How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg
terraformindustries.wordpress.com
terraformindustries.wordpress.com
If so, the hard part is getting the carbon capture cheap enough, not the hydrogen.
I crunched the numbers and you need around 13.6 kilograms of carbon and 4.54 kilograms of hydrogen to make enough natural gas to give you 1GJ of heat when combusted (this is how natural gas is priced in the metric world - 1 GJ is roughly 0.95 MMBTU).
If you're extracting CO2 from the air, roughly 27% of the CO2 is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
Doing the maths suggests that at current ballpark prices for CO2 direct air capture of $1000/tonne, the cost of capturing enough CO2 to make a GJ of natural gas is about $50. That's before you've done the processing to convert your CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen.
So let's assume an order of magnitude improvement in air capture costs. Even at $100 per tonne, the CO2 capture cost is around $5. When you combine that with the approximately $4.50 worth of hydrogen required, that gives an input cost of around $9.50. That's way more than domestic natural gas currently costs in the US, but it's in the ballpark that you could subsidise your way around that at scale, and the numbers look pretty reasonable compared to imported LNG in Europe and Asia.
So to me this suggests that, if your business plan is to make methane, the hydrogen part is almost a sideshow to getting direct air capture costs down.
At $1/kg, the fuel cost of a combined cycle power plant will be $0.05/kWh. Hydrogen is quite storable underground (just like natural gas). At this fuel cost, new construction nuclear is hopelessly uncompetitive, even for base load generation. And unlike nuclear, the hydrogen burning CC plants can be economically dispatched, turned down/off when renewables or short term storage are directly powering the grid.
The attraction of synthetic methane is that it is
1) transportable in existing pipelines, including to millions of homes and small businesses.
2) usable in literally millions of existing devices
3) relatively easy to ship.
None of those things are true for hydrogen.
I would imagine that improving CO2 capture is "easier", because it requires fewer people to cooperate. Existing infrastructure replacement/improvements will need large numbers of people to agree on what, who and how. And you know how that goes...
Methane also has the probably unavoidable problem of leaks in the distribution network. It's a strong greenhouse gas; even small leaks are very problematic.
But you can see why some people are trying to make a drop-in, clean-ish (modulo fugitive emissions) replacement for fossil gas.
And that's on an equal-mass basis. If you consider an equal-energy basis (which is what we actually care about), methane is 5x worse than hydrogen.
Finally, hydrogen has wider flammability limits than methane, so from a safety perspective you have to make hydrogen systems even more leak-proof than methane/natural gas systems.
I also wonder if it could be better to make hydrogen by electrolysis of salt water and produce chlorine instead of oxygen. Released into sunlit atmosphere, chlorine is rapidly decomposed to Cl radicals which will rapidly react with methane (or hydrogen). You'd want to release it at sufficiently low dilution that there's enough methane in each air parcel to consume all the chlorine, though.
Well, heat pumps powered by methane do exist since years, the were biggish but there is a trend towards making smaller units suitable for home use, JFYI:
It is also possible to mix a percentage of hydrogen in the normal feed of gas burners.
For the moment only at the industrial scale. Home devices are not yet adapted. Industry is quick to adapt especially because of the incentives.
All the attached "Appliances" must be converted from using Methan to Hydrogen, too. Not gonna happen.
https://www.wasserstoff-niedersachsen.de/en/wilhelmshaven-gr...
https://www.ewe.com/en/media-center/press-releases/2022/11/t...
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/fortes...
Source: I work in oil & gas.
What the FDP is doing/promoting with the stupid run your gas burner at home on H2 in 10 years and get money now is something totally different and from my personal point of view as someone working in oil & gas completely stupid. We should not use gas (be it H2, CH4, whatever) for heat. And I say that knowing that it is bad for my salary. But I have kids and they need a future...
I guess the last mile is a more difficult problem, but the OP didn’t claim that was solved, saying: “For the moment only at the industrial scale. Home devices are not yet adapted.”
Also, many leaks are in the mains or services under the road. Natural gas will flow along the outside of the pipe and through the soil and end up in the basements of nearby buildings. Again, hydrogen would not do this, it would diffuse up through the soil and disperse in the atmosphere.
The big change is to boiler enclosures. These are currently designed to limit voids sufficiently to prevent natural gas explosions which require a minimum cell size of a meter or so to explode (regardless of concentration) rather than deflagrate. That same size for hydrogen is about 5cm so that is the largest acceptable void within the boiler enclosure which requires re-engineering of the way parts fit together and the use of non-h2 permeable foams and plastic spacers to avoid unacceptable voids.
All in all I'm convinced it's just not worth doing for residential when you look at the challenges and the terrible efficiency. Since the majority of appliances aren't 'hydrogen ready', it's better to just electrify.
I've no doubt you're right there would have to be significant upgrades done somewhere, but it might not be as big an issue for Ireland and I suppose it depends on how cheap that green hydrogen is for us, but we have to get there first. We'll use it for something.
Here in NL the electricity prices are negative ~5% of the time this year so a lot of opportunity for making some cheap hydrogen
If we are breaking hydrocarbons down to build them back from scratch might as well use the cheapest feedstock. That is currently methane. The nice thing about methane is we can get it almost for free, anywhere, using biology. That means we can continue our high energy lifestyle relying less on moving energy around.
No idea if the 1 USD per kg is realistic so.
Thats not an advantage if hydrogen does not need to be transported at all - you burn it in a powerplant and send out electrons.
Or, just use the solar electricity as-is.
I understand the energy storage aspect here but it comes at a high cost.
One battery breakthrough will obsolete this entire process. Lots of time and money is being devoted to new battery technology --- very little to this.
This effectively looks like a long shot effort to salvage the internal combustion engine.
Certainly, in year 2060 when it's too late.
I can't help thinking that peolle who believe in Rapture have a similar thought process - if you are holding out for a miracle, it doesn't make sence to put in effort now
So when will this hydrogen thingy will be ready and economically viable?
Don't look now but you might have just as big (if not bigger) case of religion.
Isn't this sorta how the "free market" works? People/corporations invest money based on their judgement of viability, effectiveness, etc..
Right now, the majority of the collective mind trust is betting on new battery technology. But feel free to convince them otherwise.
Batteries are short term storage; hydrogen is long term. They complement each other.
Mystery batteries that are cheaper than todays batteries do not exist even in a lab
In other words, it is not economically viable for anything beyond niche applications.
Hydrogen is not a fuel. It readily reacts and forms strong chemical bonds with *everything*. It can be manufactured but not without the overall process being energy negative --- a net consumer of energy. Not many applications can realistically absorb this cost.
The implication you are trying to make there, that hydrogen is useless because its manufacture does not violate conservation of energy, is ridiculous.
Maybe this is the battery breakthrough.
Further gas storage of energy is cheaper than battery storage (with a fixed cost for actually burning the stuff) Are batteries ever going to get to the point of being viable for storing a week's worth of energy? A month's worth?
In a lot of the world that's what you'll need to do. Solar isn't going to cover that European January where there's no wind.
I can see why I sounded in favour of methane over batteries but I was just acknowledging the OP's point about dollers/joule stored. Batteries have plenty of other advantages that I think put them ahead despite that figure.
Not for rare outage backup or seasonal storage. Batteries would have to improve by two orders of magnitude in cost to achieve that.
Yes, it would be inefficient overall. And it's still cheaper than nuclear. Throw in a large fraction of energy not going through hydrogen (direct to grid, or through batteries) and the cost would be even lower.
Startups like ETFuels are decarbonizing other industries, like transportation and fertilizers.
We'll need all the solutions. Not either-or, but yes-to-all-and-more-of-it-please.
It sure isn't efficient. But with energy sources that are intermittent and have no ability to scale up for demand, we will have a lot of intermittently very cheap energy. Anything that can use this intermittent power is valuable, because we will need overcapacity to handle the low-wind, low-sun moments
I’m not sure how expensive it would be for it to be clean and pure enough, or what purity that process would need, but most of the cost you mention would be solved by colocating with a burner plant.
“ We’re developing a scalable electrolyzer to deliver the cheapest possible green hydrogen, which we use as a precursor chemical to make cheap synthetic carbon neutral natural gas in our Terraformer.”
If the cost of sequestering the CO2 and pumping + refining oil / natural gas is less than the cost of capturing H2 and using it to synthesize fuel with the CO2, then the synthetic fuels are a dead end. (Until we run out of oil, but that will he centuries from now.)
If you’re capturing CO2 that comes from an industrial process like cement production, turning it into methane, burning the methane, and releasing the combustion products into the atmosphere, from an accounting point of view either the gas isn’t carbon neutral, or the cement plant isn’t carbon neutral, and the process is still incompatible with achieving net zero emissions.
Although this doesn't solve all the carbon emissions, concrete production accounts for >5% of carbon emissions IIRC and energy production a whole load on top of that, so if this can make a significant dent whilst stopping some of the other environmental side effects of drilling for Nat Gas, is this not a significant step forward?
* The Material World by Ed Conway is a really interesting read that explores some of these tradeoffs
I'd say in this situation that the hydrogen is green, but the cement isn't. It's still capturing Co2 that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.
Although I'm sure the cement manufacturers will let you know about the CC and imply its green.
The cement company can still do its own thing to become carbon neutral.
You might be interested in ETFuel's strategy.
"Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables" [2023-06-28] https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...
TDLR: Combo of solar and wind for power, CO2 from industrial sources, create fuels (methane, methanol, amnonia). Use pipes or trucks as needed.
ETFuels' "secret sauce" is integration and creating fuels. They'll use best available option for electricity and CO2. They'll build where it makes most sense to optimize opex.
In the future, once direct-air capture becomes cost competitive, no problem.
Also, I'm certain they'll also adopt advanced geothermal, in combination with solar and wind, to solve their electricity problems as well as greatly expand where they can feasibly deploy.
This reminded me of various[1] vox[2] articles on scientific reports over the past decade that reinforce the central truth and challenge of the climate crisis: we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8748081/us-100-percent-renewabl...
[2]https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
Right, which is why it's simply not going to happen. It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other. On top of that, large parts of the the global population 1) don't believe the problem exists in the first place, 2) doesn't think it's technically possible to do anything about (i.e. they think it's mostly natural, even if it's real), or 3) think they shouldn't have to change their actions at all because they're mad that the rich countries got to burn lots of oil and then stick all humanity with the problems from it.
The problem is beyond fixing. Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much when the USA and China and Russia and India are spewing out so much carbon and refuse to stop. The thing to do at this point is to understand and predict well what's coming, so that we can take measures to mitigate the effects at local scales.
*edit: The downvotes are fair for the level of snark. Still, as I cannot judge the validity of the approach, shouldn't I be skeptical when there is an inclination to change more than necessary?
At least for me, the page keeps scrolling for a short moment, unlike other pages like HN. It's tasteful, but unnecessary.
No you should not. This is not a website where they present a new web framework that respects your browser.
I live in Australia and think of the cane toads being introduced to eat the cane beetle. In this can I worry we overdo it and cause an ice age.
We merely trade one risk for another, there is never a silver bullet. Most climate skeptics are happy to take the risk that the models aren’t accurate or the scientists doom predictions don’t occur. I think there’s a chance the models are wrong but I’d prefer to take the pain/risk of trying to reduce the potential for a problem before it’s too late.
Oil and gas companies would probably come to mind. If we apply quick fixes, you can be sure O&G will be lobbying hard not to do anything to restrict their operations.
I’m guessing you still use products made from fossil fuels: would you say that you are avoiding the problem? Or would you say you a just being pragmatic? It’s easy to point fingers but unless you are living in a hut in the woods you will still be contributing to GHG.
* They knew about climate change a long time ago, yet decided to use tobacco industry playbook rather than try to be part of the solution.
* They obfuscated plastic recycling on purpose (do you know the difference between PET-1 and PET-2, why does the plastic type symbol look exactly like the universal symbol for recycling?)
* Even more recently, they branded the term 'clean coal' and had different media outlets and politicians parrot it around.
* Established fake grassroots movements to make it look like people support whatever shit they do.
These and many other violations are discussed in the excellent YouTube channel Climate Town.
If we do quick fixes, O&G will absolutely use the opportunity to keep pushing their garbage and hinder other progress.
I don't think there is much scientific evidence it is safe to do and the last people I would want engaging in geo engineering would be a VC funded startup.
Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy.
Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity. And once you add in the environmental externalities on top of just the pure cost, it becomes even more egregious.
Saying that it's impossible is as ridiculous as saying it's impossible for us to have built the huge energy system we have today. Rebuilding it all will take just a few percentage of global GDP, less than would be spent on fossil fuels, and create the infrastructure for cheaper more abundant energy, laying the groundwork for more technological advancement.
Instead of repeating tired narratives of the past, it's time to start thinking critically and apply even the tiniest amount of skepticism to the received wisdom of entrenched interests. We only hurt ourselves when we wear the rose-colored glasses that let us live with the out-dated "truths" of the 20th century.
It's time for us to advance technologically.
I would really like to believe this claim to be true.
Unfortunately my recent real-world data points gathered as a consumer while doing such mundane stuff as heating and powering my home and fueling my ageing vehicles leave me wondering what I'm missing.
I'd love to drive an EV. I'd love to have PV at home. A geothermal heat pump would be nice, too.
I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices until they get considerably cheaper.
The key question would be: expensive for whom?
Take a look at "Why is cheap renewable electricity so expensive?"[0] (published last week) which details the changes in electricity generation in the UK:
'The proportion of electricity generated [..] by renewables has increased from 3% in 2000 to 42% in 2022, whereas the proportion generated by fossil fuels has decreased from 73% in 2000 to 41% in 2022'
...but thanks to marginal cost pricing consumers don't see this because...
"The wholesale price of all electricity is set by the most expensive method of producing electricity, which is usually from burning gas"
[0] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/why-is-cheap-renewable-...
Very odd. Almost as if you are not trying to argue based on data, but just being contrarian.
Again: cheaper for whom? Are we talking producers or consumers?
> Very odd
Renewables being cheaper unfortunately doesn't mean the electricity consumers purchase will necessarily be cheaper, at least not if we use the current market approaches and rely on gas to top up what can't be provided elsewhere.
They rarely make financial sense against modern air source heat pumps. Spend the saved money from digging on insulation and PV instead.
No, you haven’t got credit. Solar panels pay for themselves like 3 or 4 times 9n their lifespan. We had a period of zero-interest rates, we could have bought everyone solar panels.
But our bankers are too busy playing with fictitious derivatives instead of providing favourable credit to honest homeowners for renewables investment.
It's not clear that our politicians are actually particularly serious about change, either. The only big change I've noticed this side of the pond in the last year is that our drink cartons now have tethered plastic caps.
OK, they're still made of bonded layers of cardboard, aluminium and polyethylene which make them hard work to recycle, and according to a 2021 German study indeed less than 1/3rd of them are actually recycled ...
...but at least now the hard-to-recycle plastic lids now stay attached to the empty and hard-to-recycle cartons!
<sigh>
About ten years ago I realized that solar, wind, and batteries were going to beat fossil fuels on pure balance sheet accounting. Bonus: better long term risk. Were now in a rentier capitalist stages of grief situation where they're having to deal with all their fossil fuel based assets being suddenly worthless. But there is nothing they can do to stop what's coming.
Ok, exactly how do you propose to: 1) Get China to stop building more coal-burning power plants, and 2) Get Americans (and others) to start building and moving to dense, walkable cities and stop driving SUVs?
The problem isn't "fossil fuel interests", it's a very large number of "normal" people who refuse to change their lifestyles, plus various authoritarian governments that refuse to change their trajectories.
The only way you can "rebuild it all" is to somehow take control of the whole world militarily and set up a single global authoritarian government to do all this. Trying to get the world's existing governments, some authoritarian (and not caring about the problem) and others democratic (with most of their populations refusing to change their lifestyles), is like herding cats. What you want to do is technically possible, but politically completely impossible. Getting everyone to work together just to deal with a virus turned out to be a disaster, in case you forgot that.
>The problem isn't "fossil fuel interests",
I would say it's not "just" fossil fuel interests. But they are playing a huge part in this - particularly in sowing misinformation about clean technologies, and how being carbon neutral will mean the end of your life, or that some kid in a country you've never been to will be digging stuff out of the ground for your EV/solar panel. Most of which isn't actually true (or is a minority case), but they have successfully made everyone think that it is.
I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.
But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway. The only way will be to do this, otherwise it'll be game over.
>I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.
Exactly. And these aren't people in authoritarian countries; there are people in democratic nations. If politicians try to hard to push these people to give up their current lifestyles, they'll be voted out.
>But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway.
What we're going to get is some smaller, rich, democratic nations like Netherlands and Finland making real changes, and not making any significant change planet-wide because these places are small and have little population compared to India, China, and USA. Meanwhile, Americans will still be driving everywhere in 6000-pound SUVs (some of which might become EVs, but lots of EVs still means lots of electricity needed, which has to come from somewhere) and heating and cooling their huge 5000 square foot (464 square meters) homes, and China will still be running coal-fired power plants and probably building even more so their people can live more like Americans, etc. etc.
I simply see no way that you're going to get most of humanity to agree to the degree of changes in energy use and emissions output needed within the next 5 years to head off a climate catastrophe. Making significant and meaningful changes in 100 years isn't going to help because it's going to be much too late. Basically, we're like the Titanic, 30 seconds before it hits the iceberg: there's simply no practical way to change course at this point. The best thing to do is stop arguing how to avoid the iceberg, and start talking about who gets the lifeboats.
Obviously the people with the most money and/or the biggest guns.
I don't think the outcome is anywhere near as binary as you suggest, and there is a way to reduce emissions while increasing or maintaining living standards; you pay the price of development to make renewable options the best choice.
I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.
This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.
For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.
> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much
I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
It does, but it's not a linear relationship. Everything I've read talks about a "tipping point" and exponential curve: basically, once you get past a certain point, it starts snowballing. Critical ocean currents stop working the normal way, etc. Germany becoming carbon neutral just isn't enough to avoid this. Germany isn't that big an emitter when compared to everyone else.
>I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
Germany is not "the developed world". It's not even much of a leader of it. The US is, and the US is NOT going to become carbon-neutral (or even close to it) in our lifetimes. And even if they did, somehow, there's still China.
The energy transition will be cheaper than our current infrastructure.
The challenges are not technological nor economical, the challenge is prevent entrenched interests from preventing the best, cheapest, and most environmentally friendly system from taking its rightful place.
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
Renewable energy and battery storage are on tech curves like semiconductors or DNA sequencing. Fossil fuels are not.
There will be no competition within a decade.
Add to that that batteries have been around for centuries, but renewables are decades old, so it makes sense that they are improving in cost so quickly: they are a newer tech.
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy
Batteries are completely on a similar curve, continuously improving at an exponential rate, and as they get scaled up to TWh/year production there is a chance of acceleration of this trend. There is a proliferation of new chemistry and tech in all parts of the battery. We are just at the very beginning.
Of course stuff like Lithium batteries are accelerating, but these aren’t economical for utility scale batteries yet. There’s a good chance they will never be.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/us-will-see-more-new...
Based on the latest projects such as this one in Australia [0], building a grid-scale system will result in energy prices increasing by many multiples. Of course it will get cheaper, but I don't see it being cheap enough that it won't have massive impact on costs (I hope I'm wrong btw).
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/engie-and-macquarie-to-fund-150m...
There is a lot of fossil fuel development going on that doesn't make sense if renewables are cheaper. Especially in China where panels are actually made. I'm open to an alternative explanation, but I don't think it's inertia. Most industries switch to cheaper tech pretty soon after it becomes available.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-says-it-wil...
China is starting to move in the right direction, but there's a ton of planning lag. China is by far the largest single consumer of solar panels. It also deploys more wind turbines than any other country.
Two limiting factors are China's insatiable need for ever greater power generating capacity of any kind, and the surprisingly rapid uptake of renewables globally which has constrained new production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
and for the fun of it
> Nuclear $6,695-7,547
regarding you question: In large scale projects there is a lot of inertia, especially in less developed areas. Many of these places have just build a conventional grid, and are in no situation to upgrade to renewables.
That being said: some non-industrial countries are actually moving fast towards adopting renewables (compared to developed countries). e.g. Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brazil.
>The first German Offshore Wind Park Alpha Ventus Offshore Wind Farm with a nameplate capacity of 60 MW cost €250 million (after an initial estimate of €190 million).[21] In 2012 it produced 268 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, achieving a capacity factor of just over 50%.[22] If the overnight cost is calculated for the nameplate capacity, it works out to €4167 per Kilowatt whereas if one takes into account the capacity factor, the figure needs to be roughly doubled.
It also ignores fuel costs, maintenance, external costs of pollution etc.
On a mixed grid this is fine because you just ask your gas plants to up their load contribution and they can do it because they can overbuild fairly cheaply - they just increase their moment to the moment fuel burn. On a theoretical grid which is carbon neutral, you've got a real problem answering that question (in fact on any grid with >30% intermittent renewables you've got a big problem). Storage doesn't save you here either - i.e. the cheapest, largest storage you can build is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro can only be "charged" at about half the rate it discharges. Catching up when you have an outage is not trivial (i.e. you have to overbuild by an enormous amount).
You start adding all those problems together, and solar and wind stop looking "cheap" - they get away with being cheap because very much like coal, oil and gas, they avoid pricing in their own externalities (and no, you can't just ignore power grid outages - you lose the grid you lose water and sanitation in cities, and they "die" within a week).
Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore.
So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go.
Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
Oh and you know... They're a lot cheaper per reliable kWh then any other option (green methane would require solar power to be an order of magnitude cheaper then it currently is - not impossible but it also hasn't happened yet and may not).
If you don't have regularly operating gas power stations any more, then the cost for underproduction protection is going to be a lot higher - because rather then running an extra turbine or increasing fuel burn, you have to justify the whole powerplant and it's sort infrastructure existing.
One good book regarding napkin math was the following (in German unfortunately): https://www.amazon.de/Erneuerbare-Energien-zum-Verstehen-Mit...
I'm interested what you mean about the 'conventional grid' preventing upgrades to renewables?
The more confident an online commenter is of their assertion, the lower the chances it is true.
> On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,[1]: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.
sorry, I should've said "conventional power generation". I mean it like "using old school tech, like coal and oil".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_developing...
> Renewable energy technology was once seen as unaffordable for developing countries. However, since 2015, investment in non-hydro renewable energy has been higher in developing countries than in developed countries, and comprised 54% of global renewable energy investment in 2019. The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable energy will provide the majority of energy supply growth through 2030 in Africa and Central and South America, and 42% of supply growth in China.
There's lots of gas plant construction, even in poor countries https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/boom-and-bust-gas-202...
Intermittent generators does not mean an intermittent grid, and in fact by having fewer single points of failure, and ensuring that grid operators are used to dynamic dispatch from intermittent generators, grids like Germany's have become more reliable with the addition of intermittent generators.
It's like ~10 years ago when web apps went from large architectures with a few boxes to cloud-scale operators where random failure was expected. By planning for lots of small, less reliable components, overall reliability increased.
Is it not just because they get backup from French nuclear and they have turned their coal plants back on? I.e. renewables have made things worse?
> The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours) — both far more reliant on nuclear power — did worse, for various reasons.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
Nuclear is typically not a good thing for reliability. They are big single points of failure, and France was less reliable than Germany. Similarly, Texas relied on nuclear during their massive cold snaps and that foolishness killed people. It takes better planning than "nuclear is baseload" to build a reliable grid.
It's a moot point anyway, since renewables don't stabilize Germany's grid: coal and gas power plants (and imported electricity) do. Renewables are cheap if they are a small proportion of sources or the grid is stabilized by another source. If you need storage the cost simply explodes.
E.g. how many billions of euros were collected within a week after the Notre Dame burned? At the risk of offending a lot of french I will say that the Notre Dame is just a building. In the big scheme of things it is not important. Nobody will starve if it is not re-built.
The problem is 'mental inertia', convenience and (perceived) risk aversion.
If rich countries open sourced all tech related to renewables and made -publicly avable designs for solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and factories that produce them, then it would be a valid question.
Oh, also provide loans because renewables have higher cap-ex and lower op-ex. This factor alone can account for massive difference, as -or countries don’t have cash on hand and can’t access credit.
Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
And a lot of these poorer countries don't have the industrial capacity to build all this stuff even if it was open sourced.
>Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
Well it depends why. The west tried this and it just ended up bankrupting multiple countries. Eg for hydro, which is also high cap ex, low op ex.
World war two, the example raised the most often, required only increased output. It had no limits on how to get there. This requires both. I really don't think it's like anything we've ever tried to do before.
In particular it wouldn't be this hard to...replace everything eventually when it makes sense. In order to maximally dampen climate change we would need to do this as quickly as possible.
Edit: I also want to add that any project that needs 100-300% of global GDP certainly qualifies as "one to two orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have done." Wikipedia puts the 1940 world GDP at 3,000 billion USD[1]. The manhatten project cost ~$2bn (0.06%). The whole war was estimated to cost the US ~$288bn (9.6%)[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
[2](unreliable but fine for a ballpark) https://www.whatitcosts.com/world-war-ii-cost-united-states-...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176462647/green-energy-trans...
We replace all cars every 10-ish years. We replace all infrastructure every 50-ish. All we had to do is replace them at their normal pace with carbon neutral alternative.
First, solar will not use up land. "Agrivoltaics" provide farmers a year-round revenue stream without reducing yield appreciably (on some crops, increasing yield), while improving water retention and protecting livestock from weather extremes.
Second, cost of the energy used will be zero. It will come not from bespoke solar farms, but from utility-scale production above immediate demand. Big producers will buy these things to provide themselves another revenue stream from zero-marginal-cost excess generation after their local batteries are charged up.
https://www.agritecture.com/blog/2022/2/3/largest-farm-to-gr...
Which seems like the better idea?
But there is more than enough pasture to site all the solar we need to power the world, while simultaneously protecting the livestock from weather extremes.
The truth is there is far more than enough land, available very cheaply, to power the world with renewable energy.
1) recognizing the steady past improvement in solar costs
2) using the concept of LCOE
3) accepting that solar will improve for at least 10 years
4) targeting a future cost target of solar
These are things the hydrogen folks often pretend isn't going to happen.
But anyway, the theory being that as soon as hydrogen is cheaper than petrol by a sufficient margin a massive economic shift will occur. I'm assuming he means switches to FCEVs (not going to happen) or synthfuels for the ICEs.
But... batteries and EV tech are also improving on a very aggressive curve. Currently it is my belief that state of the art EV drivetrain tech has dropped under ICE costs. This is already the current state of the market, and there is likely a large amount of further cost reduction in EV drivetrains forthcoming in the next 10-20 years that will make the ICE drivetrain functionally obsolete in at least 70% of applications and perhaps 95%.
So even if a synthfuel chain based on H2 production from solar appears that is cheaper than current oil extraction in about 10 years, the fact is that, while there will be a large installed base to milk for another 10-20 years, EVs are going to eat the terrestrial vehicle drivetrain market.
I will say it would still be an enormous boon for the used equipment out there, as well as aviation. So I wish them the best. Also, grid power storage (short and long term).
And we'll still have the issue that oil extraction might still be cheaper for methane -> H2, and it sneaks into the "green" H2 market, which is a danger, but if solar is really so cheap in 7-10 years as predicted in this article, it might be economically infeasible to do grey/blue/purple/rainbow hydrogen from methane, which would be a good thing.
Did I miss something?
I will always fondly remember a presentation explaining that you could have strawberry fields or goat-herding under the shadow panels and how they worked together well: evaporation lowers the temperature of the panel, and goats cleared the vegetation around frames—when someone (who looked like he operated a farm) heckled, absolutely deadpan: “That won’t work. Goats are going to eat them strawberries.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/many-evs-outperform-epa...
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
My renault Zoe would do about 176 miles (283km) on the same electricity put straight into the battery.
Hydrogen cars do not make sense unless the electricity is free, and even then there are lots of difficulties not present in a BEV.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
Quoting "apples to oranges" here ignores the massive inefficiency in other stages of the process of storing and distribution of hydrogen, which is difficult and expensive to do. The distribution of electricity is much more efficient and cheaper.
In fact, this is a total inversion of reality, bordering on science denial. The process of making and storing hydrogen is a straightforward process. It is trying to this with only electricity that is very hard.
You ramp up your hydro output and spread out and postpone the load. People have adapted to doing dishes and laundry when electricity is cheap, this is not different.
Pumped hydro is energy storage that you have to put energy into to push water uphill. And yes it has losses, 25% losses round trip.
If you have a hydroelectric damn however, you increase the flow when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow and curtail it otherwise.
> It also requires you to have hydropower.
It's true. Just as wind turbines needs good wind, solar needs ample sunlight, and hydrogen proposals need large underground caverns.
The point is that hydrogen gives you nearly lossless energy storage. This is why simplistic accounts of efficiency are simply wrong. People are ignoring energy storage losses on the BEV side, but always bring up the full cycle losses on the hydrogen side. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and gives you an invalid conclusion.
Of course most hydrogen vehicles are actually battery electrical vehicle where the battery is charged by the fuel cell. Reason for this is that fuel cells are not that easy to throttle up and down and typically have a lower output than the maximum input of the motor. So, you put enough battery in between the fuel cell and the motor so that you don't run out of energy when e.g. driving up a mountain. Also this enables benefiting from things like regenerative braking. Technically, you could take any hydrogen vehicle and convert it to pure battery electric by simply replacing the hydrogen bits and bops with a bigger battery. No need to change the drive train or anything else. It already is a battery electric vehicle.
So a hydrogen car or truck inherits all those supposed (in)efficiencies of battery electric and then adds the additional (in)efficiencies of the hydrogen production, storage, transport, and fuel cell conversion. The whole process starts with the same renewable energy that you would otherwise put straight into the battery. So these are additional inefficiencies that go on top of the whole end to end chain. The further away you are from where the hydrogen is produced, the worse it gets.
Anyway, when you multiply all of these efficiencies, you end up with a good reason why hydrogen cars are not a great idea from a cost point of view. Just a lot of losses in this long chain of energy conversions that you necessarily have to do that multiply to lots of energy loss.
What this article proposes is super interesting of course but it doesn't change the math for transport. Battery electric is inherently more efficient. It works today and it's going to only get better. Cheaper more dense batteries, cheaper renewable energy production, etc. There are plenty of more sensible/economical uses for hydrogen outside transport.
I guess you'd also have take into account loss during transmission (which seesm to vary wildly between 2-10% depending on location) and charger efficiency. IIRC if we add it all up it's about 70%.
As for the cars, they can we can install chargers at all parking spots and take advantage of the intermittent energy during the day to charge the cars then. Many colder climates have engine blocker heater outlets as a standard feature for outdoor parking, adding 120V or 240V chargers to new parking spots (and retrofitting old ones) is not a far fetched idea.
The problem is that adds significant energy losses for a hypothetical car powered purely by renewable energy. In fact, it could be even greater than what it takes to power a hydrogen car. That is immediately obvious when you realize that the energy storage system is hydrogen in the first place.
Ultimately, people are just demonizing the inefficiencies of the hydrogen process while totally ignoring real-world losses for battery cars.
Perhaps mid 30% are living in the past. Do you have a reference for the round trip efficiency of a production hydrogen car?
Of course things not being ideal, it's more like 4x with the 80kwh / kg hydrolyser this company advertises. Now we're talking 80*0.85 = 68 kwh. That's typical for a lot of mid range EVs (including Teslas) with a range of 250 miles or better; or about 400km. 4x the energy + all the additional cost. Sure it will only cost a 85 cents per 100 km. But you could be driving for 21 cents per 100 km.
Now cheap hydrogen can be useful for industrial processes and aerospace so seeing the cost come down is still very good.
[0]Plausibly viable, non precious metal catalysts typically have less than stellar lifetimes but there is a lot of fat to plausibly trim out of an electrolyzed.
Totally different logistics requirements
(The lossy part may be a genuine climate issue if the cheap solar methane economy takes off.)
Their problem is that solar power isn't cheap yet. The other big problem is that electrical transmission lines are way more efficient than hydrogen, which 30% efficient on whole cycle. It makes no sense to use hydrogen as energy transport. Cheap hydrogen production at every use point, airport, factory, port, would make sense.
They don’t address this directly, but is probably what they’re going for given the low deployment cost, no maintence, size, and comparison against other energy sources.
Their proposed device would be really good for distribution if it is cheap and simple. Scale up to port, scale down to truck stop.
The first step should be stop using CH4 for H2 production, which is 65-75% efficient (steam reforming) and instead use green hydrogen. Today, hydrogen production is $155 Bln / year market that may take even a decade to transition. Simpler and more profitable than synthesising CH4.
One more trick, would be to connect partial solar to grid at lower capacity to benefit from price surges (e.g. evening). E.g. 100 MW solar, but with grid connection of just 1 MW to profit from when grid electricity is expensive.
Also please do not worry about transporting or storing hydrogen. Just produce ammonia and sell it on the market. Till we decarbonise ammonia production (1%+ of global CO2 emission), we don't have to worry about that.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?...
So where are the sums for running the system off behind the meter solar when the sun shines, pausing production for a few hours as net load peak occurs, then starting again with grid supplied off peak overnight power?
I think a naive conparison would be misleading as low rates at night for consumers are often accompanied by slightly higher prices during the day to nudge usage out of peak times, but I'd assume there's still some saving to be made.
What we can do is replace the origin of their fuel source, and the cheaper the better. You can synthesize methane into any liquid fuel you like. Now you'll lose energy in the transformation, but if the input energy is cheap and abundant enough - and can be stored well enough - then maybe that doesn't actually matter.
There are large areas of the planet which get more then enough sun to provide all our power needs and would impact no one if we harvested there. But we can't get the energy out of them, and we can't store enough of it to cover the times we can't.
I'm amazed at the size of the solar farm, the cost and the impact it could theoretically have (but hardly doesn't right now).
> But in essence, electrolyzers are glorified electric resistors, with no more intrinsic complexity than a kettle that boils water and costs $15/kW, including free two day shipping from China!
That's patently false! Resistive heating and electrolysis are two completely different effects. Also, resistive heaters don't have to deal with issues like galvanic corrosion, that electrolysis involves.
11;rgb:3838/0c0c/2a2a
> Why does our website look like this? At TI we believe we can change the world by displacing fossil hydrocarbon production at global scale. Like our website, our machines are simple so we can build millions of them as quickly as possible. Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resources where they solve the most important problems.
Seems odd considering they have a WordPress running in the OP
> PHP/Wordpress.
Pick one.
WordPress seems like a reasonable choice to build a website "as quickly as possible".
I don't like WordPress either, I prefer static site generators, but if you're going for something simple and fast to setup it's a legitimate choice.
Those sharp edges aren't really relevant anyway on a hosted service (wordpress.com) where they are buffed out for you.
What do you propose is the more pragmatic solution to standing up a blog, compared to going to wordpress.com and registering a free tier account?
He/she/it has created an inscrutably mixed-up paper sack of ideas to promote a never-defined end. Run this by a half-talented human editor and it might be possible to see what this 'visionary' is all about.
I don't like the pictures, though--there would not be a solar plant next to a water cracker next to a methane maker, but rather smaller scale components stacked together. The shorter the distance you ship it the cheaper--you put your panel right on top of the other equipment.
It’s increasingly starting to look like they anticipate having plants synthesize methane in remote areas (maybe near methane wells) and possibly have higher productivity from those setups than people would anticipate if they looked closely at the hydrolysis performance.
That's a lot of annual fuel use.
See (for example):
https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
where you're looking at serious physical engineers dealing with moving Mt Fuji magnitude problems of scale with billions in the budget.
Contrary wise, see also:
https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2021/Rio-Tinto-Teams-...
https://www.riotinto.com/news/releases/2022/Rio-Tinto-purcha...
these being some of the largest, longest, heaviest trains globally.
Similarly, if they need hydrogen as a reduction agent, they will produce it locally — i.e., not ask anyone trying to capture CO2 in the air or buy from it far away. No one is moving smelting facilities, so they’ll setup solar panels and wind farms around those.
That’s why the argument of making those far away, in place known for nothing but sand and oil fields always felt disingenuous.
> in place known for nothing but sand and oil fields
Errr, just as a reality check, almost all mines impact people in some form or another, often indigenous people who never adopted advanced western lifestyles that they are directly impacted by with mines, pipelines, climate effects, etc.
FWiW I'm making that statement as someone with decades as an exploration geophysicist, backend developer of
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...
and someone who has negotiated on environmental impact statements with traditional landowners.
In the US the proposed $64 billion half century supply Resolution Copper mine will impact people:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/ceraweek-rio-tin...
despite being somewhere that many on HN would describe as "empty", "barren", "uninhabited", etc.
Rio Tinto has stretched it's credibility with traditional owners in recent years:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/03/rio-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/may/24/a-yea...
Setting up energy generation to power it on site, rather than drag more energy transport that cuts through more of the local ecosystem, doesn’t.
Rethink that carefully - how many acres for an open pit mine?
Now, how many acres for solar panels, etc. to generate power to dig that mine?
If someone objects to landuse for the mine, then solar power is going to at least double the amount of land used.
I'm remaining neutral here on the ethics - but don't kid yourself that there's magically no additional land clearing from onsite solar.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
The penalty for not using hydrolox when you're going beyond low orbit grows even greater--but SpaceX is figuring that with Starship they can ship up fuel separately and still get more throw weight per dollar. Even now, note how a fully recovered Falcon Heavy launch is cheaper than an expended Falcon 9 launch even though it uses 3x the fuel.
Hydrogen has poor energy density (needs very large storage volumes), is expensive to handle safely, and still hits the equivalent of $13/l for petroleum gas. The field trials already profiled the degenerative nature of fuel cells, and problems with Hydrogen embrittlement.
I wager Goat Carts are the future, as most civilizations had them in their past. They are also far more radiation tolerant than primates. =)
Cost effectiveness is just part of an optimization problem, that will be constrained by desirable traits: temperature resistance, replication rate, and viable fuel content. In many places, uncontrolled algae blooms are already a naturally occurring issue in the run-off from large cities/farms.
There are several firms already working on this biotech. Note, a algae biodiesel would solve the issues with clean efficient generation, energy density, repurposing distribution, and repurposing storage.
Thus, a Goat cart is a safer bet. =)
Thermolyzer, maybe there’s something there.
If they hired me, I could make their project pass investor due diligence and more importantly actually work. Oh well.
However, if you were not familiar with the writer or early stage of terraform, then yeah I could imagine some letdown.
It's not exactly electrolyzer - mains were AC - but, if fuses (or usually their less fire-preventing replacements) held, water was heated - resistive effect.
I think Casey is just simplifying things a bit.
I often take issue with the highly-reductive, "model a cow as a sphere" type thinking that seems like a phd-doctor trope, as well, though.
Good luck, man.
There are a lot of actual good points in the article, but the ending lets it down in terms of building excitement for the bold new future. But hey, it's engineering not PR.
We can make vessels which will contain increasingly high pressures; however their permeability is higher, vs. older materials. This is a central problem of hydrogen as a primary fuel... Better to burn it (or convert it into methane) where and when it is produced.
Compressed hydrogen storage tanks are of 4 types [1]. Types 1,2 metal tanks, but they can be used only up to 300 bar. Their permeability rate is negligible. Type 4 is composite (e.g. carbon fiber) with a polymer interior lining. It operates at 700 bar (and various manufacturers state their product can work up to 850 bar). They have some permeability. Type 3 is similar, but with metal interior lining. Negligible permeability, but more expensive. I don't know how much more expensive, with these things all providers tell you to "call for quote".
In any case, the only problem is Type 4. They are the affordable alternative to Type 3, and they are also in much wider use.
There are some regulations and standards that govern them. Specifically EU 406/2010 and ISO 19881:2018 which prescribe a maximum steady state permeation rate of 6.0 Ncm3 of hydrogen per hour and per liter internal volume of the container [2].
To be honest, I'm not sure how to read this rate. Toyota Mirai uses such tanks (2 of them), so it can't be that bad. Each has a volume of about 60 liters, and holds about 5kg of hydrogen [3].
The more important thing is that permeability is a function of the surface area. A tank 1000 times larger has a surface area only 100 times higher, so the permeability per volume goes down by a factor of 10.
Such tanks do exist and are commercially available. I'm aware of the Hexagon Titan XL that can hold 220 kg of hydrogen. The latest quarterly revenues of the manufacturer [4] show 57% year-on-year growth, so it looks like customers are quite happy with their offering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_tank
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
[3] https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023
[4] https://hexagonpurus.com/news/hexagon-purus-asa-results-for-...
Nerd sniped. Atmosphere is 1.2 kg/m^3, hydrogen is 0.090 kg/m^3. So 1 kg of hydrogen at STP would be 11 m^3. The buoyancy force would then be 13kg-1kg.
Accordingly, 1kg of H weighs -12kg.
That’s a false dichotomy. I don’t want any of these, I want airplane quota per capita and stopping travel growth to preserve earth and its biodiversity. Fuck growth. There’s enough planes in the sky.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/terraform
> to alter the environment of (a celestial body) in order to make capable of supporting terrestrial life forms.
The abuse of English continues.
It's like calling it a "Car", or "Computer", these words have specific, concrete meanings. If you want to have a 'cool' name for your product fine, but not an already existing concept you bastardise to use in your name.
In this pitch, the secret sauce is using DC directly from solar cells in budget electrodes to produce cheap hydrogen fuel. I'm skeptical, but not immediately dismissive. I would like to see a prototype electrolyzer running directly off solar panel DC. This feels like a prototype that could be built for less than $1k in materials, and is probably the single largest impact thing he could do to improve his pitch deck.
LOL, what? This sort of seems to imply that Venezuela, where gasoline is sold for Pennie’s per liter, is better governed than, say, the Scandinavian county of your choosing.
I think higher energy prices are a perfectly valid public choice that a polity can choose to embrace if the costs and benefits represent an agreeable trade off.
But I think there’s very little support for the flat statement I quoted from the post. Higher energy prices are political suicide under any form of government? I think that’s quite obviously false.