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It actually doesn’t have to do with transmission at all. Rather, when you pay for electrolysis, you’re paying for all the energy inputs. When you burn fossil fu
by rcme 3y ago
It actually doesn’t have to do with transmission at all. Rather, when you pay for electrolysis, you’re paying for all the energy inputs. When you burn fossil fuels, you’re not paying for any of the energy inputs (hundreds of millions of years of solar radiation). So it’s not surprising that fossil fuels are cheaper even if they’re less efficient.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoFirstly I don't see how that follows. You still need to pay to transport both the oil and the hydrogen from where you make it to where you use it. Most importantly, you're not (in most places) paying for the pollution of the atmosphere. E.g. Prices on carbon are nowhere near the level of societal harm that putting it into the atmosphere causes.
- rcme 3y agoMy point is that to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, you need to input energy. Due to thermodynamics, you can only ever hope to get 0.9 units for each unit of input energy. With fossil fuels, you don’t need to input energy to get them. At least not in the same way. You can run a pump to pump them out of the ground. For each unit of energy that goes into the pump, you likely get 1000x units of energy out.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoI get what you mean. That will really depend on where you get the oil from. Some places need a lot more downstream processing (looking at alberta oil sands) to get something useable than others (the middle east). Whether you want to consider that analogous to the electrolysis step or to another one is not clear since the processes don't map one to one.