91–100 of 137 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it would still be an upgrade over fossils, I think that would be a slap in the face for renewables. We need sustainable energy production, not more digging for stuff that is limited by design.
If the goal is to de-carbonize why is underground hydrogen a bad alternative to natural gas and coal?
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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
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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.
Hydrogen has many industrial applications in processes such as oil refining and steel making. But ammonia production is by far the biggest single consumer, using around 50 per cent of global hydrogen production.
Ammonia itself also has many uses, including as a feedstock in the production of nitrogen fertilisers for farming.
But making ammonia releases around 500 million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, or 1.8 per cent of global emissions.
If you're interested in where they're planning to go, see (for starting points):
https://www.fool.com.au/2022/12/09/will-fortescues-green-hyd...
https://ffi.com.au/technology/green-hydrogen/
https://arena.gov.au/blog/fortescue-plans-massive-hydrogen-e...
etc. (there are multiple capital projects on the go ATM)
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 complicate…
That there are occasional instances of concentrated mineral hydrogen is a new concept to me, but not entirely surprising.
That there might exist hydrogen deposits rivaling the largest oil fields ever found seems ... unlikely.
Virtually all presently-exploited fossil hydrocarbon reserves were known in antiquity. I did some digging around into old books published following the Titusville, PA, a few years ago (several of these are at the Internet Archive, I need to do some digging to turn up titles). What struck me was that largely all the major US oil fields were already being described by the 1870s and 1880s: Pennsylvania and New York (the original oil boom), Texas and Louisiana, California, and further deposits in the Orinoco basin (Venezuela), Baku (Russia), and of course the middle east.
Most useful minerals derive from some geological ore- or lode-forming process. In the case of oil, that's ancient shallow sea beds, and a map of the present world's oil-bearing regions is in fact a map of ancient shallow seas and wetlands. This makes prospecting for oil far more straightforward than it might otherwise be.
And tectonic forces also come into play. The major middle east oil fields seem to have been smushed together as the African and Asian plates merged together, focusing what oil was in the region into huge and highly-concentrated regions.
(That's my interpretation based on tectonics and geography, the actual geology may differ.)
Point being that at least from the overview in the linked article, it doesn't seem that mineral hydrogen would follow similar patterns. It might be concentrated near serpentine and olivine rock formations, which Wikipedia tells me form near mid-oceanic rifts and subduction zones ... neither are particularly long-lived concentrating regions as far as I understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite>
The prospect (so to speak) of a mineral resource which is reasonably evenly distributed across the Earth's crust might avoid the more pernicious aspects of hydrocarbon-driven geopolitical machinations, but seems a challenge from an economic front.
Solar power is, of course, also largely evenly distributed, though with intensity decreasing at high latitudes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it would still be an upgrade over fossils, I think that would be a slap in the face for renewables. We need sustainable energy production, not more digging for stuff that is limited by design.
Well then, why don't we stop digging for lithium for the batteries, rare earth minerals for all electronics, metals etc. Where do you think the resources for renewable energy come from? Windmills and solar panels don't come out of thin air. "No more digging stuff" shows such a disconnected view from reality. Everything is "limited" in some sense. The puritan attitude as if you can somehow avoid using resources, is ju…
Yes they both run out, but one will run out in the 21st century and the other will run out in the 210th century.
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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.
There's no doubt we can do it if money is no object; whether we can do so at scale cheaply enough to be worth doing is another question entirely.
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 complicate…
This: "If there was concentrated hydrogen to be found, you'd expect that more would have been found by now." That there are occasional instances of concentrated mineral hydrogen is a new concept to me, but not entirely surprising. That there might exist hydrogen deposits rivaling the largest oil fields ever found seems ... unlikely. Virtually all presently-exploited fossil hydrocarbon reserves were known in antiquity…
Other than in one location in Mali, nobody has found substantial deposits of hydrogen.[2][3]
The level of hype associated with this is excessive for the results obtained.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/World-oil-and-gas-well-d...
[2] https://hydroma.ca/about-us-our-history/
[3] https://geoscientist.online/sections/unearthed/natural-hydro...
> A second mechanism, radiolysis, may generate the rest. As radioactive elements in the crust such as uranium and thorium decay, they emit beta particles, aka helium nuclei, What is this? Chat-GPT writing "sciency" fairytales?
Seems a bit harsh. Uranium decays by both alpha and beta decay, so assuming the author just meant alpha particles in the quoted sentence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well then, why don't we stop digging for lithium for the batteries, rare earth minerals for all electronics, metals etc. Where do you think the resources for renewable energy come from? Windmills and solar panels don't come out of thin air. "No more digging stuff" shows such a disconnected view from reality. Everything is "limited" in some sense. The puritan attitude as if you can somehow avoid using resources, is ju…
1 pound of resources used to build a solar panel will provide power for years or decades. 1 pound of gasoline might provide power for 30 minutes. Yes they both run out, but one will run out in the 21st century and the other will run out in the 210th century.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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