Seems like it would make more sense to work out a process that skips the cells altogether and just runs from a redox mix or something. This seems wildly inefficient.
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Well the entire point is to keep using fossil fuels since 95% of hydrogen fuel cells are created using natural gas. This is blatant fossil fuel greenwashing
Any more info on this? Have trouble finding anything on Google.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis of water; which account for 48%, 30%, 18% and 4% of the world's hydrogen production respectively.[1] Fossil fuels are the dominant source of industrial hydrogen.[2] As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Hydrogen production is the family of industrial methods for generating hydrogen gas. There are four main sources for the commercial production of hydrogen: natural gas, oil, coal, and electrolysis of water; which account for 48%, 30%, 18% and 4% of the world's hydrogen production respectively. Fossil fuels are the dominant source of industrial hydrogen. As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification. Other methods of hydrogen production include biomass gasification and methane pyrolysis. Methane pyrolysis and water electrolysis can use any source of electricity including renewable energy. The production of hydrogen plays a key role in any industrialized society, since hydrogen is required for many chemical processes. In 2020, roughly 87 million tons of hydrogen was produced worldwide for various uses, such as oil refining, in the production of ammonia through the Haber process, and in the production of methanol through reduction of carbon monoxide. The global hydrogen generation market was fairly valued at US$155 billion in 2022, and expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.3% from 2023 to 2030.
Ah it’s to make the actual hydrogen fuel not the fuel cells. Ty for the info.
Essentially if you combine hydrogen with oxygen, you get water. This chemical reaction happens naturally when the two are exposed to each other and produces heaps of energy which can easily be controlled and used for anything else.
One way to produce hydrogen is to take water, and heaps of energy, and "split" the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You can just release the oxygen into the air (since you'd be making too much to sell it).
The cost largely comes down to where you get your energy from. As solar gets more and more widely deployed, some countries now have more energy during the day than they can use - the price of power in those countries is not just close to zero sometimes it's negative. The grid will literally pay you to use the electricity during peak production. Since it's cheaper to provide power than shut down infrastructure that will be needed again in a few hours.
At that point, all you need to produce hydrogen is water. The power is free. And it doesn't need to be pristine water either - ocean water is fine.
Hydrogen itself is perfectly clean - it produces water or steam. The debate over wether or not it's "clean" is all about the energy used to produce it and that is changing as our electricity grid moves to zero emission power sources. One of them being hydrogen — which is a great way to fill in gaps when solar and wind aren't producing power.
It's FUD. There's literally more than a dozen different ways to produce hydrogen.
Yes, right now, the cheapest options are some of the "dirtier" ones, however the cost to produce zero emission hydrogen is coming down rapidly and fossil fuel produced hydrogen is going up in price.
The two are expected to cross over in the next few years and green hydrogen, typically using solar power to split seawater, will be the cheapest way to produce hydrogen and nobody in their right mind would get it from any of the more expensive sources.
Right now there is nobody in the world doing large scale zero emission hydrogen production. However a bunch of massive hydrogen production plants are being built right now and clean hydrogen is expected to become widely available starting next year. Several of the plants opening in the next couple of years will produce hundreds of tons of hydrogen per day. With zero emissions.
Keep in mind this is a trial of a fuel-cell powered data center. They're just testing the technology to see how well it works, and if it works well, by the time they actually start deploying it widely they will be using hydrogen that has zero carbon emissions.
This is basically how all green energy ideas start. Wind and solar power went through the same thing. What we're seeing are people who dismiss new ideas, either because they're climate change deniers or because they're outdated and don't want to see change they don't understand.
Maybe it's more of an experiment/ proof of concept
Renewables like wind and solar produce power inconsistently. Hydrogen fuel cells could be a viable tech for storing excess power generated for later use.
You mean like taking the electricity used to make the hydrogen and just feeding it into the data center?
Stationary buildings like data centers are absolutely the worst use for hydrogen. Why not run power lines?
Anything to further fuel cell development as well as hydrogen storage is a win.
Whoever figures out how to store hydrogen easily will be the next energy megacorp, hydrogen engines and fuel cells are reliable, proven tech, we just haven't figured out how to store it and transport it without cryogenics and/or insanely high pressures.
Problem with hydrogen is that it can pass through solid materials, because it's just one proton, keeping it under high pressure makes the problem worse.
It's unwise to say something is impossible, because people tend to find solutions, but AFAIK there is no known way to store Hydrogen efficiently.
Apart from that hydrogen production is very wasteful, meaning the complete system waste about 45%, before actually producing useful energy from fuel cells.
Seems to me this is not just an engineering problem, it's a problem we simply don't know if a solution even exist.
Fuel cells have been heavily researched for 30 years now, and it seems like they are getting nowhere. In the mean time Tesla was started "just" 20 years ago, and progress on batteries and EV is very strong.
Leaked hydrogen (H or H2) also binds to oxygen (OH or O) to create water vapor, which is a problem because GHG also binds to oxygen or OH and becomes neutralized. Some studies peg Hydrogen leakage at scale as being 100x worse, in the short term, than CO2 for warming due to this impact.
https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/publications/hydrogen-leakage-potential-risk-hydrogen-economy/
Thank you, very interesting article, I've always claimed Hydrogen isn't a benefit, because it's to wasteful so it may be actually detrimental over just using the original fuels used to make hydrogen directly. But I never even considered the hydrogen itself would be a problem. But reading the article, it's actually quite obvious, that at scale it's absolutely a problem that it "occupies" oxygen that is used to break down greenhouse gasses.
Problem with hydrogen is that it can pass through solid materials, because it's just one proton, keeping it under high pressure makes the problem worse.
Heard about that issue in a YT video from a specialist about extreme vacuum devices and atoms leaking into it.
This concept is still absolutely wild to imagine for me. Atoms passing through solid stuff...
EV's have been around since the dawn of ICE cars pretty much I wouldn't say it's recent tech.
It's recent because EV simply weren't practical with older batteries, the new tech is Lithium batteries, that have been improved significantly since the first Lithium based cars.
The interesting part IMO is that the fuel cells were massively researched despite obvious problems with no solution, when lithium batteries were already in existence.
And despite Lithium is an OLDER technology, it has made better progress since fuel cells were massively hyped.
we just haven't figured out how to store it and transport it without cryogenics and/or insanely high pressures.
And we won't.
To compress a gas to that level, it either has to be under a lot of pressure, or chilled to the point it becomes a liquid. There's no getting around physics.
I mean... unless we invented something truly insane like TARDIS technology, but I imagine if we had the capability of doing that, we'd have moved past hydrogen for energy storage anyway.
All we can do is try to find energy efficient ways of chilling/insulating it, and ways of safely and cheaply pressurising it.
Never say never. Lol
If there's one thing I've learned, innovation can wildly subvert expectations.
Well yeah but I make exceptions when it comes to the laws of physics
It's not like we've made any advancements in the speed or light or the Earth's gravitational constant, either.
Especially for data centers, it's absolutely a waste of money.
DCs consume very high amounts of power, but in a pretty predictable way. There is no reason whatsoever to use hydrogen in that context. Hydrogen is extremely expensive and will stay expensive more or less forever. Why would a fuel cell ever be economically viable here?
Hydrogen has its uses. This is not one of them.
Are you a five your old?