4 ms·

If they really want to be "green" then the don't just have to beat NG, they have to lap it several times. The issue is steel, which is a cornerstone of "green"

If they really want to be "green" then the don't just have to beat NG, they have to lap it several times. The issue is steel, which is a cornerstone of "green" energy. That steel must be made with metallurgical coal and while there are alternative processes, they require hydrogen. Hydrogen is currently impossible to generate efficiently (from an energy perspective), much less a cost-effective manner. Hydrogen will also need to be generated without fossil fuels, which is how most hydrogen today is generated. I see prices going up in the "green" future.

retrac 3y ago
> Hydrogen is currently impossible to generate efficiently (from an energy perspective) Thermolysis of water at high temperature directly driven by a nuclear reactor. Roughly a thousand tonnes of hydrogen per gram of uranium. Admittedly, this is somewhere between entirely theoretical and barely prototyped at the kilowatt scale in research reactors. But Atomic Energy Ltd. of Canada was investigating it as an application of their next generation CANDU design before it was shelved. Or use some other source of heat. Concentrated solar power has been proposed. https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-thermochemical-water-splitting https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-th... The economics are not necessarily favourable vs. fossil fuels. But they're not horrible either. Even something more conservative, like standard electrolysis of water, driven by traditional nuclear power, would be something like 2x - 5x more expensive than current hydrogen sourced from natural gas. In locations where electricity is very cheap, it is sometimes competitive already. Fossil fuel prices never really represented their full cost. We were paying far more than we thought.
- labster 3y ago
  I do wonder how economical it would be to run high energy processes like hydrolysis, aluminum extraction, and desalinization only when renewable supply is high. Like a peaker plant, but in reverse.
- manquer 3y ago
  I own a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle so I keep a close eye on hydrogen tech and prices and it is expensive and not a easy chemical to work it. Even the commercial hydrogen that comes from natural gas at the pump costs $26/ KG in California - up from only $13 this time last time. As much as I would like to see a robust hydrogen economy we are long way from using hydrogen for proper energy storage . From my experience, density and leaks are major problems that is going to be hard to solve at scale cheaply, commercial hydrogen i. buy is already at 10,000 psi and 5kg tank(carbon fiber no less) my car has is massive . The pumps usually have dedicated buildings just to store <1000 kg .
7952 3y ago
Th co2 emissions from steel used by the turbine are tiny compared to the co2 avoided by building the turbine. So it is still a big net win in terms of CO2. Also, recycling steel releases less co2 than making it from scratch so there is a benefit after construction. Low energy efficient hydrogen will work if electricity is sufficiently cheap at purchase and hydrogen is sufficiently expensive at sale. Those factors will probably come to dominate more than conversion efficiency. Steel production just adds another potential customer to the mix.
vkou 3y ago
If we got everything but industrial processes off fossil-fuels, it would be a colossal win for the environment. When we do that, I'll start getting concerned about industrial use of carbon. Losing sleep about the cost of green steel is like worrying about traffic jams on Mars. Utterly irrelevant in our current timeline.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Industrial processes are not the problem. The industries that use a lot of energy also make large long-term investments. That forces them to think in longer term than most other fields. In Europe, we are already seeing industries telling politicians not to back down from climate goals, because unpredictable policy is bad for business. In their time horizon, adapting to climate change is inevitable, and there are business opportunities in it. Transportation is a bigger problem. Not only people are still buying new cars, ships, and aircraft that use fossil fuels, but businesses continue designing new models. It's likely that transportation's share of total emissions will increase, as electricity, heating, and industrial processes decarbonize.
  - oblio 3y ago
    > Transportation is a bigger problem. Not only people are still buying new cars, ships, and aircraft that use fossil fuels, but businesses continue designing new models. Europe is very close to banning ICE cars from 2035 - 2040. And part of the people pushing for this ban are... European automobile manufacturers, especially VW. Funny, right? Volkswagen has invested tens of billions of euros into EVs and will invest about 80 billion more until 2030 and I think they expect their entire lineup to be EV-only by 2030 or so, so if they manage to ban ICEs by 2035, they'd basically be banning some of their slower moving competitors :-))
ajross 3y ago
Cite for the steel thing? I have a hard time believing that the total energy input to smelting and casting the plant mechanics makes up anything more than a vanishing fraction of a wind or solar generation facility.
nine_k 3y ago
Why, the problem is not carbon, and not even CO2 per se. It's CO2 escaping to the atmosphere. Why let it escape? Steel plants are a perfect setting to capture the CO2 which the furnaces emit: it's highly concentrated and is emitted from compact, well-controlled areas (blast furnaces, and even converter furnaces). The CO2 thus collected can be meaningfully reprocessed into hydrocarbon fuels, for instance. There are even solar-powered methods [1] which can run when the sunlight is available. since the CO2 can stay safely captured in a typical industrial gas storage facility. [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1904856116 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1904856116
maxerickson 3y ago
Hydrolysis works good enough to pair with solar, it's not quite 'just' a matter of scaling it up, but it's not far off.
outworlder 3y ago
> The issue is steel, which is a cornerstone of "green" energy. That steel must be made with metallurgical coal and while there are alternative processes, they require hydrogen. That's not really much of a problem. How much steel is going to be used for energy generation compared to the steel that's used by basically everything else, including construction? That's not a consumable (barring any hardware losses) and emissions will be offset across the lifetime of the generator.

retrac 3y ago

> Hydrogen is currently impossible to generate efficiently (from an energy perspective) Thermolysis of water at high temperature directly driven by a nuclear reactor. Roughly a thousand tonnes of hydrogen per gram of uranium. Admittedly, this is somewhere between entirely theoretical and barely prototyped at the kilowatt scale in research reactors. But Atomic Energy Ltd. of Canada was investigating it as an application of their next generation CANDU design before it was shelved. Or use some other source of heat. Concentrated solar power has been proposed. https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-thermochemical-water-splitting https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-th... The economics are not necessarily favourable vs. fossil fuels. But they're not horrible either. Even something more conservative, like standard electrolysis of water, driven by traditional nuclear power, would be something like 2x - 5x more expensive than current hydrogen sourced from natural gas. In locations where electricity is very cheap, it is sometimes competitive already. Fossil fuel prices never really represented their full cost. We were paying far more than we thought.

labster 3y ago
I do wonder how economical it would be to run high energy processes like hydrolysis, aluminum extraction, and desalinization only when renewable supply is high. Like a peaker plant, but in reverse.
manquer 3y ago
I own a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle so I keep a close eye on hydrogen tech and prices and it is expensive and not a easy chemical to work it. Even the commercial hydrogen that comes from natural gas at the pump costs $26/ KG in California - up from only $13 this time last time. As much as I would like to see a robust hydrogen economy we are long way from using hydrogen for proper energy storage . From my experience, density and leaks are major problems that is going to be hard to solve at scale cheaply, commercial hydrogen i. buy is already at 10,000 psi and 5kg tank(carbon fiber no less) my car has is massive . The pumps usually have dedicated buildings just to store <1000 kg .

7952 3y ago

Th co2 emissions from steel used by the turbine are tiny compared to the co2 avoided by building the turbine. So it is still a big net win in terms of CO2. Also, recycling steel releases less co2 than making it from scratch so there is a benefit after construction. Low energy efficient hydrogen will work if electricity is sufficiently cheap at purchase and hydrogen is sufficiently expensive at sale. Those factors will probably come to dominate more than conversion efficiency. Steel production just adds another potential customer to the mix.

vkou 3y ago

If we got everything but industrial processes off fossil-fuels, it would be a colossal win for the environment. When we do that, I'll start getting concerned about industrial use of carbon. Losing sleep about the cost of green steel is like worrying about traffic jams on Mars. Utterly irrelevant in our current timeline.

jltsiren 3y ago
Industrial processes are not the problem. The industries that use a lot of energy also make large long-term investments. That forces them to think in longer term than most other fields. In Europe, we are already seeing industries telling politicians not to back down from climate goals, because unpredictable policy is bad for business. In their time horizon, adapting to climate change is inevitable, and there are business opportunities in it. Transportation is a bigger problem. Not only people are still buying new cars, ships, and aircraft that use fossil fuels, but businesses continue designing new models. It's likely that transportation's share of total emissions will increase, as electricity, heating, and industrial processes decarbonize.
- oblio 3y ago
  > Transportation is a bigger problem. Not only people are still buying new cars, ships, and aircraft that use fossil fuels, but businesses continue designing new models. Europe is very close to banning ICE cars from 2035 - 2040. And part of the people pushing for this ban are... European automobile manufacturers, especially VW. Funny, right? Volkswagen has invested tens of billions of euros into EVs and will invest about 80 billion more until 2030 and I think they expect their entire lineup to be EV-only by 2030 or so, so if they manage to ban ICEs by 2035, they'd basically be banning some of their slower moving competitors :-))

ajross 3y ago

Cite for the steel thing? I have a hard time believing that the total energy input to smelting and casting the plant mechanics makes up anything more than a vanishing fraction of a wind or solar generation facility.

nine_k 3y ago

Why, the problem is not carbon, and not even CO2 per se. It's CO2 escaping to the atmosphere. Why let it escape? Steel plants are a perfect setting to capture the CO2 which the furnaces emit: it's highly concentrated and is emitted from compact, well-controlled areas (blast furnaces, and even converter furnaces). The CO2 thus collected can be meaningfully reprocessed into hydrocarbon fuels, for instance. There are even solar-powered methods [1] which can run when the sunlight is available. since the CO2 can stay safely captured in a typical industrial gas storage facility. [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1904856116 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1904856116

maxerickson 3y ago

Hydrolysis works good enough to pair with solar, it's not quite 'just' a matter of scaling it up, but it's not far off.

outworlder 3y ago

> The issue is steel, which is a cornerstone of "green" energy. That steel must be made with metallurgical coal and while there are alternative processes, they require hydrogen. That's not really much of a problem. How much steel is going to be used for energy generation compared to the steel that's used by basically everything else, including construction? That's not a consumable (barring any hardware losses) and emissions will be offset across the lifetime of the generator.