Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

For hydrogen skeptics, here's an excellent but long two part series about Europe's massive investment in hydrogen, starting at 40GW and ~30B$, and moving on to $500B after that.

Part 1, EU hydrogen supply: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...

Part 2, EU hydrogen demand: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...

And Spain is already focusing 800MW directly into fertilizer production (usually the hydrogen comes from natural gas): https://www.iberdrola.com/press-room/news/detail/iberdrola-f...

And as noted in the Part 1 article, China is making massive investments in hydrogen.

The US effort is orders of magnitude smaller than others efforts, about $50M/year: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/h2scale

Our oil and gas sector is also far too focused on fracking, a business that wasn't making money even before the crash in oil prices that have refocused capital from companies like Exxon to extractors with super low costs in the Middle East.

The US is often viewed as being late to the party, but a big player when it finally arrives. However I fear that the business competition in the EU and China will be too strong for us unless we start focusing ping term investment in these areas soon. Every bit of news I see makes me feel like we are getting further and further behind, which will leave us far more strategically weak than if we don't have, for example, semiconductor fabs.

Why do you think countries investing in it would make me not a skeptic? I'm a skeptic because of the technology being a bad idea pushed originally by oil companies. Hydrogen is only green if you produce it yourself by green electricity by electrolysis which is quite inefficient and then convert that energy back into electricity with another quite inefficient process.

Now as to the reason why Japan has been investing, it's because the actual way Hydrogen is produced is from fossil fuels. It's done by taking methane and other hydrocarbons and pulling the hydrogen off and expelling the CO2 (ideally capturing it). This process is called steam reforming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming This is the sweet lie people aren't told when hydrogen is brought up. Japan happens to have extensive offshore methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor and if they can make a hydrogen economy happen then those clathrates may become economical to mine.

Remember George Bush pushing hydrogen?

The big problem with hydrogen is that it currently is a smokescreen for a certain industry that has a ton of hydrogen attached to carbon atoms desperate to maintain relevance in the "green" energy revolution.

It is staring down a massive economic challenge as well, shared with any new five-year nuclear reactor project or similar cutting edge power generation scheme, is that solar/wind/storage is in the prime curve of double-digit improvements to various aspects of cost, scale, storage, performance every year.

BEVs are poised to undercut ICEs fundamentally in cost and simplicity. Solar/wind is about to drop under even natural gas in LCOE for even installed turbines. All of those have three year projections of continued double-digit percentage drops in cost and massive increases in scale.

Even worse for hydrogen, most of that is using existing infrastructure for transmission, so while charging stations need to be built out for EVs, it is far easier to do that than put in hydrogen storage / transport infrastructure.

So even if some hydrogen article targets a certain cost on the batteries / EVs / power transmission lines, in five years things will look completely different.

Maybe aviation?

>The big problem with hydrogen is that it currently is a smokescreen for a certain industry that has a ton of hydrogen attached to carbon atoms desperate to maintain relevance in the "green" energy revolution.

I see this attitude often and I think it's detrimental. If 'blue' hydrogen (ie, extracting hydrogen from natural gas & storing the carbon) provides an economical stepping-stone toward a fully fossil-free energy system, why not take it? If the only comeback is reflexive disdain for incumbent technologies, give me a break.

Your points on battery vehicles vs hydrogen vehicles are in agreement with in the second Bloomberg article linked by the GP.

an economical stepping-stone toward a fully fossil-free energy system

That's a PR phrase from the oil industry. The people who brought you "mild hybrids" and such.

Full electrics are getting cheaper each year. And bigger. The battery-powered Ford F150, Jeep Wrangler, Tesla's Cybertruck, and, of all things, the GMC Hummer, are all going to be out for 2022. That's going to totally change the way people look at electric vehicles.

>PR phrase from the oil industry

Doesn't mean it's not true. I take your point that batteries are a better option for personal automotive applications. However, there are other applications where hydrogen does have advantages. In those cases, using 'blue' hydrogen (A) kick-starts the technology, because it is currently cheaper than 'green' hydrogen (B) is carbon-neutral if done correctly.

For instance, consider how a renewable-heavy grid relies on gas turbines to step in when there is a 'drought' in renewable production. Using 'blue' hydrogen to replace the natural gas for those turbines would immediately get a fully reliable, zero-carbon-emission grid. Then as renewable prices continue to fall, 'green' hydrogen can close the loop & eliminate fossil fuels altogether.

"For instance, consider how a renewable-heavy grid relies on gas turbines to step in when there is a 'drought' in renewable production. Using 'blue' hydrogen to replace the natural gas for those turbines would immediately get a fully reliable, zero-carbon-emission grid. Then as renewable prices continue to fall, 'green' hydrogen can close the loop & eliminate fossil fuels altogether."

To be fair, in that instance the blue hydrogen would crowd out other battery investment, delaying cost reductions in actually renewable batteries.

With lithium-ion batteries you get back about 95% of the energy you put in.

If you're starting from electricity, a water to hydrogen to power system gets maybe a third or a half of that.[1]

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/406676/battery-electric-hydrogen-...

I'm not buying it. The lower round-trip efficiency of hydrogen means you only use it where batteries can't do the job (chemicals, air/sea travel, long-term grid storage). Batteries and hydrogen might both be competitive in certain niches (long-haul trucking, short-haul air/water, some train routes). As batteries continue to improve, they will actually cut into the addressable market for hydrogen, at least in mobility (chemicals and long-term storage are safe though).

> extracting hydrogen from natural gas & storing the carbon

This is what's promised. In practice it turns into "extracting the hydrogen and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere". There are very few operating CCS schemes.

That might still be a net win for the environment, if (A) the efficiency of the end-use is higher (eg, fuel-cell cars) or (B) even 'grey' hydrogen could help solve the chicken/egg dilemma of hydrogen infrastructure while we're waiting for the price of 'green' hydrogen to come down.

To ensure that the fossil hydrogen is 'blue' and not 'grey,' we'd need carbon tax or some other legislative action.

> "five-year nuclear reactor project"

A five year nuclear reactor project would be amazing! Most of them, outside of China at least, are more like 15 year projects these days.

I think the 1st pair of articles is more addressed to your skepticism. I recommend them -- they are not merely boosterism. The author provides a thorough rebuttal of the hype around hydrogen for cars & home heating. 'Blue' and 'grey' hydrogen (from fossil fuels with or without carbon capture) are addressed. The upshot is that carbon tax would be necessary to shut 'grey' hydrogen out. After that, initially 'blue' hydrogen would win on cost, but 'green' hydrogen could eventually become cheaper.

Would you be happier if there was a way to grab that water, and split the hydrogen from it by using green energy?

Would that massively change your interest?

Yes. But that's not what these projects are in practice.

Why it is a bad idea? We all agree releasing massive amounts of gases with greenhouse potential is a very bad idea. But reducing the energy consumption drastically is not a good idea either as this is tightly coupled with the welfare of humantiy (ok there is some potential here which needs to be tapped in but Jevons paradox is waiting for it). We might could use all the energy of the oil, coal and gas fields without releasing CO2:

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/low-cost-clean-hydro...

Indeed, the point is countries have a good track record of investing billions of tax money in cuckoo projects.

Massive investments are by far are not an indication of a future success, nor can they influence it.

In this case, no amount of money can do anything about the thermodynamics of the process.

This still misses the primary reason why hydrogen won’t ever be useful, where lithium-ion batteries can do the job. Hydrogen is just too energy inefficient from an end-to-end efficiency perspective.

Lithium-ion achieves a 80%+ efficiency from energy input to usage via an AC motor, or more if DC is usable. Hydrogen fuel cells only achieve 40-60% efficiency, and that’s just one step (converting it back from storage to electric energy, not even the motor itself). No matter how much is being invested, this can’t just be wished away and effects how expensive something is per kWh.

On top of that, there’s a massive Li-ion R&D and production train already under way that will be hard if not impossible to catch up with.

In short, right now it looks like this will only be useful for a few edge cases that battery electric can’t feasibly support.

If we stop using fossil fuels to make chemicals and materials, we'll need vast quantities of electrolytic hydrogen. Ammonia production alone was about 175 million tonnes in 2016, requiring 31 million tonnes of hydrogen. At 50 kWh per kg of hydrogen, that would be roughly 177 GW of electrolyzer capacity working at a 100% duty cycle. Using hydrogen in place of coal for reducing iron ore would consume even more hydrogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

Japan is interested in it as fuel, despite the well known drawbacks, because Japan has such limited domestic energy resources.

There's also been work on getting solar thermal to the point where heat alone could be used at input into an industrial process.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90477609/this-startup-uses-mirro...

What if we lived in a world where EVs are ubiquitous and they are powered by lithium ion batteries charged by renewable energy and/or nuclear. Specialized plants can still exist in this scenario to provide hydrogen and even diesel for industrial processes. The existing gas and coal plants wouldn’t be used for powering the general population anymore and would become more specialized producers.

But the original article's project isn't stopping using fossil fuel. It's using fossil fuel to make hydrogen. This is just money laundering for carbon atoms.

You are correct. I originally thought that this was another article about this Australian hydrogen project, also targeting Japan (and other energy importers) but powered by renewables:

"Western Australia’s multi-gigawatt green hydrogen giant edges forward"

https://www.pv-tech.org/news/western-australian-renewables-h...

>where lithium-ion batteries can do the job

Right, so for short-term grid storage and automotive applications.

How about long-term storage, chemical feedstocks, air & sea transport? Those are huge, and batteries aren't a good match. There's still a place for hydrogen, just maybe not where people initially thought it would be.

For air, hydrogen isn't that great either. The volumetric energy density isn't fantastic, and you need to store it in cylindrical tanks rather than just using the wings as tanks.

There are several projects to make smaller hydrogen planes, but I suppose larger planes will always need liquid hydrocarbons. Considering that the very smallest planes will probably be battery-electric, hydrogen may end being squeezed from both ends of the market in the long term.

For long distance sea transport, ammonia is a big competitor.

Fundamentally speaking, hydrogen is not a good fuel. It's hard to handle and not very energy dense (volumetrically). What's good about it, is that we have relatively efficient ways to make it from electricity, and to convert it back to electricity. But it's possible that methods to produce/use other fuels could be almost as efficient over time.

Hydrogen will be very important in the next 3+ decades, but I can see it being made irrelevant again over time, by better batteries at one end, and better ways of making/using hydrocarbon fuels on the other.

You need hydrogen to synthesize ammonia and hydrocarbons though. It might gradually become irrelevant as an end product, but increasing quantities will be produced and consumed close to production of steel, fuels, and other chemicals.

The US government spends over $150MM a year on hydrogen. https://www7.eere.energy.gov/office_eere/program_budget_form... It’s closer to $200MM when you include work from DOE’s Fossil Energy Office and Nuclear Energy Office.

Also California has funded a number of hydrogen fueling stations and the US has the most fuel cell vehicles on the road (almost all in California).

The US has seen hydrogen hype cycles before when George Bush called for a hydrogen highway in a State of the Union.

My point is that the US is not going to be left behind given significant investment over the last couple decades.

Thanks for this, I hope you are right.

I have seen California's H2 station map and have caught glimpse of a few Mirai in the Bay Area.

However only a tiny fraction of the hydrogen stations were for electrolysis derived hydrogen.

Any money going to steam reformation or other fossil fuel based hydrogen is absolutely wasted investment. We need commitment to electrolyzers, and can't let the money go to dead technologies. I look forward to reading more about how this program operates.

It sounds like you have some domain knowledge, so some layman questions--

Does electrolysis research make sense in a region that is already short of freshwater and experiencing drought?

Would you say that the science of electrolysis of seawater is worth researching and investing further?

I actually might argue the opposite direction; anything involving electrolyzers is likely wasteful. It's inherently an inefficient process even a theoretical maximums, and we can probably put that capacity to better use through other mechanisms with a higher conversion efficiency.

On the other hand, there are a ton of sources of methane that society pretty much will always generate through agriculture or landfills. For example, BMW ran a pilot a few years ago running a large factory's forklifts on hydrogen sourced from biomethane from a local landfill[1]. Cost and technology improvements in areas like steam methane reformers and anaerobic digestion could drive costs down to the point where those facilities can actually gain meaningful adoption, and meaningfully, co-locate hydrogen sources near points of consumption, so you can worry less about the headache of transporting H2 molecules around.

Hydrogen is unlikely to wholesale compete with battery electric at this point, but it absolutely shines in certain niche performance applications. To me, aligning the supply chain to leverage those particular instances seems like the best way to work it into a green(er) energy portfolio.

For what it's worth, while in school, I did a 7-month co-op a few years ago working on next-gen R&D of PEM fuel cell stacks, so I generally consider myself fairly well versed on potentially out-of-date information.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/garbage-power-out-south-caro...

> anything involving electrolyzers is likely wasteful

I've seen this stated a few times in this thread, but read elsewhere that electrolysis of water currently has nearly identical efficiency to steam reforming of natural gas, in the 70-80% range, with a theoretical max that is significantly higher than for the steam reforming process. Factor in the huge CO2 expense of extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels and the ever-increasing abundance of cheap green electricity, and electrolysis looks like the right place to focus to me.

Well, it would make the US strategically weak if there weren't reasonable alternatives. Wires are cheaper and more convenient ways of moving energy around than refrigerated/insulated pipes or tankers. So anywhere you can use electricity directly you probably would. Batteries are already good enough for cars. Hydrogen might be good for energy storage, but pumped hydro is probably simpler and cheaper where geography allows.

Hydrogen might be very useful for some applications that require high energy density (electrified aircraft, perhaps?), though maybe those use cases will be served by conventional liquid fuels that might be increasingly made using renewable energy inputs rather than made from fossil fuels.

For the demand side, I agree with the Part 2 article that I posted. Namely, hydrogen will be used primarily for non-electrical industrial purposes, and perhaps for seasonal storage of excess electricity that wouldn't have been used anyway.

I don't see much use for shipping hydrogen around, unless it's as a minor component of a synthetic mixture that replaces natural gas, but that's super speculative.

However for ammonia (fertilizer), steel, maybe shipping, there's few other options.

(And I'm super hopeful that we figure out how to build more wires in the US, probably by repurposing existing right of way. But I'm also skeptical that we will be able to fight NIMBYs for that...)

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