> Carbon efficiency is one of the most pressing problems of carbon dioxide electroreduction today. While there have been studies on anion exchange membrane electrolyzers with carbon dioxide (gas) and bipolar membrane electrolyzers with bicarbonate (aqueous) feedstocks, both suffer from low carbon efficiency. In anion exchange membrane electrolyzers, this is due to carbonate anion crossover, whereas in bipolar membrane electrolyzers, the exsolution of carbon dioxide (gas) from the bicarbonate solution is the culprit. Here, we first elucidate the root cause of the low carbon efficiency of liquid bicarbonate electrolyzers with thermodynamic calculations and then achieve carbon-efficient carbon dioxide electroreduction by adopting a near-neutral-pH cation exchange membrane, a glass fiber intermediate layer, and carbon dioxide (gas) partial pressure management. We convert highly concentrated bicarbonate solution to solid formate fuel with a yield (carbon efficiency) of greater than 96%. A device test is demonstrated at 100 mA cm−2 with a full-cell voltage of 3.1 V for over 200 h.
Sigh. The PR department of universities are about selling IP, getting grant$ to fund their toys, and sometimes attracting PI's and students to do the work based on the university's reputation.
There is a no-funding land that is needed to advance society. Between basic scientific research and advanced low probability engineering research no for-profit corporation is willing to fund - so it’s mostly the domain of the government allocating grants to universities and labs.
Sorry to pour cold dihydrogen monoxide on their press release birthday cake: It's not sequestration, so it's not all that useful. Take all the process losses to use the inputs as electricity directly, be it charging EV batteries or directly with mass transit motors.
FF aviation should be abandoned because of the climate change implications. It's extremely inefficient. Large EV gliders are workable. Solar Impulse 2 was a record-setting PoC on a smaller, cheaper scale.
Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon. Hybrid cargo ships are already a thing. (Aasfjell)
Rail shipping is extremely energy efficient. This is how most cargo should be transported. A global rail transport network should be seriously considered.
You won't be able to ship 300+ people across Atlantic any time soon on a EV glider. So, a realistic take is using biofuels instead of kerosene for aicraft engines.
Biofuels are not a realistic take - most of our farming runs on oil, so most (note: not all) biofuels turn oil into less oil.
Also, farming is how we produce our food, and if we have the overhead to produce fuel instead, then we have overhead to lower our output to healthier levels to avoid overtaxing our farmland.
Currently we have no viable sustainable aeroplane fuel. Theoretically we could design planes that work well with hydrogen, but hydrogen is expensive as heck already and we'd need to not only replace the planes, but also all our refueling infrastructure. Also it wouldn't be ready for a decade or two anyway, so in the mean time there's literally sustainable option.
Ideally, we'd find a way to make synthfuel somewhat viable, but in the mean time our best option is reducing plane usage and reducing emissions elsewhere in the economy.
>FF aviation should be abandoned because of the climate change implications.
(I'm talking specifically about overseas travel here, where electric trains are impossible)
FF aviation currently doesn't have an alternative - we could theoretically use hydrogen or synthfuel, but 1) synthfuel is not remotely viable right now and 2) hydrogen would require major plane redesigns (and new infrastructure), so even if it turns out to be viable it'll take decades. Also, I'm not sure if it'll be viable.
In terms of climate change implications, abandoning FF aviation only makes sense if we abandon all climate emissions ASAP, because FF aviation is one of the hardest forms of emissions to actually replace. Aerospace is hard, and FF aviation is already as efficient as is possible with current technology, given the sheer amount of savings an extra percent of efficiency gives the airline company.
>It's extremely inefficient. Large EV gliders are workable.
Aviation in general is extremely inefficient; it comes with the territory of being heavier than air but insisting on staying in it while traveling cross-continent.
Large EV gliders can only cross seas by being extremely lightweight - those things don't even have pressurized cabins, let alone hundreds of passengers (hundreds of passengers means the plane is hundreds of times more profitable than a 1-person). And I'm willing to bet they travel a tad slower, to boot. If you don't care about speed, then airships are the obvious best option - they were functional back in the 1910s, and were abandoned largely because 1) aeroplanes outperformed them and were then produced in large numbers for WW2 before being subsequently sold off once the war was over, and 2) they were seen as unsafe - not unreasonably given that the 1930s aviation industry put far less emphasis on safety compared to today, but also because the Hindenburg was designed to use helium but was forced to deploy using hydrogen for geopolitical reasons*.
Airships are still more expensive than aeroplanes - if only because they tend to fly much slower, and the subsequent flight duration requires paying out far more hours to flight staff - and the flight speed is a serious qualitative problem (one-week business trips aren't viable and ditto for week-long vacations), but they're technically doable. Although at that point, why bother? Why not take a cruise/cargo ship?". This is why there's no airship industry, by the way. They're too slow to compete with planes and too expensive to compete with ships/trains.
*namely the US not wanting to support the mid-1930s Zeppelin company due to it being funded largely by the Nazi party and airships being associated with military usage at the time, and it probably didn't help that Zeppelins were being used for Nazi propaganda purposes at the time.
>Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon. Hybrid cargo ships are already a thing. (Aasfjell)
Hybrid cargo ships don't mean much - they're just supplementing their power. Also, that thing is 5 metres wide and uses batteries; batteries are a dead end for cross-ocean shipping. Full EV maritime shipping is indeed possible and, depending on the cost of hydrogen fuel, quite viable. Although hydrogen has its own problems and isn't particularly good as a fuel (it's specific energy is great but it's energy-density is literally the worst, and it's hard and expensive to store due to needing special tanks and liquefaction or compression, and it slowly leaks away at a rate of ~1% per day so it's harder to stockpile, and it's incompatible with existing fuel infrastructure and engines, and with current tech it's expensive AF to produce renewably so we're essentially gambling that those particular technologies will improve rapidly if we invest in them).
Although given how hard it is to get the shipping industry off bunker fuel, I&#...
> Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon.
We' ve been building nuckear powered ships for like 60 years, they eork great, thry are nuch faster thsn normsl ones since they dont worry about energy efficiency and daving power.
The headline number of 96% (in the original new release) is very misleading.
What matters is not the fraction of gaseous carbon that ends up in the fuel (the yield), it's the energetic efficiency of the process. ie: Nobody will spend 100 Joules of energy to store, say, 1 Joule of energy. The paper says their process has low energy efficiency (low enough they don't seem to want to say the number)[1]:
> ...rather than relying on the CO2(gas) feedstock, bipolar membrane (BPM) electrolyzers with aqueous bicarbonate HCO3−(aq) input were demonstrated (Figure S2b). In principle, the energy-intensive CO2 regeneration process could be circumvented. In practice, however, the BPM induces a large overpotential, causing *low energy efficiency*, and it still suffers from CO2 escape, low FE, low yield, and low operation lifetime. [** emphasis added]
Is it feasible/possible to knowingly do that, and still 'win'? That is, power the process with nuclear or some renewable, not necessarily as a way to get fuel, but a way to get carbon out of the air?
This seems like far in the future, where the direct use of the nuclear wouldn't prevent more CO2 from being introduced into the atmosphere, than could be removed.
Also, it could be wherever nuclear wouldn’t be permissible otherwise (e.g floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, away from populations that don’t want it nearby)
Yup, said another way, this would only really make sense if we are producing more energy than we can reasonably use and need to sink it somewhere.
However, there are so many sinks for energy that I just doubt CO2 will be a priority any time soon. Desalination, for example, will almost certainly end up being a huge energy sink as the world gets hotter.
Free energy is not necessarily a fantasy. In Australia, the wholesale electricity price regularly goes into negative, usually many hours in an average day, reaching as low as -70c/kWh occasionally (more commonly -5c/kWh). There is just no enough energy sink to absorb all the power we generate from solar in the day time. If we can store some of this energy in a stable form, that would be a good win.
That's not unlimited it's solar generating more power than the grid needs at a given point in time. If that power could be used during that negative event something could storage that power. How often it goes negative, for how long vs how much time is required to start the storage process and costs to run will determine if the idea is appliable
Electric cars are the best energy storage for this supply. Cars are parked 23 hours/day, can be charged when price is negative. I'm certain at least some people would like to be paid for charging their cars.
Yes and: Colocating carbon capture with energy sources awaiting grid connections would uncork the backlog of new construction.
In the USA, there's something like a terawatt of proposed projects stuck in the interconnection queue. We simply cannot wait for the queue to catch up with the financing of these shovel ready projects.
ETFuels is one example of this strategy. Build next to cheap electricity, pump out e-fuels like methanol and ammonia. Today. And then H2 in the future, when the green hydrogen infrastructure is built out.
"when the green hydrogen infrastructure is built out."
You mean in like 20 years if we invest a trillion dollars today?
By then batteries may be three times as dense and 1/3 the cost. H2 cars are a dead end and a trojan horse for fossil fuels derived H2 and a political policy disruption strategy to delay EVs and alt energy.
A business strategy that involves a new infrastructure build while waiting for ... Other infrastructure to complete seems stupid.
I can already see it. The H2 transport vehicles get built, but shockingly doing green H2 gen is never cheaper than methane sourcing, so the green part of the infrastructure just becomes a very small scoped show pony.
H2 is a bad energy carrier.
I do support research and startups, but the H2 proponents pump wayyyyy too much FUD against grid storage and EVs, which is a tell as to who is pulling the strings behind the H2 industry
Green H2 is needed to replace fossil carbon for carbohydrates and ammonia, for industry and agriculture.
Not every use case for energy can be electrified. Transportation is just 1/4 of our carbon emissions. There's also (categorically) industry, agriculture, and buildings.
> but the H2 proponents pump wayyyyy too much FUD against grid storage and EVs
I can't speak to that.
There is no either-or. We need it all. Every battery (lithium, sodium, thermal, pumped hydro, etc). Every transmission (grids, pipes). Every source (e-fuels, wind, district heating, solar, nukes, advanced thermal, waves, whatever).
Arguing about the details is a harmful distraction. The time for pearl clutching, food fights, and concern trolling has passed.
That implies unlimited switchover investment dollars are available.
H2 is trying to steal a slice of the pie from (now proven) alternative energy / decarbonization techs. Yes, there is potential for grid storage and other nice stuff from H2 research and expensive infrastructure. But you and I know where the value of decarbonization dollars are maximized in the next ten years: EVs, wind, solar, and probably battery grid storage.
You are technically right that H2 has the potential to address decarbonization in areas that EVs/solar/wind can't immediately deal with. We'll need this at some point.
But... like H2 proponents, it always seems to boil down to FUD in the end.
Founder Anthony Wang discusses their (proven) tech stack, like electrolyzers and energy sources. How they compare with other H2 startups; ETFuels' launch MVP is methanol for shipping. He shares their intended roadmap, eg branching into methane and ammonia, and unlikeliness of doing pure H2 (for customers). There will be other startups for every niche and segment. eg pure carbon capture plays, make methane, colocate with manufacturers that need H2, etc.
IMHO, green H2's position on the cost-learning curve is almost "crossing the chasm". Roughly equiv to PVs in the '90s and batteries in the 00's. (Roughly. You get the idea.) The tech is fully validated, customers and financing are on board. The challenge now is scaling up. And lots of people know how to do that.
That means green H2 will start to move the needle ~2040 and be gang busters ~2050. (Recall that Obama Admin jump started batteries, BEV, and PV. These things take time.)
--
I'm grumpy that any money whatsoever would be used for non-green H2. That we're still subsidizing fossil fuels. That utilities and Big Oil are obstructing and sabotaging. But I'm not in charge. But please don't conflate those bad actors with the work that needs to be done.
Ok, I've spent too much time on this topic. I'm not even much interested in green H2; everyone's racing to discover better electrolyzers, just like with batteries. And that's just not my thing.
I'm way more excited about thermal batteries and advanced geothermal. Most end uses for energy is heat. So just use heat. Brilliant! Whereas H2 is best for decarbonizing fuels (e-fuels) and fertilizers. Until there's some kind of H2 power cell tech discovery, I think H2 as a fuel is a non starter. Besides, we can't even economically transport H2 yet. Those advocating H2 as fuel for automobiles are nutty or Japanese.
Again, we need all of it. More "Yes, And" less "Yes, But".
The use case for all of these CO2 reduction methods that seems particularly interesting is if you capture the CO2 inevitably produced as a byproduct of cement production and then convert it into useful plastics. You avoid air capture and you get something that's good for more than just burning.
Scalable CCU at source in cement production would be great at getting the 8% or so of global emissions related to cement production down somewhat. Other ways of tackling cement production related emissions are less CO2 producing alternatives to clinker, and even reusing old concrete panels in new construction. There are many rational, viable paths to address this, and other CO2 emission sources - but as long as CO2 emissions don’t have a cost associated, incentives to research, scale and push alternatives forward are lower than to keep doing what we’re doing
We are going to need liquid/gaseous fuels and carbon feedstocks for the foreseeable future. If electricity generation is abundant and cheap (eg ever expanding solar+wind generation) it “costs nothing” to turn that energy into another format, even if the round trip efficiency is low.
The problem we have is CO2 is mixed into the atmosphere at ~420 ppm. Isolating just the CO2 and concentrating it enough for these processes to work is one of the major energy sinks.
This is compounded by the fact that the energy it takes to turn CO2 back into fuel can never be less than the energy released by the fuel.
> This is compounded by the fact that the energy it takes to turn CO2 back into fuel can never be less than the energy released by the fuel.
That doesn’t seem right. Most fossil fuels have multiple CH3 complexes. Even without pulling up the enthalpy of combustion of the molecules, I’d still wager that the 3-H’s combing with O2’s will produce more than the balance of re-capturing the C’s.
That would violate the conservation of energy. Put simply: The energy that is released from those CH3 complexes has to be put back into them to make them be CH3 complexes again. Otherwise you could, for example, heat your house by burning the same bit of fuel over and over again (using some of the energy released by the combustion to recapture the carbon and rebind it to the hydrogen molecules and leaving the rest as heat to enjoy all through the winter). Alternately, you could generate a tremendous amount of electricity by the same method.
Ah my mistake. I misread and was thinking in regards to just doing the CO2 capture portion of generating fuel. Yes making new fuel from captured CO2 will take as much or more energy than released from burning it.
Thanks for the summary - the headline alone made me immediately question “what is the energy requirement of this” and if they’re unwilling to include it I assume it’s pretty abysmal.
I added the 96% to the title here on HN intentionally, because it says here in the abstract "We convert highly concentrated bicarbonate solution to solid formate fuel with a yield (carbon efficiency) of greater than 96%"
Neither MIT Press nor the ScholarlyArticle authors asked or paid me to modify the headline to cite the carbon efficiency.
This capability is arguably better than everything else we do for energy; it is 96% carbon efficient.
Other stats for comparison of such methods are proposed herein?
Really hard to keep a molecule that small in one place for long! I've definitely heard that it really just flies out of steel containers at shockingly high rates
Edit: I misunderstood context... My comment is regarding liquid hydrogen storage vessels. Gaseous can be stored indefinitely with proper seals.
It doesn't leak; it has to be vented. Hydrogen cannot be a liquid, no matter the pressure, at ambient temperatures, and there will always be heat leak. So your liquid hydrogen is always boiling, and with a good vacuum jacked dewar you'll lose 1-1.5% of the vessel's volume a day.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] thread> Carbon efficiency is one of the most pressing problems of carbon dioxide electroreduction today. While there have been studies on anion exchange membrane electrolyzers with carbon dioxide (gas) and bipolar membrane electrolyzers with bicarbonate (aqueous) feedstocks, both suffer from low carbon efficiency. In anion exchange membrane electrolyzers, this is due to carbonate anion crossover, whereas in bipolar membrane electrolyzers, the exsolution of carbon dioxide (gas) from the bicarbonate solution is the culprit. Here, we first elucidate the root cause of the low carbon efficiency of liquid bicarbonate electrolyzers with thermodynamic calculations and then achieve carbon-efficient carbon dioxide electroreduction by adopting a near-neutral-pH cation exchange membrane, a glass fiber intermediate layer, and carbon dioxide (gas) partial pressure management. We convert highly concentrated bicarbonate solution to solid formate fuel with a yield (carbon efficiency) of greater than 96%. A device test is demonstrated at 100 mA cm−2 with a full-cell voltage of 3.1 V for over 200 h.
They could probably do institutional PR off student projects since MIT already gets top talent
Licensing & PR departments > Dept chair > TP > PI > AP > VP > PhD candidate > Master's candidate > TA > ugrad
This is a different article from last year also about storing energy as [Aluminum] Formate.
Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon. Hybrid cargo ships are already a thing. (Aasfjell)
Rail shipping is extremely energy efficient. This is how most cargo should be transported. A global rail transport network should be seriously considered.
Also, farming is how we produce our food, and if we have the overhead to produce fuel instead, then we have overhead to lower our output to healthier levels to avoid overtaxing our farmland.
Currently we have no viable sustainable aeroplane fuel. Theoretically we could design planes that work well with hydrogen, but hydrogen is expensive as heck already and we'd need to not only replace the planes, but also all our refueling infrastructure. Also it wouldn't be ready for a decade or two anyway, so in the mean time there's literally sustainable option.
Ideally, we'd find a way to make synthfuel somewhat viable, but in the mean time our best option is reducing plane usage and reducing emissions elsewhere in the economy.
Brazil is insanely wasteful with their sugar/biofuel scheme. Japan will also be inefficient going to hydrogen.
That is true.
>So, a realistic take is using biofuels instead of kerosene for aicraft engines.
This seems unlikely in the face of a growing population that needs feeding and the impacts climate change will have on our ability to grow crops.
(I'm talking specifically about overseas travel here, where electric trains are impossible)
FF aviation currently doesn't have an alternative - we could theoretically use hydrogen or synthfuel, but 1) synthfuel is not remotely viable right now and 2) hydrogen would require major plane redesigns (and new infrastructure), so even if it turns out to be viable it'll take decades. Also, I'm not sure if it'll be viable.
In terms of climate change implications, abandoning FF aviation only makes sense if we abandon all climate emissions ASAP, because FF aviation is one of the hardest forms of emissions to actually replace. Aerospace is hard, and FF aviation is already as efficient as is possible with current technology, given the sheer amount of savings an extra percent of efficiency gives the airline company.
>It's extremely inefficient. Large EV gliders are workable.
Aviation in general is extremely inefficient; it comes with the territory of being heavier than air but insisting on staying in it while traveling cross-continent.
Large EV gliders can only cross seas by being extremely lightweight - those things don't even have pressurized cabins, let alone hundreds of passengers (hundreds of passengers means the plane is hundreds of times more profitable than a 1-person). And I'm willing to bet they travel a tad slower, to boot. If you don't care about speed, then airships are the obvious best option - they were functional back in the 1910s, and were abandoned largely because 1) aeroplanes outperformed them and were then produced in large numbers for WW2 before being subsequently sold off once the war was over, and 2) they were seen as unsafe - not unreasonably given that the 1930s aviation industry put far less emphasis on safety compared to today, but also because the Hindenburg was designed to use helium but was forced to deploy using hydrogen for geopolitical reasons*.
Airships are still more expensive than aeroplanes - if only because they tend to fly much slower, and the subsequent flight duration requires paying out far more hours to flight staff - and the flight speed is a serious qualitative problem (one-week business trips aren't viable and ditto for week-long vacations), but they're technically doable. Although at that point, why bother? Why not take a cruise/cargo ship?". This is why there's no airship industry, by the way. They're too slow to compete with planes and too expensive to compete with ships/trains.
*namely the US not wanting to support the mid-1930s Zeppelin company due to it being funded largely by the Nazi party and airships being associated with military usage at the time, and it probably didn't help that Zeppelins were being used for Nazi propaganda purposes at the time.
>Shipping by full EV maritime shipping is on the horizon. Hybrid cargo ships are already a thing. (Aasfjell)
Hybrid cargo ships don't mean much - they're just supplementing their power. Also, that thing is 5 metres wide and uses batteries; batteries are a dead end for cross-ocean shipping. Full EV maritime shipping is indeed possible and, depending on the cost of hydrogen fuel, quite viable. Although hydrogen has its own problems and isn't particularly good as a fuel (it's specific energy is great but it's energy-density is literally the worst, and it's hard and expensive to store due to needing special tanks and liquefaction or compression, and it slowly leaks away at a rate of ~1% per day so it's harder to stockpile, and it's incompatible with existing fuel infrastructure and engines, and with current tech it's expensive AF to produce renewably so we're essentially gambling that those particular technologies will improve rapidly if we invest in them).
Although given how hard it is to get the shipping industry off bunker fuel, I&#...
We' ve been building nuckear powered ships for like 60 years, they eork great, thry are nuch faster thsn normsl ones since they dont worry about energy efficiency and daving power.
> ...rather than relying on the CO2(gas) feedstock, bipolar membrane (BPM) electrolyzers with aqueous bicarbonate HCO3−(aq) input were demonstrated (Figure S2b). In principle, the energy-intensive CO2 regeneration process could be circumvented. In practice, however, the BPM induces a large overpotential, causing *low energy efficiency*, and it still suffers from CO2 escape, low FE, low yield, and low operation lifetime. [** emphasis added]
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
However, there are so many sinks for energy that I just doubt CO2 will be a priority any time soon. Desalination, for example, will almost certainly end up being a huge energy sink as the world gets hotter.
https://livewall.com/products/indoor/
The problem is that free energy is a fantasy for the foreseeable future and thus an energy-inefficient process is a nearly useless process.
In the USA, there's something like a terawatt of proposed projects stuck in the interconnection queue. We simply cannot wait for the queue to catch up with the financing of these shovel ready projects.
ETFuels is one example of this strategy. Build next to cheap electricity, pump out e-fuels like methanol and ammonia. Today. And then H2 in the future, when the green hydrogen infrastructure is built out.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...
You mean in like 20 years if we invest a trillion dollars today?
By then batteries may be three times as dense and 1/3 the cost. H2 cars are a dead end and a trojan horse for fossil fuels derived H2 and a political policy disruption strategy to delay EVs and alt energy.
A business strategy that involves a new infrastructure build while waiting for ... Other infrastructure to complete seems stupid.
I can already see it. The H2 transport vehicles get built, but shockingly doing green H2 gen is never cheaper than methane sourcing, so the green part of the infrastructure just becomes a very small scoped show pony.
H2 is a bad energy carrier.
I do support research and startups, but the H2 proponents pump wayyyyy too much FUD against grid storage and EVs, which is a tell as to who is pulling the strings behind the H2 industry
Not every use case for energy can be electrified. Transportation is just 1/4 of our carbon emissions. There's also (categorically) industry, agriculture, and buildings.
> but the H2 proponents pump wayyyyy too much FUD against grid storage and EVs
I can't speak to that.
There is no either-or. We need it all. Every battery (lithium, sodium, thermal, pumped hydro, etc). Every transmission (grids, pipes). Every source (e-fuels, wind, district heating, solar, nukes, advanced thermal, waves, whatever).
Arguing about the details is a harmful distraction. The time for pearl clutching, food fights, and concern trolling has passed.
Build, build, build.
H2 is trying to steal a slice of the pie from (now proven) alternative energy / decarbonization techs. Yes, there is potential for grid storage and other nice stuff from H2 research and expensive infrastructure. But you and I know where the value of decarbonization dollars are maximized in the next ten years: EVs, wind, solar, and probably battery grid storage.
You are technically right that H2 has the potential to address decarbonization in areas that EVs/solar/wind can't immediately deal with. We'll need this at some point.
But... like H2 proponents, it always seems to boil down to FUD in the end.
I'm not aware of any proposals for using H2 for grid storage.
--
Please checkout ETFuels.com. They are decarbonizing today. Their pilot project validated their tech stack and they've signed customers.
https://www.et-fuels.com/our-projects
Interview linked upthread.
Founder Anthony Wang discusses their (proven) tech stack, like electrolyzers and energy sources. How they compare with other H2 startups; ETFuels' launch MVP is methanol for shipping. He shares their intended roadmap, eg branching into methane and ammonia, and unlikeliness of doing pure H2 (for customers). There will be other startups for every niche and segment. eg pure carbon capture plays, make methane, colocate with manufacturers that need H2, etc.
IMHO, green H2's position on the cost-learning curve is almost "crossing the chasm". Roughly equiv to PVs in the '90s and batteries in the 00's. (Roughly. You get the idea.) The tech is fully validated, customers and financing are on board. The challenge now is scaling up. And lots of people know how to do that.
That means green H2 will start to move the needle ~2040 and be gang busters ~2050. (Recall that Obama Admin jump started batteries, BEV, and PV. These things take time.)
--
I'm grumpy that any money whatsoever would be used for non-green H2. That we're still subsidizing fossil fuels. That utilities and Big Oil are obstructing and sabotaging. But I'm not in charge. But please don't conflate those bad actors with the work that needs to be done.
Ok, I've spent too much time on this topic. I'm not even much interested in green H2; everyone's racing to discover better electrolyzers, just like with batteries. And that's just not my thing.
I'm way more excited about thermal batteries and advanced geothermal. Most end uses for energy is heat. So just use heat. Brilliant! Whereas H2 is best for decarbonizing fuels (e-fuels) and fertilizers. Until there's some kind of H2 power cell tech discovery, I think H2 as a fuel is a non starter. Besides, we can't even economically transport H2 yet. Those advocating H2 as fuel for automobiles are nutty or Japanese.
Again, we need all of it. More "Yes, And" less "Yes, But".
Peace.
I wish it wasn't true, but it's the Lazard numbers
Not sure why so much money has been spent on these thermodynamic dead ends.
> "Synthesis of Clean Hydrogen Gas [and Graphene] from Waste Plastic at Zero Net Cost" (2023) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202306763
The problem we have is CO2 is mixed into the atmosphere at ~420 ppm. Isolating just the CO2 and concentrating it enough for these processes to work is one of the major energy sinks.
This is compounded by the fact that the energy it takes to turn CO2 back into fuel can never be less than the energy released by the fuel.
That doesn’t seem right. Most fossil fuels have multiple CH3 complexes. Even without pulling up the enthalpy of combustion of the molecules, I’d still wager that the 3-H’s combing with O2’s will produce more than the balance of re-capturing the C’s.
Sadly, thermodynamics says, "No."
Neither MIT Press nor the ScholarlyArticle authors asked or paid me to modify the headline to cite the carbon efficiency.
This capability is arguably better than everything else we do for energy; it is 96% carbon efficient.
Other stats for comparison of such methods are proposed herein?
Nothing about fusion, no feasible, practical and scalable energy storage on the horizon. Yet.
Wow, I did not know that.
It doesn't leak; it has to be vented. Hydrogen cannot be a liquid, no matter the pressure, at ambient temperatures, and there will always be heat leak. So your liquid hydrogen is always boiling, and with a good vacuum jacked dewar you'll lose 1-1.5% of the vessel's volume a day.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/atmospheric-impli...
Reading between the lines, what I’m saying is produce a wood replacement product that is more efficient than growing a tree.
>makes formate