‘Gold hydrogen’ is an untapped resource in depleted oil wells
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Blue, black, green, grey, white, translucent, gold, purple polka dot… this is a stupid way to name things…
If it’s hydrogen derived from oil by industrial petrochemical processes like steam reforming or catalytic cracking, can we just use these terms… it’s not like we’re trying to explain which pump handles to fill up a car with, we’re talking about issues with a proposed concept and obfuscation of what that concept truly is and what it’s competing against, with cutesy colours labels… frankly just puts me off the entire hydrogen industry …
Hydrogen is pretty easy to get ahold of chemically speaking because it’s everywhere. If we need to differentiate let’s just use the additional nouns necessary. “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Carbon Neutral electricity” and “Hydrogen by thermochemical decomposition of organic waste powered by Carbon Neutral fuels” are ecologically better than “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Coal” and “Hydrogen captured as a waste gas from existing oil refineries, with no other effort to reduce Carbon emissions“
I don’t normally come across a HN thread that reads so “cliquey” outside of the crypto community stuff… seeing this sort of stuff about Hydrogen is just weird.
Also, the descriptions would be too long in some cases. To be green, according to the new taxonomy, it’s not enough for hydrogen to be generated using renewables. It has to be generated by renewables built specifically for this purpose, and from water that is not drinking water - so that we don’t drain lakes and rivers to produce it.
Now, gold hydrogen is just a marketing gimmick. It’s just brown or black, unless they store generated co2 safely and permamently - then it can become green.
Really. Hydrogen in general is just a weird prospect. Hydrogen from SMR of natural gas has like way higher emissions than just burning natural gas, and massively higher emissions than just using diesel. It has exactly zero uses energy-wise other than as a medium for moving a ridiculous amount of energy quickly. Makes it real nice in things like rocketry and real useless for anything else. The most efficient way to produce it is by using electricity and water, which can make a no-emissions solution for that one niche. If you use gas or oil for electricity, reforming is technically slightly more efficient. In any case, it's always worse than fossil fuels by themselves, unless you use green energy. And cramming greenhouse gases underground doesn't make the situation any better, which everybody knows but for some reason pretends is not true. Digging tunnels and caves and building facilities to store monoxide in is far worse than just burning fossil fuels as fuel in the first place. This is a fairly doomed industry, because it has no point in an environmentally sustainable future.
The hydrogen ladder offers a good overview of where hydrogen makes sense and where it doesn’t: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
For me methane pyrolysis from biogas seems like the most realistic way of carbon capture (while also producing hydrogen).
Existing processes are the best use of hydrogen, and for those I'm fine with anything. It just makes little sense for energy applications.
Methane pyrolysis uses hardly more energy than steam reforming and leaves solid carbon as a side product. You don't need to concentrate carbon from the atmosphere, that was already done, solid carbon can be stored way more easily than the gas CO2. It has a very limited scale though, as you want to only use waste products for biogas production.
Hydrogen has potential to replace natural gas in area that need serious heating. Where I am standing it is currently very cold, days are short, and the sun is very low on the horizon. Electric heating is possible, but without any green power sources nearby that just means more burning fossil fuels, a horrible conversion of energy. And the electrical infrastructure needed to move sufficient power from sunny/windy areas to heat homes in the north would be immense. But "green" hydrogen shipped over the existing natural gas infrastructure could work. So in those circumstances where you need to move energy for purposes of heating, hydrogen has its place.
Only "green" hydrogen works. I live in the north, the very north, like constantly above the hudson bay north. Insufficient electrical infrastructure where gas infra exists isn't really a big niche anyway.
We use color to describe non-color things all the way from fundamental physics (eg quark "color") to emotional metaphors (eg feeling blue, seeing red, green with envy, yellow as a substitute for being a candidate, white for both rage and fear). We use color for political leanings (eg red states, blue states, green parties)
We use color for when we have no other language or concept that might apply (eg color and spin for particles) but we also use it as a form of abstraction. We can label something with a particular color because it shares some essential qualities without necessarily understanding all those properties or verbosely enumerating all those properties. Those meanings can change over time.
Jargon can be useful and important. Don't be a Literal or Gatekeeper Andy.
Hydrogen can be created cleanly, but once the infrastructure is in place, the cheapest and most profitable sources will all be fossil fuel sites, depleted or otherwise.
I'm glad electric cars are already taking off. Hydrogen may have a future for storage for excess renewable energy eventually, but as a simple replacement for gas tanks it's simply dangerous.
So brown hydrogen, then.
Seems like a bit of a dealbreaker to me. CO2 storage is a huge unsolved problem. This is about as close to a climate friendly solution as saying “we’ll do traditional hydrogen and put the CO2 somewhere.” Theoretically fine but not a practical idea at the moment.
Hydrogen tech is just a scam to greenwash the legacy fossil fuels industry.
The brown and black hydrogen will be far cheaper than green hydrogen for some time. They also have the advantage of existing subsidised infrastructure for drilling and pumping. And when the hydrogen vehicles and Power stations become common, the common man have no choice but to purchase this cheaper hydrogen
However there are also lots of industry incumbents who are proposing hydrogen-themed solutions that are not even carbon neutral.
Except the article already stated the Co2 is already emitted as part of the process of breaking down these hydrocarbons (club being in their name) -
"microbes began breaking down the residual oil hydrocarbons in there—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—to generate hydrogen and CO2."
Would this spritz be measured in gallons or tons?
As much as it's worth considering the co2 byproduct and it's affect, doesn't pumping large volumes of liquids into the earth like this lead to all sorts of unintended consequences as well?
Leaking these cells into the biosphere and contaminating every other oil source would be, no pun intended, unwell.
Is it better to have the large voids that were created when oïl was extracted?
I expect the vast, vast majority of our energy is going to be derived from fossil fuels for the next 2-300 years.
Their cost : $1 / kg of H.
Other's cost : $1.5 / kg on average.
1 kg H is equivalent to 1 gallon of petroleum fuel in energy.My god the hydrocarbon industry is shameless. "Our hydrogen got dumped on with this color grading system." "Not with out gold tier ultra premium deluxe hydrogen."
And what happens to the carbon that hydrogen is bonded to?
>Capturing or otherwise neutralizing the CO2 must be done safely, says Stephen Wallace, who runs a microbiology lab at the University of Edinburgh. But he adds that Cemvita Factory’s idea of
OK so no plans.
The most inexpensive thing possible will happen. This is grey hydrogen with branding.
It could be a potential export from the Middle East. They also have the infra already.
Desalination and electrolysis don't have much in common.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
Don't know how much merit this has
Have you ever considered why there are no home hydrogen generator/storage units to be hooked to solar? Because it's just too technically challenging and in the end not competitive to batteries or thermal storage.
Cf. https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1596449504194367488
Outside of research and prototypes, absolutely no funding should go to hydrogen infrastructure or production/use. It's wasted money and funding that should be applied to grid, alternative energy, and EV infrastructure projects.
If research produces economical use cases for hydrogen, great. But this article is the best example of what "The Hydrogen Movement" is: greenwashing fossil fuels and carbon accounting fraud.
I've been arguing for two years now that the "grey/blue/green" hydrogen labels are pure marketing bullshit. While they may in the beginning refer to legitimate categorizations of hydrogen "sourcing", in reality they will be used to greenwash fossil fuel hydrogen production through fraud, lies, obfuscation, or switcheroo.
"Gold" Hydrogen. The industry is drinking their own kool aid.
We need something for this issue and marketing and lies aside, my admittedly limited understanding of the science is that there are actually ways to make hydrogen without negative externalities.
But yes, this article feels like a totally load of bollocks.
Your example of handling CO2 emissions from hydrogen reserves is a case in point.
It doesn't sound good when you put it like that, so you call it gold instead, supplanting the """"actual"""" meaning of "gold hydrogen" which is emissionless hydrogen pockets underground. Fuck the colour system though, it's ridiculous obfuscation. This is just plain old "hydrogen we made by wasting half the energy from oil (using microbes)".
PS. For a little substantiation to those "less energy" claims, dihydrogen has a heat of combustion of ~290 kJ/mol. Methane has 890 kJ/mol, and ideally decomposes into two hydrogen molecules at 580 kJ/mol. Add in the fact that such a reaction literally cannot exist and whatever reaction the microbes do, they probably do to gain energy as they release the carbon, we can expect a lower ratio of hydrogen molecules to methane in. With longer hydrocarbons, the super ideal ratio drops, as well as with switching to more complex hydrocarbons, so we're talking hyper idealised scenario here. This is overall a pretty bad idea, probably not far from SMR in efficiency, if not worse.
EDIT: I've gone and balanced it out, assuming that the microbes use water to pull the oxygen from (as they do with extreme likelihood), the ideal reaction is CH₄ + 2 H₂O → CO₂ + 4 H₂ with an enthalpy of 252.8 kJ/mol. That's more endothermic than SMR, which sits at 206 kJ/mol. Both are very strongly endothermic. _It would, genuinely be way more efficient to just burn natural gas or your output hydrogen to make ""grey"" hydrogen._ This is garbage and results in higher emissions than existing, widespread technology accounting for ~78% of global hydrogen production. What the hell! Not to mention that both of these are a horrible idea beacuse it's genuinely more environmentally friendly to just burn natural gas. This causes more emissions in every case than just natural gas.
It's not a totally crazy idea, carbon capture from the atmosphere is very hard - there's only 400 parts per million. Carbon capture from concentrated sources, like the smokestacks of coal power plants is a real thing. It remains to be seen if it's done responsibly.
Please don't make CO2 a boogieman when it doesn't need to be. CO2 produced in a wellbore =/= CO2 in the atmosphere.
The precautionary principle needs to at the forefront any large project involving hydrocarbons. Maybe instead of trusting the companies that got us into this mess we should, do the opposite, and not trust their claims?
Reflexively opposing green tech that isn't up to your environmental standards is not useful. Nothing I said involved "trusting" these companies, I think they should be better regulated.
We've caused devastation by over confidently assuming that we know what we're talking about and that there won't be any unintended consequences from our actions.
We did it before and we'll do it again.
Hydrogen is very much needed for chemical synthesis (ammonia for fertiliser), and can also be used to make steel. Using this would be much better than blue hydrogen. A good pragmatic solution until we have green hydrogen.
The CO2 still is getting emitted in this plan, near as I can tell?
The line is stop drilling, digging and cutting.
This produces the same amount. Actually, steam reforming is more efficient energy-wise, consuming 206 kJ/mol instead of the 253 kJ/mol this ideally consumes. Since the microbes are not being fed electricity, that comes out of the same fossil fuels, giving us an even worse, actually much worse, carbon / hydrogen ratio. The emissions are higher and storing the gas is no easier or harder than with ordinary SMR from natural gas or oil. We absolutely can and do store the CO from SMR, consuming many times the energy stored in the hydrogen coming out.
It's really no solution at all and just a worse, less efficient version of hydrogen from fossil fuels. No matter how you seal it, nowhere close to the produced amount of CO₂ can fit in the well and it will nearly in its entirety just find alternative routes out. It's a waste of time, mostly.