Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by ruchir » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:02 AM UTC

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…

> why not just use the electricity directly and not pay the 40-50% penalty of electrolysis?

because EV battery disposal can be a huge environmental problem. electrolysis is zero waste.

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

#152

Post by mlindner » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:04 AM UTC

the-anarchist wrote: post #39

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…

I'm lost, I thought hydrogen is the goat. Many manufacturers (eg Benz) push it no?

The more you need to care about the weight of energy storage the more hydrogen is useful. For land vehicles hydrogen is basically completely pointless and for stationary storage it's truly pointless. Hydrogen makes some sense for aircraft but not for anything on land.

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

#153

Post by foobazgt » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:05 AM UTC

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…

I don't know if the specs are public, but from what people have seen, it seems to perform mostly as advertised. Frito Lay is using them in earnest and happy with the results so far: https://insideevs.com/news/632312/tesla-semi-megacharger-at-...

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

#154

Post by mlindner » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:09 AM UTC

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #87

We can't give up on hydrogen. A transfer to EV will not be practical for all current fossil fuel vehicles so we need an alternative for them. Hydrogen is not practical now but it has potential. I think electric and hydrogen are the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Are there others?

EVs for land vehicles is a solved problem and is practical for all of them. Hydrogen makes sense for aircraft (though I'd argue artificial jet fuel production from algae makes more sense). Hydrogen has very narrow use cases that make it beat using batteries.

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

#155

Post by gruez » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #121

gruez wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this have anything to do with the question posed by the parent? You want the whole world to stop using fossil fuels, but clearly the world isn't ready for that. In the meantime, what's wrong with fossil fuel companies using some of their profits to fuel (heh) renewable energy projects?

Those companies have a half century history of lying about the science. We have no reason to believe they aren’t lying now about this technology’s feasibility or the carbon emissions in their production process — or that any profits wouldn’t be used in part to fund their political lobbying to prevent action or dodge the consequences of their actions.

>We have no reason to believe they aren’t lying now about this technology’s feasibility

It'd be a pretty big lie for them to pull off. It's one thing to spend a few million funding some climate change denying think tanks. It's a whole other level of deception to spend hundreds of millions on a technology in the hopes that others will fall for it.

>the carbon emissions in their production process

This seems like the weakest possible argument. Either the chemical reaction they're proposing generates carbon or it doesn't. It's very easy to validate. Are you expecting them to build an entire "green" hydrogen plant that claims to use a process that doesn't produce co2, but is secretly burning oil? That seems extremely risky to pull off and very easy to discover.

>or that any profits wouldn’t be used in part to fund their political lobbying to prevent action or dodge the consequences of their actions.

So you would rather shoot ourselves in the feet (metaphorically) when it comes to the green energy transition, because you can't stand the thought of the bad guys making money in the process? Do you also think that we should drag out the pandemic a bit longer because a bad guy[1] might be making money in process?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer#Legal_issues

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

#156

Post by bigger_cheese » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:11 AM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #65

credit_guy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydrogen is the way to send energy from sunny places, like Australia to not-so-sunny places, like Japan. You can't send batteries, and you can't lay a cable that long. You can try to pack that energy in a different form of chemical energy like ammonia, or methylcyclohexane, or methanol, or synthetic methane or gasoline. The jury is still out. Europe is investing big time in hydrogen too, so chances are that hydrogen…

You absolutely could lay a cable that long, and IMO we should . There is no reason not to export abundant renewable energy today while we can, and figure out the long term storage issues as we go. Hydrogen can be manufactured anywhere you have seawater and electricity, so it would be a much better use of resources to lay a subsea superconducting cable once and let Japan store power by generating hydrogen locally.

There was literally an article in the news today about all the problems they are having building a cable from Australia to Singapore

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-23/sun-cable-demise-show...

From the article "Crucially, he argued the subsea cable was likely to be its steepest hurdle, pointing out that it was more than five times longer than the world's biggest, the 767-kilometre Viking link between the UK and Denmark currently under construction"

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

#157

Post by runarberg » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

danans wrote: post #117

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #87

We can't give up on hydrogen. A transfer to EV will not be practical for all current fossil fuel vehicles so we need an alternative for them. Hydrogen is not practical now but it has potential. I think electric and hydrogen are the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Are there others?

> A transfer to EV will not be practical for all current fossil fuel vehicles But we can transfer most of them to EVs, including nearly the entire light duty vehicle fleet and short haul trucking, which is probably good enough. There will always be niche cases for ICE vehicles, like driving across Siberia, or military vehicles. But the vast majority can be electrified. Flight is a different story, perhaps hydrogen wi…

> But we can transfer most of them to EVs, including nearly the entire light duty vehicle fleet and short haul trucking.

No we can’t. We don’t have the industrial manufacturing capability. Not even by a long shot. And even if we did, we don’t have enough minded minerals to supply the manufactures, and even if we did, we don’t have enough electrical infrastructure to charge all the electric cars.

Note this also applies to hydrogen, and even if we had both, each technology relieving the stress on the manufacturing capability of the other, then we’d still need the infrastructure capable of supplying to both.

The best path forward for immediate success is public transit, using whichever technology is available (hydrogen, battery, overhead wires, diesel, whatever).

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

#158

Post by jeffbee » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:15 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #55

grahar64 wrote: post #25

For example, Toyota makes good reliable cars, and saw massive success with the Prius because it was the only good alternative to a full internal combustion engine. Now, years after that success, Toyota has only a very limited selection of fully electric plug in vehicles, and all their competitors are a decade in front of them because they continue to chase some pipe dream of hydrogen, is just disappointing.

I'm curious how far ahead are Toyota's competitors. For instance, how many more EVs are they selling than the Toyota hybrid plugins ? (and I mean that not just in the US or Norway, but globally) To my knowledge the EV field is still a very small and restricted market, and the makers are all about the same advancement technology wise. I mean, Tesla for instance sources its batteries from Panasonic, which isn't much mo…

I think this is the right way to look at it. How many cumulative tons of batteries has Toyota shipped to end customers and for how many years have those cars been on the road? This is proportional to the amount of fossil fuel burning foregone. That's a benefit.

Toyota has shipped 20 million hybrids over 25 years. Tesla has shipped 3 million EVs, mostly in the past few years. Which strategy has cumulatively avoided more GHG emissions?

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

#159

Post by roneythomas6 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:17 AM UTC

themitigating wrote: post #112

roneythomas6 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key here is Toyota is biggest employer in Japan and when you add its suppliers it's even bigger. Toyota very much wants an Hydrogen future so that they can retain those jobs.

I read this analysis last year about why Japan is so behind with EVs. The number of parts required is less then combustion and Japan's government is concerned about maintaining employment levels This article talks about the filler jobs and how the economy is stuck in the past. https://news.yahoo.com/japan-future-stuck-past-220130554.htm... Annoyingly I can't find the source that went into why they are pushing EVs. Ed…

Yup that is correct. I know what you are talking about. Japanese govt(MITI) is very much involved in Totyota’s future goals.

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

#160

Post by defrost » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 4:29 AM UTC

liketochill wrote: post #124

cbkeller wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seasonal storage is an interesting idea. Rare grid outages seems pretty easy with batteries if the South Australia example is anything to go by though, and for medium-term storage there's also pumped hydro -- not sure where that compares in cost?

How long can south Australia power their load from batteries? I thought they had the one 100MWH battery so basically could power 100k house for an hour? And that battery was over 100 million dollars.

South Australia’s incredible week: 104.1 per cent wind and solar over seven days

https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-incredible-week...

   South Australia aims to reach 100 per cent “net renewables” within a few years – over a full year – but in the past week it has already done better than that.

It would appear they are aiming to export excess renewable power to Victoria (neighbouring state).