cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8569504
How is the hydrogen made?
To save you all a google: it's made from natural gas, at a pretty significant energy loss compared to just burning the gas. It generates about 4 times more co2 than burning diesel.
Time to arm the swans and Canada geese, too.
That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of 'fossil' hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).
Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It's a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.
How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands
That's not to say it's perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don't have a good way to measure leaks. It's also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.
And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.
Storing hydrogen is also really hard. It needs to be kept extremely cold, and when it isn't, it tends to pass right through most storage units.
But as a local battery, it can be very useful. Or for applications in large machinery where batteries aren't a useful option yet.
If the leaks of hydrogen should be kept under 5%, we don't have a good track record of keeping gas leaks under control anyway...
Yes. I'm not watching a video but it is a serious problem, especially as hydrogen degrades metals and finds its way out anyway. The private sector cannot be trusted to self-regulate nor the government to meaningfully regulate.
Trying very hard not to succumb to nihilism here ...
And better yet, if the excess heat can be used. Last Friday i heard a sales rep from a (green) hydrogen company describe their solution as a heating solution that produce hydrogen at an energy storage conference. Seems fair to me😊
I really don’t get why hydrogen remains popular. Hydrogen is significantly less efficient than lithium batteries in storing electricity. There are currently dozens of technologies on the way for improving batteries beyond what’s possible with lithium. So what’s the market potential for green hydrogen again?
It wins by a huge margin on the energy to weight ratio. In scenarios where weight doesn't matter it's dumb, but there is potential in places like air travel where it does make sense.
Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).
That doesn't make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can't take all the power they generate from it.
Oh great, and I was wondering why some of our policians were pushing hydrogen cars as an alternative to electric cars, despite even the car industry telling them to shut the fuck up.
You know, when a proton and electron love each other very much...
You can make hydrogen greenly with electricity and electrolysis. But I doubt BP is doing that.
Where is the electricity coming from?
Extra solar and wind capacity ideally, but again, I don't trust BP with that.
Hydrogen was made approximately 400,000 after the big bang in a process called recombination, as the universe cooled down enough for stable neutral atoms to exist.
OMFG that thread is full of people missing the point.
You mean the people literally answering the question? I doubt anybody is missing the point.
Attack geese.
I'd normally suggest that attack geese are against geneva conventions or something... but these guys.... they got it coming.
first you'd have to purify water by distilling it and then putting it through an R.O. with a regular water filter as a pre-filter.
Then once you have that completely pure mix of hydrogen and oxygen you'd need to do electrolysis on the water. But that initial purifying process would have to be done very strictly, because if there's even the smallest amount of salt or even chlorine in that water, or any other minerals then you could have a mixture of some very dangerous elements in the air around the water
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