Hydrogen’s moment is here at last?
economist.com
economist.com
Unless the energy input for production is from solar or wind.
Hydrogen is a great battery and can form a good storage solution for wind and solar.
With the proliferation of installed solar capacity, and availability of low cost renewable energy, the economics of H2 production allow for use of lower efficient systems, with focus on reducing exotic materials in the system.
Where is this solar capacity? Where is this available low cost renewable energy? We are decades away from making the renewables our main electricity source if there were massive investment into it, meanwhile we are building new coal and gas plants instead. And the electricity demand is still going up.
Even if things go way better than anyone can predict, we will never have enough energy to throw it away on inefficient hydrogen, not in a lifetime of anyone currently on Hacker News.
The whole H2 hype is just shilling for oil and gas, whether the people perpetuating it know it or not.
Of course we can have the capacity, after just a few more doublings.
...in 2018. It's 2021 already. In 2020 solar made up something like 3.2% (https://www.worldenergydata.org/world-electricity-generation...). That alone is an increase of 0.6% per year. Even if nothing changed about PV buildup, it would still be headed for 15% in 2040. This rate is likely to increase, though.
SOME materials have trouble with hydrogen. But this is a problem that can be, and is, worked around as needed. It's a nuisance, not a showstopper.
If you just want 'hydrogen from any source' and aren't trying to get off fossil fuels, then yes, the materials costs are that horrible. But I don't believe that's where anyone is going with this conversation.
And no, most of the infrastructure connecting these can't be reused either. Our existing hydrogen production facilities are set up to produce the hydrogen as it's needed for other industrial processes. Our existing hydrogen economy does not have a significant storage capacity. Rather, it's set up to minimize the need for hydrogen storage altogether. For your proposed renewable grid, we'd likely be transporting methane many miles away from its generation to under ground storage facilities. Sure, the existing pipes connecting to fertilizer plants can still be used. But we still need a lot more pipes connecting electrolysis plants, to storage sites, and to hydrogen to electricity production facilities. This isn't something our existing infrastructure is set up to support.
Your proposal has us effectively rebuilding our hydrogen economy from the ground up: First, changing production from steam reformation to electrolysis. And second, building out a vast hydrogen storage and transportation network to deliver this hydrogen to where energy is needed. There's a lot more to your proposed hydrogen grid storage than just valves and pipes.
There has been progress on all of these fronts, one of the most interesting developments that I'm aware of is this fleet of 1500 trucks that is being built:
https://www.electrive.com/2021/02/18/hiringa-energy-orders-1...
But there are a large number of questions (for me) around this project that make me wonder how much it is vaporware and how much of it is reality. If they pull this off, and that includes delivery of the vehicles, infrastructure and do it within budget and with a substantial fraction of the life-span of an ordinary truck without major issues it will be a game changer. If not some investors - and their customers - are going to be extremely pissed off.
Even the first 50 deliveries would already be a huge milestone, I'm aware of exactly one truck like this that is supposed to be driving for Campina ( https://www.nieuweoogst.nl/nieuws/2021/07/13/frieslandcampin... ) but I have not been able to get any data on the actual use of this truck by the customer (ie: service history, operational readiness history).
What is suspicious is that if I enter that truck's license number (19-BLD-5) into https://ovi.rdw.nl/ that it comes up as a more or less regular Volvo truck with a 12.7 liter LNG installation, not a hydrogen installation, which it would surely mention if that were the case.
It's very well possible that that was just a promotional picture from before the conversion to Hydrogen, but you'd expect the company to put out one press release after another to prove their tech is real if it was actually road worthy. But all of the pictures where they 'Hyzon' logo is present on the front of the trucks show no license plate.
(for instance: https://www.truckpartsandservice.com/alternative-power/hydro... and many other promotional articles like it).
I guess it is easier to modify an LNG truck to handle H2 rather than a diesel one.
There are 100's of promotional pictures of that vehicle but none that show it in actual operation or with its license plate post modification and you can't just take a truck like that on the road here without going through all of the required processes.
RDW is pretty strict and good at what they do, if you bypass them for something like this they'll smack you down hard.
They claim they will deliver 100 trucks this year. So far I've seen precious little evidence of that.
69-BPR-8 is a good example of a vehicle that is powered by Hydrogen, it is listed as 'electric / hydrogen' with RDW, and that's what I would expect for this Hyzon truck.
That's a garbage truck in the city of Groningen, which is also a hydrogen conversion of a regular (diesel) truck, no data about reliability, availability, range or service.
See:
https://www.alexmiedema.nl/2021/01/22/exclusieve-beelden-nie...
These are the tanks they use:
https://www.waterstof-centrum.nl/product/700-bar-waterstof-c...
Hyzon went public July of this year:
https://www.fleetowner.com/emissions-efficiency/article/2116...
Forklifts do not operate on highway distances, but instead they operate in very limited areas around where they can be immediately serviced.
Toyota is also still on the hydrogen-for-vehicular use bandwagon but it looks as though all electric has the future, and I really don't see how fuel cell tech has an edge over battery tech, especially not with the new battery chemistries that are becoming available for large scale use.
As for hydrogen usage in vehicles, it's hard to imagine that it won't be used in some capacity. Battery electric cars aren't a one-to-one replacement for an ICE car, and there are genuine drawbacks to the recharge time. Crucially, this isn't a problem that can be fixed through battery technology -- it has to be fixed at the grid level, because electricity has to be consumed when it's produced. Fuel cell tech is already cheaper than battery electric for use cases where the cost of overlay is taken into consideration, and it's hard to see new battery chemistries fixing this without somehow being dramatically cheaper than existing chemistries. Not to mention, fuel cells aren't exactly standing still either; future battery chemistries will have to compete with next generation fuel cells, not current ones.
The reality is that there's almost certainly a market for people who want vehicles that refuel using a traditional model, and that's okay. The idea that there has to be a winner in the automotive industry is asinine, because different vehicles fulfill different needs, and it's unlikely that someone who relies on on-street parking, or goes on frequent long roadtrips, is going to want the same solution as someone who owns a home with a garage, and mainly drives around the city.
IMV batteries are not sustainable. Currently there is a huge hype on batteries, but once the first set of batteries start dying out and the disposal process begins, we will have to deal with a lot of toxic waste. This is going to start happening in about 10 years or so.
Suppliers like Tesla and Panasonic might be making recyclable ones, but Chinese vendors scarcely give a thought to recyclability.
That's pretty much irrelevant. Hydrogen is used as an energy store. Thus the whole point is to generate it where it's cheap to generate, and afterwards transport it to customers willing to pay for it. Therefore conversion effixiency is irrelecant and the key factor is market price, whose lower bound is dictated by the combination of production cost and how much it costs to transport it.
To illustrate how irrelevant conversion efficiency is, keep in mind that right now both Morocco and Australia are investing in Hydrogen export.
If I recall
> if I remember correctly. Adding to that the storage tank cost and the far bigger explosion potential compared to batteries its supposed advantage is dwindling fast given the continuous improvement in batteries.
You're already describing how natural gas is used. Not only are there large natural gas storage tanks in residential neighborhoods but also there are plenty of major cities throughout the world where natural gas is piped straight into apartment buildings.
Indeed, but the round trip efficiency is hardly exceeding 30 to 40%.
Production of hydrogen (via a variety of methods) for use in vehicles is actually more efficient than gasoline (including hybrids) if you measure well to wheel.
It just in turn gets stomped by battery electric, so it has little future there, but that doesn't mean it is bad compared with the status quo. Like Windows phones were better than Blackberries and (pre windows) Nokia, but not as good as Android or iOS.
Something either needs to be dramatically failing, or an overnight success to make a good story.
Something being an obvious evolution and way forward in the future as part of a portfolio of other complementary technologies doesn't really come across well in this medium.
I think the story is trying to capture that the continued success of renewable energy means green hydrogen is inevitable now and that's becoming the consensus.
Personally, I assume that's part of the reason no-one believes it's at grid parity and beyond, and half the users of this site are waiting for fusion to save them.
Decades of stories about how expensive PV is, because that worked as clickbait/propaganda, while "this is the early stages of a sensible long term investment" didn't.
"Instead, hydrogen can help in niche markets, involving complex chemical processes and high temperatures that are hard to achieve with electricity"
The article title is a little misleading, although as misleading titles go, it's not that bad.
And niche in this case means about the same size as nuclear or hydro power at their peak and working in conjunction with other techs to completely decarbonize the world.
Again, the lack of nuance is a problem inherent in the medium, but they gave it a try.
Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.
As long as you produce it by cracking fossil fuels anyway, which is how >95% of hydrogen production currently works.
In theory hitting ~60% energy efficiency on solar power could be cheaper than fossil fuels. But hydrogen is a long way from that benchmark.
Could this be a useful form of carbon capture for fossil fuels? Hydrogen at least burns much more cleanly at the point of use.
https://spectra.mhi.com/achieving-net-zero-what-is-turquoise...
You might even be able to sell some of it, although i suspect there isn't a market for all the carbon you would produce.
I'm sure someone will come up with something more interesting to do with it than just dumping it though if it all works out.
I think that it's solar and wind energy, peaky and unstable as it is, should be used to produce hydrogen. Then it could be used as is, or combined with heavy hydrocarbons to produce much lighter hydrocarbons like methane. Maybe it can be economically used to produce something useful from CO₂, from fuel to plastics.
Burning hydrogen emits water.
Burning CH₄ produces much more water and less CO₂ than burning longer hydrocarbons. This works for ICE car engines, with tiny modifications, too. So it could still be a useful step in phasing out carbon-based fuels, until we have epic-scale batteries and likely more nuclear generation.
https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/eus-hydrogen-stra...
> “'Hydrogen Europe' promotes the growth of green hydrogen production in the EU... €145bn in support between grants and subsidies."
- Hydron has very low energy density per unit volume unless you compress it to many times atmospheric pressure.
- Highly compressed hydrogen is a safety nightmare.
Do we currently have hydrogen storage technologies that compare acceptably with modern batteries in terms of weight, size and catastrophic failure risks?
Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable.
> Last, hydrogen can be used as a material to store and transport energy in bulk. Renewable grids struggle when the wind dies or it is dark. Batteries can help, but if renewable power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored cheaply for long periods and converted to electricity on demand. A power plant in Utah plans to store the gas in caverns to supply California. Sunny and windy places that lack transmission links can export clean energy as hydrogen.
Sounds like the answer is yes.
My main question is how does it scale safely? An acre full of pressurized hydrogen sounds like a Port of Beirut moment waiting to happen.
To a large part is doesn't even need to. Even just the need for non-fossil chemical feedstock is so high that shaving the peaks of oversized generator fleet is enough to contribute to most of grid balancing. Just for ammonia synthesis at current global consumption levels you'll need hundreds of gigawatts of average power to generate the feedstock hydrogen.
Thorium reactors remain an insufficiently explored option here.
I'm no expert in nuclear power, but it's my understanding that Thorium reactors aren't that much safer due to the higher gamma radiation emissions, and Thorium reactors are far more expensive to build and operate to the point that they are not cost-effective, let alone profitable.
But there are many problems with MSRs, particularly the kind that dissolve the fuel in a salt. Materials issues have not been solved, despite internet claims to the contrary, and once you're no longer confining the fuel in fuel elements there's radioactivity spread all over your plant. Maintenance will be a bitch, especially (as needed if you're trying to breed w. thorium in a thermal reactor) if you're doing online chemistry on that salt.
You still need oxygen to react no? If it’s pure hydrogen …
It's 4 and 75 in air (so hydrogen will readily ignite between 4% an 75% hydrogen in air at 1atm), and it's 4 and 94 in pure oxygen. And the good news is that there is a limiting oxygen concentration, but the bad news is it's 5% (so over 5% oxygen by volume at STP it becomes possible for hydrogen to ignite), but I could not find flammability limits at sub20.
"While ammonium nitrate is stable at ambient temperature and pressure under many conditions, it may detonate from a strong initiation charge. It should not be stored near high explosives or blasting agents."
"Pure ammonium nitrate does not burn, but as a strong oxidizer, it supports and accelerates the combustion of organic (and some inorganic) material."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Safety,_handl...
Hydrogen would behave more like gasoline. It's only when there is a fuel-oxygen mixture do they start explosively burning - i.e. it should not go off all at once unless you pump the tank with oxygen and mix them/give the oxygen time to diffuse through the tank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsZOE1nvlhI
(Note that ignition will usually but not always fail. I don't advise making a habit of this.)
Hydrogen is far more readily ignited:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudCaJB_Xx4
(It can also produce surprises after burning for a while.)
Whilst it's true that a container or pipeline filled with gaseous or liquid hydrogen would be unlikely to explode iself directly, chances are reasonably high of leaks developing and from those, explosive mixes of hydrogen and air either within ground cavities or nearby structures. Embritlement might result in catastrophic failure of tanks or pipes (petrol is also rarely stored at high pressures or cryogenic temperatures). Resulting thermal and pressure shocks could further extend damage and increase rates of release and combustion.
Resulting conflagrations might more closely resemble natural gas fires than ammonium nitrate / ANFO explosions, but those can be dangerous enough of themselves. Keep in mind that ANFO also tends not to flow as a liquid or gas, and whilst it reacts very rapidly, has only about ten percent of the energy by unit mass of hydrocarbon or pure hydrogen fuels.
Once ignited, and if supplied with atmospheric oxygen, hydrogen will burn quite vigorously, and even explosively (flame front expanding faster than the speed of sound) given a proper stochiometric balance.
All told, if anything goes wrong with a large hydrogen storage or distribution facility, it will quite probably be quite spectacular.
We have dealt with gasoline, which can leak and is just as dangerous, IMO just fine for decades - and gasoline vapor has a tendency to pool near the ground rather than float off and disperse high into the sky like hydrogen.
Franky, it seems just about every energy storage system has pretty frightening failure modes - I take it you have seen the video of a Tesla fiercely burning up in a carpark in China.
How many hydrogen storage tanks and pipelines do you think exist today? How are they regulated? How much hydrogen is stored and transported via them annually?
How does this compare with the number of petrol fuel tanks and pipelines, numbering in the many hundreds of millions for automobiles alone? And the volume of petrol stored and transported on an annual basis?
Limited lab, hospital, aerospace, and industrial hydrogen usage is not the same as parking a hydrogen bomb in every residential garage, or assembling collections of them in apartment, commercial, or office-tower parking structures.
EV's are irrelevant to this question, but I've got you covered:
About 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547486
10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3284804
FWIW: I see hydrogen-derived synfuels as a potential / probable option going forward in some uses (marine, aviation, possibly rail), but reformulated into hydrocarbon equivalents of current fossil fuels, probably via something like the Fischer-Tropsch process. That's been uneconomic to date, though it's chemically feasible.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
Alphabet explored this through "Project Foghorn". I'd argue that petroleum is priced far too low, rather than synfuels too high as they state.
Don't use metal. If you do replace it periodically - let's not pretend batteries last forever either.
A bit of leakage is acceptable. Did you know that natural gas that already in widespread use today leaks as well.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
Come to think of it, most of the problems we have with hydrogen we also have with natural gas - which we dealt with just fine; we even had natural gas powered cars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle
Hydrogen storage is an active field of research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
I say we keep our options open. It's worth further exploring the use of hydrogen as a energy storage and transportation medium.
"News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough disaster."
Nuclear has mostly an economics problem. The capital costs are massive and the path to profitability is unclear during the continued buildout of renewables.
Not just politically: also economically untenable.
At the moment, gas peakers remain the only good solution to this. Hopefully in the future overbuilding renewables or some sort of advancement in storage will work. Unsolved problem for the 2040s.
> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid?
Probably not because of the inefficiencies. It may well be useful as a kind of "last line of defence" to handle low probability situations where a lot .
However, it does seem like it may be the best solution for air travel, and perhaps also shipping and heavy good vehicles.
Oil hasn't been consistently cheap since 2003, it is only going to get more expensive. We've consistently been using more of the stuff than gets discovered since the 1980s. There is only one way the story ends.
Not sure about batteries, but it seems to me given giga factories exist that it is way more scalable than the refinement and delivery process of oil.
Put another way: delivering you a car once every 5 years is way more scalable than delivering you energy in the form of oil every week.
This is changing with cheap solar and higher capacity HVDC lines, but in order to truly compete with fossil fuels, renewables need a scalable storage medium, because a fundamental weakness of electricity is that it has to be consumed when it's generated. Batteries just don't scale to this level, in my opinion. Sure, gigafactories exist, but it doesn't really compete with being able to add hundreds of GWh of storage at a time in the form of salt cavern hydrogen storage, of which the US has more than 330GWh already in operation. They're just different scales.
I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
We have plenty of lithium and it’s recyclable, unlike oil.
I’ma but lost at your point to be honest… my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
It's still cheaper today. HVDC might eventually be cheaper, but that isn't the reality right now. Hence, your argument for batteries and electricity being the more scalable option is factually incorrect. We use other vectors for transporting energy long distances -- ones that scale more effectively -- and then we convert it to the form needed at the point of use. Why is this important? Because...
>my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
You effectively always need to transport energy to the point of use, whether the transport vector is as electricity through a cable, or fuel in a pipe. Different methods come with different trade-offs. Electricity is good for relatively short distances, because it's typically hard to store for long periods (relative to energy stored in chemical bonds, for example), and is better used as it's generated. This is why we use oil and gas pipelines in the first place; if electricity were a better vector for long-range energy transport, we would use it as such. But we don't, because it's not the right tool for the job.
>Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
Except they demonstrably don't. We have a billion cars on the road, the vast majority of which use gas. We use the same stuff to run ships and planes, and we even use it as a chemical feedstock to make fertilizer to grow the food we eat. Acting like batteries scale better than fossil fuels, when not everyone has a place to park and charge their car overnight, is a fairly insular take. BEVs don't even meet all of the use cases that standard cars and trucks currently do, and that's before getting into all of the other transport applications that fossil fuels enable. No one is trucking goods across the Nullarbor in a battery electric truck any time soon.
And to be clear I'm not saying that we don't need to get off of fossil fuels, or that batteries aren't part of the solution -- rather, I'm saying that scalability matters, and we shouldn't pretend like batteries have anything even approaching the scalability of fossil fuels, because it blinds us to the bigger picture. They don't, for many reasons, which is why it'll take multiple solutions working in tandem to fill the voids left behind when we inevitably move away from fossil fuels.
>I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
You mentioned battery storage when talking about scalability.
On a grid level, scalable energy storage is being able to add 100GWh at a time through a salt cavern, not 500MWh batteries here and there. Batteries have a place, but they're mostly load shifting on short time scales, and don't scale to the size of a grid. You can't use batteries to smooth out weather patterns that can last for weeks, and it's probable we never will. We have more scalable solutions for that.
At the transport level, scalability means low cost, high endurance, and low downtime; batteries can only make tenuous claims for any of these, and are still outclassed by fossil fuels. We'll see how it shakes out in the future, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.
But, put 100 years of scale into solar/wind/batteries and the world looks very different: we’ll easily have 1 billion BEV and they’ll easily traverse the Nullarbor.
I think scaling looks very different in the renewable space, I think adding 10Kw a billion times over is the better way to scale, and have a truly distributed energy network.
Large scale power generation should be for large scale industry.
If you wired up enough panels around the world… you don’t need a lot of storage (except for balancing) because the sun is always shinning somewhere.
Regardless of what the solution looks like. My original point: drilling, refining and delivering oil globally is no where near the efficiency of local generation and consumption.
Batteries are the main problem right now; everything else in an EV is pretty simple and cheap. Apparently there are some major patents on lithium iron phosphate batteries that are about to expire; hopefully that means we'll have a lot more production outside of China. LFP batteries don't require cobalt or nickel, so they can be made in higher volume with fewer resource bottlenecks.
If we continue to use transportation fuels made from oil, though, prices will likely remain high for the foreseeable future. There are likely to be weird fluctuations, though. (Remember when oil prices went negative a short time ago because there weren't enough containers to store it?)
Hydrogen is inevitable.
Paul Martin is very good on this subject. Check out https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-p... and the associated artcles (paticularly on heating).
Sadly it's likely the Economist Journos have been captured for a nice long lunch by the 'big oil' proponents of blue hydrogen as a "transitional" technology (which, not co-incidentally, keeps them in business and doesn't turn all their pipelines into stranded assets).
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...
I don't know how long we're going to wait, but we need to using petroleum tomorrow, and be very very pragmatic about it.
Certainly be good use of the off-peak spare capacity type issues with electricity production. Cost wise compared to a therm of natural gas (a therm of natural gas is about 2kg's) then hydrogen starts to become viable on price alone. Now if your able to tap excess electricity production to produce that hydrogen, then you start to become more competitive as an alternative.
The place where hydrogen might be helpful on the grid is injecting hydrogen into the natural gas pipeline and generation systems. That way the generation and storage (line packing, tanks) come from existing infrastructure. However there are limits on how much can be added (5% of the mix usually), some unanswered questions about what it will do to the equipment, and the likelihood that this infrastructure will be shut down in the late stages of decarbonization.
I think exploitation of this avenue very much depends on increasing or removing that limit, for example:
https://hydeploy.co.uk/about/news/hydeploy-and-the-road-to-1...
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/hydeploy-keele-hydrogen-co2/
There's a fun fact in there, although specific to the UK (possibly the whole EU):
> Furthermore, any appliance produced after 1993 which is required to conform to the gas appliances directive has already been tested on 23% Hydrogen
There might also be a place for ammonia storage/transport here. It's a denser fuel, which gives it some transportation applications (creating a bigger market), and it's easier to store.
Today, natural gas (or where there isn’t a gas grid, oil) peaking plant wins in this market, but that isn’t an option when people plan for a truly zero carbon grid. All the models I can remember seeing for that situation need hydrogen storage or carbon capture - and carbon capture looks likely to be even more expensive than hydrogen. If renewables and electrolysis get cheap enough, hydrogen might even beat oil and gas here on cost.
Of course these numbers are tricky to estimate exactly, so I'm open to the idea that a low loss hydrogen storage method might be out there. And of course the prices in these areas are changing quickly, so sources from 10+ years ago don't give a good picture of where we are now or will be in the future.
And, of course, in many ways an electrolysis to hydrogen storage to fuel cell system is just a type of (flow) battery. So in some ways this is a question of what type of battery system will win (as are discussions of hydrogen vehicles really, though I’d personally see those as staying pretty niche).
Edit: typo further to future.
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2021/07/hijacking-recovery-th...
Infrastructure is the problem. If you though charge stations for EV were a problem, hydrogen is 1000x worse (and harder to solve).
Hydrogen is a bitch to control - generally do you NOT and never are able. We only have to look at the trouble (and costs) that NASA has had and continues to have to spend to manage hydrogen without major injury or accidents.
Hydrogen that escapes into the air ALSO is an ozone destroyer like freon is. Leaks are far more inevitable than with even natural gas. And for that reason you CAN NOT use natural gas pipes to transport hydrogen (some ignorant yahoos have claimed that as a plan).
> Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy like oil or coal. It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery. It has to be manufactured. Low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and nuclear power can be used to separate water (H2O) into its constituents of oxygen and hydrogen. This is inefficient and expensive, but costs are falling. Hydrogen can also be made from dirty fossil fuels but this emits a lot of pollution unless it is coupled with technologies that capture carbon and sequester it. Hydrogen is flammable and bulky compared with many fuels. The implacable laws of thermodynamics mean that converting primary energy into hydrogen and then hydrogen into usable power leads to waste.
Does it get any better below the fold?
Hydrogen enthusiasts pretend like they're just months away from solving the various threats that hydrogen poses to safety. Those problems will never be solved, but it doesn't matter. The real barrier to hydrogen energy storage and transport is that we don't yet have the capacity to create hydrogen in sufficient quantity from renewable energy. As soon as that capacity issue is solved, serious people will start using hydrogen in its safer, well-understood form: liquid anhydrous ammonia. Pieces like TFA that don't mention that are just fluff.
Why not just store excess renewable electricity that way, local to wherever that power is being generated in underground pressure vessels or something, venting the oxygen produced to the atmosphere? Then when the wind isn't blowing, or sun isn't shining, burn the hydrogen to run something resembling a conventional natural gas generator... Don't bother transporting this stuff anywhere, produce it onsite, burn it onsite. Couldn't you also capture the exhaust of the hydrogen combustion to recharge the input electrolysis water?
There are also (probably) a lot of costs involved with trying to contain the hydrogen, and making and industrial sized fuel cells. Maybe quite a few unsolved problems as well e.g. do fuel cells eventually wear our like batteries?
Basically, we could do it, but the current techniques are possibly more expensive and too lossy compared to other options, like molten salt, pumped hydro etc.
The platinum catalyst is expensive, and as others point out, you need special piping for hydrogen.
More promising is direct ammonia synthesis: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/ammonia-synthesis-go...
But its use for energy storage is much more limited. Actually producing , storing, and converting the hydrogen back into electricity is much more expensive than just producing the electricity when it's in demand.
I believe the documentary was called At War with the Dinosaurs.
https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/h-2-s-hope-and-hype/bnl-... -- $0.49 for this article.
One thing though if released Hydrogen will escape the earth's atmosphere right? Seems kinda risky to slowly lose all our water...
Edit: you might be thinking of helium, which is inert, and so I believe does escape the atmosphere more easily.
(No, in reality, we have nowhere near the power to make appreciable amounts of hydrogen escape. Even if you electrolyzed water continuously with 2.5 TW of power, which is roughly global average electricity generation, you'd lose something like 4 cubic kilometers of water per year. The Earth meanwhile has over a billion cubic kilometers of water in its oceans, so you'd need over 250 million years to make them disappear.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery