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Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

hydrogeninsight.com

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Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#131

Post by runarberg »

Xixi wrote: post #119
jiggawatts wrote: post #31

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a "green energy" world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a "zero pollution fuel" while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal. If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indir…

These few legitimate use cases should not be dismissed though, from the perspective of sizing an energy grid: for example reducing iron ore with hydrogen rather than coal works out to about one nuclear reactor for one furnace. No idea for chemical feedstock, but it's likely to also be huge. I don't think anyone pushing for hydrogen in cars in Japan has done even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many nuclear…

There is a double standard here because any back of the envelope calculation for migrating the entire fleet of any sizeable country with battery electric cars will also turn out to be an impossible task with current technology and industrial manufacturing capabilities.

If your standard of passing as a technology is that it has to replace the current one in its entirety, you’ll always find it lacking, even with battery electric cars.

No, to stop fossil fuel pollution we need many technologies to come together, a lot of infrastructure and some societal change to happen gradually while not to slowly.

Indeed all the current battery electric cars (even adding every one that will be produced this year) are only providing a tiny relief for the climate disaster relatively speaking (if any). I bet that you don’t have to add together many bus and metro lines in Mexico and Brazil to sum up to all the electric cars in terms of climate relief.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#132

Post by noogle »

One thing opposition to any chemical electricity storage (hydrogen and other fuels) doesn't answer is: _how to transfer electricity across distances?_

HVDC are typically presented as the solution, but even if technically possible, they do not seem to actually materialize. Constant cooperation and reliance between countries for their energy seems like a bad idea in 2023. There are numerous solar project plans stuck because of lack of such transmission lines.

We did not start our current energy infrastructure with expensive pipelines. We started with batched shipments (tankers), and when supply and demand were stable enough we built a gas pipeline. Not sure why electricity requires the optimal solution or nothing.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#133

Post by narrator »

danans wrote: post #108
TheRealPomax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know Toyota was a fossil fuel company, or was owned by one? Japan is uniquely trying to make this thing work. They have no domestic oil production, and so few coal mines as to basically be irrelevant: all their fossil fuel is imported. Anywhere else on the planet: sure, this might be another way for big fossil to push for relevancy, but in Japan's case, hydrogen would be something that they can produce thems…

> I didn't know Toyota was a fossil fuel company, or was owned by one? > Japan is uniquely trying to make this thing work You have conflated Toyota with Japan there. Even in a society dominated by it's megacorps, they are not necessarily the same thing. After all, Nissan brought us the first mass market EV (and yes, they promptly punted on their first mover advantage). > Anywhere else on the planet: sure, this might…

Hydrogen will be the only thing that will work for long-haul aviation and large scale container shipping, in the form of ammonia (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/nilsrokke/2021/10/05/ammonia-a-... ). that isn't synthetic fuel which is ridiculously inefficient to produce from electricity, even more so than hydrogen. Japan being an island, this might be important to them. Zero Avia (http://www.zeroavia.com) is the leader in the hydrogen aviation space currently.

The other thing about hydrogen is that you can refuel quickly. Otherwise, you're going to need a ridiculous number of charging stations to have the same amount of transportation just to deal with charging time alone. Can you imagine how long it would take to refuel a long-haul container ship and/or what kind of electricity infrastructure would be needed for that?

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#134

Post by astrange »

naravara wrote: post #70
cbkeller wrote: post #12

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery. After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been…

It is a bad battery (along certain dimensions). But there is serious doubt as to whether the world actually has enough Lithium and other rare earths to actually meet battery demand indefinitely, even assuming we get the supply chains and infrastructure to where the materials are infinitely recyclable.

Lithium is not a rare earth metal (neither is cobalt). There is actually quite a lot of it, but it's evenly distributed so needs a lot of demand to be worth extracting from seawater. On the other hand, if we got a lot of cheap lithium we could use it to improve everyone's mental health like those fluoride conspiracy theories.

Notably people think Tesla gets lithium from Bolivia because Elon made a joke about it once, but I think it actually comes from Australia.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#135

Post by grey-area »

hajile wrote: post #111
gumby wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to stop using fossil fuels. Both their extraction and they use are ecologically disastrous. They power they provide is all op ex, rather than cap ex as with solar or wind (or nukes for that matter).

How will you make a battery-powered semi? Tesla claimed to have one then got super-quiet about it. Do the calculation for joules of power to move a fully-loaded tractor-trailer. Do a joule/kg calculation for modern batteries and calculate the series you get due to the rocket fuel problem (it takes a lot of battery to haul your battery). You find that the towing capacity of that semi is miniscule vs an ICE engine. Sam…

The EV semi is in testing with real loads and works fine.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#136

Post by 7e »

jiggawatts wrote: post #31

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a "green energy" world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a "zero pollution fuel" while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal. If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indir…

For long term energy storage (seasonal) hydrogen is vastly cheaper than batteries.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#137

Post by liketochill »

fy20 wrote: post #120
rtpg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the pricing compared to stored energy like pumping water up a hill? I get that it’s not exactly a universal strategy but not like underground caverns don’t have the same issue

The main issue with pumped storage is you need a lot of water. Imagine a elevated water tank like that used on farms. 20,000 gallons (75,000 litres) of water elevated at 18 feet (5.4m) has 1.1kWh of potential energy.

Or a lot of difference in elevation. With 900m head you can get 8 MW from only 1.5 m^3/s in a pipe less than 2 feet in diameter.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#138

Post by mlindner »

noogle wrote: post #132

One thing opposition to any chemical electricity storage (hydrogen and other fuels) doesn't answer is: _how to transfer electricity across distances?_ HVDC are typically presented as the solution, but even if technically possible, they do not seem to actually materialize. Constant cooperation and reliance between countries for their energy seems like a bad idea in 2023. There are numerous solar project plans stuck be…

> One thing opposition to any chemical electricity storage (hydrogen and other fuels) doesn't answer is: _how to transfer electricity across distances?_

For some countries this isn't even a problem so it doesn't need to be talked about. For example the amount of reusable energy available in the US covers all the needs in most areas.

Also you need to compare the reduced efficiency of building the renewable energy locally versus the energy lost in transporting that hydrogen and creation and use of the hydrogen. Creating the hydrogen is an especially inefficient process for example.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#139

Post by fomine3 »

starfallg wrote: post #128
fomine3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuel cell (and tank) is a different tech but car industry believe that it can be still manufactured at competitive cost and quality in Japan. It's hard to compete with Chinese massive amount of cheap batteries in Japan.

Japan together with South Korea was a leader in NiMH and Lithium based battery chemistry during this period. So that wasn't the reason.

Make it massively and cheaper is different to developing better one. So they now try to developing solid state battery but who knows will it success.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#140

Post by _8j50 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #31

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a "green energy" world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a "zero pollution fuel" while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal. If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indir…

Battery based technology requires rare earth minerals which only a few countries control from what I understand. It is also not feasible due to weight to ship batteries to transfer power, you can only use them near the power source, is that not correct?

Desalination is desparately needed, one byproduct is hydrogen: https://scitechdaily.com/efficient-seawater-desalination-and...

Solutions that solve multiple problems and don't disrupt the norm are ideal are they not?

I mean, by all means, go to war with fossil fuel companies if your goal is only that but less people to fight means more practical change. I am hoping micro nuclear reactors become all the rage but even then a light fuel you can transport easily (despite the difficulty of efficiently transporting hydrogen) is sort of a battery except you can send lots of it continually.

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