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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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Except there is already a massive market for hydrogen. It is needed, produced, and used in bulk for a vast collection of industrial processes. The problem is that green hydrogen is simply expensive to make, gains very little from being done at scale, and when it comes to competing with other energy storage techs any that don’t inherently have to throw half the energy away as waste like hydrogen does are always going to have an advantage.
Like the garbage batteries we have today that barely last 10 years? It doesn't matter how expensive hydrogen is to make if you're making it with excess green energy that would be wasted otherwise.
Neglecting that we actually study and know how fast large batteries degrade with age and time, and thusly know that they do last far more than ten years, it does actually matter that hydrogen is to expensive to make with excess green energy and that no company is willing to buy it precisely because green hydrogen made from excess green energy is so many times more expensive to make then grey hydrogen.
If it is saves more money to electrify and save wear and tear on equipment by shutting down when there is an excess power than could ever be made by making and selling green hydrogen with it, people arn’t going to make much green hydrogen. Put another way, green hydrogen being so expensive that even with free electricity it is still too expensive to compete is a problem for green hydrogen.
Maybe raising taxes on grey hydrogen to the point green hydrogen can compete might be worth it, but that is a very different solution to a very different problem then what you originally claimed, which was that there wasn’t enough demand for hydrogen.
Indeed given the actual problem facing green hydrogen, which is that it is too expensive to produce compared to the more common grey hydrogen, increasing demand for hydrogen is actually directly harmful to the planet from a global warming perspective.
I don't think you can actually back any of that up. Demand for hydrogen is negligible compared to demand for gasoline. I'm convinced there's enough wasted green energy to produce enough green hydrogen to power every single electric car on the planet today that's currently using shitty batteries.
Current gobal hydrogen demand is in the region of a 100,000,000 metric tons per year. That is not too small a market to be worth creating green hydrogen, and the fact that green hydrogen cannot come close to meeting even that demand would seem to prove that more demand for hydrogen is not the problem. Indeed if too expensive for applications that actually need to use hydrogen, why would expanding applications that waste half of it like cars be at all helpfull?