181–190 of 254 posts
I'm interested if you could have a hydrogen stove, or hydrogen space heater- just as diesel, kerosene, propane, methane, electricity, alcohol, wood, and coal are all viable. What practical problems would arise? For example, gasoline camping stoves exist, but are too dangerous for indoor use. If hydrogen is widely available, surely someone will want to do this.. This is what the flame looks like: https://www.youtube.c…
The FF industry is leaping (has leapt, historically) on CCS as a getout clause and has sunk french metric tonnes of money into CCS. So far, its uneconomic except for the specific use of pumping gas into wells to make them more productive, which leads to more fugitive gas. No significant CCS experiment worldwide has achieved its goals as sequestration. The one in Western Australia releases so much CO2 it has to pay a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully agree with your perception of CCS but i think it's only a small historical detour of about the same scale/level of harm as cellulosic ethanol or concentrated solar thermal used to be. Tried, failed, moved on. No one bets the farm on it, Fit for 55 plan for example, makes no mention of CCS.
Not here in Australia. Have a look at: https://www.kwm.com/au/en/insights/latest-thinking/ccs-in-au... (Burrup is the one I mentioned) Thats $250 million of committed funding to a range of high scale projects by the gas industry, coal-seam gas included.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I read, the efficiency of ammonia production is like 16%, which is well below hydrogen at like 40% or whatever. Even with cheap renewables that is terrible amount of losses even before you get to use the fuel.
Let me quote Clark, from Ignition! https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd... > the nature of the chemical industry being what it was, and is, one could be confident that it would come down to a reasonable figure when anybody wanted it in quantity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you expand why separation from water is a net energy loss?
It is absolutely trivial that separating hydrogen from water uses energy. Then, when you burn it, you get water and energy back. That is the whole point.
What wasn't obvious to me from the parent comment was why it is apparently completely impractical. No energy conversion has an efficiency of 100% so the answer couldn't just have been "because thermodynamics" but as other comments have since revealed, it is because _current_ hydrolyzers only operate on an efficiency scale of 60-80%.
The FF industry is leaping (has leapt, historically) on CCS as a getout clause and has sunk french metric tonnes of money into CCS. So far, its uneconomic except for the specific use of pumping gas into wells to make them more productive, which leads to more fugitive gas. No significant CCS experiment worldwide has achieved its goals as sequestration. The one in Western Australia releases so much CO2 it has to pay a…
I'm interested if you could have a hydrogen stove, or hydrogen space heater- just as diesel, kerosene, propane, methane, electricity, alcohol, wood, and coal are all viable. What practical problems would arise? For example, gasoline camping stoves exist, but are too dangerous for indoor use. If hydrogen is widely available, surely someone will want to do this.. This is what the flame looks like: https://www.youtube.c…
For heating, you are probably better off converting to electricity (burning or fuel cell) and driving a high-COP heat pump. Good heat pumps are ~250-300% "efficient" at "converting" electricity to heat. (Efficiency isn't in the Carnot sense, and heat pumps move heat rather than generating heat... Semantics, but point stands.) For example: I recall reading that it is more efficient (ie BTUs generated) to use natural g…
It’s more efficient to burn the gas in a grid power station, convert to electricity, and use the electricity to drive the heat pump, then it is to burn the gas for heat directly.
Cheap, green fusion would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green synthetic fuels would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green antimatter reactors would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green vacuum point energy reactors would be... you get the idea.
However, the cheap, green sources of energy today are solar and wind, and no one is going to beat them for a decade.
Here's more fun stuff:
- Hydrogen has been and will be sold as green and extracted from fossil fuels.
- Hydrogen has been and will be propped up by desperate industries to delay or obfuscate EV and actual green energy
- Hydrogen has no significant infrastructure, while EVs and green energy have extant and robust delivery infrastructure (aside from battery storage).
- and I didn't even get into the inefficiencies and engineering challenges.
Hydrogen will have it's niches. But right now it is a trojan horse, and suffers the same issues as new nuclear or fusion: solar and wind are kicking so much ass and still getting stronger/cheaper/better year on year, that any application that involves even a five year schedule can't target the price to be competitive.
Usually, they'll be disingenuous and only talk about current prices, and complain about "subsidies" for their competitors and hide the "subsidies" they need or will redirect.
The path forward is solar, wind, battery, and PHEVs and EVs.
Oh look, Russia's war on Ukraine being sold to prop up an uncompetitive approach (well it is a trojan horse by the oil industry, what would one expect).
You know what would have made us ready for Russia? If we took an auto design that is 25 years old (the hybrid vehicle) and slapped a charging plug on it (aka a PHEV) and about 10 or 15 years ago forced or incented every new car to have that design, and pushed incentives to get the all-electric range improved each year as batteries got better and better.
To emphasize, that design was not rocket science. It was superior efficiency on highway (atkinson cycle), far greater efficiency in city driving, better torque, quieter, less emissions, all-electric for 80-90% of city trips, blah blah blah.
We'd need less military, would have kneecapped Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, averted Daesh (funded by oil), Ukraine (it's over pipelines, dummies), and Syria (also was over pipelines) in all likelihood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection. For instance, Chicago could get solar power from Chile in the winter time to buffer out the seasonal variability. Or if they didn't even want to have to maintain a smaller buffer to deal with day/night cycles, they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on tim…
The US already struggles to build transmission lines across state lines. Building across nations is basically impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For heating, you are probably better off converting to electricity (burning or fuel cell) and driving a high-COP heat pump. Good heat pumps are ~250-300% "efficient" at "converting" electricity to heat. (Efficiency isn't in the Carnot sense, and heat pumps move heat rather than generating heat... Semantics, but point stands.) For example: I recall reading that it is more efficient (ie BTUs generated) to use natural g…
A modern heat pump claims a cop in the 4.8 range It’s more efficient to burn the gas in a grid power station, convert to electricity, and use the electricity to drive the heat pump, then it is to burn the gas for heat directly.