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Comment by thereisnospork | Hacker News Reader

So really, really cheap electricity with a side of really, really cheap hardware[0] coupled with an absence of operations, maintenance, storage, or transport costs. Noting for the latter direct energy from panels must be used with a high locality to the panels themselves, which means a distributed collection and transportation for the produced hydrogen.

[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.

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I like how the Terraform's electrolyzers (80 kWh/kg) are less efficient than legacy systems (50 kWh/kg). He compares legacy with current electricity to their system with cheap solar when they need to be compared with the same input.

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.

> Cheap hydrogen production at every use point

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.

The article talks about converting to hydrogen at the solar panel. They don’t mention the expense of shipping the hydrogen where it is needed. And that much of the need is electricity so have to burn it for even more waste.

Their proposed device would be really good for distribution if it is cheap and simple. Scale up to port, scale down to truck stop.

Collection and transportation for natural gas, not hydrogen. Which is very easy to imagine since it is already widely done.

LNG =/= LPG

Totally different logistics requirements

Natural gas transport and storage is lossy (which is a serious problem), but it’s mostly a solved problem at very large scale.

(The lossy part may be a genuine climate issue if the cheap solar methane economy takes off.)

Storage costs should be considered, particularly for an intermittent process. Otherwise, you need an end user that can accept intermittent and somewhat unpredictable supply.

I too was missing the punchline of how they reduced the capital costs so much. The writing implied it was inevitable engineering, but the real world is seldom so simple.

Tankage and sea-surface shipping are both dirt-cheap.

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