- 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
Is it less than using fossil fuels for power exclusively? If so then it’s a step in the right direction. Yes I know it sounds like I’m shilling for BP now but we get lost in the doom spiral so fast we forget we are indeed making progress. We just have to keep their feet to the fire or…erm… solar panel?
They’re not using electrolysis and water to make hydrogen, they’re using power and steam to crack petroleum products into hydrogen.
And this is still a large step in the right direction, because cheap hydrogen creates an incentive to develop hydrogen infrastructure, which increases the demand for hydrogen, and can help lay the groundwork for a future in which hydrogen is produced from renewable sources.
Also, steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and as such it can be performed without carbon emissions.
There isn’t a real need for hydrogen. We have plenty of other solutions. People have the expectation that our society changes from unsustainable to sustainable by just swapping in clean technologies in place of the dirty one’s. That isn’t going to happen, and hydrogen won’t change that.
I mean it’s not bad to have alternatives though.
My roomie is a trucker, and the idea of an electric truck is laughable, at least in my country, because of how trucking works here. Unless the truck is out of order, being loaded, or being refuelled, it’s always on the road; they just swap drivers around like a relay race. Unless a truck came with a swappable battery it wouldn’t be feasible to operate like that, they’d have to at least double their arsenal, (at which point we can already start to question how environmentally friendly that is), and that’ll increase the overall operating costs, which will ultimately end up on the consumer; everything will get more expensive because that’s what they transport. Another problem with pure electric is also that the batteries weigh a shit ton, so the trucks end up being able to transport less because they have to lug the battery around everywhere.
Biogas is an alternative, and as far as I know it works alright; they already use it. They end up not as powerful as diesel trucks though.
Something I wonder if it might be applied is something like Toyota’s hybrid system, with regenerative braking etc. I wonder if it scales. My roomie recently had to leave his Golf at the shop for a week, and got it swapped with a Yaris. It cut his fuel consumption by three quarters.
The alternative to trucking is a better cargo rail system on electrified rail. Won’t get rid of all long haul trucking, but it’ll displace at least 70% of it.
Even if that doesn’t happen, battery capacity improves by 5-8% per year. At the low end, that’s a doubling every 15 years. We’re not close to theoretical limits yet, so we can expect this to continue as long as we keep funding the research.
Solid state batteries are still some time away, but once those are on the market, they’ll leapfrog everything. Good enough not just for trucking, but also airplanes, which was thought to be out of the question otherwise.
I find with a lot of workers in positions like that tend to focus on what exist right now. Then they sit around at a truck stop over coffee, reinforcing their opinions and laughing at battery trucks. They don’t think about what’s likely to happen over the next decade.
But still, trains are the way to go. The US needs to start that process by renationalizing the railroads.
I wouldn’t argue against expanded rail. Used to have a decent rail system in my country, hell even the town I currently live in, while small, actually has rail. A lot of it has been shut down however, and that’s a shame. Sweden is a pretty large country dotted with a lot of small towns. If we had rail connecting places we’d not need as many long-haul trucks, and the more local deliveries could definitely be handled by EV trucks and vans. It’s the long haul that’s an issue. As it stands though, proper investment in rail doesn’t seem to be a high priority more or less anywhere. Instead we get stupid ideas like putting up electric lines over motorways, costs just as much but is less versatile.
It’s quite sad. The rails are still here, I think they might be used by the local industry every so often, but I genuinely have no idea as I know my roomie has delivered stuff to them before and he obviously doesn’t drive a train. The old station house is also still here, just abandoned, not even repurposed for something else.
If solid state batteries actually came around then sure, EV trucks might become more viable, particularly if they can charge decently fast since fuelling a truck does take a while (like 15 minutes or so) so there is downtime. There could also be other incentives, like tax reductions (or tax increases on fossil fuel trucks) making EVs more appealing. I believe the reason you hear truckers ridicule the current tech is because there is a push for trucks to be replaced with EVs and it’s just not feasible today, unless you do short distance shuttle deliveries. You can replace your long haulers with electric trucs, Mercedes for example makes them, but as it stands the only effect would be that you’d go bankrupt.
There isn’t a real need for hydrogen.
For energy it is terribly inefficient.
It would be nice to have green ammonia and methanol though.
Definitely. We already saw this with fucking natural gas
Might’ve been a step forward 40 years ago. Today its finding a spot to dig in, so they can keep the fires of hell burning.
But they aren’t capturing the carbon. They aren’t storing it. It’s supposed to be the easiest case of CCS and they dump the CO2 in the atmosphere
I strongly suspect that CCS is a lie aimed to make people happier to continue burning fossil fuels
using electrolysis for fuel cells would violate the laws of physics and thermodynamics
Unfortunately, no. It’s not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.
The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.
In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution
Do you have a source?
bp themselves still talks about “if we can decarbonise it’s production” (it being hydrogen). They have published in more detail, but they’ve not made it as easy to find. If you do some searching you can find their approach in more detail tho.
For the rest: knowing an electric device does not care where the electricity came from. You can double check this by seeing if the same smartphone exists all over the planet.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/what-we-do/hydrogen.html
Not enough progress fast enough. We’re kind of on a clock here, we can’t see exactly where we are, and we might already be too late to do anything.
In the spirit of the comic - how is the solar panel made?
short answer: once
Solar panels (PV) degrade over time and use and have to be replaced and disposed of. A better case would be for things like solar furnaces that are simpler, but most of the time solar implies PV panels.
Wow, solar panels that last forever? That’s quite the technological achievement…
This is the dumbest fucking argument. I’m sorry but what point do you think you’re making?
Is it imperfect? Yes. Just like ALL OTHER THINGS. Is it a major improvement compared to burning coal? OBVIOUSLY YES.
The obvious answer is to live in a yurt, drink rain water, and never use electricity again that you don’t make from a bicycle-powered generator.
What’s the yurt made of?
Its not an argument, its a joke.
You must see enemies around every corner… I’d recommend talking to a therapist about that.
I would, but they’re all out to get me.
“Oh, your solution doesn’t break the laws of physics? Trash it, we’re gonna keep burning shit to make more shit we can burn forever until you have a magic solution or until we kill the planet”
- You
The hundred year solution is nuclear. The thousand year solution is colonizing other planets.
Ultra dense energy has its place, namely where weight and volume are critical like in aerospace. Everything else can deal with not putting more carbon and worse things in the air.
You’re taking an off-hand joke comment pretty seriously there, bud.
I’m a proponent of things like solar and nuclear, but having some kind of fantasy position of them being perfect technologies with no downsides whatsoever is a special kind of delusional.
You want to actually convince people of their benefits? Stop making up dream scenarios and provide realistic examples.
You can buy solar panels at Costco.
I can’t help you with any more of a real world scenario. If you want to offset some dollar amount of your energy use with home-grown juice, that’s the easiest way to get it done right now.
Solar panels lasting for decades here and now, that’s close enough for all practical purposes. Solar has a proven track record, hydrogen technologies never made it past gospel.
With lots of slave labour, and unimaginable damage to the environment from mining.
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?
Read it again, slowly.
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.
The demand might increase in the future though. And as demand rises before supply does, then prices go up and there can be an incentive to roll out hydrogen infrastructure more. Positive feedback loop.
See the following for examples of how demand may be increasing: https://www.powermag.com/aces-deltas-hydrogen-electrolyzers-arrive-in-big-boost-for-hubs-progress/
https://www.powermag.com/u-s-power-heavyweights-unveil-hydrogen-power-to-power-demonstration/
https://www.powermag.com/pioneering-hydrogen-powered-gas-peaking-inside-duke-energys-debary-project/
https://www.powermag.com/siemens-led-group-completes-test-of-100-renewable-hydrogen-in-gas-turbine/
Apologies for these all being from the same source, but I find that PowerMag covers a lot of good news in the power/energy space.
Yeah, fuck the other 70% of energy from renewables you lose when converting to hydrogen
At the moment it’s either that or manufacturing huge batteries.
No. You can manufacture lots of small batteries too. And invest in different battery technologies.
Why is it either/or? That feels like a purposeful false equivalence.
How else do you propose storing energy?
Smaller batteries for load shaving. Smaller batteries for home and businesses to self store. Hydro. Gravity. Thermal.
And that’s just looking at the most basic swap out. The whole point of the energy transition is to also make everything better. Continent wide energy grids need to happen ie. Wind in Norway, solar in Morocco and a grid between etc. local generation by solar or wind also has a huge part to play. Geothermal is getting much better with lower temperature or harder to reach heat sources too, see Eden Project in Cornwall.
I don’t want to come too aggressively at you here but I see this kind of “attitude” a lot in these conversations and it’s always struck me as very insincere.
If you haven’t already have a watch of the Everything Electric videos on YouTube for good views on how wide this whole thing is going to have to be.
The original post refers to a Tweet made by BP. They supply cars. Good luck putting thermal or gravity energy storing in cars.
Yea, that’s the issue. BP is not
how could hydrogen power possibly produce carbon dioxide
Using hydrogen doesn’t emit carbon. But the principal way hydrogen is produced is called steam reformation. It’s a process that turns methane (CH4) and water (2* H2O) into hydrogen (4* H2) and CO2 (i think, I’m not an expert). So all the carbon get emitted as co2. So it’s not better, and there are a bunch of inefficiencies too. (The reformation process itself, and transportation challenges, and leakage). But theoretically, it does centralize the emissions which would make them easier to sequester so there’s that.
In the USA for example about 99% of commercial Hydrogen is a byproduct of Steam Cracking Petroleum refinement. We have the technology to create hydrogen via other methods, but so far we’re not really utilizing them. Still, as a byproduct it’s better to use it than to not.
it’s the production of the hydrogen that’s done improperly. Similar to how electricity doesn’t cause emissions, but coal power plants do
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 can’t even come close to imagining her medical bills, can you?
Is she “ok” now? The last I knew she was completely incapacitated and couldn’t get out of bed. One hell of “long covid” case… :(
That video is a really hard watch. If you’ve ever been in either of their positions taking care of a family member full time or relying on someone, you know the tremendous amount of love involved in it. Usually you see it as an afterthought, but what was amazing about Destin’s video is seeing it happen in real time.
I have one of the conditions some doctors suspect is the root cause of long COVID, mast cell activation disorder, and it absolutely sucks ass if it’s uncontrolled. It can make for some amazing naps, but they get old when it’s all you can do.
I’m fine’ish now, although I guzzle the contents of a small pharmacy every month.
I.didnt know her at all before this comment chain.
But it is interesting.
By big fear short of everyone dying in covid was these symptoms would be far more widespread.
Everyone seems to have forgotten about covid now
No. No, we remember, Americans just pretend it doesn’t exist.
Quotes being used for sarcasm or emphasis. The world may never know
I used the quotes because seeing her condition before I can’t imagine she’s going to be 100% better. I just meant to ask if her condition improved at all that she would be able to make another video knowing that ok isn’t going to mean perfectly healthy. The long covid quotation was just because that’s what we call it colloquially but I don’t think that’s a real diagnosis. I’m not a covid denyer or anything lol
Seeing another comment though I see the video being discussed was before she got sick.
Long covid is just a common name for a collection of post viral sequelae caused by the virus. It’s not a single disease.
Her Instagram is kept fairly up to date. She is still confined to a bed, and it sounds like she still requires round-the-clock care. Her partner and family are absolute heroes.
The videos were made before she got long covid. I don’t know how well she’s doing now. My only updates about her are from the host of veritasium and only when I go looking for his videos.
Destin from Smarter Every Day visited them. https://youtu.be/xbcjf-hrOAs?feature=shared
She can’t even make videos in her current state. This was done well before then. The fact that she is able to have the medical care she has now is a sign she didn’t need that money though. She was obviously making enough from other more ethical sources. Now if she made that, I could excuse it, but it wasn’t done now.
That said, her medical bills shouldn’t be an issue for anyone. There are people out there in the same state but with much less support. They shouldn’t have to suffer even more because they can’t afford it.
She’s still got an income from Patreon, though I don’t know how much it is. Also, depending on her income and savings level she could have coverage through Medicare or Medicaid. Source: I’m a young person with CFS that is on one of those two because I’m too fucked up to do anything remotely approaching work.
For sure she’s still making some money and receiving support. Her channel has also been reuploading clips of old content as shorts. I’m certain it doesn’t keep pace with what it used to though, plus she’s got mounting bills. I’d understand if she did something desperate right now basically, but not at her peak.
Oof. I’d offer psychadelics, seen implications they can sometimes help with that sort of thing; potentially resetting the thinky bits of the immune system and stuff, but I have no idea where you are.
No worries, I got a great doctor that’s helping pull me out. Hydroxychloroquine is the main drug that’s helping me. I just have to stop making mistakes, which is harder than you would think. I didn’t know psychedelics acted on the immune system, I figured any help they offered would be related to the default mode network (DMN).
Dunno, I didn’t see in depth medical shit. Was about mushrooms and cacti more than LSD, but honestly I’d advise you to just explore-it’s fun as fuck anyway.
Oh, also, psychadelics can be enjoyed while you sleep. Some of them.
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.
They are far from dumb. Fuel cells are one of the few ways that hydrogen can be consumed in a green way.
What? It can be consumed in pretty much any way possible and the only byproduct is going to be water.
I haven’t heard about this. Can you elaborate on what happened?
Kari Byron, formerly of MythBusters fame, recently put out an ad for Shell. I believe she’s also committed to a 3 year “docuseries” for them. See here for a thread on Lemmy.world with a link to the video
I can’t find the specific video but here is the first video in her series: https://piped.video/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY
She says that the hydrogen is sourced using water and renewables but it’s highly sus that Shell (or BP; I can’t remember) was sponsoring the series.
Shell does that all the time. Among the oil companies, they seem to be the biggest advocates for hydrogen.
They 100% know that electrolysis methods won’t be economically viable. The path through hydrogen goes through traditional hydrocarbon sources.
One maybe possibly exception is the recent finds of underground hydrogen sources. Still unclear if that’s going to be economically viable. But even if it is, we would just add it to the list of decarbonized energy sources. We’re not short of solutions; we’re short of political capital to implement them.
They 100% know that electrolysis methods won’t be economically viable.
I would argue against that any day. Electrolysers are viable, they are just not the current state of the industry because dirt cheap solar and wind weren’t around in previous decades.
It’s the storage that might not be viable in most countries (because only some have geology that allows for underground gas storage). Producing hydrogen from water at 95% efficiency is doable with today’s tools, if you have somewhere to put it.
Electrolysis is a great idea for local generation using excess domestic solar capacity. They are shit as a centralized fuel generation mechanism.
The biggest issue is that batteries are just better than hydrogen electrolysis for local domestic storage.
We don’t have a lack of other possibilities for using excess solar/wind. Heating up rocks can work.
Fucking. Mood. People need to stop relying on fucking governments; I can think if like five that aren’t hardcore invested in the end of the world (the largest of those being, like, Cuba, which still uses oil for everything because its all they can get-the others are even more marginal). We need more guerilla infrastructure or syndicalist infrastructure. Especially energy.
She says that the hydrogen is sourced using water and renewables but it’s highly sus that Shell (or BP; I can’t remember) was sponsoring the series.
Well, if you make a single hydrogen atom from renewable and add that into a huge tank of dirty hydrogen…Technically you could claim that the hydrogen is sourced from renewables.
deleted by creator
Well, supposedly almost all hydrogen was made not long after the Big Bang went bang, with a tiny bit getting once in a while produced by the spontaneous formation of particle and anti-particle pairs, if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah, but then it combines with stuff and is no longer hydrogen. For example, a lot of it on earth is bound with oxygen in a from known as dihydrogen monoxide. You can input energy to separate the two hydrogen from the oxygen, but it’s not freely available. This is a useful way to spend excess energy to store the energy for later or to move, but not if you don’t have excess clean energy.
You can also get some from things like Methane (CH4, aka natural gas). This is how most of the gas companies are producing it, and it obviously isn’t clean. They like to pretend it’s clean by saying using the hydrogen just produces water, but obviously the hydrogen didn’t just appear.
My favorite way to get hydrogen is mixing caustic soda, water and aluminum foil. Only cause I think it’s funny you can get very explosive things from the grocery store
Don’t get me started on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide: that stuff can kill you!!! ;)
I see what you did there
Some is also produced by the decay of heavy elements (helium too)
Helium was made from fusion of hydrogen so haha it always has been hydrogen
Petroleum companies boast h2 vehicles not bcz they love environment but they get profit from petroleum itself (h2 is made from petroleum iirc)
How is that relevant here?
Hydrogen is the name of both an atom and a molecule, and humans are perfectly capable of creating hydrogen molecules.
You just described the same event twice. The particles formed shortly after the Big Bang came into being precisely through the formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in the energy-dense early universe.
Is there a community for green memes like this? Love it
This is it
Where do you think we are?
In a general meme community
In a meme community on a solarpunk instance.
Didn’t realize what instance I was on!
Gotcha! I came here from the everything feed. I shall now subscribe!
Not everyone knows what these instances mean, and you’re federated. In fact, this message is the first time I knew what it meant. I also don’t necessarily look at instances before commenting.
Edit, also ty for explaining, the rest, although unintentional I’m sure, felt condescending for us not knowing what every single abbreviated instance we interact with means.
This is your stop, you can disembark the maglev! 😁
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]
Which is sad, because it’ll give a bad name for hydrogen, then we will stuck with oil and stuff, especially thanks to those “muh 70’s muscle car” and “muh family truck” types.
That’s what a transition is though, the new things need to be tested and built up but it’s pointless making green hydrogen if there’s nothing using it so we need both to be developed at the same time.
We’re moving towards having good uses for excess power at peek generation which will make wind and solar much better investments, personally I prefer sequestered SAF but hydrogen has a great chance of helping stabilize the grid which will make transition much easier
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.
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
Not clear on what you’re trying to say here. The energy generated from a fuel cell is electricity. The entire fuel cell assembly is essentially a battery, using hydrogen and oxygen as the electrochemical components.
But, I think you’re trying to argue that one is better than the other. To that all I can say is we all are just getting out of being locked into a singular infrastructure (combustion engines) for the last 90 so years, it’s probably best to invest concurrently in multiple alternative energies instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket. Hydrogen has some strengths where lithium ion does not and vis versa. I’d assume it would be best to diversify so if one fails we have multiple backups. Kinda like investing money, don’t put all your money behind one horse.
Storage and transfer are the complicated parts, remember that hydrogen leaks VERY easily (even right through most metals) and require very high pressure. It’s never going to be the cheapest option unless you’re weight constrained
This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
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.
If they were using excess renewables there’d be much more efficient ways to capture that energy. A simple one would be pumping some water up hill.
You just pour water on solar panels or something.
Soaking coal in diesel and burning it to capture the hydrogen.
It’s literally pouring rain on top of my solar panels right now. I’ll letcha know how much hydrogen it produces. What kind of container should I store it in? How would I even collect it and gather it and trap it into a can?
Store it in a well crafted German zeppelin. Nothing can go wrong.
Update: My solar panels got wet and I did not harness any hydrogen.
This usually happens at night. When the sun comes back up, try it again.
Obviously they mean purified and stored hydrogen, fit for use and delivery as an energy medium.
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.
You need water and transport, and someone to use it once it’s made.
Water is non issue since it doesn’t have to be too close to generators. We kinda figured out how to transfer electricity where we need it.
Transporting it is a small issue but we’re already transporting a lot of liquid gasses and other flammable stuff like gasoline.
If nothing else it could be used by millions of semis for which current battery tech is absolutely fucking useless and likely will remain that way for decades.
But really if we didn’t jump on completely wrong tech years ago and just switched to hydrogen instead of batteries, we would have cars with zero emissions, zero range issues and zero charging problems a decade ago.
Water is non issue since it doesn’t have to be too close to generators. We kinda figured out how to transfer electricity where we need it.
If you can transport the electricity then you can find better, more efficient uses for it (e.g. EV charging)
Transporting it is a small issue but we’re already transporting a lot of liquid gasses and other flammable stuff like gasoline.
So, you want to liquefy hydrogen? Below 20 kelvin? As a gas it’s much more difficult to contain than methane. It’s nothing like gasoline.
If nothing else it could be used by millions of semis for which current battery tech is absolutely fucking useless and likely will remain that way for decades.
All it takes is an additional, interchangeable, battery trailer.
But really if we didn’t jump on completely wrong tech years ago and just switched to hydrogen instead of batteries,
Nah. Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce and difficult to store. It does have niche use cases like for ammonia and methanol products
we would have cars with zero emissions, zero range issues and zero charging problems a decade ago.
I think you have a point here. Hydrogen was mature enough a decade ago. If a distribution network existed, backed by a cheap source of electricity production then EV tech wouldn’t get a foothold.
We already transport electricity and then it is just wasted because we don’t need that much of it during peak green energy generation. You would use this otherwise wasted energy and store it in hydrogen.
You have no real argument here so you’re bringing in useless semantics. We’re already transporting and storing hydrogen in liquid form without any issues.
You have to realize just how idiotic the idea of a battery trailer is. Current, garbage batteries barely able to achieve 250 mi of range are 25% of car’s weight.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient hydrogen is to produce because we’d be using energy that is currently just wasted.
We already transport electricity and then it is just wasted because we don’t need that much of it during peak green energy generation.
There are 2 types of waste, one where prices are negative. These are is best captured by efficient storage, like EV and pumped hydro NOT inefficient hydrogen. Long term, if there is a huge excess of electricity for long periods of time, then investment in hydrogen equipment may be economical.
The second type is from grid congestion. Here hydrogen production has a role because it can be co-located
You would use this otherwise wasted energy and store it in hydrogen.
Better to invest in batteries than electrolyzers.
We’re already transporting and storing hydrogen in liquid form without any issues.
There is the issue of needing, for equivalent energy, 30 tube trailers of hydrogen to replace one tanker of diesel. Extending the electricity grid is a better option than building hydrogen pipelines.
You have to realize just how idiotic the idea of a battery trailer is.
Hydrogen energy per volume is equivalent to an EV battery, and volume is what is most important in transportation.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient hydrogen is to produce because we’d be using energy that is currently just wasted.
First you need to invest in hydrogen electrolysis, large scale storage, transport and a fleet of hydrogen vehicles and stations.
Or avoid all that expense and just use 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.
All hydrogen was made just after the Big Bang.
Technically correct, i.e., the best kind of correct.
Is it? Isn’t atom splitting a thing?
Fusion turns hydrogen into helium, releasing massive amounts of energy in the process.
The opposite might be possible, i.e., using massive amounts of energy to split helium into hydrogen. But there’s no reason to do so, and it’s not something that happens naturally at any significant scale.
It’s all about the nuclear energy binding curve.
Proton emission does happen, and that’s just a positive hydrogen ion waiting to steal an electron from something else.
You could say that everything came from fusing hydrogen in the first place, and so the hydrogen being created here is just returning to its original form.
My thought first aswell…
Didnt see the bottom text only the goose meme first
Either by pendulum air separation and filtration, by steam cracking petroleum as a biproduct, or by electrolysis of water with an oxygen biproduct.
Removed by mod
I don’t get the joke.
Looking at you @Hypx@lemmy.world
So, why is making hydrogen from other energy source worse than filling up lithium batteries from other energy sources?
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.
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 is less efficient, so you waste energy and you have to transport hydrogen from producer to consumer, usually with gas powered vehicles anyway.
Isn’t it just blasting water with loads of electricity to split it up? That’s how I learned it in school at least. So yeah, just use the electricity directly for now.
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
