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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

#101

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

Xylakant wrote: post #81
ComputerGuru wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remind me but there is also no way to make new helium. It’s not a renewable, is it?

I thought it was only available as a byproduct of natural gas collection.

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

#102

Post by ncmncm »

weswpg wrote: post #94
xyzzyz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, from food waste through yeast and other methods. How is it better than generating biogas from biomaterial, something we already do at industrial scale? What’s the advantage of biohydrogen over biomethane?

isn't methane much worse for the environment than generating power from hydrogren?

It depend where the (carbon in the) methane comes from. If it comes from the ground, the exhaust contributes to global climate disruption.

Venting methane is worse, but that would be wasteful, too.

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

#104

Post by jasonlaramburu »

kolinko wrote: post #71
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are those emissions calculated? Is there anything in the process that needs to generate co2? (like in concrete, where production of concrete generates co2 by itself). If this co2 is due to electricity/transportation cost then the problem will solve itself with more electricity from green sources.

Couldn’t you make the exact same argument about hydrogen? As renewables grow the emissions associated with hydrogen production will come down too.

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

#105

Post by jasonlaramburu »

mcot2 wrote: post #67
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

1.) There is already tech in development for batteries to last 1M miles. https://www.autoblog.com/2020/06/11/catl-million-mile-batter... 2.) Energy required to produce the batteries will eventually shift to zero emission sources. 3.) Materials can be recycled from the battery even after its million+ mile use. It’s hard to overcome the energy required to produce hydrogen plus the bad efficiency of fuel cells compared…

Green energy will decarbonize hydrogen production as well.

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

#106

Post by jasonlaramburu »

sorenbs wrote: post #82
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those figures cited by Auke are self-reported by Tesla. Not saying that invalidates them but important to consider context. It would seem that emissions associated with battery production vary greatly depending on geography and mix of energy sources. Eg in Germany, emissions from Model 3 battery production are estimated at 11 to 15 tonnes per vehicle: https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-electric-cars-...

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

#107

Post by wtallis »

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.

I think that $150000 per MWh buys you a storage system you can use more than once, rather than being the cost per usage of the storage system. After a few years, the amortized cost drops below coal generation.

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

#108

Post by thinkcontext »

generatorguy wrote: post #73
thinkcontext wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iceland exports renewable energy in the form of aluminum. They have the potential to develop more energy but it's controversial because of impact on the landscape.

What type of energy can they develop? Iceland is well known for their geothermal energy I wouldn’t have thought that would have a huge impact on the landscape more than any other low rise industrial buildings.

70% of electricity is hydro, most of the rest is geothermal. On the consumption side about 70% is used for aluminum.

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

#109

Post by dmix »

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…

I've read about a couple of solar projects that projected x/kWh and turned out to be much worse in production.

Pakistan's big deployment is one example, it was planned to be 100MW but only produced 18MW. Mostly because they didn't factor in the dust that would cover the panels, keeping them clean was very expensive (I'm curious how this applies to other proposed desert deployments). Nor factoring in the typical malaise of public projects adding significant delays/costs, which is hardly unique to Pakistan when it comes to major infrastructure in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park

Then there's the famous Solyandra which got half a billion in US tax payer money and flopped without ever being competitive price-wise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

Tesla's famous Australian battery factory only has enough to power 30k homes for about 1-2hrs each day. It was on-schedule, which is rare, and also makes money but scaling it up to millions of homes to make a real dent in coal would be much more challenging, especially sourcing enough lithium.

I think it's safe to take any cheery prediction from green projects and add 1.5x time/production costs and/or minus 30% of the expected output.

Note: I'm not trying to rain on the parade, I'm otherwise all for this stuff as long as it's realistic on a large scale.

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

#110

Post by BenjiWiebe »

kumarski wrote: post #5

Okay, going to chime in here because this is categorically wrong on so many fronts. Tldr: Impossible for civilization to make an instantaneous non-gradual switch to hydrogen fuel cells. People like Hydrogen because they're hyped about how it is: - Clean - Plentiful - Emission-less Hydrogen is difficult to handle. - Unwieldy as a gas - Boils at 20 degrees F/ - 6 degrees C / ~420 Kelvins - Tough to maintain at a high p…

Hydrogen boils at 20 degrees Kelvin, not Fahrenheit. That's -423 degrees Fahrenheit. If it boiled at 20 F, it would be a LOT easier to store and handle.
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