cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8569504
How is the hydrogen made?
To save you all a google: it’s made from natural gas, at a pretty significant energy loss compared to just burning the gas. It generates about 4 times more co2 than burning diesel.
That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).
Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.
How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands
That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.
And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.
Storing hydrogen is also really hard. It needs to be kept extremely cold, and when it isn’t, it tends to pass right through most storage units.
But as a local battery, it can be very useful. Or for applications in large machinery where batteries aren’t a useful option yet.
If the leaks of hydrogen should be kept under 5%, we don’t have a good track record of keeping gas leaks under control anyway…
Yes. I’m not watching a video but it is a serious problem, especially as hydrogen degrades metals and finds its way out anyway. The private sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate nor the government to meaningfully regulate.
Trying very hard not to succumb to nihilism here …
Or, in other words, the hydrogen economy is prone to bubbles and explosions here and there.
I really don’t get why hydrogen remains popular. Hydrogen is significantly less efficient than lithium batteries in storing electricity. There are currently dozens of technologies on the way for improving batteries beyond what’s possible with lithium. So what’s the market potential for green hydrogen again?
It wins by a huge margin on the energy to weight ratio. In scenarios where weight doesn’t matter it’s dumb, but there is potential in places like air travel where it does make sense.
Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).
That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.
Hydrogen is useful in a lot of industrial processes. It also maybe win the race for green aviation fuel, but this one is not likely. There is plenty of market for green hydrogen.
There is also absolutely no reason to hype about any of it. Everybody hyping it on the media is trying to make global warming worse.
Oh great, and I was wondering why some of our policians were pushing hydrogen cars as an alternative to electric cars, despite even the car industry telling them to shut the fuck up.
Didn‘t we have a process to electrically synthesize hydrogen out of water?
Electrolysis, it works but it takes a lot of energy to produce, so burning hydrogen from this would be a fools errand.
Wouldn’t you spend almost same amount of energy to split water compared to heat produced by burning hydrogen?
Are those CO2 emissions? I don’t get where the CO2 comes from.
I know this is an animation, but it shows pretty well, how hydrogen is made from natural gas. No CO2 emissions. And using the hydrogen should produce H2O.
In reverse order:
1 - it needs to be tranported
2 - it needs to compressed and cooled, in order to transport it. You need to cool it down around 1700 degrees, because:
3 - methane pyrolysis is done at around 1500 degrees C, getting something that hot isn’t free.
4 - methane isn’t the only component in natural gas, so you need to seperate out all the impurities.
5 - methane is a very strong contributor to global warming, so any natural gas leak from the drill to the factory adds co2equivalent.
6 - you need to extract natural gas from the ground and transport it, which takes energy.
And we’re not doing so well on the gas leak part…
I think the issue is where the energy to heat the reaction vessel comes from. The video shows green sources, but that isn’t the only way to do it. The thing is, this is ultimately an energy storage tech rather than an energy generation tech. You need excess capacity to make it work, and if that means you have to make up for a shortful with conventional generators elsewhere, you aren’t actually saving anything.
I don’t know if the previous poster is right of course, but the planet is an almost closed system, and there really is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to energy.
The ultimate idea afaik is to build huge renewable energy power plants (for example solar energy in deserts) to generate it there, and then transport it through pipelines to wherever you need it.
You can, but it is totally inefficient
You get about 30% of the energy out that you put in
Any evidence to your claim?
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-the-environment.php
Natural gas is a relatively clean burning fossil fuel
Burning natural gas for energy results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2) than burning coal or petroleum products to produce an equal amount of energy. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. The clean burning properties of natural gas have contributed to increased natural gas use for electricity generation and as a transportation fuel for fleet vehicles in the United States.
Burning natural gas isn’t so awful but getting it out of the ground and to the place where is needs to be burned is always overlooked. It’s a gas, it wants to escape and much of the infrastructure leaks and so a great deal is lost before its used. I walk around Boston and no joke you just SMELL it all the time because the infrastructure is so old. Natural gas is also mostly methane which when leaked is 80 times more potent than CO2. Furthermore much natural gas needs to be transported on ships to be uses. To summarize there is no ‘greener’ fossil fuels it’s all to be avoided if possible.
Sure, the primary dutch co2 source website: https://www-co2emissiefactoren-nl.translate.goog/lijst-emissiefactoren/?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Translated, because nobody speaks dutch.
That’s the states for actually burned natural gas. Natural gas is basically methane and is therefore not too good for the climate when it leaks (which it does)
It does result in higher methane emissions, which have a ln ~30x larger greenhouse effect than CO2.
See here: https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw
Edit: Looks like metane’s GGG co2 equivalent is 27 to 30 over 100 years.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials
How is natural gas made? How is natural gas more natural than natural element?
Natural gas is a byproduct of ancient organic material being buried and slowly cooked by the earth’s heat. The hydrocarbons of the plant break down, and the gas rises. Under certain conditions, it gets trapped below non-porous rock and builds up.
Basically, all fossil fuels are Carbon fixed from CO2 by plants, then trapped underground. The solid material we call coal, the liquid oil and the gas natural gas.
You know, when a proton and electron love each other very much…
You can make hydrogen greenly with electricity and electrolysis. But I doubt BP is doing that.
Hydrogen was made approximately 400,000 after the big bang in a process called recombination, as the universe cooled down enough for stable neutral atoms to exist.
