> They claim a breakthrough in converting hydrogen to natural gas, but natural gas is by far the cheapest source of H2.
Are you serious? Water is right there!
Are you serious? Water is right there!
It's considerably easier to get H2 out of methane. Unfortunately, that process also yields CO2, so it's not helping the greenhouse gas situation.
Hydrogen proponents suggest a route where we start with "blue hydrogen" from natural gas. Then, when we've got a good H2 infrastructure going and a lot of excess electricity from solar, we can switch over to "green hydrogen" from water.
Skeptics point out that this is incredibly stupid, and that "hydrogen proponents" tend to be closely in bed with the fossil fuel industry. It looks an awful lot like an excuse to delay the elimination of fossil-fuel replacements like wind and solar.
What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia.
The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.
This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything.
Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc.
But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is.
[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...
On that relevant metric, hydrogen is very hard to beat, particularly if proper geology is available (salt formations for solution mined storage cavities). Costs less than $1/kWh are possible.
Artificially heated geothermal may be competitive on that metric, but its RTE is likely to be even lower.
There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actually important ones.
yes :-) Think about it: why did Saturn V use hydrogen and oxygen? Because burning hydrogen produces more energy by weight than any other chemical reaction.
If putting hydrogen and oxygen together releases the most energy, then splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen would also take the most energy. Any other chemical reaction which yielded H2 would take less energy.