India’s biggest businesses are tapping green hydrogen as a future fuel
fortuneindia.com
fortuneindia.com
Hydrogen will be a great chemical feedstock, and be used in all sorts of chemical processes that need to be decarbonized.
But thinking it will be a fuel is pretty clearly not going to happen. At best it will be one step towards a fuel. Or it will be a fuel in a few areas with very special geography: salt caverns.
Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody comes up with an easy and cost effective way to store significant amounts of hydrogen. That would be a wonderful way to be wrong.
The world needs to pour investments into such an infrastructure, so that we can have a chance at a fully carbon free world.
Have we solved hydrogen embrittlement? Last time I checked storage was terrible compared to something like LNG/LPG.
Don't forget "safe". A hydrogen leak is extremely dangerous, as it detonates over a very wide range of concentrations and is flammable over more.
Save the headline at submission, then a few more times more later. Let us see all the headlines when we hover the title.
Title being shortened, changed drastically, etc . I think the HN admins could simply note the reason.
For example if a user changed a title to something bias, even if that's the mods opinion, multiple times perhaps something can be done.
We sometimes mark submissions (internally) as having been editorialized, but we don't do anything with the data.
Enough will be stored in underground tanks at airports to fuel aircraft for a day. More will be made at need via transmission line and local electrolysis.
It seems far more likely that we will create synthetic kerosene (from hydrogen feedstocks).
Anyplace where LH2 aircraft are in use, kerosene craft will be found to be completely unable to compete.
Thus, starting on key routes, kerosene craft will be driven off to less profitable routes. Demand for LH2 craft will be driven by need to stay in the market at all. The earlier adopters will profit most, initially pocketing the huge difference between current prices and their own cost, and later by wholly owning the most profitable routes.
Second, because the hydrogen for a flight will cost less than kerosene, because it was made on-site rather than pumped, refined, and trucked in. Further, it was made at the time of day when grid power was cheapest.
The result is that an LH2 operator can always undercut a kerosene operator, anytime they compete. The kerosene operator only gets flights the LH2 operator passes up. Thus, the LH2 operator also gets the most profitable routes, because those are where they choose to bid.
Even after synthetic kerosene becomes available, it will necessarily cost more than hydrogen, and not anyway be made on-site, and still weigh too much.
I'm told this has really big impacts for aircraft design, which will put hydrogen aircraft at a big disadvantage compared to kerosene fueled vehicles. I could be wrong on this, and don't have any references handy, so I definitely welcome being corrected on this.
In particular, increasing volume by a factor x means growing the skin by only x^1.5. Tankage is only a small fraction of aircraft volume. So, even though space in the wings, where fuel is put today, would go unused, the amount of extra weight for new tankage would be minimal.
If, as I expect, tankage is slung under the wing alongside the engines, airframe design would not need to change, and existing aircraft could even be retrofitted. Lifting bodies are supposed to be more efficient and have lots more room inboard, but efficiency might get less important as fuel cost plummets.
Ultimately we expect aircraft to move to electric-driven turbines, attached to fuel cells. Tankage and fuel cells could be anywhere convenient on board. It seems like there would be safety reasons to keep the tanks outboard, as the kerosene is, mostly, today.
The energy in a full 737 is roughly equivalent to 85000m3 H2. To take a worst case look, there are about 1300 flights per day out of Heathrow. That means you need to generate or supply 110,000,000m3 H2 per day.
Total production capacity per day, today, across all of Europe, looks about 42,000,000m3, across about 150 plants. The biggest of those makes 3,240,000m3 per day. So to supply Heathrow alone with enough H2 to supplant conventional fuels you need 34 of the biggest hydrogen plants we've currently got, and a power supply of at least 13.7GW.
Storage is the least of the worries here. And to head off any criticisms about Heathrow being an outlier, I'm happy to talk about milliheathrows as a comparison unit for other airports; it doesn't make the overall picture much happier.
On the up side, the mined kerosene infrastructure may be wound down as airport hydrogen infrastructure ramps up to serve the new, much more efficient aircraft.
Getting electric power to airports will be an overwhelmingly smaller job than moving kerosene there. Generating the power to send to it will be an overwhelmingly smaller job than exploring, drilling, pumping, transporting, refining, transporting again, and distributing petroleum products. Producing and liquifying the needed hydrogen on site is done without any direct labor, from tap water already piped in. The equipment can be where the tanker trucks used to stop.
Measuring future industry against current output before any of it is built gives you bad numbers.
Not at all. That system has a huge advantage over what you're proposing because a) it's distributed, and b) the energy doesn't have to be put into the kerosene by the infrastructure, it's already there.
> Getting electric power to airports will be an overwhelmingly smaller job than moving kerosene there
With the power requirements you're talking about, you're genuinely better off generating it onsite. The national grid won't cope. ~30 conventional nuclear reactors in the 500MW range ought to do it. Your wind option looks like tripling the UK's current onshore capacity, and solar means replacing Slough with a 14kmx14km square of photovoltaics (tempting), assuming it's always windy and/or sunny.
> Generating the power to send to it will be an overwhelmingly smaller job than exploring, drilling, pumping, transporting, refining, transporting again, and distributing petroleum products
Again, distributed vs concentrated. You've got to do that work all in one place.
> The equipment can be where the tanker trucks used to stop.
Problem of scale again. If you need a supply equivalent to 34 of the current biggest hydrogen-producing plant to generate the hydrogen, a fair guess says that you need at least a double-digit multiple of the land area of that plant to do so. "Where the tanker trucks used to stop" doesn't really work unless you mean "the west half of Hounslow". Besides which, if we're winding down kerosene infrastructure while hydrogen ramps up, they're both in use at the same time, so no, the equipment can't be where the tanker trucks used to stop because they're still there. Can't have it both ways.
If you're generating on-site, the rate you need to be generating H2 is high enough that you absolutely can't be faffing about with underground caverns. You need to be piping it straight into buffer tanks that will supply one (1) plane then get refilled while the next plane taxis up.
> Measuring future industry against current output before any of it is built gives you bad numbers.
And planning without taking account of basic physics is worse. All I'm doing here is using a rough guess at the current energy requirements for the current activity and using that as a guide for future requirements according to your layout which, I think, is fair. If you think there are economic assumptions which break that, say so. If there are social changes you need to happen in order for this to make sense, say so. Otherwise you're arguing with thermodynamics.
Efficiencies may come into the picture; I've assumed they're a wash between hydrogen generation tech, the on-site power generation, and present-day gas-turbine jets but even if that's not the case it's tweaking round the edges. This whole picture looks at least an order of magnitude out from anything practical in every respect.
> You appear unaware of the magnitude of the system that now supplies kerosene to aircraft.
Since that is an overwhelmingly larger effort than generating electricity by solid-state PV panels, automatically collected and distributed on the grid via transmission lines, and electrolysing and liquifying, and tanking hydrogen via completely automated machinery, your sense of outrage is wholly misplaced.
Of course, pumping LH2 into aircraft would involve some manual work with hoses. That is the only place where people need to be directly involved. No drilling technicians, pump operators, ship crews, refinery operators, truck drivers.
Obviously, when we do more work via the electric grid, the grid must be beefed up to handle the extra load. It is not honest to insist that the existing grid, unchanged, would need to shoulder increased load. If we need for it to carry more load, we augment it. That is overwhelmingly cheaper than pipelines, ships, and refineries.
Synthesizing hydrogen may be done anywhere at any time. There is exactly zero benefit to synthesizing in one place and transporting it to another, vs transmitting the power and synthesizing in place. Of course each airport may synthesize its own hydrogen. There is also no benefit in centralizing synthesis. Where you need it, drop equipment there.
Generating power is done where the power-generating equipment is. There is no benefit in doing that at the airport, instead of at a thousand places on the grid and sending it in via transmission line. Anyway, where do you imagine the airport would put its PV panels and wind turbines? Yes, we need more solar and wind farms. That is not a novel or insightful observation.
The entire "pumping, transporting, refining, transporting again, distributing" process, with all of it manual labor and industrial machinery, completely vanishes. Your lack of need to be aware of all that manual work done daily does not mean it is cheap or easy. It is done reliably just because it is a mature process, but it is very, very far from cheap or simple.
1) The scale of the existing kerosene system is a liability to your scheme such as it is, not an asset, because both need to exist in parallel. You cannot reuse it. Costs are additional for any transition period, and can easily be high enough to make transition impossible.
2) The scale of the kerosene system is thermodynamically irrelevant. The relevant scale problem is that you need double-digit gigawatts available to planes on demand and on-site. That's the whole game. Where you put the solar, wind, or nukes to make that happen is your problem, not mine, but I can guarantee you that transporting XXGW into a single site over transmission line starts to look silly. "Do it at a thousand places on the grid" is a non-starter. That's why I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that on-site was naturally beneficial for your scheme. My mistake, it won't happen again.
3) However you do this, you are doing this in addition to the power generation capability of the rest of the grid. I've talked about one airport. Taking the UK as a whole you need to have a proposal which, give or take, doubles electricity generating capacity for the entire country. That needs more than a dismissive "not a novel observation" jibe. The scale of that challenge means that it's on you to propose how to achieve that as part of the scheme. You have not made such a proposal, rather you prefer to accuse me of misplaced outrage and dishonesty when you have failed to clarify a critical part of your idea adequately. You're handwaving about manual work and implying, I have to assume, that one can take the vast flow of money currently spent on manual labour and use it to bulldoze any inconvenient laws of physics which happen to get in the way. I wish you all the best in that particular endeavour.
4) Either you generate H2 on-site with huge amounts of equipment, or you pipe from elsewhere at pressure. In the former case "drop the equipment where you need it" takes vast tracts of land next to the airport, as I pointed out, in addition to the space the airport already takes up and in competition with the housing (or whatever) that's already there. In the latter you manage high-pressure hydrogen over considerable distances. It's just not true to say there's no difference. Elsewhere you've tried to dodge this dilemma, but you do actually need to pick one. You can't say that the storage and transport problem is fine because you can generate on-site without acknowledging the amount of space that takes up, and you can't restrict piped supply to low pressure because of the sheer quantity of H2 you need to transport.
We're done here. The scheme's not practical, you've got no adequate response to the problems with it, and I'm past caring any more.
But... Do you really believe that gigawatts are not delivered via gigawatt-scale transmission lines to wherever they terminate? Where does the power they carry go, instead?
Halving the material operating cost of civil aviation while eliminating its climate impact will require temporarily expensive and temporarily inconvenient changes. Like every substantial change, ever. Railway systems have been built. Highway systems have been built. Electrical power distribution systems have been built. Airports have been built. All cost, and all were inconvenient. That did not make them impractical.
Using green ammonia a fuel would be, as I said, using hydrogen as a step towards other fields. But I sincerely hope ammonia is never allowed as a fuel near cities, because the NOx pollution would be horrifying. I think ammonia as a fuel for shipping might be more realistic.
But then, I'm just a random guy on the internet who spends an hour or two a day learning about the energy transition, I could be very wrong.
Any chance such scrubbers and combustion could be put on mobile engines for motorcycles and cars and trucks? That's my biggest fear for ammonia being combusted in cities. Though batteries handle city-based use cases well, once ammonia is a fuel I fear for urban environments with poor air pollutions controls, like those often found in India.
The main point is this: cheap, clean, renewable electricity promises to make fuel cheap.
Those who claim "Hydrogen isn't a fuel; it's a means of storing energy." are absolutely wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel
"A fuel is any material that can be made to react with other substances so that it releases energy as thermal energy or to be used for work."
Usually, the hydrogen-isn't-a-fuel wonks seem to be social justice warriors who are arguing speciously out of anger against fossil fuel companies which they believe are pushing hydrogen as a means to increase the use of "dirty hydrogen."
Full production at the first such I know of is scheduled for 2026. It takes a damn long time to build GW-scale anything.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31832490
Thanks.
Here's a link I suggest you include when posting on the subject...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-the-shipping-industry-is-betti...
"Also by 2024, the Viking Energy is poised to become the first vessel propelled by ammonia fuel cells...."
Hydrogen and ammonia per se are not very important. What's important is that as a result of cheap, plentiful, renewable energy, a huge opportunity now exists for an efficient and effective means of converting that energy into a useful fuel (or fuels).
Please understand that I’m not arguing that hydrogen, generally, and ammonia, in particular, are bad fuels. They seem to be very promising… today. But I can imagine that they might be replaced in, say, 25 years with “the next big thing.” What’s unlikely to change in, say, 25 years is this: cheap, plentiful, renewable energy.
When looking at energy these days, most engineers and business people are struggling with the following: they are so accustomed to energy being dear (being expensive) that they are having a difficult time wrapping their minds around the new reality. Namely, energy, much like most popular commercial agricultural products in the West from, say, 1650 to 1875, and steel from 1850-1875, and long-distance phone calls from 1985 to 2005, is on the cusp of becoming extremely inexpensive.
One of the results of cheap energy is obvious: energy efficiency will become much less important than it is today.
Imagine if you lived in Phoenix, Arizona. You’d probably be somewhat focused on conserving fresh water because, well, fresh water is expensive there, just as it is in the middle of most hot, arid deserts.
But what if you moved from Phoenix, Arizona to, say, Recife, Brazil? You probably wouldn’t bother much with conserving fresh water because, well, much of the time, you could quench your thirst simply by walking outside, looking up, and opening your mouth. (I’m being facetious).
Collectively, vis-à-vis useful energy, it is as if we were all quickly moving from Phoenix, Arizona to Recife, Brazil.
Of course the Hacker News hoi polloi will need to find a new casus belli once the global warming boogeyman abruptly vanishes ignominiously into the dustbin of history along with their pet energy fantasy, nuucuuler energy (read in the accent of President George W. Bush).
Finally, I’ve become extremely contemptuous of the arrogant and ignorant arguments in favor of nuclear energy on Hacker News that seem to pop up every month or so. These days wind and solar are generally cheaper and easier means of creating useful energy. (Sure, nuclear-powered submarines make sense, but that’s a very small niche case).
Bring on downvotes… cowards!
Nukes will fade out with a whimper as they become increasingly unable to produce power at a price to match renewables'. The plants will be quietly mothballed, however much was spent on them, because we are not, as a society, chained to the sunk-cost fallacy.
The coming climate catastrophe will bite hard, over and over, for decades before it subsides -- if it does. Civilization might collapse, first. That would cut CO2 emission sharply, but it will remain for many generations, despite that trees would fill out abandoned fields once the fallout fades.
Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in. An economic model that drives sequestering atmospheric carbon is harder to imagine. Most extraction schemes just sell it to be burned again.
Just as castle towns went from refuges to death traps (starting about 800 years ago when cannonballs started knocking down castle walls), and were soon generally abandoned, large modern cities, as we know them, are on the cusp of both shrinking and transforming.
Once the vast majority of people stop commuting long distances to work and school, it's very likely that cars (as we know them) will become as common in cities as, say, horses. If you work 2 or 3 miles from where you live, and cars have been outlawed for most people, even in the middle of winter in Prince Albert in Canada or Irkutsk in Siberia, one could simply get into something like a fully enclosed, heated, pedelec velomobile with spiked tires and go to work.
This vehicle wouldn't be some ridiculously overengineered self-driving car like we see them today, but rather could be easily guided by computers placed every 25 feet along the roadway that communicate with each velomobile's onboard navigation and braking system.
Therefore, there'd be no need for mom to take the kids to school. Kids, even as young as 5 years old, could go on their own. Of course the vehicles would have video cameras built in, so that mom (or school employees dubbed "commuting monitors") could monitor/talk with her children as they commute to school.
I suppose the amount of energy needed to power such vehicles for would be, perhaps, 90% less than current conventional electric cars.
Perhaps compressed air (and people, gasp, actually peddling) might be used instead of hydrogen or batteries. Regardless of the energy source used, not much would be used (compared to current conventional cars) because commute distances would be shorter and vehicles would be much lighter than current conventional cars.
All of the above would apply when vehicles were actually needed. Much of the time I imagine people would, believe it or not, gasp, walk to and from work or school. Imagine that. People actually walking to and fro in a city.
I agree.
>> The coming climate catastrophe will bite hard, over and over, for decades before it subsides -- if it does.
Shake yourself my man. That is 100%, complete rubbish. Don't conflate your personal agenda with reality. Sure, global warming is real, yet it is something we can and are dealing with. Don’t you remember how we all died from skin cancer as a result of the irreparable hole in the ozone layer?
Besides, as we transition to renewables (solar and wind at this point) we won't be burning much fossil fuel; therefore, global warming fear mongering will fade out with a whimper as it becomes increasingly difficult to sell.
It's like COVID. It destroyed civilization. Right? I mean, we're all just barely hanging on. Right? Oh yeah. Sorry, "Long COVID" is going to come for the rest of us any day. Sure. Right. Of course.
I suggest you go back and read some of the doomer “non-fiction” (which was actually fiction) from the hippie era such as the "Population Bomb" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb and "Diet for a Small Planet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_for_a_Small_Planet. Those authors were spinning dystopian tales that "shockingly" never came true…. just like the greenhouse effect, er, uh I mean global warming, no, no, no, I mean today’s climate change liars.
Every month or so they need to come up with some new set of falsehoods to feed to their minions. It’s as predictable as it is despicable. It reminds of William Randolph Hearst’s infamous Yellow Journalism.
To me it looks like we've got way too many jobless PhD's who can't get jobs as professors. Therefore, they stand on the street corners ranting and raving, "The sky is falling... er, uh… buy my book! I'll explain how you can survive! Buy my book (I need to pay my mortgage)!!!"
>> Civilization might collapse, first.
As a result of global warming? No way. As a result of World War III, sure that's possible.
>> That would cut CO2 emission sharply, but it will remain for many generations, despite that trees would fill out abandoned fields once the fallout fades.
Speaking of trees, you do realize that all of this “noxious and evil” CO2 is actually beneficial to vegetation. Right? In essence we had a bunch of “dead plants” (not really, but I’m oversimplifying to make my point easier to follow) that were underground. For the last couple of hundred years we’ve been burning them up. All of that “pollution” will eventually become “live plants”. And no, in the meantime the Earth isn’t going to turn into Mercury. Raising the temperature a couple of degrees might cause some rich movie stars in Malibu and Formula One race car drivers in Monaco to have their houses washed out to sea. Boo-hoo. I’ll be sure to shed some tears for them.
>> Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in.
I agree.
>> An economic model that drives sequestering atmospheric carbon is harder to imagine.
Here’s an idea: have Elon’s kids R2-D2 and C-3PO take it with them to their utopia on Saturn, or is it Jupiter?
My man. Please. Shake yourself. Carbon isn’t some rare, and dangerous element. Here ya go. Read and learn…
Carbon-based life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_life
Yeah. Sure. Over the last 200 years or so we’ve released too much CO2. But think of it like an oil spill. It’s a form of pollution. Gradually “Mother Earth” (I hate tree huggers) will reach a new equilibrium. Relax.
Do you remember “The War to End All Wars.” It was really, really, really, horrible. The Zone Rouge still exists. See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
“The Zone Rouge (English: Red Zone) is a chain of non-contiguous areas throughout northeastern France that the French government isolated after the First World War. The land, which originally covered more than 1,200 square kilometres (460 sq mi), was deemed too physically and environmentally damaged by conflict for human habitation. Rather than attempt to immediately clean up the former battlefields, the land was allowed to return to nature. Restrictions within the Zone Rouge still exist today, although the control areas have been greatly reduced.”
Guess what? We figure out how to deal with the pollution we create.
>> Most extraction schemes just sell it to be burned again.
Most extraction schemes are absurd. CO2 isn’t a problem worth worrying about anymore due to cheap solar and wind rapidly replacing fossil fuels. People who have dystopian fantasies are a real problem. You are suffering from “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Climate change has been unpleasant for many people. Sure. I agree. But really, it’s something we can and are dealing with. Furthermore, all that’s really going on is we’ve been “burning too many dead plants too quickly.”
Of course as fossil fuel use plummets over the next couple of decades climate change won’t be a suitable topic to sell books. Not to worry, unemployed PhDs will come up with some dystopian tale of “doom and gloom” to sell to people who are into that sort of nonsense.
Whatever is going wrong in your life: deal with that. Stop focusing on “big problems” you can’t solve and hardly affect you at all.
Besides, climate change isn’t all bad anyways. It has enabled some excellent grapes to be grown for wine in southern England.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/climate-change-makes-engl...
“DORKING, England — The damp and cool English terrain hasn't traditionally been known for producing quality wine.
But vineyards are sprouting up all over the countryside as climate change makes England increasingly suitable for making sparkling wines to rival those of France's Champagne region — winning prizes at international competitions.”
Doomers. Ugh. They are people who are happy to be miserable about problems that don’t directly affect them.
At the point where ocean pH falls enough that the basis of the ocean ecosystem collapses, ending access to protein for at least a billion people, global war will follow.
When 100 million people find they cannot grow food where they are, anymore, or even survive outdoors on certain days, they will move to where they can. But people already live where they would go. That pushes fascists into government. Global war will follow.
Before anything that directly threatens civilization, indirect effects like that will force war, and shortly collapse civilization. It will go fast. Nuclear weapons will come out. Global supply chains will vanish never to return.
If you don't think global thermonuclear war would collapse civilization, you are not paying attention. Millions of people would survive it. Probably. Not us.
It might still be possible to forestall this outcome. But not from in denial.
You seem to be in the position of the guy who insists Y2K was a big nothing because nothing happened. But it turned out that way precisely because $billions were spent to bring that about.
Your house stays warm in winter not because the cold is no problem, but because you have an active system ensuring, at substantial cost, that the temperature stays up.
Consider yourself schooled, and let the realization percolate.
It turns out now that their remedy, HFCs, also have ~2500x GHG heat forcing potential over CO2. Fluorine compounds already released account for 10% of heat forcing beyond natural level. The implication is that even if we were to remove all the added CO2, we still could not get back to the preindustrial condition.
There is a very large effort going on as I write this to phase out HFCs and substitute a new refrigerant less harmful if released. Big industrial refrigeration systems have returned to using ammonia refrigerant as a way to avoid involvement in another big rollout.
>> Economically, switching to non-polluting energy is a shoo-in.
> I agree.
I also agree, but I have some questions about your position re nuclear.
Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years. Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant? If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?
You could say the same about nuke waste. But the pollutant threatening us with global collapse is CO2.
Placed elsewhere than desert, lifetime can be rather longer. But prices are still falling. In 20 years, how cheap will replacement be?
The point of renewables is renewal. Lately, this means opex near zero. It will come to be impossible to compete with generation and storage that have near zero opex, and capex less than a few years of your opex. No one will buy your power for the price you have to quote just to stay open, never mind pay down your construction loan.
There are also CdTe panels, in relatively small proportion, even more easily reclaimed: dissolve the Te and Cd in acid, and refine that back to pure metal. Glass is glass.
Later there will be perovskite panels, with overwhelmingly less mass, so of correspondingly less moment.
Thanks. Hacker News is full of arrogant, ignorant engineers whom I despise. I’m brash, harsh, and opinionated. I have a take-no-prisoners style of arguing . Nonetheless, I’m neither arrogant nor ignorant. Really. I’m not.
I carefully consider my interlocutor’s arguments, and I readily admit when I have made a mistake or, gasp, actually been w-r-o-n-g. I don’t argue to win; I argue to learn. My goal isn’t to persuade my interlocutor; rather, my goal is to ascertain the truth.
Sure, these seem “simple and obvious”, yet, in reality, relatively few people on Hacker News actually engage their interlocutors in such a fashion.
Ironically, despite being a “non-engineer” I’m generally far more rigorous in applying the scientific method than most of the Hacker News hoi polloi. Furthermore, although I know it seems incredible (by which I mean “lacking credibility”, not “wow, man, that’s incredible”), yet as a non-engineer I’m better at engineering than most engineers I’ve worked with. Nope. That’s not arrogance; that’s an accurate assessment.
Frankly, that was a very depressing observation to me when I first realized it because I don’t enjoy engineering, and because I don’t consider myself to be good at engineering.
Furthermore, I am tired of embarrassing engineers whom I work with. It’s not fun for me; it’s a hassle. And, of course, they hate it. Engineers typically want to be right to satisfy their egos; whereas, I almost invariably want the products they create to work properly for my customers. In other words, they typically engage in self-righteousness; whereas, I’m focused on truth-seeking. Self-righteousness and truth-seeking are generally, although not always, mutually exclusive.
By the way, I’m not claiming to be selfless. I’m not. I like to learn.
I often need to expose many of the “theories” engineers proffer to me as little more than wishful thinking (a house of cards). It’s annoying and time-consuming. They become myopically focused on some bad technological solution; I want a good solution. I am barely interested in technology per se. To me technology (such as software applications) are like a bunch of hammers, screwdrivers, and chisels.
But if I don’t disabuse them of the falsehoods they are clinging to, they will almost invariably provide code to me that proves Weinberg’s Second Law: “If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
>> In this spirit:
>> Solar panel lifetime is approx ~20 years.
I've read figures like that too. Therefore, I'll grant you that point.
>> Is the e-waste from solar panels a pollutant?
Sheesh. Please stop nitpicking. From what I’ve read, solar panels can easily be produced to be over 90% "recyclable." Why are their quotes around the word recyclable?
Because recycle means this, "return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process." In reality, everything can be recycled. But what is commonly meant by the term is "easily recycled."
No. I'm not nitpicking. I remember complaining to one of the two excellent engineers I've ever had the privilege to work with about plastic going into landfills where it would sit for thousands of years before decomposing. He calmly looked at me… like I was a complete and total idiot. That look is hard for me to forget, although it’s probably been 15 years.
He simply said something like, "You know, one day robots will go down into landfills and retrieve everything that is useful. It's just a matter of time." That hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized instantly he was right, and that I was wrong. It was then that I began to look at landfills like, say, iron mines instead of terrible places which should be minimized and avoided.
In other words, when we toss stuff into a landfill, we are merely creating a new type of mine. Obviously, cases where, say , groundwater is being polluted, would be problematic (and should be avoided). Nonetheless, normally a landfill is just a man-made mine in my mind. (alliteration unintentional).
Soon after that conversation I lost almost all interest in the entire concept of “worrying about recycling everything” because I realized that most of the stuff that is valuable in the landfills will probably be recycled in 100 or 200 or 500 years. As for the stuff that isn’t valuable in landfills, it will simply remain in the ground, like over 99% of the stuff that is sitting in the ground around the world.
>> If not, is the spent fuel from a nuclear reactor a pollutant? If so, how do you reconcile the apparently inconsistent position that solar is non-polluting but nuclear is not?
I don’t intend to answer those questions directly, but I hope I will indirectly. My problem with nuclear power plants used to, say, produce electricity for cities (as opposed to say, “nuclear power plants” to power US navy submarines) has nothing whatsoever to do with pollution per se.
I don't care much about nuclear waste one way or another. It's simply something that needs to be dealt with. In other words, I view nuclear waste as a cost, not a boogeyman. Nuclear waste is no big deal in my eyes. I don’t mind burying nuclear waste in some mountain somewhere until, say, we find some bacteria that will gobble it all up and render it harmless.
My problem with nuclear power plants has to do with cost: they are too expensive compared to solar and wind today. Furthermore, solar and wind look like they will keep dropping in price.
If nuclear were significantly cheaper than solar and wind, I'd very probably be advocating for nuclear. The dangers associated with nuclear are overblown by the general public, but they are real nonetheless. Therefore, at the same price point, I’d pick solar and wind over nuclear.
But these days, solar and wind are much cheaper than nuclear power plants. Therefore, building new nuclear power plants isn’t a feasible option for, say, providing electricity to a city.
These days any working engineer who generally advocates, say, constructing nuclear power plants to generate electricity for cities, is almost certainly a bad engineer. There might be some exceptions, but I don’t know of any.
Sure, in 10, or 20, or 30 years from now a new form of nuclear energy might produce electricity cheaper than wind and solar. I realize that. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Nuclear power has a lot of promise.
The main point you should focus regarding energy production in this: we are on the cusp of cheap, readily available electricity. That matters; that matters, a lot. As you might know, in 1850 steel was expensive; yet by 1870 it had become cheap. As a result skyscrapers started appearing in cities such as Chicago, New York, Rotterdam, and Turin. The Romans and the Japanese had steel. But it was super, super, super expensive compared to wood and bricks. (Oh, wait, what’s that you say? The Romans had famous concrete too? Huh. Well, I guess you learn something every day).
Cheap electricity is poised to change the world, much like cheap steel did about 150 or so years ago. How that electricity is produced doesn’t actually matter much for engineering projects. For example, when the Bessemer process was replaced by the Basic oxygen steelmaking process, I doubt many structural engineers at the time cared much about the technology. What they probably cared much about was obtaining cheap steel that met their requirements.
Finally, here is the most important point of all for you. (Yes, I saved the best for last). Engineers often become sooooo infatuated with “their toys” (their preferred technology) that they often become extremely biased and unscientific. I have excoriated many engineers for lying to me about their preferred technology.
No, I am not exaggerating. They lied to me; and I did indeed excoriate them. My tongue lashings were necessary because engineers often act like helpless drug addicts when they are enthralled with a piece of technology. They will “lie, cheat, and steal” to use what, to me, is a mere widget (tool).
Again, I am not exaggerating; I’ve lost a lot of time and money when working with engineers who have flat out lied to me in order to use their favorite technology, although it was obviously the wrong technology for the job.
Bring on the downvotes… cowards!
That said, plastic in a landfill is anyway well sequestered. So, I thought there was no point in trying to recycle plastic. But I have been disabused, again: making plastic from petroleum tar releases many times as much carbon into the air as is contained in the plastic, and much more than recycling would. So, if we must have plastic, it is better if it comes from a recycle bin, even if the tar it would otherwise be made from will just end up cracked and burned for bunker fuel.
That said, plastic we put in the recycling bin generally just goes straight into the landfill anyway, but costs manual handling by the recycling service in between.
So it is hard to draw any sort of lesson about what to do with plastic trash. But anyway glass of all colors can be very efficiently turned into wall insulation and other stuff.
The Roman concrete we find in still-intact structures has certain desirable qualities, such as self-healing fractures, and getting stronger with exposure to seawater, but is 1/10 as strong as modern concrete. Their early concrete lacked the better qualities of later formulations.
One paper: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(20)30495-5
The sun shines brightly 100% of the time and the wind blows strongly 100% of the time... somewhere. California currently imports electricity from... Wyoming.
With a network of ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission (UHV electricity transmission) lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... throughout the USA, the current concern many engineers seem to have with "the energy storage problem" associated with renewable energy might vanish into irrelevancy.
At 7pm on Tuesday, most of the East Coast might get 80% of its electricity produced by photovoltaics in the Mojave Desert in Nevada; whereas on Wednesday at 2am, Florida might get 90% of its electricity produced from wind generators in Custer County in Oklahoma.
Even if 20% of the electricity were lost due to long-distance transmission, it wouldn't matter much if the electricity were produced extremely inexpensively.
Currently, almost 100% of the aforementioned solar and wind energy are "lost" because almost all of the sunlight in the desert simply lands on the ground, and the wind in the prairies simply blows along without being utilized.
Sure, for airplanes and cargo ships, fuel is important. But for most terrestrial uses (such as in cities and farms) "just in time" electricity might be the best solution.
"But, what about outages?" I'm glad you asked. The military and hospitals have backup diesel generators. Personally, I think "evil" coal-fired power plants might be a feasible source of local, backup electricity which would normally be used very rarely.
The current "anti-coal" bandwagon is absurd. Coal is a great source of fuel. However, much of the world "went crazy" burning way, way, way too much coal for a couple of hundred years. We never should have done that because of the terrible pollution we suffered from.
My favorite things about coal are this: it's very easy to store and very easy to burn.
If people want to store tanks of hydrogen gas in their backyards above ground, or tanks of ammonia underground, that would probably be fine too. But for large scale, backup sources of electricity (say for a city like Portland, Oregon) "evil" coal-fired power plants might be the cheapest and easiest method.
As long as the ultra-high-voltage electricity transmission network has suitable redundancy, is maintained properly, and is not sabotaged (say, by terrorists) then I would guess that within 10 years or so, it would be up over 95% of the time; and within 25 years or so, it would be up over 99% of the time.
Coal plants are monstrous beasts that need a long time to fire up and a lot of expensive maintenance whenever down. Combined-cycle turbines start up in a few minutes, are cheap to maintain, and a little one makes as much economic sense as a big one. But storing LNG, long-term, is a nuisance. So you want to fire them on something readily stored, liquid unless you have a salt dome. So, ammonia, or synthetic methanol, metal hydride, or even mined and refined kerosene. Because it is just for emergencies anyway.
Perhaps one of those would be best. I really don't know. But based on my limited knowledge, at this point, I'd bet on coal over any of those.
>> You could be right about the US, but other places are geopolitically less stable.
Actually, in my penultimate posting in addition to terrorism I was going to mention, "As long as Idaho doesn't declare war on Oregon" but it seemed a little over the top to me.
>> And, transmission lines have outages, and there are never quite as many as you would like.
The rich run the world. They always have. When some rich guy living in a 10 million dollar home on the beach in La Jolla, California (near San Diego, California) has his power go out for a few hours several times in the same week, his wife will "read him the riot act." The rich got rid of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) down there (near La Jolla). They'll make sure they have a reliable source of power.
But yeah, in Flint, Michigan or rural Mississippi, well, the impoverished folks who live there are generally "hanging on by a thread." Those people invariably suffer. But their suffering isn't a result of technological problems; it's a result of political problems.
>> And, the US is getting less stable as we speak, with avowed insurrectionist election suppressors poised to take over Congress and Senate, and maybe the presidency again.
We've had an extremely long period of peace in the USA. Eventually war comes to all lands. It will return here one day. Regardless of the source of power, once war comes "all bets are off." That's part of the reason I like coal. Massive amounts of it can be stored cheaply and indefinitely. If I were in charge of running a state, I'd want a huge supply of coal on hand so we could produce electricity locally 24/7/365 for a long-time. Obviously, solar, wind, and hydro would be the ideal choices. But in case solar, wind, and hydro weren't producing enough, I'd want to have lots of coal to burn.
These days burning coal, as a first choice to generate electricity, would be absurd. But as a backup, it would be great. During peacetime it would likely be used very seldom in a country like the USA as we know it now. But, yeah, if we had something like a civil war, then coal might become a very important source of power.
>> Coal plants are monstrous beasts
That assertion is obviously false.
Certainly, most commonly used coal-fired power plants used to supply the overwhelming majority of power around the world are monstrous beasts.
Nonetheless, small coal plants are neither monstrous beasts nor difficult to fire up. They've been around for centuries, though, admittedly they aren't what most people think of when they think of coal-fired power plants.
>> and a little one makes as much economic sense as a big one
Nope. That's a common lie trotted out. Read what you wrote, and ponder about how inane it is. Utility companies lie... a lot. The problem is this: we are so accustomed to building huge power plants we simply overlook many smaller scale solutions.
Sure, the small ones tend to be much less efficient. But, "the perfect is the enemy of the good." During emergencies, "You do what you gotta do." Engineers get way, way, too focused on efficiency. Generals, particularly during wartime, hardly focus on efficiency much at all. Instead, they focus on effectiveness. In case of emergencies, effectiveness is generally much more important than efficiency. Sure. It's expensive. But, hey, guess what? Wars, which can be seen as the most terrible of emergencies, are expensive.
During wartime enemies are going to target power plants. I'd rather have a few dozen small ones to protect, than one or two big ones because I wouldn't want to "put all of my eggs in one basket." Most Americans are so accustomed to presuming that peace will continue indefinitely, that they fail to make calculations based on the assumption that war has befallen us.
"Economic sense" during peacetime is very different than "economic sense" during wartime. Put simply: when the enemy destroys both of your, big, efficient, coal-fired power plants, those plants end up being of almost zero economic value. As a result, you might end up suffering massive losses of human lives and you might even lose the war because you were unable to provide much-needed power.
It's common knowledge the USA squanders vast sums of money on its military. Nonetheless, these days most American engineers have an "efficiency during peacetime" mentality; whereas most generals (thank God) have an "effectiveness during wartime" mentality.
I am weary of Americans assuming peace will always prevail. It won't. When war returns, how are we (and, by the way, who are "we" in the first place?) going to produce power locally in case solar, wind, and hydro aren't producing enough?
Me? I'm a big, big coal guy. I think the stuff is great... as an emergency solution. But I hope we never need to burn any of it. Ditto for nuclear weapons. I hope we never launch any of them again. But I'm glad we have them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible. But I presume you know how many Americans died in the "Battle of Hiroshima" and the "Battle of Nagasaki" that never occurred. 2 men, 1 plane, 1 bomb, 1 second (more or less). Then 2 days later: 2 men, 1 plane, 1 bomb, 1 second (more or less). Then the war was over. As a result on those battles that never occurred, in the USA, there were no grieving widows, nor any grieving children, nor any grieving parents. Obviously, that was not the case in Japan.
Any ordinary adult who is anti-nuclear weapons is a fool. I hate watching people protest nuclear weapons. Sure, the US military should be reformed. If memory serves, all retired generals and admirals who I've ever heard speak on the subject of reforming the military, have very strong opinions about the dire and urgent need to reform the military because it is currently incapable of protecting the US of A properly. But being anti-nuke is like being a pacifist: it's complete lunacy.
Having opined all of that I'll close with this: coal (and coal-fired power plants) as well as nuclear weapons are great to have... not to use. But if you need 'em; you'll be glad you have 'em.
Generally, coal and its infrastructure are much less suited to automatic handling and to substitution for other things than is liquid fuel. A combined-cycle turbine is happy to run on NG, kerosene, ammonia, hydrogen, soy oil, or beef tallow. Meanwhile, steam turbines need frequent very expensive overhaul, because superheated, high pressure steam is nasty.
I, too, expect war, particularly after civilization collapses because we failed to slow climate catastrophe enough. The US will not survive that as a single entity. Long distance transmission lines will be destroyed early on, even before power plants.
You've also got to account for hydrogen embrittlement, where the small size of the hydrogen molecule means that under pressure it works its way into the crystal lattice of the metal of the container itself, and changes its mechanical properties.
But they are a product of high pressure. Keep pressure low and ensure positive airflow in any closed space, and there is little to worry about.
And it's not just a pressure problem, either: embrittlement will happen at room temperature and pressure, just through diffusion.
For decades, lamp gas -- carbon monoxide and hydrogen - was piped to homes, factories, offices, and ... street lamps, in cast -iron pipes. Then they switched to methane, same cast-iron pipes. They started out pretty brittle, really. Still in use, though.
Where a large amount must be handled, underground caverns at low pressure and LH2 tanks at ambient pressure will be favored.
The most promising solutions I've seen are taking advantage of the fact that single H+ “dissolves” into metal under pressure. You store that saturated metal and heat it when you want to release it. That way energy density starts to make sense. This video shows one such approach:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0fnEsz4Ks0
Binding it with carbon seems promising as well, but I wouldn't bet on simply trying to jam it as a gas in a tank.
But I'm not an expert, just very interested on the subject for many decades.
Liquefaction is the way. We already do it for natural gas (LNG), we just need to build similar infrastructure for LH2.
>We already do it for natural gas (LNG), we just need to build similar infrastructure for LH2.
That doesn't address the "easy and cost effective" part. Current estimates say that the energy required is 30% of the energy value of the hydrogen itself.
>But whereas liquefying natural gas only requires temperatures of -160°C, to liquefy hydrogen you need refrigeration systems capable of getting down to -253°C. That is an expensive proposition. Using current technologies the energy required is 30% of that in the hydrogen being liquefied.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2022/06/23/ma...
LH2 is the obviously correct fuel for future aviation. But probably few other places.
Transmission lines will be favored for up to 2000 km, ships full of liquified ammonia much beyond that. Far northern cities without reliable transmission lines will get regular ammonia shipments from solar farms in the tropics, just as they get LNG today.
It take a lot more energy to liquify hydrogen compared to natural gas. At least 10 kWh per kg. And storing/transporting it is expensive: you need to maintain cryogenic (-253 deg C) conditions.
Even the Space industry has given up on LH2 in favour of liquid CH4, partly due to all the costs and difficulties in handling it.
If there will be a massive double digit global switch to EVs, green hydrogen becomes uneconomical to produce.
[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_resources_of_India#L...
[1]:https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2020/03/lithium...
[2]:https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...
There are myriad other, cheaper methods. India will use many of them, in different places and scales.
Kind of conspicuous omission not to mention India’s nuclear plan to bootstrap to thorium reactors.
Most likely they will be abandoned as it becomes clear they cannot be made competitive with other sources.
And once a critical mass is reached, along with electrification of transportation, we can drastically reduce oil usage.
Systems and procedures for LNG can probably be adapted for LH2 with not too much difficulty, but ammonia will be the more practical choice, most places.
When it comes to Hydrogen, its basically industrial compressors, tanks, piping, etc.
Water shortages happen because agriculture uses so much water, not because we don’t have much of it.
Getting hydrogen from water is one of: red or purple (nuclear - depending on process), yellow (solar), green (other renewables).
Very soon NG will be too expensive to bother extracting, as renewables cost continues plummeting. It will all be green. People will laugh at us for having thought up blue hydrogen.
It'd be great if there was a chemical reaction path that leads to some common fuel that removes CO2 from the air as it 'burns'. Don't know enough organic chem to know if that's even possible. (But then, maybe, life ... finds a way.)
Nearly everything starts out expensive and difficult, then over time, with innovation it becomes cheaper. Coal, oil and gas were the same until all the infrastructure was made, mining technology improved.
What do people who write this same comment over and over want people to do? Nothing?
This decision will eventually be seen as a colossal mistake.
If they plan to use solar photovoltaic to make hydrogen, then it's much more efficient to just use the electricity directly, without going through hydrogen.
They will end up making brown hydrogen and won't admit it, doing absolutely nothing to help the climate catastrophe--but they will be able to claim in public that they are.
Yes, batteries are more efficient than power-to-hydrogen-to-power. But the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge-discharge cycles of the storage system over its economic lifespan. For diurnal storage, you'd be correct, hydrogen is a poor choice. But diurnal storage is only one storage use case. For other storage use cases, such as seasonal storage, or backup against rare prolonged outages of renewable sources, there are relatively few charge/discharge cycles. For those uses, hydrogen is vastly superior to batteries.
The argument that hydrogen would imply use of fossil fuels is nonsense. Fossil fuels are going to have to be kept in the ground in general by punishing legal sanction. What makes production of hydrogen somehow immune to that?
https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-power-p...
The project is projected to cost close to $22bln, which sounds like a lot, but is still less than the cost of yet-to-be-finished Hinkley Point C.
Plentiful solar farms in the tropics will synthesize ammonia and ship it in liquid form anywhere. There will be no possibility of embargo.
Cities far inland will rely on transmission lines from the coast, when local reserves run low.
Probably few places will bank more than 2 weeks' worth, locally.
If you are willing to increase mining, and want the cheapest solution, and you can ignore or solve geopolitics, the “best” solution is neither hydrogen or batteries, it’s to make a several square meter cross-section HVDC loops around the planet, because nighttime winter is never more than 20 Mm from daytime summer and the losses are low enough that it is still worthwhile.
But: you probably still want hydrogen and batteries for the vehicles, and vehicles use so much power that solving transport almost automatically gives you enough used parts to build the storage capacity for the electricity grid, and that even with batteries (and over-provisioning PV, which is fine because of how cheap it is), there would be enough storage for winter.
That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :)
I agree though, in a thousand years there will be a worldwide electricity grid that takes care of the "big picture" energy flows; hydrogen will be created as needed to serve as chemical feedstock to make eg plastics or hydrocarbons for specialized purposes. That or we kill ourselves in the meantime, but since killing everyone is in nobody's best interest I don't think that'll happen. Hopefully.
Indeed! It's one of many reasons that "the best" isn't always the real best.
I'm extremely optimistic about technology, but not so about politics.
Let's take one half-way around the world.
That's 1 sq m * 20000 km = 20000000 m^3. Let's take aluminum because it's cheap. 2.7 tons/cubic meter = 54 Mt.
Multiply by price: $2444 x 54M = $132B for just the wire. That's $16.5 per capita.
But you also need insulators, labor, machinery, design, and so on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...
Because in general it's much cheaper to deal with seasonal variations by adding generation than with storage, and 'rare prolonged outages of renewables resources' doesn't even begin to make sense to me.
If you use just wind/PV/batteries, the cost is almost TWICE that if you use wind/PV/batteries/hydrogen. This is for a cost optimized system relative to real historical weather data, in a solution where one is allowed to overproduce if that helps.
So, no, it's not true at all in general that it's much cheaper to deal with seasonal variations with overgeneration rather than including storage.
A buried LH2 tank can have very, very good insulation. You probably want to flare off or re-liquify any boil-off, because H2 has, all told, something approaching 200x CO2's GHG potential.
Anyway, change only the assumption that hydrogen storage is free underground and watch its usage plummet into less than half. Change the country to India (that we are talking about) and see it go near zero.
Anyway, it's comparing free underground hydrogen with encapsulated portable batteries. I expect none of those to be very useful on practice.
It's supposed to be a very conservative model, with very high probability targets for costs and availability. Because of that, it's focused on public data of mature technologies. But the hydrogen industry mostly doesn't publish anything, and doesn't sell to the general population, so its numbers are all over the place.
It also ignores the equivalently closed numbers from other industries (batteries mostly), in favor of the very public values in open markets. As well as it ignores the more location dependent options, and the less consensual ones (like hydro and nuclear).
Overall, it achieves its goal very well. It's very unlikely that the reality will look like it or worse, it's almost certain it will be better.
The storage is not free, but it is extremely cheap, compared to the cost per energy capacity of batteries. Ignoring this fact will not make it go away.
Is there somebody that did a practical small scale run of this?
Hydrogen storage has a huge amount of issues that natural gas doesn't. By its face value, storing hydrogen in a natural container doesn't look viable.
There are also large scale plans in progress to do it for grid energy storage, for example in Delta, Utah. The salt formation there has enough space for 100 cavities that could, altogether, store enough hydrogen to power the average US grid electrical energy consumption for about a day.
>> Almost all of this demand came from oil refining and industrial sectors, mainly for production of ammonia and methane. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels for these applications results in close to 900 MT CO2 emissions per year, according to IEA data. Oil refiners are largest consumers (40 MT). The gas they use is usually produced onsite by either steam methane reforming, separated from by-product gases through petrochemical processes or sourced externally as merchant hydrogen. Since use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining is not economically viable yet, refiners are trying to move to carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies to lower carbon footprint. In this process, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide formed during the ‘coal to hydrogen’ process are trapped and stored in an environmentally sustainable manner. Estimates say use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining rose from 250 KT in 2019 to more than 300 KT in 2020, and based on the current pipeline of projects, 1.2-1.4 MT low-carbon hydrogen is likely to be used in refining by 2030.
Some will be kept operating at a loss for a while, as ego props.