Hear me out, so we make a ton of hydrogen for cars, heating, etc. But it takes lots of methane to make hydrogen. So we give oil companies subsidies so they can do more fracking which is how we get the methane in the first place. This will be great for climat cha—wait a minute...
It’s ok because after we have already fully transitioned the grid to renewables, batteries, and pumped hydro in twenty or thirty years, we’ll then be so good at making renewable electricity that we won’t mind using a process that throws half of it away, all so that we can keep going to gas stations instead of just getting electricity delivered to our homes.
Being able to fill up your car in 5 minutes instead of 18 during your occasional road trip is definitely going to win out over being able to fill up at home for a tenth the cost, and people will want to burn hydrogen for heating even though it would be a lot cheaper and more energy efficient to use it in even a basic diesel generator to power a heat pump, because people just love throwing their money away so that the poor oil companies can still have a growing business and it’s not like their is an easy and 98% percent efficient way to deliver power to people’s homes, that would just be ridiculous.
Well, there's the whole other conspiracy to this... Cars wouldn't need 18 minutes to recharge, or even 5.. even 1 really...
in my ignorance i assumed that we got hydrogen from electrolysis or something
We don't at the moment. Hydrogen is primarily part of the fossil fuel process.
But there's nothing stopping us getting it from water, other than cost.
That's really expensive compared to fracking. It's reasonable to assume that any hydrogen project is going to use fossil hydrogen
Treating Hydrogen as a fuel is a problem, but it's an OK storage medium. Putting it next to Bromine or whatever is fine. I think people using it for flight or trucking is a good outcome overall, but yeah unfortunately the oil companies basically ruin all the good things.
Yeah, or maybe for moving container ships. It's not quite as energy dense as the heavy fuels they're currently burning, but its only emissions are water vapor, and if we keep building renewable power generation there will be times of negative power prices where producing hydrogen with the excess will make a lot more sense.
Unbridled enthusiasm can be cute to a point, but those hydrogen folks are way beyond that. Yikes.
Look at which corporations are all pro hydrogen. Those hydrogen folks are probably astroturfing.
85%+ of hydrogen production is currently from fossik fuels. While there is a forseeable future where solar and other green energy could be used, an immediate increase in hydrogen production would come 100% from fossil fuel producers.
So yeah, it is currently oil company propaganda from trying to find alternate revenue streams.
"And where does that hydrogen come from, my sweet summer child?"
Excess of generated power during the day.
Much more economical to store the electricity in batteries or pumped hydro than using an electrolyzer, even if you found the electrolyzer for free on the side of the road.
Using hydrogen for steel and fertilizer production are the only feasible use cases for it over the next 100 years at least, if your goal is maximum GHG reduction.
Sure, in the future state where we have all the energy we need from solar and wind, but then we have all the energy we need
Hydrogen maybe has a place in sea and air transport. Maybe has a place in trucks
Hydrogen right now comes from fossil fuels
It kinda depends. Hydrogen protons were formed in the first second after the Big Banger🤘, but full hydrogen atoms that included a proton and an electron didn't form until 370k "years" later during a time range called the Recombination Epoch.
I believe in both hydrogen and nuclear power… it’s called the sun
I'd be interested in home scale hydrogen electrolysis with excess solar energy even if only to sidestep the "use it or lose it" reality of off-grid solar.
Rather than just filling up batteries?
Thing about batteries is.
From an environmental standpoint, both mining the raw materials and producing the batteries uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution.
Morally, many raw materials for batteries come from desperately poor conflict zones, so you have megacorps staffing mines with slavery and child labor, paying local warlords/dictators for permission to operate, having those warlords/dictators kill protesters and union organizers, etc.
If we can get a hydrogen economy working, and the equipment and technology don't need conflict minerals or polluting heavy industry to manufacture, it would be a boon for the world both practically and morally.
But that's a big if.
Hydrogen can be stored in underground caverns and that can be relatively easily scaled to TWh. Electrolysis and fuel cell can get you 70% or so of your electricity back. So it is less efficient then batteries. However there might be a place for hydrogen as seasonal storage. Also the storage makes sense as quite a few processes use hydrogen anyway.
So there is a use case, but right now we mostly should just add renewables and batteries. We are nowhere close to a solar/wind grid, which does actually need seasonal storage. Also grid size helps a lot and there are options such as burning waste.
After my batteries are charged. I have 40kW, but excess would probably go toward the diesel powered implements I have, that way they can run more efficiently and reduce emissions.
There is a startup company I worked with called Solhyd that Is trying to do that.
The downside is they are trying to do per-panel electrical hydrolysis because it is flashy and sexy for investors when it makes compression a complete bitch and you need a ton of hydrogen tubing bringing the loose hydrogen everywhere to an expensive compressor instead of just bringing solar electricity to a safer location for the hydrolysis and compression to storage.
Erm, actually...
It is. At a massive scale hydrogen provides almost all energy used on earth.
Oil? Got it's energy from essentially plankton, which got it's energy from... The sun.
Coal? Energy from trees, which.... you guessed it, the sun.
Solar panels? Well duh.
How about water wheels in rivers? Well you see, the water cycle is driven by.... The sun.
And what is the sun mostly comprised of? Hydrogen.
Hear me out, if we somehow had infinite energy and need that stuff for rockets, it's a reasonable exchange. Not for cars though. Just use E cars, they're way more efficient.
Smells like glass... and Davinci....
I heard a whole talk about using hydrogen in the steel melting process. Where a big part of the inefficicy of the hydrolysis is offset by higher efficiency in the steel making process.
