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After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

economist.com

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Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#81

Post by Xylakant »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #79
Xylakant wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen has the nasty property of leaking through many materials, including metals. It also needs to be kept extremely cold. Both properties make it much harder to transport and store. It’s not clear that technology must exist that makes transporting and storing hydrogen as safe and economically viable as gasoline.

Even storage of helium has largely been solved, and that is far more tricky than hydrogen. It’s just expensive.

Helium is inert and not prone to explode when it sees the first spark. Also, as you indicate: storing helium is expensive - it is only economically viable because there is no competing product and hence whatever the price for helium storage is, it will get paid.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#82

Post by sorenbs »

jasonlaramburu wrote: post #57
speedgoose wrote: post #6

I used to drive a hydrogen car once in a while a few years ago. It was nice to fill the car in a few minutes and get about 300km of range, but that was it. With the hydrogen you have so few refueling stations, they are very expensive, that range anxiety is a thing. To not improve things, reliability is very poor. My work had a hydrogen refueling station on its parking. It was often broken and actually a bit scary to…

When you consider the energy required to produce lithium ion batteries they are actually worse than fuel cells from an emissions perspective: “As an example, a 100kWh battery will give a potential range of 250 miles and, in order to produce that battery, it will take around 20 tonnes of CO2,” he said. “A typical battery lasts for 150,000 miles, so that equates to around 83g/km of CO2. Then, when you take into account…

Sounds like you need to follow Auke on Twitter :-P

He has literally spent the last five years debunking this nonsense. Here's a thread from just 5 hours ago: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1279359481177083904

TL;DR: These comparisons always use too much energy for battery production, too high efficiency for gasoline cars, and fail to take into account that the grid is rapidly decarbonising, even in backwater countries like USA. Your source claims 20 tonnes for battery production, but reality is around 6 tonnes and falling due to grid decarbonising.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#83

Post by unchocked »

threatripper wrote: post #7

Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you cou…

And batteries have a scaling problem - hydrogen complements them nicely for long term storage. When energy is free, make hydrogen and store it in a tank (or in a salt cavern, as the article describes).

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#84

Post by FabHK »

svara wrote: post #24

I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic. Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1]. The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down ex…

Regarding [1], the article quotes production costs of USD 50/MWh for renewables, and USD 100/MWh for coal (graph 3).

You/[1] is saying that with storage costs of USD 150,000 per MWh, renewables can be competitive? It doesn't compute, unless I misunderstand something.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#85

Post by FabHK »

SmokeyHamster wrote: post #77
threatripper wrote: post #7

Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you cou…

>You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. When wouldn't it be at a loss? That's just physics. Hydrogen fuel cells aren't a source of energy in and of themselves, they're just a storage medium, like any other battery. And the act of filling them will never by 100% efficient because nothing is, so there will always be loss.

Yes, any conversion incurs a loss. The point is that hydrogen introduces additional conversions, because it must first be produced, and then converted to something useful.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#86

Post by pkphilip »

threatripper wrote: post #7

Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you cou…

There are other ways of generating electricity apart from electrolysis. For example, from food waste through yeast and other methods. Yes, there is some energy being used but you are talking about material which would go waste anyway:

https://fuelcellsworks.com/news/a-simplified-way-to-turn-foo...

First: Energy density The primary advantage of hydrogen is energy density. Though Li Ion and other technologies have improved considerably, they are no where near the energy density of fossil fuel technologies and therefore vehicles which use these batteries will have to carry huge weight of batteries to get better range. With Hydrogen that is not a problem.

Second: Storage There has been huge advances in the safe storage of hydrogen - from the use of nanoporous carbon for storage https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100200711...

to the use of LOHCs (Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers) that is aromatic liquids to store hydrogen instead of storing it as gas or liquid hydrogen: https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrogen-storage-get...

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#87

Post by polishdude20 »

SmokeyHamster wrote: post #77
threatripper wrote: post #7

Hydrogen has an efficiency problem. You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. Then you need to store it and transport it, which is costly and may impose quite some energy cost for cooling or compression. Then you need to convert it back to electricity, also at a loss. If you start at electricity, the electrical grid and batteries would be much more efficient. If you start at oil or gas, you cou…

>You need to convert other forms of energy to hydrogen at a loss. When wouldn't it be at a loss? That's just physics. Hydrogen fuel cells aren't a source of energy in and of themselves, they're just a storage medium, like any other battery. And the act of filling them will never by 100% efficient because nothing is, so there will always be loss.

Hydrogen fuel cells don't store the hydrogen. They convert the hydrogen into electricity. The losses come from a: converting electricity to hydrogen by electrolysis and b: converting that hydrogen back to electricity.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#88

Post by azdle »

FabHK wrote: post #84
svara wrote: post #24

I've been diving into this literature a bit recently, and it's been mostly encouraging. Affordable clean energy is realistic. Clean energy sources are typically the cheapest sources of energy [0]. The intermittent production issue is solvable: At ~150 $/kWh storage, a combination of storage and renewables is the cheapest energy source 95% of the time [1]. The cost of different energy storage methods is coming down ex…

Regarding [1], the article quotes production costs of USD 50/MWh for renewables, and USD 100/MWh for coal (graph 3). You/[1] is saying that with storage costs of USD 150,000 per MWh, renewables can be competitive? It doesn't compute, unless I misunderstand something.

Just from your numbers, it sounds like it's a good deal as long as you need to (grid) store less than 1/3 of your generated/consumed energy.

Re: After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

#90

Post by speedgoose »

amelius wrote: post #49
speedgoose wrote: post #6

I used to drive a hydrogen car once in a while a few years ago. It was nice to fill the car in a few minutes and get about 300km of range, but that was it. With the hydrogen you have so few refueling stations, they are very expensive, that range anxiety is a thing. To not improve things, reliability is very poor. My work had a hydrogen refueling station on its parking. It was often broken and actually a bit scary to…

> Electric cars with large batteries are a much better solution to hydrogen cars IMHO. Electric cars are still very dangerous when they catch fire though. And the fires are very difficult to control. Especially in multistorey (or underground) car parks. And even more so if there are multiple EVs parked next to eachother.

Sure when the batteries burn it's a problem. But the batteries don't burn that often. For example, when a diesel car did burn inside an airport parking in Stavanger, many electric cars did burn as well but not their batteries.
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