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If we're being realistic, the road to a circular economy is going to be long. We're still going to produce non-recyclable garbage in 50 years (you could potent
by pbmonster 3y ago
If we're being realistic, the road to a circular economy is going to be long.
We're still going to produce non-recyclable garbage in 50 years (you could potentially even reform that to hydrogen and carbon monoxide, lowering the energy requirements relative to synth fuel production from CO2), and the world will still be running gas turbine peaker plants for those wind-less winter days.
- audunw 3y agoWe might be running gas peaker plants in 50 years but there’s no way they will run on natural gas. The reduced scale, and gas being harder to find, will obliterate the economies of scale. We’ll be running them on hydrogen produced from excess electricity on days with a lot of wind and sun. There’s even some serious talks about delivering hydrogen over existing gas lines. Like all the off shore platforms in the northern sea can become hubs for off shore wind (super strong and stable wind all the way out there) that power electrolysis to send hydrogen to Germany.
- pbmonster 3y agoI really hope it works out like this. But right now, the technological challenges (electrolysis cells are expensive at GW scale, transporting and storing hydrogen is dangerous and expensive) are substantial. I just don't see a scale where a hydrogen electrolysis facility that only runs on days with excess electricity production is more economically feasible than running a thermal hydrogen reformer of a natural gas pipeline and using the natural gas itself for the applications where you end up just burning it anyway. Gigantic taxes on CO2 emission could fix this, but ever then hydrogen would need a couple of breakthroughs to make it more economical than carbon capture and storage.