Its a simple fact, and your belligerent and ignorant promotion of a technology, which for all practice purposes, is a fossil fuel, is deeply immoral and a significant part of the problem.

Show me any meaningful production of hydrogen from non-fossil fuel sources and we can have a conversation. Until then, you are worse than a climate denialist and a significant part of the problem that the world currently faces.

Investing in hydrogen as a solution is the fossil fuel industries strategy for navigating how they'll still be able to keep doing BAU. Its a direct equivalent of clean coal or DAC. Imaginary technology that doesn't exist and wont at scale when we currently have all the technology we need, with a modicum of social change, do reduce most of the planets carbon impact to sustainable levels.

You are a deeply immoral and irresponsible person for the work that you do on behalf of promoting the farce of hydrogen as a solution for climate change.

[–] scratchee@feddit.uk 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.

[–] MxM111@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You seemed to be knowledgeable about this topic, so I have a question:

I thought the process of obtaining hidrogen from the natural gas, naturally (pun not intended) captures all carbon as CO2, which is then can be stored somehow. Is it a valid path?

What do you think about electrolyses?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

One kilogram of hydrogen is the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline, which produces 9.1 kg of CO2 when combusted.

Carbon footprints are often reported in terms of energy. For example, power plants usually report carbon footprints in terms of kilowatt-hours (kWh). One million SCF of hydrogen contains 79,100 kilowatt hours of energy.

This converts to 0.28 kg of carbon dioxide emissions associated with one kilowatt-hour of hydrogen production.

This article lays it out, is based on up to date metrics for production, and was written by a qualified chemical engineer, in what I would consider, a very anodyne tone.

The key take-away is here:

On an apples-to-apples basis, it depends on several factors but it is likely that the conversion of hydrogen into power will have a carbon footprint greater than that of natural gas-fired power, but less than that of coal-fired power. However, it is possible in theory to capture the carbon emissions generated in the SMR process.

Right now, today, you would be better off burning the natural gas in a power plant than turning it into hydrogen. Its better than coal. The CO2 could be captured, but that's only a hypothetical. Currently, that isn't part of the process, and doing so will incur an energy cost, at which point the ROI will likely be lower than coal.

In conclusion, you should think of hydrogen as a green-washed fossil fuel, because that's what it is.

[–] set_secret@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

your gallon and kg combination gave me a TIA.

Why not just explain it all in metric?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

1: I'm quoting the article

2: In carbon accounting, its not uncommon at all (at least on the forestry side), to switch between some kind of standard or regional unit like board feet, or acres, whatever, and units of CO2e (CO2 equivalent), which are always international units. People have a direct understanding with something like a gallon of gasoline, whereas a unit of CO2 is abstract from the get-go.

[–] set_secret@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

i and the rest of the world bar USA have zero clue what a gallon is. I'm assuming it's some sort of arbitrary measument of something. possibly the depth of a hat?

[–] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Do you not, in-fact, consider the capacity of your fuel tanks in units of hat depth?

Curious..

[–] set_secret@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

well of course i do, i mean it's simple common sense.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social -4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Except you've actually debunked your own argument.

At 9.3 kg of CO2 for one kg of H2, and assuming 110 km/kg of H2 (normal fuel economy for an FCEV), you get 84.5 grams of CO2 per km of driving.

Meanwhile, a BEV gets anywhere from 70-370 grams per km, depending on dirtiness of the grid: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions/

In other words, an FCEV is comparable to a BEV when it comes to emissions. You can even double the numbers for the FCEV if you want to include possibilities like upstream losses or production. The numbers would still be very comparable to BEVs running on most grids.

And this is the problem here: You're so deep in your anti-hydrogen conspiracy theory that you failed to notice that the math works against you.

[–] Hypx@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

So was electricity until recently. Nearly all of it was made from fossil fuels. The difference is that we can make it from renewable energy.

And the exact same is true with hydrogen. If you cared at all, you'd google it yourself and realize that significant green hydrogen production is coming online. Not only is it all over the news, there are huge government programs supporting it now.

The fundamental problem is that you are either closed-minded or totally out of touch. It's time realize that it's 2024 and whatever outdated thinking you have is long over.