They're not using electrolysis and water to make hydrogen, they're using power and steam to crack petroleum products into hydrogen.

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

That would be nice, if it actually happened 🥲

They aren't using dirty energy to do electrolysis, they're steam reforming methane. It isn't possible to do renewably.

Yeah, fuck the other 70% of energy from renewables you lose when converting to hydrogen

Is she "ok" now? The last I knew she was completely incapacitated and couldn't get out of bed. One hell of "long covid" case... :(

The videos were made before she got long covid. I don't know how well she's doing now. My only updates about her are from the host of veritasium and only when I go looking for his videos.

Kari Byron, formerly of MythBusters fame, recently put out an ad for Shell. I believe she's also committed to a 3 year "docuseries" for them. See here for a thread on Lemmy.world with a link to the video

I can't find the specific video but here is the first video in her series: https://piped.video/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY

She says that the hydrogen is sourced using water and renewables but it's highly sus that Shell (or BP; I can't remember) was sponsoring the series.

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

In a general meme community

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 it's usually produced by processing oil instead.