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Comment by Enginerrrd | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this is a little disingenuous.

It is currently most economical to source the hydrogen for the Haber process from natural gas, but there are many alternative ways to produce hydrogen. I wouldn't call that true "dependence".

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"most economical" is not just some minor feature. If you were to switch to another means of producing hydrogen the price of the process would rise dramatically. The only non-fossil fuel hydrogen generation process is water electrolysis (well and biomass, but guess what's involved in efficiently producing large quantities of biomass).

If you currently eliminated fossil fuels from the process the price required to maintain our current food levels would escalate dramatically. In practice this would mean likely that both food production will drop and food prices would rise.

I don't think it's disingenuous. Maybe I should add "affordable" as a prefix to nitrogen fixation, but "less economic" fertilizer means "less economic" food which is a fairly big problem.

According to the IEA (International Energy Agency) [1] the current (well, as of 2018) production cost of hydrogen using methane as a feedstock is $ 0.9-3.2 /kg, while using renewables is 3.0-7.5 USD/kg. However, as the cost of renewables goes down, there will be plenty of places in the world where the cost of producing H2 (including transportation to the place of use) will be below $2/kg, so quite competitive with methane (not to mention that the price of methane is about twice now what it was in 2018).

[1]https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/hydrogen-prod...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen

Given the rapid drop in green hydrogen costs, this argument is itself becoming outdated. We will just switch green sources of ammonia and there will be minimal if not nonexistent increases in cost.

From the other reply's (very green optimistic) source [0]:

> While less than 0.1% of global dedicated hydrogen production today comes from water electrolysis, with declining costs for renewable electricity, in particular from solar PV and wind, there is growing interest in electrolytic hydrogen.

When do you think we'll see >50% of hydrogen produced with green energy via electrolysis?

I'm betting: "not within our lifetime", but enjoy taking long views on these things and being wrong. Just curious when you think that's realistically feasible, and when we'll reach 10% (again, I'll still vote "not within our lifetime")?

I'd be delighted to be wrong on this, but still haven't convinced myself. I would be genuinely interested to see your targets on this and then we can interpolate and come up with some milestone we can agree will be seen in our lifetime if you're correct.

0. https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-hydrogen

It will happen by around 2030. It might reach 100% shortly afterwards. Also, hydrogen production should increase by well over an order of magnitude in 25-30 years.

We've banned this account for using HN to post only about one thing and ignoring our request to stop. Sorry, but you can't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301556

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