211–220 of 254 posts
Science is clear and simple: we have to half (at least) our energy consumption in the next decades to avoid the worst of the Catastrophe. Sorry Bill, your private jet should be grounded and the rich much be steeply taxed.
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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.
That's right, but by comparison, Australia has 25GW of solar installed, so this funding represents only $0.01 per watt of installed solar, probably less than 1% of subsidy that went to solar. It's an OK amount to try and fail once.
A 250m subsidy to grid solar right now would easily increase total installed solar to 100GW+. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that project alone was a larger subsidy than every subsidy given to grid solar in Australia.
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We produce it in immense quantity from fossil fuels and vent the fossil CO2 into the atmosphere. The price of which is forecast to go up. Green Ammonia is made from renewable energy, which is forecast to become cheaper. It also requires electrolysers which are ramping up production and are also predicted to fall in price as they get made at scale from cheaper components. So it's a fairly safe bet even if you don't be…
Ammonia production is already in billions of dollars, we produce 191 million tonnes What is the basis in physics for your belief that ammonia can be produced more efficieblntly, and why was it not done already?
It's not "cheaper" for a mob connected waste disposal firm to dump waste into a river. If they were prosecuted for the damage they did to other people's property and had to pay for the damage they did then they'd need to raise their prices to the point that just dealing with it properly would be cheaper.
In physics terms:
Dig up hydrogen connected to carbon. Separate the hydrogen from the carbon. Release the fossil carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. Capture the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Seperate it from oxygen, store the carbon. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
Versus
Use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
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The point is that some countries have long dark winters, often with windless spells. Some are also lowland countries with little or no access to hydro. For green energy, you'd need to literally store months' worth of energy somehow, and the cost of doing that via batteries is prohibitive too. I guess the hope is that storing hydrogen, difficult and expensive that it is, could be made to be more like storing hydrocarb…
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…
Nope, we tried this in Europe and you end up with a free rider problem where nobody but us invested sufficiently in renewables and decided to buy most of their gas from Russia instead, which led to them driving our electricity prices through the roof when the rug got pulled from under them by the war even though we did all the right things. It was clearly a mistake that we deregulated and connected to the European market and now everyone knows this with certainty.
Funny how Bill Gates always talks about global warming, but then owns mega mansions, super yachts, and flies all over the world in private jets
It’s because reducing your personal footprint feels good but doesn’t achieve much globally.
I don't see hydrogen playing any role for energy storage or grid demand balancing. Even if all the technical and engineering challenges associated with storing and transporting it safely could be addressed, I just don't see how the economics of green hydrogen is supposed to work. The round-trip energy efficiency of electrolysis-fuel cell is poor - currently about 40%. The counter-argument is that such inefficiency do…
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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.
That is trivial yes and I was well aware of that :) 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%.
What do you imagine is the raw efficiency of making hydrogen from. NG, vs the enthalpy of the input gas?
BTW, "electrolysers". Hydrolysis is a thing plants do.
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You insist on this, but it is not, in fact, true. All that is true is that we have not yet built out enough electrolysis equipment to produce much hydrogen. But that is an empty fact; of course, before you build something, you don't have it yet.
Let's made a game: how much electricity in kWh you need to extract a liter / gallon of H₂? How fast H₂ leak from a generic tank/in what form you propose to contain it and how much energy such form demand. With this data we can discuss scalability.
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Diverting money from building out renewables to building nukes, for whatever purpose, brings climate catastrophe nearer. If ever there was a process forgiving of intermittently available energy, it is chemical synthesis. The same money spent on wind and solar would produce a lot more ammonia. Conversion losses don't matter much when marginal cost of generation is near zero, as we get with renewables, but very much no…
Technically it may be forgiving, but not economically. Imagine electrolyzer or ammonia plant that uses only 20% of full capacity on average because of using only peak electricity surplus. The rest 80% is basically wasted. Classical plant with higher capacity factor might still be more profitable even if it uses more expensive electricity.
Demand for ammonia will be so strong that, after enough renewable overcapacity is built out, you would run electrolysers off your other storage, 24/7.
A nuke would, of course, produce exactly zero grams of ammonia for ten years. It would also require burning coal for those ten years. Ten years of coal is part of the cost never accounted for, like the public indemnification subsidy, and cost of decommissioning.
Starting after the ten years, the nuke would produce a fraction of the ammonia, per dollar, that the renewables would have, because operating cost of nukes is quite high, against zero for renewables.
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That's right, but by comparison, Australia has 25GW of solar installed, so this funding represents only $0.01 per watt of installed solar, probably less than 1% of subsidy that went to solar. It's an OK amount to try and fail once.
Most of that is 25GW is recent and cheap PV at close to $0.02 per watt. It’s the tiny fraction from before 2015 that was really expensive. A 250m subsidy to grid solar right now would easily increase total installed solar to 100GW+. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that project alone was a larger subsidy than every subsidy given to grid solar in Australia.