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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's a typical hydrogen news story.

So while there is a lot of potential in hydrogen, a LOT of legitimate and useful use cases, and likely some real fundamental science in the article, the hyping of hydrogen is a desperate astroturfing campaign by oil/gas/nuclear to stave off EVs and wind/solar/battery which is eating their lunch in raw economics.

Thus the lack of real numbers intentional. Hydrogen production isn't efficient compared to grid transport and battery/hydro storage, because water is a very stable molecule and splitting it will fundamentally take a fair degree of energy and thermodynamic/heat loss/entropy.

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> Well, it's a typical hydrogen news story.

Yeah, if you combined all the published results on generating hydrogen from water, you'd have perpetual motion. Search with Google for "hydrogen from water breakthrough":

* Revolutionary technique to generate hydrogen

* A breakthrough method uses solar energy to produce hydrogen

* Israeli scientists make breakthrough on producing 'green' hydrogen fuel

* CRUCIAL BREAKTHROUGH IN HYDROGEN ENERGY

* Australian Lab Turns Hydrogen Into Green Energy With Secret

* UCSC Makes Green Hydrogen Breakthrough

* New breakthrough in the study of hydrogen production by

* A new way to generate hydrogen fuel from seawater (Stanford)

* SunHydrogen has developed a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen using sunlight and any source of water.

* HyTech Power may have solved hydrogen, one of the hardest ...

* Universal Hydrogen's decarbonizing technology is coming to

These go back years.

The difference is that there is serious interest in 2022 in green hydrogen to replace hydrogen from methane steam reforming or the shift gas reaction and coal.

Having a "serious interest" and earnestly wanting it this time doesn't change the fundamental fact that you need a lot of power to crack water apart. There's simply no way around that, all improvements found will be marginal at best.

I wish somebody would do a very simple roundtrip calculation for each of these 'breakthroughs' and publish it.

all i want to know is the efficiency, cost & power density these on consumption side so I can decide which applications this works best in. on the production side same thing except for power density. the fact that its incredibly hard to find these numbers makes me think that these are mostly puff pieces for hydrogen before BEV eats their lunch.

green/blue/gray hydrogen is mostly BS.

The main interest now is not for ‘dispatchable energy’ but for industrial uses of hydrogen, metallurgy, etc. There is a lot of competition for energy storage such as conventional batteries, vanadium flow batteries, compressed air, pumped hydro, etc. I think fuel cell cars have been dead since Tesla made attractive BEV cars.

why would I care about hydrogen when I have a perfectly good electrical system ready in hand. hydrogen's main selling point is energy density, which makes is good on paper for 'mobile' applications. if you forgo that than there are plenty of good energy carries like NG/gasoline or electricity which round-trip much better in efficiency terms.

I am not sure if there is a sudden step up in industrial uses of H. on face value this looks more like groundwork for some upcoming fossil greenwashing subsidy that uses hydrogen to justify public funds.

I'm not sure you understood this: "The main interest now is not for ‘dispatchable energy’ but for industrial uses of hydrogen, metallurgy, etc."

He's not talking about hydrogen as a store of energy. He's talking about hydrogen to be used in industrial processes that require hydrogen input. Energy density has nothing to do with it, and the superiority of NG/gas/electic for carrying energy isn't relevant.

> I am not sure if there is a sudden step up in industrial uses of H

Step up? There is existing demand for hydrogen which this would, presumably, be more efficient at meeting. If they're not meeting that demand for hydrogen by cracking water apart, they'll do it by cracking natural gas apart instead.

Look up Paul Martin on linkedin for a thorough examination of H2 as a fuel, including round-trip efficiency.

thanks for the suggestion. This is exactly what I needed: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-p...

esp the efficiency chart about 1/3rd way in lays it bare.

You're welcome!

> I wish somebody would do a very simple roundtrip calculation for each of these 'breakthroughs' and publish it.

Yeah. Commercial electrolyzers are about 70% efficient right now. So only 30% headroom is available for improvement. There are people with prototypes that claim 95%. It's apparently possible to beat 70% without much trouble, but overall costs go up. If you search for "electrolyzer efficiency" you find discussions of equipment size, cost, durability, water quality requirements, and purity of the output gases. That's apparently a bigger issue in practice than electrical efficiency. The breakthrough story industry wants is "we built a big one, it cost half as much to build, it runs on tap water, and it's self-cleaning."

When you electrolyze water, the dissolved solids have to come out somewhere. Or you have to start with highly purified water, which means a big water processing operation and more operating cost.

The amount of energy to crack water is already only a small multiple of what you get back when you get the products back together.

The improvements are in the cost of equipment per unit output capacity, and the production rate per unit volume of said equipment. Improvements are cumulative.

Airports, steel mills, and ammonia synthesizers will need to produce huge amounts of H2, soon, so reductions are important.

Exactly the same thing can be said about battery and solar technologies.

But eventually research does reach a point where they make a difference to ordinary end users.

Right, but also things like electricity was harnessed a mere 100 years or so after its discovery -- so it might take another 100 years before it's practical.

The other problem is that we have an infrastructure built up for electricity today. This is not the case for H2. It's not that we can't make it, but, electricity is far cheaper to transfer across a continent than H2.

> the hyping of hydrogen is a desperate astroturfing campaign by oil/gas/nuclear

I'm not sure why it would be an astroturf. This really reads like an institution that is promoting the work they are doing and they are trying their best to make a newsworthy story. The second they add in words like "thermodynamics" and "entropy", or add anything boring like actual science, they are no longer newsworthy. Nothing to see here, just (over-hyped) marketing.

Your comment has an air to it which makes you sound no different than the same dogmatists you seek to discredit.

Framing the raw economics of renewables as superior to fossil fuels is wrong in many ways, mainly due to the narrowmindedness of viewing it through the lens of just energy. Do your views encompass the the vast network of global production tied to fossil fuel derived goods and processes?

No one should view it as a competition between fossil fuels and renewables. Phasing out fossil fuels has huge implications beyond energy production and if you're not at least attempting to model the "raw economics" to include things like plastics, fertilizers, etc., you're doing a disservice to achieving a sustainable future.

The fossil fuel industry certainly sees it as a competition, and they're playing for a very different goal of preserving profits at pretty much any cost - including broad social costs. Trying to play that off as "no competition between fossil fuels and renewables" seems very naive at best.

I do think it is an interesting question on "phaseout" of fossil fuels as a carbon emitting energy consumable, vs a feedstock for various chemical processes, like fertilizer production. But the fossil fuel industry very much does not want to go from a centralized role in energy vs a smaller role in chem feedstocks.

Passenger vehicles account for about 16% of greenhouse gas emissions. Electric power is another 25%. The rest is industry, commercial & residential, agriculture, and other forms of transportation. It is these areas of the economy which will need hydrogen.

You'll probably die of old age before there is even a whisper of a battery powered passenger plane the scale of a 787. But you may live to see a hydrogen powered passenger plane.

Once LH2 airframes start being delivered, displacement of kerosene airframes will happen very fast, probably limited mainly by production capacity of synthetic hydrogen. The changeover will certainly have started by 2040.

I understand the oil/gas industry produces hydrogen from methane. But why would nuclear care whether their electricity is used for electrolysis or battery EVs?

Gen 4 Nuclear could use sulfur-iodine or other thermochemistry to make hydrogen directly rather than spinning a turbine and doing electrolysis.

There was recent news on this calling it purple hydrogen or something silly.

We're so far away from having sufficient green (or green adjacent) hydrogen supply to cover existing industrial uses that it's pointless even considering it for transportation.

If anything, cheap electrolysis is a deadly threat to nuclear. Green hydrogen solves the last remaining problems for a 100% renewable grid (the rare dark/calm periods and seasonal leveling.) Cheap electrolysers mean nuclear is defenseless against much lower LCoE renewables.

nuclear sees themselves as a provider of heat/electricity for industrial hydrogen generation.

I didn't say it made sense, but it might give them gravitas for subsidies to keep them afloat. Political calculus is totally different than economics or logic.

>Hydrogen production isn't efficient compared to grid transport and battery/hydro storage

Electrolytic hydrogen production and consumption is not efficient. Mostly because of the consumption end of the equation (~50%, fuel-cell) rather than the production (~70-80%, electrolysis). But nuclear-driven thermochemical hydrogen production is currently being developed, and can theoretically exceed the thermal->electric conversion efficiency of the nuclear power plant:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965262...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...

For applications where energy is used for incineration, direct chemical use of hydrogen, or when power-to-weight efficiency is critical, it has some potential: we are really comparing thermal->electric->thermal with thermal->hydrogen->thermal in that case. Such applications account for a decent fraction of total energy use.

>campaign by oil/gas/nuclear

Oil and gas companies have always worked against nuclear. There's no association there.

Nowadays coal companies promote nukes, because a new nuke started means at least a decade of continued coal sales.

They know coal is doomed, so the best they can do is put off the inevitable. Solar, wind, or tidal would start displacing coal almost immediately. The nuke, furthermore, costs so much it eats budget that could have been spent on displacing much more coal than the nuke will when it is finally turned on.

> Nowadays coal companies promote nukes

Is there any source for this information?

Not if they are careful enough.

Hydrogen is needed to do chemistry and is a possible path to make metals. Fuel cells for cars don’t look like a good idea compared to battery EVs, but they might find a niche.

Renewables will still require some form of long-term utility energy storage though. Hydrogen seems like it could be a useful medium for that - batteries have gotten a lot better, but it's not clear that they'll become cheap enough when everything else wants batteries as well. Pumped hydro can only be installed in so many places (not to mention the tremendous environmental impact of building it).

Hydrocarbons for energy storage are and will stay way more efficient and safe than pure hydrogen or batteries.

Using synthetic hydrocarbons for energy storage will always cost more than storing hydrogen underground, or bonded to nitrogen as ammonia.

There will be reasons to synthesize hydrocarbons, but energy storage won't be among them.

Notice how solar mppt controllers (or wind turbine controllers with dump load resistors) are lacking a "hydrogen electrolysis" load connector for excess?

Enough trickles make a flood (butterfly effect scaled), but on the same token, its like converting a pretty yard into an edible organic yielding space.

Diversification is now offering a lot more options that do not have toxic byproducts.

Just using excess capacity from solar transforms local hydrogen harvesting into a boost to many local economies (emptied/harvested weekly/monthly/quarterly to power local infra for example using an onsite storage cylinder and scheduling similar to trash pickup).

The sardine can neighborhoods cannot gaudy retrofit any of it, but an energy shed 50ft from a residence with new construction makes the applicable opportunities more than a pipe dream. They have to relocate the fire-hazard solar panels to a ground array anyways for reasonable insurance rates and right-sizing options for expandability as the technology progresses.

Wealth breeds health :)

>the hyping of hydrogen is a desperate astroturfing campaign by oil/gas/nuclear to stave off EVs and wind/solar/battery which is eating their lunch in raw economics

Meanwhile, in reality, gas (not sure why you lumped in nuclear but others have already called you out on it) are providing the lion's share of reliable power generation and will continue to do so for decades. Even after 2050, you'll still need gas-fired generation to provide a backup to intermitten generation from wind/solar, which WILL need it, a lesson that California has yet to learn.

As for oil, it's an incredibly dense form of energy which can be stored in a tin can. Even with battery storage wind/solar will never have that ability.

Tired of HN's need to put ideology over real economics.

This comment doesn't quite make sense. A hydrogen cell is still just a battery with a different name and those vehicles would still be EVs, no?

I believe the name is hydrogen fuel cell. It takes hydrogen as a fuel and generates electricity like a battery, instead of combusting it like a typical gas powered motor

The output of a hydrogen fuel cell is water, so it is a fairly sustainable loop if you can capture the water and generate hydrogen from it. But you need an efficient process to convert water into hydrogen

That fuel cell is more like an engine than a battery. You have to get O2 into it, get waste heat out (harder than the engine because the temperature is lower), keep it from drowning in the water it makes, etc.

It is hard to see the fuel cell EV competing with a battery EV.

Yes, but they have very different characteristics. You can't just plug a hydrogen car into the grid and charge it anywhere, so the overnight charges that EV owners are accustomed to go away. The hydrogen fuel cells tend to be large and heavy, so they don't save weight and also lose luggage capacity relative to an EV of similar size.

And without great advances in hydrogen production, they tend to cost more to operate than gasoline powered vehicles.

The one perk is faster fillups for road trips or lacking infrastructure. Most EV owners wouldn't switch just for that.

Many experts disagree with you, hydrogen may play a role in clean energy grid scale distribution due to existing pipeline capital.

Why the issue with nuclear ?

Doubly so because the same oil and gas industry has spent quite a bit of money over the years to spread anti-nuclear hysteria, including covert support of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. The effects can be seen now in EU, where gas has been labeled "green", while nuclear isn't.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...

This link provides a breakdown (be aware that is from an explicitly pro-nuclear group):

https://www.ans.org/news/article-930/sierra-club-natural-gas...

The oil and gas industry has tremendous incentive to expose nuclear. It's still the only game in town for truly replacing them.

Yup :)

> The effects can be seen now in EU, where gas has been labeled "green", while nuclear isn't.

Gas plants have been labeled a transition technology on the path to a fully renewable grid, because they are cheap, fast to construct and can serve as peaker plants burning biogas. While they are currently burning fossil fuels, the emissions are way lower than for other fossil fuel plants - per each kWh produced, less CO2 gets emitted, and particulate emissions are additionally way lower.

In contrast, nuclear plants take an extremely long time to plan and build - the EPR design took almost two decades alone for building it in Olkiluouto and almost as much in Flamanville. Add to that the many years of bureaucracy in obtaining permits, purchasing land and other activities, and suddenly you're looking at 25+ years until the plant is operational, and dozens of billions of euros in sunk cost.

The future is many things, but certainly not nuclear fission!

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