Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen | Hacker News Reader

Why the next energy race is for underground hydrogen

technologyreview.com

27 pointskeepit51 comments

This "race" is being fueled by oil giants who can reuse much of their infrastructure. The extraction of hydrogen is environmentally destructive just as it is for natural gas. The energy required for extraction is intensive, resulting in far overhyped claims of how clean hydrogen is as a fuel (this is "blue hydrogen", the kind most monied interests are pursuing). There is "green hydrogen" built from splitting water molecules, but that's only a clean energy if the energy we use to split the water molecules is itself clean.

Hydrogen is not a path to clean energy, it's a sideshow for an ostensibly-but-not-in-fact clean energy alternative by the oil and gas industry.

The Hydrogen Ladder by Michael Liebreich is a good take on it. For must use cases Hydrogen is overhyped by the fossil industry.

But for some use cases like fertilizer and fuel for jet aviation and ocean going shipping it is the only realistic pathway we see today.

Now that renewables deliver cheap energy it is time to spend the big bucks to enabling the decarbonization of the use cases not solved by batteries.

https://mliebreich.substack.com/p/hydrogen-ladder-version-50

How credible is this gentleman’s experience? He says:

> Anything with a piston currently, plus a whole new slew of VTOLs and STOL aircraft, will go electric, so Light Aviation remains way down the ladder on Row F.

From all that I have heard from aviators as well as manufacturer side, electric crafts seem highly unlikely beyond small/unmanned vehicles or research prototypes. As much as I would love electric planes, I wonder what’s the veracity of his data (or expertise).

>Hydrogen is not a path to clean energy

I agree for blue hydrogen, but for green I think that depends on what/how you use it. WE have two current problems that lend themselves to green hydrogen. The problem of de-carbonizing heavy transport and the problem of energy storage as more energy is coming from variable renewable sources. Creating green hydrogen at times of excess power generation, instead of load shedding or attempting large scale battery storage, and using it to fuel long haul trucking or trains would help solve both issues. Hydrogen powered vehicles don’t work for personal vehicles, since there is no infrastructure for convenient refilling, but the logistics of heavy transport already have central hubs where hydrogen stations could be installed.

> this is "blue hydrogen"

I think in most definitions blue hydrogen that is produced from natural gas and carbon captured and stored, which is a bit iffy.

The hydrogen they are talking about in the article gets called white hydrogen - natural hydrogen found in the ground. It's probably a good thing if they can find lots.

Indeed I agree with everything you said, although permit me to clarify one thing:

"reuse much of their infrastructure"

Despite the rosy predictions of the gas companies, I doubt this is true in practice for most existing natural gas pipelines.

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/can-we-use-pipelines-and-pow...

I used to do experiments with high-pressure hydrogen. It is a lot harder to get leak-free seals, and hydrogen is so small it can actually penetrate certain metals leading to embrittlement. The nice mercaptan we use so humans can sensitively detect leaks with their noses also won't be as effective any more (it's way too big.) I am not aware of a substitute.

Mass-scale deployment of hydrogen is just not going to happen.

Isn't mercaptan also much bigger than methane? Do we not have similar issues with natural gas, with gas escaping though holes that mercaptan can't?

Methyl mercaptan is slightly larger, but H2 is way smaller than either methane or methanethiol

Of course it is a path to clean energy. It's basically a perfect solution if you consider the whole cycle.

We have increasingly longer periods of surplus electricity from solar and wind. So much so that getting rid of the surplus is a growing problem!

Splitting water to hydrogen using this surplus electricity would basically be "free energy" that can be stored for years. And when you consume it, the emissions are clean water!

Sunshine becomes free energy and clean water. What could possibly compete with that?

I believe the main problem is that it will disrupt the current revenue structures in the energy industry, which makes it hard to get the ball rolling. Anyone currently making money from selling electricity will lose if it gets cheaper, and hydrogen can only make it cheaper.

> Splitting water to hydrogen using this surplus electricity would basically be "free energy" that can be stored for years.

If we're using renewables to generate the hydrogen then I 100% agree. We probably won't be doing that though, and that certainly isn't what the Oil & Gas industry, the proponents behind hydrogen's push into the mass market, are trying to accomplish.

Important problem: the equipment used to do the splitting is not free. For the platinum catalyst process it's quite expensive. The alkaline is cheaper, but you've still got a lot of chemical plant to have around. This has a capital cost, as well as all the permitting and staffing and safety around handling explosive gases. What do you do with the spare oxygen? Obviously when you have more than you can sell you dump it back in the atmosphere, but you have to be careful with the dilution because pure oxygen is an extreme fire hazard.

I'm not sure we're ever going to see cheap hydrogen.

It could be part of incremental steps, rather than trying to speed run from Oil and Natural Gas to Solar and Wind before it is ready.

> oil giants who can reuse much of their infrastructure.

Sounds like a good thing?

OK so where is the path? Electrification of everything requires at least 2x more copper than we have in circulation (official IEA estimate), while all existing/planned mines only produce very low grade ore. So the mining will result in environmental destruction either, or won't happen at all due to local resistance. If this can be alleviated by reusing some oil infra for hydrogen, is that really so evil?

Whether it is actually possible and not just gaslighting like promises of plastics recycling, that's another question. Hydrogen has different properties, requires different materials and lower energy density than gas.

Do you have a source for your statement about copper? The closest I can find is [1] "The expansion of electricity networks means that copper demand for grid lines more than doubles over the same period". That's a doubling of demand, not of total current circulation.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...

Sorry not in circulation, my bad. The discrepance between required(for net zero) and planned mining is still worrying. Other metals like cobalt can be substituted by something else but not copper.

https://www.iea.org/reports/copper

There currently isn't one that doesn't cause wrecking economies.

But that doesn't matter because if you wreck your economy and crater your GDP the economy becomes more green because you are doing less. /s

If there in fact is a bunch of subterranean hydrogen that’s mostly or entirely free of carbon, that is a big deal. Still I worry that we are continuing to hitch our trailer to non renewable resources, which cannot be a long term basis for an advanced civilization.

Whatever happened to super deep geothermal drilling? That’s renewable at least on human time scales and we can tap quite a lot of power that way.

It works. It's just that there's so much easier to extract energy, both renewable and non-renewable, that no one seems to bother. We can fairly see it as a hedge in case "something goes badly wrong with all other renewable energy sources", same as methane hydrates are for non-renewable fuels - also plentiful and technically exploitable, just unable to stand competition with cheap fracked gas.

Whole "energy crisis" is made-up. There is no energy crisis. We have oceans of energy of all sorts available, it's just that the memory of 1973 oil embargo permits both sides of political spectrum to manipulate people by, as usually happens, fear (right wing), or guilt (left wing).

Where is this molecular hydrogen in vast and accessible quantities?

there are load of locations

do a google search for "subterranean hydrogen locations"

Hyterra is right now pilot mining a few locations in the US. I know there is a huge reservoir in Western Australia as well.

So far no production wells have produced any substantial hydrogen other than the expected amounts for the existing hydrogen needs. So far no exploration has uncovered any hydrogen. Most of the hydrogen that people are looking for is in peridotites if it’s there caused by low temperature fluid rock reactions. So far none of these exploration regions produce hydrogen at a scale that anyone would care about. It’s likely to get hydrogen from the region it will need to be heavily fracked. Hydrogen is not the panacea that you or any other hydrogen people seem to see it as. Everyone I ask who claims there’s hydrogen out there gives the same kind of wishy washy answers. “Oh people are working on it”. “There’s huge reservoirs out there!” “You can google it!” This is all a grift until someone actually finds all this hydrogen and actually demonstrates any evidence that is there.

Where is the vast market for molecular hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a molecule, you can use it as is or you can grab nitrogen from the air to turn it into ammonia etc etc

In 2024, the global ammonia market was valued at $79.47 billion. its expected to grow significantly.

Hydrogen is used in the metallurgy of smelting as well. Dont get fooled into thinking that hydrogen cars are not worth it therefore its not worth anything.

Hydrogen is an almost magic molecule.. you can use it for loads of things for loads of different reasons.

To me the most "almost magic" thing about hydrogen is that it's #1 on the periodic table. It's literally the minimum viable atom: 1 proton + 1 electron. And H2 is the minimum viable molecule: Join two of these atoms.

The consequence is that it's small and can do the magic trick of vanishing, buy getting through gaps that other molecules can't, even permeate solid metals (1)

Because of this, it's hard to work with, and won't be a general energy solution. You're right that hydrogen cars are not worth it. It will be used when you really need hydrogen specifically. But only then.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

Being more general than senectus1, Fertilizer is huge market, explosives and ordnance is (sadly) a huge market, synthetic fuels (eg: methanol for container ships) is a huge market - all of these are growing rapidly and looking for non traditional sources (eg: Hydrogen with much lower methane and trad fossil fuel miced in, "green hydrogen" from solar, etc.).

Dude I’m just trying to find all this hydrogen people keep promising. If we actually find it this hydrogen will sell itself!

I agree about a true energy crisis, but it depends on how long term you want to think.

In the short term I think there's "problemists" on both left and right who actually hope for scarcity or collapse so that their preferred social system can rise from the ashes -- some kind of scaled-back communitarian socialism or neo-primitivism for the left, and various types of traditionalism for elements of the right.

I didn't think of it that way, but you seem to be onto something. I can indeed see that at least some groups of far left and far right are looking for modern society to collapse because they see it as the best way to push their values forward. I hope they don't become mainstream though.

A common term for the most extreme of these groups is accelerationists. They believe in actually accelerating collapse to bring about the conditions for change.

It's the kind of thing that's easy to believe when everything is abstract and you don't think about how this would affect real people.

Energy is scarce, at least compared to the amounts people want so that they can enjoy a high standard of living. Pretending otherwise does not change that. Hydrogen is a battery technology, only storing energy we get elsewhere.

Energy is not scarce. It’s our translation mechanisms and own ability that is scarce. Look up that sun has produced our entire planet for millions of years and continues to do so. It’s virtually infinite compared to our needs.

Then you notice all the other stars in the sky that are nuclear reactions going off.

>Energy is not scarce.

You're not even being pedantic. I could at least respect that. We're talking specifically about energy that can be used by human beings for comfort, manufacturing, and work. If it can't run your air conditioner or fabricate cheap baubles to keep the consumer economy going, then you're not even in the right conversation. And that kind of energy is scarce. "But but but what if we build a bunch of solar panels or windmills!!?!?!?" If we could magically have machines to harvest that technology, instead of having to resort to the modest quantities of machines we can actually build, then sure, energy wouldn't be scarce. But we don't have magic and we can't wish them into existence. There are limits. You might as well be talking about the black hole at the center of our galaxy, that's energy too. I'm hoping you're just missing the point and not a volunteer propagandist.

I will reveal my ignorance: This idea of 'mining' for hydrogen, must mean applications where we can't use hydrogen sourced from splitting water molecules? So it must be cost-effective relative to splitting water molecules? So, splitting water molecules is too expensive?

Splitting water molecules is too energy intensive generally, but that is not the problem this solves. The problem this solves is that splitting water molecules is a process as old as chemistry, for which there are no private excludable rights like patents, which means no incentive to create an initial investment with the expectation of future returns on a monopoly / market-leading position. If the hydrogen is in the ground, then somebody can own that ground. Without a huge, irrational investment in hydrogen, nobody has any incentive to build hydrogen infrastructure.

As for "applications" - basically the only application for hydrogen that has big engineering advantages with current tech is in longrange aviation, where it grants a bit more than double the range, and we're going to have to wait for China to launch a liquid hydrogen combustion scramjet bomber for anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design. I believe we'll have standardized regional lithium ion aviation long before we build antipodal liquid hydrogen planes.

> anyone in the industry to actually care about that capacity enough to overcome the logistical hurdles of airports supplying a deep cryogenic gas and the innate conservatism of aerospace design

https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2024-09-developin...

TL;DR Airbus is confident that they will have solved the technology development and logistical hurdles and will have commercially available hydrogen airplanes with ~100 passengers before 2035. There are serious R&D programs working on this across Europe. Cryogenic engineering is not some voodoo that nobody understands.

This is hype.

Anybody that presents terms like "green hydrogen", "blue hydrogen", emphasizing the renewable nature of hydrogen, is BSing you. The case will never close on these merits.

The case can't even close on a prototype basis unless we're using liquid hydrogen. Gaseous pressure vessels are orders of magnitude too heavy.

What liquid hydrogen combustion does in the short term is gives you a fuel that's difficult to produce & distribute but more than twice as effective gravimetrically as fossil fuels, so long as you design a plane around the fuel tank rather than the other way around. Twice the range.

Any other merit of hydrogen combustion, you can beat with biofuels that are (comparatively) cheap to produce and far easier to distribute. Or just use fossil fuels directly.

We don't know if there will ever be hydrogen fuel cells (giving you ten, twenty, thirty percent more percent range over combustion) that are power-dense enough to function; A few companies claim they've made advances but haven't brought anything to market.

And I reveal my scepticism: The current energy race is for more and cheaper solar, and for ways to store it. Since solar energy is intermittent, battery storage technology is growing to match. But also, splitting water molecules is one way to use that intermittent energy.

As solar gets cheaper, splitting water molecules gets cheaper. I don't see any strong reason why the current energy race won't continue for the foreseeable short-term future, so there's no other "next energy race" coming soon.

this is ~2 year old info from a presentation I can't dig up quick, but iirc the numbers were roughly $4 - 5 per kg of green hydrogen from western PEM systems, and about $1 even for grey hydrogen (steam reformed nat gas).

at the time rumor had it that the chinese alkaline systems were producing green hydrogen for $2 - 3/kg

the inflation reduction act put some monster subsidies in place that added up to something like $3 or $4 per kg, so effectively they were trying to force the economies of scale by moving the price drops forward several iterations.

of course the new administration is already ripping apart that legislation, so its doubtful much of that will pan out now (if you ever thought it would).

in the meantime, the price of a kwh of wind/solar has continued to decline rapidly, so the original $4-5 estimates can be reasonably eyeballed down to $3 - $4 now. still not enough, but in a decade it might be.

of course as with all of climate change economic math, so long as pollution is free its difficult to cost compete with.

Pretty sure the hydrogen market shook out really hard when nothing significant came about the massive infusions of money during the zerp years.

Hydrogen is and will remain a relatively niche player given its use case (industrial) and complexity of managing. Wish it were different.

I'd be interested to know what massive infusions during zIrp you're talking about, I'm not familiar with any (r&d stuff sure).

the IRA would have been a massive infusion, but it passed in '22, after the rate hikes (its how/why it got its dumb name). Even still most of its effects were convoluted tax credits that are difficult to model investment risk on right now (putting it nicely).

I don't know why it only just now occurred to me to wonder how you measure the KG of something lighter (less dense) than air.

I know mass is not the same measurement as weight, but we still mostly use weight to measure mass, don't we?

Obviously this has already been solved for helium, but is it just measuring volume and converting? Or pressure level in a known volume? Or I guess if you pressurize it enough it'll be more dense than air.

What a fun problem!

I believe they use flow meters and convert that to kg. https://www.rheonik.com/company/h2-filling-stations

FYI from searching the internet and asking chatgpt, I came up with these rules of thumb regarding BTU equivalency:

     10 gallons of California RFG gasoline is equivalent to
     10 kg of hydrogen
     12 CCF natural gas
      9 gallons of low sulfur diesel
     330 kWh of electricity

The efficiency between internal combustion and BEV are of course dramatically different.

There was an article in the nyt last year which is in some ways more informative https://archive.ph/SGWaS

They've been using natural hydrogen for power in Mali since about 1987 when they found some by accident and there's an operation in Lorraine France hoping to go live in a couple of years. Whether it can scale fast enough to make much difference I don't know. But I guess there's plenty of oil and gas drilling kit knocking around if people find some big deposits.

For anyone who wants to understand the economics of hydrogen, I can't recommend this lecture [1] by Michael Liebreich highly enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0Q9cuF8zKg

With all the offshore technology and expertise, why don't oil and had companies dive head first into offshore wind? It's expensive now, but it's not clear why offshore platforms are more expensive than oils and gas ones.

I'd rather we use mined hydrogen than continue to destroy precious water molecules to get it. Water is an important resource and once split the water is gone forever.

You just burn the hydrogen and receive h2o in return.

And a slightly more complex version of that cycle plays out when the body burns Carbohydrates (literal meaning: molecules of Carbon and water). Water is being split and re-combined all the time in biology.

Quite the opposite, a hydrogen power plant would generate clean water as a byproduct.

Planet surface is 80% water.

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