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Fraking has made natural gas so cheap, I can't see these being used for anything but virtue signaling. They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natu

by rhelz 3y ago

Fraking has made natural gas so cheap, I can't see these being used for anything but virtue signaling. They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. And, given that methane is 80 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, is it really a good idea to be manufacturing it? Inevitably there would be leakage, and it wouldn't take much to leak enough gas to more than compensate for any C02 sucked out of the air.

alexb_ 3y ago
> They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. Are you serious? Water is right there!
- jfengel 3y ago
  Water is right there, but the hydrogen is really closely bound to the oxygen, and extremely hard to get out. It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation. Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess electricity from solar, we can switch over to "green hydrogen" from water. Skeptics point out that this is incredibly stupid, and that "hydrogen proponents" tend to be closely in bed with the fossil fuel industry. It looks an awful lot like an excuse to delay the elimination of fossil-fuel replacements like wind and solar.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    There is this really dumb internet meme, that hydrogen is just there as a plot by the fossil fuel industry to keep selling fossil fuels. What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia. The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      100% of anything doesn't really go away. We still use horse-drawn vehicles for some purposes. But we didn't have to get rid of 100% of the horse-drawn vehicles to get rid of the mountains of horse shit which used to accumulate on city streets.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      Natural gas was also pitched exactly this way in 2008 or so. There's now a mountain of natural gas infrastructure being built, the the US is a major exporter, and for some reason people think the industry is going to just "switch off" that infrastructure when asked to. This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything. Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc. But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
      - pfdietz 3y ago
        Power-to-hydrogen is often attacked for being inefficient, but the alternative presented by the anti-hydrogen people for dealing with seasonal variations and long dark-calm periods is to just overbuild solar and wind massively -- in which case, most of the time power from these is just being curtailed. Apparently using this excess power with 0% efficiency is preferable to using it with nonzero efficiency making hydrogen.
        XorNot 3y ago
        The issue is that hydrogen makes no sense except for transportation fuel, where it also makes no sense. There are other options for stationary energy storage, and hydrogen is amongst the worst. i.e. if we can tolerate high losses, iron-air flow batteries are a much more reasonable option[1] The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is. [1] https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/ https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    Skeptics also point out that the blue part of blue hydrogen is carbon capture and storage, and nobody seems to be willing to pay for the extra cost of that.
- rhelz 3y ago
  > Are you serious? yes :-) Think about it: why did Saturn V use hydrogen and oxygen? Because burning hydrogen produces more energy by weight than any other chemical reaction. If putting hydrogen and oxygen together releases the most energy, then splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen would also take the most energy. Any other chemical reaction which yielded H2 would take less energy.
mikeatlas 3y ago
Their claim is that this method is still yet cheaper than drilling/fracking.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The cost of natural gas on the Henry Hub is somewhere around $300/ton. A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2, so the cost of CO2 capture has to be well below $110/ton (and that ignores the cost of the hydrogen and the equipment for doing the methane synthesis.) They must be assuming large increases in natural gas prices or large CO2 taxes. I think it will be much easier to get the price/BTU of H2 down below the current price of natural gas than it would be to get synthetic methane down that cheap. (If they are assuming large CO2 taxes then it's probably a better business model to just collect CO2 from the air and sequester it.)
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > so the cost of CO2 capture has to be well below $110/ton they say $250/t in the article, but could you expand how you came to "A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2"? Where 1.75t of CO2 is disappearing in result?
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Molecular weight of methane (CH4): 16 Molecular weight of CO2: 44 One molecule of CO2 is needed to get the carbon atom to make one molecule of methane. 44/16 = 2.75 The 1.75t of CO2 that went missing is the oxygen, which obviously isn't in the methane.
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        Thank you, I am an idiot in chemistry )
  - aaronblohowiak 3y ago
    I went to double-check your math and I don't see $300/ton on Henry hub.. the units are a little weird as it looks like the price is per million btu which is... 50 pounds? of lng, so to get the per-ton price we take the Henry hub price and multiply by 40 (2000 pounds per ton divided by 50 pounds per million btu)? with a 52-week high of 3.63, this would get to $177 per ton, which seems short of your $300/ton? Anyway, I ask because id love to learn where I went wrong with the math (my result makes your point stronger, not contradicts it...)
rdedev 3y ago
The US is already extracting a lot of natural gas and leaking a ton of it. The main culprit of these leaks are those regulatory bodies who outsource their jobs onto the companies. Fund them better and enforce heftoer penalties and the issue of leaks can be minimized drastically
noutella 3y ago
Leakages are indeed an enormous problem. It’s estimated than more than 2% of the gas leaks !

by rhelz 3y ago

alexb_ 3y ago

> They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2. Are you serious? Water is right there!

jfengel 3y ago
Water is right there, but the hydrogen is really closely bound to the oxygen, and extremely hard to get out. It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation. Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess electricity from solar, we can switch over to "green hydrogen" from water. Skeptics point out that this is incredibly stupid, and that "hydrogen proponents" tend to be closely in bed with the fossil fuel industry. It looks an awful lot like an excuse to delay the elimination of fossil-fuel replacements like wind and solar.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  There is this really dumb internet meme, that hydrogen is just there as a plot by the fossil fuel industry to keep selling fossil fuels. What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia. The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    100% of anything doesn't really go away. We still use horse-drawn vehicles for some purposes. But we didn't have to get rid of 100% of the horse-drawn vehicles to get rid of the mountains of horse shit which used to accumulate on city streets.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    Natural gas was also pitched exactly this way in 2008 or so. There's now a mountain of natural gas infrastructure being built, the the US is a major exporter, and for some reason people think the industry is going to just "switch off" that infrastructure when asked to. This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything. Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc. But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Power-to-hydrogen is often attacked for being inefficient, but the alternative presented by the anti-hydrogen people for dealing with seasonal variations and long dark-calm periods is to just overbuild solar and wind massively -- in which case, most of the time power from these is just being curtailed. Apparently using this excess power with 0% efficiency is preferable to using it with nonzero efficiency making hydrogen.
      - XorNot 3y ago
        The issue is that hydrogen makes no sense except for transportation fuel, where it also makes no sense. There are other options for stationary energy storage, and hydrogen is amongst the worst. i.e. if we can tolerate high losses, iron-air flow batteries are a much more reasonable option[1] The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is. [1] https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/ https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  Skeptics also point out that the blue part of blue hydrogen is carbon capture and storage, and nobody seems to be willing to pay for the extra cost of that.
rhelz 3y ago
> Are you serious? yes :-) Think about it: why did Saturn V use hydrogen and oxygen? Because burning hydrogen produces more energy by weight than any other chemical reaction. If putting hydrogen and oxygen together releases the most energy, then splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen would also take the most energy. Any other chemical reaction which yielded H2 would take less energy.

mikeatlas 3y ago

Their claim is that this method is still yet cheaper than drilling/fracking.

pfdietz 3y ago
The cost of natural gas on the Henry Hub is somewhere around $300/ton. A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2, so the cost of CO2 capture has to be well below $110/ton (and that ignores the cost of the hydrogen and the equipment for doing the methane synthesis.) They must be assuming large increases in natural gas prices or large CO2 taxes. I think it will be much easier to get the price/BTU of H2 down below the current price of natural gas than it would be to get synthetic methane down that cheap. (If they are assuming large CO2 taxes then it's probably a better business model to just collect CO2 from the air and sequester it.)
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > so the cost of CO2 capture has to be well below $110/ton they say $250/t in the article, but could you expand how you came to "A ton of natural gas requires 2.75 tons of CO2"? Where 1.75t of CO2 is disappearing in result?
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Molecular weight of methane (CH4): 16 Molecular weight of CO2: 44 One molecule of CO2 is needed to get the carbon atom to make one molecule of methane. 44/16 = 2.75 The 1.75t of CO2 that went missing is the oxygen, which obviously isn't in the methane.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      Thank you, I am an idiot in chemistry )
- aaronblohowiak 3y ago
  I went to double-check your math and I don't see $300/ton on Henry hub.. the units are a little weird as it looks like the price is per million btu which is... 50 pounds? of lng, so to get the per-ton price we take the Henry hub price and multiply by 40 (2000 pounds per ton divided by 50 pounds per million btu)? with a 52-week high of 3.63, this would get to $177 per ton, which seems short of your $300/ton? Anyway, I ask because id love to learn where I went wrong with the math (my result makes your point stronger, not contradicts it...)

rdedev 3y ago

The US is already extracting a lot of natural gas and leaking a ton of it. The main culprit of these leaks are those regulatory bodies who outsource their jobs onto the companies. Fund them better and enforce heftoer penalties and the issue of leaks can be minimized drastically

noutella 3y ago

Leakages are indeed an enormous problem. It’s estimated than more than 2% of the gas leaks !