Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.
> Liebreich gives an example of Shell being happy to spend $12bn on a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform, the Prelude, which has seen a host of problems, “but they won't spend $12bn just producing blue, green, pink, or any other sort of clean hydrogen for those [existing] uses where we currently are driving 3-4% of global emissions”.
It's not exactly been a winning strategy electorally for those who employ it the loudest, but it's been an effective strategy to prevent political wins of the parties and politicians that actually want to make the sustainability transition happen.
So far, it seems to have empowered the anti-establishment populist right instead...
I will not believe a policy based around future increases in carbon price unless it is implemented at a constitutional level (i.e. hard to reverse), comes with a detailed plan to redistribute the taxes raised in a manner that makes it socially just, and includes detailed information campaigns what the future price means for investments done now.
Having a huge carbon price in 10 years, for example, implies that internal combustion engine cars are worthless then. Just trying to implement a policy to stop selling them in ten years already causes a huge backlash, the idea that there will be the political capital to turn all existing ICE cars into expensive paper weights that only the richest few can afford to drive is wishful thinking.
Carbon prices do have an important role to play, but for those situations where we need to transform large systems in our societies (heat sector, mobility) that are incredibly ingrained in the status quo, relying on market mechanisms that depend on a politically backed price does not seem feasible.
Green steel you can do without hydrogen. Basically you need lots of heat and some carbon to produce steel. Generating heat with electricity is not that hard. You can use induction, plasma heating, resistive heating, etc. And doing that is a lot more efficient than using that same electricity to first create hydrogen and then burn it.
Hydrogen has its place, mostly as a chemical half product that is used to create other stuff. It doesn't store very well; it doesn't travel very well. It's mostly used close to where it is generated. Which as of yet is done almost exclusively by expending large amounts of fossil methane or coal. Green hydrogen production is minuscule and relatively inefficient and costly. Most uses of hydrogen today are neither green nor sustainable. Or carbon free. And that's going to stay like this for a while. Even just shifting current hydrogen production to being green is going to take a massive investment and take decades.
Blended wing body designs may solve the volume problem. It's only intractable if you try to fit the same energy content into a modern airliner that was designed for Jet A.
Weight is the usual suspect in aerospace, and fuel weight significantly favors hydrogen over Jet A (factor of ~2), so a blended wing body design with a much larger internal volume wouldn't even have to have equal aerodynamic efficiency in order to be a suitable replacement.
To be clear, this is not a simple shift and will probably take decades, but it is merely an engineering challenge rather than a fundamental constraint.
Your other points hold, but I don't think this one is necessarily so (depending what you mean by "a while"): electrolysis is so incredibly trivial that I suspect it'll become green as fast as the grid in general, and if current exponential trend continues, that's going to be almost everything within a decade.
If the current exponential continues. It might, but such is never assured.
Just doing the simple math of the twh needed to produce the fuel for a major airport on a daily basis is kind of eye watering. Just a little back of the envelope math makes it really obvious that that's not going to be a thing any time soon even if we do get some magic laws of physics defying electrolysis technology (those pesky laws of thermodynamics are hard to beat though).
And even just shifting current hydrogen production, which is good for a few percent of carbon emissions today, is a huge undertaking. I agree that electrolysis improvements will actually make that cost effective to do at some point. Possibly even as soon as next decade. But right now it just isn't and most of those electrolysis companies still have a few things to prove. Like having working products or the ability to produce those cost effectively at scale. Either way, within now and a decade, we won't have nearly enough renewables in place to power any of this new hydrogen economy. We'd struggle to power the current one with that. As long as renewables remain scarce, hydrogen is not a great use case for wasting them.
Yes. 30% per year compound growth does that very quickly.
(Exponentials will turn into s-curves of course, no guarantees, but growth here doesn't have to be asymptotic to the current market).
The basic mistake you're making here is thinking that "carbon free" is key. It is not, what matters is that a given energy source is carbon NEUTRAL. Anthropogenic global warming is driven primarily by net increase in atmospheric CO2 on our timescale. When CO2 in consumed from the atmosphere, and then shortly released again (textbook example being a plant fixing CO2/H2O into sugar and the getting eaten by an animal and the animal the metabolizing sugar back to CO2/H2O) the short term net change is zero. The problem has come from releasing stored carbon that was fixed in geologically long term ways, ie, fossil fuels.
We're used to thinking of "hydrocarbons" as equivalent to "fossil fuels" but that's not true. It's perfectly possible to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2, water, and zero carbon energy like solar. Burning those hydrocarbons later will result in net zero change to atmospheric CO2, and thus are perfectly acceptable from an AGW POV (at ground level in particular burning fuels have other pollution issues that may be worth getting away from, but not global warming). The issue is "just" cost, it's much more inefficient and thus costlier to go solar -> fuel synthesis -> combustion -> useful work vs solar -> transmission -> battery -> work. But for applications where battery energy density is insufficient or other properties are required (like high performance aircraft that use fuel as coolant as well as energy) that could be worth it.
So green hydrogen directly faces not just batteries, but green methane, gasoline and other hydrocarbons. Which are far, far easier to work with and have many better properties than hydrogen itself. And on top of course feed seamlessly into existing infrastructure and system.
2 Fe2O3 + 3 C → 4 Fe + 3 CO2
Fe2O3 + 6 H2 → 2 Fe + 3 H2O
So switching to hydrogen could save about 500kg of CO2 per capita. Carbon capture of the fumes could help alleviate some 30% of that. Direct air capture is just not feasible, or wayy to expensive compared to just using H2.
In any case, even with H2; 321 kg of steel per capita will have to be reduced (main uses: construction, transport, industry, pipes, machines, weapons)
The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.
The real problem there though of course is that oil from the a well has always been cheating by not pricing in its externalities. To get an apples-to-apples comparison with synthetic fuel, fossil fuel would also have to be made at a minimum [0] carbon net neutral too, such as by running an atmospheric scrubber and ensuring that for every ton of carbon coming out of the ground a ton was getting captured again in an equivalently long term stable way.
----
0: Fossil fuel extraction has always resulted in a ton of other externalities too, not just in terms of massive non-carbon pollution but geopolitical costs. That itself may well be a driver, if a country can switch fully to renewable/nuclear power and then run its entire economy solely off of that via grid/batteries/synthetic hydrocarbons the security implications alone are pretty massive. No more fossil fuel blackmail from hostile regimes, ever.
[0] Toyota Teases Solid-State Batteries in 2027
https://spectrum.ieee.org/toyota-solid-state-battery
[1] Toyota reveals its plan to catch up on EV battery technology Three liquid chemistries, solid state cells, and flatter battery packs.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/toyota-reveals-its-plan...
[2] LGES to supply Toyota with batteries, invest $3 billion in US plant
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
I’m not sure it’s such a loss though. Nissan was early with the Leaf but nobody talks about them as cornering the EV market. Toyota can benefit from the battery advancements everyone else made over the last 15 years and catch up quickly.
At the time it made sense to invest in hydrogen. And in hindsight it wasn’t as much of a mistake as it might seem. It was a moonshot but they didn’t risk their existence on it and if it had worked they’d look like geniuses. If hydrogen was feasible Toyota and Japan would be world leaders in energy tech or at least have secure domestic energy independence.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1...
but the interesting thought experiment to have is... once you have converters all over the place for those uses... would that make it more attractive to cars?