Fuck hydrogen. Its a fake green product so oil companies can transition as slow as they want while still keeping their strangle hold on our society.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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It depends a lot on where the hydrogen is sourced from. Hydrogen that is generated from electrolyzers using renewable power is completely green (and funny enough, called Green Hydrogen), and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Oil companies however want to market hydrogen from drilling and refining, which is dirty as hell.
It's an important differentiation to make though. Hydrogen is not inherently bad and will have plenty of green applications. We just have to make sure it's coming from the right places.
Sadly almost all hydrogen currently making its way to market is dirty. I have high hopes for it in the future but it seems like thinly veiled poison at the moment.
And this article is definitely about the dirty kind or at least feels like it is.
There's companies working on it! ~~We're just broke~~
And yes, this is definitely the dirty kind. It may still be an improvement on using natural gas directly, but there would need to be a fairly comprehensive analysis to tell for sure. One possible advantage though is we could start building up a hydrogen infrastructure that we can then feed green hydrogen into and completely replace the dirty hydrogen.
Anyway though, you're right to be skeptical. It's important though to look into the details to determine if it's legitimately green energy or if it's just oil companies greenwashing. We need to shun the latter while we promote the former.
(There is a grey area, and it's the same as electric cars -- if we're using electricity from the grid to power cars, and electrolyzers which make hydrogen, is it truly green? I would say this is acceptable for the same reason EVs are acceptable. It'll become completely emission free once the grid is run on renewables.)
and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Is it really that good of a storage method, though? The round-trip efficiency is quite bad when compared to other methods of storage.
We'll need it anyway to produce existing chemical materials sustainably. It may not be the best energy carrier nor most efficient, but it shines in specific applications. Vehicles are a promising example.
There are some use-cases where hydrogen will be useful, but I don't think storage is one of them. Nor do I think vehicles are a particularly good use-case either, as compared to just iterating on battery technology.
"That good of a storage method" in terms of what, arbitrage? We should be producing hydrogen for the practical and environmental benefits of having emissions-free vehicle fuel (that avoids the problems of battery production and disposal), steel, and fertilizer.
I don't see any good reason why the merits of hydrogen for vehicle fuel would be any better than production and disposal of batteries. The other cases I agree that hydrogen will have a useful niche.
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We're about to make Fracking look like a great idea 😂
Wait. Am I getting this right? They want to inject high-pressure steam and chemicals into a massive underground natural gas reservoir. Then set off a big fire + explosion.
Surely, nothing can go wrong.
It's called in situ combustion and apparently it's a well established practice in the petroleum industry: https://glossary.slb.com/en/terms/i/in-situ_combustion
So is coal extraction. How long has that coal fire burned under that town? 60 years?
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First of all, they spelled Heelys wrong. Second, Heelys are a great idea, even better as an adult in an office with polished concrete floors.
Yes because igniting fires underground is a GREAT idea!
Centralia,PA would like a word...
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This how you realize that there are people around that just want to blow shit up.
What could possibly go wrong?
This worst case scenario is probably the same as with any reservoir of natural gas (a massive leak and explosion), which is all the more reason to convert it to hydrogen and sequester the weaker, non-flammable GHG byproduct in situ.
I imagine that suddenly all the co2 stored as gas underground could suddenly come out and being odorless, kills the whole neighboring town
Natural gas is also odorless and able to displace oxygen so I don’t see how it being CO2 underground instead of natural gas changes anything from a risk perspective. Maybe because the molecules are smaller and thus more prone to leaks? I’m admittedly way out of my depth here.
Methane is lighter than air and goes up while co2 is heavier than oxygen and stays down. I don’t know maybe in case of some disaster where water leaks in the well and then pushes out the co2
I wouldn’t want to live nearby in both cases anyway
I mean, all that methane coming out would probably be at least as bad, and the cavity had previously been filled with methane.
It'll be a cavern deep under a lot of rock. If it can contain methane for zillions of years, I imagine that it can contain carbon dioxide.
I'd be worried about the now excess co2 levels disrupting the normal saturation levels in the groundwater.
Sparkling water, on tap!
It's what plants crave I guess.
Yeah, something about this screams at me it's not right.
Why wouldn't this work? What would go wrong?
Producing hydrogen from natural gas still releases carbon in to the air.
...which is the whole reason for doing the SMR within the natural reservoir and leaving the CO~2~ in there.
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