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"Production of anything, including hydrogen produces a lot of additional emissions" Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitab

"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.
- aussiesnack 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. That's "green hydrogen" by definition - ie. what this article & discussion is all about. The gp is simply mistaken, and the coal analogy is ridiculous. Whether green hydro turns out to be economic/scalable is a separate matter.

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.

aussiesnack 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. That's "green hydrogen" by definition - ie. what this article & discussion is all about. The gp is simply mistaken, and the coal analogy is ridiculous. Whether green hydro turns out to be economic/scalable is a separate matter.