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

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

#251

Post by rich_sasha » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:10 AM UTC

POPOSYS wrote: post #235

rich_sasha wrote: post #210

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter. Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's…

We can not discuss these important issues in a football fan like culture of mutual hostility. We need to collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2. Hate speech against "the others" does not help at all.

Not sure if that's the point you are making (or the opposite) but it's precisely how I perceive the discussion: football mentality. A vocal group of people, whose background is not strictly energy production/storage, shouts down anything but solar/wind/batteries.

Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature.

If you wanted to just throw money at the problem, I'd just throw it at nuclear - reliable, carbon free, well tested and doesn't need much storage. But hey I guess that's the wrong answer to some.

My background, FWIW, is also not energy, so I'm just happy to see the research net cast wide and well funded throughout.

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

#252

Post by TheLoafOfBread » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:14 AM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #248

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...

Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.

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

#253

Post by rich_sasha » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:16 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #244

rich_sasha wrote: post #210

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter. Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's…

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are som…

So, the context is: various organisations are researching how hydrogen storage might work. And a gaggle of, hmm, commentators goes "omg did they not get the memo? Hydrogen is stoopid. Batteries much better soon".

I'm glad research is funded, because you literally never know where the breakthrough will come. Solar was painfully expensive for most of its history, now it's super-cheap.

As far as I'm concerned, a battery+wind+solar grid is just as much vapourware with serious barriers to success. I'm glad they are worked on though...

EDIT: for example, I'm quite excited about gravitation nal storage in disused mines (coal ones often, in fact). By the same token, should that be sacrificed on the altar of batteries? Or actually pursued, possibly to a happy end?

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

#254

Post by chronogram » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

linguae wrote: post #141

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?

I agree. I bet on hydrogen by purchasing a new Toyota Mirai two months ago. The reason I purchased a Mirai instead of a BEV is because I am an apartment dweller with no convenient charging options available to me; my landlord has no plans to install any charging units anytime soon and relocating is very expensive (I live in Santa Cruz County). My employer also lacks chargers. Hydrogen-powered cars are good in situati…

While not currently realistic, Reliance is aiming to produce clean hydrogen for $1/kg. More importantly that would increase scale. I think you're going to notice that sooner in 2040 than in 2024 though.

> With help from Stiesdal, a European clean-technology firm, Reliance is building a large factory in Jamnagar to manufacture electrolysers. These devices, powered by clean electricity from Reliance’s planned solar farms, will then be used to manufacture green hydrogen. Mr Ambani asserts that these investments will make India the first country to produce green hydrogen for $1 a kilogram, within a decade. (The current cost is more than $4/kg.) He dismisses doubters, pointing to his recent success in delivering data to mobile telephones at the world’s lowest cost.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/10/20/will-india-bec...

I don't have a stake in any race and haven't had a need to drive a car in years, but a combination of three energy sources sound ideal to me. Batteries for two-wheelers that keep the weight low and commercial vans & buses, grid solutions for static highly efficient routes (AKA trains), and something like hydrogen for long range non-static infrastructure (transport trucks). The road network where I live is of a high quality, and currently road maintenance for fully electric vehicles is fully subsidised to promote adoption, but eventually we'll have to choose between our roads and the funds. (I am not someone with any expertise in this matter)

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

#255

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:29 AM UTC

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #246

rgbrenner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are som…

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by raphaelj » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:34 AM UTC

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #246

rgbrenner wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are som…

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

Will not the H2 tanks scale better than batteries for large scale storage?

Battery capacity scales linearly (n) to material requirements , while a gas tank's capacity scales quadrically to material requirements (n^2, because of only using a surface of materials to store a volume).

I'd also assume the energy required to keep the tank cold relatively lower as the tanks gets larger.

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

#257

Post by 6510 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:36 AM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #241

rich_sasha wrote: post #210

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter. Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's…

I am not a fan of hydrogen, because I once worked with a former NASA robotics engineer. We were looking for a way to power terrestrial robots, and we asked him about hydrogen. He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems: - Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere. - Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—u…

The internet says storing hydrogen in metal hydrides is safe and offers similar kwh/kg as lithium ion batteries.

It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production.

Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.

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

#258

Post by sofixa » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:36 AM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #248

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disingenuous. Batteries are more convenient for everyday electronics, but not necessarily better for big storage. Reason is, that you can't easily scale a battery storage, while hydrogen can be scaled just by putting more steel tanks.

Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...

> weigh too much

This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded.

Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.

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

#259

Post by planede » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:38 AM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #126

XorNot wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One large LNG carrier of class Q-Max carries 260000 m3 of liquefied gas. If we stitch to hydrogen, that contains 2.2 million gigajoules of energy, which is 614 GWh, or a bit more than 25 GWd. If we assume a conversion efficiency of 60%, then that's about 15 GWd of electricity after taking into account all the losses. If one carrier arrives every 15 days, then this can produce a sustained 1 GW of electricity, which is…

What about the cost of the supporting infrastructure for cramming that 1GW into hydrogen and back to electricity? Well, with fuel-cell cars you don't need centralized infrastructure for converting back, but then you need infrastructure to distribute it inland. You still need the supporting infrastructure on Australia's side for the electrolysis.

Of course the power cable would also need supporting infra, other than the length of the cable, but I have a hunch that it would cost way less. I have no numbers though.

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

#260

Post by contravariant » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #244

rich_sasha wrote: post #210

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the "renewable energy gang" is. The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter. Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's…

The people who like hydrogen should show us all that we're wrong. - First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842 - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~ You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on. I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage. Hydrogen? "There are som…

That's not really the strongest argument though, you may as well compare whatever happens to be the most recent version of a hydrogen fuel cell to the original battery developed by Volta.

I mean the whole cathode / electrolyte / anode idea hasn't changed much, we just found better materials for all three.