive than the uranium ore in 1000 years) It was believed back then that a fast reactor coupled to a steam turbine would have a higher capital cost than an LWR. There also was a lot of concern that it takes a lot of uranium or plutonium to form a critical mass and that would be an expense. Recently fast reactors and other high temperature reactor types are of interest because getting rid of the water could allow miniaturizing the whole system and get the cost competitive with natural gas not to mention solar and wind on the days that solar and wind feel like supplying power. The stockpile of plutonium in spent fuel is getting bigger and bigger every day and the public seems entirely uninterested in throwing away 98% of the energy content of the spent fuel away in a place like Yucca Mountain. Thus high-quality fissile material seems a lot less scarce than it did in the EBR I - Superphenix era.

hacknat 4y ago

"nature.com" made me look because I assumed there was a paper behind this. There isn't. This is an editorial. No thanks. Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?

lob_it 4y ago

Underhyping methane emissions already makes junk sciences irony someone elses problem. You'll get high blood pressure if you take a grain of salt with everything they spew :p Hydrogen scaled is what makes diversification so much fun in the 21st century. Scale up or scale down? If we look at the excess energy generation with solar when batteries are full, that excess can be converted to hydrogen production with very little additional cost. On a timeline, it may take a few months to stockpile enough hydrogen to install new hydrogen powered equipment to take advantage of it, but nobody has hyped what to do with excess solar power production. Wind turbines have their dump load too. Same concept with after a few months of stockpiling hydrogen with excess power generation, a usable amount of hydrogen becomes available. We expect most renewables such as solar and wind to produce for decades. All of that excess solves a lot of the energy equation. Hydrogen scales perfectly with some applications outside of metropolitan areas. They indicated that it was only $8 million for this project. That ROI happens fast. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-landmark-trial-to-test-green/101649540 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-l... Hype is not sustainable :)

Animats 4y ago

Nature must have noticed that they've become a joke on energy subjects.

PaulHoule 4y ago

The electrolysis boom that is being talked about now is mainly about replacing fossil-fuel derived hydrogen with green hydrogen for industrial processes, not about using hydrogen to store energy or replace fuels other than special cases such as very high temperature flames.

seltzered_ 4y ago

The editorial seemingly misses some other issues with hydrogen production. Other issues I've seen are: - Water availability for hydrogen production: a recent article I saw was "Green hydrogen revolution risks dying of thirst" https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolution-risks-dying-thirst-2022-10-05/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolut... - touches on water availability in South Australia, and areas depending on desalination - Energy availability for hydrogen production: Recently heard Europe would still have to import hydrogen ( e.g. Germany would have to import 70% of hydrogen ) : https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 - The Great Simplification interview between Nate Hagens & Sebastian Heitmann

rgmerk 4y ago
Water availability is a red herring IMO. Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen. A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric ton. There's about 111 kilograms of hydrogen in a metric ton of water. Even assuming only 50% of that ends up as saleable hydrogen, you're still talking less than 3c of desalination cost for every kg of hydrogen you produce. The other thing to keep in mind here is that hydrogen production occur only at places and at times where energy is very cheap, so the energy inputs to the desal plant should also be very cheap, pushing down the cost of desalination.
- voxelghost 4y ago
  1) The energy cost of the desalination would have to be added to the energy budget of the hydrogen production. 2) The atomic weight ratio of oxygen to hydrogen is something like 16 to 1, even with H2 and O1 you end up with a ratio of 8 to 1, so about 100g hydrogen in weight per kg of water.
  - rgmerk 4y ago
    1) My point is that the actual market cost of desalinated water includes the energy cost - and probably more expensive energy than a dedicated desal plant for hydrogen production would because both run at times and in places where energy is cheap. 2) My calculation above already took the mass fraction into account, and added a generous fudge factor in case not all of the desalinated water can electrolysed and some ends up being wasted.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

We crack heavy fractions of oil apart to make more useful ones for plastics and other chemical feedstocks and that leaves us so much ethane, propane, and butane that we flare it off as waste gas. You can run vehicles on that, and extract useful work from that heat. We're not going to slow down the amount of plastic we make any time soon.

freedude 4y ago

Hydrogen production is a way for excess electricity from nuclear power to be stored. Is it the best way? In some circumstances it may be. At the consumer level, when I read about the dangers of lithium batteries catching fire, hydrogen sounds like a better option especially if a vehicle is design to disperse the hydrogen away from the passengers when an accident occurs. Some vehicles have you riding on the lithium battery pack. Now add tunnels to the mix and consider a lithium battery fire in a tunnel with toxic fumes and the need to add 24 times the amount of water used to put out a ICE fire.

m463 4y ago
I think hydrogen vehicles are impractical. In my area hydrogen fuel is ~ $20/kg, and 1 kg ~ 1 gallon of gas. The high pressure hydrogen tanks are bulky, expensive and have a lifetime. I think a comparison to CNG is in order. For a long time there was a push for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, and many were made. There were ford pickup trucks and police cars, honda had a CNG accord. CNG is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen - CH4. With a little fiddling, it can be used directly in a gasoline engine. You still need a catalytic converter because the high temperature combustion creates smog (NO) Natural gas was more widely available (it comes out of the ground), and costs were usually less or at worst similar to gasoline. The vehicles had storage tanks ~ 3000 psi (much lower than hydrogen). They were bulky and usually took up the entire trunk of a vehicle. The tanks also have a lifetime. They kind of worked, but just the same, they needed subsidies to survive. Now they are basically all gone.
audunw 4y ago
EV batteries are very safe. Yes there are incidents, but there's fewer as automakers learn to make safer packs. We had a fire in a big parking garage here in Norway. Already many EVs here and not a single battery pack caught fire even though the car interiors burned. Our fire departments probably have the most experience with EVs anywhere in the world, and they consider them generally safe and not hard to deal with when trained for it. Funny you should mention tunnels, it was recently found that millions could be saved on ventilation on a future tunnel project because there's such a high share of EVs now. There's a tunnel nearby that's very often closed because there's a steep grade and there's always some ICE truck that overheats and catches fire. With EVs that won't be an issue. Meanwhile, a hydrogen station blew up just a few km from my house. Incredibly loud explosion. Yeah, I think hydrogen cars and stations can be made safe with engineering. Just like Li-ion. But it is fundamentally unsafe. It easily leaks through fittings if they aren't tightened with just the right torque. And when you get the right hydrogen/oxygen mixture it borderline self-ignites. Many cars are moving to LiFePo as it's cheaper and good enough for most. It's much safer still. Solid state batteries will also be perfectly safe.