this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Fuck hydrogen. Its a fake green product so oil companies can transition as slow as they want while still keeping their strangle hold on our society.
It depends a lot on where the hydrogen is sourced from. Hydrogen that is generated from electrolyzers using renewable power is completely green (and funny enough, called Green Hydrogen), and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Oil companies however want to market hydrogen from drilling and refining, which is dirty as hell.
It's an important differentiation to make though. Hydrogen is not inherently bad and will have plenty of green applications. We just have to make sure it's coming from the right places.
Is it really that good of a storage method, though? The round-trip efficiency is quite bad when compared to other methods of storage.
We'll need it anyway to produce existing chemical materials sustainably. It may not be the best energy carrier nor most efficient, but it shines in specific applications. Vehicles are a promising example.
There are some use-cases where hydrogen will be useful, but I don't think storage is one of them. Nor do I think vehicles are a particularly good use-case either, as compared to just iterating on battery technology.
Acording to this paper/article, its better than technologies such as batteries, but the study isn't the most comprehensive and doesn't consider things like pump hydro.
It's hard to assess the validity of those claims as the article doesn't bring any numbers and the paper itself is paywalled. As the fossil fuel industry is pushing hard towards wedging in hydrogen as a means of keeping themselves alive for a while longer, it's vital to be able to assess the actual claims, lest they are just planted there by the fossil fuel industry.
"That good of a storage method" in terms of what, arbitrage? We should be producing hydrogen for the practical and environmental benefits of having emissions-free vehicle fuel (that avoids the problems of battery production and disposal), steel, and fertilizer.
I don't see any good reason why the merits of hydrogen for vehicle fuel would be any better than production and disposal of batteries. The other cases I agree that hydrogen will have a useful niche.
This article is a little old, but it explains the problems on the disposal side pretty well. This one covers the production side. Hydrogen powered vehicles avoid all that.
Sadly almost all hydrogen currently making its way to market is dirty. I have high hopes for it in the future but it seems like thinly veiled poison at the moment.
And this article is definitely about the dirty kind or at least feels like it is.
There's companies working on it! ~~We're just broke~~
And yes, this is definitely the dirty kind. It may still be an improvement on using natural gas directly, but there would need to be a fairly comprehensive analysis to tell for sure. One possible advantage though is we could start building up a hydrogen infrastructure that we can then feed green hydrogen into and completely replace the dirty hydrogen.
Anyway though, you're right to be skeptical. It's important though to look into the details to determine if it's legitimately green energy or if it's just oil companies greenwashing. We need to shun the latter while we promote the former.
(There is a grey area, and it's the same as electric cars -- if we're using electricity from the grid to power cars, and electrolyzers which make hydrogen, is it truly green? I would say this is acceptable for the same reason EVs are acceptable. It'll become completely emission free once the grid is run on renewables.)
I disagree. We need hydrogen for GHG-free fertilizer and steel production and it's the superior choice for powering vehicles. Regardless, this research is interesting because it could help solve the natural gas problem.
Hydrogen from gas fields is anything but GHG-free!
That's why processes that capture or avoid the GHG component of hydrogen production are worth investigating.
Ok, but what about the ecosystems dependent on that chemical energy staying underground?
Are you implying that there are subterranean ecosystems somehow dependent on natural gas deposits that are harmed by the exploitation of these resources?
Yes.
These ecosystems are well studied.
This paper from the oil industry opens with the sentence “Methane-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) have long been recognized as an important bioindicator for oil and gas exploration.” We literally look for these ecosystems to know where to extract their food.
This isn’t controversial in the slightest. We are destroying unique ecosystems with every barrel we extract.
That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I guess these specific bacterial ecosystems would suffer, so to speak. Perhaps there should be rules to prevent oil and gas deposits from being completely depleted, or some could be set aside as nature preserves.
Massive green hydrogen plants running on renewables now being built in Australia but hey keep being part of the problem instead of the solution.