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Where are we going to use this hydrogen, that it would be cheaper than just using electricity directly? Lots of people in the UK use methane gas for heating. T

by ajb 4y ago

Where are we going to use this hydrogen, that it would be cheaper than just using electricity directly? Lots of people in the UK use methane gas for heating. This is cheaper than heating with electricity (using standard electric heaters). There is talk of replacing the boilers with ones that can run off hydrogen. But even if the hydrogen is generated at 100% efficiency, surely it can be no cheaper than using the electricity directly, and since it won't be 100% efficient, it must be more expensive. And that's without taking into account the gain from using heat pumps, as opposed to directly creating heat. The other main use of gas is to create electricity! So where will this hydrogen be used?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ben_w 4y ago
Between about 2000 and 2010 I kept seeing people say "well actually hydrogen isn't a power source it's a just a storage mechanism", since about 2010 I keep seeing people say "oh we can't possibly get to 100% renewables, storage isn't a solved problem". And back in the 80s and 90s, the US was regularly making 3.5 GWh hydrogen tanks fly hypersonic while attached to strong enough pumps that it could've powered an entire medium-sized European country for the 500 seconds it took to empty the tank, and they didn't bother to make them reusable. So yeah, I recon it will be used for heating and power. Not 100% sure because it has competition from batteries, pumped hydro, and a global power grid, but it's certainly viable and the competition will take time.
- arghnoname 4y ago
  Despite the many challenges, I like hydrogen as part of the solution to this stuff. It's easy to produce with commonly available inputs. If we had efficient central energy generation, it's a way of making that energy transportable. When burned (or used in a fuel cell) at the point of use, it burns clean. I suspect the fears about its volatility are manageable. All concentrated forms of energy are dangerous. The issues with containing it and improving its density, I'm not sure. I'm glad we're not just 100% going with batteries. With all of these technologies there's a lot of ??? between here and panacea. I just wish this attitude I see that this is an easy problem and we're going to invent our way out of the energy situation in a few years are a bit glib. The benefits of traditional energy forms are immense. The externalities can no longer be ignored, but we have an immense challenge to get even near parity in a general way. I think we'd do better to more soberly assess the situation. Just to be clear, I'm agreeing with you, but there's a lot of untold story in how we get to the "it will be used for heating and power" bit.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  hydrogen is a power source, but green hydrogen isn't a power source.
arghnoname 4y ago
Your line of reasoning is the one I always take on these sorts of things. If it takes X input energy to make energy saving Y, if Y is not significantly more efficient than X, it's probably a net loss. A lot of green stuff ends up being much less cheap/green if one looks at the total cost and environmental impact of the thing over its lifetime (including efficiency loss over time, mineral extraction, labor, electrical source, etc). Energy has always been an expense people want to minimize. There's not a ton of low hanging fruit here.
joshuahaglund 4y ago
Industrial chemistry. Steel making uses coke to reduce ore but could use hydrogen if it was cheap enough. Fertilizer like ammonia (NH3) is produced with those H's coming from methane, releasing carbon. If it's nearly 100% efficient it becomes a low loss battery. Floating turbines could generate hydrogen in periods of low demand and send to a floating compressor and storage system to be used for energy generation or chemistry or airships, whatever
TheDudeMan 4y ago
Zepelins and rockets?
accurrent 4y ago
The country I live in is very small and has no natural resources. We rely on having oil shipped to us. From our point of view replacing oil with hydrogen would be an improvement. Due to various geopolitical and geographic issues relying on electric cables to supply us with power from our neighbors may not be a viable option.
likpok 4y ago
There’s a number of industrial processes that require higher temperatures than you can easily get from electricity. Replacing that with burning green hydrogen lets you decarbonize them. Even if you can replace a furnace with an electric one, it may be easier and cheaper to replace a process burning gas with one burning hydrogen. You can also use the hydrogen as a battery to move electricity into the future (with losses). It is of course possible that there are better options for all of this other places, or that this process will not scale up well. And hydrogen has a lot of complicated logistics — storage and shipping are harder than larger gases. But a source of cheap green flammable gas has a bunch of potential applications.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
The oxygen byproduct does not figure favorably unless it can more than pay for itself. Seems like the same amount of electricity will always have more energy than the amount of hydrogen it can be turned into. Takes theoretically a minimum of 39 kwh of electricity to make 1 kg of H2. Decently efficient processes still use up 48 kwh so far to make 1 kg of H2 since they are not perfect. 1 kg H2 yields 120 to 140 MJ when burned or probably the lower of 33 to 39 kwh depending on how you calculate the heat. Keeping in mind the only way to get 39 kwh back out is if the byproduct oxygen actually consumed none of the electricity during the gas production.[0] Probably quite a bit lower for domestic heating due to losses out of exhaust flues that are necessary. Indoor heating using the same electricity will always be more efficient than turning the electricity to hydrogen first. [0] didn't calculate that far myself to be sure.
elihu 4y ago
Someone else mentioned ammonia, steel, and similar industrial chemistry applications, but another use case is transportation. I think regular ground transportation is going to mostly be battery electric eventually, but it's not really practical now to use batteries in planes except for narrow use cases. (Hydrogen has issues too, but they're probably not quite as difficult to solve.) Ships also might use hydrogen as a fuel, if we can't find a better low-carbon alternative.
- _hypx 4y ago
  There isn't enough raw materials to power all of ground transportation with li-ion batteries. It is a matter of time before hydrogen or a derivative fuel like ammonia or e-fuels becomes the future of ground transportation.
  - elihu 4y ago
    I'd be willing to concede for the sake of argument that there aren't enough raw materials to replace all the world's combustion vehicles with EVs the way we currently do EVs. Almost certainly not if we keep using batteries high in nickel and cobalt. I think what we should be doing instead is building EVs with modestly-sized batteries and focus instead on making charge stations more available and electrifying the major highways so that cars and trucks can travel long distance cross country without ever having to stop to charge. The problem with hydrogen or ammonia is that, without some major technological advance, you lose a lot of energy in the process of making the fuel, transporting it, and converting it back into kinetic energy either in a combustion engine or fuel cell/motor. If you can synthesize the fuel with solar power but only 30% or 40% actually ends up doing useful work, then it's far less efficient than using batteries and electric drive trains, which might be somewhere around 80% when you factor in transmission losses, charging inefficiencies, motor inefficiencies, and so on. Maybe some day we'll have so much energy we don't know what to do with it, but I think current events are pointing more in the direction of energy getting more expensive rather than cheaper, and whatever means of locomotion requires the least energy will be the one the masses use if it's reasonably affordable.
_hypx 4y ago
If something is nearly 100% efficient, how can anything else be significantly more cost effective?
- ajb 4y ago
  Because the 100% efficient part is one step, and we are evaluating the whole process.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    That sounds like a cop out. The article specifical mentions low cost catalysts. There doesn't sound like there is any credible argument for the whole process being always expensive.

by ajb 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ben_w 4y ago

Between about 2000 and 2010 I kept seeing people say "well actually hydrogen isn't a power source it's a just a storage mechanism", since about 2010 I keep seeing people say "oh we can't possibly get to 100% renewables, storage isn't a solved problem". And back in the 80s and 90s, the US was regularly making 3.5 GWh hydrogen tanks fly hypersonic while attached to strong enough pumps that it could've powered an entire medium-sized European country for the 500 seconds it took to empty the tank, and they didn't bother to make them reusable. So yeah, I recon it will be used for heating and power. Not 100% sure because it has competition from batteries, pumped hydro, and a global power grid, but it's certainly viable and the competition will take time.

arghnoname 4y ago
Despite the many challenges, I like hydrogen as part of the solution to this stuff. It's easy to produce with commonly available inputs. If we had efficient central energy generation, it's a way of making that energy transportable. When burned (or used in a fuel cell) at the point of use, it burns clean. I suspect the fears about its volatility are manageable. All concentrated forms of energy are dangerous. The issues with containing it and improving its density, I'm not sure. I'm glad we're not just 100% going with batteries. With all of these technologies there's a lot of ??? between here and panacea. I just wish this attitude I see that this is an easy problem and we're going to invent our way out of the energy situation in a few years are a bit glib. The benefits of traditional energy forms are immense. The externalities can no longer be ignored, but we have an immense challenge to get even near parity in a general way. I think we'd do better to more soberly assess the situation. Just to be clear, I'm agreeing with you, but there's a lot of untold story in how we get to the "it will be used for heating and power" bit.
LegitShady 4y ago
hydrogen is a power source, but green hydrogen isn't a power source.

arghnoname 4y ago

Your line of reasoning is the one I always take on these sorts of things. If it takes X input energy to make energy saving Y, if Y is not significantly more efficient than X, it's probably a net loss. A lot of green stuff ends up being much less cheap/green if one looks at the total cost and environmental impact of the thing over its lifetime (including efficiency loss over time, mineral extraction, labor, electrical source, etc). Energy has always been an expense people want to minimize. There's not a ton of low hanging fruit here.

joshuahaglund 4y ago

Industrial chemistry. Steel making uses coke to reduce ore but could use hydrogen if it was cheap enough. Fertilizer like ammonia (NH3) is produced with those H's coming from methane, releasing carbon. If it's nearly 100% efficient it becomes a low loss battery. Floating turbines could generate hydrogen in periods of low demand and send to a floating compressor and storage system to be used for energy generation or chemistry or airships, whatever

TheDudeMan 4y ago

Zepelins and rockets?

accurrent 4y ago

The country I live in is very small and has no natural resources. We rely on having oil shipped to us. From our point of view replacing oil with hydrogen would be an improvement. Due to various geopolitical and geographic issues relying on electric cables to supply us with power from our neighbors may not be a viable option.

likpok 4y ago

There’s a number of industrial processes that require higher temperatures than you can easily get from electricity. Replacing that with burning green hydrogen lets you decarbonize them. Even if you can replace a furnace with an electric one, it may be easier and cheaper to replace a process burning gas with one burning hydrogen. You can also use the hydrogen as a battery to move electricity into the future (with losses). It is of course possible that there are better options for all of this other places, or that this process will not scale up well. And hydrogen has a lot of complicated logistics — storage and shipping are harder than larger gases. But a source of cheap green flammable gas has a bunch of potential applications.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

The oxygen byproduct does not figure favorably unless it can more than pay for itself. Seems like the same amount of electricity will always have more energy than the amount of hydrogen it can be turned into. Takes theoretically a minimum of 39 kwh of electricity to make 1 kg of H2. Decently efficient processes still use up 48 kwh so far to make 1 kg of H2 since they are not perfect. 1 kg H2 yields 120 to 140 MJ when burned or probably the lower of 33 to 39 kwh depending on how you calculate the heat. Keeping in mind the only way to get 39 kwh back out is if the byproduct oxygen actually consumed none of the electricity during the gas production.[0] Probably quite a bit lower for domestic heating due to losses out of exhaust flues that are necessary. Indoor heating using the same electricity will always be more efficient than turning the electricity to hydrogen first. [0] didn't calculate that far myself to be sure.

elihu 4y ago

Someone else mentioned ammonia, steel, and similar industrial chemistry applications, but another use case is transportation. I think regular ground transportation is going to mostly be battery electric eventually, but it's not really practical now to use batteries in planes except for narrow use cases. (Hydrogen has issues too, but they're probably not quite as difficult to solve.) Ships also might use hydrogen as a fuel, if we can't find a better low-carbon alternative.

_hypx 4y ago
There isn't enough raw materials to power all of ground transportation with li-ion batteries. It is a matter of time before hydrogen or a derivative fuel like ammonia or e-fuels becomes the future of ground transportation.
- elihu 4y ago
  I'd be willing to concede for the sake of argument that there aren't enough raw materials to replace all the world's combustion vehicles with EVs the way we currently do EVs. Almost certainly not if we keep using batteries high in nickel and cobalt. I think what we should be doing instead is building EVs with modestly-sized batteries and focus instead on making charge stations more available and electrifying the major highways so that cars and trucks can travel long distance cross country without ever having to stop to charge. The problem with hydrogen or ammonia is that, without some major technological advance, you lose a lot of energy in the process of making the fuel, transporting it, and converting it back into kinetic energy either in a combustion engine or fuel cell/motor. If you can synthesize the fuel with solar power but only 30% or 40% actually ends up doing useful work, then it's far less efficient than using batteries and electric drive trains, which might be somewhere around 80% when you factor in transmission losses, charging inefficiencies, motor inefficiencies, and so on. Maybe some day we'll have so much energy we don't know what to do with it, but I think current events are pointing more in the direction of energy getting more expensive rather than cheaper, and whatever means of locomotion requires the least energy will be the one the masses use if it's reasonably affordable.

_hypx 4y ago

If something is nearly 100% efficient, how can anything else be significantly more cost effective?

ajb 4y ago
Because the 100% efficient part is one step, and we are evaluating the whole process.
- _hypx 4y ago
  That sounds like a cop out. The article specifical mentions low cost catalysts. There doesn't sound like there is any credible argument for the whole process being always expensive.