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How is the hydrogen made?
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.
That's the ideal case, but in practice much of it is directly derived from natural gas instead of electrolysis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
That's what a transition is though, the new things need to be tested and built up but it's pointless making green hydrogen if there's nothing using it so we need both to be developed at the same time.
We're moving towards having good uses for excess power at peek generation which will make wind and solar much better investments, personally I prefer sequestered SAF but hydrogen has a great chance of helping stabilize the grid which will make transition much easier
Hah! It's amazing how many people are still hanging onto the delusion that hydrogen is made from renewables when almost every ounce of commercial hydrogen fuel is made by cracking petroleum products.
What you're saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we're developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
But hydrogen infrastructure isn't better long term than regular electric and battery infrastructure. You need quite unique circumstances like being highly dependent on high energy density while being located in a place where you're far from an electric grid. Like an island in a stormy place (without access to wave power, etc) or long haul trucks out in nowhere or electric airplanes. Almost anything else should use better options
This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
There's no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We're not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.
If they were using excess renewables there'd be much more efficient ways to capture that energy. A simple one would be pumping some water up hill.