Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Just going to say it, anyone using the mystery colour labels in their comments here, comes off to me (and I suspect others) as combinations of joking, obfuscating and even a little condescending since I’m familiar with the use of this sort of linguistic abstraction as a mechanism for gatekeeping, limiting the size of the audience that can speak to those that have kept up with current shibboleths.

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.

> 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.

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.

While I agree that hydrogen for electricity generation/storage doesn't really make sense, there are some industries that either can use or must use large amounts of hydrogen for chemical purposes. For example, the production of ammonia for fertiliser needs hydrogen, and refining metals from ore can use hydrogen.

That's obviously necessary, yes. It still really doesn't make much sense to do it with microbes when compared with SMR, though. It's entirely possible to store the CO from SMR as with microbes producing CO₂, but there's more CO₂ compared to CO from SMR.

Proton Technologies (mentioned in the article) claims to solve the problem by using a membrane that only lets hydrogen pass through. That way all the co2 just stays in the well. If that works that sounds way superior to SMR plus carbon capture.

Not really? It's not different from SMR. Hydrogen is tiny and non-polar, so it's easy to filter only for such small molecules, making storing it a pretty big issue. SMR produces a mixture of methane, water, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is just as easily filtered into plain dihydrogen. Nevertheless, it's still just storing it somewhere in a cave, not really worth the effort most of the time, and since CO / CO₂ is a lot smaller than methane, it'll find its way out by other means way easier.

Hydrogen already is needed today in some processes and some processes can only be made clean with clean hydrogen.

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).

Don't even think about carbon capture. Affording it any thought as a production process in the current world is "conservation of energy forbids it" level of impossible. Technology doesn't make it better either, it's just not feasible with the current energy output of the human race, not with (the very impressive) biogas pyrolysis nor with literal "air plastic".

Existing processes are the best use of hydrogen, and for those I'm fine with anything. It just makes little sense for energy applications.

The problem with carbon capture usually is extracting CO2 from the air and storing it without being emitted again.

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.

Heating, specifically in the north.

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.

Yeah but, gas is more power-dense. Burning hydrogen made from fossil fuels, be it with microbes (more emissions) or SMR (less emissions) in any case produces more emissions than just burning natural gas.

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.

The reason for this taxonomy is the same reason you use consts instead of plain numbers in computer code. You change the definition of “green” in just one place when someone invents a new loophole, or someone invents a new green method of obtaining sustainable hydrogen.

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.

This is silly.

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.

Blame marketing teams + policy teams. They're the ones that push this terminology.

Or just people who prefer to use one simple word rather than a mouthful of technical ones.

Sure but using non-sequitur rainbow pieces to reference complex processes seems like the extreme end of uselessness. Wouldn't words that reflected stand-out parts of the process be more intuitive?

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