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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

#41

Post by wffurr »

hkt wrote: post #17
_aavaa_ wrote: post #12

> When it is genuinely green, it is obtained through electrolysis, a process that is only 70% to 80% efficient. That's not bad compared to internal combustion engines (ICEs), but fuel cell detractors use that to bash them anyway. Scientists at Tel Aviv University plan to kill that argument with a method that is over 90% efficient in generating green hydrogen. This is highly disingenuous. The problem isn't just that e…

100% this. Few people have been able to answer the question of "how does it compare to a heat pump that has a SCOP of 4?" without me having to fight the urge to roll my eyes. By the time (highly explosive) hydrogen gets into people's homes I'd be surprised if it was even 20% as efficient as a heat pump.

You would use hydrogen to produce methane to then burn in people's existing as furnaces using the existing natural gas distribution infrastructure. That seems to be Terraform's plan.

Still seems better to me to convert as much housing as possible to heat pumps, which seem much better fit for purpose than on-site combustion.

I think green hydrogen has a lot more potential as a precursor to liquid fuels for e.g. aviation and shipping, which otherwise will be extremely difficult to electrify.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#42

Post by the_third_wave »

cassepipe wrote: post #11
ben_w wrote: post #4

Interesting; I wonder if similar approaches will help make the fuel cells cheaper as well as hydrogen? Even if not, even if vehicles remain fully electric (which is my assumption): > The scientists said gray, black, and brown hydrogen release 9 to 12 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of hydrogen produced. Yet, they correspond to 95% of all hydrogen currently produced worldwide for agricultural and industrial needs.…

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Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#43

Post by slushh »

rcarr wrote: 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?

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#44

Post by gizajob »

slushh wrote: post #43
rcarr wrote: 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?

What’s all that AI going to be doing all day to become energy-bound?

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#45

Post by sbradford26 »

micv wrote: post #37
thadjo wrote: post #30

I'm seeing a lot of people here assuming that the purpose of green hydrogen is for fuel cells / automotive transport, but I don't see many people in this space talking about that anymore (except Toyota). Instead there is a lot more interest in using green hydrogen for industrial purposes or as a key building block for cleaner fuels like methanol. Currently green hydrogen is expensive to make and sucks to transport. B…

There's been talk of replacing the natural gas used directly for heating in the UK with hydrogen. I have absolutely no idea how viable that will actually prove to be but it seems difficult.

So technically it might be possible to do that. But I don't think the economics would work out for that. Mostly because your cost of hydrogen will then be linked to the cost of electricity coming in. Given the choice between hydrogen which will cost the base electricity prices + overhead of electrolysis plants and transportation or to just use a resistive heater, you would most likely pick the resistive heater since it would be cheaper.

Not saying people should switch to resistive heaters since they significantly less efficient than heat pumps but simply that resistive electric heating would be cheaper than hydrogen (If that hydrogen is produced using electrolysis).

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#46

Post by MrVitaliy »

rcarr wrote: 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…

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.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#47

Post by pjc50 »

gizajob wrote: post #44
slushh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What’s all that AI going to be doing all day to become energy-bound?

Write spam on everything with a text field?

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#48

Post by bushbaba »

slushh wrote: post #43
rcarr wrote: 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’s energy bound in the sense that Datacenters only have so much energy supply, and heat dissipation capabilities. And the grid these DCs are hooked to only have so much excess generation that can be tapped.

But there’s ways to solve that through energy generation and DC investments.

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#49

Post by pjc50 »

rcarr wrote: 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…

> 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 pushing for hydrogen to keep people dependent.

This isn't quite it. Energy production is always going to be dominated by capital owners because it's a capital-intensive business. Doubly so for renewables. No, the real reason fossil fuel companies keep pushing for hydrogen is so they can sell hydrogen produced from natural gas as "green", after they've dumped the inconvenient carbon atoms into the atmosphere.

The medium term real, important uses for renewable hydrogen are (1) Haber process (3H2 + N2 -> 2HN3) and (2) steel production by reducing (removing oxygen from) raw iron ores.

Edit: btw, I think the underlying paper is https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cey2.411

Re: Israeli Researchers Produce Green Hydrogen with 90% Efficiency

#50

Post by dabluecaboose »

aredox wrote: post #18
_aavaa_ wrote: post #12

> When it is genuinely green, it is obtained through electrolysis, a process that is only 70% to 80% efficient. That's not bad compared to internal combustion engines (ICEs), but fuel cell detractors use that to bash them anyway. Scientists at Tel Aviv University plan to kill that argument with a method that is over 90% efficient in generating green hydrogen. This is highly disingenuous. The problem isn't just that e…

I concur: Hydrogen is a "bad" fuel in terms of practicality: it's extremely reactive and it leaks easily. To make a parallel with rocket science: there are extremely efficient liquid chemical propellants, much better than what is in use today, like Chlorine Trifluoride, that nobody uses anymore because they are just too dangerous to work with. Or the fact that hydrogen airships will never come back: nobody will ever,…

>Hydrogen has its uses (e.g. steel plants). Transportation is not one of them.

Small caveat, hydrogen is still pretty useful for upper stage rocket propulsion because of its low mass and high specific impulse.

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