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...
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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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.
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Screw that, we already have plenty of methane from cows. Just shove tubes up their asses and harvest that.
Actually, cows burp most of their methane emissions
Tubes in both ends!
Now you're thinking with capitalism!
the cows gi tracts are tubes 🤯
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.
Container Ships could be moved by sail if we really wanted to do that.
They could support the motor, maybe sometimes replace it when there's good wind, but you'd still need a motor for reliability very often. Sails and green hydrogen. Why not combined?
I own a sailboat, and let's just say that it's not as simple as it looks. If you want to have good sailing performance you can't just weld a mast to the deck and call it good: Half of what makes a sailboat go happens underwater, so it has to be designed as a sailboat from the get-go. Not an impossible task, but it'll need new ship types and perhaps new construction methods; it's not something you can just retrofit onto an existing fleet.
All sailboats large enough to sleep in also have an engine, and most of the time it's a 20-60HP diesel depending on the size of the boat. There's a lot of buzz currently around switching to electric auxiliary propulsion, but the benefits aren't as big as you get on cars. Main "issue" is that marine diesel engines already spend most of their operating time in their most efficient range of RPMs; you don't get stop-and-go like you get on cars. Given that, there's no regen braking to be had on a boat. Regen can still happen when you're sailing, but the available energy from that derives from the velocity squared or something, so you only get something negligible like 200W when sailing at 5 knots (which is the common case for most 30-40 ft sailboats). You see, the main limit to speed on a displacement hull (like sailboats or container ships) is hull speed, which is mostly a function of hull length. Longer boat, faster boat.
This is good news for a container ship, though, because they're much bigger and thus tend to operate at much faster speeds like 12-16 knots. I know some bigger sailboats in the 50-60 ft range routinely see 2kW+ of regen when sailing at 7-8 knots, so a containership sailing at 12+ knots could conceivably generate in the tens of kW, which could recharge batteries for when they're becalmed or in confined waters where they can't sail.
Also, a lot of newer ships already use diesel-electric drivetrains with AziPods, where the powerplant is actually a big generator, and the propellers are attached to electric motors mounted in rotating pods under the hull. Helps a lot with maneuverability and is actually more efficient. It'd be relatively easy to add batteries in there, but the main obstacle here is that it substracts available mass for cargo.
Other main point about sails on a boat is that it's very labour-intensive to manage, so I don't think current ships with their skeleton crews could do it without almost double the people.
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Block the user, maybe even the instance. What if they're the owner?
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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.
Well in theory, it could come from nuclear. That'd be cleaner than fossil fuels.
It uses electrolysis, so may as well cut out the middleman and just use electricity to power things without losing efficiency to convert it.
Well the only reason to use it would be in electric trucks and busses. The main benefit of the hydrogen cell is being able to swap cells instead of waiting for a recharge, which is only needed for vehicles that need to keep a strict time schedule. The cells can be charged at truck stops and bus stations that can be fed by the power grid using nuclear energy, or by solar/wind if it's a remote location, or a combination of the 3.
Hydrogen cell is not a bad technology, just like all energy solutions (expect fossil fuels) they have their strengths, weaknesses and best use cases. There's no reason why we couldn't use each one where they're the strongest. We don't need to pick just one as an end all be all.
I won't discount that possibility, but I think they get sold on a miraculous idea and simply don't understand the reasons why it's not a good idea. The more zealous one simply don't want to believe it's not the perfect solution.
The niches where it's useful tend to get pushed out by better batteries over time. We're already at the point where we don't need hydrogen for cars and busses. Long haul trucks, construction equipment, and even airplanes are on the horizon. There isn't much left to bother with hydrogen after that.
"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.
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.
lolnope.
Nuclear. Every day, all day, conventional nuclear power is so much better than trying to invent a hydrogen infrastructure. An expensive infrastructure if it's going to perform those incredibly important base load purposes like smelting, chemical feedstock production (fertilizers) and concrete production that could be handled by existing infrastructure and nuclear power. I'm not even advocating for small modular reactors (which I think are nifty but ultimately unnecessary).
Hydrogen as energy storage and transport requires cryogenic everything, people don't realize how expensive and sensitive it is. Ben Rich talks about the Skunkworks program to produce Hydrogen in meaningful quantities for the Suntan program in Skunk Works, and the prospect of large scale hydrogen production (and use on active airfields) terrified people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
Basically, it can be done, but the risks are large without a highly trained workforce and rigid compliance to safety regimes.
Now imagine that but even more widespread :|
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 fuel cells need rare earth metals, too. Sodium and iron air batteries, in contrast, don't need a whole lot. For that matter, lithium batteries are opening up more abundant sources. People misunderstood what "reserves" means for minerals.
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.
Electrolysis of the most expensive process (PEM) is around 80% efficient by itself. The more common methods are 70%. Anything that uses it after that only drops it further. Fuel cells max out at 60%, which means that electrolysis to electrical output efficiently is about 50% altogether in the very best case.
Some of the better internal combustion engines are reaching about the same.
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.
B A T T E R I E S
I already have batteries.
M O R E B A T T E R I E S
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.