Separating Hype from Hydrogen: EU's 6GW Electrolyzer Plan
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Also H2 isn't great as a dense power storage for vehicles either; the H2 plane is but a pipe dream, because it requires entirely new ways to store energy aboard, therefore probably requires entirely new planes with new architectures (like flying wings), huge new airports infrastructures...
All in all, methane would be a saner, simpler target : you can create methane from water, CO2 and electricity; we already have all the infrastructure to transport, store and distribute methane; and using methane in vehicles of any kind is a no-brainer and requires no breakthrough or radical change.
I don't believe a word of all the H2 hype.
There is no singular "energy storage problem". There are various energy storage problems. All hydrogen (or batteries, or other storage technologies) have to do to be viable is address one or more of them. No storage technology can solve all of then, and no single storage technology has to.
Hydrogen is best suited for long term and infrequently tapped energy storage. For that use case, it is vastly superior to batteries, even if its efficiency is much lower. And this use case has to be solved to get to a 100% renewable grid.
Even aside from that, realize that today 6% of all natural gas consumed in the world goes into making hydrogen, mostly for manufacture of ammonia. So this use ALONE -- which amounts to 700 cubic kilometers of H2 (at STP) per year -- is a vast market for renewable hydrogen production.
Hydrogen is the worst at everything, if compared to all available alternatives, not batteries only. Other technologies outperform it very substantially in almost every metric, often simultaneously.
Hydrogen is energy inefficient to produce, space inefficient to store, dangerously explosive, reactive with common engineering metals, and unproven.
The one thing hydrogen is optimal for is mass efficiency, but methane is almost as good and far easier and safer to store than hydrogen, and has a much higher energy density by volume, which matters more than you'd think, even for planes and rockets. The new super-heavy rocket designed by Space X uses methane, and the current ones use kerosene.
For grid storage, the sole advantage of Hydrogen -- its low density -- is utterly pointless. Nobody cares how heavy building-sized storage is. Efficiency matters, and the electricity-to-hydrogen-to-electricity round trip efficiency is woeful. There's no clear way to make this anywhere near as efficient as batteries either.
Not to mention that the huge benefit of batteries is nearly instant (single-digit millisecond!) reaction time, allowing power demand fluctuations to be efficiently smoothed out. Hydrogen can't do that, even with fuel cells.
Lastly, we make hydrogen for ammonia to use as fertiliser. This doesn't in any way mean that it this is efficient or worthwhile for power storage.
> Not to mention that the huge benefit of batteries is nearly instant (single-digit millisecond!) reaction time, allowing power demand fluctuations to be efficiently smoothed out. Hydrogen can't do that, even with fuel cells.
And hydrogen doesn't need to do that. An optimized system would include batteries to smooth over such rapid changes in the system. This is another species of the "hydrogen can't do everything, therefore it isn't useful for anything" fallacy.
What's better for seasonal storage?
b) Anything. Anything is better for seasonal storage. Methane, pumped hydro, molten salt, flow batteries, etc... all of those are existing, or viable right now, not in some fantasy future where we all have fusion-powered flying cars.
c) The free market tends to take care of such things. Power is a fungible commodity. If electricity is seasonally cheaper, it'll just be used by industry for power-hungry processes such as smelting aluminium or titanium. You can then store those end products by simply putting them in a pile.
In a renewable-energy future, it would make sense to use electricity when it is cheap to make hydrocarbons that require its physical or chemical properties, e.g.: to make industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, polymers, etc...
We already know how to store hydrocarbons. You pour them into a simple metal tank. Easy.
We don't know how to store hydrogen. Still. After decades or research.
You keep mentioning hydrogen as somehow superior for long term energy storage when the opposite is true.
> Anything. Anything is better for seasonal storage.
Let's go through that list.
Methane: you make that from hydrogen and CO2. Where is the CO2 coming from? The cost of capturing the CO2 will likely overshadow any savings in cavern space.
Flow batteries: obviously not economical. They might be good for a week or so of storage. For half a year? No.
Pumped hydro: the water volumes involved are too large (see other response.)
Molten salt: this will be stored in tanks above ground, and these will be more expensive per unit energy stored than underground hydrogen caverns. Getting the heat out of the salt is also problematic. Heat exchangers (and heat rejection on the other side of steam turbines) are not that cheap.
I don't think any of the alternatives you have proposed actually are superior to hydrogen.
> We don't know how to store hydrogen. Still. After decades or research.
Yes we do. In underground caverns. This is a known technology; it's already been done.
As for pumped hydro. Let's suppose we want to store 10% of the annual US power demand in a pumped hydro reservoir with a 200m head. The volume required is about 2000 cubic kilometers, about four years of the total flow of the Mississippi River. I don't think this is terribly practical.
Thermal storage may be competitive for efficiency, but the capital cost is likely to be higher, as you need more heat exchangers and cooling systems. Combustion turbines are cheap, especially simple cycle.
But in any case, the energy density argument I made is independent of just where the compressed gases are being stored.
That is not correct as far as i know. A modern PEM electrolyzer has an efficiency of around 80%.
> All in all, methane would be a saner, simpler target
I kind of agree, but this actually the same thing. To synthesis methane, one uses the water and electricity to create hydrogen with an electrolyzer and then add CO2 through hydrogenation to create methane. Advantage of methane is of course the higher density and it's a bigger molecule that is easier to store.
Basically start with an 80% efficient electrolyzed, but insulate the cell to capture all of the expended heat energy and use it to lower the need for electricity to split the cell. This is possible because of SOEC operating temperature ranges which wouldn't be possible with a PEM cell.
I should also add that on the other end of the hydrogen energy cycle, production SOFCs are about 60% efficient at converting hydrogen to electricity, not 45%. And the temperatures of the waste heat are high enough to efficiently convert to electricity, bringing total electrical efficiency up to the 70-80% range. Oh, and they can use hydrocarbon fuels too.
To create methane from electricity you need hydrogen to begin with. To create methane from that you need CO2, which you can get from the air and needs a lot of energy (alternatively you can get it from other emisssion sources, but well, we want to get rid of them, so this is at best an intermediate solution). You end up with much less efficiency compared to hydrogen.
Methane has only one thing going for it, and that is existing infrastructure and processes. But that's a mode of thinking where you try to think how you can keep the technology from a fossil energy system.
I share some skepticism about hydrogen. It probably shouldn't be applied where more efficient technologies are available. But there's a whole lot of areas where hydrogen really is the only game in town right now. And in many other areas it's an intermediate product needed for further steps.
You can in fact use the existing gas distribution grid although not most of the transmission grid because of material compatibility issues.
The one area where I think hydrogen can be hard to beat in areas with the geology for it is as an inter-seasonal energy store in salt caverns. Diurnal storage is obviously a battery play but in a deeply decarbonised system (<10gCO2/MWh) you end up with needing something to provide energy during a few-week-long period of overcast and windless weather (that coincides with the coldest period of the year in NW Europe). For lower levels of decarbonisation, you can just keep your gas generation around and fire them up for a few weeks a year but once you go all the way close to net zero you either need:
CCS (unproven, not everywhere has the right geology)
Lots of nuclear... but although plants can technically operate in load following mode, the plan economics (low marginal cost, high capital cost) don't support that.
Batteries at a scale and a cost that don't seem plausible even with the most aggressive LiOn learning rates
H2 storage in salt domes
Something else?
Part of the problem is that the high capital cost of H2 electrolysis and fuel cells doesn't really support a model where you only produce during the cheapest / windiest 1000 hours of the year and consume during the least windy / most expensive 1000. Really you want an electrolyser fuel combo that has today's so-so performance but low capex, that would be much more compatible with a plan to use it as bulk energy store.
I would be very surprised if at some point there isn't a change to switch to methane instead.
1. Existing distribution network for natural gas can instead distribute pure synthetic methane as natural gas is 96-99% methane.
2. Vehicles can be adapted to CNG without complete redesign. A 5k retrofit might be attractive vs scrapping a whole car.
3. It would be possible with some work to retrofit airplanes to burn LNG. You might have to lose some of say the baggage area for LNG tanks and insulation but once the engines are running the fact that the chilled LNG is boiling away is A-OK since you want to feed it into your engines anyhow.
4. A lot of existing peaker power plants already burn natural gas, no reason they couldn't burn methane too. The round-trip efficiency might not be great these plants already exist. It might be possible to repurpose them to run perhaps only a few dozen hours per month when the wind and solar in your local region happen to both be low output.
And CNG is already being used on busses, trash trucks, and tractor trailers every day. I had a CNH civic that was a great little car, and basically identical to the gasoline version except for range. Honda stopped making them due to lack of demand. Bummer.
It is to store peak renewable energy (negative price), and to achieve Zero Carbon by 2050 (no natural gas).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Industri...
I understand peak renewable at negative prices as an artefact of the market structure. If comes a time when there's actual supply problems on hydrocarbons, we'll need some other sensible way to provide a baseline, and so far only nuclear does. Furthermore, even for H2 production nuclear probably makes more sense than wind power.
I sincerely believe we'll reach 0% carbon by civilisational collapse, so that's not exactly that I'm against green power, either.
World should be Zero Carbon yesterday to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C [1].
> The Russian Federation supplies a significant volume of fossil fuels and is the largest exporter of oil, natural gas and hard coal to the European Union.
> Part of the aim of the Energy Union is to diversify the EU’s gas supplies away from Russia, which has already proved to be an unreliable partner, first in 2006 and then in 2009, and which threatened to become one again at the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine in 2013–2014 [2].
Natural gas is both climate and political issue. How much is 40 GW in bcm (Billion cubic metres of natural gas [3])?
40 GW year / 40 petajoules
31.54 [4] bcm
I am all for nuclear energy but it costs way more [6].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-mitigation-15c
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_cubic_metres_of_natura...
[4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=40+GW+year+%2F+40+peta...
[5] https://www.oxfordenergy.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
H2 is hyped at the moment but can only be at best a very small part of the solution. Synthetic zero-carbon methane is almost certainly more interesting because the infrastructure is already there, most things working on oil can be converted to methane, etc.
May work [1], I am not sure about heat recovery part, isn't heat lost in Sabatier reaction?
> Heat from sabatier reaction: 7.2 - 5.6 = 1.6 kWh
> Heat from electrolysis = 1.98 kWh
> Total heat = 3.58 kWh
> If we can recover 70% of the heat is would cover DAC heat requirement.
Climeworks is interesting company — capturing CO2 at $600/tonne, now they produce natural gas [2].
[1] https://learn.openenergymonitor.org/sustainable-energy/energ...
Hydrogen is one of the inputs for the sabatier process, so if the lower energy density by unit of volume isn't a concern it makes more sense to just use the hydrogen directly.
The reality, though, is that none of the proposed energy storage solutions are easier than just building nuclear power plants. France already generates most of it's electricity from nuclear power. Belgium recently surpassed 50% nuclear power generation. It's more feasible to just avoid the unsolved energy storage problem altogether.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Engineering
They think that at scale, a ton of CO2 will cost $100 and take 5-6GJ if energy.
Totally agreed that it is far cheaper to just never emit in the first place. But as far as building new nuclear, France has not been able to succeed at this economically, and similarly the UK's plans at building new nuclear are coming apart completely.
And even if we are able to decarbonize, with whatever technology, be it nuclear or not, we will still need to get to negative CO2 emissions in the coming decade. While some of that will take the form of CO2 sequestration in the biosphere, such sequestration is only temporary, and we will eventually want geologic sequestration.
So we must solve the capture problem by some means. Perhaps it will be with something like Carbon Engineering's process, or maybe something else.
I would say that direct air capture of CO2 is about 2x as likely to be economically efficient and a significant part of the economy than SMR fission. And fusion is only at pie-in-the-sky stage, the level of materials development that would need to happen is practically unimaginable. We have no idea that it would ever be cheaper than fission, for example.
If this start-up's promises come to fruition then that's a new option. But it's still a question of if.
This doesn't appear to be the case, or at least doesn't appear to be the case for much longer, when renewables are multiple times cheaper than nuclear.
I've repeatedly [1] [2] addressed the shortcomings of your assumption that hydrogen will deliver low cost storage, in particular electrolysis and compression remains only ~30-40% efficient, underground storage is not widespread, and existing infrastructure to transport and storage methane cannot be used for hydrogen.
At this point, claiming renewables + storage is a solution to decarbonizing the economy is analogous to saying fusion is a solution. Yes, it's possible and we are familiar with the physics of how to make it work. And if it works, then yes it's a good solution. But it doesn't currently work, and it's unknown whether or not it will work in the foreseeable future. Technology that's 10-20 years away tends to stay 10-20 years a way for much loner than 10-20 years.
It appears you've mixed up kW and kWh at the very least. The figure you're reading also appears to include the cost of buying the electricity at market rates, which is shown to not be economical. But it isn't what parent argued for, and you explicitly state it does not include.
Reading further in to the report, it breaks down the capital cost of a hydrogen system minus storage at $550/kW, and notes the very low cost of underground storage at large scales (for smaller scales, it argues for using tanks and being geographically independent).
So you disagreed with parent, threw out a nonsensical figure and linked to a report as proof that agrees with them, not you.
And hey, it looks like someone informed you of your mistake 3 months ago [2], which you didn't bother to reply to or correct yourself.
This is a repeated theme with your accounts (your main and your sockpuppet). Every time I dig in to the numbers you throw out I get a sour taste in my mouth that you've caused me to waste my time. I believe that you are arguing in bad faith, cherry picking whatever numbers you can find, in context or not, to make a pro nuclear case. Which is a bit sad, because I think there are still strong (but dwindling) cases to be made for nuclear.
[1] https://prod-ng.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23741288
Regarding the reply with no response, timestamps get more coarse grained the further in the past you get. This reply could easily be weeks after my initial comment, and I would have explained how I arrived at these figures if I has read it.
Meanwhile, glaring inaccuracies like calming that existing natural gas infrastructure can be used to transport hydrogen go unmentioned. Or that "hardly anyone is building nuclear" when in fact most of the world by population is. And if we're talking about cherry-picking pfdietz incessantly cherry picks the Vogtle and Flamanville plants as though they're representative of historic nuclear costs. You arrive at the conclusion that I'm arguing in bad faith, while conveniently ignoring these issues with the claims I'm arguing against.
This exchange makes me sad, too. Solar and wind serve as useful temporary mitigation of carbon output, even though they don't pave a way to full decarbonization. A hydrogen economy has a place to fulfill demand where energy density is necessary, like in transportation. But trying to advocate pipe-dream projects like storing tens of terawatt hours worth of energy in hydrogen really makes me wonder whether solar and wind advocates really have a grasp on the engineering challenges they're facing. Especially when these plans rest on outright falsehoods, like the claim that we can using existing natural gas pipes for hydrogen.
The "spilled wind" costs are the cost of the plant itself used in the manner described, which equals $1400/kW - actually, this is probably where you got the number originally - or $233/kWh. However, this is over the lifetime of the plant, meaning the storage is closer to $12/kWh per year.
That's not exactly cheap. You have to overbuild renewables to have the extra energy to store in it, and it's probably only going to cycle a few dozen times a year. Plus the $12/kWh figure likely represents (the study does not specify) the energy of the gas before conversion back to electricity which is lossy.
But adding extra storage is cheap compared to adding extra power, so unlike with lithium ion batteries you can actually feasibly build weeks worth of storage in to the system.
So, I'm not trying to say the numbers are great. I'm not saying this is what we should do. But there's a vast gap between the $1400 you quoted and the $12 figure which - at least I believe - is the correct number to use for this discussion.
There are absolutely tons of people (especially on HN) that trivialize the problems around rolling out renewables. Probably the majority of my posts on the topic have actually been on the other side, pointing out issues or complaining about subsidies instead of carbon taxes.
But I really think you've gone 180 degrees in the other direction and the numbers you use make it seem an order of magnitude harder than it is. I think even more extreme than using the worst Western nuclear cost overruns as representative of the intrinsic cost of nuclear.
You can also use that site (and its weather time series) and play with the assumptions to see when nuclear can be made competitive with renewables + storage at supplying steady power output in various places, under a set of simplifying assumptions that tend to favor nuclear. You will find that hydrogen tends to be more important in high latitude places using wind.
The other poster also did more than just cherry pick particularly expensive plants. Among other things, they claimed that existing natural gas infrastructure can be used to transport hydrogen. This is simply untrue, hydrogen would corrode metal pipes used for natural gas. There's a factor of 2,000 less hydrogen pipelines. Probably even less overall infrastructure if you count natural gas transported by rail and LNG shipping.
Your quote:
"Current estimates place this at $1,400 per KWh per year for the average case assuming that the electricity provided is free [1]."
Are you referring to me there? Because I never said that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24621709
> Not really. It has lower energy/mole. There is the possibility that if CO2 is present that microorganisms could react the two to make methane. But aside from that, where is this much greater complexity coming from? The equipment required for storing either is similar.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626876
> And did you read my post? There is already a great deal of equipment for manipulating hydrogen on an industrial scale. What, did you think they rip that stuff out every month? The issue you are raising is already well solved.
It's remarkable that you make a post like that without realizing how it shreds what little credibility you have left.
But if you do understand that hydrogen and natural gas infrastructure are different, then this statement is just totally unsubstantiated. You knew that our hydrogen infrastructure is several orders of magnitude smaller, but you just say the complete opposite?
> Interpreting this as saying that natural gas infrastructure can be repurposed to work with hydrogen makes sense
It absolutely does not make sense. It's a bit of illogic you apparently are not capable of recognizing as a non sequitur.
BTW, the equipment we have for handling hydrogen is not necessarily in pipelines (although the US does have many miles of hydrogen pipeline even today). It's in ammonia synthesis plants. It's in oil refineries. It's in chlor-alkali cells. The world economy makes many millions of tons of hydrogen each year, and that hydrogen is manipulated with equipment that exists. Compressors, pipes, pumps, valves, sensors... all those exist in forms that work with hydrogen.
So this claim about having infrastructure to manipulate hydrogen is referring to the chemical industry, where hydrogen frequently used as an input. You're right that the chemical industry does use hydrogen and we have infrastructure to use it in the Haber process, and refining hydrocarbons and more. But this infrastructure doesn't translate to using hydrogen as a form of energy storage. The US has less than 1,000 miles of hydrogen pipeline [1]. Most hydrogen production facilities are located close to the point of demand. Our experience manipulating hydrogen has taught us that it's important to minimize to minimize the amount of transport required.
Also, almost all of these many millions of tons of hydrogen produced each year are produced through steam reformation [2]. This is not carbon neutral, and renewable hydrogen production must be done through electrolysis or thermochemical hydrogen production instead.
By comparison, there's a larger need to transport hydrogen if we're using hydrogen as a form of energy storage. Hydrogen storage is underground, and electrolysis needs to be done by a source of water. The source and destination have different required geographic features - transport is unavoidable. Alternatively you could pipe the water to the electrolysis plant, but then you're moving 9 times as much mass through the pipeline - water is 1 part hydrogen to 8 parts oxygen by mass.
So the claim that we have extensive infrastructure in manipulating hydrogen wasn't a misunderstanding in that natural gas infrastructure can be used to transport hydrogen. It was a misunderstanding in that the infrastructure used to manipulate hydrogen in the context of the chemical industry translates into infrastructure for renewable hydrogen production, and hydrogen transport and storage. It doesn't: most of our hydrogen is produced through steam reformation, and our hydrogen infrastructure is built around minimizing need to transport and store hydrogen.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_infrastructure#:~:tex....
Extrapolated, that would represent $0.01/kWh in capital costs, or a complete rounding error of costs over the lifetime of the plant. You could even truck it in from a thousand miles away without really impacting the cost very much.
To explore the problem a different way, here in Australia, 8 million megaliters of water was used in farming in the last year. Total energy consumption (not just electricity) in the same period was 1714 TWh.
Storing 3 weeks of our energy needs would require 26,700 megaliters of water be converted to hydrogen, or 0.3% of the amount yearly used in farming, already distributed in regional areas.
The heat of formation of water is 13 MJ/kg. If we can convert hydrogen to power at 50% HHV efficiency, this means 1000 TWh of storage would require hydrogen from about 1/4 of a cubic kilometer of water. This is small compared to the water used in the US for irrigation (about 100 cubic kilometers per year). (It would be somewhat higher than this due to the need to reject waste heat from the bottoming cycle of the CC plant, and at the electrolysers and hydrogen compressors.)
A key point, though, is that nuclear uses water too, for cooling. For every MJ of power from a reactor, 2 MJ of waste heat is produced, and this heat goes out the cooling towers (there are dry cooling solutions, but they make nuclear even more expensive, less efficient, and less competitive). The heat of evaporation of water is 2.26 MJ/m^3, so 1000 TWh of power from nuclear would require evaporating 1.6 cubic kilometers of cooling water.
But it's worse than that. Hydrogen only has to handle the last slice of power demand (that 500 TWh is about 1/9th the US annual power consumption; your 3 weeks out of 52 would be even less), but nuclear would have to produce all of it, or at least a major chunk (and the reactors have to operate at high capacity factor or the cost of their power becomes even more ludicrous). So the water use of nuclear would actually be an order of magnitude higher than that.
The water argument is an argument for wind and solar (and hydrogen), not an argument for nuclear.
> You could even truck it in from a thousand miles away without really impacting the cost very much.
Lets' do the math. Trucking costs ~$.15 per short ton per mile as per Google. So shipping 270 tons over 1,000 miles works out to $40,000. And you're using the thermal energy density of hydrogen, not the electrical energy density - as in, accounting for inefficiency of electricity generation. 1 GWh thermal is typically 500 MWh electrical for both fuel cells and turbines. The actual cost would be double that, given that most systems are 40-60% efficient. So if by "without really impacting the cost vey much" you mean "increasing the cost by a factor of 5-9x", then sure. Moving large amounts of water is energy intensive, most infrastructure built to move water relies on gravity to move water from alpine reservoirs to lowlands. And unless you're capturing the output of whatever you're using to transform hydrogen back into electricity, then this is a recurring cost not a capital cost. This is easier to do for some implementations, like electrochemical cells, but much harder for gas turbines.
You're totally right about thermal vs electrical, even with a fuel cell.
Ad absurdum only, not a serious suggestion.
You will notice hardly anyone is building nuclear power plants. They can see the writing on the wall. As renewables and storage technologies continue to get cheaper, nuclear will be pushed aside.
Yes, you've repeatedly claimed I'm wrong. You're the one who is wrong. Your objections are spurious, as I've repeatedly explained.
If by "hardly anyone" you mean "most of the world" [1]. Most of the world by population lives in a country building nuclear power. This claim is throughly divorced from reality.
> Yes, you've repeatedly claimed I'm wrong. You're the one who is wrong. Your objections are spurious, as I've repeatedly explained.
Yet you neglect to actually point out any such inaccuracies, just insist I'm wrong without any specific criticism.
Meanwhile, I've actually pointed out which of your claims are false: the notion that we can use existing hydrogen infrastructure ignoring the problems of hydrogen corrosion, assuming that underground hydrogen storage is ubiquitous, and trusting highly optimistic claims on the efficiency of electrolysis.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country#/me...
You mean, 19 countries? Maybe if you go by population. In many cases, the reasons for building reactors are clearly not because it's cheapest (UAE, I'm looking at you). There's clear regret in the US about Vogtle and Summer, and in France about Flamanville. (For that matter, in India about the cost overruns on their latest Russian PWRs.)
> Yet you neglect to actually point out any such inaccuracies, just insist I'm wrong without any specific criticism.
Go to those links you provided, where I refuted your cavalcade of bogus arguments. You seem to think that concatenating a series of invalid claims somehow turns that into a valid claim.
The technique you were employing is well known, it's called a "Gish Gallop".
You claim to have explained why my criticisms are wrong, but you've done no such thing. In the more recent thread, you insist we have experience manipulating hydrogen at great scale. But I point out we actually have 2,000 times less hydrogen infrastructure. And I point out that 6% of natural gas production used for hydrogen production isn't all that impressive because most of it is used for heating, only a fraction of it is actually used in the steam reformation process. Explaining that our hydrogen infrastructure is orders of magnitude smaller than our natural gas infrastructure, you go silent. This hardly looks like a refutation.
If you want to actually refute any of my claims please do so. But you're just insisting I'm wrong without even bothering to specific what I'm wrong about.
We should be looking at electrification where possible, and otherwise, efficient/environmentally-friendly synthesis of small hydrocarbons that can substitute for fossil fuels, eg butanol. And at the same time researching direct-hydrocarbon fuel cells.
Also, if you have enough renewable generation capacity to reliably cover peak loads then there are also going to be times when you have massive overproduction. Battery costs for the coming decades will be too high with to buffer multiple weeks of power use so it makes sense to have an "electricity sink" where you can dump any excess. Hydrogen production via electrolysis is an excellent option for that since it's very quick to scale up and down and the end product has many different uses.
Check out Boston Metal.
> Finally, the higher energy density makes it suitable for larger vehicles like long range trucks. Electrification is preferablem but not everything can be electrified.
Trucks will be battery electric, its clearly more efficient for 99% of the routes.
> Also, if you have enough renewable generation capacity to reliably cover peak loads then there are also going to be times when you have massive overproduction.
Renewables will only cover peak loads with the help of massive amounts of batteries in the first place. No amount of solar power will create enough energy to cover the evening peak.
> Battery costs for the coming decades will be too high with to buffer multiple weeks of power use so it makes sense to have an "electricity sink" where you can dump any excess. Hydrogen production via electrolysis is an excellent option for that since it's very quick to scale up and down and the end product has many different uses.
Battery cost have been coming down fast and the trend is looking to continue.
I have huge question about the ideas of trying to store many weeks of energy production, the economics of that are very questionable. And hydrogen is just one of many technologies that can potentially 'solve' that if it even ever is solved. Hydrogen is far from clearly the best way to approach that problem.
> Check out Boston Metal.
MOE will release oxygen at around 1800 degrees Kelvin, making this highly impractical. I don't think this could work economically without a major breakthrough.
The trailing trailer can be shaped to further increase aerodynamics. It can have drive wheels to stabilize the truck in high crosswind, and additional regen braking on major mountain descents, as well as additional power up the mountain, although EV motors should be able to provide torque for climbing.
In the end, all the alternatives are now chasing a technology ecosystem that is improving at double digit percents per year in cost and more than that in scale of production.
The "hydrogen economy" actually needs to beat not only what Tesla can allegedly do in 2-3 years from what they presented on battery day, but even better than that, because IF/WHEN they get to scale, batteries will be at least half the cost of where they are now.
Same for nuclear. Once BEV and Wind/solar/storage stabilize their development curves, maybe nuclear or hydrogen can target a competitive price point.
This is really just wishful thinking more than anything else. You can't just pretend the problems of batteries will magically go away.
You don't need any of that for grid storage. You can pump it down into a salt cavern in gaseous form (previously used for natural gas storage) and pump it back for on-site power generation when the grid needs it.
That cannot possibly be an unpopular opinion. Hydrogen is way to cumbersome/expensive/dangerous to serve any useful purpose in transitioning to a "Carbon neutral" society.
Cryogenic storage may be feasible for ships, since the ship is surrounded by water which makes heat exchangers work better. Cryogenic storage works by constantly releasing a bit of the fluid to keep temperature down. In the case of a ship crossing the ocean, fuel is constantly being siphoned off to power the boat anyway.
Methane is easier to work with, but the sabatier process (synthetic methane) requires a source of carbon. By comparison, it's feasible for costal nuclear power plants to desalinate water and create hydrogen through thermochemical reaction. The energy used in desalination isn't wasted, since bringing the water up to temperature is the first step in thermochemical hydrogen production.
I recall reading somewhere that (in some/many countries) existing gas infrastructure is already specified to tolerate a meaningful (if small) fraction of H2 in the mix and that this fraction isn't currently maxed out, implying that it could be used as a sink for a quite sizable amount of new H2 production capacity as is.
Background: historically the network was designed to tolerate a much higher H2 fraction because the initial gas source was a conversion process from coal that happened to yield a H2 fraction considerably higher than what is currently distributed. So as long as conventional gas use continues you'd have zero storage problem for new H2 production until the existing tolerance limit is maxed out. Only switching to anything close to 100% H2 would be a storage/distribution problem.
Bonus implication: retooling existing infrastructure back to tolerate that old, higher H2 fraction would be considerably (orders of magnitude) easier than building a network for pure H2.
I still share your main view, that there tends to be too much hype for H2. E.g. be wary of people who use an imminent "H2 future" as an argument to abandon all other projects. But that doesn't negate the value of real-life H2 projects at all: chances are we won't satisfy easy H2 use cases any time soon and the things that would make difficult/impossible H2 use cases difficult/impossible shouldn't be used as arguments against production until the easy use cases appear in reach to getting saturated.
Sure, those 6% are a local maximum which further limits how much a hypothetical production point could push into the network, but that'd be more of a tactical problem (where to deploy the tech) than a universal limitation. And a solvable one, because the inputs to the conversion are quite transferable.
I like the H2 idea but it's really more complex than all electric it seems. And also late to the game.
ps: to be fair, electric batteries and cars required a lot of faith to evolve and progress... who knows if someone won't come with a few innovations for H2 storage and distribution.
https://energynews.us/2013/08/26/midwest/could-natural-gas-f...
small airports can get liquid methane the same way they get liquid hydrocarbons
https://www.onlocationinc.com/energy-policy-case-studies-liq...
large airports could have a big pipeline compressor and liquification station. At least liquid methane doesn't take weeks to get into thermodynamic equilibrium as does hydrogen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_isomers_of_hydrogen
Methane is a better synthesis target than liquid fuels from biological materials, coal, asteroid tar, etc. It would be sweet if you could get the carbon out of the atmosphere somehow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Methods_of_...
The startup Carbon Engineering claims that direct air capture of CO2, solar power, and hydrolysis, they can will be able to make cost-competitive, carbon-neutral liquid fuels by the mid 2020s using existing technologies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYopOt9siLg
To do green methane, they just need to stop before the gas to liquids step.
There are also some seemingly wacky ideas for cryogenic energy storage as well: make liquid air or liquid nitrogen, store the excess heat over time, then power a turbine when converting the liquid to gas again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_energy_storage
These cryogenic methods require extracting CO2 using the same sorts of filters and though I imagine the amounts of CO2 might be small, it seems that transfer of low level waste heat could make for an effective combination of systems? (Pure speculation there from me.)
Some parts of the atmosphere have much higher concentrations of CO2 than others, for example at the smokestack of a cement plant.
This is a convenient solution, but only one of the two gets to claim to be green. Either the cement plant gets credit for the carbon reduction or the airplane the credit for using a green fuel, but not both.
An Ethanol factory in Decatur, IL captures waste CO2 from the fermentation process, purifies it, compresses it to about 1500 psi and pumps it into a saline aquifer. If you burned the bio fuel and captured the CO2 by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_looping_combustion
or another method you could get CO2 and make methane by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
then it is no longer storage, but it is keeping the carbon in short-term circulation between the atmosphere and the biosphere.
Which means when you burn the methane you made with that CO2, it is being released into the atmosphere. Or, you need CCS on the methane burner. In which case, you might as well just save that CO2 and reuse it.
A methane pipeline passes within a few miles of my house and there is a compression station where I've occasionally seen a giant flame burning. In case they are not able to send the gas they are receiving onward, or the gas cannot be received at the next station, they will burn the gas to prevent a dangerous situation in terms of fire. (The old "synthesis gas" from the age of gaslight was 50% or more Carbon Monoxide as was immediately toxic to life.)
The system is resilient and pretty easy to manage because at worst you have a small hole in a large volume of pipe. The loss can be contained by closing a valve upstream of the leak; the sealed pipe is a huge volume and can accommodate a lot of gas just by pressuring up, giving the upstream time to stop pumping.
The spacing of the shut off valves is usually set by safety concerns in residential areas that the pipeline passes through. If you are pumping Carbon Dioxide back into the ground you have to install more shut off valves because the gas sinks and can asphyxiate people in nearby low spots.
In deep rural areas the shut off valves could be far apart and the network not well maintained -- it would not destroy the economics of a natural gas network to lose 2-3% of the gas that way.
===
Accidents are a real thing: neighborhoods around Boston were blew up (pressure wave first then fire) by the residential methane network a few years ago; earlier Time Warner Cable blew up a block of downtown Kansas City when their fiber optic excavator hit a gas line; uninigited gas leaks from a malfunctioning methane network have been a problem in Southern California.
Look for trouble at the well-head too. In many places people want liquid hydrocarbons and have no market for the methane and are tempted to burn it right there rather than face immediate or eventual calamity from venting it.
Surely lots of people calculated that lithium batteries wouldn't be enough for cars 40 years ago. You see what I mean ?
The flying wing is a design improving the efficiency know for a long time (Airbus guys teaching us about it during my studies 15 years ago), but creates additional difficulties, on top of which the impossibility to evacuate the plane fast enough. You would have the same benefits whether your plane is using hydrogen or kerosene.
I still do not see planes using hydrogen. Just doing the math on how much electricity would be needed makes it really unlikely.
However the big problem is storing H2 onboard. Most of the fuel is in the wings, and very cold liquid hydrogen (icing) as well as very heavy high-pressure tanks won't fit there. That's why I mentioned that an entirely new concept may be necessary to make room for the fuel tanks inside the fuselage.
I think you opinion is based on dated ideas. The interest in hydrogen is not being driven by electric cars, or as a battery replacement. It's being driven by one thing: if the price of renewable energy keeps dropping, it will be cheaper to make hydrogen than frac gas or mine coal. Even better, one accepted way to deal with renewables intermittency is to over provision. Over provisioning means we produce lots of unwanted electricity that is effectively free. If you can bottle what get get for free and sell it: profit.
To put this another way, the hydrogen will be used to produce heat. While lights, cars, planes and other things get all the attention, plain simple heating things is the number one user of energy. We use it to cook food, warm our houses, take showers, wash our plates and pants, iron our clothes, melt silicon ingots, make steel and concrete. Just about everything we use need heat in its production.
As you say storing hydrogen is problematic. As possible solution of storing it as anhydrous ammonia has been thwarted by our inability to reverse the reaction and get the hydrogen back. That little sticking point aside, it's nearly ideal. We efficiently produce enormous quantities of it now for fertilizer, and have decades of experience in ensuring your average job farmer handles this rather obnoxious substance safely.
But, where there is a lot of money to be made, people have an incentive to go looking. And in Australia at least it dawned there was a _lot_ of money to be made. Australia is the 5th largest exporter of natural gas in the world. Like ammonia natural gas is also difficult to handle. To transport methane efficiently it has to be a liquid, which is done by cooling it to -26O F and compressing 4psi. While exports are great now, it's on the nose. China, Australia's biggest customer, plans to be carbon neutral by 2060. But looming disaster could be circumvented as Australia has huge reserves of sunshine at it is mostly desert, it is politically stable and is very good at things requiring large coordinated infrastructure investment like food production and mining. Hydrogen would be a natural fit for us, if we could solve the storage problem.
So, they did. Or more precisely the scientific arm of the Australian government, CSIRO, did. They came us with a metal membrane that converts the ammonia back to hydrogen. https://www.csiro.au/en/Research/EF/Areas/Renewable-and-low-... I guess the plan is instead of taking delivery of a tank of methane, you take delivery of a tank of ammonia, and you convert it back to hydrogen and burn it.
Burning hydrogen sounds so low tech, so inefficient. It is low tech, but burning it for heat production is 100% efficient. And remember the driving force behind this is it will be cheaper than other things we burn, like coal and gas. This isn't rocket science. Anyone could do it, which is why Europe is looking at it too.
I'm convinced that we can't know the real price of NRE because they're heavily subsidized everywhere. It's cheap only because we have other sources (coal, nuclear, gas) to provide for the baseline (that 60-75% of production that must be precisely tailored to the demand). If we hadn't that baseline, it would be very expensive.
> Even better, one accepted way to deal with renewables intermittency is to over provision. Over provisioning means we produce lots of unwanted electricity that is effectively free.
Over-provisioning is very much not free; you must invest tremendous amounts of capital to get first this over-provision, second masses of storage. Case in point, Germany spent 300 billions € building windmills in the past 20 years, and still burns masses of coal; had it spent 100 billions on nuclear, it would be 100% carbon-free today and would have been for years.
It's not. Per kWh of embodied energy (when burned in turbines, say), storing hydrogen underground is really cheap. This is a big advantage of hydrogen, that the storage capacity can be expanded radically at affordable cost.
The same goes for virtually all commercial land transportation. Maybe if you have some super long distance transport routes into remote areas, but that is likely less then 1% of the market.
Its my believe as well that battery electric flight because of its operational efficiency will start to push chemical flight up market and eventually only intercontinental flights will be chemical. There is a clear path to this with current battery developments that are in the pipeline.
I don't know enough about ships to judge what their requirements are. Maybe there hydrogen or other green manufactured fuels like methanol or dimethyl ether could have a future.
However all of this said, hydrogen survives mostly because of massive global governments how somehow fixed on it as a solution. I don't know why this is the case, when there are tons of other promising technologies that could fix a lot of things get barely no attention at all. Hydrogen as a 'battery' for grid level extra energy for energy has many competitors who are mostly ignored. Maybe because oil company have been pushing it as 'the future' for a long time, but that is getting into conspiracy territory.
What really baffles me is that we have government all over the world talking about hydrogen pushing trail programs paying money to oil industry and car makers to set up pilots and so on, at the same time we have companies like Tesla showing a viable way to get to reasonably cheap TWh factories and many other battery startups who barley get any government support at all.
There are big research funds for things like Battery 500, or DoD/NASA work on Sulfer batteries. There are commercial players monitoring that and working with them, but they don't get money to set up huge production of these technologies.
So lets continue to do fuel cell and hydrogen at the research level. But all those huge junks of money that they want to use to force down prices are much better invested into battery next generation battery technology, specifically setting up huge factories to build such. Because they replace carbon now, and will continue to do so for the next 30 years. Land transport and short distance flight, and many ships are clearly ready to be replaced with battery electric transportation, no need for some price hydrogen miracle that will be now-where near ready at mass scale by 2030 to do the same.
Next generation batteries like sulfur-silicon can power a personal car and are the size glove box and can be carried by a person. That is a decade away at least but its very promising technology.
I have no problem with producing green CH4 to continue to run legacy systems.
https://www.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html
So to call it dead is not quite accurate. They're taking the same route as Tesla and building their own distribution infrastructure in small dense markets to start.
Will it pan out in the long term? Hard to say, but its no longer just a theoretical future vehicle but a consumer ready product that can now be iterated on.
So far two single commuter train units tested in daily passenger use (direct replacement of a Diesel powered train) for 18 months in Germany, 3 months in the Netherlands, now in Austria. Some sources say with cost advantage over Diesel trains right now.
Will it be there long term? I do not know. But cumulative orders of to my knowledge 60+ trains can be something.
Edit: two, not one unit
[1] https://usea.org/sites/default/files/event-/Willauer_7_24_20...
[2] https://www.nrl.navy.mil/news/releases/nrl-seawater-carbon-c...
[2]
For it to work, it will require the ability to make hydrogen at extremely low cost. So in practice, it is likely to just be part of the hydrogen economy.
The warming of the earth is the gorilla in the room that holds the earth in its grip. This must be solved. Altentate means to make energy, solar, wind, tide, nuclear can do this - we must do this or the earth as we know it may well vanish, with huge loss of all species of plants and animals - one of which is man!
There is a reason tons and tons of money in battery research is spent on removing every single metal that is even remotely expensive. Cobalt is being cut out. Gravity is on the getting cut soon. Once those are achieved the nickel will be replaced with sulfur. Once we have sulfur-silicon batteries the material cost of the battery will be incredibly low and will TWh factories the marginal production cost per battery will also be incredibly low.
Why should we spend lots of time and resources on a technology that has so many issues, when we already have a working much better solution, with much better prospect of being much better over time. In fact, in those technologies there is already a cost-curve happening right now that makes it cheaper every year and there is no reason why it should stop now.
Good thing they're keeping on shutting down of coal power plants.
Which doesn't mean much if the new turbines are much larger than the ones being shut down.
We're all grateful for the spending the EU has done on wind and solar. Texas wind power is approaching 1c / kWh. Tesla solar power is under $2/W installed. This never would have happened if Europe didn't drive down prices by heavily subsidizing early adopters. Thanks!
> They don't store energy, people living near wind parks hate them
You can literally apply this to every other form of energy. Who wants to live near an oil refinery, a coal mining area, a gas pipeline or a nuclear power plant?
The current energy supply chains exist since decades and therefore appear so polished.
They may build it only to shut it down as the world waits decades to recover from something potentially worse than the CFC debacle.