I fail to see an economic future for hydrogen as a fuel source. If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly. If it is produced from electricity and water (the green version), then we are wasting electricity that could have been used directly in BEVs. At the end of the day, hydrogen is always going to cost more than the energy source that was used to produce it, and it will not be competitive against solutions that use that primary energy source directly.
I think for cars that's probably the case, but that might be too focused on cars.
A possible future for it might be for large planes, boats, etc. that would really need the higher energy density of hydrogen vs batteries. The inefficiency is of course not going to be great, but it means those could possibly use renewable sources (depending on hydrogen production). Or maybe some major battery advancements come before that and make energy density less of an issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Worth pointing out that the energy may matter more on a per mass basis than strictly per volume in some applications. By looking at MJ/kg, Hydrogen even beats out gasoline[1] although that's not the case for per unit volume[2]
Special storage requirements are certainly something to considering especially with high pressures typically involved for gas storage or cryogenic temperatures for liquid. Although it's not as though other fuels have no special storage requirements - it's just that we're used to their complexities
There a plenty of uses of hydrogen, and they won't stop with electrification. But we probably won't be using them as fuel any time soon (except where its energy density is important enough to override price, flexibility and some safety concerns).
The biggest misconception about hydrogen is that it has something to do with cars. The whole "but BEV!" discussion is a distraction that has nothing to do with the real use cases of hydrogen.
Hydrogen will be extremely important in a decarbonized economy, e.g. as a chemical feedstock or as a reduction agent for steel. Likely it will also form the basis of some fuels for ships (maybe ammonia) or planes.
The threshold is renewable energy used to produce methane and ammonia, more economically than fossil fuels sources. Then H2 economy becomes inevitable.
For transportation, tackling all the use cases Li-ion doesn't. In other words, FCEV compliments BEV.
If we unlock H2 soon, maybe civilization can survive climate crisis.
Direct electrwinning is about 85-90% efficient. Why add an extra step by using hydrogen? Not to mention eletrowinning iron is a wet process. Where with reduction with hydrogen is a hot process.
I think 'hydrogen' is basically just an attempt to preserve the legacy power relations that have grown up around coal/oil/natural gas. If people can be convinced it's viable they can kick the can down the road for another 10-20 years.
Even if end to end efficiency is between 10-20% for green hydrogen (solar/wind electricity generation -> electrolysis -> hydrogen/ammonia -> fuel cell -> electricity), it helps solve the problem around intermittency for renewables.
To power a large electricity network with just wind/solar, it will need to be over-provisioned to the point where peak production will be heavily curtailed and lost or redirected to storage. Electricity needs to be used at the time of supply for something otherwise generation is wasted.
Batteries are great if you need to redirect that power over the course of an hour or maybe a day and are highly efficient but too costly at any kind of large scale. Most solar/wind at present day are only built with battery support of about 1-2 hours worth of equivalent storage. This is a massive help to smooth output but doesn’t help any kind of long term storage.
Then there is transport. Poles and wires are expensive to build/maintain. Their highly efficient but completely inflexible.
Hydrogen can be stored at large scales as well as be transported, plus be generated from generation that would otherwise be curtailed and lost due to having nothing to use it on.
Pumped hydro needs specific geography and is also hugely damaging to river eco systems, not to mention ties up a huge amount of a valuable resource (water). Renewables also geographically dependent, some places on earth are bestowed with huge amounts of wind/solar where others are not. Some of this will be solved by building international power lines, but smaller scale will likely want something like hydrogen fuel.
I’m very cynical of old/current energy companies and they are doing everything they can to slow this transition but hydrogen will very likely be part of the mix into the future. What I’m not sure of is if it will serve a massive part like heating Europe over winter via excess generated over summer or much smaller for backup of more remote decentralised grids I don’t know but it will definitely play a part in the energy mix for generations to come.
The technology for that is at a very early stage of development, only lab-scale experiments exist. (see https://www.siderwin-spire.eu/ )
It's decades away from any real-world use.
It's fine to look for better alternatives, but hydrogen-based stell is the technology you can start using in the next couple of years.
Ammonia has potential safety issues, but you should be aware that there are already ammonia ports and ammonia ships. Not using it as a fuel, but transporting it.
So while ammonia needs to be handled safely if it's being used as a fuel, there already is a big ammonia industry today that has plenty of experience in handling it.
The reason why the Swedish and German green party is so much in favor of green hydrogen is that it seems to be the best bet in their view for a future where the primary source of energy is wind. A storage for wind need to be able to last for months, have a output capacity that is proportional to the capacity of the wind, and be expected to repay the storage investment within a reasonable time frame.
The other storage alternatives each have their major drawbacks. Lithium batteries work great for solar as there you only need a few hours of capacity, and the current economical setup seems to be about 80% of output for 4 hours. Each day they get charged and each night they discharge and provide a relative fast return of investment. This doesn't work for wind.
Massive amount of reverse hydro has also been suggested, but getting the capacity up to the same output as current wind installations are difficult. Having a country like Germany operating for months on only hydro power would require a lot of land and constructions, both which carries with them a lot of initial pollution in terms of both methane and co2. It is also very expensive.
There are a few other lesser know storage suggestions like rust batteries and heat storage, but I have yet to hear any of them being currently economical viable to run a whole country.
Green hydrogen can however be created through converting a wind farm into a hydrogen production farm. The cost is currently still prohibitively more expensive compared to nuclear, but it is still the place where those political parties I mentioned early is putting their bets. They are hoping that prices will go down enough that they can start building those kind of wind farms and then convert existing fossil fuel burning power plants and infrastructure to use hydrogen instead.
Yes. Those political parties are betting on green hydrogen. I was commenting on why they are looking towards using hydrogen and wind farms that generate hydrogen, but wrote the wrong color.
The question for me would be: is hydrogen really the best chemical for energy storage? (I genuinely do not know actually.) Although you are not explicitely saying that, it seems to me that the underlying assumption behind the hydrogen-as-storage argument is that hydrogen is produced from surplus electricity and then used e.g. in transportation. The choice of hydrogen is then justified because only water is released into the environment in that scenario.
However, that seems terribly inefficient to me, if only because you have to move hydrogen around. An efficient storage system should work in a closed loop: you produce hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis with surplus electricity, store hydrogen locally, and use the locally stored hydrogen to produce electricity when needed. There is no need to release anything into the environment. In particular, other chemicals could be used instead of hydrogen.
The german green party is not in favor of blue hydrogen, and everything else you say does not make much sense either. Sure you know what blue hydrogen even means?
It would require a clean energy surplus and prices of clean energy to drop enough that the generated green hydrogen is cheaper than blue and grey hydrogen. Both are going to happen eventually.
If you look at price trends, you can pretty much calculate when that might happen. A few decades from now, blue hydrogen will be more expensive than green hydrogen. The grey variety is likely to be heavily taxed with carbon taxes by then as well but even without that it will eventually end up being more expensive than green hydrogen.
Grey hydrogen is only cheap if we let you dump 7kg of CO2 in the atmosphere for every kg of hydrogen for free. Capturing and storing that 7kg of CO2 is not going to be cheap either. 1kg of hydrogen is about 33 KWH of electricity with a decent fuel cell. It takes at least 3x the kwh of clean electricity to create that. So, about 100kwh.
The price of grey hydrogen is about 0.70$ per kg. That's the dirties and cheapest variety. A more common price is > 2$/kg (still grey) in most parts of the world. Blue hydrogen costs more like 5$ per kg. So it's about 2-5x the cost of grey hydrogen.
So, get price competitive with grey hydrogen, green hydrogen would have to be generated using clean energy costing less than 0.7 cents per kwh. Once we hit that price point, it will be the cheapest form of hydrogen.
Current grid prices are way higher than that but a few recent bids for solar and wind plants came out at around 1.2 cents per kwh. So we're not that far off from hitting that price point.
Green hydrogen is being produced today at around $2.30/kg at Ningxia in China. The actual price they quote is $0.20 per cubic meter, [here](https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/chinese-com...), which if you work backwards from a density of 0.089kg/m^3 at SSL conditions give roughly $2.24 per kg. That's a 200MW facility; a much larger 2.1 GW facility has just started construction in Inner Mongolia and is expected to come online in 2023. It's possible this facility reaches price parity with grey H2 just based on economies of scale.
Also, 33kWh is the upper bound for the energy you get out of hydrogen. Practically, a fuel cell will get 60-70% of that, depending on the type. Electrolysis is around 90% efficient today, depending on the type of electrolyzer, and how you measure. SOECs can get better than 100% apparent efficiency by utilizing waste heat.
Most sources I've seen for green H2 put the threshold for economic viability at around 2c per kWh. At that price you're still more expensive than grey, but you're at least within spitting distance, and this seems to line up with the Chinese figures.
Your projections seem pretty good. Renewable energy is likely to continue to get cheaper, opening up power to gas possibilities (e.g. green hydrogen).
Something I think is missing in these hydrogen discussions on energy storage is LiFePO4 cells. They give very good round trip efficiency, are simple to operate and have been plummeting in price.
If prices continue to decline at the current trend, I’d expect to see large scale batteries used to store energy for use over multiple days. For small towns, this could be a relatively maintenance free and economical option to only draw from the grid on the days of the week when you have surplus wind or solar.
So i kind of agree but wonder if it is usable as a means of storage of energy. Electricity is easy to generate but hard to store, we have done a great job of figuring out how to safely store gases. Could we not generate electricity in areas where it’s not needed and simply ship in the hydrogen? I feel like it’s a useful tool in the journey of replaying a fossil fuel economy.
Yeah i have read this before. I was thinking a big opportunity of coastal communities would be hydrogen from electrolysis but that lead to the reading about molocule size…nothing is easy.
Which is very energy intensive, as you need to capture CO2 for this to work. And it adds the problem of methane leakages (methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas).
The most promising chemical to use as a hydrogen carrier is ammonia. It has its problems, too, but it doesn't contain carbon, which is a huge bonus.
As long as the carbon contained in that methane comes from environmental carbon, rather than fossil carbon, the net effect on CO2 levels is 0.
If a tree absorbs CO2 to grow, dies, gives off methane and that methane eventually turns back into CO2, it's not a problem. That's just the natural carbon cycle.
The problem is that we're constantly injecting more carbon from deep underground into that carbon cycle. It's why biofuels are essentially carbon neutral.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas is a fairly popular proposal for seasonal storage. You probably want to turn the hydrogen to Methane to make it easier to store.
It is competative as a medium for energy storage and in some cases for transportation. The line losses on a hydrogen pipeline are tiny compared to those of electrical transmission lines. A two-inch pipe full of compressed hydrogen can deliver massively more energy than a conductor at the same price per mile.
Hydrogen as a direct swap for natural gas is an attractive concept in areas like mine that suffer very low renewable energies seasonally. (Northern winter. Little sun/wind for several months.)
Not necessarily. High pressure electrolysis tends to be very efficient, and gets you over the hump of getting to 200 bar with only around 3% energy loss. Compression energy is logarithmic, so getting to 700 bar from that point takes less than half the energy that we would have spent getting it 200 bar. Figures I've seen have it at around 6-8% energy lost to get to 600-700 bar (the last part is done on gas, which is less efficient).
That said, if we really wanted to, we could do deepwater electrolysis and let the Earth do the compression for us. You wouldn't even need oceanic electricity generation, because there's enough of a pressure differential between the surface and, say, 2km depth, that you could comfortably siphon some of the pressure in a turbine to power the reaction. The limitations at this point are mostly engineering and manufacturing -- we know how to do electrolysis at those pressures, and we can even do salt water electrolysis.
If you have a pressure differential, a fluid will jet from high pressure to low pressure, where the difference is converted to the velocity of the fluid. If you have a moving fluid, you can use it to drive a turbine and generate power, which in turn reduces the fluid's velocity. Since there's a huge difference in pressure between the ocean 2km down, and the surface, you could build a pipe and a reservoir that lets you "push" the byproducts of electrolysis to the surface. Say your surface reservoir is 150 bar, and the original is 200 bar -- that gives you 50 bar of pressure to get the hydrogen to the surface, and drive a turbine to generate power for electrolysis.
You can't get your fluid to the surface though with that pressure differential. And as your pipe fills up, it reduces the pressure differential, and pumping it out would cost more than the electricity you could get from the turbine.
Make gas at bottom of ocean, under pressure. Bring it up to the surface (low pressure) and run it through a turbine. Plug that turbine into the machine making gas at bottom of ocean. Not exactly free energy but very efficient. Harvesting the weight of the ocean to help generate hydrogen gas.
> Make gas at bottom of ocean, under pressure. Bring it up to the surface (low pressure) and run it through a turbine.
That isn't what OP meant (see his reply), but if the reason you create the hydrogen at high pressure is to reduce the cost of pressurizing it more, you would not want to reduce its pressure.
But let's say you do want to -- the energy stored in the pressure, would extracting that be worth the additional energy cost of creating hydrogen at the bottom of the ocean and bringing it to the surface?
> Plug that turbine into the machine making gas at bottom of ocean. Not exactly free energy but very efficient. Harvesting the weight of the ocean to help generate hydrogen gas.
But you have to generate electricity in order top split water to get hydrogen. You are better off just building more HVDC lines to distribute the electricity to where it is needed.
I'm not entirely convinced about the rationale for hydrogen, but I'll play devil's advocate. If you burn the CH4 at the place of extraction, then you need a way to transport the electricity. This is a hard problem. You can instead ship the natural gas via pipes (or LNG) to some other place, close to the consumer, where it will be burned in a power plant. For this option, there will be leaks proportional to the distance the gas is shipped. A pipeline 100km long will leak 10 times more than a pipeline 10km long. When the famed analysis that claimed 3.5% average CH4 leakage came out, they simply did not consider the length of the pipe. If you instead immediately convert the CH4 into H2, and ship that via pipes, then you have no reason to have CH4 leaks beyond a tiny amount associated with the extraction itself (which would be there even if you decide to convert the gas into electricity on the spot). So, all in all, there's a case to be made that the conversion of CH4 into H2 would result in great reductions in overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The pipeline is welded the full length, so a linear leak rate doesn't really make sense.
Where it could leak would be at valve station flanges, which by code are required every X km depending on the land risks.
You can test to see whether the flanges are leaking, and you can tighten accordingly in most cases. Effectively this leaking can be avoided in a transmission/industrial sense with the right amount of applied effort.
I don't understand why the leak rate from H2 pipes wouldn't be as bad as CH4. In fact, shipping hydrogen is generally much harder, since it requires such deeply cryogenic temperatures to stay liquid, unlike liquid natural gas which can be accomplished with just pressure.
If you burn a greenhouse gas to create H2, and then X% of the H2 goes to waste through leakage, it's possible this process may contribute more to global warming than just transporting and burning the greenhouse gas itself, depending on X.
If X is very large, you could argue that the leak of H2 does contribute to global warming.
It can also be produced from waste streams - eg contaminated plastic that can't be recycled. The process is self powering so the H2 production cycle is highly efficient as well as reducing waste to landfill.
As others have pointed out it might be used for flight/boats.
In general though saying it isn’t useful for cars is kind of missing the point of new sources of energy. New sources of energy (and the associated prime movers) allow new forms of transportation.
For example you couldn’t really make a car using steam power. That was only possible with gasoline and an IC engine.
Looking at it another way: what new forms of transportation would be possible with hydrogen? Personal flight maybe?
We do a lot of really inefficient things if there is a market for it.
> For example you couldn’t really make a car using steam power. That was only possible with gasoline and an IC engine.
Stanley (and others) made steam cars in the early 20th century. By all accounts they were quite nice, but did have drawbacks in regards to needing pre-heating, and they were rather expensive luxury cars. Steam cars were absolutely a thing, though. Electric cars too, but the battery technology of the time was too primitive for long range.
Also, hydrogen isn't a source of energy, it is merely a storage medium.
Electric cars of the era were capable of 25-50 miles worth of range. That is the same range that the first generation of modern electrics had between the 90s and early 00s.
Electrics were pushed out for many reasons, but not being an ideal commuter vehicle wasn't one of them.
> Also, hydrogen isn't a source of energy, it is merely a storage medium.
Yeah, we used to power cars with wood during WW2 but wood was just the storage medium. The wood was used to create carbon monoxide which was used in an internal combustion engine.
> If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly
Yes, but since we're capturing the CO2, that's fine.
There's also turquoise hydrogen [1] - produced from natural gas by pyrolysis, capturing solid carbon, without ever producing CO2. This is equivalent to blue hydrogen, but the technology looks a lot more promising to me, because solid carbon is easier to sequester than CO2.
The big problem with natural gas is the losses of the gas itself during production and transport. This is only 1-3% of the gas produced, but methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, so even that amount is significant. If that could be substantially reduced, turquoise hydrogen looks pretty good to me.
Something i haven't been able to find out is how much the loss rate varies. Maybe it's 2% on average because losses from old Russian gas wells are 5% and losses from modern North Sea gas wells are 0.1%. That would also change the picture.
> we are wasting electricity that could have been used directly in BEVs
It's vital to understand what hydrogen would be used for. The most important use i can see is substituting for natural gas in legacy domestic heating. There are over 20 million gas boilers in homes in the UK. We are slowly replacing them with heat pumps, electric heating, and better insulation, but it will take decades to replace them all. If we could replace natural gas in the supply with hydrogen [2], we could cut emissions much sooner - even faster than waiting for electric cars to displace petrol ones.
Is there a way to turn CH4 into C + 2H2 and bury the C or use it for some industrial use that does not result in it being burned or emitted into the atmosphere? (Plastics? Some kind of building material additive? Roads?) If so it would be a way of getting some percentage of the energy from CH4 without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
I can't see hydrogen for cars and stuff due to lack of infrastructure, but if we got better and cheaper H2 fuel cells I could see a natural gas power plant that emits absolutely zero CO2. The loss of energy by converting to H2 and throwing away C would at least partly be compensated for by the high efficiency of fuel cells vs. heat engines.
Yes, methane pyrolysis. You can search for "CSIRO Hazer Process" for an example. As I understand it, you bubble methane through a very high temperature liquid metal, and it pyrolysis the methane into hydrogen and graphite.
I am not sure of the economics or the conversion rate of methane.
Currently it seems that batteries are an expensive technology. And we have limited capacity for their production. So having plug-in hybrid EVs (which can run on batteries for most everyday journeys) or cars running on (green) hydrogen means that sufficiently more greener vehicles can be produced such that more emissions can be avoided sooner than if the focus was battery EVs. Furthermore, BEVs are heavier and cause more road wear (some wear scales with the fourth power of the weight over an axle)
Every discussion of green hydrogen should include a mention of solar thermal zinc hydrolysis. Sunlight is used to heat water and zinc to a relatively low temperature point where hydrogen is released:
What then would be the plan for a 7+ day disruption to the power grid?
At the moment, the backup plan is generally diesel generators, and the transport grid is independent of the electrical. Going full battery changes the risk profile quite substantially.
Hydrogen as a liquid fuel has no future, but hydrogen as a battery of some sort might be the solution to weak lithium batteries. I remember a post on HN talking about a special form of crystal oxygen that's filled with hydrogen atoms. That kind of thing might be an efficient battery.
It's a way of shipping solar power. There are plans for green hydrogen in the North West Australia area, using solar power to generate hydrogen that is shipped to Japan and other Asian destinations.
> end of the day, hydrogen is always going to cost more than the energy source that was used to produce it.
What your failing to account for is a.) the fact that Hydrogen (and Oxygen) used with fuel cells is effectively a battery, and b.) all batteries use more energy to charge than the amount of retractable energy, c.) we accept these energy losses (costs) in the battery charging process because we need batteries for most mobile applications (not subways & similar though, these are connected to the grid).
H2 and other batteries (including oil itself) are a means of making energy portable so that you don't have to plug into the grid. If we could pluge everything into the grid, then yes you're correct, H2 energy storage would only be useful for back up grid or grid buffer energy storage.
For stationary applications, it doesn't make much sense to have batteries (H2 or Electric, or otherwise) since, as you state, you can just connect to the electric grid and avoid battery charging losses (unless your worried about grid instanility). However, for mobile applications (cars, ships, planes, etc), now you need to consider how to store energy off of the grid in a manner that is COMPACT and LIGHT, because these factors greatly effect vehicle transport efficiency.
Oild is still king in terms of volumetric energy desnity and specific (mass) energy desnity. An energy capacity equivalent Li-ion battery is still relatively much heavier and takes up more space (meaning your vehicle will be less energy efficient). H2 storage has the potential to exceed oil in terms of volumetric/specific energy density, but it's not there just yet.*
*Note that, the other component in the energy storage race isn't just the storage media, but the energy conversion efficiency of devices that use these media. For example, most common fuel cells are roughly 50% efficient in terms of the energy usage, but if you can make a fuel cell 90% efficient, then that makes the use of H2 as a battery, much more competitive. The same is true about oil burnjng engine efficiencies. Electric batteries and motors are very efficient at converting energy, however, electric batteries are currently much less energy dense than H2 or oil systems.
Oil is effectively a battery that has been charged naturally by the sun (as with most mined chemical energy storage). If you create oil in a lab, you are storing the reaction energy for later use, just like charging any battery.
When you charge a battery, because batteries follow the laws of thermodynamics, you always invest more energy to charge that you get out of them. Mined oil is cheap energy because it's already "charged". However, if you were to capture the waste emissions from the atmosphere and recombine them, the energy lost in the recombination would be far greater than that which you can extract when you burn it again.
If someone had a way to economically capture oild emissions, then recombine the into oil - and if this process is cheaper that liberating H2 from water.
It’s just so weird we’re supposed to get hydrogen from petroleum sources. It’s not like you can’t split it from water (with solar providing the energy). Everyone learns that in elementary school chemistry.
Hydrogen doesn’t seem like a good idea for cars, too much dispersed infrastructure that needs to be built, that seems even more difficult to pull off than electric charging. But for airplanes, it might make more sense.
That depends on what you need the hydrogen for. If you want to burn it in a turbine or use it in a fuel cell then yes, using natural gas directly is more efficient. OTOH, using hydrogen as a feedstock for chemical processes often can't be replaced directly with natural gas.
iirc one main difficulty besides electricity is the cathode or anode material, as on industrial scale I think they may need to be replaced due to corrosion or something (again, not entirely sure).
However, we really ought to solve that problem and then put hydrogen stations in sunny / windy places that just make the gas when electricity is available there. Seems like a no-brainer for the middle east with copious amounts of sun year round.
There are many other challenges, like the fact that you need very pure water which if you use salt water you need to desalinate it first and make sure it has little to no impurities. Then you need to both select and engineer the structure of your electrodes to maximize surface area whilst allowing for easy H2 extraction, you need to match your electrolyte material to your electrodes as well as figure out how to extract the other byproducts without them gunking your setup until something goes boom.
There is some research into autoionization of water but that has its own massive engineering challenges you need quite high temperatures or pressure to make that even remotely feasible and that process needs to be very controlled because you don’t want free hydrogen and oxygen floating around.
You start studying chemistry before 12 years old? Around 11-12 is when elementary school ends [1]. I don't think I've ever heard of that in California and they don't usually start until high school in Sweden either [2].
I'm excited about a slew of new carbon capture processes that are integrated with green concrete + hydrogen production. There are an assortment of them that take things like salt water/air and calcium and produce hydrogen and lime (and sometimes brine or additional byproducts that would need to be managed)
Physics Girl just made a video comparing hydrogen fuel cell and batteries. The weight to energy ratio makes it extremely clear to me that there is a place for both. As far as blue hydrogen vs. green hydrogen I don’t know the details.
>I won't trust one from the "blue hydrogen" lobby either.
Agreed, I felt the same way when this article was circulating last week.
This is a guy whose career was based on, apparently, lying about the benefits of his lobby. Now he's decided to take a more socially palatable position, and suddenly we're to believe him? Sounds like his trying to get a different lobbying gig.
“Instead, they’re asking taxpayers for billions in subsidies for the next 25 years. They should tell the government they don’t need it. The fact that they don’t tells you everything you need to know.”
Can't we same the same about solar or EV subsidies? Isn't the purpose of these subsidies to diminish investment risk and promote new tech?
This mans powers his entire house from hydrogen obtained via electrolysis. Very impressive, the excess solar power from his panels is used to produce hydrogen by splitting water. Stored into huge containers. Of course, he lives on a huge piece of land, would not work for most urban settings.
If it's made from fossil fuel, whether coal, gas or oil, we cannot afford it. Any 'solution' that includes taking carbon out of the ground is not a solution. The fossil fuel industry would love to sell us on blue hydrogen. They would get to keep doing exactly what they're doing, but now with added subsidies to pay for turning it into hydrogen.
To make sense of a few things, first, what are the different types of hydrogen production (from Leachman's piece):
‘Black’ hydrogen is produced from coal or oil with the highest associated CO2 emissions.
‘Gray’ hydrogen is produced from methane with steam reformation resulting in approximately 7.2 kg CO2 for every kilogram of hydrogen produced (this is the color associated with the vast majority of industrial hydrogen produced over the years, which nearly entirely go to petroleum refining and ammonia fertilizer production).
‘Blue’ hydrogen is produced with CO2 emissions but those emissions are captured and sequestered in some way, like geological storage or concrete.
‘Pink’ hydrogen is produced with no CO2 emissions but from a nuclear reactor and the associated nuclear waste (for what it’s worth hydrogen will fluoresce a beautiful pink in an arc lamp, just about the only color hydrogen ever actually is).
‘Green’ hydrogen is produced with no CO2 emissions, typically from electrolyzing water via renewable energy like wind or solar.
From the OP arstechnica piece about Chris Jackson:
"Jackson continues by saying that blue hydrogen is “at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use” which would derail goals that the country and the world have set for decarbonizing the economy. He takes particular issue with the fact that oil and gas companies have asked the UK government for decades of subsidies while also claiming that blue hydrogen will be inexpensive to produce. “If the false claims made by oil companies about the cost of blue hydrogen were true, their projects would make a profit by 2030,”"
From Leachman's piece:
"
For what it’s worth, all you’ll see is green hydrogen in my CSA short course or on my blog, because that is the future I’m training professionals for. But you won’t see me slamming the door shut on ‘blue’ hydrogen either. The green hydrogen route with liquefaction that I’ve been pushing for over a decade now was long ridiculed using many of the same arguments as those against blue hydrogen above. Both the press and journal articles make the same mistake of casting as absolute extrapolations of the status quo without consideration for the limits of physical law. Those limits of physical law mean that if something is not forbidden, we will eventually find a use for positive means. What we really need is more research on ways to produce hydrogen (of any color) more efficiently with less global warming. Until we finally fund hydrogen research equivalently with batteries and electricity, all of this negative bias about hydrogen is turning my hair gray; no, let’s call it silver."
I don't have anything to add to the argument, but this phrase stood out to me. It's a dangerous assertion to make especially in this area, because just as eventually we will find a way to externalize the negative effects, leaving only the positive means to capitalize.
So maybe "the limits of physical law" should not be what drives this discussion?
Those distinctions are all likely academically accurate and valid technological (green/black/blue/pink) distinctions.
The real issue with the colors of hydrogen isn't the science or the technology.
It's that the petroleum industry will use politics and the complexities to forestall alternative energy and EV, and play labelling games with hydrogen:
"It's blue! We pumped all the CO2 into the ground!"
Do you have any way to prove that is actually sequestered CO2, or that you actually did the sequestering? Is there independent certification and tests to make sure it isn't leaking out?
"..... Look it's blue hydrogen! Don't use EVs!"
It's like "Organic" food and "Sustainable" products all over again.
So, I'm very pro-green hydrogen. We need to start generating a whole bunch of it right away to start replacing grey hydrogen (fossil fuels split into hydrogen and CO2 and the CO2 vented) that we use for a variety of things today, including fertilizer.
And I think it's fairly sensible to simply ban blue hydrogen and carbon tax grey hydrogen so that people don't get confused.
Combine that with minimum green hydrogen mix regulations that set a glide path to 100% green hydrogen and you're done. We can bring those dates in closer once it becomes obvious it works and is the cheapest option. You've only got the political problem of corporations that benefit from the status quo inciting conspiracy theories and fascism to slightly bump their quarterly numbers.
But, what I think is worth noting about this story, given that the guy runs a green hydrogen company and the other recent one about an Australian mining billionaire and right wing PM speaking out against blue hydrogen in favour of the green hydrogen their company produces, is that we've possibly hit a tipping point where starting a carbon friendly corporation is the best move today for selfish people who just want to get rich.
Which is kind of a good thing, though it feels kind of weird.
> Combine that with minimum green hydrogen mix regulations that set a glide path to 100% green hydrogen and you're done.
This is only "done" in the sense that you are now moving in the right direction. It might still take several decades to actually complete the transition. New green hydrogen plants don't just pop up out of the ground as soon as the incentives are right, they take billions of investment and years of labor to construct.
(Also, I don't think banning blue hydrogen and taxing grey hydrogen is something that can be done "simply". That in itself will probably take a decade to move through the slow-moving gears of government and even then there are other countries like OPEC that would not necessarily follow suit)
Those political processes aren't randomly slow. Someone paid a lot of money to slow them down.
But my point was that the market for paying off politicians is shifting. The Australian ex-PM who repealed a carbon tax is now speaking out against blue hydrogen, because he has a stake in a green hydrogen venture.
The game now is to profit from the inevitable policy response and leave governments and slow responding pension funds to carry the can for the costs of fossil fuel cleanup.
So where does this green hydrogen come from without huge subsidies? That's always seemed the main problem to me - we don't have it knocking around and making it is more expensive than alternatives like solar and batteries.
We don't subsidize it, we tax the alternative source of hydrogen and then we set a minimum green mix.
So Dino Inc can still make hydrogen from fossils, but they have to at least source 1% green hydrogen, and they pay a tax on the 99%. And they know that 1% will be 10% and eventually 100% and the tax will increase so they have a business case for investing billions.
Hmm. There are still costs even with clever accounting. I'm guessing in that scheme the tax per unit energy would have to be lower than the tax on regular gas to make people bother with hydrogen.
This is fairly standard stuff. The US, EU and China just did it for EVs, solar and wind power, battery storage with great success and they've all announced similar already for green hydrogen.
Anything that can be directly electrified should. Storing power in baggeries when you dont need to is stupid. Storing it as hydrogen is also stupid, unless:
You make fertilizer from fossil fuels and it currebtly generates 2% of the worlds greehouse gasses. We need to replace that.
You currently use coal to make steel and the replacement process uses hydrogen.
You need some kind of fuel for flights and ships and the basic building block of all of current options is hydrogen.
You need to store energy for a long time, or transport it a great distance.
The bonus is that all these things interact, and you can dip into your fertilizer reserves if you need more electricity.
The bad press around hydrogen mostly comes from fossil interests using it as a distraction (don't use battery based vehicles, hydrogen ones will be here any day now and be better, and shorlty after that well magically invent a way of disappearing the carbon from blue hydrogen) but its a fairly basic part of human life and we need to decarbonise its production.
Hydrogen is used in industrial processes not just fuel. In terms of transportation batteries are to heavy for long distance aircraft and very expensive for long distance cargo ships. It’s not clear that hydrogen is the solution for either of those, but it’s a reasonable option.
The chemistry part of making steel requires something to remove oxygen from iron oxide (unrusting it, so to speak). For conventional steel that's carbon, in the process I'm referring to hydrogen fills that role.
When are we going to make this and other forms of public disinformation akin to fraud?
Some of the biggest, deadliest, costliest sagas now and in the past 75 years have been caused by society-level disinformation campaigns by organized groups. Yes, in the long term, the truth wins out, but usually after an incredibly hard fought battle, years or decades of damage, erosion of trust in institutions, and billions in profit rewards for the fraudsters.
A. adjust our social norms to make the world at large less punishing for pedants, “well, actually”, and those who do not “read the room” — when people are more willing to accept “well that was poorly framed but true” as a valid reason to keep someone in leadership.
B. Make humans better at social interactions in general without somehow introducing tradeoffs.
I was thinking the vaccines cause autism debacle, the manufacturing consent on whether or not cigarettes cause cancer, the oil companies holding their climatology research they'd finished in the 70's. But gulf war 2 probably counts too.
I am positive growing up I read about how some anesthetic they used during childbirth in the sixties was linked to some kind of birth defect but it is ridiculous to say that about vaccines.
Why is there doubt that vaccines are safe and that tobacco is harmful?
I can understand reluctance to say too much of sweet smoothies filled with fresh fruits is harmful or milk/milk products are harmful because they contain lots of useful nutrients and the reality is very nuanced and our understanding will evolve over the next few decades.
However, the topics you mentioned are solved issues. Why is it so easy to cast doubt about them?
Thalidomide might be what you're thinking of. Didn't realise until now that it wasn't approved in the US until the risks were well known.
But in the UK at least "thalidomide was (supposed to be) safe too" is an easy argument you'll hear fairly often.
>... a subsidiary of Distillers Co. Ltd (now part of Diageo plc), marketed thalidomide throughout the UK, Australia and New Zealand, under the brand name Distaval, as a remedy for morning sickness. Their advertisement claimed that "Distaval can be given with complete safety to pregnant women and nursing mothers without adverse effect on mother or child ... Outstandingly safe Distaval has been prescribed for nearly three years in this country."
>Experts estimate that thalidomide led to the death of approximately 2,000 children and serious birth defects in more than 10,000 children, about 5,000 of them in West Germany
The entire vaccines cause autism thing started as a disinformation campaign against the MMR vaccine in order to sell an alternative (expensive) 3 part vaccine and to win a lawsuit. The media gave the original paper huge coverage without actually reading it and it took many people a lot of work debunking and discrediting the author before he even lost his medical license.
You never read "We got tricked into spreading BS" on the front page of a newspaper.
product liability truths are a third-rail in market capitalism
translation: mass market products are responsible for a very large portion of the total economic GDP, and by definition, touch the lives of millions (or more) people each day. Product liability is a system of law where the brand holder does have financial responsibility when things go wrong. Truth, obviously, is the real effects of the products on people, living things, and our common environment. A third-rail is a real-live, high voltage carrier of power for trains, but the term is used to convey something too powerful to even slightly touch, at the risk of death and destruction. In colloquial political talk it means that a appointed official or elected official could be terminated by broaching the topic in public.
from an "Economist magazine point of view" some products do cease to generate profit after restrictions or penalties on the market, which is "deadly" to profit.
depending on your world view, many products today, like gas-driven cars, are actually toxic from the beginning, yet have so much economic and daily importance that it is collectively tolerated, until it is not.
ordinary product liability, like "body burden" long lived chemistry rubbing off from sofas or children's toys, live in a gray area in markets where a change in public opinion or regulatory framework can alter the product and its market quite a bit at any time.
since steady profit over time is a de-facto definition of social power, there are multiple layers of second or third order actors that delay, deny and obfuscate any change in status quo, and are paid real money to do so.
activists, educators, researchers and regulators that try to change the status quo of products with facts about toxicity are then "touching a third-tail"
source: research on electronics products life-cycle worldwide
The solution for transport is electric trains and very lightweight electric vehicles, like electric bikes and other 4 wheel things lighter than 400kg. All powered by nuclear energy.
I even foresee a network of narrow rail tracks for cities, supplied by a collection of warehouses for freight for the last kilometer to supermarkets and shops. Such rail is much easier to build on existing infrastructure.
So true. Wind turbines are supported by the gas lobby because thermal power plants are needed to compensate for wind variations. This same lobby is pushing blue hydrogen against green. But if wind turbines were used to produce green hydrogen, many problems would be solved : energy storage, energy transport.
It doesn't even have to be wind turbines (although what you say us absolutely true). Almost every municipality/utility has peak and off-peak times where electricity must be moved around because production capacity can not be reduced any further. I've always felt that something like H2 production or high-efficiency batteries would be ideal in non-peak periods.
As a former truck driver, H2 is probably the most practical from a long-haul perspective.
I think this is the way. The only way to go truly green is to install over capacity of renewables and store the excess to handle their variability. I haven't done the math but I have the impression that Li-Ion storage at that scale is not feasible or would take us too long, so I think a balance of H_2 production from excess clean production, hydroelectric storage where possible and Li-Ion will be needed.
H_2 is also the only clean solution for certain forms of transportation, e.g., cargo shipping, air transportation, substitution of diesel trains and likely even heavy duty trucks. So we will need some form of clean H_2 if we want to make a clean transition in those areas.
H_2 is not the devil, we must steer away from so called Blue Hydrogen (and worse forms of H_2 production). But Green Hydrogen is very likely part of the solution. At least I don't see other way out.
I'm myself a big nuclear proponent and I would like to see bigger funding towards achieving fusion.
With that said, nuclear cannot solve the issues mentioned. It's great for base-load but not great to handle renewable energy variability. For that we nowadays use thermal power stations that burn fossil fuels and can be turned on and off easier.
So I agree on nuclear being part of a clean energetic mix but it can't fix the problems mentioned in the post above.
