this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Exactly. Hydrogen can be produced easily with all the green energy produced during off peak that is otherwise wasted.
But it's usually produced by processing oil instead.
Because of how little we use it. If we didn't jump on totally wrong tech and used it in electric cars instead of batteries, we'd be producing an abundance of it using green energy.
Except there is already a massive market for hydrogen. It is needed, produced, and used in bulk for a vast collection of industrial processes. The problem is that green hydrogen is simply expensive to make, gains very little from being done at scale, and when it comes to competing with other energy storage techs any that don’t inherently have to throw half the energy away as waste like hydrogen does are always going to have an advantage.
Like the garbage batteries we have today that barely last 10 years? It doesn't matter how expensive hydrogen is to make if you're making it with excess green energy that would be wasted otherwise.
Neglecting that we actually study and know how fast large batteries degrade with age and time, and thusly know that they do last far more than ten years, it does actually matter that hydrogen is to expensive to make with excess green energy and that no company is willing to buy it precisely because green hydrogen made from excess green energy is so many times more expensive to make then grey hydrogen.
If it is saves more money to electrify and save wear and tear on equipment by shutting down when there is an excess power than could ever be made by making and selling green hydrogen with it, people arn’t going to make much green hydrogen. Put another way, green hydrogen being so expensive that even with free electricity it is still too expensive to compete is a problem for green hydrogen.
Maybe raising taxes on grey hydrogen to the point green hydrogen can compete might be worth it, but that is a very different solution to a very different problem then what you originally claimed, which was that there wasn’t enough demand for hydrogen.
Indeed given the actual problem facing green hydrogen, which is that it is too expensive to produce compared to the more common grey hydrogen, increasing demand for hydrogen is actually directly harmful to the planet from a global warming perspective.
I don't think you can actually back any of that up. Demand for hydrogen is negligible compared to demand for gasoline. I'm convinced there's enough wasted green energy to produce enough green hydrogen to power every single electric car on the planet today that's currently using shitty batteries.
Current gobal hydrogen demand is in the region of a 100,000,000 metric tons per year. That is not too small a market to be worth creating green hydrogen, and the fact that green hydrogen cannot come close to meeting even that demand would seem to prove that more demand for hydrogen is not the problem. Indeed if too expensive for applications that actually need to use hydrogen, why would expanding applications that waste half of it like cars be at all helpfull?
You need water and transport, and someone to use it once it's made.
Water is non issue since it doesn't have to be too close to generators. We kinda figured out how to transfer electricity where we need it.
Transporting it is a small issue but we're already transporting a lot of liquid gasses and other flammable stuff like gasoline.
If nothing else it could be used by millions of semis for which current battery tech is absolutely fucking useless and likely will remain that way for decades.
But really if we didn't jump on completely wrong tech years ago and just switched to hydrogen instead of batteries, we would have cars with zero emissions, zero range issues and zero charging problems a decade ago.
If you can transport the electricity then you can find better, more efficient uses for it (e.g. EV charging)
So, you want to liquefy hydrogen? Below 20 kelvin? As a gas it's much more difficult to contain than methane. It's nothing like gasoline.
All it takes is an additional, interchangeable, battery trailer.
Nah. Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce and difficult to store. It does have niche use cases like for ammonia and methanol products
I think you have a point here. Hydrogen was mature enough a decade ago. If a distribution network existed, backed by a cheap source of electricity production then EV tech wouldn't get a foothold.
We already transport electricity and then it is just wasted because we don't need that much of it during peak green energy generation. You would use this otherwise wasted energy and store it in hydrogen.
You have no real argument here so you're bringing in useless semantics. We're already transporting and storing hydrogen in liquid form without any issues.
You have to realize just how idiotic the idea of a battery trailer is. Current, garbage batteries barely able to achieve 250 mi of range are 25% of car's weight.
It doesn't matter how inefficient hydrogen is to produce because we'd be using energy that is currently just wasted.
There are 2 types of waste, one where prices are negative. These are is best captured by efficient storage, like EV and pumped hydro NOT inefficient hydrogen. Long term, if there is a huge excess of electricity for long periods of time, then investment in hydrogen equipment may be economical.
The second type is from grid congestion. Here hydrogen production has a role because it can be co-located
Better to invest in batteries than electrolyzers.
There is the issue of needing, for equivalent energy, 30 tube trailers of hydrogen to replace one tanker of diesel. Extending the electricity grid is a better option than building hydrogen pipelines.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91014866/this-trailer-can-turn-diesel-semi-trucks-into-hybrids-in-just-5-minutes
Hydrogen energy per volume is equivalent to an EV battery, and volume is what is most important in transportation.
First you need to invest in hydrogen electrolysis, large scale storage, transport and a fleet of hydrogen vehicles and stations.
Or avoid all that expense and just use batteries.