Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 137 posts

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#81

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Today's magic hydrogen story!

Please stop building cheap renewable alternative energy! Keep using fossil fuels while we wait for the hydrogen breakthrough that hasn't happened in the past 20 years but is right around the corner!

Enjoy FUD and lies from pro hydrogen lobbies and startups! Listen to mendacious exaggerations of solar panel / battery / fiberglass disposal/ bird deaths!

Listen to dismissal of fundamental entropy laws, cherry picked stats, and lies about grey and green hydrogen.

Watch handwaving over infrastructure, transportation storage and refuelling station engineering and costs.

Anyway, have we ever hit a hydrogen vein in centuries of fossil fuels exploration? Or will oil and gas just say that the methane they are extracting is hydrogen?

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#82

Post by mountainboy »

quote from article: "The Ford engine ran until its spark plugs gave out a few years ago and a newly installed fuel cell—quieter and more efficient—has not yet been hooked into the village grid. Bourakébougou is dark, waiting for a hydrogen future to arrive."

They couldn't replace a few spark plugs?

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#83

Post by rcme »

Rimintil wrote: post #65
DennisP wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has very little to do with the article, which is about actual hydrogen retrievable from underground deposits. It wouldn't be made from anything, just piped out of the ground.

> That has very little to do with the article It came from the article.

Yea, but that wasn't the point of the article.

> Pumping hydrogen out of the ground should be much cheaper, which is why proponents sometimes call the natural stuff “gold.”

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#84

Post by Animats »

There are startups in this area, but they're kind of sketchy.[1] These people claim to have drilled a well, and are "finalizing plans to conduct an extended flow test". No numbers, though.

Desert Mountain Energy has a well that produces about 4% helium, 4% hydrogen, and the rest is mostly nitrogen. They barely mention the hydrogen. The helium is far more valuable. Separating out 4% hydrogen is possible but complicated, and requires energy input.

There's a huge industry in drilling holes deep into the ground, for water, oil, gas, sulfur, and heat. The US alone has over a million oil wells. If there was concentrated hydrogen to be found, you'd expect that more would have been found by now.

[1] https://hyterra.com/home/

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#85

Post by MarkusQ »

hasmanean wrote: post #77
chmod600 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures."

The idea that oil and gas come from decaying organic matter is the prevailing theory in the west but some people including Thomas Gold had the idea that they come from the primordial material the earth is made of, and seep up to the crust. If that is the case then there could be vast quantities of hydrocarbons inside the earth. https://youtu.be/lr42BP3wvOw

It's the prevailing theory because there's so much evidence for it. We have good models for how it works, they are predictive, we find deposits at various stages in the process, we find fossils of the expected sort throughout coal fields, we find other bio-markers, isotope ratios, as we would expect, etc. We even know why the bulk of the deposits formed when they did -- after plants had evolved cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin but before fungi had evolved the ability to digest these molecules.

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#86

Post by MarkusQ »

DennisP wrote: post #38
phkahler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then we burn all that hydrogen and use up all our oxygen. CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, but plants pull the oxygen back off and return it to the air.

Plants aren't doing that job all that effectively, or the CO2 levels wouldn't be going up. The entire history of industrial civilization has added 140 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere. For CO2, that's too much. But Oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere, or 210,000 parts per million. I think we'll be ok for a while.

Plants do a great job pulling out CO₂ -- that's why CO₂ levels fall in the northern hemisphere's spring and early summer (see https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ ).

Unfortunately, insects and fungi are just as good at eating plant matter and exhaling the CO₂ back again (aided somewhat by fires) so it goes right back in to the air again.

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#87

Post by zdragnar »

MarkusQ wrote: post #86
DennisP wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plants aren't doing that job all that effectively, or the CO2 levels wouldn't be going up. The entire history of industrial civilization has added 140 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere. For CO2, that's too much. But Oxygen is 21% of the atmosphere, or 210,000 parts per million. I think we'll be ok for a while.

Plants do a great job pulling out CO₂ -- that's why CO₂ levels fall in the northern hemisphere's spring and early summer (see https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/ ). Unfortunately, insects and fungi are just as good at eating plant matter and exhaling the CO₂ back again (aided somewhat by fires) so it goes right back in to the air again.

Plants also respirate C02 when they use the sugars they generate from photosynthesis. It's why you can grow plants in a completely sealed terrarium. Some do better than others- they generally don't prefer a perfect balance, but they can survive in it.

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#88

Post by shadowofneptune »

bloppe wrote: post #9

Is hydrogen really more renewable though? It releases energy when combined with Oxygen to make water, and it requires energy to split it from water (electrolysis). In this sense, it's not fundamentally different from fuel, which releases energy and carbon when burned, but requires energy (sunlight) and carbon (CO2) to re-create via photosynthesis. The involvement of carbon is a difference, but either way it's a 2-way…

Definitely is not renewable if you feel you need to drill for it.

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#89

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

fortran77 wrote: post #74
bryanlarsen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green hydrogen is not a fuel source. It takes more energy to create green hydrogen than it provides as a fuel, so green hydrogen is a energy transport mechanism, not a source.

If bursty, uneven sources of energy like wind and solar can be used to produced hydrogen via electrolysis, it could still be a win for reducing carbon emissions even though more energy was used to separate the water than can be achieved by burning the resulting hydrogen. It is a way to store the energy, admittedly at a loss, from wind and solar.

The market will hopefully decide if it is efficient and not government regulation

Re: Hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?

#90

Post by b112 »

rgmerk wrote: post #62
b112 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

h2 is shipped all the time, by boat, rail, road, pipeline and more. It is not hard to ship, it's easy to store and transport, this is a solved problem. That said, obviously ... local generation is best. The same goes for oil extraction, and power production (dam or nuclear or solar or wind), local is best.

Bulk H2 is not currently shipped. There was considerable fanfare in 2022 when an experimental hydrogen carrier shipped hydrogen from Australia to Japan: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-first-hy... Ammonia is routinely shipped but as I understand it the conversion process has considerable inefficiencies which would push up the cost of using it as an energy carrier to unviable levels.

Bulk H2 is not currently shipped

Sure it is. Just because it ships with other things, eg railcar size but on ship, doesn't invalidate this truth.

It is a solved thing, it is not complex, it is merely that we haven't needed whole tanker shipping yet.

Post reply on HN