The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter.
Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It's not like batteries work, they are fine for short term storage, but even then, they aren't displacing, say, pumped hydro. And yet hydrogen bad, batteries good. And don't even get me started on nuclear.
It feels like the "save the planet" movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.
He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems:
- Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere.
- Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—unless you compress it to a couple of hundred atmospheres pressure.
Nobody wants to store potentially explosive fuel at 200+ atmospheres. I'm not aware of current hydrogen technology at all, but that's a fundamental physics challenge that needs to be addressed somehow. And it needs to be addressed in a cost-effective way at each step of the distribution chain.
The problem with high density energy storage is that you're putting a huge amount of energy in a tiny space. Gasoline is flamable, lithium-ion batteries are notorious for ugly fires, and even flywheels can fail catastrophically. A good power storage system needs to manage this risk somehow.
(There was some really interesting work being done with carbon-fiber flywheels and maglev bearings in a vacuum about 20 years ago. Apparently that had decent power density, and it could charge off electric charging infrastructure. But car insurance companies weren't convinced it was safe. Which would also be a problem for hydrogen.)
The problem with H2, ammonia, biofuels and other synthetic fuels is not that they have some limitations, it's that they are not accepted by the green energy dogma. Some green energy activists would like to see the gas stations go away, for example, and that is not going to happen if you keep needing to go somewhere to re-fuel, with any fuel.
It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production.
Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.
> There is a “common understanding worldwide that hydrogen should be limited to applications where it would be difficult to achieve decarbonisation with other methods”, says the report by the Tokyo-based non-profit think-tank Renewable Energy Institute (REI), but Japan has instead laid out a vision of a “hydrogen society where hydrogen is used in every sector”, while promoting and subsidising the use of highly polluting grey H2.
The "save the planet" bunch are unsurprisingly not fans of plans that don't "save the planet".
edit to add: batteries are now at the point where a new pumped hydro scheme from scratch (i.e. no pre-existing dam) would be challenged to be a viable business case versus spending the same amount on renewables and batteries, even if you have a suitable geographic site for the water.
I have not looked too deeply into Hydrogen myself, but even this [0] fairly critical post classes longterm storage as a B (scale A: very good, G: absurd). Even though there is other alternatives that are mentioned.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...
For example, renewables right now rely heavily on quick-to-dispatch gas plants - and that's fine as a stepping stone to a carbon-free future. Though the plan fo eliminating it is still vapourware - maybe better batteries, maybe larger grids, maybe something else.
But creating a hydrogen economy that somewhat relies on fossil fuels, with a clear pathway to eliminating the fossil fuel component? Anathema!
I have nothing at all against renewables and batteries, it sounds neat but remains incomplete here and now. But until it's clear it can replace all our uses of energy, I remain baffled by people who would like to shoot down any potential different path to that same goal.
They are solutions which will soak up massive amounts of capital for years-decades before they will start paying off. They also know that if they don't market themselves as "the one true solution that solves all" they might not get the capital required to build out their vision. So they HAVE TO oversell it to cover all use cases where they could possibly be applicable and try to get money flowing into alternatives for themselves, otherwise they would not be feasible.
So this is at least one of the reasons for hydrogen problems. They try to create FUD about BEV so they can say hydrogen is better. Meanwhile fossil companies are like really happy about this:
- slows BEV adoption
- while alternatives are not there sell their own stuff
- hydrogen is also massive molecule shipping infra so they will bid for those projects
People who actually look into hydrogen will find lots of issues with the marketing:
- "green" hydrogen is nowhere to be seen in quantities
- real world round-trip efficiency comparable to ICE engines
- which leads to massive need to overbuild green electricity generation (== 2-4x bigger NIMBY/capital problems for nuclear/wind)
So the immediately deploy-able solutions of batteries and PV-solar that have no scale threshold are making their projects riskier.
In essence both nuclear and hydro require governmental funding to get started. So the same sales pitch is now also on political level. Lobbyists etc doing their dark FUD spewing things.
Bottom line of building out hydrogen from governmental monies means that the projects which absolutely have to use hydrogen to be green (steel and some other industrial processes, maybe flying too) will be cheaper because it has been subsidized by nations by having bought into other stuff which will not be used in scale because other market technologies are so much better for those use cases.
For example: I have a BEV and the range is good for me, home charging is 10-100x cheaper than hydrogen, I don't need to go to a hydrogen station etc.
This has always been a pain point for me. If you feel the world is facing an existential crisis (and I do), then it seems weird to go down the list of possible ways of avoiding utter catastrophe like you're at a sushi bar:
Solar: Ah, yeah.
Wind: Of course.
Nuclear power: Nope.
Geo Engineering: Hell, no.
I don't know how you can believe that we are facing millions, if not billions, of deaths and the possible collapse of civilization and then "tone police" the solutions.
Nukes and geothermal simply cost more than solar and wind: nukes, many, many times more. Spending a billion dollars gets you N GW of solar or wind, and N/M, M>>1, of others. Generally, if you need a steam turbine to keep working, you will trail behind anything with zero opex.
Hydrogen has a plausible place in long-term (i.e. strategic) underground storage, in steel refining and other manufacturing processes, and (as LH2) in the future direction of aviation. It might have other roles, such as an intermediate form when using ammonia. Trying to force it where it is a bad fit adds noise.
Is this different in some way from natural gas? Why can't we use the existing storage and distribution infrastructure for natural gas for handling hydrogen?
Less energy dense, but not less efficient
So energy to mine the materials, energy to assemble the battery, energy to recycle the battery after it's useful lifespan (5-10 years)... None of these are ever counted in people's calculations. I tried to find data on energy required to produce the batteries and they still didn't count the mining cost.
I'd wager that hydrogen is more energy efficient over the entire lifespan of a vehicle.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/14/electr...
Lithium mining is expensive and you need to move a lot of dirt to get a little lithium...
100 billion tons of waste and never mind the waste aspect, it takes a lot of energy to move a ton of dirt.
- First hydrogen fuel cell: 1842
- Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~
You've had a 100 year head start, and yet hydrogen fuel cell cars are terrible. Hydrogen planes? Some prototypes are being worked on.
I can go buy an entire car with a massive li-ion battery in it right now. I can get batteries to power my house during an outage.
Hydrogen? "There are some unresolved issues"
"Why is everyone so hostile to hydrogen" Like, release a product already. Everyone is moving forward on green energy without you.
I'm glad research is funded, because you literally never know where the breakthrough will come. Solar was painfully expensive for most of its history, now it's super-cheap.
As far as I'm concerned, a battery+wind+solar grid is just as much vapourware with serious barriers to success. I'm glad they are worked on though...
EDIT: for example, I'm quite excited about gravitation nal storage in disused mines (coal ones often, in fact). By the same token, should that be sacrificed on the altar of batteries? Or actually pursued, possibly to a happy end?
> - Earliest li-ion battery: 1965~
You just limit to lithium-ion to mislead. Battery vehicles predate all of that:
> The invention of the first model electric vehicle is attributed to various people.[7] In 1828, the Hungarian priest and physicist Ányos Jedlik invented an early type of electric motor, and created a small model car powered by his new motor. Between 1832 and 1839, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson also invented a crude electric carriage.[8] In 1835, Professor Sibrandus Stratingh of Groningen, the Netherlands and his assistant Christopher Becker from Germany also created a small-scale electric car, powered by non-rechargeable primary cells.[9]
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
I mean the whole cathode / electrolyte / anode idea hasn't changed much, we just found better materials for all three.
That might be how things appear from a view from 10,000 ft perspective, but once you zoom in, there's serious logistical problems that are unique to hydrogen, and they are problems that can't be brushed away by saying "gee why can't we all get along." I'm far from an expert here, but off the top of my head, hydrogen is uniquely difficult to store, and while it scores relatively well as an energy source per unit weight, it is not nearly so effective per unit volume.
Meanwhile the practical highly scalable applications for the more mainstream renewable sources have already arrived at our doorstep.
If we were in a situation where people loved wind, loved solar, loved geothermal but were randomly against, say, tidal power I could see your point. But this isn't that.
There absolutely should be research and prototypes, there I agree. But companies are already looking for massive amounts of government money for large projects.
Hydrogen is coming, just maybe not directly to cars for a while. The airline industry (big planes, not Cessnas) sees hydrogen as one of two options, the other being zero-emission hydrocarbons (fuel from air). Every airline exec dreams of the day they might generate their own fuel from water at plants right beside the planes. Airbus is working on a hydrogen demonstration rig inside an A380. Once airlines start generating their own hydrogen supplies locally at airports, a hydrogen fueling infrastructure for cars might just appear overnight.
Every single actor is pushing for their own interests and highlighting the flaws of the competitors. You cannot say in good faith that hydrogen, nuclear or fuel are supporting the "renewable energy gang", or that they are not a gang themselves. In fact, my opinions is that nuclear gang was so against renewables that they missed the bus of "renewables + nuclear" friendly mix, letting the gas gang conquest "renewables + gas".
Really? I usually just see the "vroom vroom gang" hyping up hydrogen as the ultimate power source for their overpowered cars, while completely ignoring the huge amount of energy needed to produce that stuff. They're glorifying Toyota for their decision to invest heavily into hydrogen cars.
I'm fine with using it as some form of storage, combined with renewable energy. Maybe even in certain applications for mobility, like trucks (which i think could be replaced by trains anyway, at least here in Europe) or other things that need plenty of power and flexibility. But not in the car of the average Joe, who just uses it to drive to our equivalent of a burger place 500 meter away.
The physical properties and limitations of hydrogen are well-known. Many people repeat them in other posts in this thread.
Here's a very factual explanation of why hydrogen internal combustion engines won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8
(In summary, you can't compress hydrogen enough to fit in a reasonably-sized tank. The energy that it takes to compress hydrogen will be expensive.)
Maybe it's the optimum (I'm not convinced). But to narrow down on one approach that doesn't even quite work seems premature.
If you wanted to just throw money at the problem, I'd just throw it at nuclear - reliable, carbon free, well tested and doesn't need much storage. But hey I guess that's the wrong answer to some.
My background, FWIW, is also not energy, so I'm just happy to see the research net cast wide and well funded throughout.
> which solutions are really helpful in reducing CO2.
There, you have already decided that lowering the amount of CO2 should be our concern, but should it?
I say: let's collect facts and count numbers and compare which solutions are really helpful in enhancing the quality of our life.
Hydrogen (also including power-to-gas, e-fuels, Ammonia) is the only technology of its kind that we have; a way of storing energy compactly and long term, and also be able to transport it relatively easy.
It is also the only solution to have carbon-neutral aviation, and many industrial processes can also not be easily electrified.
1. To make hydrogen you need energy 2. If you just put the energy in a battery you lose less energy than you do if you make hydrogen
So hydrogen only makes sense if #2 should change, and that is fundamentally impossible, or if for whatever other reason no battery exists that is suitable for the application.
Things like "most homes in Japan don't have a convenient place to put a DC charger or external electrical outlets" and "the larger scale Tesla charging places don't fit in existing infrastructure."
This sort of home parking places (https://www.google.com/maps/@35.6772271,139.70988,66626m/dat... ) don't match the American style "room enough for a car and space on the side with power for lights and a garage door opener.
On the flip side, a h2 station in Japan has about the same footprint as a regular gas station ( https://youtu.be/UHft5Lbf2Ho ). That doesn't present a "it takes 40 minutes to get an 80% charge at a dedicated super charger station" but rather something closer to the "fill up the tank" of ICE cars.
If this switches to the US, the H2 infrastructure compared to electrical infrastructure (Note: Japan is kind of weird there too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Tr... - "Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan has 50 Hz networks while western Japan has 60 Hz networks."), population density, and the ability to charge at home makes the idea of a H2 based vehicle throughly impractical.
In that context, betting on hydrogen is a way of smashing the snooze bar: the technology isn't quite ready, so we'll do some research projects and so on, and maybe we'll have something ready as a mainstream product in a few years, or perhaps a decade.
Same thing with nuclear fusion. I'm all for fusion if it pans out, but we should treat it as something that will make decarbonization a lot easier if it works, but in the mean time we should plan as if we don't expect it to save our bacon. There's an idea that "if climate change is a problem, some currently non-existent technology will save us so we don't need to change what we're doing now." That's what many of the climate-aware public are reacting against.
Hydrogen has some additional problems as well: almost all hydrogen comes from cracking natural gas, so it's effectively a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen is a thing, but it's not very energy efficient to use electricity to make hydrogen from water, and get the energy back by turning it back into water. Lithium ion batteries are in the high 90's percentage in terms of energy out/energy in. Hydrogen is, what, about 60% or so? Or maybe less? That's a lot of lost energy, so anywhere there's a viable alternative that doesn't waste huge amounts of energy we should use that.
As far as storing months worth of grid power: that's a really hard problem but I'm not convinced it's one that we even need to solve. Perhaps we need grid storage more on the scale of 12 or 24 hours to buffer solar variability. For seasonal variability we need better grid interconnection, including long distance HVDC lines to enable buying and selling electricity across time zones and perhaps even between the northern and southern hemisphere if that's what's needed. Keeping fossil fuel plants online as an emergency backup to be used in rare circumstances is also an option, we just have to make sure the rest of the system is able to handle the load the vast majority of the time.
Well, hydrogen is essentially a scam and giant energy sink.
>The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage
Sure, and compressed hydrogen is a terrible battery
>Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here.
Hydrogen isn't being pushed by "science", because it's a bad idea at the physics level. It's being pushed as a greenwashing/scam by the oil industry.
Yes, it does. It a very thinly veiled anti human movement. Ultimately, there is a loud sub section of environmentalists whose only acceptable solution will be "less humans" and they dupe a number of their fellow travellers with endless "but what about X" problems so that realistic solutions to climate change and pollution will not be enacted, and thus the only outcome left will be "fewer humans".
They are despicable people. Also, they can safely be ignored. Anyone who's anti human does not have your best interests at heart, and thus shouldn't be listened to.
If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indirectly. That, or fossil fuel powered vehicle manufacturers that are reluctant to completely retool their factories.
Hydrogen has a few legitimate use cases, such as iron ore refining and chemical feedstock, but that's about it. In all other scenarios, battery-based technology is vastly superior along multiple metrics.
Japan is uniquely trying to make this thing work. They have no domestic oil production, and so few coal mines as to basically be irrelevant: all their fossil fuel is imported. Anywhere else on the planet: sure, this might be another way for big fossil to push for relevancy, but in Japan's case, hydrogen would be something that they can produce themselves, literally freeing them from fossil fuel dependency, which is a big part of why they keep trying to make it work.
And yeah, the math says it's physically impossible to make it work without constant refueling, but again: it's Japan. The very idea of "my car needs to go 300 miles on one charge/tank" just isn't a thing there.
Hydrogen, despite this article's claim, is actually perfect for Japan. Any tanker of import fuel saved is CO2 saved both on the tanker's transit, and on that fuel getting burned, but at the same time: it's also perfect much perfect only for Japan.
Turning electricity into hydrogen and then into motive power for a car is dramatically less efficient than using a battery, and car commutes in Japan are on the short side, so huge batteries wouldn’t be as necessary. I don’t think petroleum-derived hydrogen is much more efficient, if at all, than just burning the petroleum in an ICE.
So the only way this seems like a win for Japan is if electricity were cheap, battery EVs were not economical, and the loss associated with electrically synthesized hydrogen didn’t matter.
> Japan is uniquely trying to make this thing work
You have conflated Toyota with Japan there. Even in a society dominated by it's megacorps, they are not necessarily the same thing. After all, Nissan brought us the first mass market EV (and yes, they promptly punted on their first mover advantage).
> Anywhere else on the planet: sure, this might be another way for big fossil to push for relevancy, but in Japan's case, hydrogen would be something that they can produce themselves, literally freeing them from fossil fuel dependency,
Any domestic production of hydrogen in Japan would have to be via water electrolysis with electricity, since they have basically no natural gas production. Since that's the case, why not just use the electricity directly and not pay the 40-50% penalty of electrolysis?
> The very idea of "my car needs to go 300 miles on one charge/tank" just isn't a thing there.
> Hydrogen, despite this article's claim, is actually perfect for Japan.
The first statement contradicts the second, because one of the benefits of hydrogen over batteries is that range isn't much of an issue and refueling is fast. That's why the only place it might be viable in ground transport is in long haul trucking in the US.
In Japan, a 200 mile EV would probably be more than sufficient, even for longer trips, for exactly the reason you state.
Citation needed. No, you don't need to go 300 miles on one charge/tank if you live in a big Japanese city, in fact you don't even need a car in that case. However, if you live in rural areas or need to travel long distances, 300 mi is not a lot to ask for: the main island of Honshu is >800 mi long and 300 won't even get you from Tokyo to Osaka.
Japan has huge deposits of methan hydrate on sea floors it wants to mine.https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanhydrat
And this is why hydrogen is on the shit list, all the roads lead to ever more mined carbs, blown into the atmosphere in one way or another. The roads to green hydrogen are riddled with conversions that make it economically unviable.
Its the equivalent of a addict switching from heroin injection to a fetanyl patch. Yes, the process is cleaner, less dangerous, but the longterm bad effects are still there.
Exactly. Freedom isn't free. It's always mind boggling that HN doesn't get this despite this being a community in which paying more for energy sources we like is highly popular.
huh? what did i miss?
Now, hydrogen in cars isn't just about how the "fuel" is produced. People try to reduce it to CO2 emission number, but to me there's a lot more nuance. Petrol fuel burned by thousands of vehicles in the middle of a city isn't the same as petrol fuel burned in an hydrogen plant. The CO2 numbers might be similar, but the effect on people's life is completely different. EVs achieve the same goal, but if all vehicles can't be EVs (I think it's reasonable to expect cases where EV won't work), the rest being hydrogen or other low pollution alternatives is I think important.
Car makers themselves aren't touting hydrogen as the end all be all either, most makers in the game are using it as diversification to not put all their eggs in the EV basket.
Desalination is desparately needed, one byproduct is hydrogen: https://scitechdaily.com/efficient-seawater-desalination-and...
Solutions that solve multiple problems and don't disrupt the norm are ideal are they not?
I mean, by all means, go to war with fossil fuel companies if your goal is only that but less people to fight means more practical change. I am hoping micro nuclear reactors become all the rage but even then a light fuel you can transport easily (despite the difficulty of efficiently transporting hydrogen) is sort of a battery except you can send lots of it continually.
while there is a strong degree of green washing going on in hydrogen there are REAL, Concerted efforts for 100% GREEN HYDROGEN in place as well.
Calling all hydrogen a green wash is doing the job of big oil for them stop ignoring the real efforts for a green hydrogen industry by calling all hydrogen a greenwash. Its not the reality. Be a positive force in the world.
I don't think anyone pushing for hydrogen in cars in Japan has done even a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many nuclear reactors/wind turbines/solar panels Japan would need to migrate their fleet... So the plan is likely to make it from natural gas, import it, or -more likely- there is no serious plan at all, only subsidies being collected.
Note that in I have a very similar feeling with regard to wind turbines in Europe (at least in Germany and France): behind each wind turbine field there is a very real gas turbine or lignite power plant, and a lot of hand-waving regarding storage... Heard jokes (pre invasion of Ukraine) about Gazprom being behind every wind turbine sale. The situation is different in Northern Europe though, with lots of wind turbines in Denmark, and pumped storage in Norway.
If your standard of passing as a technology is that it has to replace the current one in its entirety, you’ll always find it lacking, even with battery electric cars.
No, to stop fossil fuel pollution we need many technologies to come together, a lot of infrastructure and some societal change to happen gradually while not to slowly.
Indeed all the current battery electric cars (even adding every one that will be produced this year) are only providing a tiny relief for the climate disaster relatively speaking (if any). I bet that you don’t have to add together many bus and metro lines in Mexico and Brazil to sum up to all the electric cars in terms of climate relief.
But isn't it still better to be using wind turbines 75% of the time when it's windy, and gas/coal only 25% of the time when it's not? Surely even without adequate battery storage that's an improvement?
I don't see how these two statements are compatible.
Unfortunately you invalidate your own work by not providing the sources of your knowledge. The internet has a cool feature called "URL", it is meant to provide the source of some information so that your readers can access your sources, too. Just use it!
In a mature, scientific discussion you always want to provide these sources.
Just saying something without sources is an internet discussion style of the past and should not be accepted by modern humans.
Whenever they release a new car model, they have to re-tool their factories, just saying. I don't think this is a good argument.
No, that’s wrong. They’re planning to produce their hydrogen from high-temperature reactors like the HTGR in Ibaraki prefecture.
See: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...
Anyone trying to argue that they have any genuine interest in helping to save the planet is making an extraordinary claim, and needs to back it up with extraordinary evidence.
You are assuming that ship has sailed and it has not. Depending the political climate both here in the United States and abroad green energy, at least in automotive applications, will have to compete of functional merit alone. If the elections in a couple of years go the way Republicans would like, fuel will be down at $2 a gallon again and frankly unless there are breakthroughs in range and safety battery powered cannot compete except in certain categories.
Absent an American state oil company, zero chance. Even the majors are treating oil as a semi-stranded asset.
After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been slow but steady. It's not really clear to me what advantages H has over Li as an electron donor, at this point.
In particular: hydrogen is bad for use cases with large numbers of charge/discharge cycles, because the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles.
However, for use cases with small numbers of charge cycles, like seasonal storage or backup against rare grid outages, hydrogen's big advantage -- the low cost of storing it, vs. typical short term storage technologies like batteries -- will dominate. Storing hydrogen underground in caverns has a per energy capacity capital cost of just $1/kWh, two orders of magnitude cheaper than Li-ion batteries.
1$/kWh is only storage for already existing hydrogen. For this application you also need equipment to both produce and burn it which adds to these costs. Hydrogen generation can’t depend on 0$ prices for very long each week in the off season so you either need a lot of excess equipment that’s rarely used or be willing to pay more for electricity. Further, nobody building a grid would be willing to depend on seasonal storage running out on the last day it’s needed. So you need a large guaranteed storage surplus alongside redundancy in your generating capacity.
Start running the numbers and the annual ROI doesn’t look to be even enough to pay for the interest on your setup costs let alone profit. It might have some ultra niche applications but the economics don’t seem to work out for large scale deployment.
Hydrogen by its very nature, due to it being the smallest atom, embeds itself into the walls of its container. It will rot the metal walls you use to hold it long term.
Look up "hydrogen embrittlement"
Both compare poorly against diesel though so I'm left wondering if synthetic fossil fuels produced from renewable inputs might not actually be the way to go. In the beginning it seemed like efficiency was going to be important and a limiting factor to all this, and batteries definitely have an edge on fuels produced from renewable sources. But now it's seeming like actually producing large amounts of energy isn't as much of a problem as ensuring that it is available at the point of consumption economically and logistically. Synthetic fossil fuels that pull carbon from the atmosphere would be carbon neutral and fit neatly into the existing system with no other modifications.
It stands to reason there's a threshold at which the cost of production is so much lower than the cost of transmission and storage that it makes sense to take efficiency losses for storage and transmission gains.
Hydrogen can be manufactured anywhere you have seawater and electricity, so it would be a much better use of resources to lay a subsea superconducting cable once and let Japan store power by generating hydrogen locally.
Sure you can, and at megavolt DC levels it is _extremely_ efficient to move GW of power that way.
Actually it does get recycled well, especially with larger batteries. There's just been very little that actually needed recycling that was sufficient to run a business. There's many smaller size businesses making healthy profit off lithium battery recycling already.
Here's two examples:
In the end, the shortfalls of hydrogen are turning out to be simply too insurmountable.
Hydrogen does have niche applications, but it's clearly not a mainstream solution.
I think there are use cases where it's a very good battery if small enough devices are created. Specifically, an empty cell on its own is going to be much cheaper than a lithium battery. I could swap and store many cells in my garage, but I can't do that with a typical mounted battery. This means the capacity of cells would be limited by physical storage space. And if my solar system produces a lot more electricity that I could use on a normal day, it could make sense for a rainy day.
This reactor doesn’t use electricity to produce H2 but high temperature hydrolysis.
See: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/en/research/research_03.htm...
Management at many automotive companies likely love it for that reason too, since putting money into it makes it look like they are doing something to change when in reality they are not doing anything at all.
Here is a neat fact about hydrogen vehicles. Fueling them causes the nozzles to cool to below freezing temperatures. Try fueling vehicle after vehicle and the nozzle will freeze to each one. Coincidentally, hydrogen vehicle refueling is a sadist’s dream.
Notably people think Tesla gets lithium from Bolivia because Elon made a joke about it once, but I think it actually comes from Australia.
https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/reports/20220922....
https://www.renewable-ei.org/pdfdownload/activities/REI_Japa...
I was wondering what this "renewable energy institute" was, and it's founded and chaired by Masayoshi Son, who's latest notable investments includes huge solar projects here and there.
Perhaps there's a lot of valid ideas in it...and I'm all for more renewable energies, but I'd take a lot of this with a shovel of salt.
I don't think we need to be cynical here. The report can be read on its own merits.
> The government’s strategy neglects green hydrogen and prioritizes fossil fuel-derived gray and blue hydrogen. It neglects the development of renewable energy sources, reflecting the government’s skewed energy strategy that has set low targets for the deployment of renewables for both 2030 and 2050.
Basically, they’re saying: stop allocating resources to alternative H2 production methods, focus all the money you have on the renewables, the field we are massively investing into.
On the face of it sounds like a decent argument, but I doubt the reality is as simple as they put it. In particular how much renewables will be able to cover Japan’s energy consumption is largely up for debate (the reports pans the slow pace of H2 technology research, but we’re not there yet with the renewables either).
“stop diversifying your efforts and put all your eggs in one(our) basket” is always a dubious message IMHO.
Unfortunately at this time hydrogen is extremely expensive. A kilogram of hydrogen, roughly equivalent to a gallon of gas in energy, costs $26.75 at True Zero hydrogen stations, which is extremely expensive and is a massive price hike from $19.70/kg back when I purchased my Mirai two months ago. I'm still thinking whether purchasing a Mirai was a good financial decision for me, but I hope things will turn around in 2024.
> With help from Stiesdal, a European clean-technology firm, Reliance is building a large factory in Jamnagar to manufacture electrolysers. These devices, powered by clean electricity from Reliance’s planned solar farms, will then be used to manufacture green hydrogen. Mr Ambani asserts that these investments will make India the first country to produce green hydrogen for $1 a kilogram, within a decade. (The current cost is more than $4/kg.) He dismisses doubters, pointing to his recent success in delivering data to mobile telephones at the world’s lowest cost.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/10/20/will-india-bec...
I don't have a stake in any race and haven't had a need to drive a car in years, but a combination of three energy sources sound ideal to me. Batteries for two-wheelers that keep the weight low and commercial vans & buses, grid solutions for static highly efficient routes (AKA trains), and something like hydrogen for long range non-static infrastructure (transport trucks). The road network where I live is of a high quality, and currently road maintenance for fully electric vehicles is fully subsidised to promote adoption, but eventually we'll have to choose between our roads and the funds. (I am not someone with any expertise in this matter)
That's my impression too. It seems to be hard for some people to accept this as one solution for a narrow aspect of a complex problem. This is a problem I see a lot with "green energy" sceptics. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. If there isn't a one size fits all solution, it's not a solution at all.
Almost as good as the old adage of electricity not being clean today, therefore electrifying cars doesn't make sense. Nevermind that switching to renewable energy can be achieved asynchronously and is not something we need to wait for.
But we can transfer most of them to EVs, including nearly the entire light duty vehicle fleet and short haul trucking, which is probably good enough. There will always be niche cases for ICE vehicles, like driving across Siberia, or military vehicles. But the vast majority can be electrified.
Flight is a different story, perhaps hydrogen will be a viable path there.
No we can’t. We don’t have the industrial manufacturing capability. Not even by a long shot. And even if we did, we don’t have enough minded minerals to supply the manufactures, and even if we did, we don’t have enough electrical infrastructure to charge all the electric cars.
Note this also applies to hydrogen, and even if we had both, each technology relieving the stress on the manufacturing capability of the other, then we’d still need the infrastructure capable of supplying to both.
The best path forward for immediate success is public transit, using whichever technology is available (hydrogen, battery, overhead wires, diesel, whatever).
There are already commercial processes in place to capture it from landfills, and there are industrial processes that can produce it from hydrogen with an 8% energy loss. So if the green hydrogen problem is solved that could be used here.
A lot of Asian countries already have cars that run directly on CNG - from the factory -, as it produces less smog than petrol or diesel. I visited India recently, and I'd say 80% of vehicles I saw ran on CNG (they have a hazard label).
Maybe the most important thing is the infrastructure to distribute it is already there in most countries.
Compressed natural gas is mostly methane but we are trying to move away from fossil fuels so it's not a long term solution.
Here's a link that gives some info on it:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-gas-climatebox-explai...
But since when did physics ever stop anybody from believing in fairy tales?
Northern Europe and Canada have very seasonally-dependant energy demand that inversely correlates with solar availability. Japan has hot humid summers that require the use of air conditioners, so energy demand doesn’t vary nearly as much over the year. In most of the country you also don’t get cold enough to worry about heat pumps becoming inefficient, either.
Given that, nuclear, short term storage, a bit of hydro would do the job just fine, without the round-trip losses of hydrogen.
You still might well want hydrogen for other purposes (fertiliser, steel making, clean shipping, possibly long range trucks etc).
I seem to recall Mazda doing a thing around their RX-8 with dual-fueling, but that went nowhere a decade and a half ago.
But hey, why go for a significantly cheaper from a cap-ex perspective option where retrofititng existing vehicles to hydrogen (which can be done), and developing that tech, instead dumping more cash into rare earth development and going about hydrogen power in the most asinine way possible, because somebody is gonna get (more) rich off of doing this.
That's why I point out the physics bit. This isn't about the cost, this is about being able to generate energy, not just try to build what is in essense a perpetual motion machine.
The choice to pursue hydrogen-fuelled combined heat and power is particularly mystifying, given that Japanese companies are market leaders in heat pumps. Tokyo’S climate is also ideally suited for heat pumps, given the need for air conditioning in summer and the fact they’ll heat just fine in the coldest conditions greater Tokyo ever experiences.
Now, years after that success, Toyota has only a very limited selection of fully electric plug in vehicles, and all their competitors are a decade in front of them because they continue to chase some pipe dream of hydrogen, is just disappointing.
This feels overly pessimistic to me. I feel like just a couple of years ago people were saying that Tesla was a decade ahead of "legacy" automakers. Fast forward a couple of years and there are lots of great EVs available from a number of legacy automakers, and Tesla's stock is down almost 70% from its peak in Nov 2021. Ford even beat Tesla to market with a compelling pickup. A lot can change in a few short years.
Toyota still hasn't released a compelling EV, and their Mirai looks dubious at best. But they are putting hybrid engines into more and more models, and I think there will continue to be a strong demand for HEVs and PHEVs for years to come, until prices come down on EVs. And of course demand for ICE vehicles is still strong, too.
I saw a fair amount of that but it seemed to be more a reflection of Musk’s success at building an online fan club than sober analysis. The car people I know were bearish, noting that electric cars are relatively easy to build. The outlier was FSD, which would have been much harder to match if it hadn’t been at least a decade premature.
For instance, how many more EVs are they selling than the Toyota hybrid plugins ? (and I mean that not just in the US or Norway, but globally)
To my knowledge the EV field is still a very small and restricted market, and the makers are all about the same advancement technology wise. I mean, Tesla for instance sources its batteries from Panasonic, which isn't much more advanced than Toyota I think.
[edit] Panasonic is a Toyota partner in battery development https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/31477926.html
Toyota has shipped 20 million hybrids over 25 years. Tesla has shipped 3 million EVs, mostly in the past few years. Which strategy has cumulatively avoided more GHG emissions?
Later edit: The chairman of the board from that website is this lady Anette S. Olsen [2], who's sole proprietor of this company/group, Fred. Olsen & Co. [3], which interests also include the energy market. The company/group is into renewables, this is their website [4], lots of wind farms on their website, I suppose they're into selling that, not hydrogen. As I said, it's easier to follow the money.
[1] [1] https://www.nhst.no/en/about-nhst/board-of-directors-holding...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anette_S._Olsen
Someone is going to be selling something. Does the thing reduce carbon and pollution or not, is the question.
Building trains is simple, getting/forcing people to use them is the hard part. Making them viable in a lot of american cities requires a complete refactor of how the cities are laid out. Easy to say very hard and expensive to do. Americans also turn to violence at the suggestion of a paper mask, so forcing won't be simple.
But if you build a badass EV, they will buy it, and pollution is reduced somewhat.
If you do care about costs, you would probably not be going down this road in the first place.
Japan has no significant sources of fossil fuels or lithium (for a potentially lithium-based future), so they would prefer that the energy of the future were hydrogen, which they could produce themselves. Of course they would prefer to live in a future where they could make their own energy, rather than be at the mercy of imports. Corporations are getting dragged along to support this dream, even if it does not look like a great business decision.
It addresses the concerns about hydrogen.
"Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late. "
HVDC are typically presented as the solution, but even if technically possible, they do not seem to actually materialize. Constant cooperation and reliance between countries for their energy seems like a bad idea in 2023. There are numerous solar project plans stuck because of lack of such transmission lines.
We did not start our current energy infrastructure with expensive pipelines. We started with batched shipments (tankers), and when supply and demand were stable enough we built a gas pipeline. Not sure why electricity requires the optimal solution or nothing.
For some countries this isn't even a problem so it doesn't need to be talked about. For example the amount of reusable energy available in the US covers all the needs in most areas.
Also you need to compare the reduced efficiency of building the renewable energy locally versus the energy lost in transporting that hydrogen and creation and use of the hydrogen. Creating the hydrogen is an especially inefficient process for example.
These scenarios, both large and small, are covered currently by fossil fuels, and are not answered by permanent grid solutions like HVDC.
The generation price of solar energy is ~$0.02/kwh. Even with 33% overall efficiency hydrogen could be very competitive at $0.06/kwh electricity. , But overall efficiency is a red-herring. The important thing is COST. With solar, the cost of energy itself is the smallest part - providing it at the desired time and place are the more expensive parts.
Fossil fuels are very inefficient, yet for hundreds of years they have been a cheap option (and thus widespread). The same argument applies to hydrogen - if it's cheaper, in terms of money, time and pollution, efficiency doesn't matter a bit.
2) The hydrogen insight has what looks to be interesting articles. I'm going to read through them more.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/porsches-synthetic-gaso...
Ofc, we are talking about the "lowest green-house gas produced" hydrogen (hydro/solar/wind/nuclear).
That said Japan is maybe one of the only countries in the world serious and rigorous enough to pull that off.
There are trade terms that have emerged, including "black", "brown", "grey", "blue", and "green" hydrogen which ... aren't especially clear or consistent in my experience.
WEF have a 'splainer, though I'm not sure the classifications are universally accepted:
<https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/clean-energy-green-hy...>
Apparently NG -> H2 is "grey" or "torquiose", and CCS is "blue".
"Green" is hydrolysis from renewable electricity.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck
Both EVs and hydrogen fuel cells really need modern nuclear power to make sense. Hydrogen is less efficient, but storage is much cheaper and easier than it is with batteries. They're complementary technologies, not competitors.
People need to get over the idea that aggressive decarbonization will ever spread past the 500 million citizens of the G7 states. That's delusional. We should really be more aggressively planning mitigation than Hail Mary green transitions with multiple substantial challenges.
And storage is even cheaper and easier with gasoline and diesel. More likely that developing economies will stay on ICE engines until batteries+electricity+chargers become cheaper than ICE.
Hydrogen doesn't have a future outside of location- and weight-sensitive applications like carbon-neutral air travel.
It might not be cost competitive, but it is much more doable than making wood from ash.
It ranks hydrogen use cases by their economic feasibility. The core issue in Japan: they are focusing on things with the least economic potential at the bottom of the ladder and they are doing it with dirty grey hydrogen even.
It's a double fail. Basically they are expending more carbon to magically become cleaner. Which isn't working for obvious reasons and quite obviously so. And then they are using that hydrogen for the least economical use cases. It's not an energy strategy but a let's bail out our car manufacturers strategy.
This article is stating the obvious: this isn't working. Not even a little bit. There's nothing there. Hydrogen cars are a fantasy. Nobody is buying them and even the world's largest hydrogen cheer leader (Toyota) of these things is barely producing and selling any. And as reluctant as they are to produce and sell battery electric vehicles, they still sell more of those than hydrogen cars.
Hydrogen for domestic use also ranks at the bottom in the hydrogen ladder for very good reasons. Yes you can do it. But it's just stupidly inefficient in terms of hydrogen generation and transport losses.
These are not problems you can just wave away with some innovation magic. There is no magical solution just around the corner that will make all of this go away and improve things by 10x. The issues are pretty fundamental and have to do with hydrogen just having a very low energy density by volume (it's the first element in the periodic table), energy conversions having a cost (second law of thermodynamics), and the bonds between hydrogen and carbon or oxygen atoms being very strong.
It takes more energy to break those chemical bonds than you get back in the form of hydrogen. There's a theoretical maximum efficiency to that. Once you have hydrogen, you have to convert it again to do something useful with it. That too has a maximum theoretical efficiency. These inefficiencies multiply. What happens if you multiply two fractions? You get a smaller fraction. Compressing and cooling also takes energy. And if you introduce conversion to ammonia or some other susbtance, that's another conversion, which is lossy. That just multiplies the problem.
So, that means hydrogen should be prioritized for those use cases where you can minimize the losses. Anything involving transporting hydrogen over long distances is a problem. Because of the volumetric density. It's just not very efficient. You need to move a lot of volume of it. And it's a tough substance to contain. Leaky valves, boiling of liquid hydrogen to keep it cool, etc. The losses accumulate rapidly. And even when you contain that, you need to ship about 18x more of it in compressed gas form to match a single tanker of petrol or about 3x in liquid form (cooled to near absolute zero). Compression and cooling take energy btw.
Because of all that, the vast majority of hydrogen produced right now, is produced and consumed on site. Mostly for things at the top of the hydrogen ladder like fertilizer production or use in various chemical processes.
I’m glad everyone agreed English words are meaningless now. It makes trying to understand articles so much more fun.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/clean-energy-green-hy...
