Looking at the physics, green hydrogen has some applications but what politicians seem to be pitching ranges from delusional to physically challenging. Those pesky laws of thermodynamics get in the way.
So, transporting hydrogen at scale is a problem because even chilled to near absolute zero it's still way less energy dense by volume than liquid LNG. And of course chilling it to those levels is challenging and expensive. It takes up quite a bit more space. As in, you need several ships to move the same amount of energy as a single LNG ship. And of course the way to deal with cold gases heating up is to vent some of it (you boil some off to cool the rest). So, not all of it makes it to the destination. It gets worse. Those ships need fuel. And hydrogen isn't it because of it's volume. You'd need to sacrifice most of the shipping volume to storing the fuel to move it around.
Volumetric density of hydrogen is a problem for transport, shipping, planes, aviation, etc. Moving around enough of it to be interesting would require an order of magnitude more ships, trucks, etc. than we use today for moving around fossil fuels. That's expensive.
And all of that is before you consider that creating hydrogen is inherently more expensive than just using renewable power directly (via batteries).
None of these problems has much wiggle room for scientific breakthroughs. That perpetuum motion machine just doesn't exist. Hydrogen generation is already close to the theoretical maximum in terms of efficiency. There are not going to be any 2x or 3x improvements there. Same for volume. You can't chill it any further than absolute zero. Converting it into other fuels works but is also lossy.
There's a role for green hydrogen. It's replacing the enormous amount of grey hydrogen we generate today for things like fertilizer production. Australia is not going to export hydrogen in meaningful amounts, ever. Nor is anyone else going to be able to scale that to meaningful amounts. It's physically impossible. But they'll likely produce some other things that can be shipped out using green hydrogen. Like fertilizer, steel, etc.
What about transporting Ammonia .. that's three H and and an N .. different beast.
Mind you ammonia is an irritating gas and no fun spilled in water at sea .. so, yeah.
The main take home point is that the argument against hydrogen because it's a tiny slippery hard to teansport molecule is a complete furphy - there are other options.
Shipping ammonia half way around the world with the intention of using it as a fuel doesn't make sense from an efficiency point of view. You loose so much energy creating the hydrogen, transforming it into ammonia, shipping it around, and then turning it back into mechanical or electrical energy, which again is not super efficient. By the time that is done, you are looking at maybe 10% efficient (possibly way less). So, it's a very costly way to move stuff around using ammonia as a fuel. Nice that it works but unlikely to be a preferred solution aside from some niche use cases.
And while ammonia is better then hydrogen in terms of volumetric density. It's still about half of what lng gives. So, you need two ammonia ships for every lng ship to deliver the same amount of energy. That same property also is an issue with bio kerosene vs. ammonia in planes.
"Hydrogen oil – LOHC – has two great advantages compared to compressed and liquid hydrogen:
The hydrogen is stored in oil, LOHC, and there is substantially less free hydrogen on board the ship, which reduces the risk. The hydrogen oil can be transported in conventional tanks, about the same way as for diesel today, and therefore has substantially lower transport costs than compressed and liquid hydrogen."
https://greenshippingprogramme.com/pilot/infrastructure-for-...
This sounds like a parody of hydrocarbons.
While the 'used' oil is being stored, to be 'reloaded' with hydrogen by whichever means.
So the 'carrier-oil-component' is the reusable thing here.
All while being able to be handled, stored, transported similar to diesel.
Supposedly.
shrug
This may be nit-picky of me, but how is using a chemical battery to store energy using electricity directly, but not using a chemical (hydrogen) to store energy not using electricity directly?
A standard definition of a battery is anything that store energy and outputs electricity. To that extent hydrogen is just the chemical element of a battery (fuel cell). You don’t recharge it by inputting electricity (like you do a lithium ion battery), but you replace the active chemical element of it by using electricity to generate more hydrogen and inserting it into your empty fuel cells (recycling your battery basically).
I think if you define direct electricity usage to exclude hydrogen (which is kind of silly) then you’d also need to exclude all other forms of battery. And you are left with basically just overhead wires.
Also nobody is proposing a mass transport of hydrogen to be a viable future. Most proposals have them generated via electrolysis on site.
Solar panel to hydrogen you are down to 30-40% right away before you do anything with the hydrogen. You still need to transport it. Once it gets to a fuel cell, you hit maybe 70-80% efficiencies. That's pretty good but these inefficiencies multiply. So, now you are down to 20%. That's a 4x difference. And of course there are losses along the way, etc. So it's more like 10 to 15%. Burning it is worse.
An important fact, though, is that there has been little serious sustained effort to push for hydrogen production until now.
Just recently we have seen papers on new techniques [2] some of which are already being tested at trial industrial scales [3]
What is happening now is similar to vaccine development during COVID - accelerated parallel development of stages; the heavy industry side of hydrogen development is being pushed and built on the assumption that key stages will be improved in both incremental and hopefully radical ways.
The message from the climate side of these developments is there's little to no time to waste.
[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/se/d0se0...
[2] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/seawater-splitting-syste...
[3] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/water-splitting-device-s...
The driver behind Australias Green Hydrogen is a Western Australian Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest - PhD in Marine Biology and a few billion in iron ore wealth and generational ownership of vast tracts of land.
His plan is to significantly increase global Green Hydrogen production with the next few years and to grow more from there.
The export plans are electricity via cable to Singapore and SE Asia, and to Europe via Ammonia - large molecule Hydrogen and surplus Nitrogen (nuetral atmosphere release on cracking later for power generation.
He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure.
So, regardless of my feelings about the guy, what I see is you yelling on a forum about how he yells at the sky Vs him getting on and doing something.
> He, on the other hand, goes ahead and invests a few billion and ground breaks on capital infrastructure.
I don't have a few billion to spend. Sorry. Where's this few Billion Twigs has invested in Green project again? Maybe I'm wrong. There's Gladstone and that's about it, in terms of significant dollars actually put down by FMG/Twigs AFAICT. I'm genuinely just asking.
However many of this small projects are part of a larger $50 billion commitment with Germany to produce up to five million tonnes of green hydrogen (per annum) by 2030.
Ultimately if we decarbonise and transition to renewable green energy we will be in a much better place, but I hope the transition sees the fossil fuel giants lose their preeminence. Things like green hydrogen give them a possible way of hanging onto something like model they use now.
This is all very charitable though - it’s just as likely that this is a totally cynical bait and switch.
I think you're really stretching charitableness to its limits here... (groan)
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
[2] Even that isn’t easy so much - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon have remained at the top for about a decade and it’s unlikely their dominance will be disrupted (even Microsoft which lost its way for a while to Google came back to be number one or two). Basically you can disrupt legacy businesses that haven’t adapted to tech or don’t have a multi-national company in the mix. But disrupting multi-national tech companies is unlikely at this point. Hence why Meta is acting so desperate with MR - Apple, Google, and regulators are an active threat to their continued growth / ability to survive at all. If you own the platform, this becomes less of a concern since competitors can’t push around your business model. Regulators basically just solidify/ossify your position since anyone that reaches a much lower level than these companies are at today suddenly becomes subject to regulation that encumbers them the same way that the larger company is encumbered (ie the intent is largely to slow them down), except this happens to a competitor much earlier in their lifecycle since these companies have had several years of additional growth and none of the limits scale the legislation to account for that (not that it matters in practice because it’s unlikely anyone is going to fund a serious attempt to take on a large behemoth - see DuckDuckGo’s growth struggles and they haven’t even gotten large enough to branch out like Google has).
This is completely delusional. There was more new net capacity in solar installed in 2022 than nuclear has ever delivered by around 50%. Wind exceeded the historical nuclear max by 30%. And the balance of hydro/geothermal/etc came close to matching it as well. Pipelined production will see the first two doubling in the next few years.
What the fossil fuel companies did was hide what they knew about global warming and manipulate governments into continued investment in reliance on fossil fuels. It's not like it's all a big conspiracy against nuclear.
Also, as other commenters indicate, wind and solar are quite effective in displacing their business, even if not entirely (due to the intermittency problem) - as they are cheaper, renewable, safer, don't have the waste issues and do not involve problematic geo-politics for the fuel. Not to mention how wind and solar don't preclude the use of nuclear for night-time generation.
Green Hydrogen is Hydrogen generated by NOT using fossil fuels.
I work for a company that is working VERY HARD to make this a major industry. Cynicism is a no effort way to discount these efforts. you're doing more damage to our efforts than the fossil fuel industry is doing by greenwashing.
It is not the same political environment that has existed for the previous decade.
To be sure the fossil fuel industry is still a danger here and will stop at nothing to curb the growth of renewables. But its political power has taken a hit.
The simple colour code naming of hydrogen production methods is well established enough now for it to be pretty hard for the industry to pass off 'brown' or 'blue' etc as green (though they will try deceptively to market both as 'good enough'). And 'green hydro' is genuinely carbon emission free in both production and use.
Agree however that the messaging around it has great greenwash potential. That was deffo Australia's previous fed government's intent with it.
Why would you say that? I mean, some sort of pollutant emission is inevitable in any heavy industry, but there's no physical reason it has to involve the transfer of carbon that's been locked under the ground for 100s of millions of years into the atmosphere, which is the only thing we really need to stop doing (unless some sort of process for extracting it from the atmosphere again at the same rate we add it is feasible, which isn't looking particularly likely).
Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption?
If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it.
So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.
That's "green hydrogen" by definition - ie. what this article & discussion is all about. The gp is simply mistaken, and the coal analogy is ridiculous. Whether green hydro turns out to be economic/scalable is a separate matter.
There are significant emissions from the production of everything from turbines, batteries, cabling etc.
I don't have hard numbers, but I'm pretty sure that hydrogen is much much less green than some other alternatives like solar in total footprint. But we lump them together as if they are equally good. Same as with corporations going carbon neutral - one company is doing actual carbon sequestration and is really neutral, another company is cheating and just buying carbon credits from some undeveloped country and pretends to be neutral too (especially if they are just using existing forests as a claim). They are not the same but the names are.
If they're frothing at the mouth, it's hurting the fossil fuel industry.
64.2% of all newspaper circulation is owned by Murdoch. And it is here where he pioneered the idea of weaponing his mastheads to further his political and economic views.
And Murdoch famously partnered with the mining industry to take down a government when they tried to introduce a mining tax.
And I’m far from a conservative. I just think socialism is more stupid & damaging in the real world (as opposed to in theory) than any of the realistic alternatives, but that doesn’t make me a supporter of the Coke party rather than the Pepsi party, or indeed of Rupert Murdoch.