‘How to greenwash’: propane industry tries to rebrand fuel as renewable : worldnews

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Just be aware, hydrogen in almost all its presented formats is basically natural gas. 96% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels.

So whenever you see shit promoting hydrogen, read it as something promoting natural gas/ fossil fuels.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't think it's really fair to throw all hydrogen into one category when we already have terms to describe where the hydrogen is sourced. Green hydrogen specifically is sourced via electrolysis with renewables and isn't really a problem.

Eventually we will get to a point where we have days where we have more solar energy than we can use and storing it in some capacity would be nice. I don't know if hydrogen is a good way to store energy to be used in fuel cells but it can be used by airplanes in ways batteries simply can't manage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Eventually we will get to a point where we have days where we have more solar energy than we can use…

We already do. Electricity is free here at peaks or sometimes you even get paid for it. The main problem is balancing the network but batteries are an easier solution for that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Balancing a load is not the same as storing surplus load. Batteries are easier and more efficient but they are wildly expensive at scale and don't store power as long.

Personally I think pumped hydro is king in this field but that's not to say hydrogen can't exist at the same time. Airplanes can't use either for power and they can't be line fed but they can use hydrogen. The biggest drawback to green hydrogen storage is how inefficient it is and that's why I say using solar you have to use anyway makes it more viable.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Green hydrogen specifically is sourced via electrolysis with renewables and isn’t really a problem

It isnt that its a problem, its that its a fantasy. Its a useful fantasy that fossil fuel companies use to prop up hydrogen as the answer when what the mean is BAU.

Show me some major source of renewable generated hydrogen.

Otherwise, stop participating in the fantasy that gives fossil fuel companies a pass on green washing, because right now, there is no such thing as renewable hydrogen. Its 96% fossil fuels.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Green hydrogen is specifically not fossil fuels. Why are you getting after it like it's the same thing?

This is some peak absolutism. Especially in a world that is so completely controlled by capital and how fossil fuels have the capital to meet scale while every single little project that might one day make a difference is now apparently just fossil fuels because they don't have the capital to meet scale.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The challenge with green hydrogen is it needs to be created using green electricity. If the electricity isn’t green you’re still burning fossil fuels to create it. Creating hydrogen from fossil fuel generated electricity and then burning it is less efficient than just burning fossil fuels directly and results in a net increase not decrease in carbon emissions.

As we build additional green electricity generation, it’s currently more impactful to use that to lower grid demand on fossil fuel generated electricity than to use it make green hydrogen. If it’s used to make green hydrogen instead, we’re only delaying the day we finally eliminate fossil fuel electricity generation, which again benefits the fossil fuel industry.

Only at some point in the future, when we’ve completely eliminated fossil fuels from the electric grid, and have created an excess of green electricity generation does green hydrogen even become possible to create.

And even assuming we can achieve that some day. It’s less efficient to use electricity to create hydrogen to power vehicle than to use batteries. Anything that can be converted to connect to the grid directly or run on batteries is better doing that than running on hydrogen.

It’s not completely crazy… there are some potential use cases for green hydrogen that would make sense in some theoretical future where there’s an abundance of green electricity generation, allowing replacing of fossil fuels where more direct forms of electrification isn’t viable. Aircraft in particular come to mind here since hydrogen stores much more energy per kg than batteries, which are currently too heavy to be viable in aircraft.

But almost all promotion of hydrogen today, including green hydrogen, is either more greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry or the work of well meaning idealists that have unwittingly become their shills.

Green Hydrogen is not a solution for the vast majority of things it gets presented as a solution to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

The challenge with green hydrogen is it needs to be created using green electricity.

That is exactly what green hydrogen is. It is exclusively hydrogen made with renewables.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It is not a fantasy. In fact, the opposite is true. The problem is that you are wildly out of touch with recent events. You are still pretending like it is 2004, not realizing that that was 20 years ago. Green hydrogen is a rapidly growing market and is following the trajectory of wind and solar.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You have developed a mental disorder.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And you have developed Ludditism.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

No I'm just resilient to fossil fuel industry propaganda and propagandists.

Green hydrogen simply does not exist right now. Any hydrogen you are using is a fossil fuel, directly derived.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wrong. You have totally fallen for fossil fuel propaganda. All of that rhetoric originated from the oil and gas industry. After all, if "both sides are equally bad" then there would be no motivation to move away from fossil fuels. Unfortunately, the battery industry, which is really just an extension of mining industry and China's governmental policy, is adopting this type of rhetoric.

Again, you are 20 years out of date. As in more than one decade. As in literally decades out of date. You won't even google the term and yet you think you know everything. This is Ludditism at its purist.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The data I provided in this post is accurate as of January 2024.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Itis impossible to get data that recent FYI.

Again, green hydrogen adoption is rapidly growing and is following the trajectory of wind and solar growth in the past. Your rhetoric is just mirroring the anti-wind and anti-solar rhetoric of the past. They too were always looking backwards. You will end up no different.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The bonus of hydrogen power is it can eventually be used for energy storage when the grid is fully renewable. This is useful for transportation of energy to other parts of the world by shipping hydrogen, but also locally to offset dips in production or peaks in demand. However, currently it is absolutely greenwashing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The biggest point of me making a deal of this is that Hypx goes around propagandizing this shit, and if you arent paying attention, you might actually believe that hydrogen represent actually renewable tech. He spams this shit constantly and hasn't been banned on his lemmy home instance.

He's a completely bad faith actor.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That's climate change denial rhetoric. Same was said about nearly everything until we started to build more wind and solar power. This is just a repeat of that tactic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Its a simple fact, and your belligerent and ignorant promotion of a technology, which for all practice purposes, is a fossil fuel, is deeply immoral and a significant part of the problem.

Show me any meaningful production of hydrogen from non-fossil fuel sources and we can have a conversation. Until then, you are worse than a climate denialist and a significant part of the problem that the world currently faces.

Investing in hydrogen as a solution is the fossil fuel industries strategy for navigating how they'll still be able to keep doing BAU. Its a direct equivalent of clean coal or DAC. Imaginary technology that doesn't exist and wont at scale when we currently have all the technology we need, with a modicum of social change, do reduce most of the planets carbon impact to sustainable levels.

You are a deeply immoral and irresponsible person for the work that you do on behalf of promoting the farce of hydrogen as a solution for climate change.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Same could have been said about electricity not that long ago. Now that renewables are building steam the switch to electricity is revealed as perfectly logical, why not the same for hydrogen?

Hydrogen is a harder sell, thanks to the poorer density, cost of storage, and the poor efficiency of production. But given the variable production of renewables all but guarantees we’ll end up with vast amounts of excess power we can’t store, we will need a fuel we can make from electricity that we can use, and hydrogen is one of the contenders for that task. Whether it’ll be the winner is more doubtful, but something will be, we certainly will never build enough batteries to avoid giving away cheap power for things like this, and there are still things that benefit from higher density fuels that aren’t going away (planes). Accusing people of being “worse than deniers” just because they’re looking a little into the future and betting on something that might turn out to be Betamax is a little presumptuous.

Hydrogen today is a fossil fuel. But hydrogen has a very obvious method of green production, the only problem is cost of power to produce it (thus why it’s all fossil fuels right now) but the inevitability of variable power sources like solar and wind in the future guarantees excesses of cheap power, so cost of power today is not going to be the same barrier tomorrow that it is today.

As for the fossil fuel industries plan to use hydrogen to maintain business as usual in a post fossil fuels era, I really don’t care if they manage to use their machines as long as they stop using fossil fuels, so that’s fine with me.

Edit: to be clear, I’m not supporting a hydrogen based economy, since that makes no sense, hydrogen is a storage medium for energy, not a production source. There have been people pushing it as a magical solution to all things, that is stupid. As a small piece of the puzzle it could fit, if we don’t find a better chemistry for high density storage of energy with simple conversion from electricity, which is as yet an unsolved problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You seemed to be knowledgeable about this topic, so I have a question:

I thought the process of obtaining hidrogen from the natural gas, naturally (pun not intended) captures all carbon as CO2, which is then can be stored somehow. Is it a valid path?

What do you think about electrolyses?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

One kilogram of hydrogen is the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline, which produces 9.1 kg of CO2 when combusted.

Carbon footprints are often reported in terms of energy. For example, power plants usually report carbon footprints in terms of kilowatt-hours (kWh). One million SCF of hydrogen contains 79,100 kilowatt hours of energy.

This converts to 0.28 kg of carbon dioxide emissions associated with one kilowatt-hour of hydrogen production.

This article lays it out, is based on up to date metrics for production, and was written by a qualified chemical engineer, in what I would consider, a very anodyne tone.

The key take-away is here:

On an apples-to-apples basis, it depends on several factors but it is likely that the conversion of hydrogen into power will have a carbon footprint greater than that of natural gas-fired power, but less than that of coal-fired power. However, it is possible in theory to capture the carbon emissions generated in the SMR process.

Right now, today, you would be better off burning the natural gas in a power plant than turning it into hydrogen. Its better than coal. The CO2 could be captured, but that's only a hypothetical. Currently, that isn't part of the process, and doing so will incur an energy cost, at which point the ROI will likely be lower than coal.

In conclusion, you should think of hydrogen as a green-washed fossil fuel, because that's what it is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

your gallon and kg combination gave me a TIA.

Why not just explain it all in metric?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

1: I'm quoting the article

2: In carbon accounting, its not uncommon at all (at least on the forestry side), to switch between some kind of standard or regional unit like board feet, or acres, whatever, and units of CO2e (CO2 equivalent), which are always international units. People have a direct understanding with something like a gallon of gasoline, whereas a unit of CO2 is abstract from the get-go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

i and the rest of the world bar USA have zero clue what a gallon is. I'm assuming it's some sort of arbitrary measument of something. possibly the depth of a hat?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do you not, in-fact, consider the capacity of your fuel tanks in units of hat depth?

Curious..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

well of course i do, i mean it's simple common sense.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Except you've actually debunked your own argument.

At 9.3 kg of CO2 for one kg of H2, and assuming 110 km/kg of H2 (normal fuel economy for an FCEV), you get 84.5 grams of CO2 per km of driving.

Meanwhile, a BEV gets anywhere from 70-370 grams per km, depending on dirtiness of the grid: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions/

In other words, an FCEV is comparable to a BEV when it comes to emissions. You can even double the numbers for the FCEV if you want to include possibilities like upstream losses or production. The numbers would still be very comparable to BEVs running on most grids.

And this is the problem here: You're so deep in your anti-hydrogen conspiracy theory that you failed to notice that the math works against you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

So was electricity until recently. Nearly all of it was made from fossil fuels. The difference is that we can make it from renewable energy.

And the exact same is true with hydrogen. If you cared at all, you'd google it yourself and realize that significant green hydrogen production is coming online. Not only is it all over the news, there are huge government programs supporting it now.

The fundamental problem is that you are either closed-minded or totally out of touch. It's time realize that it's 2024 and whatever outdated thinking you have is long over.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Anyone treating hydrogen as a power SOURCE and not a form of power STORAGE is doing greenwashing.

EDIT: Wait a minute, your post sounds awfully similar to the talking points used by Kurzgesagt, the neoliberal youtube propagandist. You're subscribed to them, aren't you.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean... Technically fossil fuels are renewable.... They're just renewing at a VERY slow pace

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I learned recently coal is not renewable at all. We will never get more coal. Coal exists from a period of time when trees had cellulose but bacteria had no means of breaking down cellulose.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So we need to stick entire forests into a microwave, and then ship the sterile wood to mars, and bury it for a few billion years?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Wouldn't work. You wouldn't be able to so. Pletely sterilise the wood. There will always be bacteria on it and even inside it.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This scam is already 20 years old, starting with George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign platform of a “hydrogen economy.”

CleanTechnica: The Hydrogen Fuel Cell Scam — From George W. Bush & “The Big 3” To Toyota, Honda, & Japan

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

He also popularized the phrasing "climate change" in his speeches which was an idea from republican political strategist Frank Luntz.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Propane is profane.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Hank Hill in shambles

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