'Green Hydrogen' From Renewables Could Become the Cheapest 'Transformative Fuel' (theguardian.com) 130
The Guardian reports:
"Green hydrogen" made with wind and solar electricity could become the cheapest form of what the Australian government has described as a "transformative fuel" much faster than expected, analysts believe. Chinese manufacturers have reported making systems to create hydrogen with renewable energy for up to 80% less than official Australian estimates from just two years ago.
Energy analysts said it suggested green hydrogen was likely to leapfrog hydrogen made with gas and coal as the most cost-effective form of the energy before the end of the decade, and by the time an industry could be developed at scale... Germany has dedicated more than A$15bn of Covid-19 stimulus spending to developing a domestic hydrogen industry, and has agreed with Australia to undertake a joint feasibility study into its potential as an energy source. The European Commission recently launched a strategy that positions green hydrogen as central to the continent's goal to reach "climate neutrality" — net zero emissions — by 2050...
The hope is that hydrogen will prove an emissions-free alternative to coal and gas in industries that operate at incredibly high temperatures.
Energy analysts said it suggested green hydrogen was likely to leapfrog hydrogen made with gas and coal as the most cost-effective form of the energy before the end of the decade, and by the time an industry could be developed at scale... Germany has dedicated more than A$15bn of Covid-19 stimulus spending to developing a domestic hydrogen industry, and has agreed with Australia to undertake a joint feasibility study into its potential as an energy source. The European Commission recently launched a strategy that positions green hydrogen as central to the continent's goal to reach "climate neutrality" — net zero emissions — by 2050...
The hope is that hydrogen will prove an emissions-free alternative to coal and gas in industries that operate at incredibly high temperatures.
This was always the endgame (Score:5, Insightful)
...and it's a damn shame that China's gonna win it. The fossil fuel industry just has too much political sway in the U.S. for something truly transformitive to happen here.
But for those - either deluded, or paid not to see - that pooh-pooh electric cars because "the electric grid that charges them runs on coal", the point so far has merely been to prove that the cars work. That they sell. And that they can be made affordably. The grid still has to change either way, and when it does, the cars will be ready.
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Renewables and nuclear can power the grid less expensively than coal without the associated CO2, mercury and uranium contamination found in coal use
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You will likely always be able to make use of a liquid energy source as the simplest form of heat. I like butane as the future liquid energy store, this because you can readily convert methane (sewer gas) to butane using surplus renewables. The methane collected from city sewer systems and a green house gas no longer enters the atmosphere but carbon dioxide is actually used to make methane, so when you use surplus renewables to create and then burn the butane it is a carbon wash but you do get to keep metha
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Coal energy is being replaced by natural gas. While not a green energy source. It is much cleaner than coal, and currently much cheaper to produce.
The Coal lobbying groups are blaming Green Energy for their downfall. While it is just straight capitalism economics is the real blame.
However Solar and Wind with battery backup creates supplemental energy to the grid which is owned and maintained by the individual. So for all those electric cars that were suppose to overload the grid, is mostly balanced in
Re:This was always the endgame (Score:4, Informative)
Nuclear electricity production must solve the problem of dealing with nuclear waste. The systems must produce near zero hazardous waste or the products must have very short decay half-lives to non radioactive products. Storing huge amounts of long half-life nuclear wast for millions of years seems to me to be a non-starter.
That's only because you don't understand the physics of this. There are 3 kinds of nuclear "waste". High level (fission products with a short half life < 1 year), medium level (fission products with a half life < 30 years) and the unspent fuel. The unspent fuel has half lives in the order of 100,000s of years. And the length of the half life is roughly inversely proportional to amount of radiation. So depending on how your reactor works, what comes out is a mix of fission products (fuel that was burnt) and unspent fuel. Due to some weird (read non-scientific) aspects of how anti-proliferation treaties work, we don't reprocess the fuel which means that the waste doesn't last 300 years (10x the longest half-live which is Cs-131) but instead lasts basically an infinite amount of time. The ancient reactors we still use (mostly due to environmental laws) only burn 2-4% of the fuel and does so with solid fuel. Newer reactors we could build today burn much larger amounts of fuel (like > 90%) and so most of the waste lasts a short time. Also when you use Thorium you don't make Pu which works around most anti-proliferation concerns quite nicely.
Or you could use the already built facility that we made 35 years ago in Yucca mountain. Or were you just trying to spread FUD?
Re:This was always the endgame (Score:5, Informative)
I (and I think the GP) may very well understand the physics, but I also understand something of the politics and economics involved to know that your plan will be very far fetched unless we can somehow destroy those two non-physics factors (and currently blockades) first.
Your suggestion may work, eventually. I know it's studied upon seriously by several nations. But we aren't there yet. For example, corrosion resistance of the materials that are the current best candidates for building molten salt reactors that could do the thing you (and also by the way, I) want, isn't tested well enough yet to make production facilities with.
For a CO2 neutral solution, 'clean' nuclear fission has to compete with the solution of solar and wind combined with battery storage. Currently my bet is the latter will become available faster than the former. And even proven energy positive nuclear fusion may even be available earlier, although I don't think the production variant of that will be.
Then, about the whole hydrogen thing... I don't see it as the ultimate fossil fuel replacement. It can only compete with direct grid and battery solutions in areas where the weight of batteries is too much of an obstacle, like (space)flight or in places where placing electric infrastructure is very expensive to do so (transportation through continental scale deserts and oceans...) or where it can easily utilize existing infrastructure without too many conversion losses. Like existing gas nets for cooking and warming. But that makes default automobile transportation and trucking a no-go for hydrogen. The energy wasted by lugging around batteries pales in comparison to the conversion losses and costs associated with high-pressure infrastructure you need for automobile hydrogen.
And the current reserve of crude oil should be used for the production of materials and goods, not wasted on the energy needs of the transportation sector.
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Half right but many wrongs.
High level (fission products with a short half life < 1 year), medium level (fission products with a half life < 30 years) and the unspent fuel.
That is an arbitrarily picked number. It changes completely if you pick another number, like 200 years, oops.
The ancient reactors we still use (mostly due to environmental laws) only burn 2-4% of the fuel and does so with solid fuel.
This is so half right that it is technically completely wrong.
The old reactor you mention only contain
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It isn't a problem of science. It is a problem of stability over thousands of years.
We have movement like flat earthers who are fighting basic observed science with some degree of success. Why would you think we can keep people out of a nuclear waste zone for 10,000 years? They are going to at some point have people creating that nuclear waste is a myth and it isn't that dangerous. Look at all the life that lives there. See that tree thriving their.
So at some point government will allow people to settl
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It's pretty well acknowledged that electricity doesn't all come from coal. Anyway, this hydrogen would not be used as the basis of the power grid (which makes no sense) but for fertilizers or industrial use.
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Re:This was always the endgame (Score:5, Informative)
You missed something basic.
The "petroleum" industry is really the "energy" industry. They've been working on hydrogen technology for decades, and have it planned out down to the graphic designs they're going to put on the hydrogen pumps in gas stations. I've seen the plans for these, decades ago.
They would LOVE to sell you hydrogen to replace gasoline - they honestly don't give a rat's ass what sort of product they're selling you, since they have all of the infrastructure and plans in place for when hydrogen does finally get cheap enough. Heck, most of the places selling gasoline make as much or more profit off of selling you sodas and snacks as they do from selling you fuel. Again: they don't care what the product is, as long as you buy it.
The problem is that, so far, every "hydrogen miracle" has turned out to be a "press release miracle."
Note, for example, the confusion between "much cheaper electrolyzers" and "much cheaper hydrogen." The limitation is in the cost of energy to make H2, not the cost of the machine used to make it. While some strides have been made in experimental methods, we're still a very long way away from having cheap, plentiful hydrogen that competes with petroleum or natural gas. Look more closely the next time you see a "hydrogen breakthrough" - and notice that an awful lot of the research is funded by energy companies like Exxon.
Re:This was always the endgame (Score:4, Interesting)
> They would LOVE to sell you hydrogen to replace gasoline
Bingo.
You can't reasonably make H2 at home to fuel a personal vehicle. "The Hydrogen Economy" was always just a tool to maintain control over energy, never about the environment or even sustainability (effective and economical hydrolysis with renewable energy wasn't even on the horizon back in the late 90s when the "Hydrogen Economy" was being pushed; it was primarily made from natural gas...)
But if you drive a plug-in electric vehicle, you CAN reasonably power that with solar or wind, from your own home or just about anywhere, whether produced on site or from any number of independent energy producers.
Electricity is democratized energy. Hydrogen is not - and that's the point.
=Smidge=
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You can't reasonably make H2 at home to fuel a personal vehicle.
You can.
In Germany it is a quite a thing to have a solar installation combined with hydrogen production and a fuel cell.
There is no real reason why such a home facility can not fuel a car.
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> There is no real reason why such a home facility can not fuel a car.
A similar thing was tried with compressed natural gas, and it was a failure.
Once you factor in the cost of the equipment and the relatively dangerous nature of the operation, putting these devices in a home is really not an option. This is why I used the qualifier "reasonably."
=Smidge=
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When if it is reasonable in Germany, I always assume, it would work in other countries, too :P ...
My fault
Re: This was always the endgame (Score:2)
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USA went to the highest bidder, long ago. It’s what remains of the two-party system. Electric cars were the transitional technology phase hydrogen needed – chicken (H) and egg ( elec) paradigm that must be solved to move off petroleum based fuels.
Elon couldn’t/wouldn’t wait and needn’t. In the end Tesla technology is decades advanced and solidly puts his vision on Mars on Earth first. At the end of the gambit, his electric technology enables Tesla to leapfrog competition on bat
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You are a GPT-2 bot. Aren't you?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hydrogen isn't something dug out of the ground, it needs to be make from electrolytic breakdown of water or cracking hydrocarbons. Unless we find magic bubbles of liquid hydrogen sitting around this won't change - hydrogen is a competitor for lithium ion batteries, and a poor one at that. The energy densities in batteries far exceed those in standard non-cryogenic hydrogen storage. Since we won't have heavy and expensive cryogenic plants on cars - why? Not to mention the efficiency losses for converting ele
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They already tax oil horrendously. We pay more in taxes on every gallon of gas than the refiners and retailers make in profit.
-jcr
True, but that doesn't mean some people don't want to tax it even higher...
Have you compared European oil taxes for example?
Apparently I was a troll earlier for pointing out that governments can and will influence the economics of oil/energy use. They can deny it to make themselves feel better. But it doesn't change anything. (no need to shoot the messenger)
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...and it's a damn shame that China's gonna win it. The fossil fuel industry just has too much political sway in the U.S. for something truly transformitive to happen here.
Um. Not really. It's not the fossil fuel industry's political sway, it's that the product they are producing is So so cheap. Natural Gas is going for rock bottom prices because of fracking. That technique has made existing wells and the infrastructure that supports them WAY more cost-effective by extending the production life of the wells and making them produce more. New wells are also possible in places where they once were not economically feasible.
Natural Gas prices here in the USA are going to be ch
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It does not matter "who wins it", as long as the technology is world wide available for a reasonable price.
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What about using it for heating, in NL now we use Naturel Gas so the infra structure is already in place and converting the 'homeheater' from gas to hydrogen is a very small change and then we are *not* dependend from the USSR, and also *not* from the USA for LNG.
Buy your natural gas from the USA and keep using what you use. Better yet, buy from the cheaper supplier, just have the infrastructure for both in place. It's going to be cheaper for a long time to come... Hydrogen is a pipe dream. No way hydrogen will compete on price with Natural Gas unless governments conspire to make it more expensive through taxes and fees.
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Ignoring political stability, I think African countries could compete with natural gas in a couple decades.
PV costs can go almost arbitrarily low ... so that leaves the cost of electrolysers, I doubt those will be the hurdle.
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Ignoring political stability, I think African countries could compete with natural gas in a couple decades.
PV costs can go almost arbitrarily low ... so that leaves the cost of electrolysers, I doubt those will be the hurdle.
Photovotaic equipment is way expensive and environmentally messy to produce. Just because we build them in China, where they burn coal by the trainload to produce the electricity necessary to build solar panels as cheaply as possible, doesn't mean we've done away with fossil fuels, the environmental damage, or the costs.
THEN, when you couple the huge inefficiencies of splitting water to get H2 gas, there is zero chance photovoltaic will EVER be cost-effective.
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Photovoltaic equipment used to be way way way expensive, there's not a lot to go before encapsulation and mounting starts to cost more than the solar cell itself ... and there's a lot to gain there as well in the desert.
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OK..
The problem though is that photovoltaic is still going to be about double the cost as a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plant in cost per KW/Hour. Cost wise, it's still cheaper to generate electricity through natural gas. Solar panels take a LOT of energy to produce and that means that making them cheaply is going to quickly hit a floor, based on how much electricity it takes.
Now, if you are looking for hydrogen gas as the end product, the question becomes how cheap can you make it? Making it using ele
Re: This was always the endgame (Score:2)
I think PV in the desert will become essentially too cheap to meter during the day, so to me the question is if the write down and maintenance of high pressure electrolizers used with 50% utilization can compete ... I think they can.
Hydrogen is difficult (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen expensive as compared to batteries
Volkswagen recently released a quite interesting comparison of the battery-electric (BEV) and hydrogen fuel cell (FCV) path to zero-emission mobility. The conclusion is that the only way to go for passenger cars is battery-electric cars. [insideevs.com]
When comparing the BEVs with FCVs, Volkswagen refers to studies, which say that hydrogen fuels (as well as synthetic fuels) will remain more expensive than driving all-electric (BEV). The reason for that is simple: more energy is required to produce them (compared to electricity and charging).
Moreover, the greener the electricity is the higher the advantage for BEVs. FCVs turn out to be "very inefficient – both in terms of efficiency and operating costs".
The only light in the tunnel for FCVs is maybe long-distance heavy-duty vehicles, as well as in rail, air and sea transport - but it's not yet proven commercially. Battery electric trucks are also coming.
Re:Hydrogen is difficult (Score:5, Informative)
The other issue with hydrogen is that there is absolutely no infrastructure for it. You can't talk about the comparative cost of hydrogen without including the cost to essentially duplicate our entire gasoline production and distribution system. You can't use the same pipes, the same tanks, the same trucks, the same pumps....other than maybe the same physical locations, it all has to built from the ground up.
At least with electricity, the existing grid is sufficient to get by with incremental improvements while we shift to BEVs.
With a little bit of planning, you can drive an electric truck across the US right now, with minimal issue. That won't be possible for a hydrogen fueled truck without a decade or two and billions of dollars of infrastructure built up.
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The other issue with hydrogen is that there is absolutely no infrastructure for it.
Of course there is existing infrastructure [energy.gov]; how to you think hydrogen gets anywhere now? I think you mean there is no distribution infrastructure, a la gasoline.
Re: Hydrogen is difficult (Score:2)
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The plan is to not transporting molecular hydrogen (H2) but rather produce liquid ammonia (NH3) and ship that. This can use our existing industrial ammonia infrastructure, or even the exisiting petroleum distribution networks.
The other half of the solution, which CSIRO has been working on for a few years now and demonstrated last year, is to develop an efficient ammonia cracking system for use at filling stations.
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The grid can be upgraded using the same power "corridors" as currently exist. That is a much simpler problem than building up a brand new hydrogen infrastructure.
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Hydrogen is transported in tanker trucks, just like gasoline.
Or do you really think there is an underground gasoline pipe network connecting all gas stations to the mothership?
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Methane/Natual gas has pipelines that comix with crude oil as they are cheaply separated. Hydrogen can be forme
Re: Hydrogen is difficult (Score:2)
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I'd like to see how the economics of burning the hydrogen in an IC engine compare with these two options.
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Re: Hydrogen is difficult (Score:2)
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Tanking gasoline into your car is not free of generation and transportation losses either.
Gasoline is refined from raw oil, by burning raw oil to heat the refinery.
Oil is transported through pipelines, by burning a percentage of the oil every few dozen miles to power the pumps. (Gas pipelines work the same way)
Otherwise oil is transported in tankers by burning heavy oils, or even tar.
Gasoline is transported to the gas stations in trucks, burning diesel.
Strange, when one of you talks about production of elec
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electric engines are usually above 99% efficient (yes, this are two 9s). Since, well, something like 150 years or so ...
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Economics. Not just energy efficiency.
If hydrogen is priced anywhere near the power used to charge an EV, price may no longer be a factor. There are people who drive 12 MPG vehicles _because_ they get 12 MPG. It's a statement to the effect that they are too wealthy to care. Like lighting cigars with $100 bills. Now introduce hydrogen as a fuel and they can drive a big-ass V8 with straight pipes. And the onlookers may not know that they are paying the equivalent of 50 cents a gallon for fuel. Win, win situa
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I don't see much future for hydrogen vehicles. Electric has already won that race. But there are lots of other uses for it. Notice that the summary never said anything about cars. Here's what it actually said.
The hope is that hydrogen will prove an emissions-free alternative to coal and gas in industries that operate at incredibly high temperatures.
There's other places where it could also be really useful. Batteries are very expensive and inefficient for long term energy storage (store solar power during the summer to use in the winter). Hydrogen could be a lot better for that. It also could be a good fuel for airplanes since it has an ama
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It's amazing how most of the comments here focus on cars, hydrogen and batteries. Or even nuclear generated electricity for chrissakes. It's not about any of those things. It's about these facts:
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This is not really about cars. Overall, I think hydrogen makes a lot of sense.
The reason is that you can create hydrogen chreaply from unused wind and solar power, store it cheaply for a long time underground, and transport it via pipelines. It can be used for industrial processes, heating, and powering vehicles, and can also be back-converted to electricity. Not all of it might make sense economically at all time, but that it allows to shift energy in space and time and across sectors is the real value a h
Ya, but ... (Score:2)
Global warming is a dry heat and burning all that hydrogen is going to make it way more humid ...
[ Ghost of Luke Skywalker: "Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong." ]
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Could but won't (Score:3)
It's just too expensive for the near and far future.
Wasting energy (Score:4, Interesting)
Turning solar and wind into hydrogen to be used as fuel is just wasting energy for nothing. The fossil industry should grow a clue and let the hydrogen crap die already.
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I will happily pump hydrogen into my vehicle when it is powered by a fusion drive, until then, it is as you say a waste
I see no technical details (Score:2)
I see no technical details of how is this going to be achieved. How do we know it is real or just a load of policy/marketing wank?
Are we really still talking about this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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BEVs are a tiny part of global car sales. I would not assume market has chosen anything else yet.
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True, but FCVs are an even tinier part of global sales. FCVs are more complex than pure BEVs. They need the same electric motor, inverter, battery, BMS, and on top of that a fuel cell and a hydrogen tank. I really don't see a clear technology advantage for FCVs. Maybe if we store hydrogen as ammonia, and run ammonia through the fuel cell directly.
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I guess the market will also decide whether complexity is a primary driver of vehicle choice. I don't believe that is the case now, and I'm not convinced it will become one in the future. It may be true at the low end of the market, but reality is many people will gladly pay more for complexity if it has other tangible benefits.
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Countries are committing to zero emission in decades.
There's three ways to get there ... spending trillions on TWh scale green hydrogen storage, spending trillions on TWh scale pumped sea water storage or spending trillions on nuclear power. There's not a lot of time to decide either.
That's of course assuming their commitments aren't so much hot air of course :)
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PS. complete collapse of industrial society is also an option I guess.
Hydrogen vs Battery (Score:4, Interesting)
The future of vehicles seems to have two options: hydrogen or battery electric.
Essentially both are "batteries". Lithium cells are charged in the conventional manner from an AC source. Hydrogen uses some physics to convert electricity to a liquid medium.
Yet, it has major differences for the "energy" industry. If we go by battery electric, people can ultimately charge from their own solar rooftops (or shared ones in apartments), and pay zero cents to existing companies.
Or, if we go by hydrogen, we still need "fuel stations", expensive infrastructure, and "pumping" something inside the vehicles. They will also have more moving parts, need more maintenance, and wear out consumables, keeping existing auto dealers in the loop.
Other minor things, like charge speeds, weight, etc, are secondary. They will try to advertise "hydrogen" is greener. But it is only "green" in terms of the color of the money paper.
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California grandfathers houses into the NEM scheme that is in force when the solar panel permit is issued for 20 years. My house is grandfathered into the original NEM scheme for another 15 years. That means that on summer afternoons, I get over 50c of credit for
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The future of vehicles seems to have two options: hydrogen or battery electric
or a combination of both. Many people won't be in a position to relocate to a home with a guaranteed charging point, which is key for having the cheap electricity that helps the business case for BEV.
For those without a charging station, a weekly trip to get H2 at the usual petrol pump is a very practical way to get zero exhaust emissions. The way I see it, it's as reasonable as having the same Ford Mondeo sold with diesel and with petrol engines: some people will accept having a 30-50% mpg efficiency loss
Is shipping energy the rigth answer? (Score:2)
If an area has excess renewable energy resources, it may make more sense to move energy consuming industry there. Server farms, Aluminum refineries, etc.
Somewhat surprised (Score:2)
Re:Somewhat surprised (Score:5, Informative)
Not much research?
Electrolysis is water was invented in 1869.
The hydrogen fuel cell was invented In 1932.
Nuclear submarines have had an oxygen plant that electrolyzes water and tosses the hydrogen overboard since the 1950s. NASA has sent hydrogen fuel cells into orbit since the 1960s. Why do you think more research is needed? This is old, proven technology.
The problems with hydrogen are it leaks like crazy, a kg of the stuff takes an inordinate of space, and it's inefficient. The electrolyzer is like 70% efficient, and the fuel cell is about 80%. A battery is about 90% both ways.
My former employer looked at an industrial scale electrolyzer about 2008. The cost of hydrogen from electrolysis was three times as much as from reforming natural gas. And that was paying Pacific Northwest hydropower rates.
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That is correct for a "rule of thumb" (and upper bound), but higher volume/pressure tanks are significantly lighter.
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Failed on the "From Renewables" (Score:3)
The supply of renewables is finite at any given time. You want to generate hydrogen from renewables, that's one more coal / gas plant powering my lightbulbs. You want to stop global warming? The answer isn't to move some small part of the chain to renewables, it's top stop consuming in the first place. You can start by getting rid of gas guzzlers, and banning bitcoin.
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Depends when you do it. Under good conditions it's possible to end up with unused generation capacity, at which point you're just wasting energy that you could've been turning into something useful. Hydrogen would be a way to store that excess energy.
(Just as a quick reminder: coal, gas and nuclear plants can vary their output, but there's a minimum they can drop to before the plant starts taking too much damage from thermal cycling, which is expensive. If there's enough wind/sunlight, it's possible for the
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You are right on the coal part but quite wrong on the gas side of things. The grid is generally balanced in such a way that baseload peaker and renewables work in balance. On excess renewable capacity it's the peaking plants which shutdown. Most of the electricity grids in the world do not actually waste renewable energy at any point in their operation, instead they shut down gas plants.
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My understanding is that "gas" includes both base load and load-following plants, not all of which can be shut down willy-nilly.
In any case, the eventual goal is to get enough renewable capacity that the non-renewable plants can be shut down completely, at which point the distinction doesn't matter and we'll certainly have times when we have excess renewable generation capacity that has to be sunk or wasted.
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Renewables are intermittent, even when you overprovision it will fall short at times ... and when you overprovision you run into more and more moments of negative energy cost.
If you just want to reduce emissions that's not much of a problem, just use natural gas power plants as backup. When you want to go to zero though, you've got to be able to carry energy over more than the couple minutes we can do now, many orders of magnitude more. Countries say they want to go to zero in decades, so they do have to so
Hydrogen looks very atrractive to Australia (Score:2)
This is a very current issue in Australia which has a vast empty sun drenched interior that can host truly heroic amounts of solar infrastructure but is a long way from east coast consumers and even further from export markets so there has been limited investment to date.
There is now a lot of interest in building that renewable capacity, using electrolysis to convert seawater to hydrogen, and hydrogen to ammonia which is less explodey than hydrogen and being a liquid can easily be transported by pipeline to
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Right... No way in H E double Hockey sticks... (Score:2, Troll)
Cheapest? Ha...Not even close...
Renewables are NOT the cheapest form of electricity out there even when you consider the full lifecycle cost of the equipment, fuel (as applicable), and decommissioning. Natural Gas is the cheapest by quite a long way if you remove all the tax subsidies and credits.
Further, making hydrogen gas using electrolysis is about the least efficient way you can do it. The lowest cost way to do this is to reform Natual Gas, using high heat and steam in the presence of a catalyst.
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Um, if you have a few solar panels sitting there 6 hours a day turning water into H2 and O2, then who gives two shits how efficient it is, aside from how much physical space it takes? You're still making X cubic centimeters per watt of output, regardless. It's not like a using less-efficient panel in a non-mobile setting is somehow going to pollute more than a high-efficiency panel (assuming both have comparable lifespans, price, and end-of-life considerations).
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Um, if you have a few solar panels sitting there 6 hours a day turning water into H2 and O2, then who gives two shits how efficient it is, aside from how much physical space it takes? You're still making X cubic centimeters per watt of output, regardless. It's not like a using less-efficient panel in a non-mobile setting is somehow going to pollute more than a high-efficiency panel (assuming both have comparable lifespans, price, and end-of-life considerations).
My post is about costs.
Solar panels, when you consider the cost per watt-hour, is more expensive than natural gas, way more. Don't be fooled by the "but the fuel is free" saying, it costs a lot of resources to build that solar cell, install it, operate it and then deal with the waste when it wears out (and they DO wear out). Photovoltaic power generation is hugely expensive compared to Natural gas.
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Renewables are NOT the cheapest form of electricity out there even when you consider the full lifecycle cost of the equipment, fuel (as applicable), and decommissioning. Natural Gas is the cheapest by quite a long way if you remove all the tax subsidies and credits.
That is wrong.
I suggest to look up how expensive a as plant is, especially if you want a mall one as home owner :P And regardless of taxes: some countries simply have no "cheap antural gas".
1) Further, making hydrogen gas using electrolysis is ab
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Renewables are NOT the cheapest form of electricity out there even when you consider the full lifecycle cost of the equipment, fuel (as applicable), and decommissioning. Natural Gas is the cheapest by quite a long way if you remove all the tax subsidies and credits. That is wrong.
I suggest to look up how expensive a as plant is, especially if you want a mall one as home owner :P And regardless of taxes: some countries simply have no "cheap antural gas".
1) Further, making hydrogen gas using electrolysis is about the least efficient way you can do it. No it is not. There are plenty of ways that are far less efficient. 2) The lowest cost way to do this is to reform Natual Gas, using high heat and steam in the presence of a catalyst. No idea. But 1) does not produce CO2, but 2) does. So 2) will be forbidden tech sooner or later and or taxed so much that no one with his right mind will do it. And: if you consider that the heat has to come from some where, too - it is hardly in any way efficient.
I'm going to contend that you don't know what you are talking about. What process do you suggest we use to produce hydrogen gas from electric power? Can you share your "more efficient" process, please? I don't think one exists that can compete with the reforming of natural gas, a process that can be done in a way to capture the C02 it produces (if that is important to you). By The Way... There is a theoretical limit of efficiency when splitting hydrogen out of water using electricity and it's abysmal.
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What process do you suggest we use to produce hydrogen gas from electric power? Can you share your "more efficient" process, please?
I did not talk about "more efficient", I pointed out that there are plenty of ways that are less efficient, as you claimed that electrolysis is the least efficient, which it is not. (Hint: photosynthesis, actually pretty efficient from the point of view that only a single photon is needed to transport one H atom)
I don't think one exists that can compete with the reforming of n
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By The Way... There is a theoretical limit of efficiency when splitting hydrogen out of water using electricity and it's abysmal. Ofc, and that limit is: 100% efficiency. (*facepalm*)
Not even close... So keep beating yourself in the face, maybe something will shake loose and you might learn something.
Thermodynamics is a thing, and the laws that explain to us engineers how energy can be transformed from one form to another tell me that NO PROCESS that transfers energy from one form to another is 100% efficient. Entropy always increases and the useful work you can take out of a system always is LESS than the energy it consumes.
That means that if you have a system like this: Water +
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Thermodynamics is a thing, and the laws that explain to us engineers how energy can be transformed from one form to another tell me that NO PROCESS that transfers energy from one form to another is 100% efficient.
A) that is wrong, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
B) Thermodynamics has nothing to do with splitting H2O into 2H and O - oops
For laymen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I would read carefully the blue "links" in the first sentence of the article and look very carefully at the picture on the r
hydrogen is not a fuel (Score:2)
FFS, hydrogen is not a fuel, it's a battery technology.
The whacky world of humans (Score:2)
Hydrogen: on bad accident away from oblivion (Score:2)
Dear Hydrogen,
You are clean but you are one bad accident away and a hideous cost overrun from being relegated to the same position as your buddy Nuclear. A few accidents, lots of misinformation, omitted communication about potential hazards 'because the public wouldn't understand the technicalities', and lies about the true cost of development and maintenance ... all those led to Nuclear's scandalous reputation. Tell the people the truth; the only thing you are is clean. Be honest about everything else.
W
silver bullets (Score:2)
The total number of silver bullets reported by the media exceeds the entire world supply of silver.
Than legalize the sale of hydride... (Score:2)
Oh wait, that wont happen because its used in nuclear weapons.
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Long term the sun's heat death will tear all the hydrogen away anyway.
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Actually the Sun has been around 4.6 billion years .. the Sun only managed to get it working after billions of years (not to mention most of it was inherited from its supernova Dad).
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[Good Luck]...producing nearly enough green H2 to replace oil derived fuels without plastering every available square metre of land in solar cells or wind turbines. The physics just doesnt work because producing H2 has huge energy losses compared to direct electricity generation and battery storage.
Area of USA needed to provide entire power of USA - 0.01% of land [forbes.com]. Efficiency of hydrogen cycle about 40% [forbes.com].
The total land area to power the entire USA given that we converted all the energy to hydrogen and then back again on demand is less than 0.03% of the US land mass. I think that's easy to afford, especially compared to agriculture which uses 51% of US land and would even be able to share with the wind power. Of course we don't even have to do since most of the energy can be used as electricity direct
Re:Good luck... (Score:4, Informative)
Because 51%, down from 63% in 1949 is the number the USDA gives [usda.gov]. I suspect the difference is that it includes all land used for grazing whist you are only including land which is cultivated. That makes more sense for what I'm quoting since grazing is particularly easily compatible with wind turbines since you don't have the problem of having to program your computer driven combine harvesters to avoid crashing into the turbine supports.
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Hi - The number is implicit in the maximum efficiency of hydrolysis (e.g. 0.8), fuel cells (again e.g. 0.8) and storage (variable about 0.5-0.8) . The link I should have posted would be to underground hydrogen storage [wikipedia.org] which quotes 0.4 round trip efficiency, allows quite mass storage and has been practically tested in Germany. Sorry about the cut and paste error.
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Hydrogen round trip efficiency is likely around a quarter, which is pretty bad but not insurmountable.
Direct hydrogen reducing catalytic solar converters or bioreactors could probably reduce the loss of efficiency to 50%, but I doubt those will follow the cost reduction trajectory of PV ... PV costs still have a huge way down to go, by eliminating all the glass and metal.
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Methane is hard to store? Natural Gas is methane. Natural gas is not hard to store. Methane is not hard to store, you pump it back into formations that held...wait for it