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Comment by anonsivalley652 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe long-haul hydrogen from renewables and fission/fusion would be a better idea than digging ourselves deeper with FFs (natural gas, oil, etc.)?

Another consideration against any kind of fuel pipeline: safety. They're pressure vessels containing vast amounts of energy in the fuel only missing an oxidizer. PG&E certainly can't be trusted to get natural gas pipelines right: remember them blowing-up a neighborhood near SF? (2010 San Bruno; 8 killed, 58 injured)

Electricity and pipelines ultimately transfer energy from one place to another, so getting the fuel source, generator and points of consumption as close together as possible is a good idea from a cost-only perspective. There are other considerations, but renewables and nuclear near consumption is better than putting generation in remote areas... better still than remote gas-fired plants in say New Mexico fueled from gas pipelines from say Canada.

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Hydrogen is just about the worst gas to transport, though. (With the possible exception of helium) You'd get so much leakage from a hydrogen pipeline that it'd probably be easier to just synthesize methane and transport that instead...

I implied, perhaps unclearly, that it would be a half-measure that I'm not married to. And, I wonder how or why Japan is so set on spending trillion/s of yen on building-out an entirely new infrastructure without any significant commitment to it from any other major country. I surmise one else is committing because rehabilitating the existing electricity grid with renewables seems the most sensible energy infrastructure policy, while grand, big dreams upfront is ri$ky.

We talked this to death in the 90’s and early 00’s. Containing hydrogen is not a trivial task. Neither is detecting leaks (hydrogen sulfide is added to methane).

Hey rockets use hydrogen, lets use it for everything. Rockets are some of the most expensive machines built by man and the hydrogen fuel lines and tanks - if they even use hydrogen - are measured in meters, not miles.

There are many methods to generate methane. Some of them, IIRC, can even use waste heat from other processes. We don’t have to ransack the tectonic plates for every cubic meter of natural gas.

Hydrogen in the form of ammonia is easily transported and stored. CSIRO have developed catalyst+membrane technology for conversion back to hydrogen: https://blog.csiro.au/hyper-for-hydrogen-our-world-first-car...

In other words, hydrogen in the form of hydrogen is really horrible to transport - so horrible that this company is willing to eat the efficiency losses from converting to ammonia and back to avoid having to deal with hydrogen.

Which of course also begs the question of "well why not just use ammonia as the fuel?", but ammonia is highly toxic and thus unsuitable for use in consumer vehicles. But this also should raise some really huge warning signs when considering making a pipeline to transfer ammonia - if you don't trust the oil companies not to leak natural gas, why would you trust them not to leak ammonia?

And all of that still leaves out the fact that hydrogen fuel cell cars really don't 'work' in the way that people expect them to. Range, fill speed, performance - all suffer to the point that battery-electric cars are competitive today, and battery tech will still get better. My go-to article series on this issue is here [0], and they do a better job explaining than I could. Hydrogen might work as a substitute fuel for airliners, but even then it'd likely be easier to synthesize kerosene from scratch.

0: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-ca...

Your source is wildly out of date, and is almost completely wrong with regards to the current state of fuel cell technology. To give you idea of what he's wrong about, let's jump to part 4 where he says this:

> In reality,

> You cannot fill up like you do with gasoline or diesel. It is actually pretty ridiculous how hard it is to fill up a HFC powered car

> You won't even go 100 miles on current tech hydrogen tanks that are still safe to carry around in a car

> Fuel cells wear out crazy fast and are hard to regenerate

> Hydrogen as a fuel is incredibly hard to make and distribute with acceptably low losses

Not a single one of these claims have survived to this year unscathed, and some have been hilariously debunked.

The first two points are debunked by an existing vehicle you can actually buy. Here's a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euUiIjXA-zc

It's pretty well demonstrated that a HFC car can be refueled like a gasoline or diesel car, and can go 350 miles on a single tank.

The third point is easily debunked by real world testing. Ballard has tested it's fuel cells in HFC buses out to 35000 hours of operation: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2020/01/20200128-ballard.ht...

Fuel cells are showing to be incredibly reliable, totally at odds with your source's claims.

And the last point is at best only partially holding up, but it's looking this one will be fully and loudly debunked pretty soon. As of right now, huge progress is being made on this subject: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/01/28/green-hydrogen-costs-...

> “Based on real cost data from the industry, the analysis shows that a number of hydrogen solutions can become competitive until 2030 already.” says Bernd Heid, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. “Out of 35 use cases analysed, at-scale hydrogen can be the lowest cost low-carbon solution in 22 use cases – such as in the steel industry and heating for existing buildings. And it can beat fossil-based solutions at scale in 9 use cases – for example in heavy-duty transport and trains.”

So your source's claims are flat out wrong on the broadest scope. You should stop citing it, and in fact it's laughably wrong these days.

Five minutes (refil time) is pretty damn good for that Hyundai! And the range is also far better than I would have expected.

Fuel cell wear has also taken great leaps forward, as you've said.

And so it looks like that (5 year old???) post is now rather out of date. Tech moving faster than expected!

But the last claim, about hydrogen being hard to make and distribute with low losses? Your link has nothing to do with it. "We're reducing production costs by 60% over the next decade, says the industry hype group" is nice and all, but it doesn't address distribution and storage. And in fact the use cases they're listing largely avoid those concerns by (afaict) colocating the production with the consumers.

> But the last claim, about hydrogen being hard to make and distribute with low losses? Your link has nothing to do with it. "We're reducing production costs by 60% over the next decade, says the industry hype group" is nice and all, but it doesn't address distribution and storage. And in fact the use cases they're listing largely avoid those concerns by (afaict) colocating the production with the consumers.

Here is a better article regarding hydrogen's future cost: https://web.archive.org/web/20190823013233/https://www.bloom...

> Renewable hydrogen costs may fall to as low as $1.40 a kilogram by 2030 from the current range of $2.50 to $6.80, BNEF said in the report. That could slide further to 80 cents by 2050, equivalent to a natural gas price of $6 per million British thermal units. Gas in New York closed at $2.17 per million Btu on Wednesday. It last traded above $6 in 2014.

That's still cost at the source and not cost to distribute, though?

True, but if you can make hydrogen at $1.40/kg, distributing it won’t cost that much more.

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