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Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #540 –
Quote from: Mav on
I think it’s better just to reduce the amount of methane we produce, isn’t it?
There is R&D happening at several locations right now trying to characterise how much methane a typical tropical forests will emit, and the viability of capturing it, as it could well be more profitable to harvest the forests methane emissions than fell the trees or clear the forest, .................... but only in a hydrogen economy.

As for reducing methane emissions, we should do it but in the wider picture it's a drop in the ocean, we actually manufacture methane for use on other chemical processes, even if we captured all we emit or flare off we'd still need to make it.

Our priorities should be CO2 reduction and CO2 scrubbing, most leading institutes have long accept CO2 reductions even to zero is no longer enough, the latest figures we now have show we must start mining/scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere! Oddly of natures alleged solution "trees" are not going to do it, grass is a better option be it the land or sea version. But they accept now after zero we will head towards atmospheric engineering as the next step, that is CO2 scrubbing, by some means.

A feedback loop has been identified, the better and cleaner we make the environment, the more everything breeds like rabbits including people! Such a pain, people are again the problem, give them a paradise and they will f@#$ and f@#$ it up!
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #541 –
If you electrolyse seawater to produce hydrogen, as a by-product you get pretty much every critical element needed for advanced economies in some trace level. Luckily by volume, the sea has more than enough to pretty much last the human race long after it's made a home in space.

Batteries and SolarPV consume trace elements before they create any energy, so they need a long payback period.

As a energy storage medium, the energy density is the energy in watts per kilogram of weight. By that factor hydrogen has an energy density of 35,000 watts per kilogram, while lithium-ion batteries have an density of just over 200 watts per kilogram. That is why Cannon-Brookes and Twiggy Forest want to store energy as hydrogen, to be converted back to power via fuel cells, it's a no brainer. As a clean energy option it's so far ahead there isn't even a competition, and there wouldn't be a competition without the barrage of publicly subsidised marketing by Battery and SolarPV, industries using your tax dollars to sell you the EV / Battery con!

I've even read cons where they try to paint the generation and transportation of hydrogen as a negative compared to batteries getting efficient power from power plants delivered by cable. But of course they ignore that your EV carries around a tonne of battery whether it's fully charged or nearly discharge, while a hydrogen tank gets lighter as the fuel level gets lower. Actually, when compared on all terms even given the lower efficiency of a fuel cells versus a battery, they break about even on efficiency. However in a static application, after the initial recovering of all the overheads, hydrogen for something like bulk storage of excess grid energy is miles ahead!

Then there is the bogus claim green hydrogen will use all the water. Hydrogen is produced from water at a ratio of about 9:1, even though hydrogen has almost 200x the energy density of a LIoN battery we still need 2 to 3 GT(Gigatonnes ) of hydrogen every year. So naysayers quote that figure and claim the worlds water will be used up, except that 2 -3GT / per year equates 20 - 30 GT of water, which is less than 2ppm of the atmospheres available water, actually closer to 1.5ppm. Assuming no further technological advancement, it'll take humans at least 250k years to use 1/2 the planets freely accessible water, of course we can't expect people to accept that in 250k years time, vandals that we are! And we won't learn jack-shizen in the intervening period given we are naturally luddites, and we will of course be grounded by space debris, which is a bust because just one of those big frozen asteroids which float freely around the solar system can apparently power us at our current level of demand for hundreds of years. btw.

By freely accessible water I'm not talking about water, oceans, crust et., all, that total amount of water would be 1,388,464,566,929 GT! :o Even if our estimates are out by a factor of 100 or even 1000, supply and demand is irrelevant!

But we will dry out the air, except Greenland is currently losing 280 GT of ice annually, Antarctica lost 120 GT of ice just last year, roughly 4x what we would need to hydrogen fuel the planet!

I can imagine the protests now, "Save the asteroids!"
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #542 –
Gee, I want to get into producing methane! It doesn’t matter how much you produce, you’ll always be able to sell it. It’s like having a golden goose!

By the way, green hydrogen is produced using electrolysis to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, no coal, carbon dioxide or methane involved.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #543 –
Quote from: Mav on
Gee, I want to get into producing methane! It doesn’t matter how much you produce, you’ll always be able to sell it. It’s like having a golden goose!

By the way, green hydrogen is produced using electrolysis to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, no coal, carbon dioxide or methane involved.
Don't forget the chemical formula, the basics of nature and physics matter! ;)

H2O vs CH4

You can go from methane to hydrogen and carbon, there is no CO2 in that part of the process. The carbon you can thermally processed into graphene, the graphene becomes electronics and part of all sorts of other need materials like carbon fibre, the green alternative to steel! ;)
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #544 –
As always, the devil’s in the details. What’s the energy penalty involved in that process? Scientists can and do produce antimatter, for instance. The only problem is that it costs more than 60 trillion dollars to produce a gram. Theoretical rather than practical processes don’t impress me much.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #545 –
I guess I could go down the same path by simply suggesting we could obtain all the rare metals we need for battery production by towing mineral-rich asteroids to the moon and processing them there. Job done. All problems solved.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #546 –
It doesn’t appear that pyrolysis is being used at scale to split methane into hydrogen and carbon. Given that, your warnings about using blue sky announcements are extremely pertinent to attempts to construct an economic case for employing it at scale.

Here’s an example of a company channeling Trump - only we can do it:

‘We will make zero-CO2 hydrogen from natural gas so cheaply we could give it away for free’, rechargenews.com.

Of course, the company boasts of having a secret sauce that can overcome crippling problems in producing “Turquoise Hydrogen”. Until they prove they can scale up, we only have their word for it.

But the spokesman does at least acknowledge a nagging problem that you just wave off, LP:
Quote
The limits of the H Quest process
It would be easy to assume that H Quest’s process of making CO2-free hydrogen from natural gas could revolutionise the fast-growing H2 sector, that it would eliminate any need to produce blue hydrogen and allow a hydrogen economy to develop at speed, but the technology does have two small drawbacks.

One is that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that often leaks upstream (see panel below), and the other is that there is a limit to the size of H Quest’s market, even if it is potentially large. For instance, the carbon black market, which the company wants to target first, requires 14 million tonnes of the stuff each year.

“What we're limited by is the market of the carbon co-product,” says Skoptsov. “We’re making three times as much carbon products [by weight] as hydrogen products. So we have to balance those. That’s the fundamental problem we have to solve, but we are already working on new use cases for our materials.”

Remember that if this process aims to produce as much hydrogen as possible, then there will be 3 times as much carbon to sell off. Without resorting to the magic pudding approach you favour, LP, there’s a fairly stark choice. Either scale down the amount of hydrogen produced so that the byproduct can be sold off at a decent market price or crash the market and destroy the economic case for that process. Perhaps part of the carbon produced could simply be buried to maintain prices but there are political and perhaps legal issues with that. Would there need to be something like OPEC to ensure some producers don’t flood the market and would that attract scrutiny from corporate regulators who would regard it as oligopolistic price-fixing?

Anyway, just saying something is scientifically possible doesn’t mean it is economically viable. Let’s wait until we see a working model. After all, you’re quick to doubt that breakthroughs in battery technology will make it into real world production processes.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #547 –
There is always an attempt by naysayers to imply some link between carbon(a solid) and carbon dioxide(a gas).

But the thing is even if produced in excess, the solid carbon can be literally ploughed into the ground for use as a soil conditioner, like biochar, displacing some of the rather nasty nitrates fertilizers that are used now. Sure it might not deliver as much energy, but functionally it will be a low cost by-product of energy generation.

Of course, not being done as scale, is different to never tested at scale. Many of the hydrogen economy technologies were tested at scale long ago, but  back in a era where the fossil fuel damage to the environment bore no cost, hydrogen was discarded as uneconomic. Of course back then the very same fate came to SolarPV or Wind, which has only gained traction in recent times only through subsidies, which is a political issue.
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #548 –
Ordered solar for the house, feel happy about it.
2017-16th
2018-Wooden Spoon
2019-16th
2020-dare to dream? 11th is better than last I suppose
2021-Pi$$ or get off the pot
2022- Real Deal or more of the same? 0.6%
2023- "Raise the Standard" - M. Voss Another year wasted Bar Set
2024-Back to the drawing boardNo excuses, its time

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #549 –
Quote from: Gointocarlton on
Ordered solar for the house, feel happy about it.
Yep, and you should feel good about it, it's the right thing to do.

@Gointocarlton my debate is not an opposition to SolarPV, Wind or any other low carbon or no carbon energy. I'm debating the need for these industries to actually be what they claim to be, spend more time getting better collectively, instead of spending all day cutting each other's throat for short term profit!
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #550 –
The Wind industry will tell you SolarPV is a filthy industry that consumes perfectly good land which could can be used for agribusiness.

The SolarPV industry will claim Wind generates lots of unrecyclable waste, kills rare birds, is a hazard for shipping and causes infrasound harm to nearby residents.

Neither Wind nor SolarPV comment on the battery industry because they need batteries or they are literally dead and buried being unrecyclable.

The Hydrogen industry will tell you batteries are filthy, short lived and consume rare resources.

Battery manufacturers will tell you hydrogen is made from coal, is highly inefficient and will consume all our drinking water.

The fossil fuel industry presents a conglomeration of all these accusations.

They all sprout lies of sorts to line their own pockets, claiming one or the other has some sort of high ground is political not technical decision!

The truth is many of the accusations have some substance in a certain limited frame of reference, which is usually a privileged perspective that is chosen to make one technology look good and the other look bad. When you stack the global benefits and costs up against each other, there is barely a difference between them other than in the marketing spin!
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #551 –
I had to laugh today, as we often get dragged in these discussions at work, I sat through an extended rant from a born again EV apparatchik who spent what seemed like hours telling us how hydrogen vehicles / transport could never work. It was probably just a few minutes.

At the end he justified his position by telling us about his past experiences, back when he converted his 4WD to LPG! ::)

Back in the old OPEC fuel crisis days, Aussies turned to LPG for a large chunk of the vehicle network in the space of just 2 or 3 years, some of us might still be driving LPG vehicles!

If we think we can wait while 85% of the world's vehicle network converts to EV, then well and good, but it's not happening in a decade, or two decades or even three decades without a huge consumption of resources.
The Force Awakens!
 

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #552 –
I don’t want a bait and switch. If “Turquoise Hydrogen” is economically viable to produce, let’s see a scaled up version of it working. Otherwise, we know the drill:
1. Sorry, the Turquoise bit won’t work, but now we have the infrastructure set up we might as well produce Blue Hydrogen.
2. Sorry again, but the squints have let us down on CCS and catalysis, so it makes sense to release the carbon dioxide and methane gases into the atmosphere but we’ll buy a few bogus carbon credits to keep everybody happy.

Once the producers get approvals and governments commit to subsidies and guaranteed purchases of hydrogen, we all know they’ll be allowed to rewrite the deals to make them work. We’ve seen governments refuse to hold contractors to time constraints and default provisions in rail deals and tollway constructions. Those sorts of investments are too big to fail.

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #553 –
Quote from: Mav on
Once the producers get approvals and governments commit to subsidies and guaranteed purchases of hydrogen, we all know they’ll be allowed to rewrite the deals to make them work.
True, but then you must be fairly upset about the SolarPV industry filling warehouses full of never to be recycled redundant failed panels that didn't last the expected ROI lifetime!

And you must be furious about the SolarPV people getting massive grants, widely supported by a public expecting generous feed tariffs from providers that evaporated as the installations grew!

Now, as the range of older(old by EV standards) EVs falloff a cliff, we are starting to see old EV batteries pile up, batteries built on subsidies and sold at a premium. 10 years becomes 5 years, 300km becomes 210km, a 4hr charge is now overnight, and recycling seems to evaporate or become repurpose.

Same coin, different side, not a spec of high ground to be obtained.

Fiscal or legal or marketing smokescreens, as deadly as any desert mirage!
The Force Awakens!

Re: The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

Reply #554 –
So you want to parlay deals made at the start of the push for renewable power to jump start the industry into a legitimate expectation that Turquoise Hydrogen producers should be allowed to set up speculative ventures on the government dime? Interesting position you have there …

I would have thought setting up power plants that may end up emitting copious greenhouse gases is not what we need right now. Let someone set up that sort of power plant overseas and prove that it works as intended before we invest in them over here.

We’ve already seen a blue hydrogen setting up in the Latrobe Valley and it’s releasing greenhouse gases. There’s a pie-in-the-sky promise that there’ll be a CCS system operating around 2030 and until then the plant will rely on the dubious carbon credits system to make it “green”.