The World's Largest Green Hydrogen Plant Will Be Built In Texas (interestingengineering.com) 135
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Green Hydrogen International (GHI) has unveiled its plans to build a 60 GW green hydrogen production facility near the Piedras Pintas salt dome in Texas. The facility will be the largest of its kind in the world, the company claimed in a press release. While the world seeks cleaner alternatives to the energy that can power long-haul flights and stand in as a substitute for natural gas, green hydrogen appears to be one of the front runners. With countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Spain having initiated green hydrogen projects on a pilot basis, GHI would have to make a big splash to announce its arrival.
The company is hopeful that its proposed plant, capable of producing 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen every year, will do exactly that. According to its website, GHI has seven projects that are under development with a combined output of one terawatt. The largest and the first one to get off the ground is Hydrogen City in Texas. Using onshore wind and solar energy, the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year. The Piedras Pintas salt dome in Duval County will serve as the hydrogen storage facility for the project which in its initial stages will see a 2-gigawatt production facility being drawn up. Green hydrogen production is expected to begin by 2026 and it will tap into renewable energy from the Texan electricity grid. Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where industries will convert them to other products. "Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said. "Texas has been the world leader in energy innovation for over 100 years and this project is intended to cement that leadership for the next century and beyond."
The company is hopeful that its proposed plant, capable of producing 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen every year, will do exactly that. According to its website, GHI has seven projects that are under development with a combined output of one terawatt. The largest and the first one to get off the ground is Hydrogen City in Texas. Using onshore wind and solar energy, the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year. The Piedras Pintas salt dome in Duval County will serve as the hydrogen storage facility for the project which in its initial stages will see a 2-gigawatt production facility being drawn up. Green hydrogen production is expected to begin by 2026 and it will tap into renewable energy from the Texan electricity grid. Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville, where industries will convert them to other products. "Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said. "Texas has been the world leader in energy innovation for over 100 years and this project is intended to cement that leadership for the next century and beyond."
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .
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It's in Texas, Abbott will declare it frozen over the first time it gets a little chilly outside and screech about needing more oil and gas.
#1 in renewable energy Texas (Score:3)
"It's Texas", you say.
Texas that produces more renewable energy than any other state?
Texas that produces 27% of all the wind energy in the entire country?
Texas that produces THREE TIMES as much as California, where they talk a good game?
I'm sorry, but he's right that being even more dependent on frozen windmills and snow-covered solar panels wouldn't have prevented the blackouts. He's right that wind and solar failed at a rate three times higher than natural gas, so relying more on those would have simply m
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Quote from the article " As reported here by the Texas Tribune on Feb. 16, ERCOT said that thermal sources, such as coal, gas and nuclear, lost nearly twice as much power due to the cold than renewable energy sources
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You guys aren't saying the same thing. He's saying it failed at three times the rate, you are saying thermal sources lost twice as much power.
One is a rate of occurrence, the other is a measurement of amounts lost.
You are both correct.
That's what rate means (Score:2)
> How can something that only supplies 25% of the power fail at 3 times the rate of fossil power?
You've asked "how can it be unreliable unless everyone depends on it". :)
If thing A was supplying 25 gigawatts and now it's supplying 0 (because it's covered with snow), the failure rate would be 100%.
If thing B was supplying 45 gigawatts and it's now supplying 40.5% gigawatts, that's a 10% failure rate.
So looking at your question again:
> How can something that only supplies 25% of the power fail at 3 time
PS - love your sig (Score:2)
I love your signature. I need to plaster that all over my office walls to remind me.
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Your first sentence is true. But I go by plenty of electrical substations here up north that are not enclosed in buildings, metal or otherwise. Enclosing the substations causes its' own problems in the summer. And most of the problems in last winter's Texas blackouts were
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Possibly. He won't have to fake mourning over the burned to death victims of PG&E, however.
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I'm waiting for the Texas winter when all the hydrogen reserves froze. It's a one in a millennia occurrence
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Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .
Far more people have died from gasoline explosions.
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Methane (natural gas) has an LEL of about 5% and a UEL of around 17%.
Hydrogen has an LEL of about 4% and a UEL of around 75%.
Natural gas is used indoors all the time and it's rarely a problem until some contractor breaks a main or something.
Codes I'm familiar with treat hydrogen with much greater respect than methane.
Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to contain in piping or storage containers, so some amount of leakage is inevitable.
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Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .
You are giving everyone a lot of confidence. If the last incident you can remember occurred over 80 years ago that is a good sign that hydrogen is very VERY safe considering how much of it is in use in the world on a daily basis.
To be clear the Hindenburg (with a u, it's named a castle not a mountain) is not the most recent hydrogen related incident causing fatality or property destruction, but if that's what you point then then really all is well in perception of the industry.
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Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .
Well, we kept building planes after Hindenberg, ships after Titanic, and dreams after Challenger.
Thankfully we don't allow a random disaster, to stop progress completely.
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Cough cough challenger cough Hindenberg .
Hydrogen does have the downside of being extremely flammable, but it's hardly responsible for the Challenger disaster. This actually came up in another discussion I was in very recently. It wasn't the shuttle fuel tank that was responsible for the Challenger disaster. It was a seal on one of the solid rocket boosters that failed and a flame jet from that either cut directly into the liquid fuel tank or cut through the SRB support and it crashed into the liquid fuel tank or both. That did trigger the fuel to
The physics already has gone wrong (Score:2)
the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year
Watts are a unit of power which is energy per second. You cannot produce watts per year you produce watts - the "per time" is built into the unit.
Worse, it states that they aim to produce a terawatt and that this 60 GW project is the largest of seven projects. Even if all the other projects were the same as this one then 7*60GW = 420GW which is less than half a terawatt.
Getting simple physics and basic maths wrong does not inspire any confidence in their projects.
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the project aims to produce 60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year
Watts are a unit of power which is energy per second. You cannot produce watts per year you produce watts - the "per time" is built into the unit.
That annoyed me as well. At first I thought 60 GW? Fuck me, that's big. Then I realized they must be talking bollocks. The largest power plant in the world is the 3 Gorges Dam & Hydro plant, and that's only 23 GW. The largest nuclear is 8 GW,
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Isn't it pretty obvious one mixed up GW with GWh?
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challenger
Are you referring to the space shuttle that broke up because a problem with its solid rocket boosters? LH2 boosters would have completely prevented that, but we had to keep our ICBM manufacturing engineers employed.
It's just "awesome", when we find that humanity prioritized mass destruction over space exploration.
Just one more confirmation that our species deserves to die right here on this rock, forever addicted to Greed.
Piped where? (Score:2)
Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville
Am I the only one that did a double-take after misreading it as suggesting that there was a single, coastal citynamed "Corpus Christi and Brownsville"? I was about to post a correction to the obvious error when I realized it was just a poor phrasing.
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From the law offices of Corpus, Christi, and Brownsville?
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Green hydrogen produced at the facility will be piped to the coastal city of Corpus Christi and Brownsville
You'd think that a process that electrolyses water would have been build on the coast in the first place but not in Texas.
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As someone else pointed out, it is 40 miles over a plain. Practically speaking, it is on the coast. It is built near the power source, and the salt dome that they are using for storage.
Just don't tell Gov. Abbot (Score:2)
Or the next time the state's power grid shits the bed he'll blame it on that.
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Actually I don't think producing green hydrogen just to burn it or make electricity through hydrolysis is even very close to cost-competitive compared to other sources of green electricity like wind or s
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And here is the source for the stat.
https://wha-international.com/... [wha-international.com]
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According to the infographic in the article, it is being used for producing ammonia and rocket fuel, both of which are actually using the hydrogen as hydrogen, though there is argument to be made for alternate rocket fuels.
1st law ... (Score:2)
1st law of thermodynamics: you can't get out more than you put in.
Using renewable energy from the grid is a stupid idea. They are going to waste a lot of energy that could have been used to directly do something useful like reducing the load on a coal/gas fired plant so it doesn't put out as much CO2.
My 1 Yen: only time I would consider using renewables to directly generate Hydrogen would be if the electricity source was located somewhere that it couldn't be directly connected to the grid in the first pla
Not all energy is equal! (Score:2)
The biggest problem with renewables - at lest, solar and wind - is that they produce power when the conditions are right, not necessarily when you need it. So if you want renewables to provide a lot of your power, there are going to be many times when there is spare electricity and no one to use it. That is why projects like this are a good idea - they can spin up when there is excess energy, and slow or shut down when there isn't.
Also important is storage in the form of pumped storage hydro and batteries,
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Google electric arc furnace.
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A kiln and an electric arc furnace are not interchangeable and do not serve the same purpose. An electric arc furnace can replace a blast furnace. But little more.
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Electric kilns exist too. Probably not cost effective right now but if gas becomes scarce then things will change.
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Yes they do. Just know you're solving one end user requirement not upending the hydrogen economy with your comment.
We're not building green hydrogen exclusively for new emerging tech / problems. The world consumes a metric fuckton of hydrogen already, mostly produced from natural gas via steam methane reforming. It has done this for over 100 years. There's a reason the proposed pipe this proposed facility will attach to runs down to Corpus Christie, and that town does not have any steel or metal processing
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Sorry, there are very few use cases for H2 in providing energy for manufacturing. For a start it burns at a considerably lower temp than methane and secondly creating H2 from electricity simply to use it again for heat is utterly asinine given the energy loses involved. Any sane process would simply use the electricity directly unless the H2 is needed for a chemical process.
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You can't feasibly run everything with electricity. Kilns for example. Steel works alone produces some 7-9% of all man-made CO2 emissions and kilns are also use in other industries, like ceramics.
you are 100% correct.
That is the dirty little secret that those who advocate switching over to 100% solar and wind don't want to talk about. A notable portion of the CO2 emissions from industry and agriculture are not related to generating electricity.
Though most of the applications you mentioned could easily use an arc or other electric furnace.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating switching everything else over to electric right now. Hydrogen is a fantastic fuel in the right applications, like as a roc
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According to the graphics in TFA, they will not be pulling any electricity off the grid. The hydrogen plant will have its' own wind and solar power to generate the hydrogen. The prime benefit is that they can use that 100% of that power when the sun is shining or the wind blowing, and store the hydrogen, so there's no "baseload" to worry about in their plant.
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This sort of thing could be a substitute for batteries to assist grid stability.
Any kind of process where brief interruptions are tolerable, like say a heating element that must keep the temperature within a certain band, is suitable. When there is heavy demand some of the energy can be diverted to the grid, even if it's only for a few seconds. With a bit of planning ahead longer periods are possible.
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You can't feasibly run everything with electricity. Kilns for example. Steel works alone produces some 7-9% of all man-made CO2 emissions and kilns are also use in other industries, like ceramics.
You're going to have to be clear on exactly what kinds of kilns you're referring to, because there are most definitely electric kilns. You might be referring to kilns that produce a reducing atmosphere inside the kiln, which is something that electric kilns don't automatically do, but gas fired ones can. Of course, there are other ways to get a reducing atmosphere in an electric kiln. Also, you can probably fire a kiln with hydrogen and that would produce a reducing atmosphere as well, but I'm not completel
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Using renewable energy from the grid is a stupid idea. They are going to waste a lot of energy that could have been used to directly do something useful like reducing the load on a coal/gas fired plant so it doesn't put out as much CO2.
No it's not. Not all green energy is useful. We are constantly talking about problems with storage and grid stability. One of the main benefits of hydrogen electrolysis is that it converts energy from one form to another in a way that can be batched and stored (providing it isn't needed in a continuous process like a refinery).
In that way hydrogen plants can become a peaking load on the grid providing stability while generating energy allowing an ever larger capacity of green non-baseload power on the grid
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Dunning Kruger. You know a lot less than you think you do. This idea makes a lot of sense.
Information you did not have/use: The main problem with wind and solar is it's intermittency. Texas has a lot of wind and solar energy plants, and has gotten to the point where, at peak production times, they produce so much energy they have to not just shut down the fossil fuel plants, but have to take the wind and/or solar off line. Of course, other times they do not have enough wind/solar.
This project is des
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The first law of thermodynamics (assuming you are referring to that) has nothing to do with transmission losses. Perhaps you want to look up Ohm's Law.
Units? 60 GW plant? (Score:2)
This plant is described as "60GW in size" and that it "will be powered by 60GW of behind the meter solar and wind power." Surely they're not using units the same way; no way it's powered by 60 full-size nuclear units worth of power.
Elsewhere in the writeup, we see "60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year." I'm
Re: Units? 60 GW plant? (Score:2)
They claim in their little diagram that's it's really 60 GW of wind and solar power being fed into the plant. I'm baffled by the use of GW in this case anyway. If they're talking about energy consumption to produce the H2, what's the value of making a big deal of that number? I have no idea if a plant drawing 60GW to produce 2.5 billion kg of H2 is a good thing or not, especially when the H2 isn't being directly used for energy production. Does that imply high hydrogen production efficiency?
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Thank you for pointing this out. Hydrogen can be measured by mass, or by volume at STP. Measuring by wattage is nonsense.
"60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year" (Score:2)
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Haha. Did you see the article about the current nordstream pipeline where the capacity was quoted as kilowatt-hours per hour?
Hydrogen City! (Score:2)
"Hydrogen City is a massive, world-class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer," GHI's founder and CEO Brian Maxwell said.
Hydrogen City! (hydrogen city!) [youtube.com]
He likes the hydrogen so much, he bought the company!
Don't embrace too fast... (Score:2)
Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas, and a strong one.
https://www.euractiv.com/secti... [euractiv.com]
The fact that it's an indirect greenhouse gas has been known for years, but the magnitude is less certain. All estimates are that the GWP is much greater than 1 (1 being the climate impact of 1 g CO2). If we could store, transport, and consume it it without leaks then its GWP is a non-issue. But hydrogen is historically hard to store and transport because it leaks so readily (even leaches through metal). We also have v
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The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, going from ground level up to ~20 km. In that layer ozone is an air pollutant, in addition to its GHG impact. It can damage the lungs and cause a range of respiratory problems. Ozone exceeds safe levels in many parts of the U.S. every year.
The saying goes "ozone: good up high, bad nearby" because in the stratosphere (next layer up) it effectively blocks UV radiation. It is still a GHG up there, but the UV blocking is more important, hence our effort
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Don't worry, they're planning on using that hydrogen (GWP 5.8) to make other things, like methane (GWP 25).
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Perfect, now if they can only use that methane to produce some nice HFC's like HFC-23 (GWP 12,000), then we're really maximizing damage....
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This so 19hundreds. ...
Yes, hydrogen 'even' leaks through metal.
But it does not leak through plastics.
Oops
Green hydrogen? (Score:2)
What is green hydrogen? Is it anything like red phosphorous?
Obviously, it's Texas (Score:2)
It will be the biggest plant ever.
But have only a tiny production.
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Some are purple.
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Its to distinguish green hydrogen (which is produced by electrolysis of water where the power comes from renewable sources and the only other output of the process is oxygen) from other kinds of hydrogen where methane is turned into hydrogen through a reforming process (that produces carbon dioxide as a waste product)
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"Green hydrogen" is a really stupid way to store energy and TFA implies that this project does that. It doesn't. The hydrogen is generated for industrial use in chemical processing, not to convert back into electricity. So it actually makes sense.
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Its to distinguish green hydrogen (which is produced by electrolysis of water
Yep, and only a Texan would build one in a place away from the sea.
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Makes no sense. Texas has the 6th most coastline of any us state and is the most central of the states with large access to water to make for more direct distribution. Seems like the best place honestly, where would you put it?
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> Yep, and only a Texan would build one in a place away from the sea.
40 miles across a flat plain really isn't far from the sea - and that happens to be where the salt dome is to 6 terawatt hours. As well as being just far enough from the coast to be protected from hurricanes and such.
Let me guess, you're from California and you would have built it on the back while planning to billions of cubic feet of hydrogen in hemp shopping bags?
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Yes, their is.
Green hydrogen is when the energy used to power electrolysis comes from renewable sources like wind, water or solar.
Blue hydrogen is hydrogen produced from natural gas with a process of steam methane reforming, where natural gas is mixed with very hot steam and a catalyst.
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Also missed these others:
Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas reforming like blue hydrogen, but without any efforts to capture carbon dioxide byproducts.
Pink hydrogen is hydrogen made with electrolysis powered by nuclear energy, which does not produce any carbon dioxide emissions. (Although nuclear energy creates radioactive waste which must be stored safely for thousands of years.)
Yellow hydrogen is hydrogen made with electrolysis from the energy grid. The carbon emissions vary greatly depending on the s
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Brown hydrogen is H2 made by steam reforming of lignite.
Black hydrogen is H2 made by steam reforming bituminous coal.
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Brown hydrogen is H2 made by steam reforming of lignite.
I figured brown hydrogen would be made from the methane generated by cow farts.
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Saturn, Neptune, Uranus...
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Are there giant non-green hydrogen plants? (Other than Jupiter)
They use "green" to describe hydrogen power plants in which the only waste product is oxygen and the power source comes from renewable energy, in a deliberate attempt to confuse people into believing that hydrogen should qualify as an environmentally friendly solution for automotive use, while completely ignoring the fact the energy losses are huge (up to 80% end-to-end energy loss when fed into fuel cells), making it dramatically worse for the environment than continuing to burn gasoline in cars and direct
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I agree that "green hydrogen" is a scam, but this project is producing hydrogen as a chemical feedstock and rocket fuel, not for energy storage, so it actually makes sense.
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I agree that "green hydrogen" is a scam, but this project is producing hydrogen as a chemical feedstock and rocket fuel, not for energy storage, so it actually makes sense.
But does it really? Even in the best-case scenario, you're still probably talking about O(30%) percent efficiency, compared with 75% for steam methane reforming. That's a heck of a lot of extra energy input to save such a tiny amount of CO2 output (and probably way, way less than the CO2 that must be produced by power plants to replace that wasted energy).
I mean, I could be wrong, but it just plain doesn't sound that green to me even for that use case.
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My understanding (which could be wrong) is they are generating the H2 using off-peak wind power. It would indeed make more sense to put this power on the national grid to offset coal power being generated elsewhere, but Texas isn't connected to the rest of the country.
So, yes, it's stupid, but it isn't super-stupid.
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My understanding (which could be wrong) is they are generating the H2 using off-peak wind power. It would indeed make more sense to put this power on the national grid to offset coal power being generated elsewhere, but Texas isn't connected to the rest of the country.
So, yes, it's stupid, but it isn't super-stupid.
You can have all the connections you want, but you're not offsetting baseload (coal) with something that sometimes is available, sometimes isn't. Coal can be only offset with nuke. Or yes, green, but only if you invest several trillions into battery storage.
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but you're not offsetting baseload (coal) with something that sometimes is available, sometimes isn't
This makes no sense. Emissions are cumulative. Hence you're always offsetting the *expected value* of emissions. If something is "sometimes available, sometimes isn't", your expected value may be lower than your peak value, but it's still non-zero.
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but you're not offsetting baseload (coal) with something that sometimes is available, sometimes isn't
This makes no sense. Emissions are cumulative. Hence you're always offsetting the *expected value* of emissions. If something is "sometimes available, sometimes isn't", your expected value may be lower than your peak value, but it's still non-zero.
This may surprise you, given the way greens talk about coal, but the thing coal power plants produce is, you know, power, not CO2, that's a byproduct. And since baseload plants take a few hours to spin up, you can't use solar to replace coal, you can't just switch them off when the sun deigns to shine on your fancy solar panel, and switch it back on when it goes behind a cloud.
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But does it really? Even in the best-case scenario, you're still probably talking about O(30%) percent efficiency, compared with 75% for steam methane reforming. That's a heck of a lot of extra energy input to save such a tiny amount of CO2 output
Problem: Nobody's figured out how to transport methane without leaking a percentage of it.
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But, aside from losing it contributing to inefficiency, how is hydrogen environmentally harmful in the atmosphere?
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I don't know what the effect of introducing more hydrogen into the atmosphere would be, but burning hydrogen produces water vapor, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
I think you're confused there. Water vapor accounts for 2% to 3% percent of the atmosphere, whereas CO2 accounts for about 0.04% of the atmosphere. You're probably considering the fact that clouds and water vapor account for a larger percentage of the greenhouse effect than CO2. But if you have equal amounts of CO2 and H20, the CO2 is going to have a much larger effect. Consider that one gallon of gasoline produces about 19.64 pounds of CO2 and one gasoline gallon equivalent of hydrogen produces about 19.8
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I don't know what the effect of introducing more hydrogen into the atmosphere would be, but burning hydrogen produces water vapor, a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
What you are forgetting, at least in the case of green hydrogen, is you are not putting any more water vapor in the environment that was already there. You take one water molecule, split it in to two hydrogen, and one oxygen. Release the oxygen into the atmosphere and burn the hydrogen for whatever purpose. The result is two hydrogen plus one oxygen give you one water molecule.
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Its needed for manufacturing processes where fossil is used to create heat for the manufacturing process so in the grand scheme it maybe less efficient but its clean. e.g. Green Steel Production [theguardian.com]
Electric arc furnaces, where possible, are probably cleaner, of course, because about 70% of the energy ends up as heat instead of less than half that. Unless there's some particular reason to use burned fuel (e.g. because a particular manufacturing output requires large batches beyond the capacity of an arc furnace), this seems like the wrong approach, designed more to save on construction costs than to help the environment.
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Even in the best-case scenario, you're still probably talking about O(30%) percent efficiency, compared with 75% for steam methane reforming.
The article is light on any actual technical details, so the actual technology used isn't clear, but there are working forms of electrolysis that get around 80% efficiency. Could you be more clear on where you're getting 30%? Maybe it depends on what efficiency you're actually measuring. I suspect that you're using some sort of end to end efficiency for green hydrogen but looking only at the actual conversion efficiency for steam methane reforming, but I don't want to outright assume that. CAn you clarify?
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Even in the best-case scenario, you're still probably talking about O(30%) percent efficiency, compared with 75% for steam methane reforming.
The article is light on any actual technical details, so the actual technology used isn't clear, but there are working forms of electrolysis that get around 80% efficiency. Could you be more clear on where you're getting 30%? Maybe it depends on what efficiency you're actually measuring. I suspect that you're using some sort of end to end efficiency for green hydrogen but looking only at the actual conversion efficiency for steam methane reforming, but I don't want to outright assume that. CAn you clarify?
Ah, yes. You're correct. I was comparing end-to-end against conversion effiency. So never mind. This is quite a bit more efficient for those cases where hydrogen is actually required (as long as that's the only reason the hydrogen is used).
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It might also work "intermittently", thus consuming energy when production from wind farms and solar panels is high.
Just to lower the "negative price for energy" occurrences.
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Real question, I'm not trying to troll
If you're going from water to hydrogen back to water (at around sea level) with renewable electricity being used for water to hydrogen step, no matter how inefficient it is, how is it worse then continuing to burn gasoline in cars?
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Real question, I'm not trying to troll If you're going from water to hydrogen back to water (at around sea level) with renewable electricity being used for water to hydrogen step, no matter how inefficient it is, how is it worse then continuing to burn gasoline in cars?
Because of substitution.
Hydrogen, assuming it is being used in cars, can be used to do other things (like powering someone's house or EV). If you don't use that electricity to make hydrogen, you're using it to reduce the use of some coal-fired or natural-gas-fired power plant. That's reducing the use of hydrocarbons and offsetting the emissions from cars burning gasoline. With only 20% efficiency, I suspect it would be worse than an ICE car, though differences between emissions from various hydrocarbons
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Green hydrogen (the hydrogen generation process via electrolysis is powered by green energy without CO2 emissions).
Blue hydrogen (conventional hydrogen via steam methane reforming with a CCS bolted on the back)
Grey hydrogen (conventional hydrogen without CCS and pumping the full load of CO2 emitted right into the sky).
These definitions have been used by industry for the best part of 4 years now.
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Yes, absolutely there are non-green hydrogen plants. In fact overwhelmingly industrial production of hydrogen is done by steam reformation of natural gas which produces syngas: H2 + CO; burning or emitting CO eventually results in the CO becoming CO2 in the atmosphere.
Gray Hydrogen -- hydrogen created from processes that emit CO2 -- for example the aforementioned steam reformation.
Green Hydrogen -- hydrogen created by means that don't emit CO2 -- for example electrolysis of water using energy from photovol
Re:Why is "green" in the title? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ones that derive their hydrogen from oil are called brown.
Brown hydrogen is made from lignite, not oil.
Nobody makes H2 from oil. That would be insanely expensive.
The biggest brown hydrogen producer is Australia, mostly for export to Japan. Japan uses Australian hydrogen to reduce Japan's "national" carbon footprint while ignoring the massive emissions that occur in Australia and in transit. This is even stupider than the UKs idiotic woodchip scheme and shows that the world's current accounting for greenhouse gas emissions is deeply flawed.
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If a company moves to Texas it’s to benefit the company, not the employees.
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But, it benefits both, as Texas has less taxes and less cost of living.
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We have plenty of dirty fake-green hydrogen in California already, we don't need any more. Hydrogen is a stupid boondoggle that can never be as efficient as batteries are already.
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How would you use batteries to product ammonia and LH2 rocket fuel though? It seems that for those purposes, this project is perfect. Since that is what they plan, the criticism doesn't really seem to fit this project, though I am sure it does some of the California boondoggles.
Re: (Score:2)
If they're making the hydrogen for industrial purposes then sure, roll on. In California that's not our primary interest. Having made it you have to transport it, it's easier to produce it closer to the point of consumption.