I'm no expert on hydrogen, but the paragraph before the paywall kicks in doesn't sound great:
> Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy like oil or coal. It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery. It has to be manufactured. Low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and nuclear power can be used to separate water (H2O) into its constituents of oxygen and hydrogen. This is inefficient and expensive, but costs are falling. Hydrogen can also be made from dirty fossil fuels but this emits a lot of pollution unless it is coupled with technologies that capture carbon and sequester it. Hydrogen is flammable and bulky compared with many fuels. The implacable laws of thermodynamics mean that converting primary energy into hydrogen and then hydrogen into usable power leads to waste.
If you want to read the whole thing, just turn off javascript and reload the page. TFA is pretty silly, without much in the way of convincing detail. I laughed out loud when they proposed piping hydrogen directly into homes.
Hydrogen enthusiasts pretend like they're just months away from solving the various threats that hydrogen poses to safety. Those problems will never be solved, but it doesn't matter. The real barrier to hydrogen energy storage and transport is that we don't yet have the capacity to create hydrogen in sufficient quantity from renewable energy. As soon as that capacity issue is solved, serious people will start using hydrogen in its safer, well-understood form: liquid anhydrous ammonia. Pieces like TFA that don't mention that are just fluff.
Isn't it trivial to turn water into hydrogen via electrolysis?
Why not just store excess renewable electricity that way, local to wherever that power is being generated in underground pressure vessels or something, venting the oxygen produced to the atmosphere? Then when the wind isn't blowing, or sun isn't shining, burn the hydrogen to run something resembling a conventional natural gas generator... Don't bother transporting this stuff anywhere, produce it onsite, burn it onsite. Couldn't you also capture the exhaust of the hydrogen combustion to recharge the input electrolysis water?
It's less about the difficulty of the process, more about efficiencies. I don't have time to find numbers, but I believe it's a pretty lossy process to split water, and then turn it back into electricity in a fuel cell type device.
There are also (probably) a lot of costs involved with trying to contain the hydrogen, and making and industrial sized fuel cells. Maybe quite a few unsolved problems as well e.g. do fuel cells eventually wear our like batteries?
Basically, we could do it, but the current techniques are possibly more expensive and too lossy compared to other options, like molten salt, pumped hydro etc.
The Middle East / GCC oil countries are looking seriously into ammonia as energy transport to Europe for blue hydrogen. (produced from petrocarbons with sequestering.)
The biggest problem right now is the cost of the electrolysers (they need to be cheap to be driven with intermittently available renewable power), but their cost has been coming down and should continue to come down as production scales up, just as happened with wind turbines and PV.
I find it eternally confusing how the narrative is "this change is because of climate change" and not "this change is because we are running out of oil".
Oil hasn't been consistently cheap since 2003, it is only going to get more expensive. We've consistently been using more of the stuff than gets discovered since the 1980s. There is only one way the story ends.
I don't have a crystal ball, but if the demand for oil drops I'd expect prices to hold steady or rise. The economies of scale do a lot for big extraction operations.
I’m always blown away by how inefficient drilling, refining, transporting oil is compared to solar panel to battery. Even if you include the energy used to make the battery and panels… it’s a 1-off thing vs an everyday thing.
Markets don't optimize for efficiency, they optimize for cost and scalability. Efficiency is only useful as a proxy for cost, but it isn't strictly true that a more efficient process is cheaper than the less efficient alternative.
Drilling for and transporting energy in the form of liquid fuel has been cheaper and more scalable than transporting it in the form of electrons since the industrial revolution. It's part of why we pipe oil and gas across continents: because a pipeline is delivering continental-scale power that a HVDC line just can't compete with, for a number of reasons. Electricity is generally last-mile delivery by comparison.
This is changing with cheap solar and higher capacity HVDC lines, but in order to truly compete with fossil fuels, renewables need a scalable storage medium, because a fundamental weakness of electricity is that it has to be consumed when it's generated. Batteries just don't scale to this level, in my opinion. Sure, gigafactories exist, but it doesn't really compete with being able to add hundreds of GWh of storage at a time in the form of salt cavern hydrogen storage, of which the US has more than 330GWh already in operation. They're just different scales.
That’s really weird comparison to say “it’s been cheaper since new technology didn’t exist”… well of course.
I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
We have plenty of lithium and it’s recyclable, unlike oil.
I’ma but lost at your point to be honest… my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
>That’s really weird comparison to say “it’s been cheaper since new technology didn’t exist”… well of course.
It's still cheaper today. HVDC might eventually be cheaper, but that isn't the reality right now. Hence, your argument for batteries and electricity being the more scalable option is factually incorrect. We use other vectors for transporting energy long distances -- ones that scale more effectively -- and then we convert it to the form needed at the point of use. Why is this important? Because...
>my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
You effectively always need to transport energy to the point of use, whether the transport vector is as electricity through a cable, or fuel in a pipe. Different methods come with different trade-offs. Electricity is good for relatively short distances, because it's typically hard to store for long periods (relative to energy stored in chemical bonds, for example), and is better used as it's generated. This is why we use oil and gas pipelines in the first place; if electricity were a better vector for long-range energy transport, we would use it as such. But we don't, because it's not the right tool for the job.
>Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
Except they demonstrably don't. We have a billion cars on the road, the vast majority of which use gas. We use the same stuff to run ships and planes, and we even use it as a chemical feedstock to make fertilizer to grow the food we eat. Acting like batteries scale better than fossil fuels, when not everyone has a place to park and charge their car overnight, is a fairly insular take. BEVs don't even meet all of the use cases that standard cars and trucks currently do, and that's before getting into all of the other transport applications that fossil fuels enable. No one is trucking goods across the Nullarbor in a battery electric truck any time soon.
And to be clear I'm not saying that we don't need to get off of fossil fuels, or that batteries aren't part of the solution -- rather, I'm saying that scalability matters, and we shouldn't pretend like batteries have anything even approaching the scalability of fossil fuels, because it blinds us to the bigger picture. They don't, for many reasons, which is why it'll take multiple solutions working in tandem to fill the voids left behind when we inevitably move away from fossil fuels.
>I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
You mentioned battery storage when talking about scalability.
On a grid level, scalable energy storage is being able to add 100GWh at a time through a salt cavern, not 500MWh batteries here and there. Batteries have a place, but they're mostly load shifting on short time scales, and don't scale to the size of a grid. You can't use batteries to smooth out weather patterns that can last for weeks, and it's probable we never will. We have more scalable solutions for that.
At the transport level, scalability means low cost, high endurance, and low downtime; batteries can only make tenuous claims for any of these, and are still outclassed by fossil fuels. We'll see how it shakes out in the future, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.
You are effectively saying: the thing we’ve been scaling 100+ years scales better than the things we’ve been scaling for 20 years. I agree.
But, put 100 years of scale into solar/wind/batteries and the world looks very different: we’ll easily have 1 billion BEV and they’ll easily traverse the Nullarbor.
I think scaling looks very different in the renewable space, I think adding 10Kw a billion times over is the better way to scale, and have a truly distributed energy network.
Large scale power generation should be for large scale industry.
If you wired up enough panels around the world… you don’t need a lot of storage (except for balancing) because the sun is always shinning somewhere.
Regardless of what the solution looks like. My original point: drilling, refining and delivering oil globally is no where near the efficiency of local generation and consumption.
I think there will be an inflection point in the not too distant future where EVs become cheaper than ICE vehicles, and that will cause an abrupt change in consumer behavior. Major changes seem impossible until they happen, and then afterwards people say "what took us so long?" if they think about it at all.
Batteries are the main problem right now; everything else in an EV is pretty simple and cheap. Apparently there are some major patents on lithium iron phosphate batteries that are about to expire; hopefully that means we'll have a lot more production outside of China. LFP batteries don't require cobalt or nickel, so they can be made in higher volume with fewer resource bottlenecks.
They're also more resistant to thermal runaway, so they can be packed more efficiently into a vehicle. This makes up for their somewhat lower specific energy.
There is a possible future where we mostly stop using oil for transportation, and then prices fall as supply exceeds demand. In the long term we'll eventually run out, but in the medium term, oil may become rather cheap.
If we continue to use transportation fuels made from oil, though, prices will likely remain high for the foreseeable future. There are likely to be weird fluctuations, though. (Remember when oil prices went negative a short time ago because there weren't enough containers to store it?)
The greater, more immediate problem than running out with fossil fuels is that their pollution is killing people and lowering Earth's ability to sustain life. Around ten million people a year die just from breathing air, which is increasing and only one way they're killing us. Plastic is another.
The world needs to be able to make fertilizers for industrial agriculture after we run out of fossil fuels. We currently do this using hydrogen split from natural gas in the Haber-Bosch process. In order to decarbonize agriculture, we have no choice but to make hydrogen at a scale large enough that it becomes attractive for a number of other applications such as steel and cement manufacture, shipping, and aviation.
Oil might last a lot longer than you think at first. Even at the proven oil reserves of 2016 the oil would last for 47 years (https://www.worldometers.info/oil/). Additionally, new reserves could be found.
Another potentially very large source of oil is coal. You can make oil from coal via the Fischer-Tropsch technology. As there already are considerably more proven coal reserves than oil reserves, this would probably push out the point of "no oil left" a lot further.
I can't wait for the bitcoin lightning network to be integrated into news sites so I can just pay $0.05 worth of sats to read the article without having an account and subscription for every damn publisher.
Is there some reason to think they're interested in that? Seems like allowing one time purchases of articles for 10 cents through PayPal or something similar would be even easier, but the haven't done so(that I've seen). It seems like they're more interested in trying to get subscribers than single time readers
Wait, what is this article about? Unless there's been a major breakthrough recently (which the article doesn't seem to mention from quickly skimming through) hydrogen is impractically expensive to produce. Whenever that changes (by an order of magnitude) it'll make a huge difference but at this point it's more or less pointless if/when you consider the externalities.
My understanding is expensive material for hydrogen production was to increase the efficiency of the system (because energy is costly and not from renewable sources).
With the proliferation of installed solar capacity, and availability of low cost renewable energy, the economics of H2 production allow for use of lower efficient systems, with focus on reducing exotic materials in the system.
Solar makes up 2 % or world electricity. Wind 5 %. Coal and natural gas together make up 61 %.
Where is this solar capacity? Where is this available low cost renewable energy? We are decades away from making the renewables our main electricity source if there were massive investment into it, meanwhile we are building new coal and gas plants instead. And the electricity demand is still going up.
Even if things go way better than anyone can predict, we will never have enough energy to throw it away on inefficient hydrogen, not in a lifetime of anyone currently on Hacker News.
The whole H2 hype is just shilling for oil and gas, whether the people perpetuating it know it or not.
...in 2018. It's 2021 already. In 2020 solar made up something like 3.2% (https://www.worldenergydata.org/world-electricity-generation...). That alone is an increase of 0.6% per year. Even if nothing changed about PV buildup, it would still be headed for 15% in 2040. This rate is likely to increase, though.
The materials problems of hydrogen are overstated. The world produces and consumes 700 cubic kilometers (at STP) of hydrogen each year; this stuff is contained in something.
The equipment that makes the hydrogen, the equipment where the hydrogen is used, the pipes connecting these, the valves and sensors and pumps touching the hydrogen -- all these work in many places around the world, constantly. If hydrogen were the universal solvent ruining anything it touches, as the pearl clutchers on the internet seem to say, this wouldn't be possible.
SOME materials have trouble with hydrogen. But this is a problem that can be, and is, worked around as needed. It's a nuisance, not a showstopper.
The reason it's cost effective in those circumstances is because it's produced from hydrogen rich fossil fuels. If you want to use renewable energy to produce it, you'd likely have to fall back onto electrolysis, which is cost prohibitive because of material cost. If you check out DOE research, they point out capital necessary for materials as the factor that needs to come down, as efficiency is already > 50%: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
If you just want 'hydrogen from any source' and aren't trying to get off fossil fuels, then yes, the materials costs are that horrible. But I don't believe that's where anyone is going with this conversation.
That study assumes PEM electrolyzers. If one uses alkaline electrolysis one doesn't need platinium group elements or proton exchange membranes. The efficiency is slightly lower (although I've seen a claim it's actually just as good in practice), but the cost could be very low.
China is already making green hydrogen today at USD $2.20-2.40/kg, in Ningxia, using alkaline electrolyzers. This is in line with the cost of blue hydrogen, and getting close to the cost of grey. Mostly what's missing at the moment is economies of scale, which is coming. For example, a facility ten times the size of the Ningxia one goes online in 2023, in Inner Mongolia. Combine this with standard cost reductions in PV and wind, and electrolysis of hydrogen will likely be cheaper than SMR by the end of the decade.
We produce 700 cubic kilometers of hydrogen, but almost all of it is produced through steam reformation. No, we can't reuse the equipment that makes the hydrogen, we have to replace almost all of it with carbon neutral alternatives.
And no, most of the infrastructure connecting these can't be reused either. Our existing hydrogen production facilities are set up to produce the hydrogen as it's needed for other industrial processes. Our existing hydrogen economy does not have a significant storage capacity. Rather, it's set up to minimize the need for hydrogen storage altogether. For your proposed renewable grid, we'd likely be transporting methane many miles away from its generation to under ground storage facilities. Sure, the existing pipes connecting to fertilizer plants can still be used. But we still need a lot more pipes connecting electrolysis plants, to storage sites, and to hydrogen to electricity production facilities. This isn't something our existing infrastructure is set up to support.
Your proposal has us effectively rebuilding our hydrogen economy from the ground up: First, changing production from steam reformation to electrolysis. And second, building out a vast hydrogen storage and transportation network to deliver this hydrogen to where energy is needed. There's a lot more to your proposed hydrogen grid storage than just valves and pipes.
"Mostly" is relative. The US still stores more than 330GWh of H2 on a constant basis, and distributes it through hundreds of miles of pipe running throughout Texas. The material problems are a known quantity with proven solutions.
In theory. In practice there are a ton of really hard to overcome problems (Hydrogen embrittlement, very low activation energy so it can go 'foom' without provocation, leakage from containment vessels.
There has been progress on all of these fronts, one of the most interesting developments that I'm aware of is this fleet of 1500 trucks that is being built:
But there are a large number of questions (for me) around this project that make me wonder how much it is vaporware and how much of it is reality. If they pull this off, and that includes delivery of the vehicles, infrastructure and do it within budget and with a substantial fraction of the life-span of an ordinary truck without major issues it will be a game changer. If not some investors - and their customers - are going to be extremely pissed off.
Even the first 50 deliveries would already be a huge milestone, I'm aware of exactly one truck like this that is supposed to be driving for Campina ( https://www.nieuweoogst.nl/nieuws/2021/07/13/frieslandcampin... ) but I have not been able to get any data on the actual use of this truck by the customer (ie: service history, operational readiness history).
What is suspicious is that if I enter that truck's license number (19-BLD-5) into https://ovi.rdw.nl/ that it comes up as a more or less regular Volvo truck with a 12.7 liter LNG installation, not a hydrogen installation, which it would surely mention if that were the case.
It's very well possible that that was just a promotional picture from before the conversion to Hydrogen, but you'd expect the company to put out one press release after another to prove their tech is real if it was actually road worthy. But all of the pictures where they 'Hyzon' logo is present on the front of the trucks show no license plate.
> What is suspicious is that if I enter that truck's license number (19-BLD-5) into https://ovi.rdw.nl/ that it comes up as a more or less regular Volvo truck with a 12.7 liter LNG installation, not a hydrogen installation, which it would surely mention if that were the case.
I guess it is easier to modify an LNG truck to handle H2 rather than a diesel one.
Yes, obviously, so that part matches. But the license would then be changed when you register the fuel change with RDW and that hasn't happened as far as I can see (at least, not with that particular truck), and the conversion as far as I know with those trucks is to a hydrogen/electric system that uses Hyzon's fuel cell technology.
There are 100's of promotional pictures of that vehicle but none that show it in actual operation or with its license plate post modification and you can't just take a truck like that on the road here without going through all of the required processes.
RDW is pretty strict and good at what they do, if you bypass them for something like this they'll smack you down hard.
They claim they will deliver 100 trucks this year. So far I've seen precious little evidence of that.
69-BPR-8 is a good example of a vehicle that is powered by Hydrogen, it is listed as 'electric / hydrogen' with RDW, and that's what I would expect for this Hyzon truck.
That's a garbage truck in the city of Groningen, which is also a hydrogen conversion of a regular (diesel) truck, no data about reliability, availability, range or service.
Hyundai has already racked up a million miles on hydrogen trucks in service, and there are on the order of 100,000 fuel cell forklifts being used every day. I'm not really sure what there is to be skeptical about. The US has 330GWh of hydrogen storage operating today, and the technology is 40 years old at this point. It's also a solved problem at vehicle scale. The missing piece was always cheap excess electricity, which we only have recently thanks to renewables.
A million miles is absolutely nothing on this level to prove a technology, it needs to work everywhere where diesel works today to make it viable for long haul. In NL there are only a few places where Hydrogen is available and the number of hydrogen vehicles can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Forklifts do not operate on highway distances, but instead they operate in very limited areas around where they can be immediately serviced.
Toyota is also still on the hydrogen-for-vehicular use bandwagon but it looks as though all electric has the future, and I really don't see how fuel cell tech has an edge over battery tech, especially not with the new battery chemistries that are becoming available for large scale use.
The point is more that your skepticism seems to be based in what you want to believe, rather than reality, which is that extensive testing of fuel cells and associated technologies has already taken place across various industries, in various use cases. What we're seeing now is a scaling up of the infrastructure necessary to take the knowledge gained from those pilot projects, and translate it to industry. There are already fuel cell trucks, buses, drones, boats, and even military assets in operation every day. As industry moves applications over -- where it makes sense to do so -- the necessary infrastructure will be expanded. If there's a market for it, it'll be made available to the public as well. Expecting it to progress any other way is unrealistic.
As for hydrogen usage in vehicles, it's hard to imagine that it won't be used in some capacity. Battery electric cars aren't a one-to-one replacement for an ICE car, and there are genuine drawbacks to the recharge time. Crucially, this isn't a problem that can be fixed through battery technology -- it has to be fixed at the grid level, because electricity has to be consumed when it's produced. Fuel cell tech is already cheaper than battery electric for use cases where the cost of overlay is taken into consideration, and it's hard to see new battery chemistries fixing this without somehow being dramatically cheaper than existing chemistries. Not to mention, fuel cells aren't exactly standing still either; future battery chemistries will have to compete with next generation fuel cells, not current ones.
The reality is that there's almost certainly a market for people who want vehicles that refuel using a traditional model, and that's okay. The idea that there has to be a winner in the automotive industry is asinine, because different vehicles fulfill different needs, and it's unlikely that someone who relies on on-street parking, or goes on frequent long roadtrips, is going to want the same solution as someone who owns a home with a garage, and mainly drives around the city.
No, it’s not when you count the cost of compressing it.
Even if it was possible to have completely free hydrogen (and it’s not possible) the compression cost would lower the efficiency to something around 60% if I remember correctly.
Adding to that the storage tank cost and the far bigger explosion potential compared to batteries its supposed advantage is dwindling fast given the continuous improvement in batteries.
I agree. However, for remote solar power plants, having an explosive H2 tank is much lesser of a problem than in residential areas.
IMV batteries are not sustainable. Currently there is a huge hype on batteries, but once the first set of batteries start dying out and the disposal process begins, we will have to deal with a lot of toxic waste. This is going to start happening in about 10 years or so.
Suppliers like Tesla and Panasonic might be making recyclable ones, but Chinese vendors scarcely give a thought to recyclability.
> Even if it was possible to have completely free hydrogen (and it’s not possible) the compression cost would lower the efficiency to something around 60%
That's pretty much irrelevant. Hydrogen is used as an energy store. Thus the whole point is to generate it where it's cheap to generate, and afterwards transport it to customers willing to pay for it. Therefore conversion effixiency is irrelecant and the key factor is market price, whose lower bound is dictated by the combination of production cost and how much it costs to transport it.
To illustrate how irrelevant conversion efficiency is, keep in mind that right now both Morocco and Australia are investing in Hydrogen export.
If I recall
> if I remember correctly. Adding to that the storage tank cost and the far bigger explosion potential compared to batteries its supposed advantage is dwindling fast given the continuous improvement in batteries.
You're already describing how natural gas is used. Not only are there large natural gas storage tanks in residential neighborhoods but also there are plenty of major cities throughout the world where natural gas is piped straight into apartment buildings.
Yeah but than we would still face the fact that the total cost per amount of energy is higher than fossil as well as other forms of renewable energy storage and transmission.
Like with any substance you need to have compatible materials. Valves suitable for hydrogen do exist and are routinely used. People have been working with hydrogen since before ever. Same with storage vessels.
Nearly all hydrogen is currently being produced from fossil fuel feedstocks because it's way cheaper (and less energy-intense). It's certainly possible to create hydrogen infrastructure to complement renewable energy sources and electric vehicle infrastructure. But the loudest voices on hydrogen right now are FF interests who see it as a way to keep selling oil.
Worth noting that everything is relative to the other options.
Production of hydrogen (via a variety of methods) for use in vehicles is actually more efficient than gasoline (including hybrids) if you measure well to wheel.
It just in turn gets stomped by battery electric, so it has little future there, but that doesn't mean it is bad compared with the status quo. Like Windows phones were better than Blackberries and (pre windows) Nokia, but not as good as Android or iOS.
Journalism doesn't really have the tools to deal with a good idea that will take decades to implement in specific niches.
Something either needs to be dramatically failing, or an overnight success to make a good story.
Something being an obvious evolution and way forward in the future as part of a portfolio of other complementary technologies doesn't really come across well in this medium.
I think the story is trying to capture that the continued success of renewable energy means green hydrogen is inevitable now and that's becoming the consensus.
Occasionally journalists do pay respect to the gods of straight lines, even in mainstream news. PV has been a topic for decades long before prices reached grid parity. Learning curves are mentioned in many articles about renewables. Moore's law would be another instance.
> PV has been a topic for decades long before prices reached grid parity.
Personally, I assume that's part of the reason no-one believes it's at grid parity and beyond, and half the users of this site are waiting for fusion to save them.
Decades of stories about how expensive PV is, because that worked as clickbait/propaganda, while "this is the early stages of a sensible long term investment" didn't.
I was specifically talking about green hydrogen use for a specific range of applications that it is suited for and has no bettwr options. We already use generic hydrogen for things on a wide scale, so that makes the headline basically meaningless.
And niche in this case means about the same size as nuclear or hydro power at their peak and working in conjunction with other techs to completely decarbonize the world.
Again, the lack of nuance is a problem inherent in the medium, but they gave it a try.
> Wait, what is this article about? Unless there's been a major breakthrough recently (which the article doesn't seem to mention from quickly skimming through) hydrogen is impractically expensive to produce.
Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.
As long as you produce it by cracking fossil fuels anyway, which is how >95% of hydrogen production currently works.
You also need hydrogen to make the original useful fuel, that's where about half of the current usage goes. I wonder if oil conpanies could be regulated into self supplying all their own hydrogen needs from green hydrogen.
There's a company looking into this turquoise hydrogen that said the method has previously been optimised for multiple outputs to make the most money, but if it works at the scale we need it to for decarbonisation, we'll be overrun with carbon as a byproduct, so it would be unwise to assume you could sell all of it for the price that you currently can get, as you'd completely swamp the market, that's why they focus on making the economics work for just the hydrogen alone and consider anything else a bonus.
I'm sure someone will come up with something more interesting to do with it than just dumping it though if it all works out.
But what's the point to produce hydrogen from hydrocarbons? Hydrocarbons are already an energy-dense, stable fuel.
I think that it's solar and wind energy, peaky and unstable as it is, should be used to produce hydrogen. Then it could be used as is, or combined with heavy hydrocarbons to produce much lighter hydrocarbons like methane. Maybe it can be economically used to produce something useful from CO₂, from fuel to plastics.
Burning hydrocarbons emits CO2, which is already at high enough atmospheric levels to make us less smart, as well as particulate matter, which is directly affecting air quality and shortening our lifespans.
I see an important area where hydrocarbons will not be displaced by batteries and hydrogen for decades: jet fuel.
Burning CH₄ produces much more water and less CO₂ than burning longer hydrocarbons. This works for ICE car engines, with tiny modifications, too. So it could still be a useful step in phasing out carbon-based fuels, until we have epic-scale batteries and likely more nuclear generation.
I one worked with an engineer who knew about hydrogen fuel cell issues from his previous (highly specialized) projects. He mentioned the following concerns:
- Hydron has very low energy density per unit volume unless you compress it to many times atmospheric pressure.
- Highly compressed hydrogen is a safety nightmare.
Do we currently have hydrogen storage technologies that compare acceptably with modern batteries in terms of weight, size and catastrophic failure risks?
I saw a video by Physics Girl on Youtube a little while back going over Toyota's storage testing procedures (for crashes) and I remember being quite impressed. Quite complex/advanced tech though.
Low volumetric energy density of hydrogen is the reason why liquid fuels will likely be the energy carriers of the future in combination with fuel cells. Such as methanol.
I love the idea of hydrogen, batteries seem toxic to me, to be able to crack water and then burn it later (or use in a fuel cell) seems much more natural.
One thing though if released Hydrogen will escape the earth's atmosphere right? Seems kinda risky to slowly lose all our water...
Depends on the environment that you're in. In an enclosed space: yeah. In open air, unlikely, because the density difference means it rises (and disperses) quickly.
In open air the halflife of hydrogen to oxidation is just a few years, which is much faster than the timescale for hydrogen to be convected up to the homopause.
That just means you've invented a new fancy way to combat rising oceans!
(No, in reality, we have nowhere near the power to make appreciable amounts of hydrogen escape. Even if you electrolyzed water continuously with 2.5 TW of power, which is roughly global average electricity generation, you'd lose something like 4 cubic kilometers of water per year. The Earth meanwhile has over a billion cubic kilometers of water in its oceans, so you'd need over 250 million years to make them disappear.)
Batteries vary a lot. Lithium iron phosphate seems pretty reasonable to me: they're made of lithium, iron, copper, aluminum, plastic, fertilizer, carbon, and probably a few more things I'm not aware of. Nothing particularly toxic or hard to recycle, and they tend to have very good longevity.
Hydrogen released into the atmosphere will mostly be turned to water by oxidation with OH radicals before it can escape. This is not entirely a good thing, as an OH radical consumed by reaction with hydrogen will not be available to react with methane -- and we want that methane scrubbed out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible.
> It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery
Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable.
> Last, hydrogen can be used as a material to store and transport energy in bulk. Renewable grids struggle when the wind dies or it is dark. Batteries can help, but if renewable power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored cheaply for long periods and converted to electricity on demand. A power plant in Utah plans to store the gas in caverns to supply California. Sunny and windy places that lack transmission links can export clean energy as hydrogen.
Sounds like the answer is yes.
My main question is how does it scale safely? An acre full of pressurized hydrogen sounds like a Port of Beirut moment waiting to happen.
> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable.
To a large part is doesn't even need to. Even just the need for non-fossil chemical feedstock is so high that shaving the peaks of oversized generator fleet is enough to contribute to most of grid balancing. Just for ammonia synthesis at current global consumption levels you'll need hundreds of gigawatts of average power to generate the feedstock hydrogen.
> Thorium reactors remain an insufficiently explored option here.
I'm no expert in nuclear power, but it's my understanding that Thorium reactors aren't that much safer due to the higher gamma radiation emissions, and Thorium reactors are far more expensive to build and operate to the point that they are not cost-effective, let alone profitable.
Molten salt reactors can be used as thermal breeders, but this is incidental to their safety properties. A MSR using 235U would have the same safety advantages.
But there are many problems with MSRs, particularly the kind that dissolve the fuel in a salt. Materials issues have not been solved, despite internet claims to the contrary, and once you're no longer confining the fuel in fuel elements there's radioactivity spread all over your plant. Maintenance will be a bitch, especially (as needed if you're trying to breed w. thorium in a thermal reactor) if you're doing online chemistry on that salt.
I wonder what the flammability limits of hydrogen in low-ox environments is.
It's 4 and 75 in air (so hydrogen will readily ignite between 4% an 75% hydrogen in air at 1atm), and it's 4 and 94 in pure oxygen. And the good news is that there is a limiting oxygen concentration, but the bad news is it's 5% (so over 5% oxygen by volume at STP it becomes possible for hydrogen to ignite), but I could not find flammability limits at sub20.
The original post had a reference to the Port of Beirut which had a ammonium nitrate explosion. That type of explosion don't require oxygen to my knowledge - denotation is caused by shockwave and in fact ammonium nitrate is itself a strong oxidizer, from what I read;
"While ammonium nitrate is stable at ambient temperature and pressure under many conditions, it may detonate from a strong initiation charge. It should not be stored near high explosives or blasting agents."
"Pure ammonium nitrate does not burn, but as a strong oxidizer, it supports and accelerates the combustion of organic (and some inorganic) material."
Hydrogen would behave more like gasoline. It's only when there is a fuel-oxygen mixture do they start explosively burning - i.e. it should not go off all at once unless you pump the tank with oxygen and mix them/give the oxygen time to diffuse through the tank.
Petrol doesn't tend to molecularly diffuse through solid containment, or embrittle metals. It's also remarkably difficult to ignite --- you can extinguish a match in it. A cigarette is demonstrated here:
(It can also produce surprises after burning for a while.)
Whilst it's true that a container or pipeline filled with gaseous or liquid hydrogen would be unlikely to explode iself directly, chances are reasonably high of leaks developing and from those, explosive mixes of hydrogen and air either within ground cavities or nearby structures. Embritlement might result in catastrophic failure of tanks or pipes (petrol is also rarely stored at high pressures or cryogenic temperatures). Resulting thermal and pressure shocks could further extend damage and increase rates of release and combustion.
Resulting conflagrations might more closely resemble natural gas fires than ammonium nitrate / ANFO explosions, but those can be dangerous enough of themselves. Keep in mind that ANFO also tends not to flow as a liquid or gas, and whilst it reacts very rapidly, has only about ten percent of the energy by unit mass of hydrocarbon or pure hydrogen fuels.
Once ignited, and if supplied with atmospheric oxygen, hydrogen will burn quite vigorously, and even explosively (flame front expanding faster than the speed of sound) given a proper stochiometric balance.
All told, if anything goes wrong with a large hydrogen storage or distribution facility, it will quite probably be quite spectacular.
We have dealt with gasoline, which can leak and is just as dangerous, IMO just fine for decades - and gasoline vapor has a tendency to pool near the ground rather than float off and disperse high into the sky like hydrogen.
Franky, it seems just about every energy storage system has pretty frightening failure modes - I take it you have seen the video of a Tesla fiercely burning up in a carpark in China.
Again: Petrol does not mollecularly diffuse through solid material and embrittle it in the process.
How many hydrogen storage tanks and pipelines do you think exist today? How are they regulated? How much hydrogen is stored and transported via them annually?
How does this compare with the number of petrol fuel tanks and pipelines, numbering in the many hundreds of millions for automobiles alone? And the volume of petrol stored and transported on an annual basis?
Limited lab, hospital, aerospace, and industrial hydrogen usage is not the same as parking a hydrogen bomb in every residential garage, or assembling collections of them in apartment, commercial, or office-tower parking structures.
EV's are irrelevant to this question, but I've got you covered:
FWIW: I see hydrogen-derived synfuels as a potential / probable option going forward in some uses (marine, aviation, possibly rail), but reformulated into hydrocarbon equivalents of current fossil fuels, probably via something like the Fischer-Tropsch process. That's been uneconomic to date, though it's chemically feasible.
Come to think of it, most of the problems we have with hydrogen we also have with natural gas - which we dealt with just fine; we even had natural gas powered cars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle
"News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough disaster."
> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable.
Nuclear has mostly an economics problem. The capital costs are massive and the path to profitability is unclear during the continued buildout of renewables.
> the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable
Not just politically: also economically untenable.
At the moment, gas peakers remain the only good solution to this. Hopefully in the future overbuilding renewables or some sort of advancement in storage will work. Unsolved problem for the 2040s.
> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid?
Probably not because of the inefficiencies. It may well be useful as a kind of "last line of defence" to handle low probability situations where a lot .
However, it does seem like it may be the best solution for air travel, and perhaps also shipping and heavy good vehicles.
The inefficiency of hydrogen doesn't matter as much for the use cases hydrogen would be good for: long term storage, and rare event backup (like, no wind over Europe for two weeks). There are few charge/discharge cycles for these use cases, so low capital cost is far more important than round trip efficiency.
The efficiency argument implicitly assumes that electricity will be scarce, but this is unlikely to be the case if the majority of the world's energy needs are met through wind and solar. To give you an idea of why, Germany and California, at less than 50% renewable penetration, already curtail around 9TWh of energy a year due to mismatched supply and demand. This is enough to charge on the order of 130 million BEVs. As renewable penetration increases, so too does the need to provide statistical confidence in generation capacity. If you want to ensure that your wind farm is able to provide X units of power, say, 80% of the time, you'll be overproducing pretty much constantly. Connecting cities doesn't really change this either, because the problem is one of stochasticity and confidence. In order for two sites A and B to cover shortfalls for one another, it has to be true that both A and B are capable of overproducing, and that at least some of the time, both will overproduce (unless they're perfectly negatively correlated). If you want to ensure that A and B both have enough power with some statistical confidence, then your system will produce excess most of the time.
The US already has 330GWh of hydrogen storage in operation, of which 90GWh has been in use since 1983. You store it at around 200 bar in salt caverns. The technology is well established, for decades at this point. Last I checked, the projected storage capacity in Europe alone is in the tens-to-hundreds of PWh. The US is somewhere in the same ballpark.
AFAIK, the Praxair and Air Liquide sites are bulk storage for hydrogen supply lines running through Texas. I'd imagine the ConocoPhilips site is similar. As for what the hydrogen is used for? Probably for oil and gas extraction, though there's zero reason the technology couldn't be appropriated for storing and distributing green hydrogen.
I was pondering given the rise in natural gas prices globally, how much effort would be involved for some uses to use hydrogen instead.
Certainly be good use of the off-peak spare capacity type issues with electricity production. Cost wise compared to a therm of natural gas (a therm of natural gas is about 2kg's) then hydrogen starts to become viable on price alone. Now if your able to tap excess electricity production to produce that hydrogen, then you start to become more competitive as an alternative.
Is it cheeper to compress air / nitrogen into liquid that can be expanded or more effective to run electrolysis on water to get hydrogen and oxygen and burn that ( when needed) ?
Sadly it's likely the Economist Journos have been captured for a nice long lunch by the 'big oil' proponents of blue hydrogen as a "transitional" technology (which, not co-incidentally, keeps them in business and doesn't turn all their pipelines into stranded assets).
I don't know if this is constructive but here goes: Petroleum probably wasn't a great application for a lot of applications either, especially considering the by-product is Co2, oil spills etc; However, we've used it for hundreds / thousands of years in many different ways and it's been ok.
I don't know how long we're going to wait, but we need to using petroleum tomorrow, and be very very pragmatic about it.
In order to replace natural gas with 100% hydrogen the entire transmission and distribution network would need to be replaced as it needs to run at different pressures. In the UK we are starting to trial blended gas. I do not think we can afford the cost to go full hydrogen yet.
Hydrogen used for energy storage on the electric grid is mentioned in the article, but I’m fairly skeptical of this becoming economically viable. Hydrogen storage costs and losses over time are currently very similar to those in battery energy storage. But batteries are dropping in price very quickly and the component technologies for hydrogen storage (electrolysis, containment, turbines/fuel cells) are dropping much more slowly. So I suspect batteries will win this market and not hydrogen.
The place where hydrogen might be helpful on the grid is injecting hydrogen into the natural gas pipeline and generation systems. That way the generation and storage (line packing, tanks) come from existing infrastructure. However there are limits on how much can be added (5% of the mix usually), some unanswered questions about what it will do to the equipment, and the likelihood that this infrastructure will be shut down in the late stages of decarbonization.
I agree adapting the natural gas infrastructure to hydrogen could have big benefits.
There might also be a place for ammonia storage/transport here. It's a denser fuel, which gives it some transportation applications (creating a bigger market), and it's easier to store.
It doesn’t seem very likely that hydrogen can compete against batteries for short duration storage. But storing electricity for weeks or months (to meet unusual peaks in demand or troughs in supply) is a very different market.
Today, natural gas (or where there isn’t a gas grid, oil) peaking plant wins in this market, but that isn’t an option when people plan for a truly zero carbon grid. All the models I can remember seeing for that situation need hydrogen storage or carbon capture - and carbon capture looks likely to be even more expensive than hydrogen. If renewables and electrolysis get cheap enough, hydrogen might even beat oil and gas here on cost.
I think batteries will win in long duration storage over hydrogen as well. Batteries have a self-discharge rate, but geological hydrogen storage or cryogenic/pressurized tank storage also has a loss rate, and unpressurized tanks are very expensive. Last time I checked in the literature these loss rates were very similar to battery self-discharge rates.
Of course these numbers are tricky to estimate exactly, so I'm open to the idea that a low loss hydrogen storage method might be out there. And of course the prices in these areas are changing quickly, so sources from 10+ years ago don't give a good picture of where we are now or will be in the future.
Future costs are never certain. And it may depend where in the world you are. I’m pretty sure salt caverns full of hydrogen are a lot cheaper than most people expect batteries to get for storing (transmission grid scale) energy for a month or more. And I think that’s mostly because lithium, plentiful as it is, is unlikely to ever be as cheap as water. But admittedly not everywhere has the geology for the storing the hydrogen really cheaply.
And, of course, in many ways an electrolysis to hydrogen storage to fuel cell system is just a type of (flow) battery. So in some ways this is a question of what type of battery system will win (as are discussions of hydrogen vehicles really, though I’d personally see those as staying pretty niche).
Hydrogen can be either fuel cell or modified internal combustion. Fuel cells are more economic for larger vehicles like trucks, ships, planes than cars. Fuels cell systems have potentially lower maintenance costs due to fewer parts.
Hydrogen is a technology that never became a thing. Impractical to use at the moment and it doesnt offer anything more that todays lithium batteries after all. Green hydrogen is also a myth.
The enormous amount of hydrogen made each year would like a word with you. Just replacing this is a massive market for green hydrogen. And it's a vital market -- the current world population could scarcely be fed without artificially fixed nitrogen by the Haber-Bosch process, which is the major use of that hydrogen.
Hydrogen is useful as a fuel for things that demand high energy density relative to mass. Like air travel.
But its use for energy storage is much more limited. Actually producing , storing, and converting the hydrogen back into electricity is much more expensive than just producing the electricity when it's in demand.
I saw a documentary a few years back analyzing why hydrogen vehicles havent caught on yet. All the major auto companies had working fuel cells of internal combustion prototypes for 20 years. One villain was Obamas energy secretary Steven Chu who emphasized battery R&D at the expense of alternatives. The other was was Elon Musk who denigrated every alternative to electric vehicles, whether there was merit or not. I dont know how valid these arguments are.
I believe the documentary was called At War with the Dinosaurs.
Infrastructure is the problem. If you though charge stations for EV were a problem, hydrogen is 1000x worse (and harder to solve).
Hydrogen is a bitch to control - generally do you NOT and never are able. We only have to look at the trouble (and costs) that NASA has had and continues to have to spend to manage hydrogen without major injury or accidents.
Hydrogen that escapes into the air ALSO is an ozone destroyer like freon is. Leaks are far more inevitable than with even natural gas. And for that reason you CAN NOT use natural gas pipes to transport hydrogen (some ignorant yahoos have claimed that as a plan).
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[ 124 ms ] story [ 3740 ms ] thread> Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy like oil or coal. It is best thought of as an energy carrier, akin to electricity, and as a means of storage, like a battery. It has to be manufactured. Low-carbon energy sources such as renewables and nuclear power can be used to separate water (H2O) into its constituents of oxygen and hydrogen. This is inefficient and expensive, but costs are falling. Hydrogen can also be made from dirty fossil fuels but this emits a lot of pollution unless it is coupled with technologies that capture carbon and sequester it. Hydrogen is flammable and bulky compared with many fuels. The implacable laws of thermodynamics mean that converting primary energy into hydrogen and then hydrogen into usable power leads to waste.
Does it get any better below the fold?
Hydrogen enthusiasts pretend like they're just months away from solving the various threats that hydrogen poses to safety. Those problems will never be solved, but it doesn't matter. The real barrier to hydrogen energy storage and transport is that we don't yet have the capacity to create hydrogen in sufficient quantity from renewable energy. As soon as that capacity issue is solved, serious people will start using hydrogen in its safer, well-understood form: liquid anhydrous ammonia. Pieces like TFA that don't mention that are just fluff.
Why not just store excess renewable electricity that way, local to wherever that power is being generated in underground pressure vessels or something, venting the oxygen produced to the atmosphere? Then when the wind isn't blowing, or sun isn't shining, burn the hydrogen to run something resembling a conventional natural gas generator... Don't bother transporting this stuff anywhere, produce it onsite, burn it onsite. Couldn't you also capture the exhaust of the hydrogen combustion to recharge the input electrolysis water?
There are also (probably) a lot of costs involved with trying to contain the hydrogen, and making and industrial sized fuel cells. Maybe quite a few unsolved problems as well e.g. do fuel cells eventually wear our like batteries?
Basically, we could do it, but the current techniques are possibly more expensive and too lossy compared to other options, like molten salt, pumped hydro etc.
The platinum catalyst is expensive, and as others point out, you need special piping for hydrogen.
More promising is direct ammonia synthesis: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/ammonia-synthesis-go...
Oil hasn't been consistently cheap since 2003, it is only going to get more expensive. We've consistently been using more of the stuff than gets discovered since the 1980s. There is only one way the story ends.
Not sure about batteries, but it seems to me given giga factories exist that it is way more scalable than the refinement and delivery process of oil.
Put another way: delivering you a car once every 5 years is way more scalable than delivering you energy in the form of oil every week.
This is changing with cheap solar and higher capacity HVDC lines, but in order to truly compete with fossil fuels, renewables need a scalable storage medium, because a fundamental weakness of electricity is that it has to be consumed when it's generated. Batteries just don't scale to this level, in my opinion. Sure, gigafactories exist, but it doesn't really compete with being able to add hundreds of GWh of storage at a time in the form of salt cavern hydrogen storage, of which the US has more than 330GWh already in operation. They're just different scales.
I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
We have plenty of lithium and it’s recyclable, unlike oil.
I’ma but lost at your point to be honest… my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
It's still cheaper today. HVDC might eventually be cheaper, but that isn't the reality right now. Hence, your argument for batteries and electricity being the more scalable option is factually incorrect. We use other vectors for transporting energy long distances -- ones that scale more effectively -- and then we convert it to the form needed at the point of use. Why is this important? Because...
>my whole point was you don’t need to transport energy (plug a big solar panel into a car), to which you responded by saying transporting energy is inefficient???
You effectively always need to transport energy to the point of use, whether the transport vector is as electricity through a cable, or fuel in a pipe. Different methods come with different trade-offs. Electricity is good for relatively short distances, because it's typically hard to store for long periods (relative to energy stored in chemical bonds, for example), and is better used as it's generated. This is why we use oil and gas pipelines in the first place; if electricity were a better vector for long-range energy transport, we would use it as such. But we don't, because it's not the right tool for the job.
>Batteries 100% scale better than gas, you don’t need gas stations and we already have electricity running across our cities.
Except they demonstrably don't. We have a billion cars on the road, the vast majority of which use gas. We use the same stuff to run ships and planes, and we even use it as a chemical feedstock to make fertilizer to grow the food we eat. Acting like batteries scale better than fossil fuels, when not everyone has a place to park and charge their car overnight, is a fairly insular take. BEVs don't even meet all of the use cases that standard cars and trucks currently do, and that's before getting into all of the other transport applications that fossil fuels enable. No one is trucking goods across the Nullarbor in a battery electric truck any time soon.
And to be clear I'm not saying that we don't need to get off of fossil fuels, or that batteries aren't part of the solution -- rather, I'm saying that scalability matters, and we shouldn't pretend like batteries have anything even approaching the scalability of fossil fuels, because it blinds us to the bigger picture. They don't, for many reasons, which is why it'll take multiple solutions working in tandem to fill the voids left behind when we inevitably move away from fossil fuels.
>I’m not sure where salt cavern hydrogen came from…
You mentioned battery storage when talking about scalability.
On a grid level, scalable energy storage is being able to add 100GWh at a time through a salt cavern, not 500MWh batteries here and there. Batteries have a place, but they're mostly load shifting on short time scales, and don't scale to the size of a grid. You can't use batteries to smooth out weather patterns that can last for weeks, and it's probable we never will. We have more scalable solutions for that.
At the transport level, scalability means low cost, high endurance, and low downtime; batteries can only make tenuous claims for any of these, and are still outclassed by fossil fuels. We'll see how it shakes out in the future, but let's not count our chickens before they've hatched.
But, put 100 years of scale into solar/wind/batteries and the world looks very different: we’ll easily have 1 billion BEV and they’ll easily traverse the Nullarbor.
I think scaling looks very different in the renewable space, I think adding 10Kw a billion times over is the better way to scale, and have a truly distributed energy network.
Large scale power generation should be for large scale industry.
If you wired up enough panels around the world… you don’t need a lot of storage (except for balancing) because the sun is always shinning somewhere.
Regardless of what the solution looks like. My original point: drilling, refining and delivering oil globally is no where near the efficiency of local generation and consumption.
Batteries are the main problem right now; everything else in an EV is pretty simple and cheap. Apparently there are some major patents on lithium iron phosphate batteries that are about to expire; hopefully that means we'll have a lot more production outside of China. LFP batteries don't require cobalt or nickel, so they can be made in higher volume with fewer resource bottlenecks.
If we continue to use transportation fuels made from oil, though, prices will likely remain high for the foreseeable future. There are likely to be weird fluctuations, though. (Remember when oil prices went negative a short time ago because there weren't enough containers to store it?)
Hydrogen is inevitable.
https://blendle.com/i/the-economist/h-2-s-hope-and-hype/bnl-... -- $0.49 for this article.
Unless the energy input for production is from solar or wind.
Hydrogen is a great battery and can form a good storage solution for wind and solar.
With the proliferation of installed solar capacity, and availability of low cost renewable energy, the economics of H2 production allow for use of lower efficient systems, with focus on reducing exotic materials in the system.
Where is this solar capacity? Where is this available low cost renewable energy? We are decades away from making the renewables our main electricity source if there were massive investment into it, meanwhile we are building new coal and gas plants instead. And the electricity demand is still going up.
Even if things go way better than anyone can predict, we will never have enough energy to throw it away on inefficient hydrogen, not in a lifetime of anyone currently on Hacker News.
The whole H2 hype is just shilling for oil and gas, whether the people perpetuating it know it or not.
Of course we can have the capacity, after just a few more doublings.
...in 2018. It's 2021 already. In 2020 solar made up something like 3.2% (https://www.worldenergydata.org/world-electricity-generation...). That alone is an increase of 0.6% per year. Even if nothing changed about PV buildup, it would still be headed for 15% in 2040. This rate is likely to increase, though.
SOME materials have trouble with hydrogen. But this is a problem that can be, and is, worked around as needed. It's a nuisance, not a showstopper.
If you just want 'hydrogen from any source' and aren't trying to get off fossil fuels, then yes, the materials costs are that horrible. But I don't believe that's where anyone is going with this conversation.
And no, most of the infrastructure connecting these can't be reused either. Our existing hydrogen production facilities are set up to produce the hydrogen as it's needed for other industrial processes. Our existing hydrogen economy does not have a significant storage capacity. Rather, it's set up to minimize the need for hydrogen storage altogether. For your proposed renewable grid, we'd likely be transporting methane many miles away from its generation to under ground storage facilities. Sure, the existing pipes connecting to fertilizer plants can still be used. But we still need a lot more pipes connecting electrolysis plants, to storage sites, and to hydrogen to electricity production facilities. This isn't something our existing infrastructure is set up to support.
Your proposal has us effectively rebuilding our hydrogen economy from the ground up: First, changing production from steam reformation to electrolysis. And second, building out a vast hydrogen storage and transportation network to deliver this hydrogen to where energy is needed. There's a lot more to your proposed hydrogen grid storage than just valves and pipes.
There has been progress on all of these fronts, one of the most interesting developments that I'm aware of is this fleet of 1500 trucks that is being built:
https://www.electrive.com/2021/02/18/hiringa-energy-orders-1...
But there are a large number of questions (for me) around this project that make me wonder how much it is vaporware and how much of it is reality. If they pull this off, and that includes delivery of the vehicles, infrastructure and do it within budget and with a substantial fraction of the life-span of an ordinary truck without major issues it will be a game changer. If not some investors - and their customers - are going to be extremely pissed off.
Even the first 50 deliveries would already be a huge milestone, I'm aware of exactly one truck like this that is supposed to be driving for Campina ( https://www.nieuweoogst.nl/nieuws/2021/07/13/frieslandcampin... ) but I have not been able to get any data on the actual use of this truck by the customer (ie: service history, operational readiness history).
What is suspicious is that if I enter that truck's license number (19-BLD-5) into https://ovi.rdw.nl/ that it comes up as a more or less regular Volvo truck with a 12.7 liter LNG installation, not a hydrogen installation, which it would surely mention if that were the case.
It's very well possible that that was just a promotional picture from before the conversion to Hydrogen, but you'd expect the company to put out one press release after another to prove their tech is real if it was actually road worthy. But all of the pictures where they 'Hyzon' logo is present on the front of the trucks show no license plate.
(for instance: https://www.truckpartsandservice.com/alternative-power/hydro... and many other promotional articles like it).
I guess it is easier to modify an LNG truck to handle H2 rather than a diesel one.
There are 100's of promotional pictures of that vehicle but none that show it in actual operation or with its license plate post modification and you can't just take a truck like that on the road here without going through all of the required processes.
RDW is pretty strict and good at what they do, if you bypass them for something like this they'll smack you down hard.
They claim they will deliver 100 trucks this year. So far I've seen precious little evidence of that.
69-BPR-8 is a good example of a vehicle that is powered by Hydrogen, it is listed as 'electric / hydrogen' with RDW, and that's what I would expect for this Hyzon truck.
That's a garbage truck in the city of Groningen, which is also a hydrogen conversion of a regular (diesel) truck, no data about reliability, availability, range or service.
See:
https://www.alexmiedema.nl/2021/01/22/exclusieve-beelden-nie...
These are the tanks they use:
https://www.waterstof-centrum.nl/product/700-bar-waterstof-c...
Hyzon went public July of this year:
https://www.fleetowner.com/emissions-efficiency/article/2116...
Forklifts do not operate on highway distances, but instead they operate in very limited areas around where they can be immediately serviced.
Toyota is also still on the hydrogen-for-vehicular use bandwagon but it looks as though all electric has the future, and I really don't see how fuel cell tech has an edge over battery tech, especially not with the new battery chemistries that are becoming available for large scale use.
As for hydrogen usage in vehicles, it's hard to imagine that it won't be used in some capacity. Battery electric cars aren't a one-to-one replacement for an ICE car, and there are genuine drawbacks to the recharge time. Crucially, this isn't a problem that can be fixed through battery technology -- it has to be fixed at the grid level, because electricity has to be consumed when it's produced. Fuel cell tech is already cheaper than battery electric for use cases where the cost of overlay is taken into consideration, and it's hard to see new battery chemistries fixing this without somehow being dramatically cheaper than existing chemistries. Not to mention, fuel cells aren't exactly standing still either; future battery chemistries will have to compete with next generation fuel cells, not current ones.
The reality is that there's almost certainly a market for people who want vehicles that refuel using a traditional model, and that's okay. The idea that there has to be a winner in the automotive industry is asinine, because different vehicles fulfill different needs, and it's unlikely that someone who relies on on-street parking, or goes on frequent long roadtrips, is going to want the same solution as someone who owns a home with a garage, and mainly drives around the city.
IMV batteries are not sustainable. Currently there is a huge hype on batteries, but once the first set of batteries start dying out and the disposal process begins, we will have to deal with a lot of toxic waste. This is going to start happening in about 10 years or so.
Suppliers like Tesla and Panasonic might be making recyclable ones, but Chinese vendors scarcely give a thought to recyclability.
That's pretty much irrelevant. Hydrogen is used as an energy store. Thus the whole point is to generate it where it's cheap to generate, and afterwards transport it to customers willing to pay for it. Therefore conversion effixiency is irrelecant and the key factor is market price, whose lower bound is dictated by the combination of production cost and how much it costs to transport it.
To illustrate how irrelevant conversion efficiency is, keep in mind that right now both Morocco and Australia are investing in Hydrogen export.
If I recall
> if I remember correctly. Adding to that the storage tank cost and the far bigger explosion potential compared to batteries its supposed advantage is dwindling fast given the continuous improvement in batteries.
You're already describing how natural gas is used. Not only are there large natural gas storage tanks in residential neighborhoods but also there are plenty of major cities throughout the world where natural gas is piped straight into apartment buildings.
Indeed, but the round trip efficiency is hardly exceeding 30 to 40%.
Production of hydrogen (via a variety of methods) for use in vehicles is actually more efficient than gasoline (including hybrids) if you measure well to wheel.
It just in turn gets stomped by battery electric, so it has little future there, but that doesn't mean it is bad compared with the status quo. Like Windows phones were better than Blackberries and (pre windows) Nokia, but not as good as Android or iOS.
Something either needs to be dramatically failing, or an overnight success to make a good story.
Something being an obvious evolution and way forward in the future as part of a portfolio of other complementary technologies doesn't really come across well in this medium.
I think the story is trying to capture that the continued success of renewable energy means green hydrogen is inevitable now and that's becoming the consensus.
Personally, I assume that's part of the reason no-one believes it's at grid parity and beyond, and half the users of this site are waiting for fusion to save them.
Decades of stories about how expensive PV is, because that worked as clickbait/propaganda, while "this is the early stages of a sensible long term investment" didn't.
"Instead, hydrogen can help in niche markets, involving complex chemical processes and high temperatures that are hard to achieve with electricity"
The article title is a little misleading, although as misleading titles go, it's not that bad.
And niche in this case means about the same size as nuclear or hydro power at their peak and working in conjunction with other techs to completely decarbonize the world.
Again, the lack of nuance is a problem inherent in the medium, but they gave it a try.
Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.
As long as you produce it by cracking fossil fuels anyway, which is how >95% of hydrogen production currently works.
In theory hitting ~60% energy efficiency on solar power could be cheaper than fossil fuels. But hydrogen is a long way from that benchmark.
Could this be a useful form of carbon capture for fossil fuels? Hydrogen at least burns much more cleanly at the point of use.
https://spectra.mhi.com/achieving-net-zero-what-is-turquoise...
You might even be able to sell some of it, although i suspect there isn't a market for all the carbon you would produce.
I'm sure someone will come up with something more interesting to do with it than just dumping it though if it all works out.
I think that it's solar and wind energy, peaky and unstable as it is, should be used to produce hydrogen. Then it could be used as is, or combined with heavy hydrocarbons to produce much lighter hydrocarbons like methane. Maybe it can be economically used to produce something useful from CO₂, from fuel to plastics.
Burning hydrogen emits water.
Burning CH₄ produces much more water and less CO₂ than burning longer hydrocarbons. This works for ICE car engines, with tiny modifications, too. So it could still be a useful step in phasing out carbon-based fuels, until we have epic-scale batteries and likely more nuclear generation.
https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/eus-hydrogen-stra...
> “'Hydrogen Europe' promotes the growth of green hydrogen production in the EU... €145bn in support between grants and subsidies."
- Hydron has very low energy density per unit volume unless you compress it to many times atmospheric pressure.
- Highly compressed hydrogen is a safety nightmare.
Do we currently have hydrogen storage technologies that compare acceptably with modern batteries in terms of weight, size and catastrophic failure risks?
One thing though if released Hydrogen will escape the earth's atmosphere right? Seems kinda risky to slowly lose all our water...
Edit: you might be thinking of helium, which is inert, and so I believe does escape the atmosphere more easily.
(No, in reality, we have nowhere near the power to make appreciable amounts of hydrogen escape. Even if you electrolyzed water continuously with 2.5 TW of power, which is roughly global average electricity generation, you'd lose something like 4 cubic kilometers of water per year. The Earth meanwhile has over a billion cubic kilometers of water in its oceans, so you'd need over 250 million years to make them disappear.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_escape
Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid ? The peak vs minimum variance in renewable sources is still an unsolved problem, and the only good solution (nuclear) has become politically untenable.
> Last, hydrogen can be used as a material to store and transport energy in bulk. Renewable grids struggle when the wind dies or it is dark. Batteries can help, but if renewable power is converted to hydrogen, it can be stored cheaply for long periods and converted to electricity on demand. A power plant in Utah plans to store the gas in caverns to supply California. Sunny and windy places that lack transmission links can export clean energy as hydrogen.
Sounds like the answer is yes.
My main question is how does it scale safely? An acre full of pressurized hydrogen sounds like a Port of Beirut moment waiting to happen.
To a large part is doesn't even need to. Even just the need for non-fossil chemical feedstock is so high that shaving the peaks of oversized generator fleet is enough to contribute to most of grid balancing. Just for ammonia synthesis at current global consumption levels you'll need hundreds of gigawatts of average power to generate the feedstock hydrogen.
Thorium reactors remain an insufficiently explored option here.
I'm no expert in nuclear power, but it's my understanding that Thorium reactors aren't that much safer due to the higher gamma radiation emissions, and Thorium reactors are far more expensive to build and operate to the point that they are not cost-effective, let alone profitable.
But there are many problems with MSRs, particularly the kind that dissolve the fuel in a salt. Materials issues have not been solved, despite internet claims to the contrary, and once you're no longer confining the fuel in fuel elements there's radioactivity spread all over your plant. Maintenance will be a bitch, especially (as needed if you're trying to breed w. thorium in a thermal reactor) if you're doing online chemistry on that salt.
You still need oxygen to react no? If it’s pure hydrogen …
It's 4 and 75 in air (so hydrogen will readily ignite between 4% an 75% hydrogen in air at 1atm), and it's 4 and 94 in pure oxygen. And the good news is that there is a limiting oxygen concentration, but the bad news is it's 5% (so over 5% oxygen by volume at STP it becomes possible for hydrogen to ignite), but I could not find flammability limits at sub20.
"While ammonium nitrate is stable at ambient temperature and pressure under many conditions, it may detonate from a strong initiation charge. It should not be stored near high explosives or blasting agents."
"Pure ammonium nitrate does not burn, but as a strong oxidizer, it supports and accelerates the combustion of organic (and some inorganic) material."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Safety,_handl...
Hydrogen would behave more like gasoline. It's only when there is a fuel-oxygen mixture do they start explosively burning - i.e. it should not go off all at once unless you pump the tank with oxygen and mix them/give the oxygen time to diffuse through the tank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsZOE1nvlhI
(Note that ignition will usually but not always fail. I don't advise making a habit of this.)
Hydrogen is far more readily ignited:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudCaJB_Xx4
(It can also produce surprises after burning for a while.)
Whilst it's true that a container or pipeline filled with gaseous or liquid hydrogen would be unlikely to explode iself directly, chances are reasonably high of leaks developing and from those, explosive mixes of hydrogen and air either within ground cavities or nearby structures. Embritlement might result in catastrophic failure of tanks or pipes (petrol is also rarely stored at high pressures or cryogenic temperatures). Resulting thermal and pressure shocks could further extend damage and increase rates of release and combustion.
Resulting conflagrations might more closely resemble natural gas fires than ammonium nitrate / ANFO explosions, but those can be dangerous enough of themselves. Keep in mind that ANFO also tends not to flow as a liquid or gas, and whilst it reacts very rapidly, has only about ten percent of the energy by unit mass of hydrocarbon or pure hydrogen fuels.
Once ignited, and if supplied with atmospheric oxygen, hydrogen will burn quite vigorously, and even explosively (flame front expanding faster than the speed of sound) given a proper stochiometric balance.
All told, if anything goes wrong with a large hydrogen storage or distribution facility, it will quite probably be quite spectacular.
We have dealt with gasoline, which can leak and is just as dangerous, IMO just fine for decades - and gasoline vapor has a tendency to pool near the ground rather than float off and disperse high into the sky like hydrogen.
Franky, it seems just about every energy storage system has pretty frightening failure modes - I take it you have seen the video of a Tesla fiercely burning up in a carpark in China.
How many hydrogen storage tanks and pipelines do you think exist today? How are they regulated? How much hydrogen is stored and transported via them annually?
How does this compare with the number of petrol fuel tanks and pipelines, numbering in the many hundreds of millions for automobiles alone? And the volume of petrol stored and transported on an annual basis?
Limited lab, hospital, aerospace, and industrial hydrogen usage is not the same as parking a hydrogen bomb in every residential garage, or assembling collections of them in apartment, commercial, or office-tower parking structures.
EV's are irrelevant to this question, but I've got you covered:
About 3 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28547486
10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3284804
FWIW: I see hydrogen-derived synfuels as a potential / probable option going forward in some uses (marine, aviation, possibly rail), but reformulated into hydrocarbon equivalents of current fossil fuels, probably via something like the Fischer-Tropsch process. That's been uneconomic to date, though it's chemically feasible.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
Alphabet explored this through "Project Foghorn". I'd argue that petroleum is priced far too low, rather than synfuels too high as they state.
Don't use metal. If you do replace it periodically - let's not pretend batteries last forever either.
A bit of leakage is acceptable. Did you know that natural gas that already in widespread use today leaks as well.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
Come to think of it, most of the problems we have with hydrogen we also have with natural gas - which we dealt with just fine; we even had natural gas powered cars, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_vehicle
Hydrogen storage is an active field of research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
I say we keep our options open. It's worth further exploring the use of hydrogen as a energy storage and transportation medium.
"News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough disaster."
Nuclear has mostly an economics problem. The capital costs are massive and the path to profitability is unclear during the continued buildout of renewables.
Not just politically: also economically untenable.
At the moment, gas peakers remain the only good solution to this. Hopefully in the future overbuilding renewables or some sort of advancement in storage will work. Unsolved problem for the 2040s.
> Can Hydrogen be used to store energy at the scale of a power grid?
Probably not because of the inefficiencies. It may well be useful as a kind of "last line of defence" to handle low probability situations where a lot .
However, it does seem like it may be the best solution for air travel, and perhaps also shipping and heavy good vehicles.
Certainly be good use of the off-peak spare capacity type issues with electricity production. Cost wise compared to a therm of natural gas (a therm of natural gas is about 2kg's) then hydrogen starts to become viable on price alone. Now if your able to tap excess electricity production to produce that hydrogen, then you start to become more competitive as an alternative.
Paul Martin is very good on this subject. Check out https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distilled-thoughts-hydrogen-p... and the associated artcles (paticularly on heating).
Sadly it's likely the Economist Journos have been captured for a nice long lunch by the 'big oil' proponents of blue hydrogen as a "transitional" technology (which, not co-incidentally, keeps them in business and doesn't turn all their pipelines into stranded assets).
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/leaders/20...
I don't know how long we're going to wait, but we need to using petroleum tomorrow, and be very very pragmatic about it.
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2021/07/hijacking-recovery-th...
The place where hydrogen might be helpful on the grid is injecting hydrogen into the natural gas pipeline and generation systems. That way the generation and storage (line packing, tanks) come from existing infrastructure. However there are limits on how much can be added (5% of the mix usually), some unanswered questions about what it will do to the equipment, and the likelihood that this infrastructure will be shut down in the late stages of decarbonization.
I think exploitation of this avenue very much depends on increasing or removing that limit, for example:
https://hydeploy.co.uk/about/news/hydeploy-and-the-road-to-1...
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/hydeploy-keele-hydrogen-co2/
There's a fun fact in there, although specific to the UK (possibly the whole EU):
> Furthermore, any appliance produced after 1993 which is required to conform to the gas appliances directive has already been tested on 23% Hydrogen
There might also be a place for ammonia storage/transport here. It's a denser fuel, which gives it some transportation applications (creating a bigger market), and it's easier to store.
Today, natural gas (or where there isn’t a gas grid, oil) peaking plant wins in this market, but that isn’t an option when people plan for a truly zero carbon grid. All the models I can remember seeing for that situation need hydrogen storage or carbon capture - and carbon capture looks likely to be even more expensive than hydrogen. If renewables and electrolysis get cheap enough, hydrogen might even beat oil and gas here on cost.
Of course these numbers are tricky to estimate exactly, so I'm open to the idea that a low loss hydrogen storage method might be out there. And of course the prices in these areas are changing quickly, so sources from 10+ years ago don't give a good picture of where we are now or will be in the future.
And, of course, in many ways an electrolysis to hydrogen storage to fuel cell system is just a type of (flow) battery. So in some ways this is a question of what type of battery system will win (as are discussions of hydrogen vehicles really, though I’d personally see those as staying pretty niche).
Edit: typo further to future.
But its use for energy storage is much more limited. Actually producing , storing, and converting the hydrogen back into electricity is much more expensive than just producing the electricity when it's in demand.
I believe the documentary was called At War with the Dinosaurs.
Infrastructure is the problem. If you though charge stations for EV were a problem, hydrogen is 1000x worse (and harder to solve).
Hydrogen is a bitch to control - generally do you NOT and never are able. We only have to look at the trouble (and costs) that NASA has had and continues to have to spend to manage hydrogen without major injury or accidents.
Hydrogen that escapes into the air ALSO is an ozone destroyer like freon is. Leaks are far more inevitable than with even natural gas. And for that reason you CAN NOT use natural gas pipes to transport hydrogen (some ignorant yahoos have claimed that as a plan).