12 ms·

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewa

by gmane 3y ago

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.

xdennis 3y ago
> Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while [...]. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn Sorry, you say you're familiar with hydrogen fuel cells and you don't know it's not burning? Hydrogen fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction to turn hydrogen and oxygen from the air into electricity and water. The byproduct is water, not fire. I'm not rich enough to own either a battery-electric or hydrogen-electric car, but it's weird how the only people who hate hydrogen are the battery people. I don't hear any hate from fossil-fuel guys. It seems they're more interested in protecting their investment than saving the environment through a process (which is more inefficient, but) that doesn't require rare earth minerals.
credit_guy 3y ago
> batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases That's not true. There are two main storage cases: from day to night and from summer to winter. Because there are 365 days and nights in a year and only one summer and one winter, a battery for seasonal storage needs to be 365 times cheaper than one for daily storage to break even after the same number of years. Of course, there are no batteries that are 365 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Nothing comes close. People are thinking that chemical energy storage could work for the case of seasonal storage. It doesn't quite work right now, but it's not off by 2 orders of magnitude, it's off by maybe a factor of 5. It is much more likely that we'll succeed in making green hydrogen production, transportation and storage economical than that we could make batteries cheaper by a factor of 100. Separately, there is a fairly good chance that we'll be able to extract hydrogen from underground deposits (google "white hydrogen", e.g. [1]). Third, hydrogen storage economics enjoys the square-cube law: larger pressurized tanks can hold a lot of hydrogen for not a much larger cost than smaller tanks. So hydrogen could make sense for applications where very large tanks are needed, and one such application is railways. A typical train oil car has a volume of about 130 m3. At 700 bar (typical storage tank pressure), one m3 of hydrogen weighs about 42 kg, so this is about 5.5 tons. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel, so that would be the equivalent of about 16 tons of diesel. Train have an efficiency of at least 400 ton-miles per gallon, which is more than 125 ton-miles per kg, or 2 million ton-miles for 16 tons. In other words, such a tanker car could be enough to propel a ten thousand ton freight train for 200 miles. It would be much easier to convert diesel locomotives to burn hydrogen than to electrify thousands of miles of railways, so there's a fairly good chance that rail could be hydrogen's killer app. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...
- tcfhgj 3y ago
  Summer to winter isn't a real storage case. If you need more energy in the winter, you build more wind power, not PV to store it an entire year. And episodes of little wind+sun have a duration of less than a month. And there are more storage use cases, e.g. short term grid stabilization (<1 second).
  - rocqua 3y ago
    You cannot reasonably dimension wind power to serve the winter heating needs of northern Europe. Once you get halfway there you're summer surpluses get so huge, inefficient seasonal storage becomes a much better solution.
    - tcfhgj 3y ago
      Interestingly, others worry that the seasonal phenomenon of wind power is too large: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-patterns-and-electricity-generation-vary-across-the-seasons/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-pattern... Perhaps southern Europe will counteract as well: less need in the winter and energy required for increased cooling with heat pumps in the summer
- rnk 3y ago
  Can you explain why existing batteries don't store energy well? I don't have to use energy to crack natural gas or water. I don't have to worry about the hydrogen leaking out and catching into an invisible fire. I don't have to carry around a tank with enormous pressure, because the hydrogen isn't very dense as an energy source. I could just say we'll solve all problems with green batteries. We can recycle batteries at > 95% of materials already. We have lifepo4 batteries that are stable, don't have cobalt and be charge up to 100% without destroying them. In reality I don't have to point to some unknown incredible improvements in the future, they work today. I see hydrogen as the oil industrial complex and diesel & ice industrial complexes wanting to maintain all their infrastructure that burns fuel for engines. It makes sense from their standpoint.
Reason077 3y ago
"From 2020 through March 31, 2023, Toyota sold a total of 23,123 fuel cell vehicles." This is less than the number of EVs Tesla builds every single week.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
It's posited as a "dump" for excess electricity; while batteries may be good for storage and balancing out the grid, hydrogen is suitable to put everything else in, that is, what if the batteries are full, or there's still more electricity in the grid that has nowhere to go? Hydrogen generation - as far as I'm aware - can scale to schlurp up any excess to a huge amount in the same plant. The other one - in my country - is that they want to wind down natural gas entirely, but then want to reuse the pipes for hydrogen; I suspect this may be to continue making use of the huge infrastructure investments made in the gas pipelines.
malchow 3y ago
Are you referring to hydrogen as a mobility fuel specifically? I generally agree. However, it is a critical large-scale industrial input, a replacement industrial input for several additional large industries, and an excellent large-scale stationary energy store.
- mohaine 3y ago
  Is it an excellent large-scale stationary energy store though? I mean, it seems like it should be but * Hydrogen really likes to leak. * Hydrogen breaks down the container holding it over time. * Hydrogen is very low density. This means you need either a very large container or very high pressure. Combined with 1 and 2 this is going to be expensive. I'm really asking the question. I would love to know the full cost difference with current tech vs other options.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > * Hydrogen really likes to leak. Yes, but the rate of leakage is tiny enough that for any reasonable sized tank it's going to be years till it's all leaked away. The real risk is the leakage causing explosions if you ever put a tank in a confined space.
    - jfengel 3y ago
      It leaks a lot faster if it corrodes a hole in the container. Hydrogen is fairly reactive.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      That's probably only the 'primary' real risk, there are some number of secondary real risks of hydrogen being a very reactive chemical. Not in the flammable boom boom, but the interacting with stuff it shouldn't and causing degradation and corrosion.
idontpost 3y ago
> My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them I don't understand how any one looks at the electric car charging situation and thinks it makes sense to scale that out to 100% of vehicles. A 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  The future is public transport.
  - jryle70 3y ago
    Did you know that car ownership has kept increasing in the Netherlands, at least until a few years ago? The country renown for cycling and public transportation. From 197 cars per 1000 people in 1970 we've grown to 662 in 2019. i.e. we now have more than three times the number of cars per person even compared with the "bad old days" of the car dominated 1970s ... The simple fact is that Dutch car use has grown continuously for 70 years much as it has in every other nation I love train, but let's not pretend that public transportation will be dominant. Rather, it will be a mix of different modes of transport. Cars will continue to be important. Visit the Netherlands and see for yourself. https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-myth-netherlands-is-great.html https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-m...
  - troupe 3y ago
    The decline in passenger trains seems to indicate that future is headed in the other direction.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  The envisioned car charging situation is that you charge your car at home or at work. Cars sit unused 99% of the time, they can use that time charging without issues. What we are experiencing now is transitional, where people use infrastructure intended for road-trips for their daily needs. That phase will pass
  - 3y ago
asdff 3y ago
If the case for the battery was objectively better, oil companies would pull a phillip morris and buy out their antithesis to profit on both ends. The fact that they are doubling down on hydrogen itself I think its really interesting. To me, this shows that perhaps there is a true advantage, and also a high enough barrier to entry where only these oil companies at the scale they already exist can reap the most benefit. Its hard to know where the truth actually lies due to our propaganda/media environment, but I think these actions at least do inform of it a little.
- gmane 3y ago
  Like BP? https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bp-joins-forces-with-harmony-energy-for-battery-storage-projects https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bp-joins-forces-with-harmony... or Exxon? https://www.aa.com.tr/en/p/duyurular/1002/exxonmobil-launches-mobil-ev-offer-for-battery-electric-vehicles https://www.aa.com.tr/en/p/duyurular/1002/exxonmobil-launche... or Chevron? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ev-charging-startup-electric-era-announces-investment-from-chevron/ar-AA1hDwfr https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ev-charging-startup-ele...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  Hydrogen can be captured out of some of the oil wells they have. Its not about producing it from green energy they have a plan to keep extracting it from the ground.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  Nissan has famously owned the patent on large format NiCad batteries without producing them or offering them for sale on the open market. So you're right.
- pixl97 3y ago
  "If the case for digital cameras was objectively better Kodak would have bought up chip companies and profited on both sides".....
- 3y ago
reducesuffering 3y ago
Hydrogen was pushed by the Japanese government because BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources. It's not a coincidence the only two companies making hydrogen cars were both the largest Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda. And both of those models are economic failures atypical of their usual engineering prowess. Toyota Mirai sales have been flatlined at low ~1-2k since they started, for 7 years: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa-canada-monthly-yearly/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa... While Tesla immediately had ever-growing sales: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Toyota is said to lose in excess of $100k per hydrogen car.
- Reason077 3y ago
  > "BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources." BEVs are better suited to Japan's economy and resources than any other fuel, the vast majority of which is imported (including natural gas). It's just that it's taken Japan's government a long time to realise this. But it seems like they're finally coming around!
  - fomine3 3y ago
    BEV is hit and miss for Japan. For vehicle usage, it's great that we don't need to import oil from mideast (that is a big reason for trade deficit) and of course it's great for commute and non-long commercial usage. But it's not suitable for a big personal car use case. Japanese family can't take holidays as what they want, so they tend to do long trip in the same specific long holidays (new year, Golden week, Obon, Silver week), that needs tremendous amount of fast charging equipment at highway or need to wait multiple hours after BEVs sold well. So theoretically PHEV should be good option but manufacturers hadn't sold it much (except Mitsubishi). It's hard to install slow charger for mechanical parking system that is common in dense cities. For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. Toyota cares Japan economy (cared in a bad way, hydrogen for car). IMO they should had promoted PHEV more in 2012-2015.
super256 3y ago
What about using hydrogen in lorries/trucks? I see that argument thrown around often in hydrogen vs battery discussions.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  For long-haul trucks it's a viable option. I think there's a large-ish test fleet in Switzerland. But for personal vehicles it's 100% dead unless we get some huge advances in the technology.
- crote 3y ago
  It's an option. But short-range trucks can operate with batteries just fine, and for long-range trucks it might end up being more viable to just construct overhead wires[0] above long-distance highways and avoid the problem altogether. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
tw04 3y ago
I don't blame you for being skeptical, but it isn't just the oil and gas industry. The Japanese government went all-in on hydrogen. https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydrogen-strategy/ https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydr...
- gmane 3y ago
  Sure, and it's by and large viewed as a complete failure[0]. Is your argument that we should repeat that failure? [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a42665011/japan-hydrogen-energy-failure/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4266501...
  - tw04 3y ago
    No? I'm not sure why you jumped to attack me when I was simply providing a counter-point to your claim that it's all "oil and gas". I drive an EV, I'm quite happy with it. As to the article: they fail to mention that Japan hasn't even begun to throw in the towel. The newest CEO of Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen powered vehicles. https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-plans-next-gen-hydrogen-fuel-cell-systems https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-pla...
    - appleiigs 3y ago
      Also, it's not a complete failure according to the article he mentions "The 20-page report doesn’t argue for hydrogen’s complete removal from the energy mix. In fact, REI argues that hydrogen is vital for industries where decarbonization is particularly tricky (think: aviation, shipping, and steelmaking). However, to use hydrogen in place of electrification via other renewable sources is a mistake, REI says."
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Japan has little traditional fossil fuels, but they were making a lot of noise about exploiting the methane hydrate in their seas: > Methane hydrate is confirmed to exist abundantly in the sea near Japan and is expected to become one of the domestic energy resources of the future https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/ https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/ So in this case, they're really just a subset of the "oil and gass industry" boosting hydrogen vehicles.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
My understanding is liquid hydrogen could be a contender for a green jet fuel alternative. Batteries are too heavy.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I think we'll see a synthetic version of jet fuel before we see a hydrogen powered plane in mass production. Far less trouble to store and use and much higher energy density, also works with existing airframes (fuel tanks!) and engines.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Plus it works with the FAA and with the existing expertise in the Airline industry.
- MBCook 3y ago
  The big problem is that fueling with liquid hydrogen is not easy. Getting things down to that temperature is not easy. Getting hydrogen cleanly is not easy. I mean if hydrogen was just as abundant in the atmosphere as oxygen and didn’t need to be at ridiculous temperatures to be liquid, it would be a great fuel. But to keep things green you’re fighting a ton of trade-offs using electricity, it which point why don’t you just use the electricity directly?
- konschubert 3y ago
  My understanding of the airline industry is that it will be MUCH easier to further synthesise that green hydrogen into proper jet fuel than to build and certify a jet that runs on Hydrogen.
baq 3y ago
Batteries are heavy, expensive and we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale. I don’t believe hydrogen is the answer but methane cells could be… liquid energy storage is just so much more practical compared to alternatives.
- dangus 3y ago
  “We don’t have the infrastructure” is a temporary problem. The same could have been said about gas stations and the electrical grid capacity needed for widespread air conditioning. Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end. The weight efficiency can only improve from here and more charging infrastructure and faster recharge times will mean less demand for long range variants. This is ideal for electrics because shorter frequent stops are more time efficient for EVs while for gas vehicles it’s the opposite. The great thing about electricity is that it’s even easier to transport and generate than liquid fuel storage. Generation can be centralized with a diverse set of energy sources.
  - baq 3y ago
    Weight is an air pollution problem - tires and brake pads release fines during normal usage. Regenerative braking helps, but only so much. https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384 https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384 Electricity is easy to transport but very hard to store and it's the storage that's the problem, see batteries.
  - ninkendo 3y ago
    > The weight efficiency can only improve from here I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons.)
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  Or possibly our descendants ;)
- parker_mountain 3y ago
  Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires. Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > quite literally insane from all practical points of view Erm. I don't think that's true.
  - r87 3y ago
    I’d expect that, but would have assumed it is due to there being more old gas vehicles on the road. Is that data normalized for age of the cars driven? I assume that my neighbors 30 year old gas guzzler is more likely to catch fire than my 1 year old PHEV for example (or maybe I’m more likely since I have both a lithium battery and a gas tank).
  - freedude 3y ago
    That fun fact may be true, but ask any firefighter that has had to put out a lithium based car fire how fun that fact is. The lithium based fires require 12-15 times the amount of water to extinguish.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
I still believe there is potential for hydrogen/ammonia/methane fuel to be a seasonal storage mechanism. Battery technology does not seem capable of offering grid scale storage for the entirety of Winter. While the solar->fuel->electricity conversion takes huge efficiency hits, for “free” renewable energy, it can still pencil out as economical. Plus, it is feasible today without unobtanium (but not currently cost competitive vs fossil fuels)
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Hydrogen is _really_ hard to store. It leaks from every container, transport and storage losses are just an accepted fact. It might be a good option when we have so much renewables that we can't find any more batteries to shove it in. Then we can use it to store compressed hydrogen, that can be released as electricity from large-scale fuel cells during calm cloudy days.
- redox99 3y ago
  > seasonal storage mechanism Is this even needed? With solar, wind, etc storing more than a few days worth of energy seems very wasteful.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Available solar energy is significantly lower in winter. Additionally, heating typically requires more energy than cooling, so it is a double whammy. Solar alone cannot generate sufficient power without ludicrous over provisioning which would be wasted the majority of the year.
_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.
- senectus1 3y ago
  absolutely. but the interesting thought experiment to have is... once you have converters all over the place for those uses... would that make it more attractive to cars?
- dgudkov 3y ago
  Quebec now tests a hydrogen train. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1.6888891 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1...
- espadrine 3y ago
  Sure, but the same companies that lobby for hydrogen for cars & heating, claiming green benefits there one day, don’t raise a finger to decarbonate hydrogen for fertilizers, which does make it seem like they don’t actually care about reducing CO₂ emissions. The article points out the hypocrisy: > Liebreich gives an example of Shell being happy to spend $12bn on a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform, the Prelude, which has seen a host of problems, “but they won't spend $12bn just producing blue, green, pink, or any other sort of clean hydrogen for those [existing] uses where we currently are driving 3-4% of global emissions”.
  - Certhas 3y ago
    Absolutely. A sane hydrogen strategy can not be left to the lobbyists. Unfortunately, these companies have a lot of money to throw around, and they have no qualms about speaking to peoples "anti-ideological" impulses. In Germany, we have seen this strategy employed a number of times now politically: There is a clear technological winner (EV, battery, heat pumps, etc...), however with enormous transition costs (new infrastructure, people changing habits). So it's inconvenient. You then simply claim that you are pro-climate, but you want a "technologically neutral" solution, claiming that the slightly inconvenient winning technologies are driven by "green" moralizing and ideology. As no alternative technologies are ready to go, and their trade-offs and inconveniences (e.g. where do you build all the wind farms to produce the electricity to get your hydrogen) are not apparent in the immediate future, you get to not inconvenience your electorate, seem pragmatic/rational (vs the "green ideologues"), while still talking pro-climate. It's not exactly been a winning strategy electorally for those who employ it the loudest, but it's been an effective strategy to prevent political wins of the parties and politicians that actually want to make the sustainability transition happen. So far, it seems to have empowered the anti-establishment populist right instead...
dieselgate 3y ago
Am not well versed on these considerations but it appears one advantage of hydrogen is energy density compared to batteries. This may be less an issue for passenger vehicles but could be more relevant for air travel - as an example. No comments or opinions otherwise re: funding etc. Found the below article useful as a primer: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and-battery-electric-vehicles-compared https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and...
- linsomniac 3y ago
  Haven't we tried hydrogen for air travel before? ;-)
  - Reason077 3y ago
    It's been used successfully for space travel, in liquid (cryogenic) form. The Space Shuttle's main engines ran on hydrogen fuel, for example. However the latest generation of rockets seems to have moved away from hydrogen back to things like RP-1 (kerosene) and liquid methane. The high cost and difficulties of working with hydrogen is a factor in this.
    - the-dude 3y ago
      Hindenburg
- freedude 3y ago
  They definitely fly better than a lead balloon (batteries).
- jimt1234 3y ago
  Engineering Explained occasionally discusses hydrogen energy density: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8
- spott 3y ago
  What kind of energy density? There is energy density by volume (where it matches batteries, when you ignore all the stuff you need to keep hydrogen at 700bar safe), and energy density by weight (where it wins pretty handily against pretty much everything).
londons_explore 3y ago
You know what does make it make sense? If you can take natural gas out of the ground, split it into hydrogen and CO2 (releasing heat, which can be used to generate electricity), and inject the CO2 back underground to help release more oil and gas. At this point, you have hydrogen gas. Sure, you could burn that hydrogen to make more electricity, but it works out financially better if you can directly use it. The benefit of this approach is it can make use of most of the existing oil and gas infrastructure, and countries sitting on big gas reserves have a use for them. The downside is it makes minimal sense unless there is some financial disincentive from just burning the gas and releasing the CO2.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  You hit the nail on the head, this is why oil companies are pro-hydrogen. They can greenwash their natural gas into "green" hydrogen and get even more profits. H2 prices are at least 5-10x compared to natural gas.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  This is similar to fracking, no? Doesn't it have the same seismic/water table problems?
  - katbyte 3y ago
    Yep. And it won’t be 100% efficient. The energy to capture and store the co2 is likely greater then the energy you get in hydrogen
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      CO2 reduces the viscosity of oil, and helps get more oil out of the oil well. Even ignoring climate benefits, it's still worth pumping CO2 down the well for financial reasons alone - especially towards the end of the lifespan of classical oil wells.
- crote 3y ago
  Unfortunately it is a bit tricky in practice, and still have a very significant global warming footprint[0]. You're never going to capture 100% of the CO4, and oil and gas wells tend to leak quite a lot of methane to the atmosphere. So-called "blue" hydrogen only results in about 10% less GHG emissions than traditional "grey" hydrogen. It's something, but not big enough of a difference to actually be usable. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
askvictor 3y ago
The problem is that oil/gas companies see their impending demise. They are good at moving flammable things through pipes. Electricity is not that, and if it takes hold, they're in for a _major_ pivot. So they do what they've always done.
dclowd9901 3y ago
Batteries go bad over a rather short period of time and are incredibly expensive too. They’re basically currently infeasible as a mode of transport without _a lot_ of trade offs. Compare that to a tank for fuel, which is comparatively minuscule in cost and basically never goes bad. I don’t think electrical is as scalable as liquid fuel and I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by exotic materials.
- elsonrodriguez 3y ago
  Liquid fuel is inherently unscalable, it is a finite resource.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Gas, especially gas with ethanol in it, absolutely goes bad unless stored very well. It'll oxidize, absorb water, and evaporate within months. There's a lot of reasons why people "winterize" their lawn equipment; gas going bad is one big part.
- robertjpayne 3y ago
  Fuel definitely goes bad, at least once the storage is in vehicles. The petroleum industry keeps peddling all this FUD about how awful batteries are. The difference is batteries can be improved (and there's a tooooon of $$$$ pouring into this problem) and they are improving. Petroleum is a dead end while batteries, solar, and electrical grids have a bright future and lost of room for growth.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  How long is a "rather short period of time"? There are decade old EV batteries still in use and over 80% SOH. And fuel definitely goes bad. It doesn't work like in the movies where you can just find a 30 year old car in the desert and grab more fuel for your awesome roadwarrior vehicle. You can use additives to make it last longer and store better, but still. As for "exotic materials" we're figuring out new battery chemistries at a record pace. Some are better for vehicles, that need a good kWh/kg ratio. Others are better for grid storage where kWh/€ is a more relevant measurement.
ant6n 3y ago
The fdp, a small german party part of government, that holds the traffic ministry, managed to block an EU-wide phase-out of ICE vehicles to promote e-fuels. Whats e-fuels you ask? Its even more ridiculous than hydrogen cars - using renewable energy to synthesize fossil fuels. The beauty is that this makes ICE vehicles supposedly green, so then you can just keep selling them forever. And at some point down the line u just kill the e-fuel requirement.
numbers_guy 3y ago
Your comment contains no substance. You are just pushing a conspiracy theory. Hydrogen based fuels make sense on multiple fronts: long term storage (batteries cannot do this), scale (adding more tanks is cheaper than whole battery packs) and energy/power densities are still above what the best batteries can provide.

by gmane 3y ago

xdennis 3y ago

> Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while [...]. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn Sorry, you say you're familiar with hydrogen fuel cells and you don't know it's not burning? Hydrogen fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction to turn hydrogen and oxygen from the air into electricity and water. The byproduct is water, not fire. I'm not rich enough to own either a battery-electric or hydrogen-electric car, but it's weird how the only people who hate hydrogen are the battery people. I don't hear any hate from fossil-fuel guys. It seems they're more interested in protecting their investment than saving the environment through a process (which is more inefficient, but) that doesn't require rare earth minerals.

credit_guy 3y ago

> batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases That's not true. There are two main storage cases: from day to night and from summer to winter. Because there are 365 days and nights in a year and only one summer and one winter, a battery for seasonal storage needs to be 365 times cheaper than one for daily storage to break even after the same number of years. Of course, there are no batteries that are 365 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Nothing comes close. People are thinking that chemical energy storage could work for the case of seasonal storage. It doesn't quite work right now, but it's not off by 2 orders of magnitude, it's off by maybe a factor of 5. It is much more likely that we'll succeed in making green hydrogen production, transportation and storage economical than that we could make batteries cheaper by a factor of 100. Separately, there is a fairly good chance that we'll be able to extract hydrogen from underground deposits (google "white hydrogen", e.g. [1]). Third, hydrogen storage economics enjoys the square-cube law: larger pressurized tanks can hold a lot of hydrogen for not a much larger cost than smaller tanks. So hydrogen could make sense for applications where very large tanks are needed, and one such application is railways. A typical train oil car has a volume of about 130 m3. At 700 bar (typical storage tank pressure), one m3 of hydrogen weighs about 42 kg, so this is about 5.5 tons. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel, so that would be the equivalent of about 16 tons of diesel. Train have an efficiency of at least 400 ton-miles per gallon, which is more than 125 ton-miles per kg, or 2 million ton-miles for 16 tons. In other words, such a tanker car could be enough to propel a ten thousand ton freight train for 200 miles. It would be much easier to convert diesel locomotives to burn hydrogen than to electrify thousands of miles of railways, so there's a fairly good chance that rail could be hydrogen's killer app. [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...

tcfhgj 3y ago
Summer to winter isn't a real storage case. If you need more energy in the winter, you build more wind power, not PV to store it an entire year. And episodes of little wind+sun have a duration of less than a month. And there are more storage use cases, e.g. short term grid stabilization (<1 second).
- rocqua 3y ago
  You cannot reasonably dimension wind power to serve the winter heating needs of northern Europe. Once you get halfway there you're summer surpluses get so huge, inefficient seasonal storage becomes a much better solution.
  - tcfhgj 3y ago
    Interestingly, others worry that the seasonal phenomenon of wind power is too large: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-patterns-and-electricity-generation-vary-across-the-seasons/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-pattern... Perhaps southern Europe will counteract as well: less need in the winter and energy required for increased cooling with heat pumps in the summer
rnk 3y ago
Can you explain why existing batteries don't store energy well? I don't have to use energy to crack natural gas or water. I don't have to worry about the hydrogen leaking out and catching into an invisible fire. I don't have to carry around a tank with enormous pressure, because the hydrogen isn't very dense as an energy source. I could just say we'll solve all problems with green batteries. We can recycle batteries at > 95% of materials already. We have lifepo4 batteries that are stable, don't have cobalt and be charge up to 100% without destroying them. In reality I don't have to point to some unknown incredible improvements in the future, they work today. I see hydrogen as the oil industrial complex and diesel & ice industrial complexes wanting to maintain all their infrastructure that burns fuel for engines. It makes sense from their standpoint.

Reason077 3y ago

"From 2020 through March 31, 2023, Toyota sold a total of 23,123 fuel cell vehicles." This is less than the number of EVs Tesla builds every single week.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

It's posited as a "dump" for excess electricity; while batteries may be good for storage and balancing out the grid, hydrogen is suitable to put everything else in, that is, what if the batteries are full, or there's still more electricity in the grid that has nowhere to go? Hydrogen generation - as far as I'm aware - can scale to schlurp up any excess to a huge amount in the same plant. The other one - in my country - is that they want to wind down natural gas entirely, but then want to reuse the pipes for hydrogen; I suspect this may be to continue making use of the huge infrastructure investments made in the gas pipelines.

malchow 3y ago

Are you referring to hydrogen as a mobility fuel specifically? I generally agree. However, it is a critical large-scale industrial input, a replacement industrial input for several additional large industries, and an excellent large-scale stationary energy store.

mohaine 3y ago
Is it an excellent large-scale stationary energy store though? I mean, it seems like it should be but * Hydrogen really likes to leak. * Hydrogen breaks down the container holding it over time. * Hydrogen is very low density. This means you need either a very large container or very high pressure. Combined with 1 and 2 this is going to be expensive. I'm really asking the question. I would love to know the full cost difference with current tech vs other options.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > * Hydrogen really likes to leak. Yes, but the rate of leakage is tiny enough that for any reasonable sized tank it's going to be years till it's all leaked away. The real risk is the leakage causing explosions if you ever put a tank in a confined space.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    It leaks a lot faster if it corrodes a hole in the container. Hydrogen is fairly reactive.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    That's probably only the 'primary' real risk, there are some number of secondary real risks of hydrogen being a very reactive chemical. Not in the flammable boom boom, but the interacting with stuff it shouldn't and causing degradation and corrosion.

idontpost 3y ago

> My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them I don't understand how any one looks at the electric car charging situation and thinks it makes sense to scale that out to 100% of vehicles. A 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.

marssaxman 3y ago
The future is public transport.
- jryle70 3y ago
  Did you know that car ownership has kept increasing in the Netherlands, at least until a few years ago? The country renown for cycling and public transportation. From 197 cars per 1000 people in 1970 we've grown to 662 in 2019. i.e. we now have more than three times the number of cars per person even compared with the "bad old days" of the car dominated 1970s ... The simple fact is that Dutch car use has grown continuously for 70 years much as it has in every other nation I love train, but let's not pretend that public transportation will be dominant. Rather, it will be a mix of different modes of transport. Cars will continue to be important. Visit the Netherlands and see for yourself. https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-myth-netherlands-is-great.html https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-m...
- troupe 3y ago
  The decline in passenger trains seems to indicate that future is headed in the other direction.
wongarsu 3y ago
The envisioned car charging situation is that you charge your car at home or at work. Cars sit unused 99% of the time, they can use that time charging without issues. What we are experiencing now is transitional, where people use infrastructure intended for road-trips for their daily needs. That phase will pass
- 3y ago

asdff 3y ago

If the case for the battery was objectively better, oil companies would pull a phillip morris and buy out their antithesis to profit on both ends. The fact that they are doubling down on hydrogen itself I think its really interesting. To me, this shows that perhaps there is a true advantage, and also a high enough barrier to entry where only these oil companies at the scale they already exist can reap the most benefit. Its hard to know where the truth actually lies due to our propaganda/media environment, but I think these actions at least do inform of it a little.

gmane 3y ago
Like BP? https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bp-joins-forces-with-harmony-energy-for-battery-storage-projects https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bp-joins-forces-with-harmony... or Exxon? https://www.aa.com.tr/en/p/duyurular/1002/exxonmobil-launches-mobil-ev-offer-for-battery-electric-vehicles https://www.aa.com.tr/en/p/duyurular/1002/exxonmobil-launche... or Chevron? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ev-charging-startup-electric-era-announces-investment-from-chevron/ar-AA1hDwfr https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ev-charging-startup-ele...
deleted 3y ago
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PaulKeeble 3y ago
Hydrogen can be captured out of some of the oil wells they have. Its not about producing it from green energy they have a plan to keep extracting it from the ground.
timschmidt 3y ago
Nissan has famously owned the patent on large format NiCad batteries without producing them or offering them for sale on the open market. So you're right.
pixl97 3y ago
"If the case for digital cameras was objectively better Kodak would have bought up chip companies and profited on both sides".....
3y ago

reducesuffering 3y ago

Hydrogen was pushed by the Japanese government because BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources. It's not a coincidence the only two companies making hydrogen cars were both the largest Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda. And both of those models are economic failures atypical of their usual engineering prowess. Toyota Mirai sales have been flatlined at low ~1-2k since they started, for 7 years: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa-canada-monthly-yearly/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa... While Tesla immediately had ever-growing sales: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/

jacquesm 3y ago
Toyota is said to lose in excess of $100k per hydrogen car.
Reason077 3y ago
> "BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources." BEVs are better suited to Japan's economy and resources than any other fuel, the vast majority of which is imported (including natural gas). It's just that it's taken Japan's government a long time to realise this. But it seems like they're finally coming around!
- fomine3 3y ago
  BEV is hit and miss for Japan. For vehicle usage, it's great that we don't need to import oil from mideast (that is a big reason for trade deficit) and of course it's great for commute and non-long commercial usage. But it's not suitable for a big personal car use case. Japanese family can't take holidays as what they want, so they tend to do long trip in the same specific long holidays (new year, Golden week, Obon, Silver week), that needs tremendous amount of fast charging equipment at highway or need to wait multiple hours after BEVs sold well. So theoretically PHEV should be good option but manufacturers hadn't sold it much (except Mitsubishi). It's hard to install slow charger for mechanical parking system that is common in dense cities. For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. Toyota cares Japan economy (cared in a bad way, hydrogen for car). IMO they should had promoted PHEV more in 2012-2015.

super256 3y ago

What about using hydrogen in lorries/trucks? I see that argument thrown around often in hydrogen vs battery discussions.

theshrike79 3y ago
For long-haul trucks it's a viable option. I think there's a large-ish test fleet in Switzerland. But for personal vehicles it's 100% dead unless we get some huge advances in the technology.
crote 3y ago
It's an option. But short-range trucks can operate with batteries just fine, and for long-range trucks it might end up being more viable to just construct overhead wires[0] above long-distance highways and avoid the problem altogether. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg

tw04 3y ago

I don't blame you for being skeptical, but it isn't just the oil and gas industry. The Japanese government went all-in on hydrogen. https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydrogen-strategy/ https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydr...

gmane 3y ago
Sure, and it's by and large viewed as a complete failure[0]. Is your argument that we should repeat that failure? [0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a42665011/japan-hydrogen-energy-failure/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4266501...
- tw04 3y ago
  No? I'm not sure why you jumped to attack me when I was simply providing a counter-point to your claim that it's all "oil and gas". I drive an EV, I'm quite happy with it. As to the article: they fail to mention that Japan hasn't even begun to throw in the towel. The newest CEO of Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen powered vehicles. https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-plans-next-gen-hydrogen-fuel-cell-systems https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-pla...
  - appleiigs 3y ago
    Also, it's not a complete failure according to the article he mentions "The 20-page report doesn’t argue for hydrogen’s complete removal from the energy mix. In fact, REI argues that hydrogen is vital for industries where decarbonization is particularly tricky (think: aviation, shipping, and steelmaking). However, to use hydrogen in place of electrification via other renewable sources is a mistake, REI says."
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Japan has little traditional fossil fuels, but they were making a lot of noise about exploiting the methane hydrate in their seas: > Methane hydrate is confirmed to exist abundantly in the sea near Japan and is expected to become one of the domestic energy resources of the future https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/ https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/ So in this case, they're really just a subset of the "oil and gass industry" boosting hydrogen vehicles.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago

My understanding is liquid hydrogen could be a contender for a green jet fuel alternative. Batteries are too heavy.

jacquesm 3y ago
I think we'll see a synthetic version of jet fuel before we see a hydrogen powered plane in mass production. Far less trouble to store and use and much higher energy density, also works with existing airframes (fuel tanks!) and engines.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Plus it works with the FAA and with the existing expertise in the Airline industry.
MBCook 3y ago
The big problem is that fueling with liquid hydrogen is not easy. Getting things down to that temperature is not easy. Getting hydrogen cleanly is not easy. I mean if hydrogen was just as abundant in the atmosphere as oxygen and didn’t need to be at ridiculous temperatures to be liquid, it would be a great fuel. But to keep things green you’re fighting a ton of trade-offs using electricity, it which point why don’t you just use the electricity directly?
konschubert 3y ago
My understanding of the airline industry is that it will be MUCH easier to further synthesise that green hydrogen into proper jet fuel than to build and certify a jet that runs on Hydrogen.

baq 3y ago

Batteries are heavy, expensive and we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale. I don’t believe hydrogen is the answer but methane cells could be… liquid energy storage is just so much more practical compared to alternatives.

dangus 3y ago
“We don’t have the infrastructure” is a temporary problem. The same could have been said about gas stations and the electrical grid capacity needed for widespread air conditioning. Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end. The weight efficiency can only improve from here and more charging infrastructure and faster recharge times will mean less demand for long range variants. This is ideal for electrics because shorter frequent stops are more time efficient for EVs while for gas vehicles it’s the opposite. The great thing about electricity is that it’s even easier to transport and generate than liquid fuel storage. Generation can be centralized with a diverse set of energy sources.
- baq 3y ago
  Weight is an air pollution problem - tires and brake pads release fines during normal usage. Regenerative braking helps, but only so much. https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384 https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384 Electricity is easy to transport but very hard to store and it's the storage that's the problem, see batteries.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  > The weight efficiency can only improve from here I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons.)

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.

MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Or possibly our descendants ;)
parker_mountain 3y ago
Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires. Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > quite literally insane from all practical points of view Erm. I don't think that's true.
- r87 3y ago
  I’d expect that, but would have assumed it is due to there being more old gas vehicles on the road. Is that data normalized for age of the cars driven? I assume that my neighbors 30 year old gas guzzler is more likely to catch fire than my 1 year old PHEV for example (or maybe I’m more likely since I have both a lithium battery and a gas tank).
- freedude 3y ago
  That fun fact may be true, but ask any firefighter that has had to put out a lithium based car fire how fun that fact is. The lithium based fires require 12-15 times the amount of water to extinguish.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

I still believe there is potential for hydrogen/ammonia/methane fuel to be a seasonal storage mechanism. Battery technology does not seem capable of offering grid scale storage for the entirety of Winter. While the solar->fuel->electricity conversion takes huge efficiency hits, for “free” renewable energy, it can still pencil out as economical. Plus, it is feasible today without unobtanium (but not currently cost competitive vs fossil fuels)

theshrike79 3y ago
Hydrogen is _really_ hard to store. It leaks from every container, transport and storage losses are just an accepted fact. It might be a good option when we have so much renewables that we can't find any more batteries to shove it in. Then we can use it to store compressed hydrogen, that can be released as electricity from large-scale fuel cells during calm cloudy days.
redox99 3y ago
> seasonal storage mechanism Is this even needed? With solar, wind, etc storing more than a few days worth of energy seems very wasteful.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Available solar energy is significantly lower in winter. Additionally, heating typically requires more energy than cooling, so it is a double whammy. Solar alone cannot generate sufficient power without ludicrous over provisioning which would be wasted the majority of the year.

_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago

Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.

senectus1 3y ago
absolutely. but the interesting thought experiment to have is... once you have converters all over the place for those uses... would that make it more attractive to cars?
dgudkov 3y ago
Quebec now tests a hydrogen train. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1.6888891 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1...
espadrine 3y ago
Sure, but the same companies that lobby for hydrogen for cars & heating, claiming green benefits there one day, don’t raise a finger to decarbonate hydrogen for fertilizers, which does make it seem like they don’t actually care about reducing CO₂ emissions. The article points out the hypocrisy: > Liebreich gives an example of Shell being happy to spend $12bn on a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform, the Prelude, which has seen a host of problems, “but they won't spend $12bn just producing blue, green, pink, or any other sort of clean hydrogen for those [existing] uses where we currently are driving 3-4% of global emissions”.
- Certhas 3y ago
  Absolutely. A sane hydrogen strategy can not be left to the lobbyists. Unfortunately, these companies have a lot of money to throw around, and they have no qualms about speaking to peoples "anti-ideological" impulses. In Germany, we have seen this strategy employed a number of times now politically: There is a clear technological winner (EV, battery, heat pumps, etc...), however with enormous transition costs (new infrastructure, people changing habits). So it's inconvenient. You then simply claim that you are pro-climate, but you want a "technologically neutral" solution, claiming that the slightly inconvenient winning technologies are driven by "green" moralizing and ideology. As no alternative technologies are ready to go, and their trade-offs and inconveniences (e.g. where do you build all the wind farms to produce the electricity to get your hydrogen) are not apparent in the immediate future, you get to not inconvenience your electorate, seem pragmatic/rational (vs the "green ideologues"), while still talking pro-climate. It's not exactly been a winning strategy electorally for those who employ it the loudest, but it's been an effective strategy to prevent political wins of the parties and politicians that actually want to make the sustainability transition happen. So far, it seems to have empowered the anti-establishment populist right instead...

dieselgate 3y ago

Am not well versed on these considerations but it appears one advantage of hydrogen is energy density compared to batteries. This may be less an issue for passenger vehicles but could be more relevant for air travel - as an example. No comments or opinions otherwise re: funding etc. Found the below article useful as a primer: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and-battery-electric-vehicles-compared https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and...

linsomniac 3y ago
Haven't we tried hydrogen for air travel before? ;-)
- Reason077 3y ago
  It's been used successfully for space travel, in liquid (cryogenic) form. The Space Shuttle's main engines ran on hydrogen fuel, for example. However the latest generation of rockets seems to have moved away from hydrogen back to things like RP-1 (kerosene) and liquid methane. The high cost and difficulties of working with hydrogen is a factor in this.
  - the-dude 3y ago
    Hindenburg
freedude 3y ago
They definitely fly better than a lead balloon (batteries).
jimt1234 3y ago
Engineering Explained occasionally discusses hydrogen energy density: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8
spott 3y ago
What kind of energy density? There is energy density by volume (where it matches batteries, when you ignore all the stuff you need to keep hydrogen at 700bar safe), and energy density by weight (where it wins pretty handily against pretty much everything).

londons_explore 3y ago

You know what does make it make sense? If you can take natural gas out of the ground, split it into hydrogen and CO2 (releasing heat, which can be used to generate electricity), and inject the CO2 back underground to help release more oil and gas. At this point, you have hydrogen gas. Sure, you could burn that hydrogen to make more electricity, but it works out financially better if you can directly use it. The benefit of this approach is it can make use of most of the existing oil and gas infrastructure, and countries sitting on big gas reserves have a use for them. The downside is it makes minimal sense unless there is some financial disincentive from just burning the gas and releasing the CO2.

theshrike79 3y ago
You hit the nail on the head, this is why oil companies are pro-hydrogen. They can greenwash their natural gas into "green" hydrogen and get even more profits. H2 prices are at least 5-10x compared to natural gas.
candiddevmike 3y ago
This is similar to fracking, no? Doesn't it have the same seismic/water table problems?
- katbyte 3y ago
  Yep. And it won’t be 100% efficient. The energy to capture and store the co2 is likely greater then the energy you get in hydrogen
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    CO2 reduces the viscosity of oil, and helps get more oil out of the oil well. Even ignoring climate benefits, it's still worth pumping CO2 down the well for financial reasons alone - especially towards the end of the lifespan of classical oil wells.
crote 3y ago
Unfortunately it is a bit tricky in practice, and still have a very significant global warming footprint[0]. You're never going to capture 100% of the CO4, and oil and gas wells tend to leak quite a lot of methane to the atmosphere. So-called "blue" hydrogen only results in about 10% less GHG emissions than traditional "grey" hydrogen. It's something, but not big enough of a difference to actually be usable. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956

deleted 3y ago

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askvictor 3y ago

The problem is that oil/gas companies see their impending demise. They are good at moving flammable things through pipes. Electricity is not that, and if it takes hold, they're in for a _major_ pivot. So they do what they've always done.

dclowd9901 3y ago

Batteries go bad over a rather short period of time and are incredibly expensive too. They’re basically currently infeasible as a mode of transport without _a lot_ of trade offs. Compare that to a tank for fuel, which is comparatively minuscule in cost and basically never goes bad. I don’t think electrical is as scalable as liquid fuel and I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by exotic materials.

elsonrodriguez 3y ago
Liquid fuel is inherently unscalable, it is a finite resource.
vel0city 3y ago
Gas, especially gas with ethanol in it, absolutely goes bad unless stored very well. It'll oxidize, absorb water, and evaporate within months. There's a lot of reasons why people "winterize" their lawn equipment; gas going bad is one big part.
robertjpayne 3y ago
Fuel definitely goes bad, at least once the storage is in vehicles. The petroleum industry keeps peddling all this FUD about how awful batteries are. The difference is batteries can be improved (and there's a tooooon of $$$$ pouring into this problem) and they are improving. Petroleum is a dead end while batteries, solar, and electrical grids have a bright future and lost of room for growth.
theshrike79 3y ago
How long is a "rather short period of time"? There are decade old EV batteries still in use and over 80% SOH. And fuel definitely goes bad. It doesn't work like in the movies where you can just find a 30 year old car in the desert and grab more fuel for your awesome roadwarrior vehicle. You can use additives to make it last longer and store better, but still. As for "exotic materials" we're figuring out new battery chemistries at a record pace. Some are better for vehicles, that need a good kWh/kg ratio. Others are better for grid storage where kWh/€ is a more relevant measurement.

ant6n 3y ago

The fdp, a small german party part of government, that holds the traffic ministry, managed to block an EU-wide phase-out of ICE vehicles to promote e-fuels. Whats e-fuels you ask? Its even more ridiculous than hydrogen cars - using renewable energy to synthesize fossil fuels. The beauty is that this makes ICE vehicles supposedly green, so then you can just keep selling them forever. And at some point down the line u just kill the e-fuel requirement.

numbers_guy 3y ago

Your comment contains no substance. You are just pushing a conspiracy theory. Hydrogen based fuels make sense on multiple fronts: long term storage (batteries cannot do this), scale (adding more tanks is cheaper than whole battery packs) and energy/power densities are still above what the best batteries can provide.