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How is the hydrogen made?
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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To my knowledge, with plenty of carbon emisssions
Is it less than using fossil fuels for power exclusively? If so then it's a step in the right direction. Yes I know it sounds like I'm shilling for BP now but we get lost in the doom spiral so fast we forget we are indeed making progress. We just have to keep their feet to the fire or...erm... solar panel?
They're not using electrolysis and water to make hydrogen, they're using power and steam to crack petroleum products into hydrogen.
using electrolysis for fuel cells would violate the laws of physics and thermodynamics
And this is still a large step in the right direction, because cheap hydrogen creates an incentive to develop hydrogen infrastructure, which increases the demand for hydrogen, and can help lay the groundwork for a future in which hydrogen is produced from renewable sources.
Also, steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and as such it can be performed without carbon emissions.
There isn't a real need for hydrogen. We have plenty of other solutions. People have the expectation that our society changes from unsustainable to sustainable by just swapping in clean technologies in place of the dirty one's. That isn't going to happen, and hydrogen won't change that.
I mean it's not bad to have alternatives though.
My roomie is a trucker, and the idea of an electric truck is laughable, at least in my country, because of how trucking works here. Unless the truck is out of order, being loaded, or being refuelled, it's always on the road; they just swap drivers around like a relay race. Unless a truck came with a swappable battery it wouldn't be feasible to operate like that, they'd have to at least double their arsenal, (at which point we can already start to question how environmentally friendly that is), and that'll increase the overall operating costs, which will ultimately end up on the consumer; everything will get more expensive because that's what they transport. Another problem with pure electric is also that the batteries weigh a shit ton, so the trucks end up being able to transport less because they have to lug the battery around everywhere.
Biogas is an alternative, and as far as I know it works alright; they already use it. They end up not as powerful as diesel trucks though.
Something I wonder if it might be applied is something like Toyota's hybrid system, with regenerative braking etc. I wonder if it scales. My roomie recently had to leave his Golf at the shop for a week, and got it swapped with a Yaris. It cut his fuel consumption by three quarters.
The alternative to trucking is a better cargo rail system on electrified rail. Won't get rid of all long haul trucking, but it'll displace at least 70% of it.
Even if that doesn't happen, battery capacity improves by 5-8% per year. At the low end, that's a doubling every 15 years. We're not close to theoretical limits yet, so we can expect this to continue as long as we keep funding the research.
Solid state batteries are still some time away, but once those are on the market, they'll leapfrog everything. Good enough not just for trucking, but also airplanes, which was thought to be out of the question otherwise.
I find with a lot of workers in positions like that tend to focus on what exist right now. Then they sit around at a truck stop over coffee, reinforcing their opinions and laughing at battery trucks. They don't think about what's likely to happen over the next decade.
But still, trains are the way to go. The US needs to start that process by renationalizing the railroads.
I wouldn't argue against expanded rail. Used to have a decent rail system in my country, hell even the town I currently live in, while small, actually has rail. A lot of it has been shut down however, and that's a shame. Sweden is a pretty large country dotted with a lot of small towns. If we had rail connecting places we'd not need as many long-haul trucks, and the more local deliveries could definitely be handled by EV trucks and vans. It's the long haul that's an issue. As it stands though, proper investment in rail doesn't seem to be a high priority more or less anywhere. Instead we get stupid ideas like putting up electric lines over motorways, costs just as much but is less versatile.
It's quite sad. The rails are still here, I think they might be used by the local industry every so often, but I genuinely have no idea as I know my roomie has delivered stuff to them before and he obviously doesn't drive a train. The old station house is also still here, just abandoned, not even repurposed for something else.
If solid state batteries actually came around then sure, EV trucks might become more viable, particularly if they can charge decently fast since fuelling a truck does take a while (like 15 minutes or so) so there is downtime. There could also be other incentives, like tax reductions (or tax increases on fossil fuel trucks) making EVs more appealing. I believe the reason you hear truckers ridicule the current tech is because there is a push for trucks to be replaced with EVs and it's just not feasible today, unless you do short distance shuttle deliveries. You can replace your long haulers with electric trucs, Mercedes for example makes them, but as it stands the only effect would be that you'd go bankrupt.
For energy it is terribly inefficient.
It would be nice to have green ammonia and methanol though.
Definitely. We already saw this with fucking natural gas
Might've been a step forward 40 years ago. Today its finding a spot to dig in, so they can keep the fires of hell burning.
But they aren't capturing the carbon. They aren't storing it. It's supposed to be the easiest case of CCS and they dump the CO2 in the atmosphere
I strongly suspect that CCS is a lie aimed to make people happier to continue burning fossil fuels
Unfortunately, no. It's not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.
The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.
In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution
Do you have a source?
bp themselves still talks about "if we can decarbonise it's production" (it being hydrogen). They have published in more detail, but they've not made it as easy to find. If you do some searching you can find their approach in more detail tho.
For the rest: knowing an electric device does not care where the electricity came from. You can double check this by seeing if the same smartphone exists all over the planet.
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/what-we-do/hydrogen.html
Not enough progress fast enough. We're kind of on a clock here, we can't see exactly where we are, and we might already be too late to do anything.
In the spirit of the comic - how is the solar panel made?
short answer: once
Solar panels (PV) degrade over time and use and have to be replaced and disposed of. A better case would be for things like solar furnaces that are simpler, but most of the time solar implies PV panels.
With lots of slave labour, and unimaginable damage to the environment from mining.
Unless the energy is taken from renewable sources 🤓
That would be nice, if it actually happened 🥲
They aren't using dirty energy to do electrolysis, they're steam reforming methane. It isn't possible to do renewably.
Methane can be produced renewably from bio-waste. H2 production by steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and thus to being carbon neutral, even when the methane comes from non-renewable sources.
There's a better way to word the argument: it isn't possible to do hydrogen in renewable ways economically.
Electrolysis is easy enough to do at home if you like. Doing it at mass scale to fuel cars and airplanes is another matter.
The demand might increase in the future though. And as demand rises before supply does, then prices go up and there can be an incentive to roll out hydrogen infrastructure more. Positive feedback loop.
See the following for examples of how demand may be increasing: https://www.powermag.com/aces-deltas-hydrogen-electrolyzers-arrive-in-big-boost-for-hubs-progress/
https://www.powermag.com/u-s-power-heavyweights-unveil-hydrogen-power-to-power-demonstration/
https://www.powermag.com/pioneering-hydrogen-powered-gas-peaking-inside-duke-energys-debary-project/
https://www.powermag.com/siemens-led-group-completes-test-of-100-renewable-hydrogen-in-gas-turbine/
https://www.powermag.com/constellation-planning-significant-nuclear-powered-hydrogen-facility-at-lasalle/
Apologies for these all being from the same source, but I find that PowerMag covers a lot of good news in the power/energy space.
What? It is absolutely possible to make hydrogen with renewable energy sources?
Read it again, slowly.
Yeah, fuck the other 70% of energy from renewables you lose when converting to hydrogen
At the moment it's either that or manufacturing huge batteries.
No. You can manufacture lots of small batteries too. And invest in different battery technologies.
Why is it either/or? That feels like a purposeful false equivalence.
How else do you propose storing energy?
Smaller batteries for load shaving. Smaller batteries for home and businesses to self store. Hydro. Gravity. Thermal.
And that's just looking at the most basic swap out. The whole point of the energy transition is to also make everything better. Continent wide energy grids need to happen ie. Wind in Norway, solar in Morocco and a grid between etc. local generation by solar or wind also has a huge part to play. Geothermal is getting much better with lower temperature or harder to reach heat sources too, see Eden Project in Cornwall.
I don't want to come too aggressively at you here but I see this kind of "attitude" a lot in these conversations and it's always struck me as very insincere.
If you haven't already have a watch of the Everything Electric videos on YouTube for good views on how wide this whole thing is going to have to be.
The original post refers to a Tweet made by BP. They supply cars. Good luck putting thermal or gravity energy storing in cars.
Yea, that's the issue. BP is not