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Here's a sobering view on the economics of hydrogen: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-clean-hydrogens-missing-trillions/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebre

Here's a sobering view on the economics of hydrogen: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-clean-hydrogens-missing-trillions/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-clean-hydrogens-missin... Hint, they remain terrible and you shouldn't get your hopes up. Converting air into gas isn't hard technically. It's just really expensive. The expensive bits get waffled over a lot by proponents. But there's no real solution for this stuff just being really, really expensive.

bryanlarsen 3y ago
They've supposedly got their H2 cost under $2.50 per kg. Your link calls $2.20 per kg by 2030 "hopelessly optimistic". In comparison steam reformed hydrogen from natural gas costs $1.50 - $5.00 per kg.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  That's excluding carbon capture, which is expensive. Blue hydrogen is being talked about a lot but isn't being produced at any scale worth talking about currently. Most hydrogen is grey hydrogen and a tiny amount of it is green hydrogen. This system proposes using hydrogen to create natural gas. Using grey hydrogen for this doesn't make any sense. It would be more efficient to just use the gas directly. You'd end up with more gas for less money. Even if you capture the carbon and somehow manage to get some cheap blue hydrogen it still doesn't make sense. Especially if you then go and burn the gas and dump the carbon back in the atmosphere. This plan only makes sense with green hydrogen. Which remains expensive.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    They also claim to do carbon capture for $250 per ton.
  - fransje26 3y ago
    > Most hydrogen is grey hydrogen and a tiny amount of it is green hydrogen. They specifically explain that they produce fossil-free natural gas, i.e. the hydrogen they use is not grey hydrogen.
bodhiandphysics 3y ago
Just to point out... the whole point of Terraform Industries is to solve the problems that are raised in that sobering view! That doesn't mean they will succeed, but saying "this is hard, so they won't" is also not terribly useful. Ultimately, when faced with difficult problems, the only hope is to try to figure out how to solve them.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  > the only hope is to try to figure out how to solve them. Or to find alternative ways of doing things that aren't bottle-necked on pesky physics. Who needs really expensive methane? Natural gas is only convenient when it's cheap. When it's not, other means of creating heat are available. The whole premise of synthetic gas is that we don't have to change and it will be great. The reality is that this isn't all that great. Even at the cited prices it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than what people pay for their gas currently. And I would take those optimistic estimates with a huge grain of salt.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Their target methane price is $10/kcf. That's not "an order of magnitude more expensive". It's about 2X current prices in the US and significantly cheaper than European prices. Natural gas prices are dominated by the price of transportation in most places. Terraform's process can produce close to where it's consumed. In other words, if the price of natural gas is $0 in Alberta, Terraform might be able undercut the price of that gas in Europe by setting up a plant in Spain.
malfist 3y ago
People say the same thing about any new tech. Look at solar when it first came out. Technology advances. Manufacturing costs go down, generally.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Sure, it's just that hydrogen is very dependent on solar and wind making lots of progress. The relative inefficiencies aren't going to improve much because of physics. The article provides a good breakdown of reasons why hydrogen is very likely to stay relatively expensive and cumbersome for the foreseeable future. I don't think Terraform has nailed that yet. They wouldn't be the first hydrogen centric company to gloss over a few inconvenient things like physics. With direct air capture, we're talking ginormous amounts of volumes of air that need to be processed. At ~400 parts per million CO2, there just isn't a whole lot of it around. Which means you need to drive some kind of mechanism that pumps enormous amounts of air through the system. Which presumably takes energy and costs money to build. So, I'd take these numbers with a big grain of salt until they have proven that they can get their cost that low. The hydrogen part alone is nice. 2.50$/kg is still on the high side but it's better than the much higher price points for green hydrogen. Natural gas is one of the cheapest forms of energy which is the only reason it is so popular. Green gas generated from green hydrogen is going to be much more expensive; even at these wildly optimistic numbers. Which raises the question who would buy it and why they would not opt for far more efficient and cheaper alternatives instead. Including some renewable energy ones.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >Manufacturing costs go down, generally. No they don't, you're just falling for survivorship bias - technology that's successful goes down in cost. Technology that starts off prohibitively expensive and remains prohibitively expensive is technology that tends to stay niche or nonexistent and not thought about. Successful technology is almost definitionally technology whose manufacturing costs go down over time, but to use that as a basis for claiming that Technology X will go down in cost over time and therefore Technology X will be successful - well, that's circular logic. BTW, solar when it first came out was solar thermal. Solar thermal, as an electricity source, is dead.
h0l0cube 3y ago
It really depends on the application. If a company wants to provide a premium verifiably carbon-neutral product, instead of some sham carbon credit scheme, they can swap out their fuels to carbon-neutral versions. There's perhaps some use in capturing excess solar during times of negative prices and instead driving electrolysis. That hydrogen could either be used to sell back to the system when prices are at their highest, or export to another place. As solar enters over-capacity, such plants could be useful.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

They've supposedly got their H2 cost under $2.50 per kg. Your link calls $2.20 per kg by 2030 "hopelessly optimistic". In comparison steam reformed hydrogen from natural gas costs $1.50 - $5.00 per kg.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
That's excluding carbon capture, which is expensive. Blue hydrogen is being talked about a lot but isn't being produced at any scale worth talking about currently. Most hydrogen is grey hydrogen and a tiny amount of it is green hydrogen. This system proposes using hydrogen to create natural gas. Using grey hydrogen for this doesn't make any sense. It would be more efficient to just use the gas directly. You'd end up with more gas for less money. Even if you capture the carbon and somehow manage to get some cheap blue hydrogen it still doesn't make sense. Especially if you then go and burn the gas and dump the carbon back in the atmosphere. This plan only makes sense with green hydrogen. Which remains expensive.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  They also claim to do carbon capture for $250 per ton.
- fransje26 3y ago
  > Most hydrogen is grey hydrogen and a tiny amount of it is green hydrogen. They specifically explain that they produce fossil-free natural gas, i.e. the hydrogen they use is not grey hydrogen.

bodhiandphysics 3y ago

Just to point out... the whole point of Terraform Industries is to solve the problems that are raised in that sobering view! That doesn't mean they will succeed, but saying "this is hard, so they won't" is also not terribly useful. Ultimately, when faced with difficult problems, the only hope is to try to figure out how to solve them.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
> the only hope is to try to figure out how to solve them. Or to find alternative ways of doing things that aren't bottle-necked on pesky physics. Who needs really expensive methane? Natural gas is only convenient when it's cheap. When it's not, other means of creating heat are available. The whole premise of synthetic gas is that we don't have to change and it will be great. The reality is that this isn't all that great. Even at the cited prices it would be an order of magnitude more expensive than what people pay for their gas currently. And I would take those optimistic estimates with a huge grain of salt.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Their target methane price is $10/kcf. That's not "an order of magnitude more expensive". It's about 2X current prices in the US and significantly cheaper than European prices. Natural gas prices are dominated by the price of transportation in most places. Terraform's process can produce close to where it's consumed. In other words, if the price of natural gas is $0 in Alberta, Terraform might be able undercut the price of that gas in Europe by setting up a plant in Spain.

malfist 3y ago

People say the same thing about any new tech. Look at solar when it first came out. Technology advances. Manufacturing costs go down, generally.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
Sure, it's just that hydrogen is very dependent on solar and wind making lots of progress. The relative inefficiencies aren't going to improve much because of physics. The article provides a good breakdown of reasons why hydrogen is very likely to stay relatively expensive and cumbersome for the foreseeable future. I don't think Terraform has nailed that yet. They wouldn't be the first hydrogen centric company to gloss over a few inconvenient things like physics. With direct air capture, we're talking ginormous amounts of volumes of air that need to be processed. At ~400 parts per million CO2, there just isn't a whole lot of it around. Which means you need to drive some kind of mechanism that pumps enormous amounts of air through the system. Which presumably takes energy and costs money to build. So, I'd take these numbers with a big grain of salt until they have proven that they can get their cost that low. The hydrogen part alone is nice. 2.50$/kg is still on the high side but it's better than the much higher price points for green hydrogen. Natural gas is one of the cheapest forms of energy which is the only reason it is so popular. Green gas generated from green hydrogen is going to be much more expensive; even at these wildly optimistic numbers. Which raises the question who would buy it and why they would not opt for far more efficient and cheaper alternatives instead. Including some renewable energy ones.
Qwertious 3y ago
>Manufacturing costs go down, generally. No they don't, you're just falling for survivorship bias - technology that's successful goes down in cost. Technology that starts off prohibitively expensive and remains prohibitively expensive is technology that tends to stay niche or nonexistent and not thought about. Successful technology is almost definitionally technology whose manufacturing costs go down over time, but to use that as a basis for claiming that Technology X will go down in cost over time and therefore Technology X will be successful - well, that's circular logic. BTW, solar when it first came out was solar thermal. Solar thermal, as an electricity source, is dead.

h0l0cube 3y ago

It really depends on the application. If a company wants to provide a premium verifiably carbon-neutral product, instead of some sham carbon credit scheme, they can swap out their fuels to carbon-neutral versions. There's perhaps some use in capturing excess solar during times of negative prices and instead driving electrolysis. That hydrogen could either be used to sell back to the system when prices are at their highest, or export to another place. As solar enters over-capacity, such plants could be useful.