Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency
autoevolution.com
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This is highly disingenuous. The problem isn't just that electrolysis isn't 100% efficient. It's that the electrolysis and the compression and the transmission and the distribution and the fuel cell all have efficiency problems, and are all much more expensive that the alternative (straight electric).
> In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too
I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was.
Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.
Not in the way that you think, no. For all intents and purposes, we have limitless energy. The problem was never that we don't have enough capacity, because we can scale capacity as much as we want. The only thing that is required is that energy generation (i.e. $/kWh) is cheap enough, and this seems feasible with solar and wind and maybe fission and later one fusion or other sources.
>you're comparing apples to oranges
You are the one saying, "just attach a transmission line to it" or "just put a battery in it", without thinking of all the cases where this is just not possible.
Nobody is arguing that you should start powering your toaster with hydrogen. You all are attacking a strawman, it seems.
It doesn't have nearly as much impact as other factors, such as abundance of the material, how easy/practical it is to work with it (which influences both demand and supply), whether mass infrastructure for it already exists (although this is more relevant in the short-term rather than long-term), etc.
These factors impact the economics of an energy source much more than efficiency, and economics is by far the most important factor in deciding whether an energy source will be used or not (and how much of it), not efficiency.
e.g. if hydrogen is only 10% efficient but there's 10 times more of it on Earth compared to a similar energy source that is 90% efficient, then hydrogen wins (all other factors being equal).
As another example, if hydrogen tanks in cars explode 100 times as often as gas tanks, then it would probably be a complete non-starter for powering vehicles, regardless of efficiency.
If you need need to build out a grid to power your cars, you'll 3x as much energy at the source to get the same amount of energy into the tyres.
3 x 10 cents, which could represent a fixed amount of an abundant and easy-to-work-with energy source (therefore cheap) which has 33% efficiency (hence the 3x cost factor), still costs much less than say, 1 x 5 dollars, which might represent the same amount of energy provided by a scarce and/or hard-to-work-with energy source (therefore expensive), even if this energy source is 99.999% efficient (hence the 1x factor).
As an analogy, let's say you live in a community on an isolated island and you need to eat.
You can satisfy your hunger / nutrient / energy requirements with 1 coconut or with 5 apples (which means we're assuming one apple is only 1/5th as nutritious/efficient as one coconut in this example).
Which fruit serving will be cheaper? You can argue "if you eat apples you will need 5x more of them, therefore they will be more expensive!".
But of course, that might not matter one bit.
The problem is that maybe on the island there might only be 10 (reachable) coconuts but there might be 10,000 reachable apples, so the 5 apples would be much, much cheaper than 1 coconut.
Or perhaps there are also 10,000 coconuts but there are no knives on this island so they would be very hard to open and eat. Therefore you wouldn't be able to find coconuts at the market because nobody would want to pick them and sell them, since nobody would want to buy them despite everybody wanting to eat fruit every day.
If you truly cared about energy efficiency you'd proposition the ban or severe limitation of private car usage in sufficiency dense localities. Public trams and busses, cycling, walking, and maybe even very small private vehicles would be extremely more energy efficient.
There is nothing about a 5-ton EV SUV that says energy efficiency.
Guess what, if you get a BEV with 1/3-1/4 the battery size, the range is smaller, but for most people it will be fine. And now your vehicle is not lugging around all that excess weight.
And do you really need a massive electric pickup truck? It's absolutely possible, but I bet for most people it's a preference.
Now, you have to acknowledge the world we live in, a total ban won't be feasible in the time-frame that we have to combat climate change. (And neither will an electric grid sufficiently powerful to power millions of green hydrogen-powered vehicles or 5-ton SUVs for that matter).
Not all EVs weigh 5 tons. Promoting (smaller) EVs for people who need them is a good thing.
Utility-scale users of solar will naturally install electrolysers for the additional revenue stream, using generation in excess of immediate need after local storage is charged up. They will favor the cheapest equipment, disregarding efficiency, because of their intermittent utilization. Nobody will be able to compete with them, because the power they use will be wholly free (i.e. "zero marginal cost"). The market for electrolysed H2, and NH3 produced from it, will be unlimited.
Solar farms not producing H2 will find themselves undercut by those that are.
Long-term energy storage will not be a thing, because any need beyond a few days will be satisfied by shipments of LNH3 from tropical producers.
It will take time for all this to settle out. Expect to see a lot of short-term adaptations.
Hydrogen (and explosive gas which is notorious difficult to transport and work with safely) is neither efficient nor convenient.
Efficiency gains generally lead to lower cost, which in turn lead to higher demand. And this increased demand can very well be in excess of the efficiency gain.
This was observed as early as the 1860ies and theorized in concepts like the Jevons Paradox/Rebound Effect.
This doesn't mean efficiency gains are not desirable, but they must be implemented in conjunction with other factors like environmental policies.
But regarding your example, personally, I'm actually kind of "keep adding light bulbs" thanks to LEDs. I'm no longer using one central 75W incandescent bulb per room, but rather 4 or 5 Philips Hue lights (bulbs & led strips) in an indirect fashion. Hue bulbs & these new usages would not have existed without the LED efficiency gains.
This counter example, of course, has many flaws, firstly, it's only my specific situation, not an average case. The efficiency gains (energy and longevity) is only part of what enabled these new types of lights. And lastly, I think my energy consumption is still lower non-the-less. But it demonstrate how things might not be so clear cut.
By the time (highly explosive) hydrogen gets into people's homes I'd be surprised if it was even 20% as efficient as a heat pump.
Still seems better to me to convert as much housing as possible to heat pumps, which seem much better fit for purpose than on-site combustion.
I think green hydrogen has a lot more potential as a precursor to liquid fuels for e.g. aviation and shipping, which otherwise will be extremely difficult to electrify.
turning it into methane to burn it is trying to solve last century's problem. People need way to stay warm not things to burn.
To make a parallel with rocket science: there are extremely efficient liquid chemical propellants, much better than what is in use today, like Chlorine Trifluoride, that nobody uses anymore because they are just too dangerous to work with.
Or the fact that hydrogen airships will never come back: nobody will ever, ever switch from helium despite the cost and lift difference.
Hydrogen has its uses (e.g. steel plants). Transportation is not one of them.
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water—with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals—steel, copper, aluminum, etc.—because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride that protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes
Small caveat, hydrogen is still pretty useful for upper stage rocket propulsion because of its low mass and high specific impulse.
Most importantly, you're not (in most places) paying for the pollution of the atmosphere. E.g. Prices on carbon are nowhere near the level of societal harm that putting it into the atmosphere causes.
With fossil fuels, you don’t need to input energy to get them. At least not in the same way. You can run a pump to pump them out of the ground. For each unit of energy that goes into the pump, you likely get 1000x units of energy out.
Whether you want to consider that analogous to the electrolysis step or to another one is not clear since the processes don't map one to one.
Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?
when a query is asked of an AI it has to generate a response from all of that data and the query and response themselves become data
running an LLM on local consumer hardware can take upwards of 20 minutes for a single query, so an AI service that may be responding to up millions of requests a day would need a massive hyper-parallelized server infrastructure
But there’s ways to solve that through energy generation and DC investments.
I got my computer engineering degree back in the 90s because superscalar VLSI was popular and I wanted to design highly-concurrent multicore CPUs with 256 cores or more. Had GPUs not totally dominated the market, Apple's multicore M1 line approach with local memories would have happened in the early 2000s, instead of the smartphone revolution which prioritized low cost and low energy use above all. We would have had 1000 core machines in 2010 and 100,000-1 million core machines for 2020, for under $1000 at current transistor count costs. Programmed with languages like Erlang/Go, MATLAB/Octave, and Julia/Clojure in an auto-parallelized scatter-gather immutable functional programming approach where a single thread of execution distributes all loops and conditional logic across the cores and joins it under a synchronous blocking programming model. Basically the opposite of where the tech industry has gone with async (today's goto).
That put us all on the wrong path and left us where we are today with relatively ok LLMs and training data drawn from surveillance capitalism. Whereas we could have had a democratized AI model with multiple fabs producing big dumb multicore CPUs and people training them at home on distributed learning systems similar to SETI@home.
Now it's too late, and thankfully nobody cares what people like me think anyway. So the GPU status quo is cemented for the foreseeable future, and competitors won't be able to compete with established players like Nvidia. The only downside is having to live in the wrong reality.
Multiply this change of perception by all tech everywhere. I like to think of living in a bizarro reality like this one as the misanthropic principle.
Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclosed cabin is a formula for disaster.
? Are you suggesting this will be a result of regulatory action? Since it would most likely be more expensive for the first decade, even if I gave you a tap on the airfield labelled "free H2"
OPEC paving their deserts with PV and synthesising fuel (whatever that is: hydrogen, Sabatier methane, aluminium for burning) or just exporting that electricity along a 2m^2 cross section solid aluminium rod to the other side of the planet? Sure, plausible.
[0] I was going to say "and rockets", but then I realised we don't launch anything like as many rockets as we fly planes, so even then rockets might still be running on green hydrogen or methane derived from it.
Solar and wind farms supplying international airports would probably need to send power via HVDC transmission lines. But, yes, the airports will need much more than just overage from the farms, and probably booster shipments of LH2 from farms in the tropics, besides. Imagine how big must be the project of refining, transporting, storing, and distributing kerosene to gates, today. Yet it is made almost invisible.
(That doesn't mean they will do it, it's just the consequence of failure).
In the future when we have more solar power than we know what to do with during the day it may become economical to run the Sabatier reaction with hydrolyzed seawater and atmospheric CO2 to make methane, which can be burned in a lightly modified aircraft turbine.
(It's a bit like saying we shouldn't use AC power because look what Edison did with those poor elephants. It's interesting anti-technological propaganda that made sense socio-politically at the time but isn't that useful to today's discussions.)
Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either.
> They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.
This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere.
The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores.
Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411
Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula.
Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s literally a hundred alternative there. I’m fond of pumped hydro, which we can do anywhere with a height difference, we don’t need to restrict that to existing dams. But there’s lots of options there and many are very viable.
So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive.
If you look at planned energy projects, the market has very clearly spoken. That doesn’t mean it can’t change, but I don’t think it’s likely.
Not really economical unless you've got some suitably-shaped geology to build most of the storage vessels out of.
The lithium issues may be addressed by sodium-ion, which is now mature enough that you can buy it on aliexpress.
Ontario is a great counter example.
We have something like 60-70% of our power from nuclear, representing most of the base load. We're building more plants soon too.
Electricity is cheap, and used to be even cheaper before it was privatized.
And we have no nuclear weapons program supporting these plants.
Even china [0] renowned for pushing projects through and "getting stuff done" hasn't been able to push the price and construction time of nuclear down enough to make them cheap and easy to build.
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...
Because it can work rain or shine. Wind or no wind.
What happens if we have no wind and have a lot of clouds for a few weeks in an area? The storage is limited and nuclear can still produce. Yes, I understand other areas can likely pick up the slack, but nuclear doesn't have that issue. At a minimum nuclear is a good thing to have as a back up even if we have sufficient renewables.
Also, don't forget climate change is supposed to cause more extreme weather events. We don't know what impact that will have on wind and solar.
The answer is a combination of storage, overbuild, long distance interconnections, and diversification ( which mostly means we keep some natural gas plants around, not new nuclear.)
Sure overbuilding might work, but only getting 10% of the solar and 0% of the wind would require such massive overbuilding it would probably not be practical.
I did mention interconnection. While it can help, there can be extreme weather over large parts of the country at one time. We have fires in Canada blocking out some parts of the North East. Imagine if there was a large fire happening in California and a hurricane in the south. As climate change continues that is only going to get worse blocking out solar in large chunks of the country.
The problem is determining the correct amount of storage. If we get 10% of the normal solar along with no wind for a week or two would there be enough storage? I'm guessing not.
It is good you agree that we need some diversity. So many people are radicals and say we don't need an alternative. I agree with your sentiment, but think we should also have nuclear not just natural gas. Nuclear is reliable and clean. Why use natural gas if we don't need to?
Because natural gas is cheap and nuclear is not. If you’re using tax payer dollars, you absolutely can be wasteful and choose the more expensive option. That may even make sense when you factor in the cost of the carbon dioxide pollution. We’re not there yet, but it could come back around, especially if you implement a high enough carbon tax, which I’ve always advocated for.
I think you can get potentially very long term energy storage via pumped hydro, so I expect that would help as well. But natural gas can also be fired up occasionally on those very cloudy days when the wind is also not blowing. The pollution might not matter if you offset it via other means or you use green hydrogen or ammonia or something to that effect.
Since we already have a lot of natural gas power plants, we might not need to build any more, just maintain the more efficient ones in working order.
Did they ever get rid of the rule that prohibits nuclear from being cost competitive? Its opponents got it so if they ever found a way to make it cost less the money explicitly had to be spent on new safety measures. Which obviously not only makes it impossible to reduce the cost but also removes any incentive to try.
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/glossary/alara.html
Google doesn't want to find a more specific link right now, but you can see the implication from the definition: If you find a way to make nuclear cost less than something else, now it's economical to make it cost more in order to reduce radiation exposure, with no lower limit where you can stop.
Of course, only when the sun is shining. But it’s an incredible Lego block we’ve got to play with in building this new energy system, zero marginal cost generation.
That is mind blowing to me. There’s definitely an argument to be made for decentralizing the grid.
do not underestimate the sticky pull of collecting ̶r̶e̶n̶t̶^C ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶subscriptions from people
Superconductors aren't the limiting factor for that, on paper we can already make a 40,000 km long 0.5Ω power line for costs comparable to current annual fossil fuel mining (Chinese annual coal alone is expensive enough for the aluminium).
The problem is geopolitics and that it's a megaproject.
It will highlight many of the engineering issues and some of the political ones, and ideally will seem like an overpriced mess when we reach the level where we even want to optimise design and process for a full-size grid.
For a true planet scale grid, think half a trillion dollars of aluminium, 3.75 years of current annual worldwide production: its doable, just not what you should jump into without smaller scale experiments.
I suspect battery storage will reach that point before any nuclear plant started in the West today generates its first watt: about 10-15 years.
But it was never, and will never be "cheap".
Also not all places might be suitable for nuclear, for various reasons. Hydrogen might be a good option.
but the per kw cost is relatively low as i understand it since the fuel is so efficient and its getting cheaper as new reactor designs get cheaper and safer
So if the efficiency of generating hydrogen is increased, that's a win for endusers no matter if they do it themselves or pump it somewhere from 3rd party.
You are correct about the subscription model though.
In reality, people are spreading a conspiracy theory to mentally distract from this fact. They do not want to admit that they have been fooled by battery makers, so they create a narrative that the alternative is somehow an ever bigger scam.
Instead there is a lot more interest in using green hydrogen for industrial purposes or as a key building block for cleaner fuels like methanol. Currently green hydrogen is expensive to make and sucks to transport. But it will likely get a lot cheaper to produce in the next 10 years and you can convert it into fuels that are easier to transport.
There is recent episode of Volts that interviews a startup trying to do this: https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...
But the two chief uses will be in industrial processes that use hydrogen directly, in chemical processes that use hydrocarbons directly, and in energy storage applications where you need to store large quantities of energy for weeks or months or years.
One of those niches: boats. Specifically: user-owned recreational ones.
Not because it's hard to build electric propulsion systems for boats. There already exist many types of motors, batteries & control systems to choose from. Not because battery weight / size is a problem (it isn't). Not because of safety issues (gas/diesel have their own).
But because it requires a big upfront investment. Converting to electrical propulsion is (for most boats) expensive. For someone who already owns a gas/diesel powered boat, but not the $$ to convert into all-electric, that's a big hurdle.
Of course new boats will replace old ones over time. But average boat lasts much longer (read: takes much longer to replace) than eg. cars. Average car is what, 6..8y old? Average boat more like 20y+. Electric conversion that's both easy and cheap, is not a thing (yet?).
Professional owners like ferries, commercial shipping or boat rental, will deal with this. Private owners of recreational boats, not so quick.
That means: there will be gas/diesel powered boats around for many years. Having 'green' fuel for those available everywhere, would be quite a boon.
Not saying people should switch to resistive heaters since they significantly less efficient than heat pumps but simply that resistive electric heating would be cheaper than hydrogen (If that hydrogen is produced using electrolysis).
IF the capital cost of electrolysis isn't too bad - and this paper suggests that it can be done more cheaply than the current use of platinum - then it's economical to run them with zero or negative cost electricity produced by renewables overbuild, then keep the hydrogen in tanks (another if) or convert it to actual natural gas via the sabatier reaction and keep that. That may be cheaper than building really huge battery farms for long-duration electric storage.
I am not saying making hydrogen can't be economical utilizing cheap off peak rates. I just don't see it as economical for home heating or typical consumer transportation since there are alternatives that utilize electricity directly.
Even if not, even if vehicles remain fully electric (which is my assumption):
> The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs. Even if this green hydrogen does not help move a vehicle, it is a welcome way to curb the production of the gray and black kinds.
It's good to see them prompting all the other things this will also be useful for.
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On a separate topic: this is the second site in a row where the full-screen "we respect your privacy click here to agree" banner won't actually let me scroll down to any of the buttons.
I'm glad reader mode works, or I wouldn't be able to see any actual content.
It will only do that if countries put laws in place to require green hydrogen. green hydrogen is not just expensive because it is new, but theoretically expensive because there are currently two routes to turn natural gas into hydrogen:
gas -> combined cycle gas turbine (40% loss) -> generator -> electricity
electricity -> electrolysis (10-50% loss) -> hydrogen
gas -> steam reforming (25% loss) -> hydrogen.
From this, you can make equations bounding the prices of gas, electricity, and hydrogen for any process to be profitable. It turns out that for the middle process to work out economically, the first must be non-economic. ie. the price of electricity must be very low while the price of gas is very high.
With gas just flowing out of the ground in the USA, russia, saudi arabia, and others, this will never happen. In fact, in many places the price of gas is so low we just burn it off because it isn't even valuable enough to collect or transport.
Underrated comment. In fact, it's even worse than that: in places it must be burnt, because the CO2 is a less dangerous greenhouse gas than the methane itself.
This is a big problem in Turkmenistan where it's literally coming out of the ground on its own https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/us-deal-...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behind-the-overlay...
Safari on iPhone.
It is a fuel which has that advantage in that is it does transport around the world and can utilized on the specific site intentioned.
That said it is expensive specifically for hydrogen relative to other fuels that don't need special handling/containers/pressurizing.
This statement at the end of the article leads me to believe any widespread distribution of hydrogen is at least 10 years off. It'll be interesting to see if Toyota is vindicated after all! Realistically speaking, this seems like a good solution for long range trucks.
It might have some benefits in certain vehicle types where energy density and being far from a grid might make it beneficial but it will be a lot more expensive than electrical vehicles. Portable charging infrastructure with and wind and solar will often be a better option.
I can't see hydrogen being anything but niche now unless substantial efficiency is found in the engine optimisation, generation and storage.
Because with cheap solar power, I care relatively more about the cost of the machine than about efficiency.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/nikola-founders-trial-us-fraud...
Hydrogen electrolysed using zero-marginal-cost power from solar farms producing in excess of demand, on cheapest-conceivable electrolysers, will become cheaper than what depends on extracting, concentrating, and transporting NG.
But today it's not, and a lot of talk about hydrogen comes from the fossil fuel industry trying to delay adoption of renewables like solar.