- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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To my knowledge, with plenty of carbon emisssions
Unless the energy is taken from renewable sources 🤓
That would be nice, if it actually happened 🥲
They aren’t using dirty energy to do electrolysis, they’re steam reforming methane. It isn’t possible to do renewably.
What? It is absolutely possible to make hydrogen with renewable energy sources?
Methane can be produced renewably from bio-waste. H2 production by steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and thus to being carbon neutral, even when the methane comes from non-renewable sources.
There’s a better way to word the argument: it isn’t possible to do hydrogen in renewable ways economically.
Electrolysis is easy enough to do at home if you like. Doing it at mass scale to fuel cars and airplanes is another matter.
Yeah, fuck the other 70% of energy from renewables you lose when converting to hydrogen
Yea, that’s the issue. BP is not
It was sad when the Physics Girl took Shell’s money to shill hydrogen fuel cells.
I get you need to eat but still…a very shitty move.
I remember coming away from her videos with the perception that hydrogen fuel cells are dumb. So she did a pretty bad job shilling it, if that is the case.
With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.
That’s the ideal case, but in practice much of it is directly derived from natural gas instead of electrolysis
In 2022 less than 1% of hydrogen production was low-carbon.[1] Fossil fuels are the dominant source of hydrogen, for example by steam reforming of natural gas.[2]
Hah! It’s amazing how many people are still hanging onto the delusion that hydrogen is made from renewables when almost every ounce of commercial hydrogen fuel is made by cracking petroleum products.
This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
What you’re saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we’re developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
But hydrogen infrastructure isn’t better long term than regular electric and battery infrastructure. You need quite unique circumstances like being highly dependent on high energy density while being located in a place where you’re far from an electric grid. Like an island in a stormy place (without access to wave power, etc) or long haul trucks out in nowhere or electric airplanes. Almost anything else should use better options
There’s no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We’re not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.
Oil companies really made hydrogen sound evil. Maybe that’s what they wanted all along.
Exactly. Hydrogen can be produced easily with all the green energy produced during off peak that is otherwise wasted.
But it’s usually produced by processing oil instead.
Because of how little we use it. If we didn’t jump on totally wrong tech and used it in electric cars instead of batteries, we’d be producing an abundance of it using green energy.
Except there is already a massive market for hydrogen. It is needed, produced, and used in bulk for a vast collection of industrial processes. The problem is that green hydrogen is simply expensive to make, gains very little from being done at scale, and when it comes to competing with other energy storage techs any that don’t inherently have to throw half the energy away as waste like hydrogen does are always going to have an advantage.
Like the garbage batteries we have today that barely last 10 years? It doesn’t matter how expensive hydrogen is to make if you’re making it with excess green energy that would be wasted otherwise.
Neglecting that we actually study and know how fast large batteries degrade with age and time, and thusly know that they do last far more than ten years, it does actually matter that hydrogen is to expensive to make with excess green energy and that no company is willing to buy it precisely because green hydrogen made from excess green energy is so many times more expensive to make then grey hydrogen.
If it is saves more money to electrify and save wear and tear on equipment by shutting down when there is an excess power than could ever be made by making and selling green hydrogen with it, people arn’t going to make much green hydrogen. Put another way, green hydrogen being so expensive that even with free electricity it is still too expensive to compete is a problem for green hydrogen.
Maybe raising taxes on grey hydrogen to the point green hydrogen can compete might be worth it, but that is a very different solution to a very different problem then what you originally claimed, which was that there wasn’t enough demand for hydrogen.
Indeed given the actual problem facing green hydrogen, which is that it is too expensive to produce compared to the more common grey hydrogen, increasing demand for hydrogen is actually directly harmful to the planet from a global warming perspective.
I don’t think you can actually back any of that up. Demand for hydrogen is negligible compared to demand for gasoline. I’m convinced there’s enough wasted green energy to produce enough green hydrogen to power every single electric car on the planet today that’s currently using shitty batteries.
Technically, the majority of Hydrogen is produced as a petroleum steam cracking byproduct. More of a Coal/Coke Company stance to hate hydrogen.
And that’s how they successfully programmed everyone to think hydrogen is bad. Green hydrogen, if it becomes successful, can compete with oil/gas. Unlike batteries, you can transport/import/export the energy.
I’m not really following. I don’t think anybody would complain if green hydrogen were more available, people are only complaining because Petrol Hydrogen is 98% of the market or more.
Yup, that’s the exact talking point they want spread all over the media. Notice how we’re no longer talking about “petrol”. They want people to associate “Petrol” and “Hydrogen”. The “petrol” can go unnoticed while the “hydrogen” gets all the bad press. And after all, you can’t not use petrol if green hydrogen were more available.
Obviously they mean purified and stored hydrogen, fit for use and delivery as an energy medium.
Either by pendulum air separation and filtration, by steam cracking petroleum as a biproduct, or by electrolysis of water with an oxygen biproduct.
So, using the corpses of Palestinian children, you say?
I don’t get the joke.
So, why is making hydrogen from other energy source worse than filling up lithium batteries from other energy sources?
No the hydrogen is not a battery, it is gray hydrogen sourced from fossil gas or coal. This makes the hydrogen still a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen doesn’t have this problem.
Hydrogen isn’t a source of energy. It’s a battery all the same.
There are efficient and inefficient ways to “charge” a battery. And as a result, there are efficient and inefficient batteries.
Lithium is easy and efficient to charge, but there’s certainly environmental (and not to mention political and ethical) concerns around its mining and refinement.
Hydrogen is not. It does have a benefit of being a rather dense mechanism though. But storing and transporting it is a problem of itself due to how small hydrogen atoms are. There will always be leaks.
Thanks for the info.
Hydrogen is less efficient, so you waste energy and you have to transport hydrogen from producer to consumer, usually with gas powered vehicles anyway.
From water and electricity, directly adjacent to where maritime uses would need it: https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/docs/hydrogenprogramlibraries/pdfs/review22/ta045_pal_2022_o-pdf.pdf?Status=Master