The property of hydrogen which is being ignored is its simplicity. One proton plus one electron.
No container in the world holds gaseous hydrogen securely, it seeps through past all the other big atoms and molecules and travels through the container walls.
This also applies to hydrogen dissolved (alloyed) in another substance - it escapes.
Then, there is the problem of joins and junctions, valves and taps.
There are many assertions made to the contrary, I suppose we will have to await the explosions and the destruction before its dangers are recognised. Remember the Hindenburg?
I am almost 80. In high-school, some 65 years ago, for a science fair project, I built a demonstration fuel cell. As I recall, I measured the out put with, I think, a milliamp meter. Not scalable!
The most influential greenhouse gas is water vapor. Compared to the greenhouse effects of water vapor in the atmosphere, focusing on carbon dioxide is just playing around the edges.
Combusting hydrogen, of course, yields the greenhouse gas of water vapor.
I promise to take climate change seriously when advocates proposing solutions start to take it seriously. Hydrogen is not a serious answer to any question.
One of my favorite scams is the old "We just invented a new method of making hydrogen cheaper!" This usually involves some sort of proprietary catalyzer. Anyone with even the tiniest smidgeon of science can calculate out the energy necessary to separate hydrogen from whatever molecule it is in. The energy required is the energy required. There is no path to using less energy, and anyone claiming it is a huckster. It is literally the equivalent of saying you've invented shoes that reduce the force of gravity. Yet these types of "breakthroughs" are lavishly funded by the government and unskeptically discussed in the press.
One thing that also bugs me - hydrolysis of water requires that it be pure - otherwise the electricity going into the water is wasted on other atoms and molecules (even causing precipitation at the electrode, blocking the current). Even fresh water is not pure enough for an industrial hydrolyzer. Seawater is a joke - you'll need to distill the water first.
So, it's NOT just the energy efficiency of the distillation process, but the energy of the purification process that needs to be discussed. And distilling water sufficiently is a huge energy suck.
10000 kJ to distill one gallon of water. Figure, roughly, 2 kwh per gallon. That is on top of the energy needed to break the water molecule into hydrogen.
That additional energy cost is almost NEVER discussed in the context of hydrogen. It is just assumed there is an unlimited source of distilled water available. Or that they will use fresh water, and the additional energy loss due to the impurities is not included. Hence the equipment will be far less efficient than predicted AND need frequent replacement.
Ugh - typos - 4th paragraph - "So, it's NOT just the energy efficiency of the electrolysis process, but the purification process that needs to be discussed. And purifying water sufficiently for electrolysis is a huge energy suck."
If I were looking for a way to convert excess nuclear power to a transportable fuel I think I'd look first at directly manufactured methane (via Sabatier process without going through the H2 intermediate step) since it is less prone to leak and we already have the built infrastructure for moving it around.
California added hydrogen-powered cars, along with subsidies and mandates, about a decade ago. There are now about 7,000 of them, out of 31.3 million, and 41 places to fill them. Only rich virtue signalers drive them.
Naturally-available hydrocarbons will eventually be depleted -- petroleum and gas in a couple of centuries, and coal in about six. We'll eventually need to produce hydrogen, probably to make synthetic hydrocarbons because (as Robert explained) it's so difficult to store and move hydrogen. We'll also need them as feedstocks for 6,000 products, as Robert suggested and Ronald Stein and Todd Royal explained in "Green Energy Exploitations." The least thermodynamically obscene way to separate hydrogen from water is the copper-chlorine thermochemical (not electrical) process, one step of which needs temperature at almost exactly the core temperature of a nuclear power plant reactor -- before the heat is used to make electricity. Extract CO2 from seawater, where its concentration is 150 times greater than in the atmosphere, using the BPMED process from PARC. Combine them using the 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. We don't need new technology for this; all we will need to do, when it becomes inevitable necessary, is to stop the rhetorical abuse of processes that work, and are the most energy-efficient of presently-known methods. Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 150 bibliographic citations so you can check that I did not just make up stuff.
Robert Bryce what a beautiful summary! You are absolutely right on the money!
If I could make a minor correction, and I quote you at 1:16 in the video
"Hydrogen does NOT occur Naturally - you have to Manufacture it like Electricity or like gasoline"
That's not True
In fact, Hydrogen has The Atomic No. 1 on the Periodic Table, and has 3 naturally occurring 𝙞𝙨𝙤𝙩𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙨.
Basically an isotope indicates the number of neutrons in the Nuclei, and is denoted by a superscript "x" before the element symbol, i.e. [ˣH]
Below are the 3 Isotopes for Hydrogen
[¹𝗛]: aka Protium
[²𝗛]: aka Deuterium
[³𝗛]: aka Tritium
[¹H] and [²H] are both stable, where as [³H] is radioactive with a half-life of ~12.32 years. Most Hydrogen in nature is found as [¹H] with 99.98%
Unlike other elements and isotopes, and an exception to the Periodic Table, Hydrogen [¹H] is the ONLY element isotope that has ZERO neutron. That is, [¹H] atom has 1x proton in the nuclei and 1x electron in the 𝒔-𝒐𝒓𝒃𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍 energy field
Surely that can be read as - hydrogen does not occur as a "collectable resource" in nature. There are no pure hydrogen deposits like oil or coal or iron ore. It is present in variable amounts in gas deposits along with methane, ethane and all sorts of other hydrocarbons - unless you know otherwise?
Here is the key from the article: “…Instead, like electricity and gasoline, it must be manufactured. The most common ways are by splitting water through electrolysis, or via steam-methane reforming, which uses high-pressure steam to produce hydrogen from methane. …”
The first and second laws of thermodynamics tell us that every time you convert one type of energy to another, you lose energy…
And yet, even the ‘highly educated’ products of our school systems don’t seem to understand this…
Clearly if it takes more energy to generate hydrogen than it delivers then, all other things being equal, it would be foolish. But they aren’t are they? There is such a thing as energy waste such as wind, sun or sea.
There is no such thing as waste energy from the wind, sun, and sea. If there was, why store it as hydrogen? I can get a 90% return on storing it in a battery.
I am of the understanding that people pushing hydrogen as some kind of solution believe that it will have some properties (common in hydrocarbons) that are superior to a battery. For example, use as a liquid fuel for jets, easy pipeline or truck transport, higher energy/weight ratio. Therefore even if it has more thermodynamic loss, the difference will be made up in utility.
It seems so simple. Why take a perfectly useful hydrocarbon, in this case, methane (or natural gas) and spend extra energy (and cost) to strip the hydrogen from the methane molecule to make "green" fuel. This makes absolutely no sense. Naturally occurring hydrogen is very rare because it is extremely reactive (It after all, makes compounds like methane and propane). Use in fuel cells is probably the best but that is like batteries - expensive and resource intensive. Probably the stupidest idea (it has no scalability). The only thing that is worst is direct CO2 capture from the atmosphere for subsurface injection. That really is the definition of economic insanity.
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere, water vapor, 30% albedo not warmer.
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math & badder physics.
The kinetic heat transfer modes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render impossible a BB surface upwelling and looping “extra” LWIR energy for the GHE.
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being wrong & abusing those who dared to challenge it. (Bruno, drawn & quartered)
GHE & CAGW are wrong so alarmists resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship & violence.
Induction and natural gas stove top burners deliver almost all of their heat to the point-of-use pots or pans.
Converting NG to electricity loses 70% up the stack of a combustion turbine and 20% up the stack & 50 % out the condenser of a steam turbine.
Include station auxiliaries and transmission losses and maybe 25% of the NG energy makes it to the meter and stove top.
Switching NG stove tops for induction stove tops for some vague medical and environmental conjecture is really^4 dumb.
But what else should we expect with the snake oil hustle of the climate change scam?
Regarding fuel cells, the Space Shuttle generated its electricity with three redundant fuel cells. The cells were extremely subject to catalyst contamination and had to be refurbished or replaced after every single flight.
They were lucky to get a week of use out of them. From what I have heard the delicate catalyst problem has not been solved.
What I've been posting to Twitter, SeekingAlpha, et al for the past few years regarding H2. Phrasing may vary.
Hydrogen as a fuel makes zero sense. The only way in which any of these schemes will make any money is through government subsidies. As soon as the subsidies stop, or if the support is loans instead of grants, so will the hydrogen.
This is an idea that gets floated once a decade, every decade since at least the 70s and is (in the past) quickly slapped back down where it belongs by the laws of thermodynamics, chemistry and material science.
This time there's massive propaganda money pushing it, certainly in the hopes of generating returns in the form government largesse. Also, it is cover for the wind/solar scheme as the public and even some decision makers are finally realizing that there is no viable battery technology that can make up for the unreliable nature of wind and solar on a reliable grid. So after 20 years of promising magic batteries, they've switched to promising magic hydrogen.
H2 is almost impossible to store, it embrittles most materials, it burns with an invisible flame and it has a ridiculously low volumetric energy content, unless one cools it to temperatures not far off of absolute zero.
The round trip ecomonics of hydrogen are breathtakingly terrible.
The entire premise is based on the wrong view that CO2 at certain levels in the troposphere is some kind of problem. That and grifters gonna grift on tax credits. Sheesh.
My BSME CU ‘78 and 35 years of lucrative application forgot more about thermo than alarmists fear mongers know.
The property of hydrogen which is being ignored is its simplicity. One proton plus one electron.
No container in the world holds gaseous hydrogen securely, it seeps through past all the other big atoms and molecules and travels through the container walls.
This also applies to hydrogen dissolved (alloyed) in another substance - it escapes.
Then, there is the problem of joins and junctions, valves and taps.
There are many assertions made to the contrary, I suppose we will have to await the explosions and the destruction before its dangers are recognised. Remember the Hindenburg?
I am almost 80. In high-school, some 65 years ago, for a science fair project, I built a demonstration fuel cell. As I recall, I measured the out put with, I think, a milliamp meter. Not scalable!
The most influential greenhouse gas is water vapor. Compared to the greenhouse effects of water vapor in the atmosphere, focusing on carbon dioxide is just playing around the edges.
Combusting hydrogen, of course, yields the greenhouse gas of water vapor.
Now that's a very good point, Steve S, and one I had not considered while contemplating the insanity of this pursuit of hydrogen as a fuel source.
I promise to take climate change seriously when advocates proposing solutions start to take it seriously. Hydrogen is not a serious answer to any question.
One of my favorite scams is the old "We just invented a new method of making hydrogen cheaper!" This usually involves some sort of proprietary catalyzer. Anyone with even the tiniest smidgeon of science can calculate out the energy necessary to separate hydrogen from whatever molecule it is in. The energy required is the energy required. There is no path to using less energy, and anyone claiming it is a huckster. It is literally the equivalent of saying you've invented shoes that reduce the force of gravity. Yet these types of "breakthroughs" are lavishly funded by the government and unskeptically discussed in the press.
One thing that also bugs me - hydrolysis of water requires that it be pure - otherwise the electricity going into the water is wasted on other atoms and molecules (even causing precipitation at the electrode, blocking the current). Even fresh water is not pure enough for an industrial hydrolyzer. Seawater is a joke - you'll need to distill the water first.
So, it's NOT just the energy efficiency of the distillation process, but the energy of the purification process that needs to be discussed. And distilling water sufficiently is a huge energy suck.
10000 kJ to distill one gallon of water. Figure, roughly, 2 kwh per gallon. That is on top of the energy needed to break the water molecule into hydrogen.
That additional energy cost is almost NEVER discussed in the context of hydrogen. It is just assumed there is an unlimited source of distilled water available. Or that they will use fresh water, and the additional energy loss due to the impurities is not included. Hence the equipment will be far less efficient than predicted AND need frequent replacement.
Ugh - typos - 4th paragraph - "So, it's NOT just the energy efficiency of the electrolysis process, but the purification process that needs to be discussed. And purifying water sufficiently for electrolysis is a huge energy suck."
If I were looking for a way to convert excess nuclear power to a transportable fuel I think I'd look first at directly manufactured methane (via Sabatier process without going through the H2 intermediate step) since it is less prone to leak and we already have the built infrastructure for moving it around.
California added hydrogen-powered cars, along with subsidies and mandates, about a decade ago. There are now about 7,000 of them, out of 31.3 million, and 41 places to fill them. Only rich virtue signalers drive them.
Naturally-available hydrocarbons will eventually be depleted -- petroleum and gas in a couple of centuries, and coal in about six. We'll eventually need to produce hydrogen, probably to make synthetic hydrocarbons because (as Robert explained) it's so difficult to store and move hydrogen. We'll also need them as feedstocks for 6,000 products, as Robert suggested and Ronald Stein and Todd Royal explained in "Green Energy Exploitations." The least thermodynamically obscene way to separate hydrogen from water is the copper-chlorine thermochemical (not electrical) process, one step of which needs temperature at almost exactly the core temperature of a nuclear power plant reactor -- before the heat is used to make electricity. Extract CO2 from seawater, where its concentration is 150 times greater than in the atmosphere, using the BPMED process from PARC. Combine them using the 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process. We don't need new technology for this; all we will need to do, when it becomes inevitable necessary, is to stop the rhetorical abuse of processes that work, and are the most energy-efficient of presently-known methods. Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 150 bibliographic citations so you can check that I did not just make up stuff.
Thank you for sharing the details about the hype. Like fusion, there is a lot of hand waving and outlandish assumptions made about its feasibility.
Robert Bryce what a beautiful summary! You are absolutely right on the money!
If I could make a minor correction, and I quote you at 1:16 in the video
"Hydrogen does NOT occur Naturally - you have to Manufacture it like Electricity or like gasoline"
That's not True
In fact, Hydrogen has The Atomic No. 1 on the Periodic Table, and has 3 naturally occurring 𝙞𝙨𝙤𝙩𝙤𝙥𝙚𝙨.
Basically an isotope indicates the number of neutrons in the Nuclei, and is denoted by a superscript "x" before the element symbol, i.e. [ˣH]
Below are the 3 Isotopes for Hydrogen
[¹𝗛]: aka Protium
[²𝗛]: aka Deuterium
[³𝗛]: aka Tritium
[¹H] and [²H] are both stable, where as [³H] is radioactive with a half-life of ~12.32 years. Most Hydrogen in nature is found as [¹H] with 99.98%
Unlike other elements and isotopes, and an exception to the Periodic Table, Hydrogen [¹H] is the ONLY element isotope that has ZERO neutron. That is, [¹H] atom has 1x proton in the nuclei and 1x electron in the 𝒔-𝒐𝒓𝒃𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒍 energy field
here is my post on this very subject ;)
𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗰𝗸: 𝗛 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗛𝘆𝗽𝗲 [𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗕𝗿𝘆𝗰𝗲]
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aalshehabi_reality-check-h-for-hype-robert-bryce-activity-7196619584693563393-8irb
Surely that can be read as - hydrogen does not occur as a "collectable resource" in nature. There are no pure hydrogen deposits like oil or coal or iron ore. It is present in variable amounts in gas deposits along with methane, ethane and all sorts of other hydrocarbons - unless you know otherwise?
Here is the key from the article: “…Instead, like electricity and gasoline, it must be manufactured. The most common ways are by splitting water through electrolysis, or via steam-methane reforming, which uses high-pressure steam to produce hydrogen from methane. …”
The first and second laws of thermodynamics tell us that every time you convert one type of energy to another, you lose energy…
And yet, even the ‘highly educated’ products of our school systems don’t seem to understand this…
Absolutely my friend! That's because of ignorant Sh33P Think!
Unfortunately, Science has hijacked to the highest bidder and for a long time now.
The result is indoctrinated SH33Ps that are incapacitated to think clearly and critically for themselves.
Classic! Those who don't learn from History are bound to repeat it
Clearly if it takes more energy to generate hydrogen than it delivers then, all other things being equal, it would be foolish. But they aren’t are they? There is such a thing as energy waste such as wind, sun or sea.
There is no such thing as waste energy from the wind, sun, and sea. If there was, why store it as hydrogen? I can get a 90% return on storing it in a battery.
I am of the understanding that people pushing hydrogen as some kind of solution believe that it will have some properties (common in hydrocarbons) that are superior to a battery. For example, use as a liquid fuel for jets, easy pipeline or truck transport, higher energy/weight ratio. Therefore even if it has more thermodynamic loss, the difference will be made up in utility.
It seems so simple. Why take a perfectly useful hydrocarbon, in this case, methane (or natural gas) and spend extra energy (and cost) to strip the hydrogen from the methane molecule to make "green" fuel. This makes absolutely no sense. Naturally occurring hydrogen is very rare because it is extremely reactive (It after all, makes compounds like methane and propane). Use in fuel cells is probably the best but that is like batteries - expensive and resource intensive. Probably the stupidest idea (it has no scalability). The only thing that is worst is direct CO2 capture from the atmosphere for subsurface injection. That really is the definition of economic insanity.
Kinda like biofuels only hypier
Earth is cooler with the atmosphere, water vapor, 30% albedo not warmer.
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics use bad math & badder physics.
The kinetic heat transfer modes of the contiguous atmospheric molecules render impossible a BB surface upwelling and looping “extra” LWIR energy for the GHE.
Consensus science has a well-documented history of being wrong & abusing those who dared to challenge it. (Bruno, drawn & quartered)
GHE & CAGW are wrong so alarmists resort to fear mongering, lies, lawsuits, censorship & violence.
Induction and natural gas stove top burners deliver almost all of their heat to the point-of-use pots or pans.
Converting NG to electricity loses 70% up the stack of a combustion turbine and 20% up the stack & 50 % out the condenser of a steam turbine.
Include station auxiliaries and transmission losses and maybe 25% of the NG energy makes it to the meter and stove top.
Switching NG stove tops for induction stove tops for some vague medical and environmental conjecture is really^4 dumb.
But what else should we expect with the snake oil hustle of the climate change scam?
Who is dumber giving thermodynamic advice than a Greenhouse warming denier?
There are experts in thermodynamics all over Substack, you are not one of them.
My BSME CU ‘78 and 35 years of lucrative application have forgotten more thermo than you alarmist fear mongers even know.
Plus ad hominem insults and appeals to authority do not excuse you from refuting my 3 points.
1 Earth be cooler w atmos/water vapor/30% albedo not warmer.
2 Ubiquitous GHE balances don’t plus violate GAAP & LoT.
3 Kinetic heat transfer processes of contiguous atmos molecules render “extra” GHE energy from a BB surface impossible.
Your turn.
Bring science.
Ad hominem insults don’t excuse you from refuting my points.
Regarding fuel cells, the Space Shuttle generated its electricity with three redundant fuel cells. The cells were extremely subject to catalyst contamination and had to be refurbished or replaced after every single flight.
They were lucky to get a week of use out of them. From what I have heard the delicate catalyst problem has not been solved.
Not to mention the cost of the materials.
What I've been posting to Twitter, SeekingAlpha, et al for the past few years regarding H2. Phrasing may vary.
Hydrogen as a fuel makes zero sense. The only way in which any of these schemes will make any money is through government subsidies. As soon as the subsidies stop, or if the support is loans instead of grants, so will the hydrogen.
This is an idea that gets floated once a decade, every decade since at least the 70s and is (in the past) quickly slapped back down where it belongs by the laws of thermodynamics, chemistry and material science.
This time there's massive propaganda money pushing it, certainly in the hopes of generating returns in the form government largesse. Also, it is cover for the wind/solar scheme as the public and even some decision makers are finally realizing that there is no viable battery technology that can make up for the unreliable nature of wind and solar on a reliable grid. So after 20 years of promising magic batteries, they've switched to promising magic hydrogen.
H2 is almost impossible to store, it embrittles most materials, it burns with an invisible flame and it has a ridiculously low volumetric energy content, unless one cools it to temperatures not far off of absolute zero.
The round trip ecomonics of hydrogen are breathtakingly terrible.
The entire premise is based on the wrong view that CO2 at certain levels in the troposphere is some kind of problem. That and grifters gonna grift on tax credits. Sheesh.