this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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"And where does that hydrogen come from, my sweet summer child?"
Excess of generated power during the day.
Much more economical to store the electricity in batteries or pumped hydro than using an electrolyzer, even if you found the electrolyzer for free on the side of the road.
Using hydrogen for steel and fertilizer production are the only feasible use cases for it over the next 100 years at least, if your goal is maximum GHG reduction.
lolnope.
Nuclear. Every day, all day, conventional nuclear power is so much better than trying to invent a hydrogen infrastructure. An expensive infrastructure if it's going to perform those incredibly important base load purposes like smelting, chemical feedstock production (fertilizers) and concrete production that could be handled by existing infrastructure and nuclear power. I'm not even advocating for small modular reactors (which I think are nifty but ultimately unnecessary).
Hydrogen as energy storage and transport requires cryogenic everything, people don't realize how expensive and sensitive it is. Ben Rich talks about the Skunkworks program to produce Hydrogen in meaningful quantities for the Suntan program in Skunk Works, and the prospect of large scale hydrogen production (and use on active airfields) terrified people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_CL-400_Suntan
Basically, it can be done, but the risks are large without a highly trained workforce and rigid compliance to safety regimes.
Now imagine that but even more widespread :|
Sure, in the future state where we have all the energy we need from solar and wind, but then we have all the energy we need
Hydrogen maybe has a place in sea and air transport. Maybe has a place in trucks
Hydrogen right now comes from fossil fuels
It kinda depends. Hydrogen protons were formed in the first second after the Big Banger🤘, but full hydrogen atoms that included a proton and an electron didn't form until 370k "years" later during a time range called the Recombination Epoch.