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Pipelines of liquid or gaseous fuels is pretty much always going to be the cheapest solution for energy transmission. This fact will inevitably lead to people i

by _hypx 3y ago

Pipelines of liquid or gaseous fuels is pretty much always going to be the cheapest solution for energy transmission. This fact will inevitably lead to people investing in some kind of green chemical. If not hydrogen, then likely something made from hydrogen like ammonia or methanol. It's not actually clear if transmission lines are cheaper. Ships and trains can carry a lot of mass. For an energy dense fuel, this can be cheaper. Then again, this idea needs you to carry things in both directions, both the iron and the iron oxide. That may doom this idea to being too expensive.

lll-o-lll 3y ago
How many posts about hydrogen being the best and only hope have you made here? I can’t recall it all now, but my understanding was that if you take the entire chain from production to storage to consumption of hydrogen, it’s pretty much an unworkable engineering problem. “The closest thing to a vacuum, other than a vacuum” was one memorable quote. Happy to be shown to be wrong.
- _hypx 3y ago
  Because it is instrumental to solving to climate change. The better question is why are people unwilling to take the problem seriously? Your understanding is the result of years of FUD against it. People really need to understand that they have been lied to repeatedly on this subject. If you have a basic grasp of engineering, you should understanding that it is literally made by running electricity through water. It is an incredible simple idea that you can even do at home. And since hydrogen is already being used in a vast number of industrial and chemical processes, it should be clear that there could not be any fundamental technical challenges that haven’t been solved.
  - lll-o-lll 3y ago
    Well, many years ago before I switched to software, I was an engineer in real life! Putting on the old dusty engineering cap, I have to say that your explanation there is so underwhelming as to make it hard to take you seriously. The information I have read on this has not been FUD. It’s been careful analysis by actual engineers with experience in the field. Something being “technically possible” is completely different to something being “economically feasible”. Sorry, if you want to make an argument, you’re going to have to do better than that.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Well even engineers can have seriously incorrect understanding of an issue, especially if it is many years out of date. You’re argument seems to be based around economically feasibility, not technical issues, right? So then you will also agree that if green hydrogen radically dropped in cost, then you will agree that it will become a viable solution? Furthermore there will be subsidies going on, that will accelerate the process. In fact, the problem might be that a combination of subsidies and cost reductions will drive the price to below $0/kg, causing market confusion: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/092922-us-green-hydrogen-costs-to-reach-sub-zero-under-ira-longer-term-price-impacts-remain-uncertain https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... That would be an interesting outcome and it will be interest to see how it ends up. But nevertheless, super-cheap green hydrogen should quickly refute the major arguments used against it. It is a process that mirrors what happened to wind and solar energy. They too have years of FUD followed by many skeptics who denied the possibility of cheap renewable energy. But that skepticism simply fell apart because basic economics overrule outdated opinions.
      - lll-o-lll 3y ago
        > You’re argument seems to be based around economically feasibility, not technical issues, right? Economic feasibility due to engineering problems. Just because something can be done in a lab does not mean it can be done at scale. As an example, Musk with his stupid hyper-loop. Sure it is technically possible to evacuate a tube and send a vehicle through it at high speeds. It will never be economically feasible, however. Sometimes the engineers just have to say “not going to work” to an otherwise cool idea. It’s not the cost of hydrogen production. It’s the engineering problems that pervade the rest of the handling, storage and distribution of hydrogen that look to be insurmountable.
        _hypx 3y ago
        > Economic feasibility due to engineering problems. The question then becomes, who's actually saying this? It's certainly not real engineers. In fact, real engineers have pointed out that it is much cheaper to distribute hydrogen than electricity: >BRINK: How do you move the hydrogen from the solar farms? > AD VAN WIJK: By pipeline. That’s the interesting thing: It is about 10 times cheaper to transport energy by a hydrogen pipeline than by an electric cable. That makes it possible to transport electricity very cheaply from somewhere like North Africa to the demand centers in Europe, for example. https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-for-an-electric-grid/ https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo... And all of this is happening under the auspices of effectively free hydrogen due to a combination of subsidies and cost reduction. This should really raise the question of how any of the alternative ideas are going to compete with this, not how whether this idea can work.
  - torgian 3y ago
    I mean, then you’re gonna have dunces who try to run electricity through salt water. Which created a very bad gas that humans cannot breathe. The issue is you’re going to need distilled water in order to create hydrogen particles.
    - defrost 3y ago
      What is this, 2019 ??? A membrane-based seawater electrolyser for hydrogen generation (2022) Here we propose a direct seawater electrolysis method for hydrogen production that radically addresses the side-reaction and corrosion problems. A demonstration system was stably operated at a current density of 250 milliamperes per square centimetre for over 3,200 hours under practical application conditions without failure. This strategy realizes efficient, size-flexible and scalable direct seawater electrolysis in a way similar to freshwater splitting without a notable increase in operation cost, and has high potential for practical application. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05379-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05379-5
- coderenegade 3y ago
  Methanol is a pretty decent storage medium for hydrogen, and can be made more efficiently than LH2. It actually stores more hydrogen than LH2 on a volumetric basis, and you can crack it at fairly low temperatures, so a hydrogen economy is probably going to happen regardless, it just won't be in the form of transporting gaseous hydrogen. We need methanol to make solvents and polymers, and to power cargo ships. We need ammonia for fertilizer. These two vectors will probably be the way we create and move hydrogen around. Methanol will probably pick up an additional use case as a fuel for trucks and cars, since alcohols are what you typically resort to for ICEs in the absence of fossil fuels, and methanol is both the simplest to make, and a very good fuel in its own right. Hydrogen itself is more likely to be used to store energy in salt caverns, which is a proven technology for decades now. Aside from storage for the above use cases, it's a workable fuel for gas turbines for backup power. This seems like the most likely outcome in my opinion.

by _hypx 3y ago

lll-o-lll 3y ago

How many posts about hydrogen being the best and only hope have you made here? I can’t recall it all now, but my understanding was that if you take the entire chain from production to storage to consumption of hydrogen, it’s pretty much an unworkable engineering problem. “The closest thing to a vacuum, other than a vacuum” was one memorable quote. Happy to be shown to be wrong.

_hypx 3y ago
Because it is instrumental to solving to climate change. The better question is why are people unwilling to take the problem seriously? Your understanding is the result of years of FUD against it. People really need to understand that they have been lied to repeatedly on this subject. If you have a basic grasp of engineering, you should understanding that it is literally made by running electricity through water. It is an incredible simple idea that you can even do at home. And since hydrogen is already being used in a vast number of industrial and chemical processes, it should be clear that there could not be any fundamental technical challenges that haven’t been solved.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Well, many years ago before I switched to software, I was an engineer in real life! Putting on the old dusty engineering cap, I have to say that your explanation there is so underwhelming as to make it hard to take you seriously. The information I have read on this has not been FUD. It’s been careful analysis by actual engineers with experience in the field. Something being “technically possible” is completely different to something being “economically feasible”. Sorry, if you want to make an argument, you’re going to have to do better than that.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Well even engineers can have seriously incorrect understanding of an issue, especially if it is many years out of date. You’re argument seems to be based around economically feasibility, not technical issues, right? So then you will also agree that if green hydrogen radically dropped in cost, then you will agree that it will become a viable solution? Furthermore there will be subsidies going on, that will accelerate the process. In fact, the problem might be that a combination of subsidies and cost reductions will drive the price to below $0/kg, causing market confusion: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/energy-transition/092922-us-green-hydrogen-costs-to-reach-sub-zero-under-ira-longer-term-price-impacts-remain-uncertain https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... That would be an interesting outcome and it will be interest to see how it ends up. But nevertheless, super-cheap green hydrogen should quickly refute the major arguments used against it. It is a process that mirrors what happened to wind and solar energy. They too have years of FUD followed by many skeptics who denied the possibility of cheap renewable energy. But that skepticism simply fell apart because basic economics overrule outdated opinions.
    - lll-o-lll 3y ago
      > You’re argument seems to be based around economically feasibility, not technical issues, right? Economic feasibility due to engineering problems. Just because something can be done in a lab does not mean it can be done at scale. As an example, Musk with his stupid hyper-loop. Sure it is technically possible to evacuate a tube and send a vehicle through it at high speeds. It will never be economically feasible, however. Sometimes the engineers just have to say “not going to work” to an otherwise cool idea. It’s not the cost of hydrogen production. It’s the engineering problems that pervade the rest of the handling, storage and distribution of hydrogen that look to be insurmountable.
      - _hypx 3y ago
        > Economic feasibility due to engineering problems. The question then becomes, who's actually saying this? It's certainly not real engineers. In fact, real engineers have pointed out that it is much cheaper to distribute hydrogen than electricity: >BRINK: How do you move the hydrogen from the solar farms? > AD VAN WIJK: By pipeline. That’s the interesting thing: It is about 10 times cheaper to transport energy by a hydrogen pipeline than by an electric cable. That makes it possible to transport electricity very cheaply from somewhere like North Africa to the demand centers in Europe, for example. https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-for-an-electric-grid/ https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo... And all of this is happening under the auspices of effectively free hydrogen due to a combination of subsidies and cost reduction. This should really raise the question of how any of the alternative ideas are going to compete with this, not how whether this idea can work.
- torgian 3y ago
  I mean, then you’re gonna have dunces who try to run electricity through salt water. Which created a very bad gas that humans cannot breathe. The issue is you’re going to need distilled water in order to create hydrogen particles.
  - defrost 3y ago
    What is this, 2019 ??? A membrane-based seawater electrolyser for hydrogen generation (2022) Here we propose a direct seawater electrolysis method for hydrogen production that radically addresses the side-reaction and corrosion problems. A demonstration system was stably operated at a current density of 250 milliamperes per square centimetre for over 3,200 hours under practical application conditions without failure. This strategy realizes efficient, size-flexible and scalable direct seawater electrolysis in a way similar to freshwater splitting without a notable increase in operation cost, and has high potential for practical application. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05379-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05379-5
coderenegade 3y ago
Methanol is a pretty decent storage medium for hydrogen, and can be made more efficiently than LH2. It actually stores more hydrogen than LH2 on a volumetric basis, and you can crack it at fairly low temperatures, so a hydrogen economy is probably going to happen regardless, it just won't be in the form of transporting gaseous hydrogen. We need methanol to make solvents and polymers, and to power cargo ships. We need ammonia for fertilizer. These two vectors will probably be the way we create and move hydrogen around. Methanol will probably pick up an additional use case as a fuel for trucks and cars, since alcohols are what you typically resort to for ICEs in the absence of fossil fuels, and methanol is both the simplest to make, and a very good fuel in its own right. Hydrogen itself is more likely to be used to store energy in salt caverns, which is a proven technology for decades now. Aside from storage for the above use cases, it's a workable fuel for gas turbines for backup power. This seems like the most likely outcome in my opinion.