Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel | Hacker News Reader

Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel

nature.com

159 pointssamizdis279 comments

Not enough attention is being paid to Japan's contrarian "red hydrogen" strategy.

This entails using a novel helium cooled fission reactor to generate very hot (950C, 1750F) process heat that is then fed into an Sulphur-Iodine cycle hydrogen plant to create very cheap hydrogen without any feedstock but air and water.

Beyond fuel, hydrogen can be used to replace coal in iron smelting, Haber-Bosch fertilizer, and other chemical processes that require hydrogen made today via fossil fuels.

They already have a 30MW pilot reactor in operation, and are just about to turn on the S-I hydrogen plant. Could be a very interesting addition to global energy mix.

Strategy: https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...

Reactor: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Japanese-gas-coo...

S-I Process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle

Video (hypey): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTZWaJU6ho

"Very cheap" is definitely on the "I'll believe it when I see it" category.

Yea, totally. I'm saying it's a strategy, not a reality haha.

The high cost of Gen 3 nuclear power is largely due to the very large steam turbine and heat exchangers that are required if you are using water as a working fluid, coolant, and moderator.

From the 1950s to the 1990s the interest in fast reactors has been in the 60x better fuel economy and reduced waste problem. (e.g. less radioactive than the uranium ore in 1000 years) It was believed back then that a fast reactor coupled to a steam turbine would have a higher capital cost than an LWR. There also was a lot of concern that it takes a lot of uranium or plutonium to form a critical mass and that would be an expense.

Recently fast reactors and other high temperature reactor types are of interest because getting rid of the water could allow miniaturizing the whole system and get the cost competitive with natural gas not to mention solar and wind on the days that solar and wind feel like supplying power. The stockpile of plutonium in spent fuel is getting bigger and bigger every day and the public seems entirely uninterested in throwing away 98% of the energy content of the spent fuel away in a place like Yucca Mountain. Thus high-quality fissile material seems a lot less scarce than it did in the EBR I - Superphenix era.

There is a reason we run nuclear reactors at 400C rather than 1000C. I wish scientists could be called out for lies of omission.

“A novel nuclear reactor which operates just below the temperature where our most exotic alloys mechanically fail”.

Steam at 950°C and helium at 950°C are very, very different when it comes to corrosion and safety.

And vaporized sulfuric acid decomposed to SO2 + O2 + H2O at that temperature... how do you think that compares?

> There is a reason we run nuclear reactors at 400C rather than 1000C.

There are several reactors design that work at high temperature, HTGR are not new.

> A novel nuclear reactor which operates just below the temperature where our most exotic alloys mechanically fail

We have plenty of materials that can withstand higher temperatures than that, both refractory alloys and ceramics. Do you know the temperature in an aircraft engine? If weight is not a factor, plain old tungsten melts at 3400°C.

> HTGR

https://atomicinsights.com/chinas-high-temperature-reactor-p... has a summary of the past experimental reactors (skip half way down to the heading “Brief high temperature reactor history”), and explains some of the reasons past reactors have failed to be commercialised.

It also explains one central problem with using gas: “Even with higher temperatures and higher efficiency, each core can produce 1/10th of the electricity of light water reactors, but [China’s] HTR pressure vessel is described as ‘the world’s largest and heaviest pressure vessel.’ Pressurized gas has a far lower capacity to move heat than pressurized water.”.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=high-temperature+gas+reactor

Well yeah, they did not displace PWRs (the heat capacity issue is one of the reasons why molten salt and sodium fast reactors were investigated). But the problem is not the lack of high temperature materials (which is false).

I had never before considered, but how do they melt/cast tungsten? How do you get temperatures that hot in a controlled way, when basically nothing is solid anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_metallurgy

Melting tungsten in atmospheric conditions is not really useful. You start with tungsten oxide as a gas and it reacts with hydrogen and tungsten powder precipitates out. The powder is then heated and compressed to form a polycrystalline billet (sintering).

Technically speaking, the first step in tig welding aluminum is to melt the tungsten and it forms a little ball. It is not hard to reach the required temperature. You can just put a lightbulb filament in 220 socket and it will melt the tungsten in a split second. That being said, a crucible of molten tungsten is not a thing.

I imagine a reactor operating at 1000C is built almost entirely on graphite and ceramics... But I have no idea how they plan to use it with water, as graphite doesn't behave well on those temperatures with water around. (Maybe there is a heat exchanger at some point that makes failures on the wet side safe.)

It certainly looks possible. You will probably end up needing some amount of metals on the hot portion, but they can be minimized to a very large extent. Cheap, on the other hand, is not a property I would guess from that description.

It's that the pressure of water either in liquid or supercritical form gets too high.

Material issues for fast and/or high temperature reactors are not trivial but don't look insurmountable. 1980s literature seemed to think fast reactors could be longer-lived than LWRs, LWRs look longer lived today than they did back then.

Yeah, a chemical cycle involving vaporizing and decomposing sulfuric acid at 850 C is totally credible. Yes, let's avoid turbines and instead make our equipment out of ... tantalum? /s

The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of this cycle is 50% (and likely will be lower). This is not much better than making electricity with the reactor and driving electrolysers. And when the levelized cost of energy from renewables is very low (especially for the surplus energy that could be fed into electrolysers as needed) it's hard to see how this scheme competes. Yes, it doesn't have turbines, but it does have all sorts of high temperature chemical reactors that must survive corrosive conditions.

I think the point is that we should try a lot of different approaches, as there may be good fits that aren't possible to do via electricity - ie is electro smelting iron > using hydrogen? Unsure we really know what that looks like at scale yet.

Either way there's an unproven process step with lots of efficiency questions for plants at scale, and I'm impressed to see Japan seriously trying something totally different.

>The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of this cycle is 50% (and likely will be lower). This is not much better than making electricity with the reactor and driving electrolysers.

The numbers I've found elsewhere dispute this. The World Nuclear Association puts the thermal -> electric conversion efficiency of nuclear plants at around 35% (current) to 40% (best) [1]. A similar but far less corrosive copper-chlorine process is being developed in Canada with preliminary analyses claiming as much as double the efficiency of electrolysis [2]. The maximum thermodynamic efficiency may also be exceeded if waste heat can be converted to electricity simultaneously.

With that said, tests of the sulfur-iodine process continue to find that corrosion and damage to the (chemical) reactor components remains limiting, with 20% efficiency lost in H2SO4 splitting over just four days [3]. H2SO4 at 900 C is much more corrosive than HCl at 500 C.

1: https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/techn...

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

3: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...

Being twice the efficiency of electrolysis with nuclear is not enough, because the levelized cost of electricity ratio between nuclear and renewables is more than 2 (and even more so the ratio between nuclear and surplus renewable output.)

Looking at the solar generation LCoE alone, you're correct. The numbers I found for battery LCoE are all over the place, which makes it hard to judge. Assuming $100/kWh and a cycle life of 1000 (close to existing batteries), battery LCoE is high enough to justify nuclear-to-hydrogen. With longer cycle life, which has gone up to 10,000 cycles at lab-scale, that number comes down substantially. Assuming technology improvements, of course, would also have to be applied to nuclear.

I was originally interested in thermochemical hydrogen for a solar concentrator source, but a lot of current research seems to focus on nuclear because the thermal energy input is more stable, with an outlook towards solar as the technology is worked out.

A life cycle of 1000 is very short, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect that for currently installed batteries. I understand current utility scale batteries are shooting for an eight year lifespan (3000 cycles) with the hope of getting to 10-15 years (but data is lacking to justify that.) Longer cycle life should be proved by the time any nuclear thermochemical hydrogen system could be up and running.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned batteries at all considering that we're comparing hydrogen generation technologies. But the review I found shows cycle life is variable in existing commercial batteries, and generally not much higher than 2000:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0356-8

The interest in hydrogen is for thermal processes (cement, alumina) and weight-sensitive applications as far as I can see. For electricity storage the fuel cell efficiency is prohibitive.

Assuming a daily charge/discharge a 1000 cycle battery needs to be replaced every 3 years. That would suggest that the majority of installers that guarantee the batteries for 10-15 years are going to lose their shirt on warranty replacements.

Which should tell you the 1000 cycle figure is not correct.

I mean, they could test the cells to 1000 cycles even faster, by doing 3 charge/discharge cycles a day. They've had time to do that.

Batteries tend to longer if you don't completely drain them in each cycle. I strongly doubt the typical driver covers 200 miles in a day — otherwise cars would only last three years. IIRC you can extend the useful life of a typical Li-ion battery significantly by only charging it to 80% most of the time.

Last year I read the following post regarding the application of hydrogen on ground transportation, simple and insightful. It basically explains why it doesn't make sense to use it for that particular application.

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...

What this article does not address is however the solar problem of producing too much in the summer and too little in the winter. Using the solar energy from summer to produce hydrogen to use in the winter or at night sounds like a complete solution to me.

Maybe not for cars or heating, but for powering the grid.

Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles?

> Where's the difference that makes it feasible for powering the grid, but not for powering vehicles?

Energy density. For the fuel alone, volumetrically. Altogether, massively as well.

Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries? I don't understand why it's not applicable to transport if so.

> Isn't H2 energy density much better than Li-Ion batteries?

By weight, hydrogen and oxygen creates 20x more chemical energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries [1]. (It's comparable to gasoline and air.) By volume, uncompressed, it has far less. Once compressed, we have to take into account the weight of the containment tanks, the weight of the fuel cell and the energy lost in converting hydrogen to electricity, an output batteries directly provide, a combination which negates that specific energy advantage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refere...

H2 energy density is better than Li-Ion batteries, particularly by weight, but:

* Hydrogen is very light but takes up quite a lot of volume so it needs to be either liquified or compressed to very high pressures (and even then it's considerably bulkier than, say, natural gas). * The resulting storage tanks are heavy and add bulk. * The fuel cell to convert the hydrogen to electricity adds weight that a battery system doesn't have (the storage is the converter). * The energy density of lithium-ion batteries doesn't have to match hydrogen or gasoline, it just has to be good enough. For most light vehicle applications, we're getting pretty close to that point (though possibly not if you're planning to use a truck to tow things).

For heavy transport, the balance changes because big tanks are more mass-efficient than smaller ones, and the sheer mass of batteries currently required for long-haul trucking seriously cuts into the cargo that can be legally carried with road mass limits. That's why there's interest in hydrogen-fuelled trucks.

For hydrogen-fuelled planes, a similar argument applies with current and reasonably foreseeable battery technology you can't build an airliner with a useful carrying capacity and range. However, the bulk of hydrogen tanks required for a plane with intercontinental range is still a big problem. That's why you see all these unconventional body design concepts for hydrogen-fuelled planes - you need lots of room to store the hydrogen and still give a useful passenger load.

Cars require a large infrastructure to be in place. EVs use the power grid. Much faster and cost efficient to build large Solar+hydrogen power plants and drive EVs.

To power vehicles, you would need fuel stations all around the country with hydrogen-fuel equipment.

To power the grid from excess solar, you need a hydrogen-burning generator at the site of the electrolysis plant.

To power vehicles, you would need fuel stations all around the country with hydrogen-fuel equipment.

Why does this keep coming up? Who cares about this specific point? If there is demand, people will build the fuel stations, like we did with gas and oil?

I get there are other harder problems with Hydrogen, but worrying about infrastructure seems strange?

To summarize, IF you get the practical engineering resolved, IF you get all the consumer products designed and ready for manufacturing, and IF you get a de minimis infrastructure to scale from, that's ... 15 years?

Hydrogen infrastructure, if what we're talking about is on the scale of current ICE cars, can't "organically" compete, and won't "organically" develop. It has no chance without a massive government investment/buy-in on a decade long scale. It needs huge investment for each of the big IFs I outlined above.

Look at the cost curves of solar / wind / batteries for the last 10 years, and consider that there are numerous technologies about to be rolled out that will improve those at the same or better rate and the overall industrial scaleout / economies of scale isn't close to being done.

Hydrogen is marketed these days with "hey it will cost X and that is (theoretically / lies damn lies and accounting) competitive with wind/solar/batteries (which exist and we KNOW what they cost) price today.

But there is absolutely no chance of hydrogen being cost competitive in general power transmission/carrier, transportation, etc in 10-15 years. Heck in 5 years it likely won't.

So the hydrogen people are praying that their lobbying + fortune would produce some boondoggle subsidy to build this out, and then the government would limp it along due to the sunk cost fallacy.

I don't mind if it's used to siphon off energy; basically make it a chemical battery that is easily stored, relatively. But I'd rather it be sipohoned off into more immediately usable and scalable storage, e.g. by pumping water up into reservoirs. And batteries, close to where it's being produced, but those are costly.

That's "hydrogen as storage", and as such it sits on the efficiency curve quite a bit below batteries and pumped hydro. It's something worth building out if we can find a way to make it work on a balance sheet, but right now we have cheaper ways to solve that problem.

Also, recognize that lots of grid load is more flexible than you think. Running smelters and foundries preferentially in the summer is a very doable thing.

Efficiency is not the only factor. There is also cost and availability. You can't build pumped hydro just anywhere. I have no idea what the cost is compared to lithium batteries though.

Also the cost of lithium may rise as more vehicles start using Li-ion batteries, but price of hydrogen storage will likely remain the same

That's contrary to conventional economics -- costs fall as production increases.

I think the reason hydrogen storage costs won't fall much is because the cheapest technology (metal tanks) have already benefited from economies of scale. The parts that make them suitable for hydrogen storage specifically will get cheaper, but it's unlikely that there's a lot of low hanging fruit for manufacturing the tanks themselves. There could be a breakthrough in metal hydride storage or cryogenic storage that could reduce costs, but I'm not too optimistic. I think the most likely scenario is that most electrolyzed hydrogen is converted to methane for storage and use. Methane is much easier to convert to liquid and much more energy dense, which helps with storage costs.

Lithium prices should fall dramatically in the future as production increases.

And the rest of metals? Nickel, copper?

Storage batteries are moving rapidly toward a LiFePO4 chemistry that doesn't require rare resources. You can buy cars (even Teslas) and home batteries with them already.

Only a matter of time before phosphorus becomes as expensive as nickel or copper and you are back on the beginning with lack of materials for batteries.

> Earth's commercial and affordable phosphorus reserves are expected to be depleted in 50–100 years and peak phosphorus to be reached in approximately 2030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_phosphorus

No, phosphate is vastly cheaper than battery metals. I mean, yes, we're using way too much of it (for agriculture, in a manner that ends up unrecoverably flushed into the oceans). And we're going to hit a wall, and its price is going to skyrocket. But to matter to a battery producer it would have to be so expensive that we'd have all starved anyway. The price levels between batteries and fertilizers are just too different.

> No, phosphate is vastly cheaper than battery metals

Lithium used to be cheap. Is not anymore. Phosphate will go same route. That's the whole point.

I repeat: if phosphate was so expensive as to make a significant portion of the material cost of a LiFePO4 battery, then we would have long since starved for lack of crops. Relative to food, batteries are an extraordinarily expensive luxury good.

How is this contrary to conventional economics? Using the most basic model of supply and demand, EVs becoming more popular would shift the demand curve to the right, since more people would want to buy Li-ion batteries at any given price. We would expect the market equilibrium to shift both upward and rightward, increasing both quantity and price. It might only shift only one way or the other, if supply is particularly elastic or inelastic. But it definitely wouldn't cause a decrease in price by itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects

The effects of experience curves vary widely between different industries. For semiconductors, it's huge. For mining, not so much. Battery costs are only 25% manufacturing. So at this point, battery supply is rapidly becoming a resource extraction problem.

The scale effects in mining are very significant. Big mines are a lot cheaper per tonne than little mines.

This is no longer a question of economic axioms, but of the facts on the ground. How do we know that the scale effects relative to lithium mines as they stand today will be sufficient to offset the price increase inherently caused by the increased demand? Do you have a source for this?

The increased demand only causes a temporary increase in price. Lithium is a commodity, and for commodities price == marginal cost.

The marginal cost for lithium is about 1/10th of the current price, so the price of lithium will eventually fall.

Of course "eventually" could be a long time away...

Then why is cost up 10x over the last two years?

Price is up 10x. Cost hasn't changed.

Cost is literally another word for price - I'm not sure what you're trying to convey by trying to distinguish the two. When a battery manufacturer goes to buy a ton to lithium, the cost they have to pay has indeed increased 10x.

The price of extracting a ton of lithium from the ground may be the same, but it's not enough to keep up with demand. Which is why the cost of lithium on the market is skyrocketing.

Price is up because it takes 18-24 months to produce lithium on the margin. The primary source of lithium is solar concentrated brine, so today’s supply is peak Covid planning decisions.

The people that had the guts to invest in lithium production in the middle of Covid when the price was in the tank, are currently harvesting that lithium and getting a massive payday.

Price will come back down.

This is predicated on the assumption that Lithium is a scarce resource with new new sources available. In fact the opposite is true: Lithium is pervasively available almost everywhere[1], the problem is that it's expensive to extract and requires a bunch of processing facilities be built.

So you'd absolutely expect Li supply to grow along with demand and push prices down due to economies of scale. And that's exactly what we're seeing.

[1] Basically, go find a salt deposit -- that's a dried up ocean, which is the best concentrator we can find for Lithium compounds.

I think causality works better the other way - production increases as costs fall.

Edit: LegionMammal has the right words, demand curve.

That is not necessarily true for minerals, which are mined not produced.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

> You can't build pumped hydro just anywhere.

No, but electrical grids can efficiently transport energy across continent-scale distances, so it doesn't really matter. It's true, that stored hydrogen only needs to beat "electricity from the nearest dam" and not local generator numbers, but that's still a tall order.

Sure but how many of these locations are there? You don't just need a hill, you need large amounts of water available. Not to mention the construction is definitely not cheap or fast.

I mean there is a shit ton of land available in say Spain for solar+hydro plants. No matter the lower efficiency, you could build enough to power Europe.

What If We Covered the Sahara With Solar Panels? - https://youtu.be/62ASvupr8Zg

The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa - https://youtu.be/7OpM_zKGE4o

One of the difficult problems with extremely large solar projects is the infrastructure to move the power. In a lot of these cases, the space to build solar is large areas of land that no one uses... which means that there's not much infrastructure to build the solar power plants, and then not much infrastructure to move that power back to places where people live.

Yes, there's a lot of land that could be used for solar. Moving the enough power to power all of Spain (or all of Europe) based on solar requires some very impressive transmission lines.

Well there's also this thing called "roofs" and there is collectively a lot of them.

While the economic efficiency of massively distributing your solar collection across residential and commercial buildings is less than a grid scale, at the same time you get far more resilience with all the buildings having local energy generating capacity in disaster situations. It also alleviates the total amount of energy the grid needs to transport (especially for home/business charging of EV vehicles), so grid development/maintenance costs will stay sane.

Not that grid scale isn't important. Heat pumps, home geothermal, residential solar, grid solar, wind, battery storage, pumped hydro storage, and whatever else works will be necessary. Hopefully synthetic fuels / algae fuels / aluminum air batteries / next gen nuclear / grid geothermal can also all contribute.

> No, but electrical grids can efficiently transport energy across continent-scale distances

That doesn't matter. E.g. in Europe most natural location for pump storage are already used as such. I guess you could build some in Asia, I am not sure. We would just have to trust russia to transport our electricty back and forth. Good idea /sarcasm

> Also, recognize that lots of grid load is more flexible than you think. Running smelters and foundries preferentially in the summer is a very doable thing.

It's doable, but it requires that production capacity has been overbuilt and turns all the roles at the foundry into seasonal work.

Heavy industry is extremely seasonal already, though. And in fact highly variable in a bunch of other ways. Existing facilities are already only sporadically used, no one runs metal casting 24:7.

Not having a night shift is a very different thing than not having a winter shift.

As I stated above, the cost of inefficiency is proportional to the number of charge/discharge cycles.

For seasonal storage, efficiency is 365x less important than for diurnal storage. Minimizing capital cost is the primary concern.

The energy efficiency is so unbelievably terrible it’s a very poor option for balancing the grid even if it wasn’t also more expensive than batteries.

People talk about hydrogen for transportation because you can refuel quickly, using expensive fuels is already the norm, and it’s much lighter than batteries. But, it’s so expensive, inefficient, and difficult to store that there needs to be vast technical progresses before it’s viable. Hydrogen would be fairly viable if it was 1/4 as expensive, fuel cells cost 1/4th as much, and the energy density was 4x as high by volume. At which point we could start scaling producing, but batteries are viable today and we are already scaling production.

For large projects Hydrogren will probably be attached to nitrogen to produce ammonium. Technology to handle ammonum has been availble for about 100 years now, and while it has its drawbacks (it is toxic), using ammomium solves a lot of issues.

70%-80% electrolysis efficiency is unbelievably terrible? There are many factors such as cost, time to market and availability. Batteries require lots of mining of materials and have a limited lifespan.

Electrolysis only half of the round trip.

Fuel cell efficiency is worse than electrolysis efficiency, about 50%. Even the worst batteries beat that.

How about cost and availability.

How many cycles do those batteries work with that efficiency? How environmentally friendly is mining Lithium in China and transporting it around the globe? How much CO₂ does the transport of those minerals/batteries produce? How do we get rid of old batteries? One huge advantage of producing hydrogen or methane out of thin air with excess energy from truly renewable energy sources is, that we don't have to procure and transport source materials, and that it can be stored.

Producing and distributing hydrogen requires significant infrastructure that releases vastly more CO2 than moving lithium around for EV’s. I think you got blinded by thinking of hydrogen as green but it doesn’t magically show up.

Also, moving lithium around releases negligible CO2, an EV battery only needs 15 pounds of lithium and lasts 25 years. You can work out the exact number based on specific origin and destinations but it’s on the order of driving an ICE 1 to 10 miles. Which shouldn’t be surprising because boats are very efficient, lithium is light, and cars weigh a lot.

Lithium in China? What does that matter?

Lithium comes from a lot of places. The largest Lithium exporter in the world today is Australia. Multiple South American countries are also towards the top of the list.

A lot of lithium "mining" is digging up desert salt deposits or skimming salt brines from salt lakes. Some of that still isn't "perfectly" environmentally friendly, but compared to extracting most any other sort of mineral it is one of the environmentally friendliest we extract.

Lithium is the third element on the periodic table and the third most common element in the universe. Admittedly a lot of the planet's Lithium is in compounds/salts that sometimes need to be chemically broken down and that has more environmental impacts than the mining processes. So there is that, admittedly. But a lot of it is electrolytic just like the "advantageous" hydrogen processes people seem to love.

Lithium is not a rare or heavy mineral. It's the next fatter cousin of Hydrogen.

> How do we get rid of old batteries?

Recycling. Plenty of companies have already answered this question. Lithium is highly reclaimable from all existing Lithium-based battery formulations.

Batteries are >95% efficient round trip.

Hydrogen is: 70% Gibbs Free Energy Efficiency, 70% electrolysis efficiency, 50% fuel cell efficiency, 93% compression efficiency = 23% round trip efficiency.

Fuel cells are only useful for automotive applications, on the grid you want combined cycle gas turbines which are cheaper and more efficient. That still only gets round trip efficiency to about 25%.

> on the grid you want combined cycle gas turbines which are cheaper and more efficient

You don’t want gas turbines anywhere near the grid. It is a terrible strategic choice besides the obvious ecological effect.

You are thinking of natural gas fueled turbines, you can also burn hydrogen in gas turbines. If that hydrogen was produced domestically via electrolysis using clean sources there isn’t any strategic issues.

Also, from a strategic perspective burning domestic natural gas and burning natural gas from a different country are very different things. Europe becoming dependent on Russian natural gas was stupid, but America burning it’s domestic natural gas is mostly just an environmental issue.

A fuel cell is a battery. It has the same fundamental efficiency as any other battery. Of course, this is not how it works in the real world, but people who cite "efficiency" are usually greatly exaggerating how it works. Most batteries cannot reach 95% efficiency, especially if they need to store energy for long periods of time. Round trip efficiency of hydrogen will beat any ICE doing the same thing, and with heat recapture will basically match a li-ion battery. In situations where li-ion is poorly suited, such as cold weather or long-term storage, hydrogen will often be more efficient.

How is 93% compression efficiency calculated?

Wait till you hear about the efficiency of petrochemicals...

"In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 65-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#:~:text=in....

Hydrocarbons would also be a bad alternative to batteries for grid energy storage.

Dispatchable energy sources already compete with grid storage, in fact they have been dominant for the last 100 years.

Sure, but producing 1kWh worth of petrol doesn't require 1kWh of energy. Producing 1kWh worth of hydrogen through electrolysis always requires more than 1kWh of energy, it's just pure physics. Even if the process was 100% efficient through magic, it's still a stupid thing to rely on for producing hydrogen.

> producing 1kWh worth of petrol doesn't require 1kWh of energy

… so long as you don’t count the 1kWh of photosynthesis that was done by a bunch of ancient plankton to rip CO2 molecules apart and build hydrocarbons instead.

Well yes, of course. But it's not energy that we have to spend now, unlike with hydrogen.

Digging the oil out of the ground and burning it very much 'spends' it.

I meant the energy that was originally used to create oil in the first place. You don't need to add any more, because oil, unlike hydrogen, already exists.

... for now.

Processing fossil fuels takes less energy than producing new ones? Shocked.

Yeah, the key to any practical use of hydrogen is a massive massive infrastructure buildout. Fundamentally, a hydrogen infrastructure is competing with the power grid, which has a century of investment and already exists.

It competes with battery technology/economics, which is in roughly a 10% year on year improvement curve, a curve that will have to flatten at some point but has been doing 10% for better than a decade and with 140 wh/kg sodium ion / 200 wh/kg LFP / emerging solid state + lithium sulfur techs will probably continue.

So if hydrogen is claiming:

- IF we resolve the research barriers and core engineering to a basic state - IF we invest billions/trillions in infrastructure - IF that is built in 10 years (which would be a miraculous human achievement)

... THEN we ... might ... in theory ... be price competitive with the current day grid + batteries.

OK, what about a world where batteries are half or a third of the cost in 10 years, which is what the long term trends suggest with year-on-year improvements?

All the nuclear and hydrogen stories are being hyped hard over the last couple years, because those behind those technologies aren't stupid and see the curves in alternative energy and storage and EVs: economic armageddon at an industry wide level for the nuclear, oil/gas, and others.

The coal industry was a preview for their industries. They know it's a losing battle, but like other fading industries, the execs hold on tooth and nail to get their bonuses/retirement/payouts. The organizations have real economic inertia, and investing in things that slow down the transition allows the companies to make more money longer.

At least the economics of wind/solar/batteries are working so strongly in favor of a transition. Otherwise write the requiem for the human race.

The power grid will never be able to compete with hydrogen (or other liquid fuels). The laws of physics simply aren't on the side of using the electric grid for fueling.

Imagine a truck stop where you can have 10-15 semi trucks filling up 300 gallon tanks every 5 minutes. We're talking megawatt-hours of energy to every roadside fuel station. And there are in excess of 10 million semi-trucks and over 40,000 truck stops in the USA. This isn't even getting into more demanding applications, like aviation, where the energy demands are an order of magnitude greater (The electrical equivalent of fueling a single Boeing 747 with 65,000 gallons of JET-A in under an hour is ludicrous)

Unless you build hundreds of nuclear reactors, invent superconducting power lines, come up with battery technology that's 100 years in the future, or tell everyone that the 21st century is cancelled, this is all impossible for the grid. At least on paper, hydrogen can solve this problem if we can figure out how to generate, store and transport it properly.

1) electric trucks are more efficient than ICE trucks, so cut your overall energy costs by 2/3 to 3/4.

2) beauty with electric drivetrains is that virtually ANY sort of power generation. If we're talking a bunch of recharge sites in the midwest, you'll power them with windmills/solar that are right next door. In the south and southwest, solar farms right next door. Or some hydroelectric. Or some geothermal. You don't need to rely on the grid for everything.

3) tractor trailers can use a swappable battery system easily. You already see it in action when you see UPS trucks pulling multiple trailers. You have a trailer that's a battery (or a generator if you can figure out carbon neutral generation or hydrogen in god knows when), but you DON'T need to fast-charge everything. So a tractor trailer pulls in, unhitches spent battery trailer, and hitches up and plugs in a pre-charged one. The trailer battery can also be shaped to function like an aerodynamic rear foil to increase the overall efficiency, and maybe even function as a stabilizing rear drive motor. Better battery tech comes in? You don't need to worry about replacing the batteries in the tractor, you just phase in and out the trailer batteries.

4) aviation will be on synthfuels for long-haul trips for the foreseeable future, even I will admit that. But short hop commuter flights will absolutely be electrified, the "fuel cost" savings will guarantee that, especially once carbon taxes finally are enacted.

We solved this problem a century ago for the railways. Build trolley-style wires over the interstates. Your vehicle is directly grid-powered while on the main roads, potentially even trickle-charging, and only needs to go battery for the last few miles.

This could also potentially increase order and predictability on the roads-- vehicles have to stay in lane and move only at designated turning points in order to maximize use of the grid supply. Autonomous vehicles could use the wires as an effective feeler to make sure they're staying on a defined road.

Yes, it technically doesn't fix aviation, but if we can avoid solving an already solved problem, maybe it frees up some better minds to look at that. TBH, I could imagine a lot of aviation being displaced by better high-speed rail options, hopefully getting to the point where it's less of a critical emissions concern.

https://www.flyingmag.com/atr-72-hydrogen-electric-demonstra...

Hydrogen is only 25% efficient so using hydrogen dramatically increases demand on the electric grid, we would need an extra 600 GW of production for hydrogen trucks over EV’s.

Anyway, for the numbers those 40,000 truck stops aren’t all filling up 15 semi trucks at a time. Also, a topical refueling stop takes 20-30 minutes.

A truck can generally travel around 2,100 miles on a full tank of gas. On average per day your looking at less than 500 kWh per truck. Gasoline contains more energy but engines are not very efficient and not every truck is traveling 11 hours at highway speed per day.

Call it ~500 kWh/24 hours and the average load is 21kW * 10 million trucks = 210 GW or roughly 6MW per truck stop, but electrified roads are far more efficient and remove the need for truck stops or excessive batteries.

Either way we are talking about is a lot of power but hydrogen makes this much much worse.

>The electrical equivalent of fueling a single Boeing 747 with 65,000 gallons of JET-A in under an hour is ludicrous

You're forgetting that internal combustion engines waste most of the energy in fuel as heat. Car/truck engines are about 35% efficient at the best. I'm not sure what it is for airplanes, but turbines are well-known to be horribly inefficient, much much worse than piston engines; they're only used in airplanes because the power-to-weight ratio is so much better.

Batteries don't have acceptable energy density for use in aircraft and transoceanic shipping. It's not that hydrogen is better than batteries for a sedan. It's that you'll never, ever fly across the Pacific in a battery powered airliner.

As if we'll ever have a transatlantic voyage in a craft held aloft by hydrogen

It's been built before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155 Ships have even less of an issue with storing hydrogen since mass is less of an issue (building lightweight enclosures for liquid hydrogen is a challenge).

I assume this is a joke as the LZ127 and Hindenburg made hundreds of trans Atlantic trips.

*With current battery technology

We have no idea what batteries may be possible in the future. It may be a decade or a hundred years, but one day that may very well be possible.

A battery powered plane is possible in the same vein that a fusion powered plane is possible - it's not at all possible with current technology and anything in the foreseeable future.

There are battery electric "regional commuter" two-seater planes on sale today. There's a 9-seater prototype that has completed short hop test flights [1]. Right now almost all of that is short-hop, but the excitement in that growing industry is that may disrupt the economics of even long range jet flights before long. (Not just "foreseeable future" but "sooner than you think".) (The efficiencies of battery electric for planes is apparently really interesting: that battery motor full torque access apparently a game changer for some types of flight dynamics. Or so I've heard.)

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/largest-electri...

> The aircraft flew at more than 100 mph to an altitude of around 2,500 feet, made a few turns and then landed after 28 minutes

This isn't going to disrupt any kind of airline traffic. Battery energy density needs to improve by at least an order of magnitude - probably two - before it has any significant aerospace application outside of drones.

Already practical for some applications but needing work to more, even possibly a lot of work, is still a vast difference from "never in the foreseeable future".

Regional planes that only travel 30 minutes to an hour and do so cheaper and more efficiently than gas/diesel equivalent planes can still massively disrupt the big passenger airlines. It used to be that the airlines had a wider mixture of 30 minute/1 hour flights on smaller commuter planes to smaller "regional" airports before the economies of scale of jet engines pushed everything bigger (fewer flights below 1 hour in distance; more "hub-and-spokes" centralization; etc). A return of cheap, efficient short 9 or so passenger commuter flights could massively disrupt today's passenger airlines and their logistics, not just tomorrow's.

If electric efficiencies also manage to scale to the bigger flights, who knows what will happen, but it is something to watch that there's already practical disruption implications even before scaling it up that big.

No, it's not practical for any application - at least none besides drones. A 737 has 150-200 seats, this would entail 17 separate 9-seater electric planes - each of which needs its own pilot - to substitute one regional jet. Ticket price would have to be extremely high just to fulfill the labor cost of operating the aircraft, because of this high staff to passenger ratio. There's also no mention of how long it took to recharge these batteries after the 30 minute flight - a plane that needs to sit for several hours to recharge between each 30 minute flight is not going to yield a return on investment.

Most short regional flights use tiny aircraft. ~9 seaters are surprisingly common in the island hopping industry.

Labor costs are a non issue because the flights are so short. 2 hours of labor from people making 90k split 9 ways is 10$.

And of course scaling up makes aircraft more efficient so you could get a slightly longer range from a 50 or 200 seat variant.

The reasonable target with current technology and fuel reserves seems to be about 300 miles, which covers a surprising fraction of all trips.

Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats. "Tiny" aircraft by airline standards are things like turboprop passenger craft [1]. A single digit number of seats is much more niche than regional flights. It's limited to island hopping and bush flying in remote areas - a much more limited market than regional flights. 2 hours of labor split 9 ways instead of 90 ways increases your labor cost by an order of magnitude. And again, it's unclear if that electric plane could even lift 9 passengers - it's just a plane with 9 seats, there was no mention as to whether or not the mass of passengers in those seats were simulated with a load.

Scaling up would make it more efficient, but batteries' limitations prevent larger planes. Hence, why more energy dense fuels are required.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATR_72

> Most regional airline flights are 50-100 seats.

Today because of fuel cost economics.

The earlier point remains that if that economics flips and rather than doing 3 hour-ish flights of 50-100 people between modest "hubs" you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades.

(In some cases you light them back up because earlier periods of passenger flight did have less hub-and-spoke/deep centralization and a lot more airports and airfields overall than are in operation today.)

I'm not sure it is going to happen, but I wouldn't underestimate the potential there either just because it doesn't look like the status quo. That's kind of the definition of "disruption".

> you had more opportunities to do shorter point-to-point (1 hour/30 minutes/less) you light up a lot of possible flight legs that current passenger flight has ignored for decades

And my point is that this isn't going to be remotely possible without order-of-magnitude improvements in battery technology. The economics of a 9 seater aircraft flying 30 minutes in what a car can cover in an hour is just terrible. Remember, that plane was flying slowly and didn't even climb over 2,500 feet. With no passenger load either, probably. The amount of energy it'd take to carry a load with passengers in a 30 to 1 hour flight at normal cruising speed is vastly greater than what is capable with batteries.

The existing lithium ion batteries are already approaching or exceeding 50%. Just like how there's only so much energy you can get out of a kilogram of gasoline, there's only so much energy you can store in a kilogram of a lithium battery (different chemistries like LiFePo have different thermodynamic limits, but they all have a hard physical limit). A battery powered plane would have to have a different battery chemistry, the thermodynamics of the best battery chemistry we know of is too constrained. "Pick a new chemistry" is way easier said than done. Why haven't we just picked a new combustible fuel chemistry that doesn't emit greenhouse gases?

And in a sense, you're right that battery powered planes are the future: hydrogen is that new battery chemistry. The energy density by mass and volume of compressed or liquid H2 is much greater than lithium batteries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File%3...

First you read the chart wrong the volumetric energy density of compressed hydrogen is lower, liquid hydrogen had it’s own set of huge problems. Volumetric issues are huge for aircraft as larger volume means more drag which reduces the utility of all that energy.

Anyway, your comparing hydrogen ignoring the loss factor of engines, and the weight of fuel tanks so the useful energy density is much lower. “High-pressure tanks weigh much more than the hydrogen they can hold. The hydrogen may be around 5.7% of the total mass,[19] giving just 6.8 MJ per kg total mass for the LHV” At an overly generous hypothetical engine efficiency of * 50% that’s ~= 3.4 MJ per kg.

New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries. Aluminum isn’t quite up to the hype, but it is very promising for aircraft.

> First you read the chart wrong the volumetric energy density of compressed hydrogen is lower,

No, you read the chart wrong: Hydrogen gas at atmospheric pressure - as in not compressed - has worse energy density by volume. Hydrogen at 700 bar has ~5x the energy per liter than lithium ion batteries at liquid hydrogen 10x. And all of these have energy densities by mass that are 100x better than lithium ion battery or more.

> New chemistry is hardly a dream there are a huge range of battery chemistries out there with many under active development that beat current lithium ion batteries.

Such as? You gave the example of aluminum, but as you point out they have problems that inhibit practical use: namely corrosion of electrolytes. The point remains: lithium ion is the best battery chemistry we've yet found and even it is far, far from up to the task of powering an aircraft.

Darth Vader voice: Your lack of vision is disturbing.

Why would a plane need a pilot at all? Make it fully autonomous and be done with it. Teslarize all the things! Harr! :-)

For transoceanic shipping, direct use of nuclear power is more efficient. It also enables higher speeds more consistently and increases operational flexibility. The main cost is increased capital expenses, which should pay for themselves due to reduced cost of operations, and increased crew costs, which should reduce as nuclear operations become a standard part of the training of mariners. There are also some issues around governance, but those are fairly malleable.

Modern aviation was born with fossil fuels, and it will die with fossil fuels. We should probably just start accepting it...

The efficiency argument is a huge canard for the applications for which hydrogen makes sense. The "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of charge-discharge cycles. For annual seasonal leveling, the cost is very small compared to diurnal storage.

Hydrogen critics also say "just overbuild the renewables instead". Apparently, dropping excess power on the floor giving an efficiency of its use of ZERO is to be preferred to making hydrogen with it at efficiency great than zero.

Being 25% efficient means you need massive surplus to offset any kind of seasonal deficits, but by building those massive surpluses you reduce those same seasonal deficits. On top of this you don’t want a grid that breaks down due to unusual weather or really any predictable issues so you want to build in excess production, and again that safety net further reduces seasonal deficits.

Hydrogen might work as a kind of black swan protection, but storing hydrogen for very long periods isn’t cheap or easy. Hydrogen embrittlement is a problem.

At best it might fit the edge case that current reserve natural gas power plants do. But, that’s such a tiny percentage of annual demand we could just use natural gas without significant global warming concerns. I am fine with a 99.95% green grid, at that point many other issues need to be addressed.

Storing hydrogen underground for long periods is actually shockingly cheap. It's the same technology used for storing natural gas underground. The cost is as little as $1/kWh of storage capacity. This is already proven technology, so no whining about embrittlement please.

Yes, it fits edge cases -- but it has an outsized effect on the cost of a 100% renewable grid. Trying to cover black swan events with batteries or overprovisioning would be much more expensive. Optimizing baseload output in Germany using historical weather data and 2030 estimated cost figures for PV, wind, batteries and hydrogen, including hydrogen cuts the cost of the system in half.

PV, wind, batteries and hydrogen ignores hydroelectric generation making such numbers pure fantasy. Of there where any need to do so we can use them for seasonal storage simply by not using them when doing so is unnecessary.

I don't think hydro can displace hydrogen for these applications. In particular, I don't think hydro has enough energy storage capacity to provide seasonal load leveling in many places.

Talking here about stationary storage only (not transportation, for which I agree that hydrogen is a stupid idea.):

Isn’t efficiency kind of irrelevant when the energy you are storing - i.e. that of the sun - is essentially free?

You would need to do a comparison across many different strategies. For instance, compare against the cost of energy per kilowatt hour in winter from fossil fuels (ideally also factoring in the costs to the environment). And compare against solar energy, collected in summer, stored using different mediums.

Against batteries, hydrogen, in spite of all the conversions and the compression needed, would be dirt cheap.

Nothing is free, still need significant infrastructure to produce hydrogen at scale. It’s not like hydrogen is the only thing that wants cheap electricity and building infrastructure that’s very rarely used get’s expensive in the same way batteries sitting around for most of the year unused is expensive, so let’s assuming you can capture 1/2 of a surplus.

If the surplus is 24% for 3 months and you can capture 1/8th of it that’s only 3% for 3 months which is quite a bit of energy but is only useful if the deficit is actually 3% and nobody want’s to build a grid that close to failure simply because weather can make a larger difference than 3%. Which means you don’t get to used your equipment to generate electricity every year.

Don’t get me wrong hydrogen works in preparation for black swan events, but seasonal demand is much better dealt with by saving hydroelectric power for much of the year.

The solution to the PV problem is wind power. Wind generally blows more during the night and winter. That’s much cheaper and more efficient than generating and storing hydrogen and then turning it into electricity again.

No it isn't the solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

You need something else for those hours/days/week(s).

This isn't a good argument to be honest. Sure, it won't save the climate, this is a problem of energy generation. We will always need more than yesterday so we need to look at how we can generate it.

The main disadvantage of hydrogen is that it is very difficult to store. It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything. The efficiencies of energy conversion of hydrogen are quite good for that matter.

But BEV (how the author calls them) have major disadvantages as well. Infrastructure needs are unfulfilled, the recycling is maintenance intensive, ...

It is still more environmental friendly to drive that 10 year old used tincan than to buy a new electric car. Advantage here is that you don't have local polution, much cleaner city air etc.

But neither hydrogen cars nor BEV will save the climate.

> Infrastructure needs are unfulfilled

But infrastructure is currently being built out for that. There are very few places in the US (lower 48) that you can't drive a BEV to and back. For some of the remote ones you will need to plan your route around chargers, but you can get just about anywhere. For more dense areas you can just wait until your battery is getting low to start looking. It isn't like gas where you can wait until you are "running on fumes" before starting to look for a charger, but it isn't a big deal.

Hydrogen is far behind - maybe it will be built, maybe it won't, I won't predict the future. What I can tell you is if you buy a hydrogen car today you will have to buy the place to fill it at the same time, and you have to assume you will never go out of range.

Hydrogen also has a lot of problems that make it expensive for car use. But the real problem electric cars have to beat is battery and resource life cycle. You can charge your car now but think about how it would look like if even 30-40% of people would need to charge at the same places.

Problem is there is very little incentive for anyone to invest in energy infrastructure. That is a problem affecting EVs, but also a problem that needs to be solved anyway.

> It is still more environmental friendly to drive that 10 year old used tincan than to buy a new electric car.

No it isn't, what do you base this on? Production of a new electric van takes a limited amount of CO2, and the CO2 saved while driving it compensates for that within a couple of years. I don't know how this rumor still persists.

I'm interested in this calculation. Do you know of some data to support it?

Interactive web app that calculates this for various vehicles.

https://www.carboncounter.com/#!/explore

Note the customisation options that let you choose a state for the electricity mix, miles driven per year and so on.

I would go so far as to say it's a sunk cost fallacy to run the old carbon emitting car even one more mile.

There is no savings to be had by waiting to convert to an EV, the total emissions are always going to be higher if you drive the polluting car rather than switching today.

That’s demonstrably false. Each EV is an immediate ~13k kg hit on CO2. Average ICE passenger car is .4 kg CO2 per mile. Even if you have a source of zero carbon energy to power the EV, that’s 32500 miles of driving an ICE before you break even on CO2.

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

Note the "choose a state" and compare Wyoming or West Virginia for a regular hybrid car (e.g. Prius or Insight) to an EV... and that is quite different than if you pull up California, Oregon, or Washington.

In WY and WV, the plugin hybrids have a larger carbon footprint than a regular ICE hybrid car (Prius or Insight).

So every car that does more than 32500 comes out ahead, which is basically all of them.

Youd need to commit to keeping the car for over a decade while only doing 3000 miles per year, then blowing it up out of spite to fail that.

Only if the electricity is net zero carbon though (and, really, only if the generation of that low-carbon electricity somehow is related to driving the car and wouldn't have been generated anyway).

Right, if you live in West Virginia, it is entirely possible to never have a break even point, as in, it will never save CO2 to buy an EV.

You could always move somewhere energy generation isn't so dirty especially as its probably also effecting your air quality not to speak of the employment options.

According to the Energy Dept site listed upthread, even in WV with 92% coal generation an EV emits half the CO2 per mile as an ICE.

You really have to consider all the variables, ie grid carbon intensity, miles driven and car manufacturing. People seem to get focused on one of the variables in the carbon lifecycle.

Why does it have to be net zero? That would certainly get you to breakeven in less miles but it is by no means a requirement for an EV having a carbon advantage over an ICE.

Is it ahead really?

The total carbon is still gonna be higher than not doing all that travel

If you can actually avoid the travel, sure.

I have been able to avoid travelling by car[0], but I have the luck of being in a city with good public transport and local-sized shops, so there are 5 tram stops (and several bus stops and a suburban rail station) and 8 supermarkets closer to me than the gap between the middles of Apple's south car park and their duck pond.

And back in Cambridgeshire, roads were quiet enough I was comfortable commuting (and shopping) by bike.

Not everyone is in such a well-designed place.

[0] I don't own a car, and the last time I was behind a wheel was, I think, 2017.

such comparsions are mostly stupid, since there are too many factors that would make it really hard to analyze. i.e. as long as cars are produced the 13k kg hit on co2 will be made no matter if you buy it or not, your old ice car will probably be resold and probably to somebody that can than save co2 emissions per mile, not every electricity is green, your old card was probably produced with more co2, it depends if you upgrade/downgrade/keep your car class, it depends how you drive (and if you ever driven an ev, you will see that its easier to drive it economically), and so on.

of course the plain numbers might make sense on paper but not on the real world.

It depends how much running around you do and how much CO2 the energy mix where you live generates. For someone doing a few thousand miles per year it could easily be the case that a new car would never pay off the additional CO2 emissions during it's manufacturer.

Of course you can then make argument that they aren't doing enough mileage to justify having their own car in the first place.

I drive maybe 1500 miles per year and if I calculate in petrol usage for the next 10 years where a car wasn't produced for me, it will use less CO2 overall.

Since I live where the electric grid is already at the limit, my options to install a charger are limited as well. I could use 230V 16A to maybe charge it very slowly...

Batteries also degrade with age and we will have to see how a used car market will look like. I have a car for luxury only since my work is a few hundred meters away.

If you buy a new car anyway, an EV would be a good choice provided you have the means to charge it. Many people in the cities don't have that option. But it wouldn't be too helpful if you replace your current car just for the sake of it.

1500 miles a year is a huge caveat to your earlier prouncement. Of course if you drive rarely^, an existing ICE vehicle could result in less emissions than building an entirely new EV.

^Average annual KMs driven by Europeans is 12k, Americans average 15k Miles a year.

https://short-fact.com/how-many-miles-does-the-average-europ...

You can't simultaneously posit that you drive 1500 miles a year, and then complain about the charging speed. 1500 miles a year doesn't need 230V 16A. You would achieve the level of charging speed literally with a laptop charger.

200Wh/Mi -> 200 * 1500 -> 300,000Wh required -> 300,000 / 365 * 24 -> 35W charger needed.

> The main disadvantage of hydrogen is that it is very difficult to store.

> It is the smallest element and simply diffuses through almost everything.

The people currently most serious about the immediate expansion of green hydrogen supplies (by a significant factor over current global production) are not looking at storing hydrogen for export | transport | storage, they're looking at ammonia - three hydrogen and a nitrogen.

eg:

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/forrest-promises-to-convert-firs...

Yeah, I guess it will probably end in it being stored in some compound that can be directly used. Looks like a promising project.

Once again, I think the hydrogen ladder [0] gives a very clear and simple picture of where priorities with regard to hydrogen are.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...

I came here to pose that same thing.

Hydrogen in the creation of fertilizer? An absolute necessity, we need a good source of green hydrogen to run the Haber-Bosch process.

Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it.

Hydrogen for long-haul trucking? Maybe, maybe not.

The problem with that image is it gives no reasoning for its categorization. Putting the use cases on a specific energy and energy density plot would convey that more naturally.

Fair point. He does describe his reasoning within the accompanying article though.

> Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it.

Liebreich has that as a B in the Hydrogen Ladder (for long-term storage).

> Hydrogen production for grid power storage? Absolutely terrible idea, don't even think about it.

For DIURNAL storage, certainly. For seasonal storage? For backup against rare extended dark/calm periods? There it can make much more sense.

> Off-road vehicles

I don't understand why this is under B while cars are under G. Is that not a type of car? Or are we talking building sized mining dumptrucks?

He explains what those mean.

It's vehicles specialized on site-diverse way out of the city activities, like forest management and mining.

Well, I personally disagree on mining, but yes, those exist, and it's very likely they will not be electric.

Mining is actually planning on switching to electric. Mines often have underground areas where air at all is a problem, so running an engine requires extra ventilation and air quality control. Mines tend to cover limited areas, so it is feasible to have wires (either like a train where a phantograph, or drag the wire). Much of the equipment is semi-permanent so you can run fixed wires. The rest tends to run a fixed route so battery swap can be done often on schedule.

Not all mines operate in that way, but a significant number do. And of course nobody said that they had to switch 100%, some equipment can switch where it makes sense while others remain diesel.

That comes from a person named Michael Liebreich who is a British conservative politician that also founded Bloomberg's New Energy Finance. I listen to his podcast where he interviews people in the industry. He also has a nuclear physics background. In other word, he knows a thing or two about both the science and economics in this space; very well informed person.

He's been very critical of the mindless arguing for a hydrogen economy making the point that there are a few very fundamental issues with hydrogen in terms of cost and physics (e.g. second law of thermo dynamics) that you can't just wave away that people tend to gloss over.

Not that he's against hydrogen per se. It's just that burning it is a pretty dumb idea from a cost and efficiency point of view.

Here's another group saying much the same thing in a different way:

https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/

H2 Science Coalition is a good source of information on where and how hydrogen makes sense as part of net zero goals:

https://h2sciencecoalition.com/principles/

Green Hydrogen is just about to take off, and make lots of money and headlines, so it'll be important to not let that success be hijacked and diverted into areas where it's not helpful.

Not a very useful article, and it's weak on technical details.

Hydrogen is a poor storage medium for energy for numerous reasons, such as steel embrittlement (it requires expensive special alloys for storage or transport under pressure).

Hence, hydrogen-from-water is applicable where it can be generated and used immediately. There are three obvious industrial applications in cleantech:

Ammonia production for fertilizer using atmospheric N2.

Direct iron reduction for steel production, i.e. reduction of iron ore.

Methane and jet fuel production utilizing atmospheric CO2 as the carbon source.

In particular, steam reformation of natural gas to produce hydrogen should be eliminated as a hydrogen source, as the fossil CO2 produced is then released to the atmosphere.

Is this Toyota Mirai (hyped)? https://www.toyota.com/mirai/, I mean it's a production car for sale today.

Same for these hyrdogen powered trains in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p...

Both those things are in production, so is hydrogen really hyped? Just beginning ?

Edit: How does this car get around "the storage problem" of Hydrogen?

Hydrogen has potential to be better than BEV. Do you know how much money went to BEV and it might be written away if hydrogen fuel cells turns out to be viable?

Better make some negative PR towards hydrogen.

So hydrogen isn't popular in cars because of some conspiracy theory, and not the blatantly obvious fact that it takes much more electricity to separate hydrogen from water, super-cool that hydrogen for transport, and turn that hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell, than to just transmit the electricity to a battery.

Does it need to be a conspiracy theory though ? I don’t think it’s required.

I mean smoking is bad for people, smoking is good ads happened but it want a conspiracy ?

No conspiracy, hydrogen is slowly getting acceptance because people can't charge their BEVs at home (50% of people in EU lives in apartments) and does not want to wait hours in a queue for public DC chargers.

Simply hydrogen will more expensive, but convenient. And people LOVES to pay for convenience. Just look at Apple.

The easier solution for this is PV roofs for cars. People living apartments also have lower mobility needs.

People in apartments often live in places where there isn't a lot of sun.

Apartment >= 2 Floors, Building >= 2 Floors creates shade.

Hydrogen production is a way for excess electricity from nuclear power to be stored. Is it the best way? In some circumstances it may be.

At the consumer level, when I read about the dangers of lithium batteries catching fire, hydrogen sounds like a better option especially if a vehicle is design to disperse the hydrogen away from the passengers when an accident occurs. Some vehicles have you riding on the lithium battery pack.

Now add tunnels to the mix and consider a lithium battery fire in a tunnel with toxic fumes and the need to add 24 times the amount of water used to put out a ICE fire.

I think hydrogen vehicles are impractical.

In my area hydrogen fuel is ~ $20/kg, and 1 kg ~ 1 gallon of gas. The high pressure hydrogen tanks are bulky, expensive and have a lifetime.

I think a comparison to CNG is in order.

For a long time there was a push for Compressed Natural Gas vehicles, and many were made. There were ford pickup trucks and police cars, honda had a CNG accord. CNG is 1 carbon and 4 hydrogen - CH4. With a little fiddling, it can be used directly in a gasoline engine. You still need a catalytic converter because the high temperature combustion creates smog (NO)

Natural gas was more widely available (it comes out of the ground), and costs were usually less or at worst similar to gasoline.

The vehicles had storage tanks ~ 3000 psi (much lower than hydrogen). They were bulky and usually took up the entire trunk of a vehicle. The tanks also have a lifetime.

They kind of worked, but just the same, they needed subsidies to survive. Now they are basically all gone.

EV batteries are very safe. Yes there are incidents, but there's fewer as automakers learn to make safer packs.

We had a fire in a big parking garage here in Norway. Already many EVs here and not a single battery pack caught fire even though the car interiors burned. Our fire departments probably have the most experience with EVs anywhere in the world, and they consider them generally safe and not hard to deal with when trained for it.

Funny you should mention tunnels, it was recently found that millions could be saved on ventilation on a future tunnel project because there's such a high share of EVs now. There's a tunnel nearby that's very often closed because there's a steep grade and there's always some ICE truck that overheats and catches fire. With EVs that won't be an issue.

Meanwhile, a hydrogen station blew up just a few km from my house. Incredibly loud explosion. Yeah, I think hydrogen cars and stations can be made safe with engineering. Just like Li-ion. But it is fundamentally unsafe. It easily leaks through fittings if they aren't tightened with just the right torque. And when you get the right hydrogen/oxygen mixture it borderline self-ignites.

Many cars are moving to LiFePo as it's cheaper and good enough for most. It's much safer still. Solid state batteries will also be perfectly safe.

Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?

Converting a car to also run on natural gas costs a few hundred dollars in South America / Europe but after that the benefits are:

- x2 cheaper travel expenses

- less harmful emissions

Since the US is rich in natural gas wouldn't it have been more environmentally conscious to convert the hundreds of millions of petrol cars to also run on natural gas instead of digging up tons of minerals for brand-new electric cars?

natural gas emissions are not less harmful

but they are less. You can half the co2 emissions with very little investment. However, this cannot be ultimate solution and is probably too little too late.

Can you explain your reasoning? There are a number of reasons that natural gas emissions (after burning) are less harmful. Not least that there is a higher proportion of hydrogen so for a given energy output there are less carbon dioxide emissions.

Methane emissions from incomplete burning, and also from upstream.

Methane emissions are an issue with basically all uses of gas that has been underestimated in the past and only in recent years it's more widely recognized how problematic that is. A lot of the "gas is greener than X" messaging from the past is simply no longer true if you consider methane emissions.

Methane emissions from oil extraction aren't negligible either so it depends on your point of reference. It's almost certainly better to burn methane in a power plant and use BEVs where possible but that's a long way from possible in heavy goods vehicles for example (they will need batteries measured in MWh for a start).

There are also many dimensions to emissions, global warming potential is important but from a personal point of view I worry more about the impact on my children's health from the other emissions like particulates, NOx and aromatic hydrocarbons.

Not true, there's way less NOX and particulates, all the stuff that's bad for people in urban environments.

There are a number of issues:

- First of all, there is no natural gas fuel standard

- Safety, there are no safety standards. If there were, tanks often used in other places, such an upgraded would be more expensive

- Rolling out refueling over the whole of the US/Europe would be difficult. Most places in Europe don't have these cars.

A better and safer alternative to natural gas would be methanol. And because of the US ethanol policy, the US already has a surprising amount of Flex Fuel Vehicles.

If you could have a bunch of fuel standards for ethanol/methanol and a vehicle standard for those fuels, depending on the price, people could buy different mixes.

Converting gas to methanol is fairly efficient and can be done directly at gas production sites, sometimes with gas that would be vented instead. But there isn't a big market for methanol right now.

In China such standards do exist M20 and so on. However sadly there methanol vehicles usually use methanol made by coal.

The US would have had much lower fuel cost if they had a strategy of methanol and ethanol at the same time, and require all vehicle to be FFV. Standardizing M20/E20, M50/E50 fuels for example.

However all of this is now no longer very useful as car market is rapidly switching to electric.

For some trucks using generated fuel might be useful. Dimethyl ether would be great for long range trucks and ships rather then hydrogen.

> Could someone explain to me why cars running on natural gas aren't popular in the US like they are in South America / Europe?

There are many fleets which use natural gas. Municipal buses, city garbage trucks, etc. There, they only need to build up one (private) CNG refueling station in the city.

With a passenger car, you need to plan your trip to find public CNG fueling stations along the route where you need them.

The boom in natural gas production is a recent occurrence. Go back a couple decades and natural gas was far more expensive. Back then, propane was the obvious alternative to gasoline for vehicles, until the price for propane spiked and natural gas fell.

But more importantly, CNG is only a half-step forward, still leaving us dependent on a single fossil fuel. Battery electric vehicles are far more practical thanks to being easy to (slow-)charge almost anywhere, getting us off of fossil fuels entirely, reducing mechanical complexity/maintenance, and being far more efficient (burning the same amount of natural gas in a power plant to charge your BEV will give you far more range than burning it in your converted car engine).

On lose power and internal space on the conversion.

The US car market does not seem very concerned with economical ROI, so any argument based on costs is useless. The emissions part seems to hold for some people, but electric cars already won here.

Even here on South America gas is getting out of fashion, replaced by electricity. The costs are still high enough that there is a large market remaining, but it is constantly decreasing.

There are not enough places to fill a natural gas car. I know of a few, if you buy a natural gas car you plan all trips around filling up - and a lot of trips you have to reject.

For every public natural gas pump I know of, I know of 50 public EV chargers. Plus in the worst case you can plug an EV into a regular outlet (overnight you can get enough range to get someplace with a faster charger).

I'm no expert but I think when cars are converted, they can run on both natural gas and on gasoline. Gasoline is used to start the car. Wouldn't that solve the range issue?

Obvious problem in USA is availability of natural gas at gas stations, but that is a chicken and an egg problem - would be solved with more demand.

You would need several scientific breakthroughs to make hydrogen economically viable for transportation. It's expensive to generate, it embrittles storage containers, is highly flammable, and there's no existing infrastructure that you can piggy back off of. Right now it is a dead end.

Only 8500 coal power plants in the world producing 20% of emissions. No miracles needed to replace them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station

Replacing a billion gasoline cars is going to take decades

We should start by not making new gasoline cars, or new coal power stations

Electric cars aren’t ready. And absolutely everyone knows that, so why are we bringing it up?

We could’ve replaced coal plants two decades ago, however, and reduced emissions by 20% globally

> Electric cars aren’t ready

The scaling problems facing battery electrics are dwarfed by those facing hydrogen. They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China.

>They’re also being aggressively solved in America, the EU and China.

Challenge. Where and how are these problems being addressed, other than hoping that people voluntary reduce demand when asked?

Not sure what we are talking about.

There are an absolute shit ton of battery factories being build. A huge ramp up in science and research.

There is also a huge ramp up in cathode and anode production facilities.

All major lithium companies have announced major build out of existing facilities and building new once as well.

A major expansion of both natural and synthetic graphite is being done.

Cobalt is not expanding as quickly but its getting systematically kicked out from the batteries anyway.

In addition to that, LFP batteries reduced the projected demand for nickel from batteries.

In addition to that CATL is introducing Sodium batteries as well.

So maybe you were not paying attention but there is a gigantic explosion in every part of the battery supply chain happening right now. With major private and public investment. There will still be some shortages of important materials, specially lithium however its certainty being worked on.

Of course there are also improvements in safety, reliability and so on. A huge amount of research and development.

The gating factor for the scaling issue isn't the battery production (mining externalities notwithstanding), but the infrastructure to support them.

Wave your magic wand to will everyone a Tesla, and watch the grid collapse the same instant.

The grid has plenty of spare room in the evening "bath tub" (daytime peak is very different from nighttime peak). If you wave that magic wand and everyone has a Tesla today and everyone charges at wall outlet at off-peak times, the grid wouldn't hardly notice.

The grid operators are not stupid, they are also building generation to handle this.

While it remains to be seen if they build enough, they are planning for EVs. Where local laws allow it anyway. They see big $$$ from EVs replacing gas, and they want that money.

Yeah but nobody is waving a magic won, as production of EV will go up, ways in the network would be found to handle this.

Many studies have been done and this and every study I have seen agrees that its not as big of a problem as many make it out to be.

In fact, I assume infrastructure for charging for EV owners without a home is the much larger infrastructure challenge.

Electric cars are ready for gasoline car use cases, leaving 5-10% or so where EV is not ready. (the places where electric cars ready are not are places where diesel is better than gasoline, though some people do use gasoline anyway). Currently EVs are in the phase of scaling production, but that will take a bit of time.

> We could’ve replaced coal plants two decades ago, however, and reduced emissions by 20% globally

What we would have replaced coal with 20 years ago (and in fact what we did starting more than 20 years ago) is mostly natural gas, which itself pollutes, just less. (depending on what pollution you measure you will get different numbers for how much less) Wind and solar is coming along fast, and is also replacing coal plants (for nearly zero pollution) but we are already scaling those as fast as possible so to claim we could have done more 20 years ago is false.

Electric cars aren’t ready. And absolutely everyone knows that, so why are we bringing it up?

I have been driving an electric car for 4 years, and it serves my needs beautifully. So, no, I strongly disagree. Electric cars are ready for most use cases and many people agree.

how much did you pay for that electric car? They aren’t comparable in price.

It’s weird how we have to have these silly discussions where people must know that they’re obviously wrong before commenting.

Replacing 1.3 billion cars is going to take decades.

The average car lasts about 12 years. Sure some collectors cars will be kept running for decades, but it will take about less than 2 decades to replace essentially all cars if we only made EVs. Only selling EVs is the law set to take effect in a few years.

I'm sure that the law will be rolled back a little when one of the 5-10% usecases where EVs don't work screams loud enough (probably shipping and remote areas), but it will become hard to find fuel for your gas car in a couple decades.

Yes, in the year 2035 the internal combustion engine no longer be sold. Unless we have to push back a few years.

That gets us to around 2050.

27 years from now.

To get to 100% EV usage, yes. In the US, we're already at 5.5% sales of all cars are BEVs, up from a year ago at 3.1%, up from 1% two years ago. In just 5 years a sizable portion of American cars will be BEV, which will create demand for charging and grid usage, which will accelerate the shift. In markets with lots of Tesla adoption, there's already a robust used Tesla market.

I bought it used; the car is ~10 years old, now (still works great and has a much higher resale value than your typical 10 year old car). I have never bought a new car in my life, so I am not really in a position to comment on relative prices of new cars, but they seem quite similar to me, keeping in mind that the electric car manufacturers seem to have been targeting a slightly up-market demographic in general. You also need to consider that electric cars are much cheaper to run than an equivalent petrol car.

It’s weird how we have to have these silly discussions where people must know that they’re obviously wrong before commenting.

I agree . . . oh wait, you think I'm the one who is wrong. How bizarre.

Oh no, don't tell my electric car that's 10 years old

It won't be for long.

Remember, TSMC do chip lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin metal. The metal releases a wavelength of light that is then able to etc ultra precise lines on wafers for chips. That technology really didn't exist anywhere 40 years ago.

In many ways the plumbing problems of hydrogen are lower bars to get over. And worrying about a lack of infrastructure is also not a big issue. There's lots of engineer's who'll easily transition out of the LNG industry into great jobs working on these problems.

> lithography with a light source that is generated by firing a laser at in flight drips of molten tin

What does EUV lithography have to do with hydrogen’s generation expense, embrittlement of metals, flammability and lack of infrastructure?

Those are all engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money. I was pointing out that it's pretty common that those types of problems get solved when there's a will. the tide is turning, there's active research into everything you've listed. I'd bet on these problems getting solved.

> engineering challenges that are broadly constrained by money

You’re comparing semiconductor manufacturing, a domain so concentrated one firm (ASML) produces the world’s cutting-edge instrumentation, and so quick-moving our modern paradigms for growth (Moore’s law to venture capital) emerge from it, to building an international piping and shipping system for a novel fuel that speculatively competes with batteries. Nobody is asking if, given infinite time and resources, these problems could be solved. It’s whether the solution would be competitive with what we have. Unfortunately, this blind optimism is baseline for I’ve seen for hydrogen.

Not all problems are solvable. I don't know enough about physics/chemistry to know if the problem is solvable, but I do know there are other unsolvable problems. (faster than light travel is a common one that people think more engineering can solve)

I'm sure people are working on the problem, but the laws of physics limit them.

When something is hyped like fusion for 40 years plus and does not see the light of day, the problems that constrain it, be hard and fruitful.

The problem that constraints fusion is investment capital. You can't expect results while resting below the "fusion never" track: https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

No, actually what constrains (DT) fusion is that even if a reactor is produced, no one will want it.

http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou...

The chemical reactivity problems of hydrogen are unsolvable in a competitive fashion with other types of energy transport.

The world produces 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen every year. I assure you there are materials compatible with hydrogen, or else this would not be possible.

Hydrogen is not really an engineering problem, its an investment problem. And its simply put a gigantic amount investment for a minimal amount of gain.

There are so many, way, way, way more useful investments you can make. How about doing useful simple things that we are sure can be done successfully and we know for sure will save a lot of CO2 and emission.

Stuff like railway electrification.

If you want to have long range trucks be a thing, electrify the highway with trolley wires.

Hydrogen trains have already shown that they can't compete with electrification traditional or with battery. In trucks they are currently getting their ass kicked by battery trucks. So neither for trucks nor for trains does hydrogen really make much sense.

So why exactly should we invest in a gigantic hydrogen infrastructure. For the maybe 1% market share in trains and trucks?

And its not actually easy to reuse LNG infrastructure.

> And worrying about a lack of infrastructure is also not a big issue.

This is disproved by literally 5000 years of human history where huge infrastructure investments are always a big political problem. And even if projects are clearly of huge benefits they are difficult.

In terms of hydrogen infrastructure, nobody can make a case that it is actually worth it in the first place.

> There's lots of engineer's who'll easily transition out of the LNG industry into great jobs working on these problems.

Or we could make those engineers work on useful stuff like batteries, railway electrification, nuclear, metros and so on.

> Hydrogen is not really an engineering problem, its an investment problem.

The problems stated by the OP are mostly maintenance problems. What is even worse, because you don't just pay once and they go away; you have to keep paying and they will come back if you ever lose focus on handling them.

Railway electrification in the US is a political problem. US freight rail has tiny margins and relies on quantity for profits. Freight rail regularly delays maintenance and upgrades until unavoidable for cost reasons. The US gov't is loathe to make American rail less competitive and force it to electrify, so they continue running polluting trains.

Us freight does not have tiny margin, they pay a large dividends and have spent 100s of millions in stock by back.

> Freight rail regularly delays maintenance and upgrades until unavoidable for cost reasons.

They are gradually running down the infrastructure built 100 years ago into the ground and maintain at the bare minimum while making large profits.

> The US gov't is loathe to make American rail less competitive and force it to electrify, so they continue running polluting trains.

Electrification would make it even more profitable then it already is.

Pretty much every single study done on electrification shows that it pays for itself in a pretty reasonable amount of time. Given that this is something that would still be useful 100 years from now, the US government forcing all first class to invest in this would be of huge benefits both to them and to the US as a whole.

It's absolutely essential to deal with renewables' intermittency.

Of course this wouldn't be a thing if people wisened up and built nuclear plant instead of wasting it on feel-good project with less than 20% of actual capacity (solar in Germany ... lol).

It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen. Store it in a container and let it expand later and you can turn a turbine. There's no issue from an environmental standpoint since you are converting air to air. You can build a cryobattery literally anywhere on earth with off the shelf components.

> It's more efficient to cool and liquify air than to generate hydrogen.

I dispute this claim.

You're assuming that compressing and decompressing air can be done at greater efficiency. That's not that obvious, considering for example that compressing air generates heat that is always lost in the process.

We will need many scientific breakthroughs for battery to be viable for non-personal transportation. Then there’s industry, construction, agriculture, etc. These areas of the economy are responsible for about 50% of emissions. We need hydrogen. Not for cars, but for everything else.

"Not for cars, but for everything else." While I agree with you there are some usages where it does make sense and shouldn't be neglected, it is also worth noticing that the current consensus on Metaculus is an estimate of 6% market shares for those usages in 2030: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/552/fcevs-vs-bevs-what-p...

[Edit] consensus established in February 2020

The only thing we need hydrogen for is for chemical industry. And that is enough demand already for hydrogen production plans.

Beyond that you don't need it. Not needed for the waste majority of the things you suggest.

And often there are better solution then using hydrogen directly. For remote construction sites, just turn your hydrogen into anther syn fuel like methanol and run a conventional generator to power electric construction methods.

Hydrogen will be a niche use-case in all the areas you mentioned. And there are so many more important things to do.

For example, for construction, electrified railroads transporting all that gravel around rather then diesel.

Sustainable transportation is not about which fuel is greener. It's about replacing private with public transportation options as much as possible e.g. planning urban areas prioritizing public transit systems and discouraging private transportation

That would be nice, but in the US the people leading public transit don't care about good transit. I know they have limited budgets, but they do too many bad and over prices projects to assume anything else.

Yes as is slowly happening in many urban areas throughout the world. Unfortunately, unlike Europe, the US has spent the last 100 years remaking the American urban fabric for the car. It'll take time and lots of capital to change cultural attitudes in the US to make car driving more acceptable. People continue driving in slowly increasing amounts even in well-planned countries like the Netherlands. In the meantime, pushing existing car uses into lower-emitting forms is key. This isn't an either/or.

So what's going on here:

Hydrogen Powered Train in Germany: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hydrogen-powered-p...

and here:

Hydrogen Powered Toyota: https://www.toyota.com/mirai/

Malinvestment

You don't need to use it directly for it to play an important role. If you have the green hydrogen you can convert it to methane or ammonia, which have less issues in storage and transport. Methane is already widely used for bus transportation, although extracting CO2 from the air efficiently enough to create methane from the hydrogen is its own issue.

You can try to be as rational and logical, but in the end, it's not going to matter. The problem is hydrogen as a fuel is marketable, so it's going to be very overhyped because it's going to make a lot of money for investors. You only have to look at what happened with cryptocurrencies to get an idea of what's coming, maybe not as extreme, but no doubt it's going to happen. Furthermore, with the tech industry entering a recession with mass layoffs, investors are looking for their next target, which appears to be green and renewable energy technologies. This is even more true thank to the many government grants and tax breaks for renewable energy.

So sit back and enjoy the s%$#show while startups and entrepreneurs pitch the most ridiculous applications for hydrogen fuel and get flooded with billions of dollars.

The only advantage of hydrogen is that contrary to electricity, you can't easily produce and store it by yourself, and thus is more easily taxable. Also, because all the infrastructure need to be created from scratch, there is no big player yet and there is potential to make a lot of money.

It also has higher energy density. Which is important for some applications.

Indeed, it's the only viable electrification path for aviation.

Short haul connector flights can be electric.

I'm sure they're viable with limitations, but my understanding is that the weight of the batteries would make those not too practical in general.

That's why they are only practical for short haul connector flights. Longer flights are not practical.

Hydrogen is so incredibly easy to make yourself that I bet the ancient Greeks managed it by accident without knowing what they'd done.

This is in part because the actual scientific production of it via electrolysis predates batteries and dynamos, and instead involved generating electricity by rubbing things together, and the ancient Greeks doing this is why electricity is named after their word for amber.

Personally, I made it myself at single-digit-years-old with a battery, some wire, two pencils, two jam jars, and two yoghurt pots to stand the jam jars on.

Making hydrogen storage systems might not be a DIY option, but making the stuff itself certainly is.

I know, but your are not going to produce significant amount of hydrogen to do anything, and it will not be practical nor efficient anytime soon.

The only single reason that I won't "produce significant amount of hydrogen to do anything" is because I don't need to.

It's already available in convenient and practical forms for people who do have a use for the stuff, and production is sufficiently efficient for it to not be an obviously bad idea for energy storage.

A lot of the infrastructure isn't there, but there for sure are big players - most of currently available hydrogen is made as natural gas and oil byproduct, so oil and gas companies have a lot of it.

Selling hydrogen as green is a way for them to stay relevant.

The editorial seemingly misses some other issues with hydrogen production. Other issues I've seen are:

- Water availability for hydrogen production: a recent article I saw was "Green hydrogen revolution risks dying of thirst" https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/green-hydrogen-revolut... - touches on water availability in South Australia, and areas depending on desalination

- Energy availability for hydrogen production: Recently heard Europe would still have to import hydrogen ( e.g. Germany would have to import 70% of hydrogen ) : https://youtu.be/9Y6BvCVKC_E?t=2063 - The Great Simplification interview between Nate Hagens & Sebastian Heitmann

Water availability is a red herring IMO.

Desalination is expensive, but even desalinated water would add very little to the cost of green hydrogen.

A high-end cost estimate for desalinated water is about $1.50 per kiloliter / metric ton. There's about 111 kilograms of hydrogen in a metric ton of water.

Even assuming only 50% of that ends up as saleable hydrogen, you're still talking less than 3c of desalination cost for every kg of hydrogen you produce. The other thing to keep in mind here is that hydrogen production occur only at places and at times where energy is very cheap, so the energy inputs to the desal plant should also be very cheap, pushing down the cost of desalination.

1) The energy cost of the desalination would have to be added to the energy budget of the hydrogen production.

2) The atomic weight ratio of oxygen to hydrogen is something like 16 to 1, even with H2 and O1 you end up with a ratio of 8 to 1, so about 100g hydrogen in weight per kg of water.

1) My point is that the actual market cost of desalinated water includes the energy cost - and probably more expensive energy than a dedicated desal plant for hydrogen production would because both run at times and in places where energy is cheap.

2) My calculation above already took the mass fraction into account, and added a generous fudge factor in case not all of the desalinated water can electrolysed and some ends up being wasted.

2) Completely missed the "there is 111 kg ... " part, my apologies.

"nature.com" made me look because I assumed there was a paper behind this. There isn't. This is an editorial. No thanks.

Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?

Underhyping methane emissions already makes junk sciences irony someone elses problem. You'll get high blood pressure if you take a grain of salt with everything they spew :p

Hydrogen scaled is what makes diversification so much fun in the 21st century. Scale up or scale down?

If we look at the excess energy generation with solar when batteries are full, that excess can be converted to hydrogen production with very little additional cost.

On a timeline, it may take a few months to stockpile enough hydrogen to install new hydrogen powered equipment to take advantage of it, but nobody has hyped what to do with excess solar power production.

Wind turbines have their dump load too. Same concept with after a few months of stockpiling hydrogen with excess power generation, a usable amount of hydrogen becomes available.

We expect most renewables such as solar and wind to produce for decades. All of that excess solves a lot of the energy equation.

Hydrogen scales perfectly with some applications outside of metropolitan areas. They indicated that it was only $8 million for this project. That ROI happens fast.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-14/regional-wa-town-in-l...

Hype is not sustainable :)

We crack heavy fractions of oil apart to make more useful ones for plastics and other chemical feedstocks and that leaves us so much ethane, propane, and butane that we flare it off as waste gas.

You can run vehicles on that, and extract useful work from that heat.

We're not going to slow down the amount of plastic we make any time soon.

The electrolysis boom that is being talked about now is mainly about replacing fossil-fuel derived hydrogen with green hydrogen for industrial processes, not about using hydrogen to store energy or replace fuels other than special cases such as very high temperature flames.

We need technologies to store electricity generated by renewables. If anyone has a better idea than hydrogen to do this in a scalable way, congratulations, you made the world a better place.

Given how annoying H+ ions are to handle, rather than sticking them together as H2 it may be easier to leave them in the electrolyte from whence they came, in the form of a "battery".

Unless there's some magic breakthrough in catalytic chemistry for water electrolysis, the capital cost of all the platinum required is going to be a problem.

I mean the simplest one is gravity; the most scalable version of that is pumping water up into a reservoir behind a hydroelectric power plant. There's others that propose heavy trains going uphill or weights down a hole, but that doesn't scale very well and has additional maintenance costs.

But yeah, that would be electrical into mechanical energy (pumps), the cost would be flowing water up against gravity. Of course, it also requires a source of water downhill and a reservoir uphill. I was going to quip about Lake Mead being empty, but that would be huge distances to cover. Maybe something close to sea, or else a purpose built closed loop system.

And you think that isn't done already? If every country was like Norway, this would be the way to go. But good look doing this in the Netherlands.

There are plenty of "battery" technologies that are not perfect, but substantially better than Hydrogen(in terms of round trip efficiency) though. Several startups with sound ideas. If only Governments picked them up in war like emergency and threw their capital at it to progress. 1. https://energydome.com 2. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520 3. https://newatlas.com/energy/china-100mw-compressed-air/ 4. https://www.hydrostor.ca

Pumped hydro is great where it works, but we have used most of the best places for it. We also know it is an environmental disaster for the local area which needs to be balanced against the gain.

Even if you ignore that, it takes a lot of space.

Rust battery pretty interesting.

https://formenergy.com/technology/battery-technology/

If you are gone make hydrogen, just right there turn it into methanol and use and transport that around.

Or just make airplane fuel right on sight.

But the problem with all those theories is that investing in electricity consuming plants that will only have a very low utilization is generally not a great plan.

Maybe not trying to build your whole grid out of renewables would be the better plan.

Oh no, are wealth transfer schemes are foiled. Can’t have that.

WEF hires over 100k propagandists. No wonder you can't say anything exposing the scheme without fear of being cancelled. The bullying net-zero brigade don't sleep.

Eh, it's moreso people that have built their persona around some cause and will remain dogmatic about it, not unlike sports fans.

For 1980s "environmentalists", nuclear will be always bad, and for 2000s "environmentalists" battery electric vehicles will aways be good ... and actual circumstances are irrelevant.

>The EU is also under pressure from industry to water down the definition of green hydrogen

This is the key issue. There is nothing wrong with truly green hydrogen made with truly excess electricity. The article rightly praises the Biden administrations sensible policies which incentivize zero-emissions hydrogen.

This and windgas (synthesized methane) seem to be the best candidates for seasonal storage although both still with major issues - embrittlememt/needing CO2.

We have cheap green power (solar/wind), cheap green short to medium term storage (pumped hydro and lithium batteries) but this only gets us to 97%:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

>But they are a distraction when it comes to personal vehicles, for which efficient batteries are already available.

Stopped reading there

Right... I can't say I'm extremely well read in this (so I'd appreciate correction if someone knows better), but it sounds pretty uncontroversial that (1) batteries take a long time to charge, which is not convenient for many applications, (2) the batteries themselves require a lot of minerals whose extraction isn't great for the environment either, but in a different way.

Goes back to stockmarket shenanigans. Wether it's Pump and Dump (Nikola), or Short and Tort (Tesla)

Does it make sense to invest in a hydrogen powered vehicle company?

I think that depends entirely on what you think will happen to battery prices, and if you mean road vehicles or all vehicles.

Because aircraft have extreme energy density requirements, I don't expect chemical[0] batteries to ever replace combustible fuel.

If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles; but if you think that battery prices will reduce substantially, then I don't think it does make any sense to invest in hydrogen vehicles.

Why? Because although BEVs are (IIRC) a net cost saving over their lifetime, even at current battery cost, the purchase cost is too high for most people (the Sam Vimes Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness comes to mind), but if batteries get much cheaper then poor people will also be able to afford them and hydrogen road vehicles won't have a market to serve.

[0] There's a whole bunch of interesting storage ideas which right now are basically just sci-fi, but unless you wish to invest a few tens of millions in fundamental research on nuclear isomers or if you can use quantum tricks to dynamically alter phosphorescence half lives from weeks to hours and back, don't.

> If you think the battery prices will remain roughly where they are now, then sure it makes sense to invest in hydrogen road vehicles;

No it doesn't. Electric cars are already beating Hydrogen vehicles on price. And Hydrogen vehicles don't make a profit, they lose lots of money. while Tesla has a 30% automotive margin on their EVs.

Also, batteries will certainty get cheaper. Even if the materials don't get cheaper, production and an density improvements will make them cheaper. We know pretty well what standard batteries will look like 5 years from now because the product cycle is so long.

And the problem you mention is equally solve by people taking on bigger loans and paying more interest instead of paying for gas.

> Electric cars are already beating Hydrogen vehicles on price.

Aim for where the ball will be, not where it is. But also don't take your eye off it.

> Also, batteries will certainty get cheaper.

While I share this opinion, my certainty is only at the level of "yeah, sounds likely", which is not appropriate for a discussion about what to invest in.

> And the problem you mention is equally solve by people taking on bigger loans and paying more interest instead of paying for gas.

Poor people get the worst rates and the least options, including in some cases no option to get loans.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Nature must have noticed that they've become a joke on energy subjects.

I've heard it said that electric cars weren't invented to save the world, but to save the automotive industry.

Likewise, hydrogen tech exists to save the natural gas industry.

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