Europe’s First Hydrogen Fuel Cell Sea-Going Ferry Is Powered by Renewable Energy
autoevolution.com
autoevolution.com
Hydrogen is a less efficient way of using renewable energy than using electricity directly via batteries. The only reason to use it in shipping is that for larger ships and larger distances batteries are not feasible.
DFDS is planning to convert a large ferry between copenhagen and Oslo to hydrogen: https://www.dfds.com/en/about/media/news/hydrogen-ferry-for-...
That's the kind of project where hydrogen makes sense.
I don't think it's reasonable to be experimenting with new technologies on 200 car ferries so even if hydrogen is not the ideal use case for this crossing, I'm excited to see this technology build a track record so it becomes a more feasible option for the large scale where it does make sense.
What I'm curious about his how long will they last in that harsh salty environment?
Also for boats you need to account for shifting center of mass as the fuel gets used up, which is not an issue with batteries.
Also as the article reports, Orkney has an idiotically huge amount of renewable power available, far more than the islands can consume, and far more than the interconnect from Orkney to mainland Scotland can handle. So using it to create hydrogen seems like a fair use of that surplus power.
Intriguing, since hydrogen production is almost universally a byproduct of fossil fuel production. Not a ton of information here...
I did a little digging, and indeed this project is using electrolysis powered by wind / tidal energy projects on a small Scottish archipelago named Orkney. They produce 130% of the power they consume, so they turn the remainder into H. Smart.
Here's a really interesting article with lots of details: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190327-the-tiny-islands...
The odds-on favorite for utility-scale battery storage is iron-air batteries. Nobody even mentions the round-trip efficiency of those, so it must be pretty awful. But they are darned cheap. We can expect solar, in particular, to be routinely massively over-provisioned, so that much of the time most of the output would otherwise be wasted if not used opportunistically to charge batteries or hydrolyze water to synthesize H2 or NH3.
Also, the scale of hydrogen storage facilities far exceeds anything else ever proposed: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/10/23/weekend-rea...
It's clear that obsessing over the last step is unnecessary. As soon as you have the hydrogen available, there will be many obvious solutions available.
The cited article points out that utility-grade storage in salt caverns is still a wholly hypothetical possibility, and speculates on problems that might yet render it impractical.
Storing hydrogen underground has existed for decades. It's already been accepted by people in the industry that this is a solved problem.
I don't doubt that whatever problems turn up will be solved, in time. Underground storage of liquified hydrogen, rather than gas under high pressure, seems like a great idea, since earth is such a good insulator, but they don't seem to be talking much about LH2.
The methods used to oxidize H2 seem to produce a great amount of waste heat. If you have uses for the heat, that may be not so bad. But producing power from stored H2 at GW rates would produce more heat than is easily used on the same schedule as the power is demanded. The heat could also be banked underground, maybe, but there remains the problem of delivering it where it is actually needed.
And, as in Utah, they seem to be planning to burn the hydrogen mixed into CH4 to drive turbines. The storage appears to be pumping H2 into existing CH4 wells, although it is hard to tell. I am anyway still not seeing any big H2 fuel cell projects, never mind solar/wind -> H2 -> fuel cell.
What you're doing is just concern trolling, and suggesting that just because a program won't instantly get to zero emissions it is somehow not real. Meanwhile, electric cars are still being charged up mostly by fossil fuels, a fact that cannot change on the large scale without green hydrogen. Somehow, this fact is never brought up in every anti-hydrogen attack.
A gas turbine can get you up to 60% efficiency BTW. While fuel cells are arguably the better idea in the long run, it is not a huge problem to use gas turbines for now.
Instead, there are legitimate comparisons of hydrogen and other possible storage media. Harassing people for discussing such comparisons, and posting dubious assertions about hydrogen's maturity as a storage medium, does hydrogen and you no favors.
Maybe not actually powered by renewable energy but potentially so.
They're experimenting with H2 generation instead.
Are grid interconnectors much more capital intensive or higher maintenance than Hydrogen generating plants? (Genuine question - I have no idea of the relative costs here)
H2 is not a super-great long-term storage medium. NH3 is a good choice to use to fuel retrofitted transport shipping (which would just need new tankage and plumbing, not new engines) and to drive generators in places where solar is not practical much of the time, such as north of 55 degrees latitude.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-shipping-industry-is-betti...
Turns out battery charging and inverting has lower losses than electrolysis and compression.