3 ms·

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.

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.