Hydrogen and Carbon Capture Tech Are Key To Net-Zero US Electricity, Study Says (reuters.com) 146
The United States can generate affordable electricity without producing carbon dioxide emissions by 2035 by deploying hydrogen or carbon capture technology, according to a report released on Wednesday by a climate policy think tank. Reuters reports: The report by California-based Energy Innovatihere which researches ways to combat global warming, highlighted five scenarios for the United States to generate 100% clean energy in 15 years, without raising power costs. Three rely on the deployment of green hydrogen technology and two rely on capturing CO2 emissions from existing power plants. "These are real technologies that are not yet deployed at scale, but they are not a fantasy. We have 15 years to get there," said Sonia Aggarwal, one of the report's authors. The analysis builds on a report produced by Energy Innovation earlier this year with the University of California Berkeley that said power-sector emissions can be cut 90% by 2035 by deploying more solar, wind, and battery storage. A Reuters review of the plans of the country's top power producers showed many are relying on natural gas-fired power to supplement increased reliance on renewables. Aggarwal said its analysis shows no new gas power plants are needed.
What costs more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to scrub ALL the CO2 out of the exhaust from your fossil fuel plant, and then trying to pump ALL of it into the ground in a way that it does not escape....
Or just use one of the many other means we have of generating electricity? (wind/solar/hydro/nuclear)
Wouldn't it be cheaper/easier just to avoid burning fossil fuels in the first place?
Re:What costs more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but you missed the purpose of climate policy think tanks, which is to serve as shills for the fossil fuel industry. :-)
On the same subject, just about nobody in their right minds who has looked seriously at the problem still thinks that hydrogen is a useful part of our energy future. Green hydrogen is pretty fundamentally within the realm of fiction. Making hydrogen more green than the alternatives would likely require rewriting the laws of physics. Why? Because you actually have to use the hydrogen to produce energy in a useful form, and that is so inefficient that it dwarfs the inefficiency of just about any plausible alternative you could think of.
Fuel cells have a maximum theoretical efficiency of only something like 83%, as compared with well over 99% for chemical battery storage, somewhere in the high ninety-percent range for grid-based energy transmission, etc. So you would have to somehow make it possible to produce hydrogen that, when used in a fuel cell, would produce about 19% *more* power than went into producing it just to break even. At the efficiency that's actually achievable right now, you could just about power cars using loops in the pavement and induction coils, and still beat fuel cell efficiency. :-D (Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you get my point.)
There's only one way to do that, and it involves cracking fossil fuels, so that the energy loss comes out of the energy that the fossil fuels would otherwise produce, rather than from the electricity used to power it. This is, thus, inherently not green.
Oh, sure, in theory, it might be possible to come up with some catalyzed reaction that, in the presence of concentrated heat, might produce more energy than the amount of electricity produced by a solar panel being hit with the same amount of energy, but you're unlikely to beat the 90% conversion efficiency of thermal solar power production, again, unless what is going in is producing some of the energy.
So basically, green hydrogen is within the same realm as magic at this point — great for entertaining TV shows on Netflix, but about as likely to happen in the real world as the stories from Harry Potter. The moment you mention hydrogen with any seriousness, I have a hard time not writing off everything you say from that point on.
Going from there to carbon capture, then, is just one more step in the natural progression towards convincing everyone that the status quo is okay.
Re:What costs more? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's fair. There are certain applications where hydrogen might be useful — ships in general, aircraft, space vessels... basically anything where you have to go without refueling for an insane amount of time, and where the energy density of batteries would make them infeasible. These are basically edge cases, though, and the number of edge cases is likely to diminish over time as battery tech improves. So I see that more as a short-term to medium-term workaround for the tech not being mature enou
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The article suggests long-term (several months) storage using salt caverns, but nowhere does it discuss losses due to diffusion. Although there are working salt-cavern hydrogen storage facilities, I can't find any information on diffusion losses. Perhaps I am not very good with Google, or perhaps that is a subject Hydrogen proponents don't want to discuss.
Just wondering (Score:2)
Where/how do you capture hydrogen?
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The sun. We're going to build a giant vacuum cleaner hose. Don't worry about the heat. That's why we're going to go at night. :-D
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Anywhere you want, using a very small net. (ba-dum-tish)
There's lots of options - the conceptually simplest is probably by splitting water using electrolysis, photo-chemical catalysts, hydrogen-generating bacteria,etc.
And then there's the one responsible for ~95% of current hydrogen production: steam reforming of natural gas. Which of course releases just as much fossil carbon as CO2 as if you burnt the gas directly, but also consumes a lot of additional energy in the reforming process. Great for producin
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Where/how do you capture hydrogen?
Fart into a container.
Re:Just wondering (Score:4, Informative)
Fart into a container.
That depends on the farter. Skinny people have more H2 in their farts, while obese people produce more methane.
The proportion of the two gases depend on the difference in gut bacteria.
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Why would H2 come out the LOWER end of your body?
Magical thinking (Score:3, Insightful)
So they're proposing to generate electricity thru renewables (solar or wind I assume) to electrolize water to produce hydrogen to run power plants to produce electricity? I want what they're smoking, it's definitely stronger than the stuff I can get around here.
Re: Magical thinking (Score:2)
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Storage may be easier, but going through all those conversions is gonna drop the efficiency big time. Just the electroysis alone, let alone using hydrogen/natural gas to run a turbine, is definitely taking the long way home.
Re: Magical thinking (Score:2)
I remember about ten years ago there were a number of studies looking at using a giant cavern full of molten salt to store solar energy for when its cloudy. Making molecules to store in tanks is not the wackiest concept out there.
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This is not THE only solution (Score:2)
Successfully deploying renewables means a smart grid (no, not necessarily down to IoT in homes, but smartly meshed) of doing what's right in the locale. The wind's always blowing somewhere. Hydropower is right, some places. Geothermal is too. These solutions - H2 from electrolysis and CO2 capture - have their place.
https://www.carboncommentary.c... [carboncommentary.com]
It doesn't work so well when you just try to tweak a few things about the fossil fuel grid. There is a large-scale redesign in order to become 100% renewable
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Supercapacitors and batteries in appropriate combinations are amazing. They're already standard in modern EVs, because supercaps handle spike loads instead, thus prolonging the battery life.
https://www.bioennopower.com/p... [bioennopower.com]
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The problem is, even with today's high capacity grids, there's still only so far you can "push" power before you're losing most of it in transmission and stepping.
So, sure, the wind may be blowing out in Kansas. But if the power's needed in California, that doesn't help much.
Worse, look at California. They're COMPLETELY dependent on unfulfillable quantities of out-of-state power.
So, all that renewable energy, not backed by any sort of storage capacity?
Once the peak solar starts ramping down in the early a
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When you get enough home solar with batteries, EVs storage and grid base storage, there is no reason even now that fossil fuels need to be used for residential homes in reasonably sunny country. In reality industrial use dominates grid electricity needs.
Given the reduction in battery and solar prices, it’s really a no brainer.
I had thought perhaps Hydrogen might be good as an overnight fuel source, produced by any excess in renewables during the day, and burnt to generate at night.
We hit the 50% renew
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Sure. But how many homeowners are going to drop $30-60K into a battery-backed solar setup?
And will it be enough to cover the shortfalls they're seeing now?
I really don't think so.
Simply moving to NG in a turbine burner would still drastically reduce carbon emissions. It wouldn't be zero. But it'd still cut a HUGE chunk of carbon emissions out.
As for your state. That's cool. But what is TOTAL capacity compared to your peak demand? If your total capacity is 110%+ of peak demand, the fact that 50% of you
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"I'm sure recycling panels and batteries will become a profitable business in the future."
Uh. NO. It won't.
Recycling CAN be profitable. But the margins are worse than razor thin. And that's with cutting every corner available.
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PLUS, once the components reach end-of-life, they are only minimally recycled. With the bulk going into landfills in megaton quantities.
I doubt that is true. Wind turbines are mostly steel. At end-of-life that becomes scrap metal, profitable to reprocess rather than landfill. Similarly, solar panels are mostly glass and metal, both reprocessed. In each case, the amount of material that needs landfilling is a small minority. And even so, so what? Places like Hong Kong and the Netherlands may be short of landfill space, but the US isn't. Once a landfill is full you cap it off and it becomes just another hill, you can plant grass on it and use
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"I doubt that this is true."
Doubt away.
The turbine itself is relatively small.
The windmill BLADES are what isn't recyclable.
They're not really reusable. Most would be recyclers don't have the tools to cut them down. Nor do they have the sheer space required to store or process them. And the materials themselves aren't really worth a hell of a lot without expensive reprocessing.
Solar panels aren't really profitable to recycle.
And there are issues with them leaching carcinogenic metals into the earth.
Thing
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The problem is, even with today's high capacity grids, there's still only so far you can "push" power before you're losing most of it in transmission and stepping.
That is the concern that onsite installations of solar, with resulting minimal loss to transmission costs, and smart microgrids resolve. https://www.ase.org/blog/micro... [ase.org]
So, sure, the wind may be blowing out in Kansas. But if the power's needed in California, that doesn't help much.
Worse, look at California. They're COMPLETELY dependent on unfulfillable quantities of out-of-state power.
So, all that renewable energy, not backed by any sort of storage capacity?
You're raising valid concerns; are you aware o
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I fully understand. But "people are working on that" isn't an actual solution.
And as I said about local production and storage.
What percentage of the people are going to be able to afford a storage-backed setup?
And what utilities are going to go for storage-backed?
And as I noted, with the waste reprocessing, you're simply trading one problem for a whole new set of problems.
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> Geothermal isn't the answer either, as it's extremely location dependent.
Throwing away an entire form of technology because it's not right for every circumstance, as this sentence and the tone of your comment imply, is crazy. Sure, geo on it's own isn't going to solve the worlds energy needs, but it works very nicely in a lot of places - and so those places cease to be part of "the problem". Likewise solar and wind (recycling withstanding) - if (say) California didn't have the renewables it does, then
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Sure, geo on it's own isn't going to solve the worlds energy needs, but it works very nicely in a lot of places
Where? Certainly not California.
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It's not that Geothermal doesn't work in California.
It's that they don't have enough capacity, compared to demand, to make it one of these "100% something" pipe dreams.
Intelligently implemented power systems, taking into account MULTIPLE generation methods is what people need to be concentrating on.
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"It's not that Geothermal doesn't work in California.
It's that they don't have enough capacity, compared to demand, to make it one of these "100% something" pipe dreams."
All irrelevant to the point. The geo station at The Geysers is perpetually under production targets and over budget. That's located in the most geothermally active region of the planet. Geo for electricity is a fail in America. It's okay for heat sinking or whatnot, but for power generation it's senseless.
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"Saying geothermal energy doesn't work in California is utter bullshit, and it does nothing but prove how ignorant you are.
The plant at The Geysers is always under production and over budget, and has produced a Superfund site so it's not even clean. But I bet you know fuck-all about that, like a typical coward. Run along and let those willing to log in have a real conversation without fuckfaces like you.
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I didn't say "throw it away".
Why is that ALWAYS the first response when I level a criticism?
I'm saying that, in areas where it makes sense, geothermal is a good idea.
Now try to sell me a geothermal plant in the Chicagoland area.
What? There's no economic geothermal power in this area? Just tests for low-temp-variance heat exchange?
THAT is what I'm talking about.
This is the same reasoning behind my opposition to nuclear power in California.
Toss nuclear reactors on top of one of the world's most extensive ne
Not likely (Score:2)
TFS wrong (Score:2)
sequestration (Score:2)
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The Hydrogen Economy (Score:2)
"The Hydrogen Economy" - Scientific American, Jan 1973
https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Not exactly a new idea.
Another Greenwashing Band Aid (Score:2)
We've got approximately 4yrs before we hit a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature. This level means the end of our remaining coral reefs, the deaths of millions of people. Displacement of millions of people due to rising sea levels. Increase in poverty , disease. Crop Failure leading to food shortages will be a problem that wont go away. Just not enough time for a technology that doest exist - that wont need to exist if we cut our CO2 emmissions.
Unless we turn the CO2 faucet off the levels will keep rising
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Preface: I guess you could say I'm on the "against" side of the global warming debate on the whole. Not because I disagree the earth is warming, and that man is at the least a contributing cause if not the major one (though I am skeptical of the agenda of people on the "for" side of the argument) but because I think the fundamental goals are entirely misplaced... which I think your point illustrates quite well:
We've got approximately 4yrs before we hit a 1.5 degree rise in global temperature. This level means the end of our remaining coral reefs, the deaths of millions of people. Displacement of millions of people due to rising sea levels. Increase in poverty , disease. Crop Failure leading to food shortages will be a problem that wont go away. Just not enough time for a technology that doest exist - that wont need to exist if we cut our CO2 emmissions.
Unless we turn the CO2 faucet off the levels will keep rising.
Let's assume that everything you suggest above is fact (I don't have the data to argue, and it do
technological vs social (Score:2)
Now, add several more decades because our politicians and special interest groups have been programming society to disbelieve the science since 1995.
If we're anywhere near to an ecological tipping point, we're going to blow past it and keep barreling forward. If the consequences are intolerable, we'll have to back-pedal and fix the ecosystem damage after t
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Fantasy world? No, just a science fiction world where hydrogen dissociates from the oxygen in water using a catalyst of a magic wand, without requiring a lot of electricity to make that happen.
Re:How you build all that infrastructure (Score:5, Informative)
Really. TFA is beyond stupid. They treat H2 and CCS as if they were alternatives when they actually address completely different problems.
H2 is just a really inefficient way to store power, with an RTE well below 50%. It embrittles metal and destroys pipeline seals. It doesn't make sense under any plausible scenario.
CCS (carbon capture and storage) makes some sense as a bridge technology, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be ready by 2035 when many power plants are not located anywhere near the right kind of geological structure to sequester CO2.
This is a politically driven policy paper written by someone who doesn't understand the tech, and really doesn't even care about solving global warming. The real problem is in places like India, Indonesia, and Africa where new coal power plants are currently under construction. Any money spent on CCS would be far better spent incentivizing those countries to build wind, nukes, or solar instead.
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Or geothermal, or wave power. Just not dam-based hydro, unless we want to increase global warming. :-)
The real problem is in places like Illinois (Score:2)
Which wants to close down 4 perfectly fine nuclear power plants because they no longer generate PROFIT.
https://www.world-nuclear-news... [world-nuclear-news.org]
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Did you read the article you linked to? It isn't the state of Illinois that is shutting down the nuke plants; it's the privately-owned utility company Exelon Generation that owns and operates them. They blame "declining energy prices and market rules that allow fossil fuel plants to underbid clean resources" for declining profits, though they don't say what those "market rules" are.
Do you want the company to operate at a loss? Do you want the ratepayers to suck it up and pay more for energy? Do you want the
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CCS (carbon capture and storage) makes some sense as a bridge technology, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be ready by 2035 when many power plants are not located anywhere near the right kind of geological structure to sequester CO2.
It actually makes zero sense any time soon. Sandia NREL showed in the 1980s that it's possible to capture up to 80% of power plant CO2 output by bubbling it through algae ponds. The algae can be used to make butanol, biodiesel, whatever. The "waste" from that process is also known as "compost", i.e. "fertilizer". As long as we're still using liquid fuels, CCS is dumb
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Take hydrogen ...
From where do you "take" the hydrogen?
Hydrogen is made from hydrocarbons. To then use the hydrogen to make hydrocarbons is idiotic.
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From where do you "take" the hydrogen?
If you're trying to avoid retrieving it from a hydrocarbon? Water.
Hydrogen is made from hydrocarbons.
Quite to the contrary, hydrocarbons are made from hydrogen ;)
Now hydrogen is usually *obtained* from hydrocarbons, I'll give you that- but that's simply a matter of cost. Cheaper to let the climate foot the bill.
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There are more direct and efficient ways to do electrolysis than by throwing electricity from the existing grid. That's been the case for some years now.
https://www.carboncommentary.c... [carboncommentary.com]
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Your link compares theoretical costs between future electrolyzers and existing steam reformation techniques, but doesn't compare hydrogen storage to battery storage...
Re:How you build all that infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
What if we should raise everyone's energy cost ?
What if humanity so far has never paid the true cost of energy ?
Re:How you build all that infrastructure (Score:5, Informative)
What if we should raise everyone's energy cost ?
That doesn't matter. We are a democracy. Policies don't need to make sense, they just need to be popular.
Higher energy prices, especially gasoline prices, are very unpopular and will destroy public support for addressing global warming. We have to find another way.
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Given the current state of US politics, I would settle for politicians who are at the same level as the public.
Re:How you build all that infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
We need dramatically higher gasoline prices.
We have a democracy, and the politician who says he/she wants to raise my energy prices has lost my vote. I need my gas-powered vehicle to earn a living, and keeping my bills paid takes precedence any concerns I may have about the welfare of the environment.
This is just how the game is played in first world countries. Come up with some solution that fixes the environment without giving hard-working folks the shaft, and I'll be onboard 100%.
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What if we should raise everyone's energy cost ?
We shouldn't. Energy gives us better lives.
We are trying to save the environment, not live ascetic lives.
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What if we should raise everyone's energy cost ?
Then you disproportionately make the standard of living worse for low-income folks. For those who can absorb the increase, you're just stealing money from of other areas of the economy (dining out, entertainment, etc.) because people still need to keep their lights on and car's tank full and will adjust their budgets accordingly.
What ultimately happens is that people will complain that X number of dollars doen't cut it anymore for cost of living expense, and they'll demand change. Net result is you've pro
Re:How you build all that infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
Take econ 101 please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Fossil fuel companies are profitable because they aren't responsible for paying the true costs of their products. Drawing billions of tons of carbon from the ground, burning it and dumping it into the atmosphere results in a problem everyone else has to deal with. If the costs of climate change were built into the cost of a barrel of oil, oil might not be as lucrative a business.
Government intervention to require sellers of products to account for negative externalities is a primary job even many hardcore free-market nutjobs agree with.
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"Negative Externalities is kind of like White Privilege...It doesn't exist.
... says the white person.
I like that Monopoly experiment, where one player gets a head start of $4000. In the vast majority of cases, this player then wins the game. But if you ask the player why he won the game he will point out all the successful moves he made during the game that secured him the win. The fact that people with $4000 more capital than all the other players are more likely to win does not occur him.
Re: White Privilege (Score:2)
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"You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you'll dance with the Reaper".
Why Hydrogen? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen. Yes, it's simpler to produce than biofuels or synthetic fuels, but it's a LOT harder to handle, and renders all existing infrastructure obsolete. It *might* make sense if we were starting from scratch. Maybe. But if the goal is to pivot a global economy off fossil fuels as fast as possible, it makes a lot more sense to use a synthetic fuel that's compatible with the exiting infrastructure.
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Re:Why Hydrogen? (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen. Yes, it's simpler to produce than biofuels or synthetic fuels, but it's a LOT harder to handle, and renders all existing infrastructure obsolete. It *might* make sense if we were starting from scratch. Maybe. But if the goal is to pivot a global economy off fossil fuels as fast as possible, it makes a lot more sense to use a synthetic fuel that's compatible with the exiting infrastructure.
Because oil companies want a way to continue to provide fuel for automobiles. If you charge your car at home, they don't make a profit (unless they are building the solar farms that provide your power, or the solar panels used in those solar farms). But if they can convince everyone that hydrogen produced from natural gas is "green", then they can continue with business as usual for a while longer, until we run out of natural gas.
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Because big oil companies are energy companies and not oil companies. Big oil companies have invested in green energy for decades, long before it was politically correct or expedient to do so. Some oil companies have been investing in solar since the 1960's - over 50 years. .
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30... [npr.org]
https://oilprice.com/Alternati... [oilprice.com]
They are arguably the largest non-government investors in renewable energy. Big oil has and continues to literally invest billions of dollars in green energy over the yea
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Then they should be making Butanol and Biodiesel (actually green diesel) from algae. They are 1:1 replacements for Gasoline and Petrodiesel respectively, and can be transported with the existing infrastructure with zero changes. Dicking around with Hydrogen is dumb.
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What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen. Yes, it's simpler to produce than biofuels or synthetic fuels, but it's a LOT harder to handle, and renders all existing infrastructure obsolete.
Pure hydrogen infrastructure is infeasible. But if you store hydrogen on-site then it becomes reasonable (still nowhere near good enough, but reasonable).
It's also a great feedstock - just get some CO2 from the air, react it with hydrogen and you get methane. Methane can be stored and utilized directly or used as a feedstock for other processes.
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It's also a great feedstock - just get some CO2 from the air, react it with hydrogen and you get methane. Methane can be stored and utilized directly or used as a feedstock for other processes.
Sure. It will probably eventually be reasonable for certain industrial tasks that require lots of heat (smelting, casting, etc.) Of course, right now, given that the only really efficient source of hydrogen is natural gas (which is mostly methane), that's kind of a circuitous way to waste a lot of energy. When we run out of natural gas, though, it might be the only feasible way to do certain things.
Re:Why Hydrogen? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is workable, and methane storage can be scaled up much cheaper than batteries. It's not unreasonable to store enough methane on site for several days of autonomous work for a power plant, with batteries it's entirely out of the realm of possible.
Re: Why Hydrogen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much every serious proposal would use electrolysis to obtain hydrogen.
No, the actual bet is (rather: used to be, during the millenium years) on new materials that generate hydrogen directly using sunlight, pretty much like photovoltaic panels, but skipping the electricity part. This would be extremely efficient compared to affordable panels of that time (10% efficiency).
Yes, it's possible/thinkable, if you find material (combinations) with the correct (combination of) band gaps. During my Masters and PhD thesis, which were ~10 years ago, there used to be every other week one research group or other advertising their "promising" work in exactly this field. It was prettu much widely understood that any hydrogen infrastructure investment was a bey on exactly this kind of technology becoming available soon. It was during that time, for example, that Mercedes Benz created their BlueEfficiency lineup of engines, which could switch from burning gas to burning hydrogen while running 140mph down the highway - once hydrogen would become commonly available at your favorite gas station :-)
If peole kept working on this, it would be just a matter of time before they succeed. The physics required is pretty straight-forward, nothing science-fiction like. It's a lot more like stamp-collecting: you never know when you'll find the missing piece, and it may take a looot of searching for it.
Meanwhile, during the last decade, we've boosted photovoltaics to efficiencies well above 20% for prices next to nothing, and have a good head start on createing decent electricity infrastructure. So given the hydrogen infrastructure problems, the hype may have died off or die soon.
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No, the actual bet is (rather: used to be, during the millenium years) on new materials that generate hydrogen directly using sunlight, pretty much like photovoltaic panels, but skipping the electricity part.
That seems rather dumb since you're basically relying on future economy being largely hydrogen-based, with some amount of electricity thrown in. Electrolyzers are optimal for the exact opposite case, that is, a future that is largely electricity-based, with some amount of hydrogen thrown in. Considering that "some amount of electricity thrown in" in the former case means at the very least *everything* currently powered by electricity, whereas in the latter case, "some amount of hydrogen thrown in" is basica
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That seems rather dumb [...]
You're talking from today's perspective, while I'm talking about policy from the perspective of more like the 2000s here.
*Everything* in that economy is based on burning stuff and generating heat - mobility (cars, planes, ships), industry (with few notable exceptions), and even energy generation (burning coal is the preferred way; even nuclear power plants use hot water). Tesla is barely more than just a drawing on a napkin in Elon's drawer.
On the electricity generating part we're talking commercial solar p
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On the electricity generating part we're talking commercial solar panels with a whooping 7-9% efficiency here, while "commercial" still means freakin' expensive. (Yes, NASA has some science-fiction type of panels with 15-18%, but they only make enough of those to send to Mars once in a while.)
I assume you're *srill* talking about the 2000s here? Since commercial panels are at ~18-23% these days and NASA is using ~30-35% triple-junction cells. What is the relevance of your ancient data for the future, then?
we got lucky sometime during the 2010s, when perovskite solar cells essentially tripled the efficiency and halved the price practically overnight
Now you're just channeling alternate universes. There's no commercial perovskite modules on the market. 95% of the current production is silicon panels (and most of the rest is CdTe). Yes, they've tripled in efficiency and slashed costs by something like 80-90%, but no thanks to perovskites.
Re: Why Hydrogen? (Score:2)
I assume you're *srill* talking about the 2000s here? [...]
Yes. I was trying to illustrate why betting on hydrogen was a good idea then. (Answering to the parent why it wasn't "dumb".)
[perovskites]
Now you're just channeling alternate universes. There's no commercial perovskite modules on the market. 95% of the current production is silicon panels (and most of the rest is CdTe). Yes, they've tripled in efficiency and slashed costs by something like 80-90%, but no thanks to perovskites.
*shrug* Maybe you're right, I'm not into photovoltaic market details. (I just happen to have had a physics education and was fortunate enough to have met a few essential players a decade ago.)
But in any case it was - and still is - the perovskites that's dangling as a carrot in front of everybody as the magic technology that will get us out of this mess. Whether that's true or not, or
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Pretty much every serious proposal would use electrolysis to obtain hydrogen. Right now the best electrolyzers are about 85% efficient (compared with the theoretical best) and it's reasonable to expect around 80% efficiency for industrial models.
This is workable, and methane storage can be scaled up much cheaper than batteries. It's not unreasonable to store enough methane on site for several days of autonomous work for a power plant, with batteries it's entirely out of the realm of possible.
80-85% efficient. Provided you can utilize excess heat.
And *then* you need to transport the hydrogen somewhere.
And last but not least, get your energy back from the hydrogen, which carries its own losses. What is a plausible net return of energy with state of the art actual technology these days?
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Notice also the "compared to theoretical best" - what's the practical efficency? A.k.a. how much of the energy used to generate the hydrogen is actually stored as chemical energy within the hydrogen? That's what really matters in an energy storage system, which is essentially what synthetic fuels amount to.
Well, I suppose really it's the round trip efficiency: energyIn -> storage -> energyOut. And of course that second conversion is limited to a theoretical ballpark of 60ish% Carnot efficiency if
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>It's also a great feedstock - just get some CO2 from the air, react it with hydrogen and you get methane.
Then why bother generating hydrogen at all? You can synthesize methane directly from CO2 and water, possibly with hydrogen as an intermediate step depending on the particular reaction you're using. But if hydrogen never leaves your production equipment the rest of the infrastructure only has to deal with methane, which is far easier to store and use.
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What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen.
Very few people are obsessed with hydrogen. The vast majority of informed people realized it is a completely stupid idea that fails to address any real problem.
The last person I remember making a significant push for hydrogen was George W. Bush, and he was just pushing it as a delaying tactic to benefit the oil industry by holding up progress on BEVs.
It *might* make sense if we were starting from scratch. Maybe.
No. Hydrogen would not make sense even if starting over.
Re:Why Hydrogen? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Hydrogen is a terrible solution for almost all applications, batteries are just better.
The one exception I can think of is that its possible hydrogen makes sense for airliners. Batteries don't have the energy density needed for long haul air travel. The substantially higher energy density if hydrogen vs fossil fuels is a real advantage in airliner efficiency and might more than make up for the energy cost to cool and ortho / para transform liquid hydrogen.
The low density of the liquid is very awkward and its not clear if the aerodynamics of an airliner would work - but its not clear it won't. Since airliners are usually fueled before each flight, the short storage lifetime doesn't hurt much.
Hydrogen powered ships are also not obviously crazy since the weight of a large liquification plant is not such a serious issue.
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You can spend a lot of effort on making H2 usable as a fuel.
Or you can attach those hydrogen atoms to all of that carbon you were sequestering and create a stable, energy-dense fuel that is already compatible with existing aircraft and ships.
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If your prime power is solar or nuclear, its a lot easier to convert that to hydrogen than to hydrocarbons. Hydrogen might actually be a better aviation fuel due to its high mass energy density
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If your prime power is solar or nuclear, its a lot easier to convert that to hydrogen than to hydrocarbons.
I agree, but batteries can do even better if you're not worried about weight.
However, in aviation, you are worried. More weight means more fuel burn and less range. Take a look at the huge rockets that burn hydrogen, then compare it with those using kerosene. One is several times larger, and that size translates to weight. The size also means a larger plane, which generates drag and could prevent it from landing at airports with shorter runways. Finally, existing jet engines don't work with hydrogen, so a n
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Right... Because rail can cross mountains and oceans just as easily as aircraft. /s
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why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen
Synergistic effect, probably. You need to replace hydrogen derived from methane anyway. The amount is so large that by the time you're finished, the same tools and processes will have been made so much cheaper that they will make sense in other areas, too.
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What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen
Replacing current cars with batteries seems expensive and quite limited for those who don't have a guaranteed parking bay with a charger they own and low electricity prices.
A weekly trip to a petrol pump has worked well so far, and doing the same to buy a lower emissions fuel sounds appealing.
Re:Why Hydrogen? -- Taxes.. (Score:2)
What I don't understand is why everyone is obsessed with hydrogen.
Our current infrastructure is largely maintained by taxes on fuel. Hydrogen represents a "green" mode of transport that maintains the tax revenue required to maintain our infrastructure. If everyone drove electric vehicles, the only way to pay for our infrastructure would be a per-mile style tax or possibly an electricity tax. The problem with taxing electricity is it drives up the cost of living for those that do not even drive. So now the poor are subsidizing the rich - which is obviously going to le
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Or property taxes - after all the roads are there to make the property more valuable. Or vehicle registration taxes. Or...
Gas/mileage taxes are a convenient way to distribute the cost of roads to those who use them the most, but usage doesn't actually correlate with road maintenance costs. Roads are worn out primarily by weather and cargo vehicles (that mostly serve everyone), so there's a good case to be made for making them a social infrastructure cost like schools or courts. Though "drive-through" stat
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They're trying to find a variable power sink that will stop an impending renewable wholesale market fiasco. The reality of wind/solar is that you have to massively overbuild it even in a system that uses batteries heavily, and in a system that doesn't heavily use batteries (our system for the next couple decades at least) you need an insane overbuild of renewables to make sure you can always hit your load requirements. In the market, this is driving prices in the window of the day where renewables operate
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That same argument works for carbon emitting electricity generation, only the costs are *externalized*. Someone has to pay, it's just not either party to the transaction.
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Electricity bills do not go to offset climate change costs, so those costs are *externalized*.
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Yes, the headline is wrong, and the summary is wrong.
This is not the only scenario that delivers net zero. Generating enough renewable electricity is the easy bit, and should be feasible at current prices.
But matching supply and demand is hard. It may require a smart grid, electric cars as energy storage, home storage, pump storage, gas or hydrogen storage, demand side management etc. None of this is easy, and most options are not cheap.
Re:Energy Innovatihere doesn't have a website (Score:4, Informative)
It's the weird link in the article, which Slashdot editors in their wisdom copied without thinking. Try Energy Innovation.
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Places where AC is common will use way more electricity when it's hot. Not having enough generation capacity means you can't handle the additional load when it comes and your options are either rolling blackouts or brownouts which cause even more damage. This happens all the time it hot areas.
The solution is simply to build more peaking power plants. Or you can do nothing and people will buy their own personal backup power generators, which will most commonly run on gasoline and be very inefficient, but the
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