Ok, in that case, we should call it "new comments."

It is a huge greenwashing exercise in reality.

It is storing hydrogen in metal hydrides which is very safe.

I hope people here are realizing that our current strategies are not working. They are mostly just "feel-good" solutions like paper straws, and will not eliminate the need for fossil fuels. Which is why I keep pushing for green hydrogen, because I already knew this and want real solutions to be pursued.

Believe it or not, sails! Obviously you’re not going to get a 100% reduction because modern shipping companies wouldn’t tolerate being becalmed (and I’m not falling for that article’s “up to 90%” claim either, BTW – I only picked that one to link because it has a decent overview of multiple different technologies), but it can still make a big dent in the fuel requirements.

No. Absolutely not. Sorry, but I cannot this claim seriously at all. We are not going to switch to sail ships again. I don't think you grasp just how big modern shipping actually is, and how impossible such an idea really is.

I doubt you have any grasp of how massive the problem really is, and how tiny your proposed solutions are in comparison. For instance, you keep citing the possibility of using waste cooking oil for biofuels. Well, the world only makes 3.7 billion gallons of that per year: https://oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/supply-and-demand-report-used-cooking-oil/

Converted to barrels of oil equivalence, that's around 100 million barrels. The problem? That's literally one day's worth of petroleum consumption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption

So you are about 0.3% of the way of solving the problem with that idea. Even if we could radically reduce petroleum use in the way you are imagining, that's still going to be a negligible impact. And the world's GDP is still growing. There's still multiple billions of people that will want to live like the first world. So demand for energy will skyrocket in the coming decades, not decrease. The problem will only get exponentially larger and harder to solve.

Ultimately, this is eco-Ludditism, and is more about wishing away the problem than actually solving it. Worse, you enabling the worse stereotypes about environmentalists. Namely that they are crazy wackos who aren't willing to engage with reality. Any solution must take seriously the idea that there >8 billion people on Earth now, and they all want to live in convenience.

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.

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.

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.

Opposition to hydrogen is falling for fossil fuel propaganda. It is absolutely necessary for solving climate change.

This is mostly due to an AI boom. It will collapse once that goes bust.

The problem with biomethane is that there isn't going to be enough of it.

I've learned to stay away from some of the lemmy instances. They are ran by maniacs or worse.