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To my knowledge, with plenty of carbon emisssions
Is it less than using fossil fuels for power exclusively? If so then it’s a step in the right direction. Yes I know it sounds like I’m shilling for BP now but we get lost in the doom spiral so fast we forget we are indeed making progress. We just have to keep their feet to the fire or…erm… solar panel?
They’re not using electrolysis and water to make hydrogen, they’re using power and steam to crack petroleum products into hydrogen.
using electrolysis for fuel cells would violate the laws of physics and thermodynamics
And this is still a large step in the right direction, because cheap hydrogen creates an incentive to develop hydrogen infrastructure, which increases the demand for hydrogen, and can help lay the groundwork for a future in which hydrogen is produced from renewable sources.
Also, steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and as such it can be performed without carbon emissions.
There isn’t a real need for hydrogen. We have plenty of other solutions. People have the expectation that our society changes from unsustainable to sustainable by just swapping in clean technologies in place of the dirty one’s. That isn’t going to happen, and hydrogen won’t change that.
I mean it’s not bad to have alternatives though.
My roomie is a trucker, and the idea of an electric truck is laughable, at least in my country, because of how trucking works here. Unless the truck is out of order, being loaded, or being refuelled, it’s always on the road; they just swap drivers around like a relay race. Unless a truck came with a swappable battery it wouldn’t be feasible to operate like that, they’d have to at least double their arsenal, (at which point we can already start to question how environmentally friendly that is), and that’ll increase the overall operating costs, which will ultimately end up on the consumer; everything will get more expensive because that’s what they transport. Another problem with pure electric is also that the batteries weigh a shit ton, so the trucks end up being able to transport less because they have to lug the battery around everywhere.
Biogas is an alternative, and as far as I know it works alright; they already use it. They end up not as powerful as diesel trucks though.
Something I wonder if it might be applied is something like Toyota’s hybrid system, with regenerative braking etc. I wonder if it scales. My roomie recently had to leave his Golf at the shop for a week, and got it swapped with a Yaris. It cut his fuel consumption by three quarters.
The alternative to trucking is a better cargo rail system on electrified rail. Won’t get rid of all long haul trucking, but it’ll displace at least 70% of it.
Even if that doesn’t happen, battery capacity improves by 5-8% per year. At the low end, that’s a doubling every 15 years. We’re not close to theoretical limits yet, so we can expect this to continue as long as we keep funding the research.
Solid state batteries are still some time away, but once those are on the market, they’ll leapfrog everything. Good enough not just for trucking, but also airplanes, which was thought to be out of the question otherwise.
I find with a lot of workers in positions like that tend to focus on what exist right now. Then they sit around at a truck stop over coffee, reinforcing their opinions and laughing at battery trucks. They don’t think about what’s likely to happen over the next decade.
But still, trains are the way to go. The US needs to start that process by renationalizing the railroads.
I wouldn’t argue against expanded rail. Used to have a decent rail system in my country, hell even the town I currently live in, while small, actually has rail. A lot of it has been shut down however, and that’s a shame. Sweden is a pretty large country dotted with a lot of small towns. If we had rail connecting places we’d not need as many long-haul trucks, and the more local deliveries could definitely be handled by EV trucks and vans. It’s the long haul that’s an issue. As it stands though, proper investment in rail doesn’t seem to be a high priority more or less anywhere. Instead we get stupid ideas like putting up electric lines over motorways, costs just as much but is less versatile.
It’s quite sad. The rails are still here, I think they might be used by the local industry every so often, but I genuinely have no idea as I know my roomie has delivered stuff to them before and he obviously doesn’t drive a train. The old station house is also still here, just abandoned, not even repurposed for something else.
If solid state batteries actually came around then sure, EV trucks might become more viable, particularly if they can charge decently fast since fuelling a truck does take a while (like 15 minutes or so) so there is downtime. There could also be other incentives, like tax reductions (or tax increases on fossil fuel trucks) making EVs more appealing. I believe the reason you hear truckers ridicule the current tech is because there is a push for trucks to be replaced with EVs and it’s just not feasible today, unless you do short distance shuttle deliveries. You can replace your long haulers with electric trucs, Mercedes for example makes them, but as it stands the only effect would be that you’d go bankrupt.
There isn’t a real need for hydrogen.
For energy it is terribly inefficient.
It would be nice to have green ammonia and methanol though.
Definitely. We already saw this with fucking natural gas
Might’ve been a step forward 40 years ago. Today its finding a spot to dig in, so they can keep the fires of hell burning.
But they aren’t capturing the carbon. They aren’t storing it. It’s supposed to be the easiest case of CCS and they dump the CO2 in the atmosphere
I strongly suspect that CCS is a lie aimed to make people happier to continue burning fossil fuels
Unfortunately, no. It’s not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.
The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.
In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution
Not enough progress fast enough. We’re kind of on a clock here, we can’t see exactly where we are, and we might already be too late to do anything.
how could hydrogen power possibly produce carbon dioxide
it’s the production of the hydrogen that’s done improperly. Similar to how electricity doesn’t cause emissions, but coal power plants do
Well, supposedly almost all hydrogen was made not long after the Big Bang went bang, with a tiny bit getting once in a while produced by the spontaneous formation of particle and anti-particle pairs, if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah, but then it combines with stuff and is no longer hydrogen. For example, a lot of it on earth is bound with oxygen in a from known as dihydrogen monoxide. You can input energy to separate the two hydrogen from the oxygen, but it’s not freely available. This is a useful way to spend excess energy to store the energy for later or to move, but not if you don’t have excess clean energy.
You can also get some from things like Methane (CH4, aka natural gas). This is how most of the gas companies are producing it, and it obviously isn’t clean. They like to pretend it’s clean by saying using the hydrogen just produces water, but obviously the hydrogen didn’t just appear.
My favorite way to get hydrogen is mixing caustic soda, water and aluminum foil. Only cause I think it’s funny you can get very explosive things from the grocery store
I see what you did there
Don’t get me started on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide: that stuff can kill you!!! ;)
Some is also produced by the decay of heavy elements (helium too)
You just described the same event twice. The particles formed shortly after the Big Bang came into being precisely through the formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in the energy-dense early universe.
Is there a community for green memes like this? Love it
This is it
Where do you think we are?
In a general meme community
In a meme community on a solarpunk instance.
Didn’t realize what instance I was on!
Gotcha! I came here from the everything feed. I shall now subscribe!
With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.
Hah! It’s amazing how many people are still hanging onto the delusion that hydrogen is made from renewables when almost every ounce of commercial hydrogen fuel is made by cracking petroleum products.
What you’re saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we’re developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
But hydrogen infrastructure isn’t better long term than regular electric and battery infrastructure. You need quite unique circumstances like being highly dependent on high energy density while being located in a place where you’re far from an electric grid. Like an island in a stormy place (without access to wave power, etc) or long haul trucks out in nowhere or electric airplanes. Almost anything else should use better options
Not clear on what you’re trying to say here. The energy generated from a fuel cell is electricity. The entire fuel cell assembly is essentially a battery, using hydrogen and oxygen as the electrochemical components.
But, I think you’re trying to argue that one is better than the other. To that all I can say is we all are just getting out of being locked into a singular infrastructure (combustion engines) for the last 90 so years, it’s probably best to invest concurrently in multiple alternative energies instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket. Hydrogen has some strengths where lithium ion does not and vis versa. I’d assume it would be best to diversify so if one fails we have multiple backups. Kinda like investing money, don’t put all your money behind one horse.
Storage and transfer are the complicated parts, remember that hydrogen leaks VERY easily (even right through most metals) and require very high pressure. It’s never going to be the cheapest option unless you’re weight constrained
This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
There’s no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We’re not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.
If they were using excess renewables there’d be much more efficient ways to capture that energy. A simple one would be pumping some water up hill.
All hydrogen was made just after the Big Bang.
Technically correct, i.e., the best kind of correct.
Obviously they mean purified and stored hydrogen, fit for use and delivery as an energy medium.
Oil companies really made hydrogen sound evil. Maybe that’s what they wanted all along.
Exactly. Hydrogen can be produced easily with all the green energy produced during off peak that is otherwise wasted.
You need water and transport, and someone to use it once it’s made.
Water is non issue since it doesn’t have to be too close to generators. We kinda figured out how to transfer electricity where we need it.
Transporting it is a small issue but we’re already transporting a lot of liquid gasses and other flammable stuff like gasoline.
If nothing else it could be used by millions of semis for which current battery tech is absolutely fucking useless and likely will remain that way for decades.
But really if we didn’t jump on completely wrong tech years ago and just switched to hydrogen instead of batteries, we would have cars with zero emissions, zero range issues and zero charging problems a decade ago.
Water is non issue since it doesn’t have to be too close to generators. We kinda figured out how to transfer electricity where we need it.
If you can transport the electricity then you can find better, more efficient uses for it (e.g. EV charging)
Transporting it is a small issue but we’re already transporting a lot of liquid gasses and other flammable stuff like gasoline.
So, you want to liquefy hydrogen? Below 20 kelvin? As a gas it’s much more difficult to contain than methane. It’s nothing like gasoline.
If nothing else it could be used by millions of semis for which current battery tech is absolutely fucking useless and likely will remain that way for decades.
All it takes is an additional, interchangeable, battery trailer.
But really if we didn’t jump on completely wrong tech years ago and just switched to hydrogen instead of batteries,
Nah. Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce and difficult to store. It does have niche use cases like for ammonia and methanol products
we would have cars with zero emissions, zero range issues and zero charging problems a decade ago.
I think you have a point here. Hydrogen was mature enough a decade ago. If a distribution network existed, backed by a cheap source of electricity production then EV tech wouldn’t get a foothold.
We already transport electricity and then it is just wasted because we don’t need that much of it during peak green energy generation. You would use this otherwise wasted energy and store it in hydrogen.
You have no real argument here so you’re bringing in useless semantics. We’re already transporting and storing hydrogen in liquid form without any issues.
You have to realize just how idiotic the idea of a battery trailer is. Current, garbage batteries barely able to achieve 250 mi of range are 25% of car’s weight.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient hydrogen is to produce because we’d be using energy that is currently just wasted.
We already transport electricity and then it is just wasted because we don’t need that much of it during peak green energy generation.
There are 2 types of waste, one where prices are negative. These are is best captured by efficient storage, like EV and pumped hydro NOT inefficient hydrogen. Long term, if there is a huge excess of electricity for long periods of time, then investment in hydrogen equipment may be economical.
The second type is from grid congestion. Here hydrogen production has a role because it can be co-located
You would use this otherwise wasted energy and store it in hydrogen.
Better to invest in batteries than electrolyzers.
We’re already transporting and storing hydrogen in liquid form without any issues.
There is the issue of needing, for equivalent energy, 30 tube trailers of hydrogen to replace one tanker of diesel. Extending the electricity grid is a better option than building hydrogen pipelines.
You have to realize just how idiotic the idea of a battery trailer is.
Hydrogen energy per volume is equivalent to an EV battery, and volume is what is most important in transportation.
It doesn’t matter how inefficient hydrogen is to produce because we’d be using energy that is currently just wasted.
First you need to invest in hydrogen electrolysis, large scale storage, transport and a fleet of hydrogen vehicles and stations.
Or avoid all that expense and just use batteries.
Looking at you @Hypx@lemmy.world
So, why is making hydrogen from other energy source worse than filling up lithium batteries from other energy sources?
Hydrogen isn’t a source of energy. It’s a battery all the same.
There are efficient and inefficient ways to “charge” a battery. And as a result, there are efficient and inefficient batteries.
Lithium is easy and efficient to charge, but there’s certainly environmental (and not to mention political and ethical) concerns around its mining and refinement.
Hydrogen is not. It does have a benefit of being a rather dense mechanism though. But storing and transporting it is a problem of itself due to how small hydrogen atoms are. There will always be leaks.
Thanks for the info.
No the hydrogen is not a battery, it is gray hydrogen sourced from fossil gas or coal. This makes the hydrogen still a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen doesn’t have this problem.
Hydrogen is less efficient, so you waste energy and you have to transport hydrogen from producer to consumer, usually with gas powered vehicles anyway.
