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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Yeah, better go read some US propaganda against their peer competitor for some real facts about China. 😂
Who said anything about America? Fuck America. You know, most countries don't brainwash their citizens with China-level nationalism.
From your own article 😂
It can both currently produce only 0.1% of hydrogen using a green process, while also developing a new process that is 99.9% green (for the hydrogren that it produces using the new process). That means the overall production right now is probably still ~0.1% green, but the point of the article seems to be that they hope to transition to this new process, which sounds pretty cool.
And to also knock out a few other misunderstandings, I'll also address your comment below: The stats you link are for the number of plants, not the volume of production or consumption (what is claimed). Both stats can be correct if China has large plants that produce more volume than in other countries. But better yet, we don't even have to root around for the details - the article cites it's source: the World Economic Forum's latest whitepaper (June 27, 2023), which in turn cites statistica "Global Hydrogen Consumption By Country". So there you have it - China out-consumes hydrogen at a rate of about 2-times that of the next largest consumer (the United States). That seems to track pretty well, since both countries are similarly developed, and China is about 4x the size of the US by population. If you wanted to split hairs, you could say that this doesn't include volume of production. Given the incredible lead in consumption volume, I'm willing to grant them that omission.
And, not chalking this up to you, but I've seen other replies in here about how China is somehow cooking the books. That's becoming more and more obviously wrong (and more than a bit racist). As one indicator, their universities occupy 8 of the top 20 institutions in the Nature index. For those unaware, this is a premier British-based peer-reviewed journal that releases a ranking of academic institutions based on their publishing to high-impact journals. China's year-over-year change also means that they're rising on that list rapidly.
You've made the same mistake, we need to know who makes the most green hydrogen, not who consumes the most H2
That would be an awesome stat, but it’s not what the article claims. I explained that above.
But because the topic has caught my interest I did some more digging. The only report I found was linked on Wikipedia, which says that 0.1% of all hydrogen globally is produced using renewable energy. This is the same figure China claims they produce, so by volume I would expect the total volume to be proportional to the production/consumption, which would mean China still would produce approximately 2x the next biggest producer. There could still be other countries punching way above their weight, but given the incredibly low net green production globally, we’d be splitting hairs over what amounts to research plant production. You’re welcome to continue searching for more specific reporting.
Now, given that we’ve found ourselves on a tangent sparked by a misunderstanding of the article, trying to compare countries on a metric that amounts to 0.1% of production, I would say it would be a better use of both of our time to focus on how we get the other 99.9% of production over to green production. Given this article, China seems to be approaching that problem ambitiously and I’m glad to see it. To address climate change we absolutely need China to invest in green tech, so this article should only be received positively. I’m looking forward to tracking the progress, because it looks like there’s a lot of opportunity to improve globally.
(sorry for duplicate posts, deleted the 3 others)
Agreed
Or there is a middle ground where you'll actually get a nuanced take?
I'm mostly curious about what they're going to do with the hydrogen. Fuel cells? No hydrogen tech I know off has really proven scalable, reliable and cost effective. And while hydrogen generation was part of the issue it wasn't the biggest one. I'm also keen to understand if they use fresh water or salt water. The latter then there is potential for a energy neutral or positive even desalination process which would be massive for large swaths of Africa.
They've been using it for stuff like buses increasingly https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1132385/beijing-2022-hydrogen-buses
Another good use is in combination with wind and solar where you can produce hydrogen when there's energy available, and then use it to provide a steady energy supply. This addresses one of the main issues with renewables.
It's also just a good idea to try out a lot of things and see what sticks. We never know what might turn out to have an unexpected application in one niche. Global warming requires "all of the above" strategy. That will mean some efforts fail to produce results, but that's okay. We don't have the time to dawdle.
They don't have many buses like that yet and buses are always near population centers where using food waste to make biogas is simply much better in almost every way.
As for storing excess energy sure if we're talking solar generation but they use a lot of hydrogen too for this project and in that case pumping water up to the dam is a much easier and probably more efficient than generating hydrogen and either using it to run an engine or store in fuel cells. Fuel cells aren't all that efficient. Overall a lot of money spent that will not at all pay for itself for that use case.
I really struggle with why they've gone so heavily into generating hydrogen when there is a big lack of viable use cases. Though they're far from alone in overestimating hydrogen, BMW and Toyota both invested heavily in fuel cell research (and BMW experimented with direct hydrogen use) and neither came out the other end a winner.
China is pursuing lots of different energy alternatives to fossil fuels. That's the correct approach in my opinion. We don't know what particular approach or combination of thereof will be most efficient in the long term, the only way to find out is to try different things and see where you get. Thinking of it purely in terms of profits is a bit myopic.
The irony of your myopia, lol
You keep thinking about the long term but have you considered that these brand new technologies aren't widely implemented yet? I bet you would think that it's a good idea to get a job working with computers but in the 1970s there weren't many about. If you need some help to work all this out, I can tell you a story about this guy called Robert Wayne or something.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it's hard to predict when it's going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they're going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Spot on.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don't like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn't tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do 'knowledge exchange' work. It's all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of 'transparently' and 'rigourously' giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it's too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won't even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you're interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
Right, pretty much all the basic research is publicly funded everywhere because it's the only way it can work. Of course, thanks to decades of brainwashing, a lot of people in the west now think that real innovation comes from the private sector.
I think another aspect we can look at is the type of technological we see happening in the west with it being mostly around software, and frivolous things like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, in China, a lot of the technological development is very practical like bullet trains, nuclear power, and so on. It's just another example of how state directed research ends up producing more meaningful results than the private sector.
And yeah sure, send a link that sounds like a fun read.
Well from reading the article like a big boy I've learned that it's pure freshwater they use which is expected but lame.
As for what they're going to use it for that remains mostly a mystery. The world total for hydrogen fuel cell cars is 67,000 which is virtually nil and China aims for 50,000 of their own by 2025 which is also virtually nil. For reference they had estimated around 300 million cars 2021 and that number is on a rapid growth. 50,000 is less than 0,02%...
Further a hydrogen pipeline is not something I'd like to live near, I get it must exist for hydrogen tech to work but china + hydrogen pipeline is just a headline waiting to be written.
Personally I think they're betting on the wrong horse