The FF industry is leaping (has leapt, historically) on CCS as a getout clause and has sunk french metric tonnes of money into CCS. So far, its uneconomic except for the specific use of pumping gas into wells to make them more productive, which leads to more fugitive gas. No significant CCS experiment worldwide has achieved its goals as sequestration. The one in Western Australia releases so much CO2 it has to pay a penalty cost, to maintain status. (its a gas field associated with other extractive industry I believe)
This money they've sunk: its not their money: they've been doing it off the public teat as "research" or, when it is their money, its booked to R&D and has massive royalty & tax offset benefits. Its a shellgame.
The inclusion of blue hydrogen+CCS in this piece is really regrettable: its being used to avoid having to wear the cost of going to green hydrogen, which is abandoning FF inputs. For holders of shares in coal and gas, this is not optimal so they oppose green and argue abatement by CCS is "the one"
It doesn't work. CCS is a giant con. The evidence is strong that at scale CCS is not working, and will waste years of time, billions of dollars of cost, and gigatonnes of CO2, to prove it.
Overall I like Gates trying to help. He's been badly advised when it comes to CCS.
Carbon Capture and Storage works by capturing research funds and burying it deep, deep into fossil fuel companies accounts, where no tax officer can reach them.
I think this might be the greatest comment I have ever seen on HN or elsewhere. Thanks, I wonder if BillG has read all four of them before he made up his mind, or that he's one-sidedly informed.
I fully agree with your perception of CCS but i think it's only a small historical detour of about the same scale/level of harm as cellulosic ethanol or concentrated solar thermal used to be. Tried, failed, moved on. No one bets the farm on it, Fit for 55 plan for example, makes no mention of CCS.
That's right, but by comparison, Australia has 25GW of solar installed, so this funding represents only $0.01 per watt of installed solar, probably less than 1% of subsidy that went to solar. It's an OK amount to try and fail once.
Most of that is 25GW is recent and cheap PV at close to $0.02 per watt. It’s the tiny fraction from before 2015 that was really expensive.
A 250m subsidy to grid solar right now would easily increase total installed solar to 100GW+. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that project alone was a larger subsidy than every subsidy given to grid solar in Australia.
$0.02 per watt??? don't you confuse with the cost of kilowatt-hour of power? Cheapest installed solar is >$1 per watt, most of the time about $1.5-$2 per watt. Cheapest Chinese panels themselves are about $0.25 per watt and they make a tiny part of the overall setup costs.
Nobody is going to hand out a subsidy and say here buy panels with this. It’s all about the multiplier, even home subsidies don’t 1:1 pay for panels it’s at best deduct the cost from your taxes saving 30% or whatever on the cost and often less than that.
So, that’s where the ~2c/kWh shows up it’s roughly the minimum cash on hand someone needs to get the ball rolling for loans on a grid solar project assuming a proven track record. Now hand someone with that track record 250 million free and clear and not only can they get loans but they can also attract private investors.
Of course the risk is you hand out money to projects that would happen either way and get noting for the subsidy.
Ammonia has been mentioned a few times in this thread, but I will expand a bit, because I believe it is the most promising hydrogen-based approach. Essentially, the idea is to use ammonia directly as fuel. There is an ARPA-E funded project (that I'm currently failing to find) that cracks ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen using heat. They claim that they can create a mixture of H2 and ammonia that will burn at any required flame temperature (H2 burns too fast / hot for existing turbines, ammonia too slow, so a mixture is the right way to go). Theoretically, with this process, you could use ammonia as a drop-in replacement for LNG. The LNG infrastructure can also be converted to carry ammonia instead.
Now, there are still obvious energy losses from creating and then burning ammonia. One thing that this technology could be very helpful with is overcoming the NIMBY-ism around nuclear power - that is, build nuclear reactors to produce ammonia, then ship the ammonia to where it will be used. It would obviously be more efficient to just run power lines from nuclear power plants, but given the wide-spread opposition, it could be politically easier to build the nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere.
The downside is that ammonia is a heavier-than-air poison, like chemical weapons from WW1. Its hazards are significant.
- "Anhydrous ammonia is lighter than air and will therefore rise (will not settle in low-lying areas); however, vapors from liquefied gas are initially heavier than air and may spread along the ground."
We already synthesize and handle industrially millions of tons of it annually, and have done for going on a century. If there were a worrying problem with ammonia, you would already be hearing about it.
By the time you can smell it from a leaking tank depending on the speed of the spill you may already be inviting lung damage, if it overwhelms you you're as good as dead. With some regularity farmers here are overcome by ammonia that has pooled in manure storage pools.
This article starts up with 'three dead per year through fertilizer vapors, one breath and you are gone'.
Three from a population of how many? Compared to how many in some other possible world?
As long as people are being killed in numbers many orders of magnitude greater, just so sugar sellers will have good quarterly profits, it will be hard to count those.
That's now how it works though. If you lump all of the preventable deaths in a profession together it starts to add up, and NL is efficient enough that three people in a population of 10K farmers, a much smaller fraction of which is into animals is high enough to be noticed. Farming is a dangerous profession (lots of open rotating machinery) and we value life enough that doing something about things like this (workplace accidents) is strongly culturally ingrained.
It's also an entirely different domain from the 'sugar sellers'.
Fortunately the main use of anhydrous ammonia (agriculture) is in sparsely populated places, so its impact is limited. I think it's a questionable idea to put it in urban vehicles though.
It will be used in farm equipment, and in place of bunker oil in ships, and burned in combined-cycle turbines in times when wind and sun are not providing, and other, cheaper storage has been used up.
Ammonia seems too dangerous. With cheap electricity from solar and wind, cheap hydrogen seems like a better answer. Sure, it's not a perfect answer, but it seems better because it seems much safer.
As recently as approximately 200 years ago steel was very expensive, as was aluminum. Now both of those materials are cheap and used in a plethora of applications.
Cheap electricity will similarly enable us to cost-effectively do many things that heretofore were prohibitively expensive.
The whole, "Hydrogen is bulky and difficult to store" canard of an argument doesn't sway me... at all. Hydrogen storage could certainly be improved, but even if it never were, for long distance shipping and air travel it's good enough as it is.
"But, but, but... you'd need to build ships and planes 50% larger!!!" Sure. Ok. Yes. The world is not running out of steel.
And, of course, if ships and planes were running on hydrogen instead of gasoline and diesel, a huge amount of research would go into improving hydrogen storage.
The Ford Nucleon (a nuclear-powered concept car) never made it into production, yet we do have nuclear submarines. Choosing the correct fuel for a given application is important.
You will see a very great deal of anhydrous ammonia stored, transported, and used, but will not be asked to handle it yourself. Shipmakers are already gearing up to retrofit ships with ammonia tanks, to burn in existing engines. Probably important ports will start to forbid docking of bunker-oil craft.
You probably will not have much contact with hydrogen, either.
A safety argument does not favor consumer-level use of hydrogen. Nor, of ammonia.
But synthetic liquified hydrogen, produced at airports from power delivered on transmission lines at times when power is cheapest, and banked, will certainly come to drive aircraft where cost matters.
I think you are correct; I was very probably wrong. I did some research. NH3 (Ammonia) seems like it will be used, at least, to power large cargo ships in the near future.
I didn't realize that Ammonia is essentially a cheaper and easier way to store hydrogen.
To add on to this comment for anyone curious about ammonia: Green ammonia production is among the top 10 emerging technologies in chemistry in 2021 [1,2]. The Haber-Bosch process consumes 1% of the worlds global energy, and generates 1.4% of the worlds carbon dioxide [3].
That being said there is a lot of research both to generate ammonia from green energy, and the work to harvest ammonia for use as a fuel cell would benefit as a secondary emergent technology.
Just wanted to add some basic chemistry information as background
Hydrogen (H) can be split from water (H2O) with a by-product of Oxygen (O).
Hydrogen is hard to handle logistically (as discussed elsewhere in the thread), and the real idea in "Power to X" is to include Hydrogen in another molecule with better logistics.
Main contenders are Ethanol (C2H5OH, alcohol), Methane (CH4, ~natural gas), and Ammonia (NH3).
Ethanol and Methane are by far the nicest products: already used as energy carriers, easy to handle, relatively non-toxic, but they have one problem: They require Carbon (C) to manufacture in addition to Hydrogen. Even with increased atmospheric CO2 levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is only on the order of 400 ppm and extraction is expensive.
Ammonia (NH3) is synthesized directly from Hydrogen and Nitrogen (N) which is makes up 70% of the atmosphere. The Haber-Bosch process used for this synthesis is a cornerpiece of industrial chemistry.
Interestingly enough, at least in USA the proposed automotive hydrogen solution is one that reduces logistical problems by placing electrolysis equipment at filling stations - then you have reduced transport to just on-site piping and storage tank, and it makes sense to colocate charging of electric cars with hydrogen ones, as well as use demand-response for the stations (providing extra load balancing for the energy grid, which benefits renewables and nuclear alike)
The problem with any fuel containing H2 in any existing engine is hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen is a reactive gas that attacks steel.
Ammonia fuel cells have a comparable weight proposition to hydrogen at small sizes because the tank is so much lighter. I think that has legs (or wheels?). For stationary storage, the ammonia-CO2 adduct is a solid, which is nice.
Hydrogen embrittlement is always hyped to the sky.
It is not a serious problem unless you are trying to keep warm, gaseous hydrogen under high pressure. So, don't. Furthermore, aluminum is quite resistant to embrittlement.
Of possibly greater moment is that it leaks, and has ~200x GHG over CO2 (including secondary effects). Leaks are not dangerous in the open, or in confined places with positive airflow, but punishment for neglect is visited on all bystanders. LN2 storage is better, where you can afford the insulation and refrigeration.
It leaks very readily, it ignites very readily, it burns with a wide range of air:fuel proportions, it burns with a high flame speed, and it burns hot.
Hydrogen is ... not a good choice for something to reticulate widely around the world.
Edit: That's leaving aside its low energy density. You need three times the volume of hydrogen as natural gas for the same quantity of heat, so existing pipe networks are unlikely to be useful.
Global warming potential is off to the side of all this.
Yet, millions of tons of hydrogen are today produced, transported and used.
There is nothing special about the volumetric energy density of NG. H2 has to move faster, if carried in the same pipe for the same use. Its lower viscosity means it can.
Municipal gas networks used to carry "lamp gas", a mix of CO and H2, in cast-iron pipes.
> trying to keep warm, gaseous hydrogen under high pressure
Which of course nobody would do? Unfortunately, those are the circumstances in which H2 is made from fossil fuels and likewise the circumstances under which it is combusted in turbines. You can't just handwave materials compatibility away.
The turbine blades are downstream of the combustion chamber so they handle combustion products not hydrogen-rich gas. The turbine combustion chambers, fuel handling system, and high pressure H2 compressors[0] _do_ have to function in a high pressure high temperature H2-rich environment.
0: Take a guess as to what those look like inside.
From what I read, the efficiency of ammonia production is like 16%, which is well below hydrogen at like 40% or whatever. Even with cheap renewables that is terrible amount of losses even before you get to use the fuel.
> the nature of the chemical industry being
what it was, and is, one could be confident that it would come down
to a reasonable figure when anybody wanted it in quantity.
We produce it in immense quantity from fossil fuels and vent the fossil CO2 into the atmosphere.
The price of which is forecast to go up.
Green Ammonia is made from renewable energy, which is forecast to become cheaper.
It also requires electrolysers which are ramping up production and are also predicted to fall in price as they get made at scale from cheaper components.
So it's a fairly safe bet even if you don't believe all the published academic papers that go through the working in great detail, or the business cases that predict a multi-Billion dollar market for it.
Because it piggybacks on the political might of fossil fuel producers who are subsidized by taxpayers and don't have to pay for their externalities.
It's not "cheaper" for a mob connected waste disposal firm to dump waste into a river. If they were prosecuted for the damage they did to other people's property and had to pay for the damage they did then they'd need to raise their prices to the point that just dealing with it properly would be cheaper.
In physics terms:
Dig up hydrogen connected to carbon. Separate the hydrogen from the carbon. Release the fossil carbon into the atmosphere as CO2. Capture the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Seperate it from oxygen, store the carbon. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
Versus
Use electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Use hydrogen to make Ammonia.
Diverting money from building out renewables to building nukes, for whatever purpose, brings climate catastrophe nearer.
If ever there was a process forgiving of intermittently available energy, it is chemical synthesis. The same money spent on wind and solar would produce a lot more ammonia.
Conversion losses don't matter much when marginal cost of generation is near zero, as we get with renewables, but very much not, with nukes. You just build out more panels.
Technically it may be forgiving, but not economically. Imagine electrolyzer or ammonia plant that uses only 20% of full capacity on average because of using only peak electricity surplus. The rest 80% is basically wasted. Classical plant with higher capacity factor might still be more profitable even if it uses more expensive electricity.
Any electricity demand that can be modulated is good for renewables.
Big plants have been doing this for decades, even before renewables were a thing. The new thing is computers making it cheaply automatable and networked so that e.g. a fleet of cars can organise their charging schedule via the internet.
But rising electricity demand isn't a problem for renewables and climate change, it is in fact a required and desirable part of a virtuous cycle.
So build the Green Ammonia plant and build the renewables to power it 100% of the time but have the option to turn your electrolysers down and sell a small percentage of that to the grid when market prices let you profit from that. It's a win-win-win, less gas peakers, more green electricity and green hydrogen.
There is nowhere that you would operate at only 20% utilization.
Demand for ammonia will be so strong that, after enough renewable overcapacity is built out, you would run electrolysers off your other storage, 24/7.
A nuke would, of course, produce exactly zero grams of ammonia for ten years. It would also require burning coal for those ten years. Ten years of coal is part of the cost never accounted for, like the public indemnification subsidy, and cost of decommissioning.
Starting after the ten years, the nuke would produce a fraction of the ammonia, per dollar, that the renewables would have, because operating cost of nukes is quite high, against zero for renewables.
It would. Yet there is no promising tech in this field. Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.
If hydrogen becomes inexpensive to produce, it will by by way of solar power used to generate it.
It will never be easy to store. Hydrogen is the smallest element, and can move through solid objects over time. It is violently explosive. You think these EV fires you see all the time are bad? They're nothing compared to gasoline fires. And gasoline fires are nothing compared to a hydrogen explosion.
> Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.
I always find this false hydrogen versus batteries narrative bizarre.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are EVs. It isn't an exclusive choice between hydrogen or batteries. Choose both hydrogen and batteries, both FCEVs and BEVs.
In any case, if you want your EV to be manufactured with green steel then you want hydrogen to be used in the production of that steel:
The hydrogen-is-the-enemy-of-EVs thing comes from the way that car manufacturers in the '90s pushed hydrogen as the "fuel of the future" in order to stall the CARB EV mandate from interfering with their ICE car sales. It was a cynical bait-and-switch where they simultaneously insisted that it was impossible to build acceptable BEVs (despite both the GM EV1 and the Rav4-EV being universally lauded) and extolled hydrogen fuel cell EVs as the Bright New Future that was "only 10 years away". This let them continue business as usual in exchange for the occasional puff piece on hydrogen.
If they hadn't been allowed to get away with it, we'd have had practical EVs by 2000 instead of having to wait another decade for Tesla.
I know ammonia has safety challenges as well, but transport and storage of ammonia is routine. I believe there are new developments in using ammonia for hydrogen storage and transport, so ammonia has potential to enable hydrogen to be the fuel of the future.
> Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.
No, or at least not by everyone. Hydrogen is seen as a replacement for natural gas. For example: https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-japan-consortium-explo... There is no fancy fuel cell converting it to electricity in this plan. They are just going t burn it for heat, just as they do for natural gas.
Now there are a few problems, such as cost. Producing hydrogen costs around 4 times what it costs to produce natural gas. Or at least it did before the Ukraine broke out. Right now, if anyone was making renewable hydrogen, they would ge getting a tidy profit.
Another is storage. You can't economically liquefy it, it literally passes through metal walls and damages them on the way through. Converting to Ammonia is well understood, but getting hydrogen back was a problem. Until: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/fuels...
It might work. 100's of millions are being invested into finding out if it does.
Using hydrogen made from electrolysis of water (using solar/wind inputs) as a fuel for electricity generation is basically a futile cycle, and the only advantage would be temporal storage. For short term storage (hours/days) batteries are far more efficient. For long term storage, hydrogen is a bad idea other than as feedstock for production of longer-chain hydrocarbons (Fischer-Tropsch synthesis) or methane (Sabatier reaction).
The more obvious immediate use (not mentioned in article) is for steel production by the H2-DRI-EAF method, the direct reduction of iron in an electric arc furnace.
> "Iron ore is reduced with hydrogen while in a solid state, hence the name direct reduction, to produce direct reduced iron (DRI) called sponge iron. Sponge iron is then fed into an EAF, where electrodes generate a current to melt the sponge iron to produce steel. Some carbon is needed so that steel can be produced. This carbon can come from pulverized coal, biomethane or other biogenic carbon sources."
The other obvious use is as a replacement for natural gas feedstocks for ammonia production via the Haber-Bosch process, and there are similar uses in traditional petrochemical production where hydrogen is often used in various large-scale organic chemistry transformations with names like 'hydrocracking' (breaking apart long-chain molecules) and 'dearomatization' (converting benzene to cyclic hydrocarbons), see:
Direct air capture of carbon dioxide and conversion to methane via addition of hydrogen (Sabatier process) as a means of making rocket fuel for Starship, that's also an idea Musk should take up. That's how you'd have to fuel a spaceship on Mars as well.
DRI is great! I am [CEO at a hydrogen startup, and] very bullish on hydrogen in the power sector, at least in North America. I should also say, I agree that batteries and "electrify everything" will play a much larger role in the electricity sector vs hydrogen.
You've noted that temporal storage is a value prop of hydrogen. I'd like to add on that this is a real value prop driving real $B-scale spend at utilities in eg Los Angeles [1]. Depending on the researcher, hydrogen usually looks like the cheapest form of seasonal energy storage (vs eg iron oxide or flow batteries, excluding pumped hydro in ideal sites).
Hydrogen can move electricity around cheaply in space, and is arguably cheaper than HVDC for long distances [2].
If hydrogen can move electricity in time and space, that is kind of the holy grail for wind and solar. As you may know, there are endless square miles of CA/AZ desert and OK panhandle we we can produce power at insanely cheap prices, but we do not, because there is no cheap way to move power around in time and space. (And, because America can't permit those HVDC lines. We're much better at permitting pipelines.) If you believe in consensus cost curves for solar/electrolysis, you probably think that hydrogen will get cost-competitive with natgas @ $8/mmBTU in the next decade or so, then keep dropping. That's basically yesterday in utility years!
I'd also list "reliability" as a unique value prop, which is a key goal for grid operators with mandated zero-carbon timelines. This is a one of the things driving Los Angeles utility's acquisitions and cost/risk modeling. (There are other major factors: Utilities own lots of turbines and are building more, and can mostly start using hydrogen today alongside natural gas, and turbines fit their business model and operational expertise.) For these reasons and others, models of zero-carbon power systems are usually more expensive without hydrogen. That is, wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/nuclear/etc, plus 4-12h storage/batteries, tends to be more expensive than the same mix plus hydrogen. Example study at [3].
"24/7 clean energy" is another related concept, and is the holy grail for corporate energy buyers like Google. I haven't even brought up wind/solar interconnection yet, which is another problem which I see driving momentum for hydrogen, but that'll have to wait for another rant.
This is not an insignificant advantage, to be fair. However, I agree that using electrolytic hydrogen as a Fischer-Tropsch or Sabatier feedstock is the way to go.
Is that metal hydride stuff feasible? I heard about it and saw videos around the claims of the substance but was curious why it never took off if it was so great. What are the challenges around it precisely?
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/metal-hydride-storage-...
Metal hydrides are a great way to store hydrogen that bypasses the alternatives of very highly compressed hydrogen or liquid hydrogen. However, storage is only part of the equation here.
This is such generic analysis all it serves as is just a big-name-person blog post that can be linked to as an example of status-quo conventional wisdom.
The question is all in the numbers. What are the estimated prices of the four methods he mentions? What are their near term prospects for price reduction and/or efficiency gains? What are the crossover points between the economics of exiting methane steam reformation and the alternatives? What would drive those crossover points (a certain cost for solar? a certain scope of carbon pricing?).
I realize gatesnotes aren't meant to be deep dives, but it is genuinely infuriating how childishly oversimplified this discourse always is.
> This is such generic analysis all it serves as is just a big-name-person blog post that can be linked to as an example of status-quo conventional wisdom.
I thought the same thing, but reading through the comments here makes me realize how many people seem to be completely unaware about the hydrogen discussion.
I don't see hydrogen playing any role for energy storage or grid demand balancing.
Even if all the technical and engineering challenges associated with storing and transporting it safely could be addressed, I just don't see how the economics of green hydrogen is supposed to work. The round-trip energy efficiency of electrolysis-fuel cell is poor - currently about 40%.
The counter-argument is that such inefficiency doesn't matter as it can be used as a sink for excess/almost free renewables (solar or wind) but for this to work, it means leaving your capital-expensive electrolysis plant idle for half or 2/3rds of the day. Since the cost of green hydrogen production is mostly cap-ex not op-ex, this makes the proposition almost completely infeasible.
Looking at the trajectories of grid-scale battery storage and that of hydrogen technology, I don't see how anyone could bet on hydrogen.
The best hope is that we can replace the current industrial consumption of grey hydrogen with that of green but this currently needs massive subsidy as a kg of green hydrogen current costs about 5 times that of gray (admittedly I think the multiple will be less given the current high NG prices).
The point is that some countries have long dark winters, often with windless spells. Some are also lowland countries with little or no access to hydro.
For green energy, you'd need to literally store months' worth of energy somehow, and the cost of doing that via batteries is prohibitive too.
I guess the hope is that storing hydrogen, difficult and expensive that it is, could be made to be more like storing hydrocarbons, basically in a hole in the ground. Then you could produce it in the windy sunny months and use it in winter.
Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection. For instance, Chicago could get solar power from Chile in the winter time to buffer out the seasonal variability. Or if they didn't even want to have to maintain a smaller buffer to deal with day/night cycles, they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day.
Power losses would be significant, but probably not all that worse than doing local electricity-to-hydrogen-to-electricity.
To quote wikipedia on HVDC lines:
> Depending on voltage level and construction details, HVDC transmission losses are quoted at 3.5% per 1,000 km
An infrastructure project like that would probably be hugely expensive, but so is manufacturing lots of batteries or doing large scale hydrogen production and storage.
"they could get solar power from, say, Algeria and Australia depending on time of day."
This is basically a proposal to power all of Americas at night using solar deployment in Australia? This is far outside the realm of technical and infrastructural feasability.
What about reliability? UK power connection to france has burned down a few months ago and it will take 2 years to fix, and it only moves like 2 GW
I would have thought so too, but there was a story awhile back about China working out a deal with Chile to import solar power from Chile via a trans-Pacific cable. Maybe it's just hype and nothing will actually come of it, but someone at least seems to think it's plausible.
Probably the way to handle reliability is to keep some of the fossil fuel plants in operational condition just in case. If everything is working properly they don't have to ever be used, but countries aren't under continual threat that their energy supply is going to be cut because someone damaged the cable (accidentally or deliberately).
How would you factor in Geo-political risks to this approach? Seems like we're trading dependency on oil producing countries with a dependency on "sunny and windy" countries. Arguably worse unless the grid is connected like a mesh. Quick google shows that 61% of oil is transported by sea.
Non-mesh power-grid interconnection is the equivalent of an oil pipeline with the geo-political downsides associated with it. Though maybe the dependency would at least be bi-directional in some instances.
I think the right way to mitigate the risk is to keep many/most of the fossil fuel plants around so that they can be brought online in an emergency (i.e. someone destroys a cable), but otherwise don't use them.
> Having some cheap long-term energy storage option is one way to solve that problem, but another is better power grid interconnection.
Nope, we tried this in Europe and you end up with a free rider problem where nobody but us invested sufficiently in renewables and decided to buy most of their gas from Russia instead, which led to them driving our electricity prices through the roof when the rug got pulled from under them by the war even though we did all the right things. It was clearly a mistake that we deregulated and connected to the European market and now everyone knows this with certainty.
There's a big gap between securing funding and actually completing large infrastructure projects. We have a bunch of cancelled nuclear power plants halfway through construction from NIMBYism, cost overruns, office changes, etc.
Except it happens all the time. Canada exports Gwh to the US every year. Laos is a big exporter too (mainly to Thailand I think), Paraguay to Brazil, and obviously around europe.
Exactly. The solar energy that can be captured throughout the year using not much more than the roof area of a single-family home would be enough to cover its entire annual energy needs, both for electricity and heating. The problem is that you need to store about 30,000 kWh of energy over a period of several months. That’s on the order of 400 Tesla Model 3 batteries worth of storage. Not only is it prohibitively expensive. Those batteries would also be missing in production of electric vehicles.
That’s a good point. But for industry, it could work the same. Solar plus seasonal storage. Probably not important for countries like the US, that don’t depend on imports of oil and gas. But for those countries to do, being able to utilize the energy that comes down from the sky for free could be a game changer both in terms of economics and foreign affairs.
> Since the cost of green hydrogen production is mostly cap-ex not op-ex
Is it? I always thought that it was always op-ex, because you need to burn two joules of energy, in order to produce one joule of hydrogen-potential energy.
Which, in a world where you can dig coal out of the ground for $30/tonne, is uneconomic.
Yes, as energy production prices fall, prices for commodities that depend on it will, too. Aluminum is today "nearly free" by standards of a century ago. We will still need to mine bauxite or collect recycled cans, and handle ingots.
> it means leaving your capital-expensive electrolysis plant idle for half or 2/3rds of the day.
I think that's an exaggeration, and neglects the possibility of overbuilding solar/wind. It may mean leaving your relatively low capital expenditure wind and solar farms 50% underutilized for half the day but the benefit here is that you can guarantee a 95% capacity factor year-round for the expensive electrolysis plant.
Electrolysis equipment will move relentlessly toward 100% usage, drawing down other forms of storage, and transmission lines, when top-line generation flags. You might turn it off just when demand peaks.
We absolutely will overbuild solar and wind to have enough to charge up storage for 24-hour use. Making hydrogen will be such a use.
If we want to be serious about grid storage, look to the gigantic fleet of EVs we're building out. All of those vehicles should be able to charge and discharge to the grid based on daily demand and user preference.
I'm looking at buying a base Model 3. Huge (57.5 kWh)chunk of battery that will be sitting there most of the week (wife and I both work from home).
Charging at 40c/kWh during the day (from abundant solar) and discharging at 85c/kWh (for evening peak) would yield about $23 daily - or $8,400 annually if the car was never driven.
I would think that EVs would largely be a net load on the grid at night since that is when they would normally be charged. It could possibly be a revenue source for those with non-standard usage patterns of course.
The gray stuff isn't cheaper, the cost is just passed onto someone who can't directly input into the decision to use it or an alternative. If they could, the problem solves itself because it's obviously more expensive to be dumping stuff and then extracting it again rather than just not dumping it in the first place.
Four decades of climate change discussion and the single most important economic lesson to be taken from it, one that is absolutely basic free market economics, is still successfully suppressed and widely misunderstood, even in technical forums like this, full of people who think of themselves as libertarians. It's an impressively evil achievement for the fossil fuel producers.
The only reason it's discussed is because the fossil fuel industry has a lot of experience and infrastructure around liquid fuels. It wants a future where there is a new liquid fuel so that it can leverage that experience and infrastructure. They are pouring huge sums into moving the academic and public conversation in the direction of hydrogen - it's like the tobacco companies all over again. Don't trust a word that comes out of anyones mouth, it's all designed to further some agenda or other. There's continuous information warfare going on all around us.
"Another option is to produce hydrogen using the current methods that burn fossil fuels and then capture the CO2 produced in the process before it’s released in the atmosphere. It may never be economical to capture 100 percent of the carbon released using incumbent technologies, but while we’re waiting for thousands of industrial facilities to retrofit their infrastructure, carbon capture can help drive emissions way down."
That's the oil industry position. See "Blue hydrogen".
The "hydrogen economy" concept made more sense a decade ago. Solar cells, wind farms, and batteries have improved so much that it's obsolete.
(Now if we can just get the US auto industry to produce electric cars fast enough to keep up with demand. The electric light truck sector is running at least a year behind. This is being used as an excuse for premium pricing.)
There will be market for as much hydrogen as we can ever produce. Much of it will be bound to nitrogen, for ammonia, or to carbon, for kerosene, used directly in e.g. steel manufacture and in aircraft, and as feedstock for thousands of chemical processes.
It will undercut any sort of extractive stuff, because marginal cost is near zero. Wherever it can be used in place of one of the other things, it will be, because it will be the cheapest portable energy.
While we do need to be suspicious, we can't reject technical solutions on the grounds that it would be too convenient if it worked. Whatever we do does need to be reasonably convenient.
I agree that at current CapEx you could never run a plant 1/3 of the time and make it look good but I think this ignore two things:
1) If you take net zero as a hard goal, i.e. not one that is subject to economic tests except in relative terms then hydrogen as large scale energy storage only has to beat alternative technologies, regardless of how expensive it is.
Battery storage will absolutely dominate intra-day balancing and hydrogen will have no role to play there but the high cost per unit of energy stored of a battery doesn't work for inter-seasonal or for dealing with an unusually high demand year. (in a European context, a very cold winter for instance). No, future cost reductions will not solve that for the simple reason that the capital cost of a unit of battery capacity has to be recovered over its cycles. So a battery that cycles once a year incurs 365x the capital cost per cycle that one which cycles once a day does. In many renewable dominated power markets, current battery tech is competitive in the intra-day market. To be equally competitive in the seasonal market, you'd need two orders of magnitude cost reduction which doesn't seem possible on materials cost grounds alone. I don't see how iron-air and other battery chemistries stack up here either and to be honest, if we're going to compare long term energy storage technologies on a level playing field we have to compare like with like. We can't say "batteries" are getting much better and cheaper and are proven technology compared to hydrogen storage and then it turns out that the batteries in question are early stage VC projects.
When I look at the trajectory of grid scale battery storage vs hydrogen, I see a battery technology developing that will completely own the intra-day and probably the intra-week world but that has no chance of dealing with seasonal peaks.
Europe is prone to extended periods of cold, overcast, and windless weather which lasts for weeks and stretches from Ireland to the practically the Urals. That is the system stress condition and no system that cannot handle it can be said to be functional. The same might not be true everywhere, solar has less variation than wind and maybe California doesn't need seasonal storage, I don't know, but this is at least one area of the world which does and I suspect there are more.
Ideas which involve very long distance electricity transmission simply will not work for geopolitical reasons. If anyone fantasised about it before February of this year, they can now forget about it. No doubt electricity will be moved substantial distances but no government will allow the ability of its citizens to have winter heating / summer cooling to depend instantaneously on governments it cannot trust. Short distance integration of the kind we see in Western Europe, sure, but that doesn't really help because there's a lot of temperature, wind and insolation correlation between those countries anyway.
So hydrogen storage is lossy but the alternatives don't make the models stack up, except for a massive wave of nuclear new-build. I don't know which will be cheaper but these are both not cheap options. Proposed alternatives have to pass the test of dealing with this seasonal (and multi-year scale issue)
2) If you look at where power generation is going in high renewables markets, it is clear that we will soon have a situation where for many thousands of hours a year, we have deeply oversupplied instantaneous demand. That will be true even after intra-day load shifting, EV charging etc. This is in fact efficient since the cost of undersupply is asymmetric and vastly higher than the economic cost of oversupply. The system will be net long for most of the year and net short for a much smaller number of hours, during which period the value of dispatchable energy will be very high. More overbuilding shortens the net-short period but creates much more energy over-generated over the course of the year.
That means that your capital intensive electrolyser plant can run at full capacity the majority of the time, reduced capacity occasionally, and has to be off maybe 10% to 20% of the time. That is much easier to make work than 33%.
(I am assuming only modest electrolyser cost reductions)
The issues I have with a lot of analysis of hydrogen is that people do a quick order of magnitude comparison to either fossil gas or to batteries in the intra-day world and say, "why would you do this?" as a rhetorical question when they should be noting that fossil gas isn't a long term option, batteries aren't playing in the more than a day market at all (since there is currently no reason for such a thing to exist) and asking the question seriously rather than rhetorically.
People have been spoiled by the easy energy transition successes so far, moderately deep penetration of wind and solar into electricity and EVs and they expect that the whole energy transition will be delivered by technologies that compare favourably even without costing carbon emissions with the fossil fuels they displace and the reality is that we are not owed a set of technologies that are cheaper than fossil fuels.
Hydrogen is a battery. We have no free source of H2. We have to put energy into making it, storing it, and transporting it. We get less energy back than we put in. The most generous lifecycle analyses that I have seen estimate 60-70% roundtrip efficiency.
There are lots of efforts in creating battery chemistries that do not rely on hard to source elements. Lithium sulfur (no cobalt required), Sodium ion (much more readily available than Li), and many other efforts - some showing good results.
Unlike oil once there are enough batteries in a country that country is good for a long time as a batteries can be recycled quiet well (lead acid batteries have a recycling rate of 99.99x%, it is just a question of political will and new batteries being cheap right now).
I did a grad course on energy generation. I think the biggest problem for hydrogen is that there is not enough money in it (kind of like nuclear). IMO, a hydrogen fuel cell PHEV would would the sweet spot for a “green vehicle”. Like 70% today of hydrogen is made from fossil fuel because the reality is, there’s just not enough incentive to shift from that (like how we use so much plastic). If we put the same amount of money and research into hydrogen that we did with batteries, non platinum fuel cell and solar hydrogen is definitely technically feasible.
I can get behind the round-trip inefficiencies if it gets terribly cheap, but I can't imagine how storage and transportation can ever be economical.
We are trying to contain the most volatile substance in the universe. It needs incredible pressure just to be manageable and even then, it freaking diffuses within the steel walls themselves, leaking and making it brittle over time. It's not hard to imagine single protons wandering by in high pressure H2.
I mean, it's doable, but economical? It's hard for me to believe it ever will be, no matter the scale.
Both are easily carried in a Dewar flask. LH2 takes up more room, but that is just a matter of how big the ship carrying your flasks is, and how many of them. The number of kg in a flask of some volume is much less, but you also need to oxidize many fewer kg to get the kWh you paid for. The ratio is not 1, but is much less than 450/70.
There is nothing special about the size and laden mass of the LNG vessels we use. It was chosen by immediate convenience. Details of vessels for LH2 will be chosen the same way.
Why are we all wrapped up with hydrogen when we already have a perfectly adequate hydrocarbon infrastructure?
Sure, digging up old buried hydrocarbons and burning them isn't good, but couldn't we start synthesizing light hydrocarbons using green technology, so at least those usages are carbon neutral?
All of the synthetic light hydrocarbons (e-fuels) involve extra energy on top of the hydrogen production. Its pretty much right there in the name (hydro carbon). So for instance, we could make a ton of hydrogen and then burn it for energy, or we could make a ton of hydrogen, add in a few hundred kilos of carbon and more energy to produce e-fuels that we then burn for energy.
For logistics reasons it will almost certainly have its place, but because by definition it takes a greater energy investment than just the hydrogen, it will economically come after hydrogen production has been scaled to solve the cases where it is not logistically constrained.
Energy is plentiful, but it is not in the right places.
So surely the economics of transporting energy are going to count transmission/transport costs/efficiency not production efficiency?
Some form of synthetic fuel made from Hydrogen plus CO2 has a very good chance of being a winner here, given the extensive infrastructure we have for liquid (and gaseous) fuels.
I am no expert but this seems very clear to me. What do I have wrong?
Right, but the problem is really with hydrogen handling, and all the complexities that would be pushed onto, say, every vehicle. Keeping a hydrocarbon in a container is much, much easier than keeping a single hydrogen atom in a container.
Who isn't? I'm talking about cars(among other things). I know the article discounts cars as being solved by lithium ion batteries, but there is still a huge group pushing for hydrogen vehicles.
Sure we can, but a) all processes synthesizing hydrocarbons start with hydrogen, so you'll need cheap green hydrogen to begin with, and b) it takes a lot of energy.
Capturing CO2 to crack and attach to that hydrogen is itself expensive.
But there are places where nothing but hydrocarbons will do. Your old chainsaw, and all existing airliners, e.g. So, we will capture CO2, and turn some of it into hydrocarbons and re-exhaust it. Hopefully not most of it.
Yes, I believe that this has a lot more promise than using hydrogen directly. It's even less efficient than hydrogen, but there are tons of use cases where the cost of replacing old infrastructure is more expensive than the efficiency gains from electrification.
That's really the same bag as hydrogen. Once you have hydrogen, you could then use power-to-gas technologies to get a more stable fuel. Of course you lose energy in the process, so you only do this if you need to.
I'm interested if you could have a hydrogen stove, or hydrogen space heater- just as diesel, kerosene, propane, methane, electricity, alcohol, wood, and coal are all viable. What practical problems would arise? For example, gasoline camping stoves exist, but are too dangerous for indoor use.
If hydrogen is widely available, surely someone will want to do this..
For heating, you are probably better off converting to electricity (burning or fuel cell) and driving a high-COP heat pump. Good heat pumps are ~250-300% "efficient" at "converting" electricity to heat.
(Efficiency isn't in the Carnot sense, and heat pumps move heat rather than generating heat... Semantics, but point stands.)
For example: I recall reading that it is more efficient (ie BTUs generated) to use natural gas peaker plants generating electricity to drive a heat pump than to run a furnace. (Except at very low temps where COP drops quickly.)
It’s more efficient to burn the gas in a grid power station, convert to electricity, and use the electricity to drive the heat pump, then it is to burn the gas for heat directly.
Watch out, cop ranges wildly (1.1-5+) depending on the type of heat pump, output temperature and intake temperature. Ideal are water-water heat pumps connected to a deep well, but these cannot be installed everywhere and carry a significant (roughly double) capital investment.
Air-water heat pumps are very sensitive to outside air temperature and output temperature. Low-temperature heating (30-40C) still gets an OK ~2-2.5 cop in freezing temperatures, but sanitary water (65deg C) tanks the efficiency significantly.
Another consideration is that you lose efficiency in converting chemical to electrical energy, plus there is a higher transport and distribution loss to factor in.
Not quite true, 1/3 of energy may be from cars and household electricity but it doesn't mean the rest 2/3 are from industry. It's mainly from heating. And for heating there is a solution in form of heat pumps and energy-efficient buildings.
The second paragraph of TFA passingly mentions liquid fuels, then fails to elaborate. A blockbuster point is thereby deprived of appropriate emphasis.
According to Wikipedia[1], "Electrofuels, also known as e-fuels or synthetic fuels, are a type of drop-in replacement fuel. They are manufactured using captured carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, together with hydrogen obtained from sustainable electricity sources such as wind, solar and nuclear power."
I'm not against other approaches (such as vehicles using compressed hydrogen and fuel cells), but the implications of a drop-in replacement fuel are surely immense. As a short-term solution, synthetic fuels would allow us a slower and gentler transition away from our existing fleet of cars and trucks... and, where aircraft are concerned, e-fuels may even be a solid solution for the long term.
I'm sure there are challenges involved, so please no complaints that I'm expecting a miracle. But it disappoints me that so many discussions about hydrogen revolve around the same old topics... stuff like the energy losses associated with electrolysis, or the embrittlement of tanks used to store compressed hydrogen. With due respect, these are valid subjects... but it seems to me that HN readers (and Mr Gates) ought to find synthetic fuels a subject worthy of a great deal more ink. Darn! -- am I the only one who thinks this is exciting??
E-fuels don’t do anything other than make the original carbon consumption more efficient. Let’s say you have a coal power plant and capture the carbon to make e-fuel. You’ve made the coal more efficient, as you get the same amount of electricity + fuel, but it’s still carbon positive due to the laws of thermodynamics. E-fuels, while cool, aren’t that promising to me.
Unless of course you have a source of carbon you can't yet replace effectively or at scale, or you extract the carbon from the environment[1]. the second option (and efuel in general) definitely isn't ready for primetime but it could be a viable option in the future to keep some classes of old tech running rather than expending effort building out new tech at massive scales when it could be used more effectively elsewhere.
It's not that capturing carbon and then releasing it again is good. What's good is that the liquid fuel (made from green energy plus captured carbon) can be used in existing cars, ships and aircraft.
There's more info in the Wikipedia article I linked above. "In 2021, Audi announced that it was working on e-diesel and e-gasoline projects.
"By 2021, the European Federation for Transport and Environment advised the aviation sector was needing e-kerosene to be deployed as it could substantially reduce the climate impact of aviation."
Sorry, but I'm still not seeing how e-fuels are beneficial without violating the laws of thermodynamics. A plane is going to produce the same amount of CO2 whether kerosene or e-kerosene is used. The only way e-kerosene makes sense is if its production uses less CO2 than traditional oil extraction and refining. Given the relative simplicity of oil extraction, I find it hard to believe this will be the case. Maybe it makes sense in Europe where geopolitical considerations like energy independence outweigh strictly reducing CO2 emissions.
> The only way e-kerosene makes sense is if its production uses less CO2 than traditional oil extraction and refining.
Yes -- hold that thought! As noted above, e-fuel is made from green energy and captured CO2. So, net zero, more or less, after the fuel is burned. But traditional oil extraction doesn't begin by capturing CO2. So, burning that fuel is carbon positive.
Yes, but you're not answering why it's better to convert the captured CO2 into e-fuel rather than sequester it directly. My point is that converting to e-fuel instead of direct sequestration only makes sense if you can produce e-fuel from carbon more efficiently than you can extract and refine oil.
Ok well that's a bad assumption. Atmospheric capture is basically impossible (at scale) due to the size of the atmosphere and the density of carbon within it. Atmospheric capture is not something I'd bet the farm on.
I think the thing with hydrogen that people miss is that you have to accept that there will be huge energy losses. But then also have to remember that hydrogen allows you to easily handle and transport energy in the form of stable hydrocarbon fuels (if combined with power-to-gas) for example.
Maybe something like scaling a solar farm to 300% of needed capacity and then combining it with hydrogen storage/transportation, might be financially viable.
It's too late for hydrogen. For hydrogen to be green is has to either A) be more green than storing the generating power in batteries and using it from there or B) be created with something other than electricity. It's too late for A, batteries are already too good. As for B), feel free to come up with some kind of metamaterial that can produce hydrogen mechanically and in doing so bypass the efficiency loss of electrolysis.
There is an electrical use case that hydrogen can solve that batteries cannot (at least not anytime soon): moving energy without relying on transmission infrastructure.
On the one hand, this is absurd: transmission lines are all over, are quite efficient, and work today. On the other hand, in some markets (cough California), the incumbent utility prices are rather divorced from actual costs. The ability to make hydrogen, move it on a truck, and turn it into electricity somewhere else, even at 40% overall efficiency, could be much less expensive than selling electricity to PG&E and buying it back elsewhere.
Batteries have the serious downsides that (1) they cost more than almost anything else, and (2) cost is per kWh stored, rather than just kW in and per kW out. Flow batteries could mitigate this some where electrolyte is cheap.
Synthetic fuels have the enormous advantages that (1) tankage is super-cheap (negligible cost per kWh), (2) tankage is easily transported, (3) there is unlimited market for them, (4) you can burn them in existing combined-cycle turbines. These advantages easly overwhelm low round-trip efficiency, which is anyway relentlessly increasing.
We will be shipping hydrogen or ammonia from the tropics to Baltic states in winter. It is hard to imagine any viable green alternative, aside from reliance on fallible transmission lines.
> For hydrogen to be green is has to either A) be more green than storing the generating power in batteries
I thought batteries had some pretty toxic elements inside them? I don’t know much about using hydrogen as a power source so I’m interested to understand how it’s less green than batteries.
Correct. For hydrogen to be green it has to be more green that producing and using batteries. We're already past that point. Well past it, in fact. The generation-to-tires efficiency of BeVs is 77%. For hydrogen it's 33%. Modern fuel cells have an H2 to electricity efficiency of 55%. You could make that 100% and it would still be less green than using batteries.
Round-trip efficiency is not actually very important when generation has zero marginal cost. You just add more panels. It matters, but other things matter more. Panels are very cheap.
There are lots of different battery chemistries. All are pretty expensive as places to store utility-scale energy. Prices are still falling. Toxicity will not be any sort of long-term problem, although in the short term lithium batteries will explode fairly often (e.g. in Teslas) releasing gas that turns into drain opener when it hits your lungs. In the future we will prefer safer forms, such as solid-state electrolytes.
You are missing storage capacity - you could install a cheap storage tank and store enough hydrogen to last months. With batteries thats impossible - if you did it fir a house, it would cost 10x more than the house.
Cheap, green nuclear would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green fusion would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green synthetic fuels would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green antimatter reactors would be a breakthrough in clean energy.
Cheap, green vacuum point energy reactors would be... you get the idea.
However, the cheap, green sources of energy today are solar and wind, and no one is going to beat them for a decade.
Here's more fun stuff:
- Hydrogen has been and will be sold as green and extracted from fossil fuels.
- Hydrogen has been and will be propped up by desperate industries to delay or obfuscate EV and actual green energy
- Hydrogen has no significant infrastructure, while EVs and green energy have extant and robust delivery infrastructure (aside from battery storage).
- and I didn't even get into the inefficiencies and engineering challenges.
Hydrogen will have it's niches. But right now it is a trojan horse, and suffers the same issues as new nuclear or fusion: solar and wind are kicking so much ass and still getting stronger/cheaper/better year on year, that any application that involves even a five year schedule can't target the price to be competitive.
Usually, they'll be disingenuous and only talk about current prices, and complain about "subsidies" for their competitors and hide the "subsidies" they need or will redirect.
The path forward is solar, wind, battery, and PHEVs and EVs.
Oh look, Russia's war on Ukraine being sold to prop up an uncompetitive approach (well it is a trojan horse by the oil industry, what would one expect).
You know what would have made us ready for Russia? If we took an auto design that is 25 years old (the hybrid vehicle) and slapped a charging plug on it (aka a PHEV) and about 10 or 15 years ago forced or incented every new car to have that design, and pushed incentives to get the all-electric range improved each year as batteries got better and better.
To emphasize, that design was not rocket science. It was superior efficiency on highway (atkinson cycle), far greater efficiency in city driving, better torque, quieter, less emissions, all-electric for 80-90% of city trips, blah blah blah.
We'd need less military, would have kneecapped Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, averted Daesh (funded by oil), Ukraine (it's over pipelines, dummies), and Syria (also was over pipelines) in all likelihood.
So while it is true that current technology doesn't make hydrogen look like a viable option, improvements like we have seen in the field of lithium ans other batteries are probably possible and could change that outlook massively.
If someone manages to produce 1kg of hydrogen for $1, that would, more or less, equal the current high spot price of natural gas ($9 for 1 million BTU, according to Wolfram alpha that's 293kwh).
Hydrogen is certainly viable, but it will take a long time to build out the equipment to produce enough of it. Every last kg produced will be spoken for.
Once LH2 aircraft enter any route, kerosene craft will suddenly be wholly unable to compete. But it needs abundant renewables, and synthesis equipment and underground tankage at airports.
Ah, Bill's again advocating for a techno-optimist utopian world where he can fly his private jet with Green Hydrogen (TM) while saving us from climate change. Can't wait for the Veritasium video!
Science is clear and simple: we have to half (at least) our energy consumption in the next decades to avoid the worst of the Catastrophe. Sorry Bill, your private jet should be grounded and the rich much be steeply taxed.
In 1973 I visited the office of a chemistry professor. He and his research partner seemed to be on somewhat of a downhill slide. For years they had dreams of discovering a catalyst that would let water break into hydrogen and oxygen from exposure to direct sunlight. They never found that catalyst, and after nearly fifty years, I never even hear the concept any more.
My bet is on ammonia but yeah the economics will get tricky as producers are going to ask themselves "will I get more money if I sell this as fertilizer or as fuel?"
Kind of what happens with corn-based bioethanol, where they have to compete with the regular food market and viceversa.
There is no natural upper limit on ammonia produced. Add more panels, make more ammonia. The panels, placed intelligently, do not use up land needed for other things.
Compare to bioethanol, strictly limited by acreage under cultivation.
The question isn't whether cheap, green hydrogen would be great to have. It's whether there is any physically possible world in which cheap, green hydrogen is better than cheap, green electricity in general.
The problems with hydrogen aren't just absolute, they're relative.
We will need both. Given cheap, green electricity, there will be unlimited industrial market for as much cheap, green hydrogen as can be produced. And a very great deal will be produced.
I see exactly NO explanation about clean hydrogen production:
- electrolysis demand so much energy that there is no point in using it, yes we can even use p.v. power to made hydrogen, only issue: with a large stadium of panel we can produce less than a pencil volume in H. Natural H reserves given it's atomic size sound a bit sci-fi to me;
- since we can't store it safely we need to use it almost directly, witch is doable in fuel-cell but since decades we fail to see real practical applications on scale.
Long story short: yes if we can produce hydrogen in a clean way in quantity and we can store it the Green New Deal is solved, actually we can't. Similar thing for p.v./eolic for electricity: if we can find hyper-cheap, hyper-effective, hyper-capable batteries the renewable revolution is solved, again we can't. Lithium is the best we have now and is far to be usable on scale.
Honestly, considering myself a REAL environmentalist, witch means someone who really care about nature, not simply dream about sci-fi like tech on advertisement, the sole practical Green revolution for a spring grass green, not a dollar-green, I see are:
- nuclear fission, since we have it, we can enlarge it, it's already working and can give us nearly enough energy for almost needs, waiting for something better, perhaps fusion if it ever arrive. To be safe and usable enough it MUST BE a PUBLIC ONLY scenario;
- mountain hydro as much as we can, p.v. and eolic for SMALL plants, like individual homes or to give extra power when possible to small community;
- pushing electric logistic witch means nuclear ships and electric trains powered by public NPP, eventually receiving p.v./eolic surplus where possible;
- pushing AT MAXIMUM new modern homes constructions to need FAR LESS energy to keep them comfortable;
- pushing as much as possible electrification of industries, for some is easy (aluminum, glass for instance) for some next to impossible so fare (steel, ceramic etc) trying to favor via taxes the electrified ones, like "aluminum products cost less than iron one, use steel only if is REALLY needed";
- gas for the needed interim because so far we have not enough nuclear and we can't create new one quickly. Methane is the least pollutant of all oil&gas products we have available in sufficient quantity with sufficiently spread infra.
The rest is nothing grass green, just suicidal propaganda to milk money keeping the ship running toward rocks.
> the world will have to get better at balancing energy supply and demand so we don’t go dark when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Thanks Bill, that's really helpful, was there really no other way you could have phrased that?
> Another option is to produce hydrogen using the current methods that burn fossil fuels and then capture the CO2 produced in the process before it’s released in the atmosphere. It may never be economical to capture 100 percent of the carbon released using incumbent technologies, but while we’re waiting for thousands of industrial facilities to retrofit their infrastructure, carbon capture can help drive emissions way down.
Oh dear.
Was expecting him to shill for expensive nuclear generated (aka pink) hydrogen but he went one better and started pushing the dead end that is blue hydrogen.
Make green hydrogen, make lots of it. The more we make the cheaper it'll get. This is not complicated.
> separate it from water, which is a net energy LOSS
This is true of every form of energy transfer. There is never, ever 100% energy maintained, and maybe you'll be stunned at how inefficient existing energy sources are.
It's not a matter of efficiency but a matter of scalability: hydrogen generated by hydrolysis demand so much energy that we can't produce it on the needed scale, no matter how much it can cost.
Methane extraction is absurdly costly, transport and storage are no less absurd BUT we can do it on a needed scale. That's the sole thing that matter. Similar if for hydro: mountain hydro is fantastic, we MUST develop it as much as possible, but it demand mountains and water. For some part of the world it's ok, they are there both in needed quantity essentially all the year, for some other they are not. You can power Norway on hydro with little nuclear backup, you can't power Mongolia even if Mongolia have very little needs compared.
Similarly we can imaging electric commercial trains that only run on p.v. surplus, for all non-perishable goods that might be ok if well designed on scale. We probably can design that on scale in many, many areas of the world. We can't to the same for ships, for plane, for cars. We can't do that for perishable goods of passengers transits.
It is not, in fact, the case that production of hydrogen is impractical. It will take time to build out electrolysis equipment. But you can buy it from China today.
And, given cheap storage, of course we can run passenger trains on renewables.
I may be wrong about this but I recall reading it on a book about the history of energy.
Anyway, supposedly around 99% (!) of the net energy of fuels gets lost from the source to your home. This due to energy conversion, loss in transmission lines, transformers, you own electrical installation, battery charging/discharging and other inefficiencies on the grid or the devices you use.
Losses are generally in tens of %. 99% loss is rare, maybe limited to AA batteries and food. Many of the calories we eat could in principle be converted to horsepower (e.g. biking), but are not.
First of all, the green aspect of it is that the source is renewable. That's what makes it green. It's not correct to call it a net loss, because no one wants to produce power from hydrogen in order to harvest more hydrogen. There would always be a renewable input somewhere.
About losses. There are always losses on each energy transformation step. The same thing applies to electricity generated with fossil fuels, or heat generated with electricity generated from heat, or light generated with electricity produced with light.
The fact that the source is renewable means we can probably afford that loss in the long term.
Using green hydrogen as fuel for far-from-grid cases still makes sense.
Electric tractors are not feasible yet, given the required power×autonomy.
Also, consider Iceland, were electricity is cheap and produced via geothermal sources, but exporting it is impossible: producing green hydrogen would make that energy exportable.
And consider also the Haber-Bosch process, where ammonia production requires hydrogen that currently comes from fossil sources (natural gas) which implies carbon emissions. Shifting to green hydrogen would be a game changer in the production of fertilizers. Remember farming is one of the major sources of CO₂ emissions.
It's not a matter of efficiency but of scale: we can't produce enough hydrogen by hydrolysis even with all the electricity we can produce. On contrary probably we can made electric tools to substitute tractors. Something that demand a bit of investment but last FAR longer and can run only on p.v. the hard part there would probably be convincing farmers that they do not need tractors anywhere but only for very specific activities...
If you use all Island electricity you can't even produce enough hydrogen to power a hypothetical nations-wide fleet of cars...
This EU study suggests that we could produce enough hydrogen to fuel air travel with about 32 Pwh annually, which is maybe 20% of current global energy production. I am pretty sure your assertion is simply wrong. Converting to hydrogen would be expensive, possibly dramatically more expensive than other solutions, but it seems totally achievable.
This honestly is not a study, in the scientific sense, it's a McKinsey made scenario (and they are definitively not skilled in anything industrial, they only deal with finance) of something McKinsey want and present in nice, high paid brochures to offer politicians a way to justify spending in this or this other area.
So far the very few experimental plants we have made have proven the fact that, yes, the process work on solar, eolic ec, but also the fact that producible volumes are FAR BELOW the demand, not because we do not have enough plants so far on scale, but because we can't have them on scale on Earth at the actual state of tech.
Beside that so far we still completely miss the hydrogen storage issue: we can't store hydrogen in ANY known form. We can fill tanks of it, it will leak out slowly with relevant safety issues, and with the biggest issue that a just filled tank will be essentially empty in few days.
People like to dream, like to deny the reality following dreams pushed by interested parties, but they are just dreams, with good outcome for some scammers for some period of time, disasters for the dreamers.
You insist on this, but it is not, in fact, true. All that is true is that we have not yet built out enough electrolysis equipment to produce much hydrogen. But that is an empty fact; of course, before you build something, you don't have it yet.
Let's made a game: how much electricity in kWh you need to extract a liter / gallon of H₂? How fast H₂ leak from a generic tank/in what form you propose to contain it and how much energy such form demand.
Ok, from a conference not much time ago I've noted, but unfortunately fail to recover linkable reference, around 67kWh to extract 1kg of H₂ if there are no losses in the process. I can't estimate losses but I can imaging are there in a relatively relevant percentage. The there is the storage issue: H₂ goes trough essentially any tank, no matter how we store it in practical ways, and that's another loss hard to be computed but there.
You imagine that hydrogen cannot be stored, yet we handle tens of millions of tons every year. Do we vent it and then gather it from the air when we need some? No, we store and transport it. Some is stored in underground cavities, places where we put NG today. Some is liquified. Some is in, yes, tanks at 700atm.
You can buy electrolysers on the open market, cash on the barrel head. Need more hydrogen? Buy more electrolysers. Where does this fail to "scale"?
I imaging hydrogen can be stored, but not for long, witch means we store it and slowly it "evaporate" going through the tank.
BTW let's talk about an example: Toyota Mirai, far complex than an EV, complex than an ICE, ~1kg H₂ / 100 km. Now let's say we have spend 67kWh of green electricity to produce that kg of H₂, the process have some loss, again I can't really know how much but some [1] say are around 14%, not bad but still a certain amount of loss. Than the energy need to compress resulting gas to 700 bars. Energy to push it in the car tank. At the end of the game you get what? 33-34kWh out of initial 67?
100 km? A Tesla do 100 km with around 18kWh... Surely and H₂ fuel-cell system have far more power than a lithium one, around five time per similar size/weight, so we can potentially power trucks, even planes with hydrogen, while we practically can't [2] with lithium.
Again trying to imaging a possible hydrogen-based vehicles scenario we end up in far cheaper "energetically speaking" blue/grey hydrogen but what's it's point? We can burn directly hydrocarbons, we already use them. Using them to make hydrogen means just spent a lot for a new supply chain and just shift pollution outside citizens sight. With the benefit of running on 700 bars bombs under our asses...
Hydrogen is stored. The amount that leaks can be as small as you like. Actual loss as a percentage of what you put in is always negligible. The point often made about leaks is just that H2 must not be allowed to accumulate, so needs positive airflow to prevent detonations.
Mirai is just an electric car with an H2 tank, a fuel cell, and a small battery. The fuel cell has no moving parts: H2 and air go in, power, H2O, and N2 come out. Mirai is very light, so takes much less energy to muscle around than a battery car. Its small battery is to use while the fuel cell heats up, and maybe to absorb some kinetic energy braking.
A battery electric car is much more complex. It needs to manage charge and temperature on all its cells, use braking to recover and store kinetic and downhill energy to try to extend range. The battery is expensive.
But energy is fungible. After there is plenty of renewable generation capacity, hydrogen made from renewables has not cost anybody anything tangible. Until there is plenty of renewables, making hydrogen costs NG, so will not happen much.
Cars will have batteries. Trucks will probably run on ammonia. Aircraft will run on LH2. The kWh that goes into a unit of H2 will not matter much, because it is just sunshine and wind. We need to get there by spending on renewable generating capacity, first.
Hydrogen leak because it's damn small, so you tank can hold it as a not-watertight tank can hold water, for a certain amount of time but not forever. We have tempted various routes, micro-foams included, none succeed completely. Surely as long as there is no accumulation risk H₂ leaks are harmless, but you still loose something valuable for you.
kWh also matter MUCH: personally I can potentially produce just few grams of H₂ in a good sunny day from my p.v. witch happen to be perfectly capable of recharging an EV in a sunny day.
Try this: a classic home is cheap, but demand much energy. A modern one is far more expensive, but demand far less. Now if spending for good insulation, airtightness, relevant windows, VMC, water-heater with heat-pump + solar, a p.v. system and an EV means an initial investment of around 150% more than a classic house with a classic ICE, you can't pay it back much before EV battery is dead but anyway it's doable. If you want to add to the mix H₂ perhaps as a way to pass trough nights and non-sunny days the overall costs climb around 400%. It's essentially unsustainable for single individuals/families AND it's unsustainable for the society on scale. That's is.
Producing, compressing etc enough H₂ to power a personal vehicle means having a 20kWp p.v. at home and using the vehicle only in sunny days from spring to summer. All equipment's would costs twice the house itself. Try to do the math for a truck and even more for a plane. Also try to consider how much fuel-cells we can make on scale, since they ALSO demand rare and precious elements.
Oh, so if I change my numbers mother nature do the same?
"my numbers" are not mine, but from the current state of research on the field. The current state is simple: we can produce green hydrogen but in too little quantities, that means:
- we can't use it on scale
- there is no point in using it at smaller scale
That's why kWh count, because panels are not "toll free" coming like fruits on some tree branches, they have to be produced and they have a cost. They have a usable life, they need to be decommissioned after that. Actually we can make a single family home hydrogen+p.v. in certain area of the world, such home will cost few MILLIONS, need a variable amount of land from an hectare to few hectares, and last at around 10 years without special maintenance. We can produce few of them for the 1% of the humanity. Unfortunately such humanity can't keep up the species nor can't produce the aforementioned tech in their backyard, that's is. Is it more clear now?
We can do many things in general, some can scale, some can't, some are reasonable some are not. A green hydrogen industry so far is not reasonable and can't work on scale. We can continue researching on it of course, but we need working things, not dream, so we need something else to keep up.
Your numbers are still crazy and wholly disconnected from reality.
Panels do not, in fact require "decommissioning". They last much longer than 10 years: warranties are 20 years, often more. Output may be degraded by up to 20% after that, but they continue producing. If cooled, they last longer.
You can buy an electrolyser off the shelf today and plug it into any outlet. Efficiency is at least 60%, and rising; recent advances, which will hit market soon, have pushed it over 95%. A hydrogen car is much, much lighter than a battery electric car, so requires less energy to operate, but typical conversion losses today are larger than the difference.
Nobody needs a hectare of panels for personal transportation use, whether for charging a battery electric car or synthesizing hydrogen for a hydrogen-electric car. A typical rooftop is plenty, at least in summer, depending on latitude. A private system sufficient to produce hydrogen for a car is in low tens of $thousands, not $millions.
None of the above has anything to do with "scalability", which is a utility concern. Utilities can make hydrogen at whatever rate they have bought electrolysers for. The only thing stopping utilities is that if they had money for electrolysers, it would be far better used to buy more panels.
Making shit up gives you bad numbers and false conclusions.
«The kWh that goes into a unit of H2 will not matter much, because it is just sunshine and wind.»
Exactly. And that also means that eventual losses, arising from intrinsic inefficiency, won't have an impact on the environment, which is the main point.
Your first point doesn't make sense to me, there are transmission and discharge losses associated with batteries, but they're still practical for many use cases.
The amount of tolerable losses depends on how cheap the power is, if the power supply is intermittent, some time they'd be greatly in excess of standard loads, in which case you could run hydrogen cracking at 10% efficiency and it might still be useful just as grid ballast.
Don't use it as an energy source, see the hydrogen ladder for the sensible markets that we should switch from gray hydrogen to green and the ones we should just electrify directly:
Point is that it is hard and anyway probably unwise to divert renewable power to hydrogen synthesis from things that are using the electricity without conversion losses. It is just about as good or bad to burn NG making hydrogen as to burn NG to make electricity.
But once we have got renewable overbuilt, all the math changes. Until then, unquestionably the right place to spend capital is building out renewables. Building up hydrogen infrastructure, in the meantime, and even fueling it with gray hydrogen, is OK provided it doesn't cost money that could have gone to renewable generating capacity instead.
Often capital has strings attached, and can't go for renewables. Then, spending on readiness to use the coming, cheap hydrogen or ammonia (and burning gray fuel for now), or generally on energy storage, is better than most choices.
Thing is, money is fungible. Each dollar goes to one place and therefore not another. Energy is too, albeit with conversion losses. So, green hydrogen and NG electric is no better or worse than gray NG hydrogen and renewables. Anywhere we can displace NG entirely is good. Moving use of it around, much less so.
Water electrolysis is around 60-80 percent efficient. Hydrogen fuel cells are around 40-60 percent efficient. Plus you spend additional energy to either compress or cool the hydrogen in order to be able to store it.
Electricity storage in a lithium-ion battery is on the order of 98% efficient, and electric motors are around 90% efficient (if you take into account the whole drivetrain).
Yes, hydrogen and ammonia handling efficiency will mostly go up, unless extra-cheap (to buy) electrolysers come out with unfortunately lower efficiency.
What always matters most is cost. Inefficiency will get cheaper and cheaper as generation cost falls. Switching from gold & platinum catalyzing electrolysers to something not dependent on those and less efficient is still a win if you get a lot more electrolysers for your money.
Conversion from water to hydrogen via hydrolysis is only 60-80% efficient so it takes more energy to generate the hydrogen than the hydrogen will produce in future.
It is absolutely trivial that separating hydrogen from water uses energy. Then, when you burn it, you get water and energy back. That is the whole point.
That is trivial yes and I was well aware of that :)
What wasn't obvious to me from the parent comment was why it is apparently completely impractical. No energy conversion has an efficiency of 100% so the answer couldn't just have been "because thermodynamics" but as other comments have since revealed, it is because _current_ hydrolyzers only operate on an efficiency scale of 60-80%.
And, turbines and fuel cells are also at ~40-60%. So, round-trip is a fair bit lower than that, as little as 25%. But it doesn't matter much. Efficiency is improving, and will be much better before anything depends on it.
What do you imagine is the raw efficiency of making hydrogen from. NG, vs the enthalpy of the input gas?
BTW, "electrolysers". Hydrolysis is a thing plants do.
Green hydrogen - hydrogen derived from water electrolysis, ostensibly from renewable electrical sources so no greenhouse gases are produced
Blue hydrogen - hydrogen derived from hydrocarbons, produces greenhouse gases as waste
Pink hydrogen - hydrogen from water electrolysis from nuclear electrical sources, no greenhouse gases produced
The description of "green" hydrogen is only tangentially related to the colloquial use of "green". So long as no greenhouse gases are produced the hydrogen is labeled green.
The use for hydrogen isn't an energy source but as an energy transport and storage. So "green" hydrogen is still "green" in the colloquial sense despite its inefficiency if it doesn't produce any greenhouse gases in the pipeline.
All that being said, I personally think hydrogen is stupid as a transport and storage medium for electricity. Electrical transmission lines will always be more efficient than a theoretical hydrogen pipeline. A chemical battery has a lot less that can go wrong than compressed hydrogen storage. About the only place it even starts to make any sense is grid-scale storage and even then I don't think it can practically beat other storage systems.
I'd agree, the concept of cracking hydrocarbons and then capturing the GHG byproduct effectively is just fantasy. At best a blue hydrogen fuel cell would be on par with a super clean natural gas combustion engine. You'd get CO~2~, water vapor, and electricity. Better than rolling coal but not better than "green" hydrogen or just a chemical battery.
The math for blue hydrogen might work out in commercial and residential installations in regions with existing natural gas and siting that makes solar impractical. A fuel cell with a catalytic cracker could feed a building with hot water and electricity vs a combusting water heater that only provided hot water. For similar GHG output it might be an efficiency win. But I see that as a weak maybe all things considered.
To "extract bitumen" appears to mean mine tar sands for hydrocarbons.
I expect demand for mined oil to decline to the point where only the absolute cheapest producers of it will be able to stay in business. Extracting from tar sand will be right out.
I mean dimethyl ether: DME. Unfortunately, I really doubt we are nearing a collapse in demand for oil. This technology seeks to convert the transportation industry to safe, cheap, and green hydrogen power, but bitumen derived products are used as an industrial feedstock for countless products that make modern society. This technology can reduce the CO2 emissions of extracting and distributing bitumen by 85% - >100%, while reducing the capital costs by 65% - 85%. It allows transitional oil to be produced cheaply, relatively cleanly, and in countries that don't violate human rights or fund terrorists.
Both are called DME. Only one is described on its WP page as principally a solvent. So, you probably should be more specific when describing your process, to avoid misapprehensions.
When we have no need or desire to oxidize mined hydrocarbons for heat, our remaining demand for mined hydrocarbons (e.g. to make into plastic) will surely be less than today. Then, the most easily obtained natural hydrocarbons will be the ones we mine, because we are not wasting them by oxidizing them to CO2, water, and heat.
Unless there is no bitumen dissolved in that readily obtained oil?
It is just possible that hydrocarbons made from gathered and cracked CO2 will end up cheaper than fractions of extracted oil. But I have doubts.
I see the same cognitive dissonance repeated all the time. Most people say they understand climate change is a problem but they are unwilling to make any changes that might make their life slightly less comfortable.
This money they've sunk: its not their money: they've been doing it off the public teat as "research" or, when it is their money, its booked to R&D and has massive royalty & tax offset benefits. Its a shellgame.
The inclusion of blue hydrogen+CCS in this piece is really regrettable: its being used to avoid having to wear the cost of going to green hydrogen, which is abandoning FF inputs. For holders of shares in coal and gas, this is not optimal so they oppose green and argue abatement by CCS is "the one"
It doesn't work. CCS is a giant con. The evidence is strong that at scale CCS is not working, and will waste years of time, billions of dollars of cost, and gigatonnes of CO2, to prove it.
Overall I like Gates trying to help. He's been badly advised when it comes to CCS.