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Whenever I read about "green hydrogen" I'm always suspicious that's it's a bait and switch by the fossil fuel industry. Say green hydrogen enough times, people

by zizee 4y ago

Whenever I read about "green hydrogen" I'm always suspicious that's it's a bait and switch by the fossil fuel industry. Say green hydrogen enough times, people will start thinking all hydrogen is green. Meanwhile industry just keeps making most hydrogen from fossil fuels.

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Going all in on hydrogen is a bit of a loosely defined notion. Mostly it boils down to dumping lots of money on the table for whomever wants to grab it and creating a few photo opportunities for politicians parroting whatever their sponsors want them to parrot. And as it turns out the fossil fuel industry seems to want to claim most of that. Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way. So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around. Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive. And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries). None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy. There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.
- defrost 4y ago
  > So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. What about transporting Ammonia .. that's three H and and an N .. different beast.
  - c54 4y ago
    Better still is synthesizing methane from the hydrogen and transporting that. Three H and a C
    - defrost 4y ago
      'Better' is always subjective - methane spills from a 1 km long shipping vessel is a lot of potent greenhouse gas back in the air, with an end point issue of using the methane without the C binding and creating CO2 - versus the ammonia with just Nitrogen as waste (or going into ag soils). Mind you ammonia is an irritating gas and no fun spilled in water at sea .. so, yeah. The main take home point is that the argument against hydrogen because it's a tiny slippery hard to teansport molecule is a complete furphy - there are other options.
    - jillesvangurp 4y ago
      Of course those inefficiencies multiply. You generate hydrogen at 30/40% efficiency. You generate methane from that at a similar efficiency. Then you compress it ... which takes energy. You ship it around. Which takes energy. Then you burn it at 40% efficiency. Numbers rounded up here. Real world efficiencies are worse. Multiply all of that and you end up with efficiencies of a few percent. Nice that it can be done at great cost but there are a lot of things that are probably more efficient and cheaper.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    It works, but you loose some more energy. Better still is to make fertilizer with that and ship that out. Shipping ammonia half way around the world with the intention of using it as a fuel doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view. You loose so much energy creating the hydrogen, transforming it into ammonia, shipping it around, and then turning it back into mechanical or electrical energy, which again is not super efficient. By the time that is done, you are looking at maybe 10% efficient (possibly way less). So, it's a very costly way to move stuff around using ammonia as a fuel. Nice that it works but unlikely to be a preferred solution aside from some niche use cases. And while ammonia is better then hydrogen in terms of volumetric density. It's still about half of what lng gives. So, you need two ammonia ships for every lng ship to deliver the same amount of energy. That same property also is an issue with bio kerosene vs. ammonia in planes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hijinks 4y ago
much like clean coal
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  No. Clean coal doesn't really exist, whereas green hydrogen does. Agree however that the messaging around it has great greenwash potential. That was deffo Australia's previous fed government's intent with it.
  - Yizahi 4y ago
    Clean = no additional gh emissions. Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions. Green hydrogen is just relatively "greener" than alternatives but that doesn't matter in the long run, just like replacing brown coal with black coal is a "greener" but doesn't matter in the long run.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      "Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions" Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitable in any heavy industry, but there's no physical reason it has to involve the transfer of carbon that's been locked under the ground for 100s of millions of years into the atmosphere, which is the only thing we really need to stop doing (unless some sort of process for extracting it from the atmosphere again at the same rate we add it is feasible, which isn't looking particularly likely).
      - mac01021 4y ago
        I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise. Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption? If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it. So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.
chpatrick 4y ago
You can make hydrogen with any kind of power. The idea is that it's an alternative to batteries.
- NickNameNick 4y ago
  But most industrial hydrogen production is the so-called 'blue' hydrogen. Produced from fossil fuels, because that's a cheaper process than electrolysing water.
- masklinn 4y ago
  The problem GP is talking about is the vast, vast majority of hydrogen today is produced by steam reforming, which is vastly cheaper than electrolysis (around 3x) but produces huge amounts of CO2 (6 tons per ton of hydrogen).
kdtsh 4y ago
If you’re being incredibly charitable, it’s throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifesaver because they fumbled the ball on the transition to renewables and it won’t be possible for them to compete in the way they have previously (by being market makers)x It’s not quite a make-work scheme, but it’s a way for industry and government to transition energy sources while maintaining the market status quo. Ultimately if we decarbonise and transition to renewable green energy we will be in a much better place, but I hope the transition sees the fossil fuel giants lose their preeminence. Things like green hydrogen give them a possible way of hanging onto something like model they use now. This is all very charitable though - it’s just as likely that this is a totally cynical bait and switch.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > they fumbled the ball I think you're really stretching charitableness to its limits here... (groan)
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    Yeah. The fossil fuel companies didn’t fumble anything. They’ve actively been involved in hindering nuclear [1] and they invest in Wind and Solar because it’s an ineffective way to actually displace their main business but offers enough of a hedge to collect government subsidies they’d otherwise not have access to. These are multi-billion dollar companies in a slow-moving capital intensive market. This isn’t like tech which is easily capitalized and can move quickly to disrupt incumbents [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=13f11d437453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... [2] Even that isn’t easy so much - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have remained at the top for about a decade and it’s unlikely their dominance will be disrupted (even Microsoft which lost its way for a while to Google came back to be number one or two). Basically you can disrupt legacy businesses that haven’t adapted to tech or don’t have a multi-national company in the mix. But disrupting multi-national tech companies is unlikely at this point. Hence why Meta is acting so desperate with MR - Apple, Google, and regulators are an active threat to their continued growth / ability to survive at all. If you own the platform, this becomes less of a concern since competitors can’t push around your business model. Regulators basically just solidify/ossify your position since anyone that reaches a much lower level than these companies are at today suddenly becomes subject to regulation that encumbers them the same way that the larger company is encumbered (ie the intent is largely to slow them down), except this happens to a competitor much earlier in their lifecycle since these companies have had several years of additional growth and none of the limits scale the legislation to account for that (not that it matters in practice because it’s unlikely anyone is going to fund a serious attempt to take on a large behemoth - see DuckDuckGo’s growth struggles and they haven’t even gotten large enough to branch out like Google has).
defrost 4y ago
This is why it pays to better inform the public about the difference between Green Hydrogen from renewables and Blue Hydrogen from fossil fuels. The driver behind Australias Green Hydrogen is a Western Australian Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest - PhD in Marine Biology and a few billion in iron ore wealth and generational ownership of vast tracts of land. His plan is to significantly increase global Green Hydrogen production with the next few years and to grow more from there. The export plans are electricity via cable to Singapore and SE Asia, and to Europe via Ammonia - large molecule Hydrogen and surplus Nitrogen (nuetral atmosphere release on cracking later for power generation.
- theteapot 4y ago
  Twigs has been parroting on about Green Hydrogen for at least a decade. I feel like every time he thinks FMG stock needs bit of a pump he'll yell something about Green Hydrogen ...
  - defrost 4y ago
    You feel that, sure - I get that. He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure. So, regardless of my feelings about the guy, what I see is you yelling on a forum about how he yells at the sky Vs him getting on and doing something.
    - theteapot 4y ago
      Who's yelling? Let's all stay calm. Just saying he talks a good game, but talk is cheap. > He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure. I don't have a few billion to spend. Sorry. Where's this few Billion Twigs has invested in Green project again? Maybe I'm wrong. There's Gladstone and that's about it, in terms of significant dollars actually put down by FMG/Twigs AFAICT. I'm genuinely just asking.
      - defrost 4y ago
        Gladstone is ~$150 million direct investment (by Forrest) for Green Hydrogen, so that's small beer; Clarke Creek wind, solar and battery farm from ealier this year was $3 billion (by Forrest) IIRC, and he's just put another $4 billion into CWP Renewables acquisition (which I'll be honest I haven't yet mapped - that may or may not overlap the Clarke Creek project). However many of this small projects are part of a larger $50 billion commitment with Germany to produce up to five million tonnes of green hydrogen (per annum) by 2030.
apples_oranges 4y ago
Green hydrogen: the fossil fuel industry's sneaky way of making us think all hydrogen is eco-friendly while they keep polluting behind our backs.
- alvah 4y ago
  Your snark is inaccurate. FFI (one of the major players discussed here) is not part of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s chairman castigates the fossil fuel industry publicly and repeatedly.
- senectus1 4y ago
  Please dont be this cynical. Green Hydrogen is Hydrogen generated by NOT using fossil fuels. I work for a company that is working VERY HARD to make this a major industry. Cynicism is a no effort way to discount these efforts. you're doing more damage to our efforts than the fossil fuel industry is doing by greenwashing.
keybored 4y ago
A modifier implies that there exists things that are not that. If not then “hydrogen” would suffice. So “green hydrogen” to me suggests that “dirty hydrogen” could exist.
otikik 4y ago
Anything seemingly innovative on Australia’s energy landscape is a deflection or a smoke screen funded by fossil fuels.
- aussiesnack 4y ago
  That would have been a reasonable judgement in the previous decades. Perhaps not so much now. There is a change of mood, and attitudes towards the fossil fuel industry, reflected by this years' change of government. The recent intervention into the gas market simply wouldn't have happened a few years ago. To be sure the fossil fuel industry is still a danger here and will stop at nothing to curb the growth of renewables. But its political power has taken a hit. The simple colour code naming of hydrogen production methods is well established enough now for it to be pretty hard for the industry to pass off 'brown' or 'blue' etc as green (though they will try deceptively to market both as 'good enough'). And 'green hydro' is genuinely carbon emission free in both production and use.
- threeseed 4y ago
  We have a new left-wing government in Australia and pro-environment leaders of our two largest states. It is not the same political environment that has existed for the previous decade.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
You can tell if it's legit. Just watch how sky/fox news and conservatives react to it. If they're frothing at the mouth, it's hurting the fossil fuel industry.
- alvah 4y ago
  “Murdoch!!!!! Boo, hiss” isn’t really a constructive contribution to any debate.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Found the conservative frothing at the mouth.
    - alvah 4y ago
      More constructive commentary /sarc And I’m far from a conservative. I just think socialism is more stupid & damaging in the real world (as opposed to in theory) than any of the realistic alternatives, but that doesn’t make me a supporter of the Coke party rather than the Pepsi party, or indeed of Rupert Murdoch.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    It is highly relevant in Australia. 64.2% of all newspaper circulation is owned by Murdoch. And it is here where he pioneered the idea of weaponing his mastheads to further his political and economic views. And Murdoch famously partnered with the mining industry to take down a government when they tried to introduce a mining tax.
    - alvah 4y ago
      So more Murdoch!!! Boo, hiss! then. Constructive.
wnevets 4y ago
It does remind me "clean" coal and the push for corn biofuel.

by zizee 4y ago

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Going all in on hydrogen is a bit of a loosely defined notion. Mostly it boils down to dumping lots of money on the table for whomever wants to grab it and creating a few photo opportunities for politicians parroting whatever their sponsors want them to parrot. And as it turns out the fossil fuel industry seems to want to claim most of that. Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way. So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around. Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive. And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries). None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy. There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.

defrost 4y ago
> So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. What about transporting Ammonia .. that's three H and and an N .. different beast.
- c54 4y ago
  Better still is synthesizing methane from the hydrogen and transporting that. Three H and a C
  - defrost 4y ago
    'Better' is always subjective - methane spills from a 1 km long shipping vessel is a lot of potent greenhouse gas back in the air, with an end point issue of using the methane without the C binding and creating CO2 - versus the ammonia with just Nitrogen as waste (or going into ag soils). Mind you ammonia is an irritating gas and no fun spilled in water at sea .. so, yeah. The main take home point is that the argument against hydrogen because it's a tiny slippery hard to teansport molecule is a complete furphy - there are other options.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Of course those inefficiencies multiply. You generate hydrogen at 30/40% efficiency. You generate methane from that at a similar efficiency. Then you compress it ... which takes energy. You ship it around. Which takes energy. Then you burn it at 40% efficiency. Numbers rounded up here. Real world efficiencies are worse. Multiply all of that and you end up with efficiencies of a few percent. Nice that it can be done at great cost but there are a lot of things that are probably more efficient and cheaper.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  It works, but you loose some more energy. Better still is to make fertilizer with that and ship that out. Shipping ammonia half way around the world with the intention of using it as a fuel doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view. You loose so much energy creating the hydrogen, transforming it into ammonia, shipping it around, and then turning it back into mechanical or electrical energy, which again is not super efficient. By the time that is done, you are looking at maybe 10% efficient (possibly way less). So, it's a very costly way to move stuff around using ammonia as a fuel. Nice that it works but unlikely to be a preferred solution aside from some niche use cases. And while ammonia is better then hydrogen in terms of volumetric density. It's still about half of what lng gives. So, you need two ammonia ships for every lng ship to deliver the same amount of energy. That same property also is an issue with bio kerosene vs. ammonia in planes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

hijinks 4y ago

much like clean coal

aussiesnack 4y ago
No. Clean coal doesn't really exist, whereas green hydrogen does. Agree however that the messaging around it has great greenwash potential. That was deffo Australia's previous fed government's intent with it.
- Yizahi 4y ago
  Clean = no additional gh emissions. Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions. Green hydrogen is just relatively "greener" than alternatives but that doesn't matter in the long run, just like replacing brown coal with black coal is a "greener" but doesn't matter in the long run.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    "Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions" Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitable in any heavy industry, but there's no physical reason it has to involve the transfer of carbon that's been locked under the ground for 100s of millions of years into the atmosphere, which is the only thing we really need to stop doing (unless some sort of process for extracting it from the atmosphere again at the same rate we add it is feasible, which isn't looking particularly likely).
    - mac01021 4y ago
      I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise. Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption? If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it. So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.

chpatrick 4y ago

You can make hydrogen with any kind of power. The idea is that it's an alternative to batteries.

NickNameNick 4y ago
But most industrial hydrogen production is the so-called 'blue' hydrogen. Produced from fossil fuels, because that's a cheaper process than electrolysing water.
masklinn 4y ago
The problem GP is talking about is the vast, vast majority of hydrogen today is produced by steam reforming, which is vastly cheaper than electrolysis (around 3x) but produces huge amounts of CO2 (6 tons per ton of hydrogen).

kdtsh 4y ago

If you’re being incredibly charitable, it’s throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifesaver because they fumbled the ball on the transition to renewables and it won’t be possible for them to compete in the way they have previously (by being market makers)x It’s not quite a make-work scheme, but it’s a way for industry and government to transition energy sources while maintaining the market status quo. Ultimately if we decarbonise and transition to renewable green energy we will be in a much better place, but I hope the transition sees the fossil fuel giants lose their preeminence. Things like green hydrogen give them a possible way of hanging onto something like model they use now. This is all very charitable though - it’s just as likely that this is a totally cynical bait and switch.

einpoklum 4y ago
> they fumbled the ball I think you're really stretching charitableness to its limits here... (groan)
- vlovich123 4y ago
  Yeah. The fossil fuel companies didn’t fumble anything. They’ve actively been involved in hindering nuclear [1] and they invest in Wind and Solar because it’s an ineffective way to actually displace their main business but offers enough of a hedge to collect government subsidies they’d otherwise not have access to. These are multi-billion dollar companies in a slow-moving capital intensive market. This isn’t like tech which is easily capitalized and can move quickly to disrupt incumbents [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-fossil-fuel-interests-bankrolling-the-anti-nuclear-energy-movement/?sh=13f11d437453 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f... [2] Even that isn’t easy so much - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have remained at the top for about a decade and it’s unlikely their dominance will be disrupted (even Microsoft which lost its way for a while to Google came back to be number one or two). Basically you can disrupt legacy businesses that haven’t adapted to tech or don’t have a multi-national company in the mix. But disrupting multi-national tech companies is unlikely at this point. Hence why Meta is acting so desperate with MR - Apple, Google, and regulators are an active threat to their continued growth / ability to survive at all. If you own the platform, this becomes less of a concern since competitors can’t push around your business model. Regulators basically just solidify/ossify your position since anyone that reaches a much lower level than these companies are at today suddenly becomes subject to regulation that encumbers them the same way that the larger company is encumbered (ie the intent is largely to slow them down), except this happens to a competitor much earlier in their lifecycle since these companies have had several years of additional growth and none of the limits scale the legislation to account for that (not that it matters in practice because it’s unlikely anyone is going to fund a serious attempt to take on a large behemoth - see DuckDuckGo’s growth struggles and they haven’t even gotten large enough to branch out like Google has).

defrost 4y ago

This is why it pays to better inform the public about the difference between Green Hydrogen from renewables and Blue Hydrogen from fossil fuels. The driver behind Australias Green Hydrogen is a Western Australian Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest - PhD in Marine Biology and a few billion in iron ore wealth and generational ownership of vast tracts of land. His plan is to significantly increase global Green Hydrogen production with the next few years and to grow more from there. The export plans are electricity via cable to Singapore and SE Asia, and to Europe via Ammonia - large molecule Hydrogen and surplus Nitrogen (nuetral atmosphere release on cracking later for power generation.

theteapot 4y ago
Twigs has been parroting on about Green Hydrogen for at least a decade. I feel like every time he thinks FMG stock needs bit of a pump he'll yell something about Green Hydrogen ...
- defrost 4y ago
  You feel that, sure - I get that. He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure. So, regardless of my feelings about the guy, what I see is you yelling on a forum about how he yells at the sky Vs him getting on and doing something.
  - theteapot 4y ago
    Who's yelling? Let's all stay calm. Just saying he talks a good game, but talk is cheap. > He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure. I don't have a few billion to spend. Sorry. Where's this few Billion Twigs has invested in Green project again? Maybe I'm wrong. There's Gladstone and that's about it, in terms of significant dollars actually put down by FMG/Twigs AFAICT. I'm genuinely just asking.
    - defrost 4y ago
      Gladstone is ~$150 million direct investment (by Forrest) for Green Hydrogen, so that's small beer; Clarke Creek wind, solar and battery farm from ealier this year was $3 billion (by Forrest) IIRC, and he's just put another $4 billion into CWP Renewables acquisition (which I'll be honest I haven't yet mapped - that may or may not overlap the Clarke Creek project). However many of this small projects are part of a larger $50 billion commitment with Germany to produce up to five million tonnes of green hydrogen (per annum) by 2030.

apples_oranges 4y ago

Green hydrogen: the fossil fuel industry's sneaky way of making us think all hydrogen is eco-friendly while they keep polluting behind our backs.

alvah 4y ago
Your snark is inaccurate. FFI (one of the major players discussed here) is not part of the fossil fuel industry, and it’s chairman castigates the fossil fuel industry publicly and repeatedly.
senectus1 4y ago
Please dont be this cynical. Green Hydrogen is Hydrogen generated by NOT using fossil fuels. I work for a company that is working VERY HARD to make this a major industry. Cynicism is a no effort way to discount these efforts. you're doing more damage to our efforts than the fossil fuel industry is doing by greenwashing.

keybored 4y ago

A modifier implies that there exists things that are not that. If not then “hydrogen” would suffice. So “green hydrogen” to me suggests that “dirty hydrogen” could exist.

otikik 4y ago

Anything seemingly innovative on Australia’s energy landscape is a deflection or a smoke screen funded by fossil fuels.

aussiesnack 4y ago
That would have been a reasonable judgement in the previous decades. Perhaps not so much now. There is a change of mood, and attitudes towards the fossil fuel industry, reflected by this years' change of government. The recent intervention into the gas market simply wouldn't have happened a few years ago. To be sure the fossil fuel industry is still a danger here and will stop at nothing to curb the growth of renewables. But its political power has taken a hit. The simple colour code naming of hydrogen production methods is well established enough now for it to be pretty hard for the industry to pass off 'brown' or 'blue' etc as green (though they will try deceptively to market both as 'good enough'). And 'green hydro' is genuinely carbon emission free in both production and use.
threeseed 4y ago
We have a new left-wing government in Australia and pro-environment leaders of our two largest states. It is not the same political environment that has existed for the previous decade.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

You can tell if it's legit. Just watch how sky/fox news and conservatives react to it. If they're frothing at the mouth, it's hurting the fossil fuel industry.

alvah 4y ago
“Murdoch!!!!! Boo, hiss” isn’t really a constructive contribution to any debate.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Found the conservative frothing at the mouth.
  - alvah 4y ago
    More constructive commentary /sarc And I’m far from a conservative. I just think socialism is more stupid & damaging in the real world (as opposed to in theory) than any of the realistic alternatives, but that doesn’t make me a supporter of the Coke party rather than the Pepsi party, or indeed of Rupert Murdoch.
- threeseed 4y ago
  It is highly relevant in Australia. 64.2% of all newspaper circulation is owned by Murdoch. And it is here where he pioneered the idea of weaponing his mastheads to further his political and economic views. And Murdoch famously partnered with the mining industry to take down a government when they tried to introduce a mining tax.
  - alvah 4y ago
    So more Murdoch!!! Boo, hiss! then. Constructive.

wnevets 4y ago

It does remind me "clean" coal and the push for corn biofuel.