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I will reveal my ignorance: This idea of 'mining' for hydrogen, must mean applications where we can't use hydrogen sourced from splitting water molecules? So it

I will reveal my ignorance: This idea of 'mining' for hydrogen, must mean applications where we can't use hydrogen sourced from splitting water molecules? So it must be cost-effective relative to splitting water molecules? So, splitting water molecules is too expensive?

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
And I reveal my scepticism: The current energy race is for more and cheaper solar, and for ways to store it. Since solar energy is intermittent, battery storage technology is growing to match. But also, splitting water molecules is one way to use that intermittent energy. As solar gets cheaper, splitting water molecules gets cheaper. I don't see any strong reason why the current energy race won't continue for the foreseeable short-term future, so there's no other "next energy race" coming soon.
cagenut 2y ago
this is ~2 year old info from a presentation I can't dig up quick, but iirc the numbers were roughly $4 - 5 per kg of green hydrogen from western PEM systems, and about $1 even for grey hydrogen (steam reformed nat gas). at the time rumor had it that the chinese alkaline systems were producing green hydrogen for $2 - 3/kg the inflation reduction act put some monster subsidies in place that added up to something like $3 or $4 per kg, so effectively they were trying to force the economies of scale by moving the price drops forward several iterations. of course the new administration is already ripping apart that legislation, so its doubtful much of that will pan out now (if you ever thought it would). in the meantime, the price of a kwh of wind/solar has continued to decline rapidly, so the original $4-5 estimates can be reasonably eyeballed down to $3 - $4 now. still not enough, but in a decade it might be. of course as with all of climate change economic math, so long as pollution is free its difficult to cost compete with.
- boringg 2y ago
  Pretty sure the hydrogen market shook out really hard when nothing significant came about the massive infusions of money during the zerp years. Hydrogen is and will remain a relatively niche player given its use case (industrial) and complexity of managing. Wish it were different.
  - cagenut 2y ago
    I'd be interested to know what massive infusions during zIrp you're talking about, I'm not familiar with any (r&d stuff sure). the IRA would have been a massive infusion, but it passed in '22, after the rate hikes (its how/why it got its dumb name). Even still most of its effects were convoluted tax credits that are difficult to model investment risk on right now (putting it nicely).
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  I don't know why it only just now occurred to me to wonder how you measure the KG of something lighter (less dense) than air. I know mass is not the same measurement as weight, but we still mostly use weight to measure mass, don't we? Obviously this has already been solved for helium, but is it just measuring volume and converting? Or pressure level in a known volume? Or I guess if you pressurize it enough it'll be more dense than air. What a fun problem!
  - rawgabbit 2y ago
    I believe they use flow meters and convert that to kg. https://www.rheonik.com/company/h2-filling-stations https://www.rheonik.com/company/h2-filling-stations FYI from searching the internet and asking chatgpt, I came up with these rules of thumb regarding BTU equivalency: 10 gallons of California RFG gasoline is equivalent to 10 kg of hydrogen 12 CCF natural gas 9 gallons of low sulfur diesel 330 kWh of electricity The efficiency between internal combustion and BEV are of course dramatically different.
mapt 2y ago
Splitting water molecules is too energy intensive generally, but that is not the problem this solves. The problem this solves is that splitting water molecules is a process as old as chemistry, for which there are no private excludable rights like patents, which means no incentive to create an initial investment with the expectation of future returns on a monopoly / market-leading position. If the hydrogen is in the ground, then somebody can own that ground. Without a huge, irrational investment in hydrogen, nobody has any incentive to build hydrogen infrastructure. As for "applications" - basically the only application for hydrogen that has big engineering advantages with current tech is in longrange aviation, where it grants a bit more than double the range, and we're going to have to wait for China to launch a liquid hydrogen combustion scramjet bomber for anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design. I believe we'll have standardized regional lithium ion aviation long before we build antipodal liquid hydrogen planes.
- semi-extrinsic 2y ago
  > anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-09-developing-a-global-ecosystem-to-support-hydrogen-powered-flight https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-09-developin... TL;DR Airbus is confident that they will have solved the technology development and logistical hurdles and will have commercially available hydrogen airplanes with ~100 passengers before 2035. There are serious R&D programs working on this across Europe. Cryogenic engineering is not some voodoo that nobody understands.
  - mapt 2y ago
    This is hype. Anybody that presents terms like "green hydrogen", "blue hydrogen", emphasizing the renewable nature of hydrogen, is BSing you. The case will never close on these merits. The case can't even close on a prototype basis unless we're using liquid hydrogen. Gaseous pressure vessels are orders of magnitude too heavy. What liquid hydrogen combustion does in the short term is gives you a fuel that's difficult to produce & distribute but more than twice as effective gravimetrically as fossil fuels, so long as you design a plane around the fuel tank rather than the other way around. Twice the range. Any other merit of hydrogen combustion, you can beat with biofuels that are (comparatively) cheap to produce and far easier to distribute. Or just use fossil fuels directly. We don't know if there will ever be hydrogen fuel cells (giving you ten, twenty, thirty percent more percent range over combustion) that are power-dense enough to function; A few companies claim they've made advances but haven't brought anything to market.

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

And I reveal my scepticism: The current energy race is for more and cheaper solar, and for ways to store it. Since solar energy is intermittent, battery storage technology is growing to match. But also, splitting water molecules is one way to use that intermittent energy. As solar gets cheaper, splitting water molecules gets cheaper. I don't see any strong reason why the current energy race won't continue for the foreseeable short-term future, so there's no other "next energy race" coming soon.

cagenut 2y ago

this is ~2 year old info from a presentation I can't dig up quick, but iirc the numbers were roughly $4 - 5 per kg of green hydrogen from western PEM systems, and about $1 even for grey hydrogen (steam reformed nat gas). at the time rumor had it that the chinese alkaline systems were producing green hydrogen for $2 - 3/kg the inflation reduction act put some monster subsidies in place that added up to something like $3 or $4 per kg, so effectively they were trying to force the economies of scale by moving the price drops forward several iterations. of course the new administration is already ripping apart that legislation, so its doubtful much of that will pan out now (if you ever thought it would). in the meantime, the price of a kwh of wind/solar has continued to decline rapidly, so the original $4-5 estimates can be reasonably eyeballed down to $3 - $4 now. still not enough, but in a decade it might be. of course as with all of climate change economic math, so long as pollution is free its difficult to cost compete with.

boringg 2y ago
Pretty sure the hydrogen market shook out really hard when nothing significant came about the massive infusions of money during the zerp years. Hydrogen is and will remain a relatively niche player given its use case (industrial) and complexity of managing. Wish it were different.
- cagenut 2y ago
  I'd be interested to know what massive infusions during zIrp you're talking about, I'm not familiar with any (r&d stuff sure). the IRA would have been a massive infusion, but it passed in '22, after the rate hikes (its how/why it got its dumb name). Even still most of its effects were convoluted tax credits that are difficult to model investment risk on right now (putting it nicely).
BobaFloutist 2y ago
I don't know why it only just now occurred to me to wonder how you measure the KG of something lighter (less dense) than air. I know mass is not the same measurement as weight, but we still mostly use weight to measure mass, don't we? Obviously this has already been solved for helium, but is it just measuring volume and converting? Or pressure level in a known volume? Or I guess if you pressurize it enough it'll be more dense than air. What a fun problem!
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  I believe they use flow meters and convert that to kg. https://www.rheonik.com/company/h2-filling-stations https://www.rheonik.com/company/h2-filling-stations FYI from searching the internet and asking chatgpt, I came up with these rules of thumb regarding BTU equivalency: 10 gallons of California RFG gasoline is equivalent to 10 kg of hydrogen 12 CCF natural gas 9 gallons of low sulfur diesel 330 kWh of electricity The efficiency between internal combustion and BEV are of course dramatically different.

mapt 2y ago

Splitting water molecules is too energy intensive generally, but that is not the problem this solves. The problem this solves is that splitting water molecules is a process as old as chemistry, for which there are no private excludable rights like patents, which means no incentive to create an initial investment with the expectation of future returns on a monopoly / market-leading position. If the hydrogen is in the ground, then somebody can own that ground. Without a huge, irrational investment in hydrogen, nobody has any incentive to build hydrogen infrastructure. As for "applications" - basically the only application for hydrogen that has big engineering advantages with current tech is in longrange aviation, where it grants a bit more than double the range, and we're going to have to wait for China to launch a liquid hydrogen combustion scramjet bomber for anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design. I believe we'll have standardized regional lithium ion aviation long before we build antipodal liquid hydrogen planes.

semi-extrinsic 2y ago
> anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-09-developing-a-global-ecosystem-to-support-hydrogen-powered-flight https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-09-developin... TL;DR Airbus is confident that they will have solved the technology development and logistical hurdles and will have commercially available hydrogen airplanes with ~100 passengers before 2035. There are serious R&D programs working on this across Europe. Cryogenic engineering is not some voodoo that nobody understands.
- mapt 2y ago
  This is hype. Anybody that presents terms like "green hydrogen", "blue hydrogen", emphasizing the renewable nature of hydrogen, is BSing you. The case will never close on these merits. The case can't even close on a prototype basis unless we're using liquid hydrogen. Gaseous pressure vessels are orders of magnitude too heavy. What liquid hydrogen combustion does in the short term is gives you a fuel that's difficult to produce & distribute but more than twice as effective gravimetrically as fossil fuels, so long as you design a plane around the fuel tank rather than the other way around. Twice the range. Any other merit of hydrogen combustion, you can beat with biofuels that are (comparatively) cheap to produce and far easier to distribute. Or just use fossil fuels directly. We don't know if there will ever be hydrogen fuel cells (giving you ten, twenty, thirty percent more percent range over combustion) that are power-dense enough to function; A few companies claim they've made advances but haven't brought anything to market.