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Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

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Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate, but it will take a long time to bring up the infrastructure for it. Expect it to appear first on select freight routes. Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclose…

I am fairly sure this is due to the necessity of having pressurized cylindrical storage for the hydrogen. Fitting that kind of tank into the wings is going to be hard.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap Nuclear has never managed to be cheap. The really big nuclear buildouts always had a national security subsidy: either for energy security (France), or for nuclear weapons (US, UK, USSR, China, and also France). This is partly why non-weaponizable reactor designs never became popular either. > They obviously don't like that, which is why they keep p…

As much as I’ve been rooting for nuclear, I think the ship has sailed. If newer advances can’t make it cost competitive with renewables plus some storage (I’ll get to that in a minute) then why would you ever deploy it. Renewables are really cheap and getting cheaper, so some combination of overbuild with storage is probably the winning formula. Storage is a little too expensive as lithium ion batteries, but there’s…

> So nuclear (including hypothetical nuclear fusion) will probably not acquire significant market share. Unless you can somehow make it cost competitive.

Ontario is a great counter example.

We have something like 60-70% of our power from nuclear, representing most of the base load. We're building more plants soon too.

Electricity is cheap, and used to be even cheaper before it was privatized.

And we have no nuclear weapons program supporting these plants.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hopeful for hydrogen use in aviation. Either that or some ridiculous breakthrough in battery tech, and the latter seems less likely than former.

Existing aircraft will be wholly unable to compete on any route where LH2 aircraft operate, but it will take a long time to bring up the infrastructure for it. Expect it to appear first on select freight routes. Oddly, H2 aircraft seem to be promoted with inboard tanks. The natural place for the tanks is in nacelles slung under the wings, for safety. (Hydrogen would not fit in the wings.) Hydrogen tanks in an enclose…

Why do you believe it will be freight first? Historically, the new aircraft go to pax service, then get converted after 20 or 30 years.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#64
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obsession with efficiency is disingenuous too. The two limiting factors are generation capacity and cost/economics. Efficiency by itself says nothing. In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too, but for a whole century gasoline powered transportation was more feasible. Aviation is still only feasible with kerosene despite it being less efficient than electric propulsion.

Not really, increasing energy efficiency is at the heart of many climate solutions. Clean energy is still scarce, and in the places where it isn't, for instance Germany, there is backlash against it. Not to mention that they aren't even close to being 100% renewable-powered (wind+solar 30%), not even close to have 100% EV market penetration (about 2%), not even close to have the theoretical capacity for a grid to pow…

Efficiency matters little given a natural surplus, as will be the case when most of power comes from massively over-provisioned solar, similarly as is seen with hydro power in certain very wet places.

Utility-scale users of solar will naturally install electrolysers for the additional revenue stream, using generation in excess of immediate need after local storage is charged up. They will favor the cheapest equipment, disregarding efficiency, because of their intermittent utilization. Nobody will be able to compete with them, because the power they use will be wholly free (i.e. "zero marginal cost"). The market for electrolysed H2, and NH3 produced from it, will be unlimited.

Solar farms not producing H2 will find themselves undercut by those that are.

Long-term energy storage will not be a thing, because any need beyond a few days will be satisfied by shipments of LNH3 from tropical producers.

It will take time for all this to settle out. Expect to see a lot of short-term adaptations.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#65
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics Not in the way that you think, no. For all intents and purposes, we have limitless energy. The problem was never that we don't have enough capacity, because we can scale capacity as much as we want. The only thing that is required is that energy generation (i.e. $/kWh) is cheap enough, and this seems feasible with solar and wind and maybe fission and later one fusio…

You would have to solve the problem of getting soggy toast from the exhaust steam.

Unscheduled detonations would put an, er, damper on adoption.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#66
post #43
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

Won't AI change the energy market? Once GPU production is fully ramped up, I would expect AI to become energy bound. Can we install enough renewable energy and nuclear power plants to fulfill the demand to the point that energy will be ridiculously cheap?

It will, but that's also an x/y problem. We're seeing ridiculous energy costs and supply chain issues for crypto and AI because they're using the wrong architecture: GPU/SIMD.

I got my computer engineering degree back in the 90s because superscalar VLSI was popular and I wanted to design highly-concurrent multicore CPUs with 256 cores or more. Had GPUs not totally dominated the market, Apple's multicore M1 line approach with local memories would have happened in the early 2000s, instead of the smartphone revolution which prioritized low cost and low energy use above all. We would have had 1000 core machines in 2010 and 100,000-1 million core machines for 2020, for under $1000 at current transistor count costs. Programmed with languages like Erlang/Go, MATLAB/Octave, and Julia/Clojure in an auto-parallelized scatter-gather immutable functional programming approach where a single thread of execution distributes all loops and conditional logic across the cores and joins it under a synchronous blocking programming model. Basically the opposite of where the tech industry has gone with async (today's goto).

That put us all on the wrong path and left us where we are today with relatively ok LLMs and training data drawn from surveillance capitalism. Whereas we could have had a democratized AI model with multiple fabs producing big dumb multicore CPUs and people training them at home on distributed learning systems similar to SETI@home.

Now it's too late, and thankfully nobody cares what people like me think anyway. So the GPU status quo is cemented for the foreseeable future, and competitors won't be able to compete with established players like Nvidia. The only downside is having to live in the wrong reality.

Multiply this change of perception by all tech everywhere. I like to think of living in a bizarro reality like this one as the misanthropic principle.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#67
post #27
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics, something that you've highlighted. If significant more energy is needed, it'll likely be more expensive. Hydrogen is sometimes only a third as efficient as other solutions. It's pretty logical to assume it'll be > In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy be…

Efficiency is important for cost/economics but so is the abundance/scarcity. Fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and are in theory supposed to get more scarce in the future driving up costs/economics while hydrogen is the most abundant element. Granted it is more cumbersome to capture, transport, store, and distribute it now, I don't think it's a outlandish theory that at some point in the future, technological…

When solar-powered hydrogen production cost gets cheaper than new petroleum extraction, exploration and field development will wholly collapse. The cheapest, seemingly inexhaustible existing fields in Arabia will satisfy remaining demand.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#68
post #55

Hydrogen is dead on arrival because steam methane reforming will always be cheaper than electrolysis, it's basically a fossil fuel.

It will be cheaper until it isn't. Then, it won't be.

Hydrogen electrolysed using zero-marginal-cost power from solar farms producing in excess of demand, on cheapest-conceivable electrolysers, will become cheaper than what depends on extracting, concentrating, and transporting NG.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#69
post #38

Obviously hydrogen has it's uses, but a large part of me feels the energy industry is stalling for time. Oil and gas is basically a subscription model, whereas electric cars and heat pumps are buy once, upgrade in x years or when broken model. With enough renewable energy and a few nuclear power plants, electricity should be ridiculously cheap and if they've got the space, the consumer can even generate their own. Th…

Altria bought Juul. Nothing stops a company from leveraging itself with the beast that will one day eat it.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#70
post #13

"Hydrogen storage would still be a problem unless the gas was transformed into synthetic fuel. Hopefully, another scientific breakthrough could address that as soon as possible. We also have another idea floating around that may help solve that." This statement at the end of the article leads me to believe any widespread distribution of hydrogen is at least 10 years off. It'll be interesting to see if Toyota is vindi…

In ten years, expect nothing visible to happen. The time horizon for a heavy H2 infrastructure is at least 20 years, probably more.
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