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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #480 –
Interesting response to a stupid Matt Canavan tweet attacking Green Hydrogen and lauding Blue Hydrogen:
The Australian’s back-of-the-envelope green hydrogen figures are overblown and forget climate impact, The Guardian.

What a flog Canavan is. Why would you bother to consider a ridiculous scenario in which Australia is the sole supplier of Hydrogen to the world?  It’s about as sensible as considering whether the Australian Defence Forces would be able to defeat the aliens from Independence Day. Of course, even after making that ridiculous assumption he goes on to fudge his results.

But the article points out the problem with using Blue Hydrogen to combat climate change:

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But Beck said comparing green hydrogen with blue hydrogen was like “comparing apples and oranges”. While green hydrogen would use more land, her own published work suggests blue hydrogen would have a sizeable greenhouse gas footprint.

She said even if the CCS industry could capture 90% of the emissions from the production stage of blue hydrogen, that would still release about 1Mt of CO2 for each 1Mt of hydrogen.

But Beck said if emissions from extracting and processing the natural gas before it’s turned into hydrogen were also counted, this would see blue hydrogen responsible for “a whopping 1314Mt of CO2-e in a year to make 530Mt of blue hydrogen in Australia, using 1961Mt of natural gas.”

For context, that is almost three times Australia’s current greenhouse gas footprint.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #481 –
I get it, everybody does, but coal gasification is not the only way to produce hydrogen, and certainly not the long term way, in the long term electrolysis or catalysis will be the main method in conjunction with seawater desalination processes.

btw., Those emissions figures are a bit out of date, they are referring to gasification the old way, which is like the cooking version of a wood fired oven. There are several new techniques under development right now that use bioreactors to generate hydrogen from brown coal, with methane and other useful industrial or commercial gases as the principle by-products, but it doesn't suit the political perspective of some in the renewables sector to discuss these options. They've even been trying to have funding for the projects and Newcastle Uni and ANU to be cut on environmental grounds! That only proves to me how disingenuous the renewables sector is about reducing greenhouse gas, the actions expose profit as their primary motivation.
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #482 –
More likely they’re used to the fossil fuel industry peddling nonsense like carbon capture and clean coal and they’re not going to be conned again. No doubt scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry will be more than happy to promise miracles that are only a few years away, but only if we keep faith with the little black rock. As the Minerals Council of Australia tells us, “Coal. It’s an amazing thing.”

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1039036982786817

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #483 –
By the way, methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases and it’s pretty audacious to try to sell blue hydrogen on the basis that it produces commercially useful gases like methane. That brings to mind the cigarette industry’s promotion of the health benefits of smoking.

If methane is burnt, carbon dioxide is produced. And I’m guessing the blue hydrogen producers aren’t going to store ad infinitum methane byproducts that are surplus to commercial needs.

Garbage dumps that capture the methane created by decomposition and burn it to produce power are minimising the damage created in disposing of waste. But releasing methane trapped in coal is not in the public interest when hydrogen can be created without creating carbon dioxide and methane.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #485 –
Quote from: Mav on
By the way, methane is one of the worst greenhouse gases and it’s pretty audacious to try to sell blue hydrogen on the basis that it produces commercially useful gases like methane. That brings to mind the cigarette industry’s promotion of the health benefits of smoking.

If methane is burnt, carbon dioxide is produced. And I’m guessing the blue hydrogen producers aren’t going to store ad infinitum methane byproducts that are surplus to commercial needs.

Garbage dumps that capture the methane created by decomposition and burn it to produce power are minimising the damage created in disposing of waste. But releasing methane trapped in coal is not in the public interest when hydrogen can be created without creating carbon dioxide and methane.
Your lifestyle doesn't exist without methane, it's a base ingredient of many of the materials and chemicals you use hundreds of times a day, like it or not cars, clothing, building materials, pharmaceuticals, appliances, paint, pretty much every modern material or surface treatment has been touched by methane in the resource or material supply chain.

By the way, methane is fractionally short lived compared to CO2, so while methane is far more reactive, it's gone form the environment in just a fraction of the time that CO2 exists, consumed by organisms as a building block of life, so nature uses it in much the same way humans use it to manufacture and engineer materials.
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #486 –
But I don’t recall any articles highlighting a global shortage of methane for commercial use. Presumably, the global demand is presently met by existing suppliers. Why would more be needed?

I also assume the current suppliers only produce as much as they can sell. On the other hand, the amount of methane that will be produced as a byproduct of the production of hydrogen will depend only on the targets for hydrogen production. That won’t stop just because the methane byproduct exceeds the amount that industry can use. Will that excess be stored like the red cycle plastic that wasn’t being recycled? Or will the excess be released into the atmosphere or burnt (producing carbon dioxide)? Or maybe the mythical CCS system will store it underground (where it currently resides trapped in coal) …

As the old saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing. That’s even truer when the good thing is generally a bad thing.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #487 –
Quote from: Mav on
But I don’t recall any articles highlighting a global shortage of methane for commercial use. Presumably, the global demand is presently met by existing suppliers. Why would more be needed?
Hmm, if you keep posting that sort of comment your leftist gas banning buddies are going to disown you!

The idea is we stop mining new sources of fossil fuels and use the what we already have as by-products of existing resources.

For example, farms in Europe are now putting pavilions over cattle and sheep not to protect them from the weather, but to catch the methane resource they emit and turn it back into the fertilizer or medicines needed.

Waste not want not!

There are many ways to solve problems, but the myopia displayed by the renewables sector isn't one of them! But they know that, which is why they are hypocrites.

I'll laugh when the lefties "revise" or "review" their political position to energy generation as Dan's SEC comes back on line, I bet Socialist Energy is somehow cleaned energy! ;D

Ironically, I'm not at all opposed to base services being controlled by democratically elected governments ahead of private entities. But the change in the left's attitude, and you know it's going to happen, will still be hypocritical.

Climate change and CO2 emissions reductions are either urgent or they are not, if CO2 emissions reduction is urgent you do everything you can to remove CO2 emission from society, including CCS, Hydrogen, Solar PV, Offsets, Wind, Tidal, Wave, etc., etc.. You don't pick one option and damn all the others! Everything, Everywhere All at Once! ;D
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #488 –
Methane is just as troublesome as carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for longer, methane is 25 times as effective at trapping heat compared to carbon dioxide over the initial 20 year period. It’s pure sleight of hand to say we should concentrate on reducing carbon dioxide while extolling the virtues of methane.

The examples you cite are attempts to reduce the emissions of methane in existing industries by giving those industries an economic payoff. Often, those industries can’t readily reduce the amount of methane being produced. For example, garbage dumps can’t be eliminated: they’re an essential public service. By persuading the operators to capture methane and burn it to power the site, we make the best of a bad situation. Do nothing and the methane leaks into the atmosphere and poses a fire risk. Capturing it and burning it produces carbon dioxide which is unfortunate, but you have to make hard decisions. The operators reduce their energy costs so the reduction of methane pays for itself.

Livestock farming inevitably produces methane. It isn’t realistic to reduce the demand for meat and the like, so we have to make the best of it by reducing the methane emissions. Scientists are working on doing so by creating feed that will reduce the amount of methane being emitted by livestock. Apparently, adding seaweed helps to do this. And if livestock producers can be persuaded to capture the methane and use it as fertiliser or the like, that’s great (although does this merely delay its emission into the atmosphere?).

However, I don’t think there’s much doubt that governments would prefer to eliminate methane byproducts rather than persuade businesses to capture them. If governments were presented with a button they could press that would make businesses methane-free without incurring any cost, they wouldn’t be able to push it fast enough. Unfortunately, in the real world we can only try to make the best out of a bad situation.

But you aren’t proposing ways to reduce the methane emissions from existing industries. You are pushing the creation of an entirely new process which will create massive amounts of methane. And the joke of it is that you justify this by saying the end product, hydrogen, will combust without creating any greenhouse gases (which is of course true). But you want to use a process that produces heaps of carbon dioxide and methane. That wipes out the environmental benefits of hydrogen. When green hydrogen has the same benefit but without the downside of blue hydrogen, why?

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #489 –
Claiming or implying methane by-products will be discharged to atmosphere is the real slight of hand in this debate, it's a valuable resource that is easily collected and converted to many useful carbon based products, turning it into waste by making the production of it illegal is certainly the foolish way to go.

Even to the extreme of capture and sequestration. One of the great ironies in the debate is leftists arguing to stop mining of fossil fuels gases like methane, I suppose the premise is just leave it in the ground where it has been safely residing for millions of years. Then the very same people arguing sequestration, that pumps reserves of such gases back to the natural reservoirs where they came from, is flawed and cannot work. Yep, another let's not talk about the war moment for renewables.

Just a small example of no methane, no disposable PPE or single use (sterile) surgical kit, no catheters, no arterial clips, no sterile packaging, just a very small sample of modern life that is produced from or with the assistance of the methane that currently comes out of natural gas reserves.

Mining fossil gas is a process that can be mostly or completely replaced through the use of the methane by-products collected of gasification, farming and recycling / composting. Nobody is claiming they are to be vented to atmosphere, that accusation is just an absurdity.
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #490 –
And yet you don’t deal with the fact that the creation of methane byproduct isn’t calibrated to the level needed to satisfy demand; instead it will be proportional to the entire amount of hydrogen produced by the process you admire. It’s unlikely that demand for methane will be exactly equal to the methane byproduct and you haven’t provided any grounds to believe there won’t be excess supply. We’ve seen that already with the Red Cycle plastics fiasco. Where the collection of problematic material is divorced from the ability of businesses to convert it into another product, you end up with a storage problem.

And this all assumes that the existing production of methane will cease. But that’s optimistic. It’s not as though oil production in various countries was shut down in favour of importing oil from countries which could produce it more cheaply. The US has been hellbent on reaching oil self-sufficiency and if its own mining operations create methane gas byproduct that’s captured and used, that’s going to continue unabated. Can you imagine Australia telling the US Govt to cut the production of methane because we’re producing more blue hydrogen? Good luck with that …

If there’s an excess, one would expect the rate of excess supply to be constant or increasing as more blue hydrogen is produced. That will mean ever increasing amounts of methane to eliminate.

Of course, governments will try to find ways to convert the methane into something useful, if only to justify the continued use of blue hydrogen processes. Again, look at the Red Cycle program. It was wonderful PR for Woolies and Coles and governments that were subsidising the program that all their plastic packaging was converted into park benches and the like rather than being dumped in landfill but there was a practical limit that undercut that messaging. As the low-hanging fruit is exhausted, funding new uses for methane would become a subsidy with the taxpayer footing the bill. There are practical limits to how much methane can be used in this way.

So what will happen with the excess? Are there really enough empty spaces underground to store massive amounts of methane along with massive amounts of carbon dioxide? Is there no end to that magic? Can we build huge containers for it? Or do we burn the methane and then bury the carbon dioxide in the endless natural storage compartments below the surface.

Maybe we could just make sure the EPA is looking the other way when there are accidental releases of methane by the blue hydrogen producers or when CCS fails. After all, too much regulation would be bad for business.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #491 –
Quote from: Mav on
And yet you don’t deal with the fact that the creation of methane byproduct isn’t calibrated to the level needed to satisfy demand; instead it will be proportional to the entire amount of hydrogen produced by the process you admire. It’s unlikely that demand for methane will be exactly equal to the methane byproduct and you haven’t provided any grounds to believe there won’t be excess supply.
The demand for hydrogen won't be 100% exclusive meet by gasification methods which are just a bridge to hydrogen production via seawater electrolysis. Gasification probably can't even meet a significant fraction of the demand needed, just as Solar PV alone cannot possible meet base load demands.

Only renewables alarmists paint gasification by-products as the reason to ban the hydrogen economy.

Methane is going to be need from somewhere, it is never going to 'cease', the percentage of methane produced by hydrogen production through gasification will only provide a fraction of the methane needed for modern economies, so it's likely some gasification might be needed to help bridge the gap as mining of fossil fuels gets scaled back, but that will take decades as there are many more products produced by mining than fuels. They may even run gasification facilities to produce methane along with other heavy gases with hydrogen as the by-product.

It's completely naivé to imagine methane will cease, it's as naivé as people thinking logging will cease, or gold mining will cease, or cars will cease, or planes will cease. It's just used as an argument in renewables / climate debate because the public is oblivious to what methane is needed to produce other than burning it as a fuel.

btw. The formula for methane is CH4, there is no O in there!
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #492 –
When methane burns in air there’s a fair bit of O available to produce carbon dioxide. In fact, AFAIK it won’t burn unless oxygen is present.

If blue hydrogen is going to be a little niche market, why bother with it? Why would industry be willing to invest considerable funds into improving the technology and setting up the infrastructure if it won’t be scaled up dramatically? Just look at the blue hydrogen facility in the Latrobe Valley. It will need to implement a large scale CCS to deal with the greenhouse gas emissions and that is a Herculean undertaking. The hydrogen will then be transported to the Port of Hastings where another facility will convert it into liquid ammonia, whereupon it will be shipped offshore in special pressurised tankers. And you’re telling me that will just be a little operation which won’t create large quantities of methane which, when aggregated with similar facilities around the world, won’t make much of dent in methane demand?

In particular, it’s odd that you would bang on about how hydrogen should be widely used in transportation as well as fuelling power-hungry industries but then claim byproducts would be minimal because hydrogen won’t be a major source of energy.

Investment in blue hydrogen doesn’t seem to me to be a transient operation which will melt away when green hydrogen comes on line. It might if we were talking about some global operation where optimal environmental outcomes were more important than making money. But there’s no global operation. Operators of blue hydrogen facilities will defend their patch to the death (of the planet, if necessary). The Latrobe Valley plant is there because of access to coal and presumably disused mines which might be sites for carbon capture. Neither is of any benefit to a plant that will create green hydrogen. Instead, green hydrogen plants would be sited close to water. That blue hydrogen plant would just be another disused building. It’s not too hard to imagine blue hydrogen operators would try to kill off competition from green hydrogen operators. That would involve trying to tie up government funding and challenging the scientific and business cases presented by those new entrants. That’s the same sort of thing that we see the fossil fuel industry doing already. And in the case of the Latrobe Valley plant, the Victorian Government (no matter whether it’s Labor or Liberal) may side with the blue hydrogen suppliers as they monetise Victoria’s coal supplies and create employment in an area that depended on coal-fired power generation.

I

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #493 –
Quote from: Mav on
When methane burns in air there’s a fair bit of O available to produce carbon dioxide. In fact, AFAIK it won’t burn unless oxygen is present
So are you volunteering to light it, you'd do that just to prove your point?

I think the most common way methane reduces in the environment without some biology being involved is catalysis, and the end result is mostly methanol, acetic acid and a little CO2 on the side. But I hear you correctly noting, methanol and acetic acid are heavier than air, well at least that is how the scientists think Titan exists!

btw., Having had a quick chat with some boffins this morning to confirm my suspicions, I can relay that the catalysis of methane occurs in an anaerobic environment, forming methanol, formic acid, acetic acid, all useful chemicals used in industry and food production often with hydrogen as a by-product.

Scientists and engineers busy designing process that mimic what nature has been doing for millions of years, producing waste hydrogen that burns up in the air producing water, evil bastards aren't they causing all those floods!

Quote
anaerobic
1.
relating to or requiring an absence of free oxygen.
"anaerobic bacteria"
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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #494 –
I’m guessing you know that the garbage dumps collecting methane propose to burn it as fuel to provide power. As you know, that’s an aerobic process.
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Aerobic
 relating to, involving, or requiring free oxygen.
"simple aerobic bacteria"

And it’s wonderful that science has methods to break down methane. But real world economics has a way of spoiling things. What would be the cost of catalysis on the industrial scale needed to deal with the methane produced in the production of blue hydrogen? And again, would there be sufficient demand for this new industrial scale production of end products aggregated across the world? Surely the latter question impacts the former as sale of the end products would underpin viability. And how much power would be required for the large-scale catalysis process? After all, the fact blue hydrogen requires less power to produce than green hydrogen production requires is one of its selling points. But when we add in the power required to process the byproducts, maybe that pro turns into a con. Maybe blue hydrogen would then be a con?

By the way, science also gives us the ability to split carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. In theory, we could deal with this byproduct of blue hydrogen production. But the power required to achieve this in order to produce power makes it impractical. So let’s focus on practicality rather than theory.

Maybe rather than trying to cut the Gordion knot by searching for ways to minimise the impact of greenhouse byproducts, we should simplify the problem by producing green hydrogen. As you’ve already noted, hydrogen will only meet a tiny fraction of the world’s energy needs, so let’s not get tied up in knots over it.