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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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The first time we had a fuel cell powered car of any kind was in the 1960s. It is a much more recent technology.
Part of the advancement in fuel cell is our ability to produce hydrogen at a low cost. It is mirroring the progress that photovoltaics went through.
That's the only part, in fact, that needs advancement. And it's in no way mirroring PV cells development path or cost decreases. Our most efficient, lowest cost form of abundant hydrogen is cracking it out of methane / natural gas. And that method will always be more expensive than just generating electricity from the methane because you need to generate high temperature steam as part of the process by burning some of the methane. The only other source of less expensive but not abundant enough hydrogen is as an industrial process byproduct. And that's not even close to producing enough to meet current demands if we could magically capture it and had no refining costs to scrub out other wastes.
Then you are painfully stuck in the past. Your rhetoric is not just a repeat of anti-wind and anti-solar, it is purely climate doomerism. The same argument climate change deniers have continuously made. It's entirely based on the idea that nothing can replace fossil fuels. In reality, this is an infinite resource for all practical purposes. It's long-term cost will be approximately zero, not whatever number you wish it to be.
I guess I'll just say that if you think we're stopping climate change at this point, you live in a fantasy. It's happening, we've already done irreversible damage, and the conversation we're having now is how do we stop making it worse than the catastrophe it's already guaranteed to be. We aren't preventing head deaths or massive climate migrations, that shit's happening no matter what we do.
As for me, I absolutely do not believe fossil fuels are our only way forward. I simply don't believe in magic. The energy required to produce H2 gas isn't free, the energy to compress and chill it isn't free, the energy to truck it around or build and operate pipelines isn't free. What I do believe is that renewable energy will continue to displace existing fossil fuels at an increasing pace. Their LCOE is exceptionally hard to beat with any system that destroys its energy source as part of its reaction. Nuclear is likely off the table due to cost and regulatory issues, but it's perhaps our best bet for base loads.
You are misdirecting. You are effective saying that green hydrogen can never be as cheap as fossil-fuel based hydrogen, which is an absurd argument and is basically climate doomerism.
What you are fundamentally missing is the fact that this does not require limited resources. It's all made from stuff that is available everywhere. It is literally just combining wind, sunlight and water together to create a fuel that can nearly directly replace natural gas. These are basically infinite resources with basically infinite supply. The cost floor is zero because of that. It is exactly the same argument as wind or solar.
In fact, you are repeating the exact same anti-PV argument that fossil fuel people made: That the EROI of solar panels is permanently poor, or that efficiency is simply too low. Which in their minds meant it will never be cost effective. But they never noticed the fact that sunlight is an effectively infinite resource with a cost floor of zero. As a result it simply didn't matter what advantages fossil fuels had. A solar panel can just churn out energy at nearly zero cost, and ultimate that is what happened. Same thing with wind too. And anything that is just an extension of that idea will also have a cost floor of zero. As a result, it is merely a matter of when green hydrogen drops to nearly zero cost. Alternatives will not be able to beat that and therefore they will be displaced by it.
No, I'm not even engaging in the boondoggle that is "green" versus all the other types of hydrogen. I'm telling you that producing hydrogen from electricity is nonsensical when you can just use the electricity.
No, it's saying this is a stupid solution not that there's no solution.
But Hydrogen, largely, is not freely available. It's found bonded to other atoms, and those bonds require energy to break. The problem you face is that the amount of energy necessary to break those bonds is higher than the amount of energy you can get back out of the hydrogen.
This is pure nonsense and fantasy. You do not have a supply of freely available hydrogen, which means your cost floor is the cost of breaking hydrogen out of its existing bonds. That's like saying the cost floor to charge a battery is zero. It's nonsense. You need to put energy into producing the hydrogen, plain and simple.
The rest of your comment is just nonsense. You're attempting to put words in my mouth and inventing arguments I'm not having. So I'm not engaging with that in any way.
You are still missing the point then. You cannot use that electricity. It is going to be curtailed electricity and is basically lost in the production process.
Taking that unusable electricity making something out of it will drive the cost of hydrogen to basically zero. This is the fundamental reason why solar also became so cheap, despite PVs being "inefficient." You're simply taking something free and making something useful out of it.
Like I said from the beginning, you are just repeating the same anti-wind and anti-solar arguments of the past. You can insist that you didn't actually say that or claim that this is somehow different, but none of that is meaningful. It is just closed-minded nonsense regardless.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3
5%. You're talking about 5% of energy transmitted is lost. So you're going to start a hydrogen revolution with 5%?
I get it, you've found a thing you can be a champion for. But you're blinded to the real world by your overzealous fandom.
Because electricity is traditionally sent very short distances. It's too bad that this is going away. Your renewable energy resource may be thousands of miles away in the future.
PS: It was a pipeline that sent natural gas to your local gas turbine power plant. If electricity losses was always going to be 5%, why did that pipeline exist at all?
P.S.: My power plant doesn't burn hydrogen.
I literally said natural gas...