Honestly, could be worse. Hydrogen is a greenwashing scam anyway.
The bad part is that funding for wind and solar projects is apparently being cancelled, too.
On an unrelated note, I had to read that article with some bullshit popup about ToS demanding binding arbitration and a class action waiver superimposed on it because I refused to tap “accept.” Binding arbitration and a class-action waiver, just to read a damn web page! Fucking delusional.
Bloomberg is shit; please find a better source.
There are both processes which need it to decarbonize like nitrate fertilizer manufacturing, and things like cars where you can get the same outcome more cheaply via other methods, leaving hydrogen based systems as greenwashing.
On the whole, this is not great.
And I’m unwilling to ditch Bloomberg; they’re doing a meaningful chunk of the environmental tech reporting right now, and gift links like this one enable almost everyone to access it.
You should let go of your BEV obsession too. Hydrogen cars will be very cost effective once the technology get scaled up. FCEVs can be cheaper than ICE cars to make, and green hydrogen can get cheaper than fossil fuels. They will be valid options in the future.
People have been saying that for 20 years. Meanwhile battery-electric actually became practical. We aren’t in a place where we can wait another 20.
We’ve already waited decades for BEVs to be ready. It’s hypocritical to say we cannot wait for anything else. And besides, hydrogen cars are in production right now, so we don’t have to wait much longer for it be mainstream.
And given that the BEV is simply not going to the universal solution, there will be many people that will have to wait anyways. So we should be open to other options regardless.
Yes, hydrogen cars exist in tiny numbers…but there is wildly inadequate fueling infrastructure, and no sign that it will be built out. Meanwhile, you can charge at home, and there is a massive buildout of fast chargers underway in most of the world. I don’t expect hydrogen for ground surface transportation to be meaningful as a result.
That’s closed-minded thinking. There is nothing stopping the rapid deployment of hydrogen cars. The obsession with only one type of green car is a major detriment to the green car movement. For many people, green transportation is a threat to their lifestyle, since they are not allowed to look at any option other than the BEV.
Its literally driven by economics and practicality. People dont buy them because its cheaper and more convenient to use battery-electric.
If there had been a huge green hydrogen build out earlier, it might have been different, but it isn’t
What are you actually advocating for here? Not electrifying and waiting another few decades for hydrogen? You come off as excessively defensive of the practically nonexistent H2 industry and excessively critical of electrification, which is basically the Shell and Exxon position. We don’t have time wait for anything, we need to use the tech we have now to reduce warming. Where do we get the hydrogen in your world? Is it blue or green? Blue is just fossil fuels with extra steps and green doesn’t make sense until we have significant excess renewables and already electrified the easy stuff (buildings) and then it might still make sense only for industry/shipping and niche stuff. H2 itself has a GWP of 11 or so, and we will leak quite a bit. So again, what are you actually arguing for? I can’t buy hydrogen, period. I can’t buy a hydrogen vehicle, or a hydrogen furnace, or a hydrogen anything. What do you actually think we plebs should be doing here? I already want green steel as much as you do.
The first point to make is that hydrogen is not decades off. Green hydrogen is happening now, and its production is rapidly expanding alongside the expansion of renewable energy production. Many sectors can rapidly adopt green hydrogen right away. This is similar to the conversation we we had about solar power about a decade ago. Critics of solar power back then were being Luddites (and sometimes secret fossil fuel industry stooges). They were convinced that solar could not be cost-effective or scale, based off of very outdated understandings of the issue, but they were wrong. This conversation is repeating with green hydrogen.
On a related note, pro-electrification crusaders are being hypocrites on this subject. They themselves are demanding that we wait decades for miracle batteries or multi-decadal long electrification programs. Because they want “perfect” solutions rather than “good” solutions. A good example is how they demand we fully electrify all rail, a process that will take decades, rather than doing something faster like switching diesel trains to hydrogen trains. In reality, adopting hydrogen now, alongside more reasonable forms of electrification, will be a faster path for reducing CO2 emissions.
Also note that most “fearmongering” types of argument against hydrogen originated from the fossil fuel industry. They are always spreading propaganda intended to undermine green energy projects, and make similar claims about all green technologies. Claims that hydrogen is dangerous, or a GHG, or will leak, etc., are all fear tactics created with minimal amounts of evidence. In reality, hydrogen has very few problems, and adopting it will drastically make transportation and industry safer and more green. It is unfortunate that many environmentalists have fallen for this tactic, but I suppose every green idea had to overcome it.
Finally, you can buy hydrogen and hydrogen-related products. Sure, we are still a bit early on the adoption curve, but that is true of every new idea. Someone can buy a hydrogen car, or a furnace, or whatever right now. Many more are also capable, but don’t know it yet. So rather than demonizing something for not being able to basically time travel, environmentalists should promote green ideas in order to accelerate their adoption.
Opposition to hydrogen is falling for fossil fuel propaganda. It is absolutely necessary for solving climate change.
On the contrary, hydrogen itself is fossil fuel propaganda. They sell it on its “potential” for being generated via electrolysis using renewable electricity (“green hydrogen”), but in practice the vast majority of it comes from cracking natural gas (“gray hydrogen”). And that “potential” will never come to fruition, because by the time it would battery electric vehicle (“BEV”) tech and infrastructure will be so far ahead there won’t be a point anymore.
We should just face facts: a hydrogen car is, in practice, a CNG car, except that you’ve converted the fuel into a form that makes it (even more of) a pain in the ass to handle for no good reason.
If anything, if we’re really Hell-bent on non-BEV solutions then we should go the opposite way and work on synthesizing “green hydrogen” into hydrocarbon liquid fuel so that we can use it with the fueling infrastructure and internal-combustion vehicles we already have, making that stuff carbon-neutral.
Except that’s total bullshit. In fact, it’s literally same argument used against BEVs in the past. There was a time when any talk of BEVs were shouted down by people who kept insisting that the grid is being powered by coal or natural gas, and that BEVs were nothing more than “coal-powered cars” and the like. But now we know that’s nonsense. Electricity can be made green, whereas fossil fuels cannot. Same is true of hydrogen.
The other point is that we are push hard towards the limits of BEVs can really achieve. We’ll never see long-ranged airplanes powered by batteries, and same can be said of ocean-going ships. Many industries stand no chance of switching to batteries either. They either require a fire source, or need the chemistry provided by hydrogen. Nor will the grid reach zero emissions without long-duration energy storage, which will require hydrogen in most cases. So if you actually think this problem through, you’ll realize that batteries alone are only going to solve a small part of the problem. Everything else will require hydrogen in some way.
E-fuels will require prodigious amounts of green hydrogen to exist at scale. They are produced by combining H2 with CO2. While I don’t rule them out as a solution, it will require massive investments in hydrogen first. It is not an excuse to dismiss hydrogen.
E-fuels will require prodigious amounts of green hydrogen to exist at scale. They are produced by combining H2 with CO2. While I don’t rule them out as a solution, it will require massive investments in hydrogen first. It is not an excuse to dismiss hydrogen.
It doesn’t require “massive investments in hydrogen,” though! It just requires electrolyzing the hydrogen, and that’s the easy part. It can be done right there in the same facility as the Fischer-Tropsch reactions, so the end product you’re distributing everywhere is a convenient liquid and all you need to handle the hydrogen gas itself is a short chunk of pipe going between reaction vessels.
The “massive investments in hydrogen” for the “hydrogen economy” are all the absurd cryogenic or ludicrously high-pressure storage tanks to build out the entire distribution and fuel station network that we’d need to use actual H2 as an energy storage medium instead of just an intermediate step in an industrial process. None of it is necessary for synthetic liquid fuels.
Having enough electrolyzers for that is still a huge investment. Plenty of naysayers have said, and still are saying, that this alone is impossible. Also, if we can make the Fischer-Tropsch process cost-effective for making synthetic fuels, then green hydrogen would have already become really cheap by then.
No one is wedded to the idea of always using pure H2 for everything. The pro-H2 position is simply pointing out that green hydrogen is necessary for solving climate change, even if that means making synthetic fuels in the end. But it is worth saying that using pure H2 is not some huge challenge. Having to use cryogenic fuels or high pressure tanks are already possible in cars today.
Having enough electrolyzers for that is still a huge investment. Plenty of naysayers have said, and still are saying, that this alone is impossible.
Wat?
An electrolytic cell is just a couple of chunks of metal stuck in some water and hooked up to a voltage source, plus some tubes to collect the gases. It’s so simple elementary school kids could build one in science class, and (unlike the proton exchange membrane in a fuel cell) requires no exotic materials or complicated-to-manufacture components.
No one is wedded to the idea of always using pure H2 for everything. The pro-H2 position is simply pointing out that green hydrogen is necessary for solving climate change, even if that means making synthetic fuels in the end.
If that’s true, we’ve been talking past each other and don’t disagree as much as it seemed. But I’m not convinced it is. Every time I’ve seen folks talking about the “hydrogen economy,” it’s in the context of building out a shitload of infrastructure for carting gaseous H2 around, with zero mention of making synthetic liquid fuels.
And that latter part is the point I care about: it’s true that batteries are never gonna be viable for stuff like aviation, but gaseous H2 fuel cells won’t be either. The real future for that stuff looks a lot like the present, except using non-fossil feedstocks to make the same sorts of fuels we’re already using. That could mean fuel synthesized from hydrogen, or biofuel, or some mix of both – it doesn’t even matter as long as it performs the same as the Jet A or whatever you’re trying to replace – but it’s definitely gonna be a liquid that’s easy to handle with the infrastructure we already have and it’s probably gonna be burned in the same sorts of combustion engines we’re already using, not reacted in a fuel cell.
The goal is carbon-neutral fuel made from non-fossil sources, for those use-cases batteries aren’t good for. Hydrogen is only part of one possible solution, and a pretty incidental part at that. Talking about the “hydrogen economy” is missing the point.
But it is worth saying that using pure H2 is not some huge challenge. Having to use cryogenic fuels or high pressure tanks are already possible in cars today.
It’s “possible,” sure, but at huge cost and complexity that means it’s flat out dumb compared to using a liquid fuel. And that’s never gonna change.
By the way, I’d like to get back to my original “greenwashing scam” point for a minute. Consider that there are two orthogonal issues here:
- the feedstock for the fuel (fossil coal/petroleum/natural gas vs. sustainable “green” H2 or biofuels)
- the technology for distributing and using it (liquid fuels and combustion engines vs. gaseous fuels and fuel cells that provide electricity)
With “the hydrogen economy,” a huge emphasis is placed on the latter of those two issues, while the former is just sort of hand-waved as a trivial detail we’ll get to later, even though transitioning from “gray” to “green” hydrogen is also a huge unsolved problem that isn’t trivial at all.
Meanwhile, with liquid fuels and combustion engines, the latter is a solved problem, so there’s no excuse to direct less than full attention to the former.
So if you’re an entity with a vested interest in fossil fuel extraction, what’re you gonna do? You’re gonna push for hydrogen, of course, because it provides a whole extra set of distracting issues for engjneers and tree-huggers to occupy themselves with that aren’t getting down to the brass tacks of actually replacing the fossil feedstock with a sustainable one.
Wat?
An electrolytic cell is just a couple of chunks of metal stuck in some water and hooked up to a voltage source, plus some tubes to collect the gases. It’s so simple elementary school kids could build one in science class, and (unlike the proton exchange membrane in a fuel cell) requires no exotic materials or complicated-to-manufacture components.
You and I might know that, but the loudest critics of hydrogen do not. They really think that this step is impossible.
If that’s true, we’ve been talking past each other and don’t disagree as much as it seemed. But I’m not convinced it is. Every time I’ve seen folks talking about the “hydrogen economy,” it’s in the context of building out a shitload of infrastructure for carting gaseous H2 around, with zero mention of making synthetic liquid fuels.
Just to be clear, green synthetic fuels are a huge ask. We will need direct air capture of CO2 before it is feasible at scale. It is a technology only now coming into view, and is still effectively impossible at this very moment.
And that latter part is the point I care about: it’s true that batteries are never gonna be viable for stuff like aviation, but gaseous H2 fuel cells won’t be either. The real future for that stuff looks a lot like the present, except using non-fossil feedstocks to make the same sorts of fuels we’re already using.
For aviation, the conversation was always centered around either SAF (either biofuels or synthetic fuels) or LH2.
The goal is carbon-neutral fuel made from non-fossil sources, for those use-cases batteries aren’t good for. Hydrogen is only part of one possible solution, and a pretty incidental part at that. Talking about the “hydrogen economy” is missing the point.
FYI, batteries are themselves never going to be truly green. You will always have a dirty supply chain for their production and mining. Today, that requires vast amounts of fossil fuels to be used. Even if you really believe batteries can solve most of transportation, there will still be a major reason to abandon BEVs in transportation at some point in the future.
It’s “possible,” sure, but at huge cost and complexity that means it’s flat out dumb compared to using a liquid fuel. And that’s never gonna change.
Then you are making a similar mistake that the critics of electrolyzers are making: Forgetting that this is just a series of pipes and tanks, and those are dirt cheap to scale up. Cheaper than expanding the grid BTW. If we have to use gaseous or liquid hydrogen, we could easily do it.
By the way, I’d like to get back to my original “greenwashing scam” point for a minute. Consider that there are two orthogonal issues here:
- the feedstock for the fuel (fossil coal/petroleum/natural gas vs. sustainable “green” H2 or biofuels)
- the technology for distributing and using it (liquid fuels and combustion engines vs. gaseous fuels and fuel cells that provide electricity)
With “the hydrogen economy,” a huge emphasis is placed on the latter of those two issues, while the former is just sort of hand-waved as a trivial detail we’ll get to later, even though transitioning from “gray” to “green” hydrogen is also a huge unsolved problem that isn’t trivial at all.
Transitioning from gray to green hydrogen is trivial. It’s literally the same process that the grid is going through now. Nothing changes for the end-user, since it is the same thing to them, just like green electricity. In fact, the reason why this conversation is happening at all is because pro-hydrogen people are certain this step is easily solved.
Meanwhile, with liquid fuels and combustion engines, the latter is a solved problem, so there’s no excuse to direct less than full attention to the former.
Actually making green hydrocarbon fuels in the quantities needed is not a trivial problem. It is likely just as difficult, if not more so, than figuring out how to distribute pure hydrogen. It needs to be mentioned that we can pipe hydrogen just like natural gas. The infrastructure for that is already largely built.
So if you’re an entity with a vested interest in fossil fuel extraction, what’re you gonna do? You’re gonna push for hydrogen, of course, because it provides a whole extra set of distracting issues for engjneers and tree-huggers to occupy themselves with that aren’t getting down to the brass tacks of actually replacing the fossil feedstock with a sustainable one.
Fossil fuel companies would strongly oppose any kind of green energy. It’s a conspiracy theory to think that would support the lesser of two apocalyptic outcomes. At best, only the pipeline companies would accept a transition to green hydrogen. But that is the same situation as the utility companies, and we don’t spread conspiracy theories about the BEVs being a trick by the utility companies.
