BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen as it dumps diesel

Couldn't cargo ships use wind? A wind turbine on the ship? A kind of modern re-imaging of how sailing ships of old were powered.

Is the problem that wind isn't reliable and you might go days without it? Or you wouldn't fit in ports or other areas with a big turbine sticking out? Or is there some other practical problem.

How would a hydrogen powered passenger plane work? How big and or heavy would the fuel tanks need to be? As I understand it you either need very big tanks to store it as gas, or very heavy insulated tanks to store it liquefied. Would a passenger plane still work?

Synthfuel apparently exists already and the US Navy has a solution. It's just very energy-intensive.

The shipping industry is investigating making ammonia from the hydrogen and then using that in fuel cells; it has the advantage that it's easier to handle. https://maritime-executive.com/article/highest-power-output-...

It will make sense for nearly all transportation that can’t be directly electrified. The problem with batteries is that it is a massive resource hog, and one that is fundamentally unsustainable. It will have be abandoned. The only alternatives are ideas like synfuels or ammonia, but those require green hydrogen production anyways.

The best solution for large airplanes is remote meetings and realistic remote experiences.

Sorry. But there’s no reason so many people need to fly (consultants, I used to be one racked up a few hundred thousand miles) besides leisure or critical travel. And it should reflect in the price so tickets aren’t $150 to be crammed in like cattle.

And yes it should be rare to fly until we figure out cleaner fuel methods. Just my hot take.

Liquid hydrogen takes 4x the volume of standard aviation kerosene. Coming up with on-jet liquid storage of hydrogen of that volume is a rather steep engineering hurdle. And hydrogen, liquid or not, will require some rather impressive storage and handling techniques at the airport.

If I were to bet, I would say that converting hydrogen to kerosene will be far cheaper and more efficient than trying to power long distance flight with hydrogen

The problem isn't doing one plane. It's doing enough of them to make a difference.

Jet fuel is ludicrously energy dense, to the extent that it's easy to underestimate how much energy you need: at any reasonably-sized airport, if you want to replace the current fleet then you need to be talking about roughly a power station's worth of continuous energy delivery into aircraft fuel tanks. That's doable with jet fuel because you're not climbing out of an energy well just to get hold of the fuel. You just separate it out, and the problem becomes pure logistics.

With H2, the volume you need and the added storage complexity means the current logistics becomes a rounding error in comparison to how on earth you get the gigawatts to churn feedstock into gas.

You could do it, but you'd want nukes on-site to do it.

> ...there aren't any outright technical showstoppers here

H2 molecules are extremely small -- storing them without loss is heavy and volumetrically expensive, making it implausible for any aircraft.

The same factors apply to ships, pipelines etc because space for fuel is space that does not contain high value cargo.

Another place where it could make sense is trains. Building overhead power lines could be expensive, especially if we are talking about high speed trains. Because of the square cube law, large pressurized tanks could be economically quite efficient. A train could carry an extra car with a pressurized tank at 700 bar. At this pressure the hydrogen density is 42 kg/m3. A typical oil car has a volume of 131 m3, so assuming the same volume, we'd get about 5.5 tons of hydrogen. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel fuel, and hydrogen cells about twice the efficiency of diesel engines, so all in all 5.5 tons of hydrogen would be the equivalent of about 33 tons of diesel. That's more than enough to move a train from one train station to another one, even if the stations are hundreds of miles apart.

> Do you see any practical consumer hydrogen infrastructure going up? Has it even been invented yet?

It has been invented, the majority are in China and Japan if I remember rightly.

Hydrogen becomes more attractive once electricity is decarbonized. It's really the only fuel that has both the energy density to power flight and transoceanic travel and does not emit carbon. Batteries are fine for cars, and trains can be electrified. But you'll never fly across the Atlantic on a battery powered passenger plane.

Synthetic methane and other hydrocarbons are also ideas that are floated. But those need hydrogen as an input anyway. They also need a source of carbon, which is too difficult to extract from the atmosphere. So using the hydrogen directly may be more feasible.

They have hybrid test trucks that can power themselves via overhead lines for the uphill loaded portion of the trip. I wonder if something like that could reduce battery usage and time to charge.

Please see my sibling comment.

Do we really use 2000A cables running around a work site? Are they buried ?

> fat ass HV cables running to them

Do you a more exact specs?

Maybe MV 10kV-40kV ?

And how thick are these cables?

Do they carry 2000A snaking around the site?

I would guess overhead lines and catenaries for some portion of the route rather than dragging cables around.

The answer for "who pays for X" is always similar. If no government intervenes, people that use electricity when its most expensive pay for it; or if the power company keeps the price constant, it gets included on the average price.

Also a looooot of coal. https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-genera...

Uhhh, BHP is like one of the largest coal miners on the planet. Though, it's just one of their operating units (mainly iron and copper).

Thats interesting point, thanks.

Came to say this. I would add that "powered by electric" also typically means that power was generated at an industrial-scale facility and so is likely inherently more efficient than on-site generation. Powering a vehicle with electricity generated from diesel is (or can be upgraded to be, over time) more efficient than powering the same vehicles using diesel powertrains.

Yes, almost always. But it's important to point out the edge cases.

Where I'm from the largest power plant in the country is also insanely polluting - Bełchatow power plant burns lignite for electricity and the CO2 emissions are just bananas. The official number is around 1.7kg(!!!!!!!) Of CO2 for every kWh of electricity produced[1]. If you run your electric car using energy from that power plant then yes, it pollutes more than almost any petrol/diesel vehicle bar some sports cars and large trucks.

But that's a curiosity, an edge case, and if anything it proves that Bełchatow should be closed down immediately and not that EVs are a bad thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...

> An electric car powered by coal is still cleaner overall than one powered by gasoline

I'm sceptical that we know enough about the energy and resource mix in use across our global supply chains to be anywhere near that confident.

Look up Enrico Mariutti and his thoughts on the photovoltaic lifecycle figures ( mentioned in "China's dirty fuel advanage" - https://public.substack.com/p/solar-panels-more-carbon-inten... )

Electric fueled by coal produces less CO2 than gasoline. It's not cleaner by a long shot. The pollution produced by a coal plant, especially a brown coal plant, is insane even when they don't have an ash pond breach that kills more wildlife than a tactical nuclear explosion.

Same with locomotives. Most are diesel-electric in that a diesel engine drives a generator, which generates electricity to power an electric motor that actually turns the wheels. Less mechanical wear and tear this way, though it adds some inefficiency as the article says.

Funnily enough, if you mine underground you spend an incredible amount of electricity trying to keep the air fresh down there, mostly due to whatever combustion reaction is powering your vehicles.

I’ve seen reports claiming you break even or even use less electricity when operating electric vehicles since your ventilation requirements are significantly reduced.

> Only to those without a firm grasp on the laws of thermodynamics.

You are the one completely confused by the laws of thermodynamics.

A hydrogen fuel cell is an electrochemical system. So are electrolyzers. They represent the equivalence of charging and discharging a battery. There is no fundamental reason why this must be less efficient. You can potentially reach 100% efficiency at least in theory.

What people really are saying is that “in practice,” it is less efficient than a battery setup. But this is also mostly made-up and filled with exaggeration. Electrolyzers are reaching 98% efficiency. Fuel cells, at least in large installations, can already reach 85% efficiency or battery (assuming heat recapture).

In short, it is already pretty close to what batteries can do. Future advancements will eliminate the efficiency gap almost entirely.

Furthermore, it is actually more efficient to store and move around hydrogen than it is with electricity. Energy storage at scale is very difficult, and enough of a problem that we are looking at using hydrogen for long-duration energy storage. That alone basically kills the argument that batteries have any advantages in this respect.

Finally, as the economics of hydrogen production scale up, we can expect cost to approach zero. That’s because it is very much like wind and solar: We’re using a basically free resource (wind, sunlight and water) and turning it into a fuel. People criticized the efficiency of photovoltaics in the past, but the fundamental advantage of not having to pay for fuel means that costs can drop to nearly zero, and it did. This is the same story again. Except nearly free green hydrogen in the long-run.

You don't need to transport hydrogen - you can generate it on-site from water at the fuel station. Although this will require upgrading the electrical grid.

Hydrogen is already in use in e.g. forklifts that need to operate 24/7 (because recharging is slow), so while the logistical problem could be solved, I don't think it's worth doing so in all cases. Hydrogen has it's niche.

(tl;dr below: there's stuff that hydrogen is bad at but batteries literally cannot do, so if we prioritize ditching oil then hydrogen wins by default in those specific niches.)

IMO hydrogen also makes sense for large vehicles that need a long range - planes flying the New York to London trip will need to either be synthfuel or hydrogen, and we haven't figured out how to make synthfuel at scale yet. So while synthfuel will eventually be better than hydrogen, it might not be available in time for our climate deadline.

Similarly, hydrogen might be a better option for multi-man trucks on a long haul (i.e. a truck with a bed in the back and a second (or even third) driver, so they can drive for two 10-hour shifts without stopping for a break) through low-infrastructure areas. Yes, that is a bit niche.

Also, cargo ships could use hydrogen right now with only a 1-5% loss in cargo capacity. Batteries wouldn't get 100KM let alone across the pacific and synthfuel doesn't exist.

In theory biofuels are also a drop-in solution, but modern farming is very heavily reliant on oil, so biofuels are mostly just fossil fuels with extra steps (and speaking of which: tractors need high uptime, you can't be constantly charging the tractor batteries on harvest day so once again, hydrogen tractors win by default). Also, unnecessarily straining our food supply is really dumb.

It’s the theoretically best one possible. BEV fanatics are just spreading propaganda against it.