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It'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 elect

It'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 ago
I 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.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  “Existing hydrocarbon infrastructure” The fact that it exists does not mean that it’s fit for purpose. Hydrogen gas has very different material requirements, you can’t simply put it into those pipes. “If the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive” Except a) the energy is not cheap (nor is the equipment required to make and transport the hydrogen). And b) who is going to buy this expensive hydrogen when they could instead use a cheaper alternative which is much more efficient (direct electricity cation)?
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  True, it's just that that excludes any use cases where that hydrogen competes directly with renewable electricity. When the choice is using the electricity to charge a battery to drive a truck, or convert the electricity to hydrogen transport it half way around the world after first compressing and cooling it and while boiling off double digit percentages to keep it cool and then transporting it by road to a fueling station (in gas form by now stored at 300 bar), putting it in a truck and then running it through a fuel cell .... you get my point. No sense whatsoever. Unless you ignore all the inefficiencies. The vast majority of road transport is going to be powered by batteries. Including 100+ ton road trains in Australia. Because that already happened. Green hydrogen production will eventually happen at scale. As you say, it's way too valuable for that not to happen. But the caveat with that is that using it for uneconomical / low value things doesn't make much sense. Why waste an expensive resource on stuff like that when there are much more valuable things you can do with it. At the top of the ladder are things like industrial and chemical processes, long haul aviation via e-fuels generated from hydrogen, etc. Sticking it in the ground in order to burn it in order to boil water and drive a generator would be closer to the bottom. You could do it technically but there are a gazillion other ways to store and generate energy. Likewise using it for road transport is just madness. And forget about replacing methane with hydrogen to heat your home.

7952 3y ago

I 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.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
“Existing hydrocarbon infrastructure” The fact that it exists does not mean that it’s fit for purpose. Hydrogen gas has very different material requirements, you can’t simply put it into those pipes. “If the source energy is cheap and the sold hydrogen is expensive” Except a) the energy is not cheap (nor is the equipment required to make and transport the hydrogen). And b) who is going to buy this expensive hydrogen when they could instead use a cheaper alternative which is much more efficient (direct electricity cation)?
jillesvangurp 3y ago
True, it's just that that excludes any use cases where that hydrogen competes directly with renewable electricity. When the choice is using the electricity to charge a battery to drive a truck, or convert the electricity to hydrogen transport it half way around the world after first compressing and cooling it and while boiling off double digit percentages to keep it cool and then transporting it by road to a fueling station (in gas form by now stored at 300 bar), putting it in a truck and then running it through a fuel cell .... you get my point. No sense whatsoever. Unless you ignore all the inefficiencies. The vast majority of road transport is going to be powered by batteries. Including 100+ ton road trains in Australia. Because that already happened. Green hydrogen production will eventually happen at scale. As you say, it's way too valuable for that not to happen. But the caveat with that is that using it for uneconomical / low value things doesn't make much sense. Why waste an expensive resource on stuff like that when there are much more valuable things you can do with it. At the top of the ladder are things like industrial and chemical processes, long haul aviation via e-fuels generated from hydrogen, etc. Sticking it in the ground in order to burn it in order to boil water and drive a generator would be closer to the bottom. You could do it technically but there are a gazillion other ways to store and generate energy. Likewise using it for road transport is just madness. And forget about replacing methane with hydrogen to heat your home.