Ask HN: Is hydrogen likely to be a major source of power in the next 10 years?
Just today, Bank of America research released a 103 page "Hydrogen Primer" in which they predict that the hydrogen space will generate $2.5 trillion in direct revenues and $11 trillion of indirect infrastructure potential. They believe that a tipping point is coming soon because of the falling cost of renewable energy and electrolysers used to produce "green" hydrogen, as well as better efficiencies in fuel cells.
My question is for the experts in the crowd here, either based on engineering experience or on first principles and physics, does this seem likely to you? Why do we really need hydrogen? It seems we are getting to the point where wind power and particularly solar power are now cost effective. Once we have better batteries for storage, what problem do we have left that requires hydrogen to solve? Is this just a giant promotional bubble being pushed by Wall Street and unscrupulous companies trying to sell a dream? I may sound skeptical but I genuinely don't know and would like to hear from people with more expertise.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadAn obvious short-term problem is weight-efficiency - hydrogen is still far better than best batteries, and weight is of crucial importance on aircrafts, so if you want to fly green - jets, turboprops, electric propellers - you can use hydrogen.
Think like the difference between a battery and capacitor. Some alternatives like super capacitors may bring greater power, albeit not at the same total storage?
Is this correct understanding?
That last part of sort of the point, while batteries and capacitors serve the same theoretical function (storing energy), in practice they are used differently. One as a sort of buffer, the other for actual storage.
Take this[1] pack of four cells for example which is rated for 450A constant discharge and 650A bursts. And there are more extreme packs like this[2], still four cells, which is rated for over 1100A burst discharge.
Sure a capacitor might do better for a brief instant, but li-io batteries can put out some serious energy quickly.
[1]: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/graphene-5000mah-2s2p-hardcase-w...
[2]: https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-rapid-8000mah-2s2p-140c-...
Hydrogen has high power density in the sense that you can let it out of the tank very quickly and ignite it, but unless you want an explosion you are still constrained by an ICE motor or fuel cell. Those are much less power dense than batteries.
Hydrogen has 142 MJ/kg and at 700 bar is 42 kg/m^3. "At this pressure, 5 kg of hydrogen can be stored in a 125-liter tank." (https://energies.airliquide.com/resources-planet-hydrogen/ho...). That's 710 MJ in 125-liter tank.
I couldn't find the stats on a 127-liter tank, but a 49-liter, 300 ft^3 tank is 139 lbs, or 63 kg. That would hold about 2kg of hydrogen. (https://www.mathesongas.com/industrialgas/pdfs/Industrial-Cy...)
That's 280 MJ in 65 kg, or 4.3 MJ/kg. A lithium ion battery is 0.36–0.875 MJ/kg, but jet fuel is 43 MJ/kg. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)
Therefore the relevant comparison is between H2 fuel cells and Li ion batteries. Batteries have much higher full cycle efficiency (energy input -> storage -> energy output), but they are large and heavy. H2 can be stored in less volume and less weight, but it is less efficient. In my opinion, batteries will be a technically and economicly superior solution for all uses other than where weight is extremely critical such as in aircraft.
The proof is in the pudding: the curb weight of a Mirai is more than that of the larger and more capable Model 3.
Although, after google search, I see that the Mirai weight is 4075 lb, and the Prius weighs around 3100 lb.
Maybe there's a future world in which we can do it all in orbit -- harvest comets, produce hydrogen in space using solar power or nuclear, and efficiently drop it down to earth in some safe way. That would definitely alter the equation. But by the time we figure that out, it'll probably be too late.
Personally I don't going into competition with laptops, mobile phones and car battery manufacturers as a viable long term strategy for grid scale storage.
Any electric car plugged in is a great buffer for surplus electricity production.
Taking the number above for installed capacity of pumped hydro. You are looking at nearly half a million cars and homes to match the capacity (assuming 50kwh per vehicle), before considering the plugged in factor.
At say a nice round £1000 to upgrade each home you are already looking at a cool half a billion. Already around the cost of the Dinorwig pumped hydro station before you figure out how to compensate electric car owners for the extra wear on their batteries or the fact that when they leave for work their car is flat because it has been powering your neighbors electric showers.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promisin...
A LiOn battery is good for many many cycles, and can then be recycled. Hydrogen must be produced and then consumed, and is usually produced from natural gas, itself a greenhouse gas that is on the main a byproduct of the oil industry.
But hydrogen requires production, either from fossil fuels, or electrolysis, both can be environmentally taxing. It requires transport. It requires either liquefaction or compression. It require mining to manufacture suitable storage tanks - which will become brittle and have to be replaced pretty often.
> Hydrogen also depletes along the trip unlike battery which will be massive dead weight for planes & ships.
This is indeed a major difference.
Frankly, if you want to burn hydrogen, you're better off synthesizing something like methane. It's a far more effective storage mechanism. After all, if you are willing to spend the massive amount of resources required to do large-scale electrolysis, you might as well go the extra step and setup some sabatier reactors. You'll recapture the CO2 too.
Pretty much all battery research is targeting materials that are common. The DoD made a large bet on Lithium-Sulfer batteries.
Battery recycling can be energy intensive if you go for the full metallurgical extraction. But pretty much all car manufacturing plants want to just 'disassemble' the battery and use other far less energy intensive processes to get battery grade materials out. Also, at least in the west, these factories are generally located in location where there is cheap green energy or at least there is the potential. That is both Tesla/Panasonic and Northvolt (Europe) plan.
With batteries you can reload the battery from your gravitational energy. That is actually quite a significant range extender but it might be a regulatory issue.
I was excited about the use of hydrogen in aircraft for a while but the more I looked into it the less likely it seems. I think the advantages of liquid fuels are too great and that even if there were no oil production it would still make more sense to synthesize jet fuel or some other liquid fuel for use in aviation.
This has nothing to do with feasibility (the Soviet Union had an airliner that ran on hydrogen, so hydrogen aircraft are absolutely feasible), just with lock-in effects and ease of use.
Hydrogen has a couple of "unique" properties that make it especially disadvantageous.
Namely: It'll diffuse through just about anything on a fairly short time scale if it isn't kept as a liquid at cryogenic temperatures, and it causes almost all metals to become brittle.
I think hydrogen is basically a dead-end as energy storage, except in a few niche applications where it's produced as a byproduct and can be consumed immediately.
This doesn't sound completely ridiculous but is there even any proof of concept for that? The gravitational potential energy doesn't seem all that high - most airplane fuel is burnt maintaining height, not gaining it - to justify the complexity of recovering some small fraction of it. Still, I once thought the same about regenerative braking in electric cars.
> The reaction of hydrogen with OH radicals has a further side-effect of reducing the availability of OH radicals with potential impacts on the build-up of greenhouse gases.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Both claims are wildly wrong. Neither actually happens except at high temperatures and only with certain metals.
I am not an expert on this, but random internet searches such as [0] indicate that common materials, like high strength steel, are susceptible to both diffusion and embrittlement at room temperature
[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f10/pipeline...
It's hardly a theoretical-only problem, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...
That's probably due to them using a vulnerable alloy, and was likely exposed to hydrogen while at a high temperatures. This is nothing like a gas tank filled will hydrogen.
It seems you would try methane before you try hydrogen:
https://energynews.us/2013/08/26/midwest/could-natural-gas-f...
Petroleum-based liquid fuels contain mixed entity hydrocarbons that match a specification; if you have the perfect feedstock and markets for the fractions you don't use this is cheap. Worst-case you have to synthesize them with Fischer-Tropsch chemistry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
which is such a PITA (normally a chem E would be delighted that you can use iron as a catalyst, but it works so poorly that a desperate search of the other 91 elements found just 2 that sorta-kinda work)
The issue there is you are sticking C's onto the end of a chain and you have to deal with a network of reactions that produce products you couldn't care less for, such as petroleum jelly that gums up your catalyst, sticks up your downrisers, etc.
Sustainable motor fuels tend to be single entities such as 1-butanol, dimethyl ether, etc. You might need to blend something in for low temperature starting, but it's possible for a single entity fuel to be synthesized with decent yield.
General av is seen as a backwater that is barely hanging on and couldn't possibly get the lead out. The USAF has done biofuels trials, but commercial av is spooked to try anything that could leave passengers up in the air.
The issue is infrastructure. Modern engines run fine on unleaded fuel, but the little airstrips in the middle of nowhere all have 100LL and/or jet fuel, so that's what pilots use.
I know a few pilots who are prefer to use unleaded in their Rotax engines to prevent spark plug fouling, and they have to jump through some pretty ridiculous hoops to get gas, while their buddies just fill up with whatever is on the field.
It's important to qualify this: jet fuel contains no lead, and constitutes the vast majority of commercial aviation, and hence of emissions.
Jet fuel itself is kerosene, with some additives that aren't superb in raw form, but nothing so durable in the environment as lead.
A sibling comment does a fine job of explaining why avgas still contains lead, and to be sure, a plan to phase that out except where absolutely necessary would be welcome.
Airbus is experimenting with liquid hydrogen: https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/hydrogen/zer...
Unlike flowing water which may turn a generator, hydrogen isn't a continuing source of generating power.
I can't believe that we went to the moon in the 1960's and now we cannot get support 60 years later for trying to economically exploit space.
Once in orbit, it takes very little energy to go to an asteroid and to launch that asteroid to a parking orbit compared to dredging mountains of soil and rock on Earth. The yields would be extremely high; there's more gold and platinum in some Inner Belt asteroids than we've ever mined on Earth so far, and it's just floating there for you to grab and bite chunks out of.
This is not true at all. This is laughably absurd. Getting from Earth's surface to LEO takes about 9.8km/s of delta-v but then getting from LEO to another destination requires more delta-v. To get to the Moon requires another 6km/s of delta-v on top of the 9.8km/s you needed to get from the ground into orbit. There's a reason the Saturn V was a giant rocket with a teeny tiny capsule mounted on top. Getting places in space requires a lot of propellant.
Here's a nice list of NEAs and the delta-v required to reach them (one way) from LEO[0]. The list is very helpfully sorted by delta-v requirements. You'll notice that the easiest NEA (2018 AV2) requires an additional 3.758km/s of delta-v. The easiest to reach NEA on the least requires more than half the delta-v that it would take to land on the Moon. Once you rendezvous with an asteroid you need to come home which requires yet more delta-v (thus more propellant). Moving an asteroid to orbit Earth is not in any way as simple as you might think from reading science fiction.
So there's nothing "very little" about the energy required to land on an asteroid let alone land on one, mine anything useful, and then return it to Earth. There's also the complexity of the vehicle needed to do the mining. Platinum (pure platinum mind you) goes for up to $37k per kg.
Even if we pretended that all of the technology existed and was donated and we just paid for a Falcon Heavy launch (about $150m to get about 17t of payload to an asteroid) we would need to ship back 4t of pure platinum to Earth just to break even. Even if you assumed that in the best case platinum was a thousand times more abundant in an asteroid than Earth's crust[1] that's still only 5ppm! You'd need your asteroid miner to process about eight million tons of ore (if my math is right) to get that 4t.
If our asteroid miner is 17t or so how long do you think it will take to process that much ore? The loan for the Falcon Heavy would have defaulted long before it would be even close to finished. There's just nothing asteroids have that ends up being worth the cost to mine them instead of mining them on Earth. Don't forget besides raw ore Earth also has lots of landfills literally filled with stuff than can be recycled and valuable materials extracted.
Materials in space are only really useful to an entirely space-based industry and the only way to bootstrap a space-based industry is to launch it from Earth which is basically just lighting money on fire.
[0] https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/~lance/delta_v/delta_v.rendezvous.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
Its not cost effective by and order of magnitude to mine in space and bring it back to earth.
Your fuel of choice also must be transmitted from the point of generation to the point of consumption. For electricity, this is easy, you can run it down a wire. For gasoline, you need a tank that can hold liquid. For hydrogen, you need to cool it to −253°C and compress it in a cryogenic tank.
Just a side note, you could ship it in hydride tanks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/round-trip-...
Roundtrip efficiency is not the reason to use hydrogen for anything.
Again, it's kind of stuck in the middle: energy density by volume sucks compared to hydrocarbons, and if it isn't cryogenic, it really sucks, and cryo is expensive. Transporting fuel by truck is volume limited, not weight limited.
If we're comparing to batteries, then... ok, but you kinda only have to move the batteries once, and then you can either recharge on site with solar or connect to grid. With hydrogen, you have to keep bringing it, and you may as well have hydrocarbons at that point.
The lack of carbon emissions on-site is what makes it tempting, but it's just easier to work around this problem in various ways than it is to pay the hydrogen penalty on an ongoing basis. To a first approximation, all commercial hydrogen is cracked off of methane anyway, and electrolysis is a pretty inefficient way to use renewable electricity, so even that just displaces emissions to fossil fuel plants unless none of those exist anymore.
Depending on energy density and power density requirements, I think a combination of batteries and traditional fossil fuels will win in the short term. In the long term, when we have stopped burning fossil fuels for electricity, then we can use electricity to manufacture them. Under this path, hydrogen will have limited importance.
Agreed that doing intrinsic safety for H2 is hell. I did once design a LED sidelight for the relevant class with significant current (redundant electronic energy regulation). So it is possible to do stuff, it just takes more work. The tendency for modern electronics to be very low voltage helps a lot.
The ignition zone is larger, risk is higher.
Add in hydrogen's extreme tendency to leak, metal embrittlement, and high pressures and/or low temperatures, and the risks are immense. Particularly at scale, in widespread use, with poor maintenance and inspections.
It’s not strictly better or worse, just different. Diesel for example can be very dangerous in a large open topped container, hydrogen just doesn’t stick around in that environment.
PS: Consider what it would take to make a large hydrogen fuel air bomb that’s as effective as it’s hydrocarbon equivalent.
That and they have very few missions where the increased ISP from LH2 would actually benefit them. The other upside of LH2 and LOX is that you can run it in engines, but you can also run it in fuel cells directly and generate a surprising amount of electricity from a very small package -- the other benefit there is that the Fuel Cells produce pure water as a byproduct.
The Space Shuttle had three fuel cells which provided more than enough power for a full mission. Most missions could be run on two without any compromises. Also, when it was visiting the ISS, it was a convenient means of supplying water to the station.
On non ISS missions, so much water is generated that they have to dump it overboard.
100% this.
IMHO, this is by far the biggest misconception about hydrogen among people.
If the former, then what does "H2 can be stored in less volume and less weight" mean? I would assume you would want to compare the mass required to store the same amount of energy, in which case it sounds like H2 takes up more space and weight than Li-ion?
If the latter, then isn't it just a matter of improving our technologies? Or is there some law of nature that makes efficient conversion to electricity impractical?
Usage wise: Batteries have lower gravimetric density than h2 tanks. Batteries have about the same gravimetric density than h2.
Economic wise: Batteries have cobalt which is more scarce than oil/nat. gas from which h2 is made.
Without data to back this belief: I tend to think that synthesized jet fuel is probably going to be a technically easier solution than converting the jet fleet to hydrogen fuel (or to battery-electric storage). If you take yesterday's carbon from the atmosphere to make today's fuel, it's even carbon-neutral.
[0] - $NKLA's Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure does. ;)
The US Navy has always been interested in that. They have surplus energy, after all, and incentives to manufacture their own fuel. It has not materialized it, for whatever reason.
There are a few people who are - racers who need the custom blend of high energy (not to be confused with high octane though they may also run that) because that extra 1/10th second reduction in lap time matters.
FT might have a future in jet fuel where the weight advantages are worth the cost. I also believe that modern engineering could make it more efficient, but it will always be energy intensive to convert low energy materials into high energy fuels.
My general understanding is that Hydrogen doesn't make much sense for cars because it won't compete at that scale with the qualities (and size and weight and infrastructure) of Lithium Ion batteries, but where Hydrogen has a lot of room to grow/"disrupt" is in the long-tail of "heavy/occaisional diesel applications". This is things like ships (and cruise ships), festivals/food-trucks and other sorts of "off-the-grid" mini-grids, grid-scale batteries for load timeshifting (though Li-Ion looks quite competitive there too), possibly aircraft, and a very long tail of so many other ways that diesel especially gets burnt to generate mostly electricity (or refrigeration).
* The energy density (kWh/kg) of the Mirai fuel cell system (stack, tank, etc) is probably 2x or more than its battery. Replacing it with a battery would probably cut range substantially.
* New car ramp-ups are weirder than I would've guessed, even when they're not pioneering a new fuel source and infrastructure. Eg the Prius took 8 years to break 50k sales per year, and it was a money-losing or breakeven proposition throughout that entire period. Later, of course, it became a breakout success story. [1]
* If fuel cells eventually matter (eg for heavy-duty applications), the Mirai could fail as a vehicle while succeeding as an R&D testbed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius
I'm not sure how much that matters practically, however. The Toyota Mirai has an EPA estimated range of 312 miles and a base Tesla Model 3 is only a few miles shorter at 299 EPA estimated miles. They appear to be about the same size, though admittedly the Model 3 weighs 20X as much, if quickly searched numbers are correct. Consumers likely don't care about the weight difference other than how it impacts handling (and no one is complaining about the Model 3's handling) and indirectly felt impacts on road maintenance costs (and no one is paying attention to that at all, at least not right now in SUV/light truck-loving America).
(ETA: And it doesn't look like the weight scales the way that the size does in a comparable way to battery weight, density aside, and that Toyota can't just double/triple the tank size and blow EVs out of the water range-wise weight for weight or they would have already done so.)
> If fuel cells eventually matter (eg for heavy-duty applications), the Mirai could fail as a vehicle while succeeding as an R&D testbed.
That almost sounds like a valid reason for the Mirai to continue to exist. Certainly if you are a heavy-duty industrial user of Hydrogen such as a mining company using Hydrogen to replace diesel mining equipment, it might makes sense to have your support fleet of vehicles in/around your mines also capable of using the same Hydrogen infrastructure. That's looking likely to be a small corporate niche at best, so I'm still not sure that it makes sense in 2020 for Toyota to sell the Mirai as a consumer vehicle, but yes maybe calling it a gloom and doom for Toyota to be doing so is a bit strong.
(Though a quick search just turns up that Toyota has definitely made an about face on that position in its Chinese operations last year and is finally planning an EV suite of cars with the Chinese market in mind. It's an interesting reminder that right now China is the EV market to beat in terms of how fast EVs have heated up in China. Interesting to watch if it will be the Chinese market that saves Toyota from US/EU mistakes like the Mirai.)
Power is rate of energy transfer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)
You would not typically call something "source of power". Rather, we would typically discuss "source of energy" which is then converted to power by expending it (transferring/converting) at different rates depending on application (think in terms of your power at your academia letting you force undergraduates doing work for you).
As to sources of energy, the only way hydrogen can be used as a source of energy is through fusion which is currently unattainable on commercial scale in 10 years. There are also no sources of hydrogen that can be mined or otherwise exploited on Earth.
There exist, arguably, fossil fuels that are rich in hydrogen. A cell using such a fuel could technically be called hydrogen fuel but in normal use they are typically called cars.
If your goal is to get off fossil fuels, hydrogen is completely not the way to go.
Moreover, if it's performance that you want. Hydrogen 0-60 will be at best grandma speed.
Oh and let's not forget that it's hydrogen. In my jurisdiction, all pressure vessels for hydrogen must be inspected quarterly. Who wants to take their car in quarterly for inspections?
Only if you don't have any batteries in the system, but in general I agree that hydrogen isn't going to be a major factor.
Yeah, I know, not helpful. Hydrogen storage continues to be a huge issue. It is just so much more efficient to manufacture long chain molecules with hydrogen that you can then drive around in tanker trucks, store underground for pumping into units which burn them to recover the energy.
Once there is enough excess energy I expect you will see Fischer-Tropsch[1] type refineries that convert hydrogen and CO2 into liquid fuel rather than trying to ship around the hydrogen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
The energy density of hydrogen is great on a mass basis but sucks on a volume basis unless it's compressed in which case the container is heavy enough that you lose all the gains. Plus compressed hydrogen is way harder to protect in an accident.
I think any theoretical application for hydrogen fuel cells you will find is using batteries in ten years. That's my opinion. The biggest advantage of a fuel cell is decoupling energy density from power density and flow cells solve that with batteries that use liquids that are easier to handle than hydrogen.
[1] https://www.bloomenergy.com/datasheets/energy-server-es5-250...
It seems to me like their fuel cell is designed to be a replacement for natural gas power plants and that it would better complement renewables than traditional fossil fuel use because it's probably extremely fast to respond to being turned up and down so it can follow unpredictable supplies. That's great!
Though to be fair, a combined cycle natural gas plant is also likely a lot more efficient than you are thinking, they're more like 50-60% than 30%. The gains may be very marginal... so maybe more for home use where if the electricity goes out maybe you still have gas (though in such an emergency I imagine you'd be more concerned with reliability than efficiency).
I can't really imagine these being used in cars, LNG does have infrastructure as you point out but if you think it's widespread I have to wonder where you live. In my life I've only ever seen LNG pumps in California and New Zealand. I think it heavily depends on what the country has kind of settled on as a standard fuel... but batteries are also 90% efficient at storing and releasing energy in temperate climates and I know solid oxide fuel cells tend to need to be super hot to get reasonable ionic conductivity don't they?
But also on the point of grid use, I should point out that the big difference between these fuel cells and a battery storage system is that these fuel cells as best I can see don't work in reverse. So you can't like take extra solar electricity and just run it backwards to make natural gas like you'd store power in a battery.
So I guess... within the error bars of the efficiency of a combined cycle natural gas plant and it can't store power? I hope it's cheap.
We had some of these at Google powering the lab in one of the buildings with some standard Google type equipment racks. Easy start, rapid response, and N+1 or N+2 or 3 redundancy without needing a whole additional plant. (four of their 250kW units could cooperate to generate 1MW of power, and a fifth 250kW unit could provide surge and allowed for you to take a unit offline for maintenance without losing power.
I still probably wouldn't use one as a portable generator but I'd definitely consider it as power backing for a hospital in a dense area where a big enough generator wasn't feasible (if it were in fact smaller).
Edit: I'm going to assume that if you pay for it you can get the kind of redundancy and automatic switching controls too with a diesel generator, I'm not actually positive they exist but I'd figure they would for the right price.
Seems unlikely to be more reliable than a battery backup system but I bet those battery sizes aren't nearly big enough (having lived quite a weird life and having actually researched industrial battery backup systems from GE too for some reason). I can definitely see it making sense.
Main downside I'd see is that if you're talking SF, I bet you the next earthquake takes out natural gas. If it's something important like a hospital that might be reason enough to have a big diesel generator since I know diesel fuel is so dense and you can ship it by truck if you have to. I don't really know how important your datacenter is in a disaster =)
I mean, honestly I mostly looked hard at Bloom before they left stealth mode but I kinda researched the same kind of stuff that they did in grad school and I'd be totally shocked if they were operating under 350C. Probably more like 500-600C.
If they had a major technical innovation I would imagine it's around decreasing the temperature that iron is catalytically active at but the solid electrolyte still needs to be hot enough to have good ionic conductivity.
My stuff from ages ago on this vague sort of thing: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/59228
Is storage a problem because of hydrogen loss due to diffusion, container embrittlement, or just the sheer nastiness of compressing and chilling something that can done blow up on you?
LNG is not as efficient as diesel in an ICE, electricity however is more efficient. Lots of discussion here[1]
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f8/deer12_ka...
Another related problem has been solved though: Hydrogen cannot just be put in a normal tank, it dissipates through Hydrogen bonds which is a quantum mechanical effect.
I honestly really appreciate gasoline for being such and incredibly portable source of energy. It gets a lot more hate than it deserves.
We will always use it. Just hopefully more judiciously?
This is left as an exercise to engineers :)
But as a matter of public perception, what about the invisible flame? All it takes is a bunch of horror stories.
> Hydrogen cannot just be put in a normal tank, it dissipates through Hydrogen bonds which is a quantum mechanical effect.
This goes against my understanding of a hydrogen bond.
Hydrogen is a feed stock for green steel production, which isn't commercially developed yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-X
So, yes, hydrogen powered fuel cells are likely to be a major source of power in the next 10 years. It is just that there will be other major sources of power as well. Different energy storage systems have different attributes and are viable in different applications.
Sure you can. Electrolysis is a middle school science experiment, and it's efficient to do at a small scale. In fact, it's often more efficient to do small scale electrolysis at fueling stations than to do it in a larger scale operation and ship it to the fueling stations.
(Splitting it from natural gas is cheaper, but then it's no longer clean energy, so...)
[0] https://www.homepowersolutions.de/en/product
Hydrogen is stupid for a lot of other reasons, but dependence on central infrastructure isn't one of them IMO.
Well... also storage. The cheaper it becomes to store energy as hydrogen the better. The fact that the overall process is less efficient than battery storage does not mean hydrogen will not be used.
The amount of energy that can be stored in batteries is relatively small, and there are only so many viable hydroelectric storage sites. We'll need more than one way to store energy on the grid level.
Hydrogen also enables countries to export energy. For instance, quite a few oil-producing countries receive lots of sunshine. Moving away from oil, they could produce hydrogen using solar power and export it elsewhere in the world. That might be less efficient than transporting the electricity directly, but much easier politically: just imagine building a power line from Saudi Arabia to Germany. How many countries would have to collaborate to make it work?
Edit: hydrogen can also replace other substances in process engineering. For instance, there are ways to produce steel with hydrogen instead of carbon-based fuels as a reducing agent.
Expanding on that... Bitcoin also enables countries to export energy.
Pipelines can work though, if you can get them built. The lower energy density vs. natural gas is offset by a higher flow speed. And the energy transported by one pipeline could be much greater than a HVDC power line.
People seem to misunderstand how institutionalized most of our infra is.
If we had a 'great car, and great tech' today in 2020, it would take 10 years to start to see common adoption.
But we really don't have proper hydrogen solutions and infra taking shape, so it's unlikely anything material will happen in 10 years.
(1) Does hydrogen make sense as a store of energy?
(2) Will the various companies pushing hydrogen be financially successful in the medium term?
I think the answer to (1) is pretty clearly "no". But That doesn't strongly imply that the answer to (2) will also be "no". I can picture a world where hydrogen companies use hype to get funding, then use funding the get subsidies, then use subsidies to get more hype and install more infrastructure and generally push the concept to adoption. When big subsidies or externalities are on the table, it's very easy for the social/info/misinfo side of things to win and for the whole economy to do something stupid for 50 years. See, e.g., smoking, leaded petrol, nuclear power, etc.
As for why it doesn't make sense: hydrogen has essentially the same performance as batteries in terms of the car itself, but lower overall efficiency. So it costs you more energy, and it is less convenient because hydrogen requires a gas station whereas electricity doesn't.
People will get an EV and trade off the price of the battery versus the time it takes to fast-charge it.
For short term storage batteries make more sense because short term efficiency affect economics more.
But when you store long term that storage needs to be cheap. Hydrogen or a synthetic fuel derived from hydrogen gives you that.
There are also use cases where batteries are too heavy. For long flights batteries are too heavy but hydrogen will work. After all plenty of rockets use hydrogen fuel, none use lithium-ion.
Then there are plenty of industrial process which can use hydrogen. E.g. a lot of coal is used as a reducing agent when producing silicon, iron etc. This cause emissions when creating solar cells e.g.
By using hydrogen as a reducing agent instead we don’t get CO2 emissions.
Then to transport H2 efficiently you need to compress it to several hundred bars. That process, again, consumes a lot of energy.
Then you'll have to transport and distribute that H2 around the country, to fill your car's tank.
All in all, the energy efficiency of the whole cycle is at most 15%, more or less the same as diesel.
H2 is a made-up response to the terrible ROI of wind turbines and solar when not backed-up with storage. That's how it's supposed to be the future. However when you do the math you quickly realize that it would be much more cost-effective to use nuclear power for combined thermolysis/electrolysis, that would get a way higher yield and ROI...
The three biggest problems that come to mind are (a) meeting peak energy demand, (b) process heat for some industrial processes where there’s no current adjective to a burner, and (c) fuelling long distance vehicles like planes, ships and long distance truck and train routes away from big electricity infrastructure.
Hydrogen looks like a good candidate to be at least a part of the solution to all of these as it is currently expected to be the cheapest chemical fuel to produce at sufficient scale in a net zero manner. Multiple (proprietary, not all publicly available, but see [0]) predictions say that as scale grows hydrogen from electrolysis powered by dedicated renewable plant could reach prices comparable to those of natural gas in most parts of the world (not the US) today. The recurved advantage of hydrogen could disappear, but there’s no clear alternative today.
For (a) meeting demand peaks - a big problem in cold regions where space heat is a big part of energy demand and the occasional winter is very cold - hydrogen can be produced when the wind blows and the sun shines and then stored. This is easier in places with the right geography to store hydrogen directly (e.g. salt caverns), but hydrogen may still play a part elsewhere. Batteries are energy efficient, but very cost inefficient at long duration (in this case, months to years) energy storage.
For (b) fuelling industrial processes, hydrogen can usually be used as a direct alternative to oil or natural gas. Sometimes this would require new plant, sometimes not.
For (c) transport, batteries are more likely to develop to solve many challenges. Where they don’t (my guess: all but short distance aviation and shipping; very long distance trucking), hydrogen is the most likely chemical starting point to create net zero fuels - maybe hydrogen itself, maybe synthetic hydrocarbons, maybe ammonia.
Note that none of these is an immediate challenge anywhere today, so hydrogen is seldom a commercial solution. But they all will be to get a net zero future.
Now none of this means today’s hydrogen companies will be successful. In fact, based on past transformations, most will probably fail. And those that do succeed and grow, whilst technology driven companies, may well not be anything like either software developers or oil producers in terms of return. I’d guess a mix of smaller technology providers (maybe c.f. Arm if they’re very lucky) and something more like regulated utilities or merchant renewable developers: relatively low risk and thus return, capital intensive industries.
[0] https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promisin...
When he was nearing the end of the project I asked if he thought the future of energy was battery technology or hydrogen or both? He answered both. The energy density of hydrogen is too good to ignore for commercial vehicles (buses, construction, 18 wheelers). The momentum in battery technology and infrastructure for (car) 'limited' range use is going to carry forward.
This friend now makes high end technology based liquor cabinets (chuckle). Probably too much pressure in his last gig.
Batteries can be charged basically anywhere hooked to the electrical grid. They can also be charged in places with their own islanded power generation (renewable or not). So they can effectively be recharged anywhere they can stop for a while.
They can also be charged while in motion with electrified roads. A bus in a downtown area can be charged/run off overhead lines but then drive around outlying areas on their batteries. General utility overhead lines could also be used by any cargo vehicle with a pantograph for inner city driving.
Long haul EVs and construction vehicles are more likely to electrify as diesel-electric hybrids rather than pure battery or fuel cells. Their "recharge" profile is very different from passenger vehicles. Construction vehicles need to power their actual tools so they need super high density power they can really only get from diesel fuel.
There is a developing consensus that in order to get to "net zero" by 2050, hydrogen will need to be a significant part of the energy mix. For example, here [1] are two forecasts that predict H2 will account for ~10% of global energy use. This could just be dismissed as "hype" but across China, Europe, and elsewhere, real money is going into electrolyzers and fuel cells (at, I dunno, 500% YOY growth?) which I think is why stocks are acting as they are.
Here's a list of where H2 fits in, and other sustainable alternatives. (Of course, for all entries, "indefinite fossil fuel usage" is an option in some sense!)
Current H2 usage. Fossil-derived hydrogen is a cornerstone of the economy (for eg fertilizer), and responsible for a few % of global GHG emissions. Replacing that with low-carbon-intensity hydrogen would be a major win by itself. Kind of by definition, there are few alternatives here.
Other industrial uses. The production of steel, plastics, etc are complicated systems, each too complicated to explain here, but eg HYBRIT [2], a fossil-free steel plant, could reduce emissions from Nordic countries by 7-10%. I have not heard of many alternative decarbonization pathways here.
Non-passenger-vehicle transport (trucks, ships, planes, trains). Molecular fuels have higher energy density than current-gen batteries by 1-2 orders of magnitude. I predict that these vehicles will mostly not be battery-powered. Biofuels are another prospect. "E-fuels" (sourced from H2 and an atmospheric carbon source) are another.
Lots more. Intermittent renewable valorization, building heat, power storage, gas pipeline admixtures... but this comment is already too long. I also like this story [3] about the Intermountain Power Plant, the largest H2 project in the US that I'm aware of.
[1] ETC: Page 38-39 of https://www.energy-transitions.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
BP: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/ener... https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/ener...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-steel-hydrogen/swe...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-12-10/los-ang...