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Wind-to-hydrogen production reaches deep water
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- dmbche 3y agoThis is so exciting that I had Freebird playing in my mind while reading. This is so cool. Cheap, away from people, little environemental risks. I hope maintenance won't be a nightmare, I wonder what problems seawater electrolysis plants run into!
- tcfhgj 3y agoEnvironmental risk: hydrogen leaking and reducing the amount of methane removed from the atmosphere
- Brian_K_White 3y agohydrogen is almost as bad as batteries for storage, distribution, and portable use. Worse in a lot of ways. Even if it were totally free. Maybe it can be a component of an artificial hydrocarbon, but unless the carbon were sourced from the air it wouldn't be a cycle and wouldn't be any better for the environment.
- dghughes 3y agoHydrogen can be stored as a metal hydride. More of it can be stored in the same volume compared to liquid hydrogen.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoAnd how much equipment, energy, and time does it take to convert it back to a gas?
- dghughes 3y agoI think it has to be heated other than that I'm not sure. But my point being its storage and stability as a solid material unlike liquefied hydrogen which may cause embrittlement of its container. A solid material, heat to release H, send it through a fuel cell. At some point maybe that method will become a type of battery. I get people like batteries and they are very efficient but there seems to be such weird hostility at the mere mention of hydrogen. It's bizarre. It has its uses especially for the ability to store a powerful energy source.
- _hypx 3y agoThat literally is a battery. What do you think nickel-hydrogen batteries are? PS: People are hostile because they own a BEV, or own shares in a BEV company, or have some other financial motivation. They are openly hostile to anything that could disrupt their business or lifestyle. In fact, we really should just be more direct in confronting this. Hydrogen is straight-up disrupting the conventional battery market, and the opposition is running a FUD campaign to stop it.
- credit_guy 3y agoI don't know why you are saying that. Batteries are expensive. To recoup the capital expense you need to charge and discharge them daily (so you can buy the electricity cheap and sell it expensive and you get a profit). If you want to use them for long term storage, then you buy cheap electricity in the summer, sell it for a profit in the winter, do the same each year, and find out in a few years that you are broke. With hydrogen, the storage is cheap. We already store natural gas in tanks. We can switch to hydrogen. Maybe hydrogen will leak more, but 1. hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas and 2. the square-cube law tells you that for large tanks you don't really care about leakage. I don't think we will find an alternative to hydrogen for long term storage of electricity.
- Rygian 3y agoYou seem to happily ignore the distribution costs, metal embrittlement, sheer loss of efficiency and rest of factors that make hydrogen a bad idea for almost any use where it's not yet being used.
- goethes_kind 3y agoSo what is your better option? What alternative technology has the potential to be used to store six months worth of energy for an entire continent? Nobody is saying that hydrogen technology is without its problems, but it is feasibly scalable unlike anything else I am aware of, and it is not some kind of mythical vapourware that exists only in the form of CAD renderings.
- ianai 3y agoDefinitely another space where the anti/propaganda has won the early game. Is there somewhere to learn about the proper storage and use of hydrogen? I’d just add that for grid scale storage the hydrogen probably doesn’t have to go far from generation. That probably resolves plenty of problems.
- funnymony 3y agoStoring hydrogen is not the same as storing oil. Over time, hydrogen damages the tank. (Which is undesirable combo with “explosive gas when mixed with air”) I would like some breakthrough in material sciences here.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoIt's much worse than batteries for energy storage. With batteries you get most of the energy back at least. Converting electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity, the losses are much steeper. Which makes it not ideal for that kind of thing. There are lots of battery chemistries at this point; the round trip is well over 90% efficient with most of them. With hydrogen there are a lot of lossy steps, generating it, storing it, transporting it, transforming it back, etc. Batteries are produced at large scale now. Hundreds of gwh per year. Soon twh. Green hydrogen production is orders of magnitude away from that. A good reference is Michael Liebherr's hydrogen ladder. It organizes hydrogen use cases by their economical viability. Some of the least economical things you can do with it is using it for transport or heating. It just doesn't make any sense to do that; there are cheaper ways to do those things. The more economical things at the top are a combination of things we already use lots of (grey) hydrogen for such as fertilizer production and other industrial processes and a few things like steel production and other industrial processes that currently rely on burning fossil fuels. For each of those producing the hydrogen close to where it is consumed is key. There are plenty of economical uses for hydrogen. More than enough that bothering with the low yield uneconomical use cases just doesn't make sense. Just cleaning up the existing uses of grey hydrogen is actually a massive project by itself. Because of it's physical properties, transporting and storing hydrogen is costly and technically challenging. It takes up a lot of space. In liquid form it's almost 3x the volume of liquid methane. And to get it to that state, you have to cool it to a few degrees above absolute zero. Keeping it in that state also costs energy. You typically get that by boiling some of it off. Same with methane of course but liquid methane is a lot warmer so the need to boil it off is a lot smaller. Converting hydrogen to methane or other fuels is of course possible but also not free. Every energy conversion you sacrifice double digit percentages of energy. The more conversions, the less economical sense it makes.
- 7952 3y agoI was reading about the hydrogen projects around Teeside in the UK. You have existing hydrocarbon infrastructure, industrial customers, offshore storage, spare land, and an existing grid connection to the wider grid and renewables. This proximity makes the economic case work as there are opportunities to buy and sell in one place. Also, efficiency becomes far less important if the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive. If the margins are high enough you can afford to waste energy.
- Etrnl_President 3y ago[dead]
- goethes_kind 3y agoOnce you build enough wind and solar, energy itself become cheap and one is then more concerned with how to store and transmit that energy. That's why hydrogen makes sense despite the inherent conversion inefficiencies.
- Valgrim 3y agoCompared to other fuels, what are the advantages of hydrogen?
- goethes_kind 3y agoWhat other fuels? All green/synthetic fuels depend on hydrogen and as such I consider them the same technology.
- ianai 3y agoPulls oxygen in from the atmosphere and outputs energy plus water. Just have to make the hydrogen generation/transport emission free. My question is whether storing hydrogen and the complications therein are mitigated. I just don’t know my modern material science/manufacturing enough.
- funnymony 3y agoIf you have some time: https://youtu.be/Zklo4Z1SqkE https://youtu.be/Zklo4Z1SqkE (Sabine Hossenfelder) If I remember video correctly, summary would be: not yet
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- ianai 3y agoSeen it, she’s taking pot shots at hydrogen. I’d be more interested in hearing how it works in established applications now and relevant to the article.
- usrusr 3y agoStill needs mooring? What i want to see are swimming hydrolyzer/hydrogen transport units that sail the oceans under wind power, driving a hydrogenerator turbine as they go that powers hydrolyzer and compressor. They'd go wherever weather models predict favorable conditions, cruise up and down those waters on a net stationary beam reach course until the storage is filled. Might want to leave some capacity for the return trip harvest. Then they return home, or to whatever port has the best offersvfor selling hydrogen and buying maintenance.
- jonnycomputer 3y agoWould be moored more or less the same way deep-sea oils rigs are. The main difficulties, as I understand it, is the unique stresses and forces of the turbine on platform stability. I can see why an image of these moving back and forth is appealing, it will almost certainly make more sense to have dedicated craft responsible for it (even if they were not fixed to the ground). The very sorts of stability you need would work against it being an efficient transport.
- usrusr 3y agoThat's why it would be so nice to just forego the static stability you need for an air turbine: a sailboat gets all the stability to push its sail into the wind from its movement. It's like the lift of an airplane that is completely gone without movement. So you put up sails (or a powerful traction kite), get to speed so the keel provides the lateral lift you need to not just drift downwind and engage the hydrogenerator to skim off some off the energy.
- DropPanda 3y agoThe article states that the capital investment cost of an electrolyzer and pipeline is lower than that of a cable and a substation. But what if you want electricity? If you include a fuel cell and grid connection at the end of the pipeline, is the capital investment cost still lower? Edit: A fair comparison needs to keep the electrical power input to the grid constant. This means the calculation needs to account for both the losses in conversion to and back from hydrogen, as well as that offshore electrolysis would be able to make use of a greater share of the power during peak wind turbine output. I want to see the math, not only an opaque claim of lower cost when one set of infrastructure delivers electricity and the other delivers hydrogen.
- scythe 3y ago>If you include a fuel cell and grid connection at the end of the pipeline, is the capital investment cost still lower? You wouldn't, though. If you are going to convert hydrogen back to electricity, it makes the most sense to do it where that electricity is hardest to obtain by any other method — say, an off-grid research station in the Yukon or something.
- DropPanda 3y agoCan you elaborate on why? Getting hydrogen to an off-grid research station in the Yukon is both difficult and a very poor business case for large-scale investments in off-shore hydrogen production.
- jonnycomputer 3y agoI recommend a listen to this series https://gwec.buzzsprout.com/1229717/11455756-hydrogen-series-part-1-poul-skjaerbaek-from-siemens-gamesa https://gwec.buzzsprout.com/1229717/11455756-hydrogen-series...