Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the plan is to use this hydrogen in combination with CO2 captured from the air to make methane.
If so, the hard part is getting the carbon capture cheap enough, not the hydrogen.
I crunched the numbers and you need around 13.6 kilograms of carbon and 4.54 kilograms of hydrogen to make enough natural gas to give you 1GJ of heat when combusted (this is how natural gas is priced in the metric world - 1 GJ is roughly 0.95 MMBTU).
If you're extracting CO2 from the air, roughly 27% of the CO2 is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
Doing the maths suggests that at current ballpark prices for CO2 direct air capture of $1000/tonne, the cost of capturing enough CO2 to make a GJ of natural gas is about $50. That's before you've done the processing to convert your CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen.
So let's assume an order of magnitude improvement in air capture costs. Even at $100 per tonne, the CO2 capture cost is around $5. When you combine that with the approximately $4.50 worth of hydrogen required, that gives an input cost of around $9.50. That's way more than domestic natural gas currently costs in the US, but it's in the ballpark that you could subsidise your way around that at scale, and the numbers look pretty reasonable compared to imported LNG in Europe and Asia.
So to me this suggests that, if your business plan is to make methane, the hydrogen part is almost a sideshow to getting direct air capture costs down.
Or, just use the hydrogen as-is, in stationary power plants. Hydrogen can be burned in combustion turbines just like methane; why add the extra step?
At $1/kg, the fuel cost of a combined cycle power plant will be $0.05/kWh. Hydrogen is quite storable underground (just like natural gas). At this fuel cost, new construction nuclear is hopelessly uncompetitive, even for base load generation. And unlike nuclear, the hydrogen burning CC plants can be economically dispatched, turned down/off when renewables or short term storage are directly powering the grid.
It's more efficient to burn hydrogen (or methane) in a combined cycle plant and use that power to drive heat pumps in homes and businesses, than it would be to burn that fuel in furnaces there. As an added bonus, you can often drive those heat pumps directly from renewable sources without the conversion cost of electrolysis (and for methane, DAC and methane synthesis.)
Methane also has the probably unavoidable problem of leaks in the distribution network. It's a strong greenhouse gas; even small leaks are very problematic.
In any scenario where electricity is cheap enough to make hydrogen or methane, it is cheap enough to run heat pumps. It is cheap enough to use heat strips. It is cheap enough to use the savings to buy everyone with gas furnace a heat pump.
>It's more efficient to burn hydrogen (or methane) in a combined cycle plant and use that power to drive heat pumps in homes and businesses
Well, heat pumps powered by methane do exist since years, the were biggish but there is a trend towards making smaller units suitable for home use, JFYI:
Yes, I agree, and am of the view that the widespread distribution of piped gas (hydrogen, methane, or blends thereof) to homes and small business is going to be phased out for the reasons you describe.
But you can see why some people are trying to make a drop-in, clean-ish (modulo fugitive emissions) replacement for fossil gas.
Nope, the GWP of methane is 2x larger than hydrogen, both on 20 and 100 year time scales.
And that's on an equal-mass basis. If you consider an equal-energy basis (which is what we actually care about), methane is 5x worse than hydrogen.
Finally, hydrogen has wider flammability limits than methane, so from a safety perspective you have to make hydrogen systems even more leak-proof than methane/natural gas systems.
It may be possible to increase this capacity, for example by releasing iron salt aerosols. These would generate additional OH and Cl radicals by photochemical reactions in sunlight. It would be better to use that increase to destroy methane, though.
I also wonder if it could be better to make hydrogen by electrolysis of salt water and produce chlorine instead of oxygen. Released into sunlit atmosphere, chlorine is rapidly decomposed to Cl radicals which will rapidly react with methane (or hydrogen). You'd want to release it at sufficiently low dilution that there's enough methane in each air parcel to consume all the chlorine, though.
Only if you presume that considerably larger fraction of the hydrogen would leak, which is not a bad assumption. Anyway, use of hydrogen for grid storage does not require its transmission or distribution in pipelines, especially in the small pipes of local distribution networks for home/small business use where one might expect the most leakage.
Synthetic methane also would enable renewable, carbon-neutral plastics - I have a friend working on a startup that is using microorganisms to produce traditional petrochemical precursors and they have said a major barrier to this being green is that the methanol that the bacteria needs is typically produced from natgas now.
Are we? Do you have a source for that? Unless it has already been built with hydrogen in mind we'd need completely new infrastructure, pipepines, storage and turbines in power plants.
Yes, the industry first, because it is easy during a turnaround (refineries are stopped for maintenance every 5 years) to adapt the burners etc. to run on a different mix.
What the FDP is doing/promoting with the stupid run your gas burner at home on H2 in 10 years and get money now is something totally different and from my personal point of view as someone working in oil & gas completely stupid. We should not use gas (be it H2, CH4, whatever) for heat. And I say that knowing that it is bad for my salary. But I have kids and they need a future...
https://www.dvgw.de/english-pages/dvgw/news/germanys-gas-pip...: “The steel pipelines installed in the German gas grid are suitable for transporting hydrogen. They were found to possess no differences in terms of their basic suitability for transporting hydrogen compared to natural gas. Both operational ageing and the required fracture toughness and strength meet the expectations for safe availability spanning decades.”
I guess the last mile is a more difficult problem, but the OP didn’t claim that was solved, saying: “For the moment only at the industrial scale. Home devices are not yet adapted.”
Good to hear that the pipelines can be reused. For home appliances we really should move away from using natural gas and not try to substitute it with hydrogen instead, heat pumps and district heating are better solutions.
We aren't. It's all a pipe dream. We want to, but Hydrogen is much harder to contain than Methane. If anything we are closer to dismantling the gas pipelines then to use them for Hydrogen.
All the attached "Appliances" must be converted from using Methan to Hydrogen, too. Not gonna happen.
I can tell you that the industry, that is, the biggest are setting up the infrastructure at the moment to have H2 transit between the "North" and the Ruhr region. So, yes, we do it now.
I suspect the plans in Germany are to import Hydrogen as Ammonia from overseas in addition to directly creating and locally storing hydrogen from wind and solar power .. all to feed local generators to baseload the German powergrid.
Ireland's gas infrastructure and domestic appliances can handle up to between 50% to 80% hydrogen admix. I'm hopeful we go this way soon with a wind energy surplus.
That doesn't sound correct... My understanding was that only quite recent appliances allow a mix of greater than about 30%, and networks can't be operated with a high mix without big upgrades (for 100% hydrogen I believe you need all the compressors to be about three times bigger than a natural gas network, so even getting over 50% H2 with the existing infrastructure doesn't sound right).
All in all I'm convinced it's just not worth doing for residential when you look at the challenges and the terrible efficiency. Since the majority of appliances aren't 'hydrogen ready', it's better to just electrify.
I tried looking for my primary source on this, it was an interview with someone involved with the gas infrastructure here. They mentioned specifically that it was newer than in the UK (and I assume some other EU countries) and that's why it could handle the higher admix. They also have good numbers on the appliances that are in use, there's been grants for a large scale upgrade, all the boilers that have been installed under these programs are rated to 80% H2.
I've no doubt you're right there would have to be significant upgrades done somewhere, but it might not be as big an issue for Ireland and I suppose it depends on how cheap that green hydrogen is for us, but we have to get there first. We'll use it for something.
Doesn't this increase the risk of gas explosions in houses? (Hydrogen has a wider flammability range than methane, particularly it is flammable in higher concentrations, =presumably bigger bang) Seems a bit dicey.
The latest quantitative risk assessment of hydrogen in a domestic context is that slightly greater explosion risk is outweighed by the slightly lower fire risk. Hydrogen has a wider explosion range... but most natural gas explosions are from small leaks accumulating basements or low spaces in houses which hydrogen won't do. It could instead accumulate under the roof but roofs are almost never sufficiently gas-tight to hydrogen to allow for substantial accumulation.
Also, many leaks are in the mains or services under the road. Natural gas will flow along the outside of the pipe and through the soil and end up in the basements of nearby buildings. Again, hydrogen would not do this, it would diffuse up through the soil and disperse in the atmosphere.
The big change is to boiler enclosures. These are currently designed to limit voids sufficiently to prevent natural gas explosions which require a minimum cell size of a meter or so to explode (regardless of concentration) rather than deflagrate. That same size for hydrogen is about 5cm so that is the largest acceptable void within the boiler enclosure which requires re-engineering of the way parts fit together and the use of non-h2 permeable foams and plastic spacers to avoid unacceptable voids.
Hydrogen is also ised in a variety of industries, including steel. Today, that hydrogen is a by-product of oil refining. Having a green hydrogen source that is cost competitive is a great thing.
Most hydrogen is produced deliberately by steam methane reforming (SMR). Some 6% of world natural gas demand is making hydrogen. The primary use is for synthesis of ammonia (with hydrodesulfurization of petroleum also important.)
I agree on methane being the ideal energy storage medium. It can be synthesisize but it is more efficient to use an anaerobic digester to turn organic waste to methane.
Methane is not ideal. Liquid hydrocarbons would be much easier to store. They might be harder to make than methane, but then methane is harder to make than hydrogen (from non-biomass renewables), so by that metric methane isn't ideal either.
If we have the energy available for longer hydrocarbons, sure, do it. Methane is the feedstock. We would do well to produce as much methane as possible as local as possible. Everybody wants natural gas and we spend a lot of energy transporting it around the world.
I'm not referring to the Haber-Bosch process. Fischer-Tropsch process also uses syngas mosty derived by steam reforming methane. FT is used to make a variety of hydrocarbons.
If we are breaking hydrocarbons down to build them back from scratch might as well use the cheapest feedstock. That is currently methane. The nice thing about methane is we can get it almost for free, anywhere, using biology. That means we can continue our high energy lifestyle relying less on moving energy around.
so the question becomes whether it's harder to improve CO2 capture, or to make transporting and using hydrogen (ala, build out new or improve existing pipes, machines etc).
I would imagine that improving CO2 capture is "easier", because it requires fewer people to cooperate. Existing infrastructure replacement/improvements will need large numbers of people to agree on what, who and how. And you know how that goes...
> One battery breakthrough will obsolete this entire process
Certainly, in year 2060 when it's too late.
I can't help thinking that peolle who believe in Rapture have a similar thought process - if you are holding out for a miracle, it doesn't make sence to put in effort now
In other words, it is not economically viable for anything beyond niche applications.
Hydrogen is not a fuel. It readily reacts and forms strong chemical bonds with *everything*. It can be manufactured but not without the overall process being energy negative --- a net consumer of energy. Not many applications can realistically absorb this cost.
Further gas storage of energy is cheaper than battery storage (with a fixed cost for actually burning the stuff)
Are batteries ever going to get to the point of being viable for storing a week's worth of energy? A month's worth?
In a lot of the world that's what you'll need to do. Solar isn't going to cover that European January where there's no wind.
not my idea, I prefer batteries. But Methane storage would be above hydrogen storage in my hierarchy of things I'd allocate capital to.
I can see why I sounded in favour of methane over batteries but I was just acknowledging the OP's point about dollers/joule stored. Batteries have plenty of other advantages that I think put them ahead despite that figure.
I don't see why you'd prefer methane storage. You're straining mightily (capturing CO2, synthesizing methane) in order to save on storage caverns, which are cheap.
I wasn't aware hydrogen storage in salt caverns was a thing, I had been thinking of a 'metal tanks' solution similar to gas stations which I know leads to major issues with corrosion.
The cost of an underground cavern for hydrogen storage is as little as $1 per kWh of storage capacity. So in an application where the charge/discharge power is small compared to the amount of energy you want to store, hydrogen will be among the cheapest storage options, far better than batteries.
The storage, transport, and existing infrastructure and machinery that already uses natural gas makes it much more attractive as a fuel.
It sure isn't efficient. But with energy sources that are intermittent and have no ability to scale up for demand, we will have a lot of intermittently very cheap energy. Anything that can use this intermittent power is valuable, because we will need overcapacity to handle the low-wind, low-sun moments
That's highly inefficient though, and therefore negates all the cost savings in the process before. How much efficiency can you get out of burning stuff, 40% of the stored energy?
Combined cycle powerplants are > 60% efficient (LHV). The LHV of hydrogen is 33.3 kWh (of heat) per kilogram.
Yes, it would be inefficient overall. And it's still cheaper than nuclear. Throw in a large fraction of energy not going through hydrogen (direct to grid, or through batteries) and the cost would be even lower.
The space of solutions includes ideas that are ludicrous. We don't need all the solutions, we need some of the solutions that make sense. And you can't presuppose for any solution that it will fall in the sensible-and-not-ludicrous part; you have to argue why that would be. For new construction nuclear, for example, it's not at all clear building any more will make sense.
There are countless opportunities to capture the CO2 from industrial applications, not from the air. I’m hoping that many of them will be replaced by carbon neutral option soon, but things like burning domestic waste might not disappear soon.
I’m not sure how expensive it would be for it to be clean and pure enough, or what purity that process would need, but most of the cost you mention would be solved by colocating with a burner plant.
Of course, if you have inexpensive direct air capture of CO2, and a way to permanently store the carbon (e.g, as a block of coal, or by injecting CO2 deep under ground), then all of a sudden, burning fossil fuels can be made climate neutral.
If the cost of sequestering the CO2 and pumping + refining oil / natural gas is less than the cost of capturing H2 and using it to synthesize fuel with the CO2, then the synthetic fuels are a dead end. (Until we run out of oil, but that will he centuries from now.)
You could simply build one of these plants next to a concrete plant, which is producing highly concentrated CO2 to reduce that cost. (A lot of similar industries exist of course.)
They’re saying that the synthetic gas will be carbon neutral.
If you’re capturing CO2 that comes from an industrial process like cement production, turning it into methane, burning the methane, and releasing the combustion products into the atmosphere, from an accounting point of view either the gas isn’t carbon neutral, or the cement plant isn’t carbon neutral, and the process is still incompatible with achieving net zero emissions.
Not an expert, but I’d expect that in the USA the IRA would treat them both as “not clean”, and in the EU the gas maker would have to pay the carbon price.
Yes, I agree. On the other hand,
- we need concrete, steel and other similar materials to build the transition to clean energy. *
- we need to be able to store (and ideally transport energy) from renewable, intermittent sources, such as solar, and sources that are hard to turn off/control, such as nuclear and wave power.
Although this doesn't solve all the carbon emissions, concrete production accounts for >5% of carbon emissions IIRC and energy production a whole load on top of that, so if this can make a significant dent whilst stopping some of the other environmental side effects of drilling for Nat Gas, is this not a significant step forward?
* The Material World by Ed Conway is a really interesting read that explores some of these tradeoffs
TDLR: Combo of solar and wind for power, CO2 from industrial sources, create fuels (methane, methanol, amnonia). Use pipes or trucks as needed.
ETFuels' "secret sauce" is integration and creating fuels. They'll use best available option for electricity and CO2. They'll build where it makes most sense to optimize opex.
In the future, once direct-air capture becomes cost competitive, no problem.
Also, I'm certain they'll also adopt advanced geothermal, in combination with solar and wind, to solve their electricity problems as well as greatly expand where they can feasibly deploy.
The most sensible option would be to store the hydrogen geologically and burn it directly if you needed the power. If you want something transportable, methanol is the simplest fuel you can make, and is what typically gets used when fossil fuels aren't an option (e.g. Germany in WWII). No need for carbon capture, since any source of carbon will do, and plants will pull carbon out of the atmosphere as long as you run carbon negative.
The third part of the article compares their approach with an alternative of extracting hydrogen from methane, so they definitely aren't focused on using hydrogen to produce methane.
“ We’re developing a scalable electrolyzer to deliver the cheapest possible green hydrogen, which we use as a precursor chemical to make cheap synthetic carbon neutral natural gas in our Terraformer.”
> I am wary of exaggeration but I think it is fair to say that in terms of parts, factories, ramp rate, and energy consumption, this is the single largest technology roll out to occur in the history of humanity, and will cause the other so-called industrial revolutions to pale into insignificance.
This reminded me of various[1] vox[2] articles on scientific reports over the past decade that reinforce the central truth and challenge of the climate crisis: we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
There's somewhat a recent Planet Money episode (Green energy gridlock[1]) that talks a little bit about this. There are massive hurdles in the US to getting new energy projects actually connected to the grid because of supposed fears of overloading the infrastructure. The result is energy prices stay high and the number of green energy projects stays low.
Oh come on, one or two orders of magnitude more than our current energy system?
The energy transition will be cheaper than our current infrastructure.
The challenges are not technological nor economical, the challenge is prevent entrenched interests from preventing the best, cheapest, and most environmentally friendly system from taking its rightful place.
If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, why do poor countries keep building coal and gas fired power stations?
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
Planning cycles take 5-10 years and are often based on out of date information when the plans are made. Couple that with it being far easier for corrupt officials to skim off approvals of a few large projects than many small ones, and you will find that what has been happening 5 years ago is going to be completed different than what will happen 5 years from now.
Renewable energy and battery storage are on tech curves like semiconductors or DNA sequencing. Fossil fuels are not.
I think this theory has merit, but I don't think you can necessarily say that battery tech is on a similar tech curve to renewables. We simply haven't built many utility scale batteries so it's unclear how much improvements can be made.
Add to that that batteries have been around for centuries, but renewables are decades old, so it makes sense that they are improving in cost so quickly: they are a newer tech.
Batteries are completely on a similar curve, continuously improving at an exponential rate, and as they get scaled up to TWh/year production there is a chance of acceleration of this trend. There is a proliferation of new chemistry and tech in all parts of the battery. We are just at the very beginning.
I’ll believe they are on a similar curve when I see a similar curve using data from utility scales.
Of course stuff like Lithium batteries are accelerating, but these aren’t economical for utility scale batteries yet. There’s a good chance they will never be.
I have been following the industry from a distance; construction is accelerating but the prices are still well beyond economical for the scale required for grid stability. And projects are still relatively tiny (<10 GW).
Based on the latest projects such as this one in Australia [0], building a grid-scale system will result in energy prices increasing by many multiples. Of course it will get cheaper, but I don't see it being cheap enough that it won't have massive impact on costs (I hope I'm wrong btw).
> Renewable energy technology was once seen as unaffordable for developing countries. However, since 2015, investment in non-hydro renewable energy has been higher in developing countries than in developed countries, and comprised 54% of global renewable energy investment in 2019. The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable energy will provide the majority of energy supply growth through 2030 in Africa and Central and South America, and 42% of supply growth in China.
I suspect this is because many poor countries are used to intermittent power, and so renewables are acceptable. In developed countries, continuous power is expected. It may be luxurious, but if power is interrupted too often the populace will reject renewables.
That has nothing to do with it, as renewable power is being deployed extremely quickly in developing countries too.
Intermittent generators does not mean an intermittent grid, and in fact by having fewer single points of failure, and ensuring that grid operators are used to dynamic dispatch from intermittent generators, grids like Germany's have become more reliable with the addition of intermittent generators.
It's like ~10 years ago when web apps went from large architectures with a few boxes to cloud-scale operators where random failure was expected. By planning for lots of small, less reliable components, overall reliability increased.
It's been years since I followed the translations of documents, but a web search will turn up lots of documentation, like this top hit from a source that I haven't used before, but which matches what I have found in the past:
> The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours) — both far more reliant on nuclear power — did worse, for various reasons.
Nuclear is typically not a good thing for reliability. They are big single points of failure, and France was less reliable than Germany. Similarly, Texas relied on nuclear during their massive cold snaps and that foolishness killed people. It takes better planning than "nuclear is baseload" to build a reliable grid.
This comparison really exaggerates the differences, the measures are basically the same. If you look at the ranges over 2015-2020, France ranged from 0.17:0.25 and Germany ranged from 0.14:0.46. Top 11% in 2020 vs top 14% of countries with data.
It's a moot point anyway, since renewables don't stabilize Germany's grid: coal and gas power plants (and imported electricity) do. Renewables are cheap if they are a small proportion of sources or the grid is stabilized by another source. If you need storage the cost simply explodes.
regarding you question: In large scale projects there is a lot of inertia, especially in less developed areas. Many of these places have just build a conventional grid, and are in no situation to upgrade to renewables.
That being said: some non-industrial countries are actually moving fast towards adopting renewables (compared to developed countries). e.g. Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brazil.
Worth noting that is initial capital costs of building the plant. Maintenance, fuel etc are not included, even before considering external costs such as poor health outcomes from pollution.
I didn't even notice that. I think I got blind sighted by the fact that the parent commenter went to the effort of googling the Wikipedia page for a source and it didn't even support their point.
The more confident an online commenter is of their assertion, the lower the chances it is true.
Because your comment is slightly ambiguous and who knows what LCOE is:
> On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,[1]: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.
>The first German Offshore Wind Park Alpha Ventus Offshore Wind Farm with a nameplate capacity of 60 MW cost €250 million (after an initial estimate of €190 million).[21] In 2012 it produced 268 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, achieving a capacity factor of just over 50%.[22] If the overnight cost is calculated for the nameplate capacity, it works out to €4167 per Kilowatt whereas if one takes into account the capacity factor, the figure needs to be roughly doubled.
You also can't just plug capacity factor in and call it a day either: it is very difficult to black start the power grid if all your intermittents happen to be under producing at the same time and you can't shed load fast enough. In the case of most renewables, this fall off can happen very quickly.
On a mixed grid this is fine because you just ask your gas plants to up their load contribution and they can do it because they can overbuild fairly cheaply - they just increase their moment to the moment fuel burn. On a theoretical grid which is carbon neutral, you've got a real problem answering that question (in fact on any grid with >30% intermittent renewables you've got a big problem). Storage doesn't save you here either - i.e. the cheapest, largest storage you can build is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro can only be "charged" at about half the rate it discharges. Catching up when you have an outage is not trivial (i.e. you have to overbuild by an enormous amount).
You start adding all those problems together, and solar and wind stop looking "cheap" - they get away with being cheap because very much like coal, oil and gas, they avoid pricing in their own externalities (and no, you can't just ignore power grid outages - you lose the grid you lose water and sanitation in cities, and they "die" within a week).
Batteries can save the grid in the short term (all those unused EVs standing around) and more and more loads are designed to be controllable by power grid operators. You're making this a bigger problem than it is. In Germany, many households are currently replacing their old fossil heating with heatpumps, and many of the heatpumps are equipped with technology that allows the grid operators to switch them off remotely within seconds.
No one is going to build a power plant they "mostly" can't run and make revenue from. So you're going to be subsidizing the full build and expense of a gas plant that you plan to never actually sell power from.
Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
Running them almost never (predictions assume around 3 days per year for Germany) means we can use cheaper plants with lower efficiency. These plants will be operated by the grid operators, not by power generation companies. Their cost will be factored into the grid fees since they provide "grid stability". It's going to cost a bit, but not nearly as much as the difference between nuclear or coal power and renewables.
Most of these plants already exist. We just have to pay their upkeep and see how the future unfolds. It isn't necessary to build many additional plants.
Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
No, you have to buy them. They have owners - they're private infrastructure. The owners intend to sell power from them. If they can't do that, then they're going to either try to sell the asset, or demolish the asset and use the land for something else.
The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore.
So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go.
Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
Since the writing is on the wall that these power plants are mostly worthless in the foreseeable future most energy companies had to reduce the asset worth of the power plants already considerably. Who would want to buy such legacy tech?
Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
Doesn't sound very doomed if your entire energy strategy is completely dependent on it.
Oh and you know... They're a lot cheaper per reliable kWh then any other option (green methane would require solar power to be an order of magnitude cheaper then it currently is - not impossible but it also hasn't happened yet and may not).
They will be paid not for the energy they produce but for the ability to produce energy on demand. It's a grid operation cost and is already financed as such in Europe. Companies can sell the guarantee to produce a certain amount of energy within X seconds and they are compensated for that. In combination with the low LCOE of renewables, it is way cheaper than nuclear power for example.
The current bid for demand response though is still higher then for conventional operation, and piggybacks off the infrastructure for gas supply which runs constantly
If you don't have regularly operating gas power stations any more, then the cost for underproduction protection is going to be a lot higher - because rather then running an extra turbine or increasing fuel burn, you have to justify the whole powerplant and it's sort infrastructure existing.
Do you have a source for the world cost estimate? The only ones I can find have pretty absurd assumptions about expected future costs and expected savings.
> If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, why do poor countries keep building coal
If rich countries open sourced all tech related to renewables and made -publicly avable designs for solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and factories that produce them, then it would be a valid question.
Oh, also provide loans because renewables have higher cap-ex and lower op-ex. This factor alone can account for massive difference, as -or countries don’t have cash on hand and can’t access credit.
Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
In all of the places I have worked both for pay and voluntarily money has very rarely been the problem, but it has always been the excuse.
E.g. how many billions of euros were collected within a week after the Notre Dame burned? At the risk of offending a lot of french I will say that the Notre Dame is just a building. In the big scheme of things it is not important. Nobody will starve if it is not re-built.
The problem is 'mental inertia', convenience and (perceived) risk aversion.
At least in Germany, fossil fuels are gifted to power companies (they don't pay per ton of coal extracted), while the resulting costs due to fueling the climate crisis are carried by society (and mostly by poor countries around the globe). That's why it is profitable.
There is a lot of fossil fuel development going on that doesn't make sense if renewables are cheaper. Especially in China where panels are actually made. I'm open to an alternative explanation, but I don't think it's inertia. Most industries switch to cheaper tech pretty soon after it becomes available.
Social and political considerations can be components of inertia too. Consider China's fairly recent decision to stop funding new fossil fuel generation development outside its own borders, where social and political considerations should have minimal impact to Chinese citizens.
China is starting to move in the right direction, but there's a ton of planning lag. China is by far the largest single consumer of solar panels. It also deploys more wind turbines than any other country.
Two limiting factors are China's insatiable need for ever greater power generating capacity of any kind, and the surprisingly rapid uptake of renewables globally which has constrained new production.
Remember we're not just talking about power plants. We also need to replace our petrochemical distribution networks, beef up our grid in a real way, replace all of the petrochemical based heating (a majority of heating in the US, often built centrally into buildings), both replace all petrochemical-powered vehicles and make any changes required to routing, replace all on-demand power generation with non-gas-based solutions, rebuild all industrial facilities to not use petrochemicals...and so on. This is all happening concurrently and would largely focus on existing infrastructure and it would need to happen FAST.
World war two, the example raised the most often, required only increased output. It had no limits on how to get there. This requires both. I really don't think it's like anything we've ever tried to do before.
In particular it wouldn't be this hard to...replace everything eventually when it makes sense. In order to maximally dampen climate change we would need to do this as quickly as possible.
Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. Not a small ask, but also not insane.
There are various studies from consultancies such as McKinsey, the IEA or national thinktanks (e.g. Fraunhofer in Germany) that have put out ballpark figures like these. Commonly the total is on the order of 100-300 trillion USD. Current global GDP is 100 trillion.
I think the point of the reports in that I linked is that we don't avoid climate change by following that time frame. Instead, we'd spend 100-300% of GDP on avoiding old projections, while moving forward into more poorly understood territory. Ignoring the timeliness of a particular change has been a common error / delay tactic of groups that urge less expeditious responses. Obviously, unless you link these reports, I don't really know if that critique applies - but it is a common critique for plans with a longer time frame.
Edit: I also want to add that any project that needs 100-300% of global GDP certainly qualifies as "one to two orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have done." Wikipedia puts the 1940 world GDP at 3,000 billion USD[1]. The manhatten project cost ~$2bn (0.06%). The whole war was estimated to cost the US ~$288bn (9.6%)[2].
>we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
Right, which is why it's simply not going to happen. It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other. On top of that, large parts of the the global population 1) don't believe the problem exists in the first place, 2) doesn't think it's technically possible to do anything about (i.e. they think it's mostly natural, even if it's real), or 3) think they shouldn't have to change their actions at all because they're mad that the rich countries got to burn lots of oil and then stick all humanity with the problems from it.
The problem is beyond fixing. Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much when the USA and China and Russia and India are spewing out so much carbon and refuse to stop. The thing to do at this point is to understand and predict well what's coming, so that we can take measures to mitigate the effects at local scales.
The cheapest energy systems are the carbon free ones.
Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy.
Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity. And once you add in the environmental externalities on top of just the pure cost, it becomes even more egregious.
Saying that it's impossible is as ridiculous as saying it's impossible for us to have built the huge energy system we have today. Rebuilding it all will take just a few percentage of global GDP, less than would be spent on fossil fuels, and create the infrastructure for cheaper more abundant energy, laying the groundwork for more technological advancement.
Instead of repeating tired narratives of the past, it's time to start thinking critically and apply even the tiniest amount of skepticism to the received wisdom of entrenched interests. We only hurt ourselves when we wear the rose-colored glasses that let us live with the out-dated "truths" of the 20th century.
> The cheapest energy systems are the carbon free ones
I would really like to believe this claim to be true.
Unfortunately my recent real-world data points gathered as a consumer while doing such mundane stuff as heating and powering my home and fueling my ageing vehicles leave me wondering what I'm missing.
I'd love to drive an EV. I'd love to have PV at home. A geothermal heat pump would be nice, too.
I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices until they get considerably cheaper.
> I just haven't got enough spare money to make any of these choices
No, you haven’t got credit. Solar panels pay for themselves like 3 or 4 times 9n their lifespan. We had a period of zero-interest rates, we could have bought everyone solar panels.
But our bankers are too busy playing with fictitious derivatives instead of providing favourable credit to honest homeowners for renewables investment.
It's not clear that our politicians are actually particularly serious about change, either. The only big change I've noticed this side of the pond in the last year is that our drink cartons now have tethered plastic caps.
OK, they're still made of bonded layers of cardboard, aluminium and polyethylene which make them hard work to recycle, and according to a 2021 German study indeed less than 1/3rd of them are actually recycled ...
...but at least now the hard-to-recycle plastic lids now stay attached to the empty and hard-to-recycle cartons!
I think when they say "systems" they are referring to large grid scale energy generation systems, not what you can install at home, which is necessarily more expensive per unit energy than at grid scale.
PV+storage with subsidies (which I count as the regulator pricing in positive externalities) should be economical in large parts of the world. Where do you live?
Although household power prices have risen steadily over the last 20 years (and increased not so steadily in the last two!), PV feed-in tarifs have been falling relentlessly (see slide 41 from https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... for specific data) so as far as I can tell, the ROI period for household PV still seems to be measured in decades.
Well the OP claimed "Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy. Every single delay in the transition is wasted money."
The key question would be: expensive for whom?
Take a look at "Why is cheap renewable electricity so expensive?"[0] (published last week) which details the changes in electricity generation in the UK:
'The proportion of electricity generated [..] by renewables has increased from 3% in 2000 to 42% in 2022, whereas the proportion generated by fossil fuels has decreased from 73% in 2000 to 41% in 2022'
...but thanks to marginal cost pricing consumers don't see this because...
"The wholesale price of all electricity is set by the most expensive method of producing electricity, which is usually from burning gas"
Wait, so you have this whole document you can produce about how renewable energy is cheaper, but you started with complaints about how it's not cheaper?
Very odd. Almost as if you are not trying to argue based on data, but just being contrarian.
Again: cheaper for whom? Are we talking producers or consumers?
> Very odd
Renewables being cheaper unfortunately doesn't mean the electricity consumers purchase will necessarily be cheaper, at least not if we use the current market approaches and rely on gas to top up what can't be provided elsewhere.
> Every single delay in the transition is wasted money
About ten years ago I realized that solar, wind, and batteries were going to beat fossil fuels on pure balance sheet accounting. Bonus: better long term risk. Were now in a rentier capitalist stages of grief situation where they're having to deal with all their fossil fuel based assets being suddenly worthless. But there is nothing they can do to stop what's coming.
>Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity.
Ok, exactly how do you propose to:
1) Get China to stop building more coal-burning power plants, and
2) Get Americans (and others) to start building and moving to dense, walkable cities and stop driving SUVs?
The problem isn't "fossil fuel interests", it's a very large number of "normal" people who refuse to change their lifestyles, plus various authoritarian governments that refuse to change their trajectories.
The only way you can "rebuild it all" is to somehow take control of the whole world militarily and set up a single global authoritarian government to do all this. Trying to get the world's existing governments, some authoritarian (and not caring about the problem) and others democratic (with most of their populations refusing to change their lifestyles), is like herding cats. What you want to do is technically possible, but politically completely impossible. Getting everyone to work together just to deal with a virus turned out to be a disaster, in case you forgot that.
I would say it's not "just" fossil fuel interests. But they are playing a huge part in this - particularly in sowing misinformation about clean technologies, and how being carbon neutral will mean the end of your life, or that some kid in a country you've never been to will be digging stuff out of the ground for your EV/solar panel. Most of which isn't actually true (or is a minority case), but they have successfully made everyone think that it is.
I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.
But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway. The only way will be to do this, otherwise it'll be game over.
>I actually read people on here (who I'm assuming are intelligent) last week saying they were not going to give up any part of their current lifestyle to reduce emissions, so you're right in that respect. It's like dealing with stroppy 8 year-olds in many cases.
Exactly. And these aren't people in authoritarian countries; there are people in democratic nations. If politicians try to hard to push these people to give up their current lifestyles, they'll be voted out.
>But I do think that it's still worth countries who can do (democratic ones) going ahead anyway.
What we're going to get is some smaller, rich, democratic nations like Netherlands and Finland making real changes, and not making any significant change planet-wide because these places are small and have little population compared to India, China, and USA. Meanwhile, Americans will still be driving everywhere in 6000-pound SUVs (some of which might become EVs, but lots of EVs still means lots of electricity needed, which has to come from somewhere) and heating and cooling their huge 5000 square foot (464 square meters) homes, and China will still be running coal-fired power plants and probably building even more so their people can live more like Americans, etc. etc.
I simply see no way that you're going to get most of humanity to agree to the degree of changes in energy use and emissions output needed within the next 5 years to head off a climate catastrophe. Making significant and meaningful changes in 100 years isn't going to help because it's going to be much too late. Basically, we're like the Titanic, 30 seconds before it hits the iceberg: there's simply no practical way to change course at this point. The best thing to do is stop arguing how to avoid the iceberg, and start talking about who gets the lifeboats.
> The best thing to do is stop arguing how to avoid the iceberg, and start talking about who gets the lifeboats.
Obviously the people with the most money and/or the biggest guns.
I don't think the outcome is anywhere near as binary as you suggest, and there is a way to reduce emissions while increasing or maintaining living standards; you pay the price of development to make renewable options the best choice.
My worry is that by applying quick fix bandaids we avoid tackling the real problem and are not forced to decarbonize. Then we're stuck with more and more fixes in the future and who knows what side effects it'll have.
I don’t think anyone is avoiding the problem, I think people are just unsure about what the best solution is. We could have replaced coal with nuclear in the 70s but that was ‘too risky’ for the average environmentalist, so we are putting out bets on developing renewables faster than climate changes occur.
We merely trade one risk for another, there is never a silver bullet. Most climate skeptics are happy to take the risk that the models aren’t accurate or the scientists doom predictions don’t occur. I think there’s a chance the models are wrong but I’d prefer to take the pain/risk of trying to reduce the potential for a problem before it’s too late.
Oil and gas companies would probably come to mind. If we apply quick fixes, you can be sure O&G will be lobbying hard not to do anything to restrict their operations.
I wouldn’t call that avoiding the problem. No one expects oil and gas companies to shut down until we have something to replace them. Renewables haven’t been very effective yet (just look at Germany) so we still need oil and gas companies to function (eg just stop oil all using iPhones and Macs).
I’m guessing you still use products made from fossil fuels: would you say that you are avoiding the problem? Or would you say you a just being pragmatic? It’s easy to point fingers but unless you are living in a hut in the woods you will still be contributing to GHG.
It's actually easy to point fingers when you're aware of the tactics used by O&G. Examples:
* They knew about climate change a long time ago, yet decided to use tobacco industry playbook rather than try to be part of the solution.
* They obfuscated plastic recycling on purpose (do you know the difference between PET-1 and PET-2, why does the plastic type symbol look exactly like the universal symbol for recycling?)
* Even more recently, they branded the term 'clean coal' and had different media outlets and politicians parrot it around.
* Established fake grassroots movements to make it look like people support whatever shit they do.
These and many other violations are discussed in the excellent YouTube channel Climate Town.
If we do quick fixes, O&G will absolutely use the opportunity to keep pushing their garbage and hinder other progress.
Thanks for the youtube suggestion, I'll check it out. The only one I'm aware of is the PR firm that worked with BP to develop the recycling concept. Maybe I'm being too easy on them.
I don't think there is much scientific evidence it is safe to do and the last people I would want engaging in geo engineering would be a VC funded startup.
Does the page take over scrolling? Not a good sign for somebody who wants to take control over our climate.
*edit: The downvotes are fair for the level of snark. Still, as I cannot judge the validity of the approach, shouldn't I be skeptical when there is an inclination to change more than necessary?
At least for me, the page keeps scrolling for a short moment, unlike other pages like HN. It's tasteful, but unnecessary.
> It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other.
I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.
This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.
For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.
> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much
I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
>I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts.
It does, but it's not a linear relationship. Everything I've read talks about a "tipping point" and exponential curve: basically, once you get past a certain point, it starts snowballing. Critical ocean currents stop working the normal way, etc. Germany becoming carbon neutral just isn't enough to avoid this. Germany isn't that big an emitter when compared to everyone else.
>I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
Germany is not "the developed world". It's not even much of a leader of it. The US is, and the US is NOT going to become carbon-neutral (or even close to it) in our lifetimes. And even if they did, somehow, there's still China.
China is currently the country that builds the most renewable energy. Their energy production through solar exceeds that of the rest of the world (!). Thanks to the Biden administration, the US is currently at least trying to catch up to that.
> at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
We replace all cars every 10-ish years. We replace all infrastructure every 50-ish. All we had to do is replace them at their normal pace with carbon neutral alternative.
First, solar will not use up land. "Agrivoltaics" provide farmers a year-round revenue stream without reducing yield appreciably (on some crops, increasing yield), while improving water retention and protecting livestock from weather extremes.
Second, cost of the energy used will be zero. It will come not from bespoke solar farms, but from utility-scale production above immediate demand. Big producers will buy these things to provide themselves another revenue stream from zero-marginal-cost excess generation after their local batteries are charged up.
So... it appears in the quick scan of the article that the $1/Kg is entirely dependent on what it is planned that solar will cost in about 5-7 years. First off I'd like to credit the author for
1) recognizing the steady past improvement in solar costs
2) using the concept of LCOE
3) accepting that solar will improve for at least 10 years
4) targeting a future cost target of solar
These are things the hydrogen folks often pretend isn't going to happen.
But anyway, the theory being that as soon as hydrogen is cheaper than petrol by a sufficient margin a massive economic shift will occur. I'm assuming he means switches to FCEVs (not going to happen) or synthfuels for the ICEs.
But... batteries and EV tech are also improving on a very aggressive curve. Currently it is my belief that state of the art EV drivetrain tech has dropped under ICE costs. This is already the current state of the market, and there is likely a large amount of further cost reduction in EV drivetrains forthcoming in the next 10-20 years that will make the ICE drivetrain functionally obsolete in at least 70% of applications and perhaps 95%.
So even if a synthfuel chain based on H2 production from solar appears that is cheaper than current oil extraction in about 10 years, the fact is that, while there will be a large installed base to milk for another 10-20 years, EVs are going to eat the terrestrial vehicle drivetrain market.
I will say it would still be an enormous boon for the used equipment out there, as well as aviation. So I wish them the best. Also, grid power storage (short and long term).
And we'll still have the issue that oil extraction might still be cheaper for methane -> H2, and it sneaks into the "green" H2 market, which is a danger, but if solar is really so cheap in 7-10 years as predicted in this article, it might be economically infeasible to do grey/blue/purple/rainbow hydrogen from methane, which would be a good thing.
"Solar will not use up land"? Have you any clue how invasive large solar installs are? I know people involved in the surveying, prep, archaeology, etc. of large installs in central CA. There is a lot of churning of soil, a lot of land covered, a lot of native species disturbed, etc.
The idea that land use renders solar infeasible is a noxious lie. Simply compare the $/acre one would get from PV vs. $/acre from farming: the former is much higher (orders of magnitude). If you think land cost would rule out PV, it would rule out agriculture even more strongly.
The truth is there is far more than enough land, available very cheaply, to power the world with renewable energy.
Just recently heard that in my area, a local farm gets ~$650-$1250 per acre depending on the crop. I was told it went corn on the low end to hemp on the higher end. The conversation was specifically about hemp farming, so "of course" it roughly doubled.
At this point, I'm coming around to accepting that something has to be disturbed since it seems (simplified) to be a choice between either planned, somewhat bounded, localized invasiveness or unplanned, weakly bounded, global disturbances/invasiveness...
I guess he means land retains it current use (i.e. farming/grazing) and gets solar panels as well. Has been done, wouldn't vouch for "no impact", there's still less sun reaching the plants.
Actually it doesn't ... the panels need wires / infrastructure to get the captured energy onto the grid, there is the need to infrastructure to hold up (if not mechanize) the panels. The process of doing this as can be seen in works down along highway 46 in CA is invasive. Yes, maybe the land can be used for some of it's original purpose but generally it is not. You see the same in Europe (Germany is where I am familiar) where large fields for vegetables, hops, etc have been turned into a mix of farming and solar capture and the areas don't overlap.
You can just make up whatever sounds right to you and post that, or actually do some research and learn that what sounds right to you is just completely false.
Farming is sun+water+fertiliser. Remove anyone of those components and you reduce output. Solar will reduce the productivity of almost every crop under it.
Most plants can only process a strictly limited amount of sunlight, and just endure the rest. Partial shade relieves heat stress. Peppers, in particular, yield 3x in partial shade, vs. full sun. Even those like wheat and maize bred and adapted for full sun do fine with partial shade, with only slightly reduced yield.
But there is more than enough pasture to site all the solar we need to power the world, while simultaneously protecting the livestock from weather extremes.
I find the presentation on colocating agrovoltaics inexplicably endearing: it’s the softer side of Solar-punk, I guess.
I will always fondly remember a presentation explaining that you could have strawberry fields or goat-herding under the shadow panels and how they worked together well: evaporation lowers the temperature of the panel, and goats cleared the vegetation around frames—when someone (who looked like he operated a farm) heckled, absolutely deadpan: “That won’t work. Goats are going to eat them strawberries.”
Most EVs go a lot further on the 50kwh * 0.85 = 42 kwh it would take to produce that. Most EVs with a battery that size would be doing 150ish miles or around 200km. That kind of shows the problem with hydrogen and transport. With an expensive and ideal hydrolyser (using the numbers in the article) you are still requiring twice the energy per km.
Of course things not being ideal, it's more like 4x with the 80kwh / kg hydrolyser this company advertises. Now we're talking 80*0.85 = 68 kwh. That's typical for a lot of mid range EVs (including Teslas) with a range of 250 miles or better; or about 400km. 4x the energy + all the additional cost. Sure it will only cost a 85 cents per 100 km. But you could be driving for 21 cents per 100 km.
You covered the most important detail that I think most people skip and that is that hydrogen is just a very inefficient battery if you are utilizing green hydrogen. With the intrinsic inefficiencies of generating green hydrogen and the of fuel cells you will always end up using 3-4x the amount of energy versus just charging an EV directly. That is even before you deal with transportation, storage, and pressurization of the hydrogen.
Now cheap hydrogen can be useful for industrial processes and aerospace so seeing the cost come down is still very good.
You cannot magically put electricity directly into the battery. There is a significant loss between production and powering the wheels. This is the biggest source of misunderstanding about the subject.
Most batteries are around 90-95% efficient. Electrical motors are around 85-90% as well. So that isn't that bad.
Of course most hydrogen vehicles are actually battery electrical vehicle where the battery is charged by the fuel cell. Reason for this is that fuel cells are not that easy to throttle up and down and typically have a lower output than the maximum input of the motor. So, you put enough battery in between the fuel cell and the motor so that you don't run out of energy when e.g. driving up a mountain. Also this enables benefiting from things like regenerative braking. Technically, you could take any hydrogen vehicle and convert it to pure battery electric by simply replacing the hydrogen bits and bops with a bigger battery. No need to change the drive train or anything else. It already is a battery electric vehicle.
So a hydrogen car or truck inherits all those supposed (in)efficiencies of battery electric and then adds the additional (in)efficiencies of the hydrogen production, storage, transport, and fuel cell conversion. The whole process starts with the same renewable energy that you would otherwise put straight into the battery. So these are additional inefficiencies that go on top of the whole end to end chain. The further away you are from where the hydrogen is produced, the worse it gets.
Anyway, when you multiply all of these efficiencies, you end up with a good reason why hydrogen cars are not a great idea from a cost point of view. Just a lot of losses in this long chain of energy conversions that you necessarily have to do that multiply to lots of energy loss.
What this article proposes is super interesting of course but it doesn't change the math for transport. Battery electric is inherently more efficient. It works today and it's going to only get better. Cheaper more dense batteries, cheaper renewable energy production, etc. There are plenty of more sensible/economical uses for hydrogen outside transport.
>Most batteries are around 90-95% efficient. Electrical motors are around 85-90% as well. So that isn't that bad.
I guess you'd also have take into account loss during transmission (which seesm to vary wildly between 2-10% depending on location) and charger efficiency. IIRC if we add it all up it's about 70%.
That two is share by hydrogen, which again just adds to this. So, it doesn't change the math. Everything downstream of the fuel cell is not something you can avoid and any improvements you make there benefit BEVs with and without a fuel cell. The key thing to focus on here is how much the fuel cell adds in terms of inefficiencies.
Pumped hydro is a well established technology with a round trip efficiency ~75%.
As for the cars, they can we can install chargers at all parking spots and take advantage of the intermittent energy during the day to charge the cars then. Many colder climates have engine blocker heater outlets as a standard feature for outdoor parking, adding 120V or 240V chargers to new parking spots (and retrofitting old ones) is not a far fetched idea.
This entirely ignores the problem of intermittency. The wind does not blow all the time and the sun does not shine all the time. To solve this, you will need grid energy storage.
The problem is that adds significant energy losses for a hypothetical car powered purely by renewable energy. In fact, it could be even greater than what it takes to power a hydrogen car. That is immediately obvious when you realize that the energy storage system is hydrogen in the first place.
Ultimately, people are just demonizing the inefficiencies of the hydrogen process while totally ignoring real-world losses for battery cars.
It is not demonizing to say that electric cars have a round trip efficiency of ~80% while round trip efficiencies for electrolosys->storage->fuel cell for anything outside of a lab is in the mid 30%.
Except you are ignoring energy storage losses for BEVs. Take that into account and it drops to the same level as doing it with hydrogen. It also helps to stop living in the past with hydrogen. Efficiencies are significantly better than you are admitting.
We’ve already had this conversation before. I’m not interested in repeating myself. You already have the knowledge the grasp the truth, provided you have any interest in doing so.
That has nothing to do with the subject at hand. You cannot charge a battery at 100% efficiency, especially from the source electricity. People are simply creating an apples-to-oranges comparison here. You're just distracting from this fact.
There are of course losses when charging a battery, but they are orders of magnitude larger when talking about the creation of hydrogen versus the charging of a battery. Hydrogen simply isn't a good idea for a number of reasons, and the energy needed to separate it from water is just one of them.
Quoting "apples to oranges" here ignores the massive inefficiency in other stages of the process of storing and distribution of hydrogen, which is difficult and expensive to do. The distribution of electricity is much more efficient and cheaper.
Factually no. There is no straightforward method of taking energy from renewable sources and getting it to a charging station. In reality, this is one of the hardest parts of green energy. You simply have to ask the question, "what happens when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining?"
In fact, this is a total inversion of reality, bordering on science denial. The process of making and storing hydrogen is a straightforward process. It is trying to this with only electricity that is very hard.
> "what happens when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining?"
You ramp up your hydro output and spread out and postpone the load. People have adapted to doing dishes and laundry when electricity is cheap, this is not different.
If you are relying on wind and solar, then you will need energy storage. You will have to take the losses into account. You’ve already admitted this partially by acknowledging 25% losses with pumped hydro. But not everywhere has pumped hydro, nor hydropower at the scale needed.
The point is that hydrogen gives you nearly lossless energy storage. This is why simplistic accounts of efficiency are simply wrong. People are ignoring energy storage losses on the BEV side, but always bring up the full cycle losses on the hydrogen side. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, and gives you an invalid conclusion.
The main "breakthrough" the article seems to be pivoted on is: sacrificing efficiency of electrolyzer brings the capex down by and order of magnitude, thus making $1/Kg hydrogen possible. The whole downstream (to H2) value chain is a different economic argument, relevant to how they want the future to be.
So really, really cheap electricity with a side of really, really cheap hardware[0] coupled with an absence of operations, maintenance, storage, or transport costs. Noting for the latter direct energy from panels must be used with a high locality to the panels themselves, which means a distributed collection and transportation for the produced hydrogen.
[0]Plausibly viable, non precious metal catalysts typically have less than stellar lifetimes but there is a lot of fat to plausibly trim out of an electrolyzed.
I like how the Terraform's electrolyzers (80 kWh/kg) are less efficient than legacy systems (50 kWh/kg). He compares legacy with current electricity to their system with cheap solar when they need to be compared with the same input.
Their problem is that solar power isn't cheap yet. The other big problem is that electrical transmission lines are way more efficient than hydrogen, which 30% efficient on whole cycle. It makes no sense to use hydrogen as energy transport. Cheap hydrogen production at every use point, airport, factory, port, would make sense.
They don’t address this directly, but is probably what they’re going for given the low deployment cost, no maintence, size, and comparison against other energy sources.
The article talks about converting to hydrogen at the solar panel. They don’t mention the expense of shipping the hydrogen where it is needed. And that much of the need is electricity so have to burn it for even more waste.
Their proposed device would be really good for distribution if it is cheap and simple. Scale up to port, scale down to truck stop.
Storage costs should be considered, particularly for an intermittent process. Otherwise, you need an end user that can accept intermittent and somewhat unpredictable supply.
I too was missing the punchline of how they reduced the capital costs so much. The writing implied it was inevitable engineering, but the real world is seldom so simple.
I didn't get why Terraforms focus on producing natural gas (CH4) instead of just hydrogen (H2)? Today we use a lot of CH4 to produce hydrogen primarily for fertilisers (ammonia) and oil refining.
The first step should be stop using CH4 for H2 production, which is 65-75% efficient (steam reforming) and instead use green hydrogen. Today, hydrogen production is $155 Bln / year market that may take even a decade to transition. Simpler and more profitable than synthesising CH4.
One more trick, would be to connect partial solar to grid at lower capacity to benefit from price surges (e.g. evening). E.g. 100 MW solar, but with grid connection of just 1 MW to profit from when grid electricity is expensive.
Also please do not worry about transporting or storing hydrogen. Just produce ammonia and sell it on the market. Till we decarbonise ammonia production (1%+ of global CO2 emission), we don't have to worry about that.
This saves on infrastructure since we already have CH4 pipelines, power plants, vehicles etc. If we stop and just produce hydrogen, we need to redesign every single pipeline and plant. Also H2 has the downsides that it is extremely explosive and not very energy dense. Only upside I can think of is that hydrogen is so light that leaks don't tend to pool around the plant.
Why bother? The main use case for hydrogen is energy storage. So you just have a big tanker next to the solar farm that fills up when its producing more than the grid needs, and then burn it when there's less than the grid needs.
I think it's pretty implausible that the main use case for hydrogen will be energy storage when so many important industrial processes require a good reducing agent that's either currently hydrogen generated from natural gas or carbon monoxide from coal. Steal production, fertilizer production, etc. It's a pretty large chunk of our current global energy use.
You argument holds true if you want massive distribution. I believe 100% green ammnoia is first step and for that I just need green H2. No need to redesign anything.
I don't think so, the only real limit is reusing existing infrastructure. I think you could put ammonia through most pipelines so that isn't a concern, but you will have to replace generators/engines if you want to use it for storage and produce power from it.
I’ve been hoping one of Casey’s articles would get traction here. I love what he’s writing but I don’t have the context to evaluate how correct they are.
Offshore wind got also potential to match or beat onshore wind, as we scaled up turbines, mass produce floating ones with high degree of automation across the whole process.
This. Many comments talking about how e motor is superior in terms of energy efficiency just failed to realize. Cost and energy density matters the most in transportation, and cost is down when solar is abundant so hydrogen makes more sense
I must assume that people with this level of investment have thought of this but, today in many places overnight energy costs are low. Given the trajectory of wind costs and deployment, this seems only likely to continue.
So where are the sums for running the system off behind the meter solar when the sun shines, pausing production for a few hours as net load peak occurs, then starting again with grid supplied off peak overnight power?
I think a naive conparison would be misleading as low rates at night for consumers are often accompanied by slightly higher prices during the day to nudge usage out of peak times, but I'd assume there's still some saving to be made.
I’m suspicious of articles that try to dazzle with numbers and end up promising vaporware. If they ever do get carbon capture working and scale up natural gas production (“hydrogen” in the title was just a head fake) the they still have to contend with the issue that ICE engines are just way less efficient than electric motors. If you have electrical power, which is part of their elaborate chain of stuff in their picture, just use it directly. We already have the cars and the batteries and the home batteries and the homes that can use it. Just scale that part up. Don’t double down on things that are less efficient and more dangerous.
Batteries are still expensive, and wear out. We are realistically not going to replace ICE engines in substantially less time then 20 years, probably closer to 50 or 100 even given penetration.
What we can do is replace the origin of their fuel source, and the cheaper the better. You can synthesize methane into any liquid fuel you like. Now you'll lose energy in the transformation, but if the input energy is cheap and abundant enough - and can be stored well enough - then maybe that doesn't actually matter.
There are large areas of the planet which get more then enough sun to provide all our power needs and would impact no one if we harvested there. But we can't get the energy out of them, and we can't store enough of it to cover the times we can't.
Also a very interesting way to produce cheap low-carbon Hydrogen is with very high temperature nuclear reactors, so you don't even need to convert to electricity and can directly use efficient chemical processes, such as the sulfur iodine cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
I don't have the knowledge to fully understand this article but recently saw this video (from B1M) that does a great job at explaining what is Green hydrogen and why it matters. But most importantly why it's almost impossible to do it cheaply right now.
> But in essence, electrolyzers are glorified electric resistors, with no more intrinsic complexity than a kettle that boils water and costs $15/kW, including free two day shipping from China!
That's patently false! Resistive heating and electrolysis are two completely different effects. Also, resistive heaters don't have to deal with issues like galvanic corrosion, that electrolysis involves.
If you liked this post, y'all may also appreciate the Terraform Industries home page, which is entirely written in monospaced text, written in <tt> and <br> tags.
> Why does our website look like this? At TI we believe we can change the world by displacing fossil hydrocarbon production at global scale. Like our website, our machines are simple so we can build millions of them as quickly as possible. Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resources where they solve the most important problems.
Seems odd considering they have a WordPress running in the OP
How is that odd? They have chosen not to allocate resources towards building their own blog site, and instead have gone with what is, like it or not, the standard format for blogging. Seems exactly on-message to me.
It's not that WordPress, the technology, is simple. It's that deploying the bog standard solution, rather than investing energy into researching alternatives and developing workflows for them, is a simple and pragmatic approach.
Those sharp edges aren't really relevant anyway on a hosted service (wordpress.com) where they are buffed out for you.
> We want the cheapest possible power. What adds cost to solar power? Moving it from the array to another place.... Hydrogen distribution costs are also extremely high, but because Terraform is only using hydrogen as an immediate precursor we’re going to ignore distribution costs here.... by ~2040 ... nearly all grid electricity will be downstream of solar, providing energy to customers through parallel distribution networks of electricity, oil, and gas.
He/she/it has created an inscrutably mixed-up paper sack of ideas to promote a never-defined end. Run this by a half-talented human editor and it might be possible to see what this 'visionary' is all about.
No--he is quite correctly dumping all those other costs because the intent is to neither store nor ship the hydrogen, but rather directly use it to make methane. That's much easier to work with (it's also commonly referred to as "natural gas".)
I don't like the pictures, though--there would not be a solar plant next to a water cracker next to a methane maker, but rather smaller scale components stacked together. The shorter the distance you ship it the cheaper--you put your panel right on top of the other equipment.
I was curious how much fossil fuel lobbyists are pushing hydrogen (they keep assuming electricity is free but somehow not competitive with hydrogen).
It’s increasingly starting to look like they anticipate having plants synthesize methane in remote areas (maybe near methane wells) and possibly have higher productivity from those setups than people would anticipate if they looked closely at the hydrolysis performance.
I do not doubt that those trains will be powered by electricity (solar or wind: no one will object to either near a mine or along tracks).
Similarly, if they need hydrogen as a reduction agent, they will produce it locally — i.e., not ask anyone trying to capture CO2 in the air or buy from it far away. No one is moving smelting facilities, so they’ll setup solar panels and wind farms around those.
That’s why the argument of making those far away, in place known for nothing but sand and oil fields always felt disingenuous.
> no one will object to either near a mine or along tracks
> in place known for nothing but sand and oil fields
Errr, just as a reality check, almost all mines impact people in some form or another, often indigenous people who never adopted advanced western lifestyles that they are directly impacted by with mines, pipelines, climate effects, etc.
FWiW I'm making that statement as someone with decades as an exploration geophysicist, backend developer of
To extract a thousand tons, estimates are around 6,700 kWh [0]. That’s a bit less than what one of the larger windmills can produce in an hour (7.5 MW). The largest mine I know produces 25.6 million tonnes of ore per year, so (/365/24) three times that. I’m sure we can find room for three windmills over the 16.53 km^2 of that mine.
It seems to me that these guys are taking the SpaceX approach--don't look for what's best, look for what's the cheapest way to get the job done. That's why almost all orbital rockets have used hydrolox for at least the upper stage but SpaceX uses kerolox. Hydrolox has substantially better performance but brings with it a whole bunch of handling headaches. SpaceX uses a lot more fuel to deliver the same mass to orbit--but fuel is a tiny percentage of the total cost of a space launch.
The penalty for not using hydrolox when you're going beyond low orbit grows even greater--but SpaceX is figuring that with Starship they can ship up fuel separately and still get more throw weight per dollar. Even now, note how a fully recovered Falcon Heavy launch is cheaper than an expended Falcon 9 launch even though it uses 3x the fuel.
Methane can be the feedstock for so many fuels and chemicals so it has a huge potential. I think a lot of the skepticism of this is due to skeptics associating methane with fossil fuels and having an emotional reaction.
Algae biodiesel could be put in regular trucks, is carbon neutral, and uses existing infrastructure. Additionally, Algae will be the only thing robust enough to survive >50'C temperatures, as hot lithium batteries also start to have issues.
Hydrogen has poor energy density (needs very large storage volumes), is expensive to handle safely, and still hits the equivalent of $13/l for petroleum gas. The field trials already profiled the degenerative nature of fuel cells, and problems with Hydrogen embrittlement.
I wager Goat Carts are the future, as most civilizations had them in their past. They are also far more radiation tolerant than primates. =)
Indeed, but genetically engineered agriculture technology scales quickly at negligible cost. Note, people have already cultivated food-grade Spirulina for many years.
Cost effectiveness is just part of an optimization problem, that will be constrained by desirable traits: temperature resistance, replication rate, and viable fuel content. In many places, uncontrolled algae blooms are already a naturally occurring issue in the run-off from large cities/farms.
There are several firms already working on this biotech. Note, a algae biodiesel would solve the issues with clean efficient generation, energy density, repurposing distribution, and repurposing storage.
Casey writes to explain, not so much to showcase. Even his most marketty blogs seem like information-dense, well thought out physics courses rather than puff pieces.
However, if you were not familiar with the writer or early stage of terraform, then yeah I could imagine some letdown.
In the past, in the non-existent country, surprisingly often the water was boiled by shorting mains via water in a vessel, oddly enough, used to buy beer. The electrodes used were frequently shaving blades.
It's not exactly electrolyzer - mains were AC - but, if fuses (or usually their less fire-preventing replacements) held, water was heated - resistive effect.
I think it's fair to let that one tiny detail slide, and to read the rest of the article as is. And you may enjoy other articles he's written, if you can get past that detail you disagree with.
I often take issue with the highly-reductive, "model a cow as a sphere" type thinking that seems like a phd-doctor trope, as well, though.
Rhetoric 101, things need to be arranged in the proper order to make the most impact on the recipient. Saying "this is the single largest technology roll-out" followed by a bit of DIY on the kitchen table does rather fall flat.
There are a lot of actual good points in the article, but the ending lets it down in terms of building excitement for the bold new future. But hey, it's engineering not PR.
Don't be snarky, did you spend 20 minutes without reading it to the end? That plexiglass cutout is an interview prompt for engineering hires. It's only a small part of their prototype.
> In fact, if you asked me to produce a kilogram of hydrogen I don't know what I would do. Is it buoyancy? do you want -1 kilo of the stuff?
Nerd sniped. Atmosphere is 1.2 kg/m^3, hydrogen is 0.090 kg/m^3. So 1 kg of hydrogen at STP would be 11 m^3. The buoyancy force would then be 13kg-1kg.
What would be better though? 1kg is 1kg, regardless of temperature, pressure and volume. A litre, gallon, cc, all need clarification with respect to something else. You could use moles, but for a given compound, mass is just a more accessible, yet equally accurate, scaled value.
Hydrogen is generally stored compressed at 700 bar. At that pressure the density is 42 kg/m3, or one kilogram per 24 liters. Roughly one kilogram per one jerry can.
No need to worry; Hydrogen's exceptional permeability means the gas will diffuse through the jerry can, into the atmosphere; thus lowering its internal pressure.
We can make vessels which will contain increasingly high pressures; however their permeability is higher, vs. older materials. This is a central problem of hydrogen as a primary fuel... Better to burn it (or convert it into methane) where and when it is produced.
I keep hearing this, and sometimes people claiming it's not true anymore, so I decided to look into it.
Compressed hydrogen storage tanks are of 4 types [1]. Types 1,2 metal tanks, but they can be used only up to 300 bar. Their permeability rate is negligible. Type 4 is composite (e.g. carbon fiber) with a polymer interior lining. It operates at 700 bar (and various manufacturers state their product can work up to 850 bar). They have some permeability. Type 3 is similar, but with metal interior lining. Negligible permeability, but more expensive. I don't know how much more expensive, with these things all providers tell you to "call for quote".
In any case, the only problem is Type 4. They are the affordable alternative to Type 3, and they are also in much wider use.
There are some regulations and standards that govern them. Specifically EU 406/2010 and ISO 19881:2018 which prescribe a maximum steady state permeation rate of 6.0 Ncm3 of hydrogen per hour and per liter internal volume of
the container [2].
To be honest, I'm not sure how to read this rate. Toyota Mirai uses such tanks (2 of them), so it can't be that bad. Each has a volume of about 60 liters, and holds about 5kg of hydrogen [3].
The more important thing is that permeability is a function of the surface area. A tank 1000 times larger has a surface area only 100 times higher, so the permeability per volume goes down by a factor of 10.
Such tanks do exist and are commercially available. I'm aware of the Hexagon Titan XL that can hold 220 kg of hydrogen. The latest quarterly revenues of the manufacturer [4] show 57% year-on-year growth, so it looks like customers are quite happy with their offering.
TI are going to use the hydrogen internally, so they can measure that in whatever they want. If they'd sell it or transported - good luck talking with the truckin' industry in kilomoles.
> Do we want a future where Europe pushes through mandatory low quality carbon offsets on airfares, further restricting the privilege of high speed travel to the richest of the rich? Or do we want a future where cheap carbon-neutral aviation fuel expands access to globe-spanning travel opportunities for hundreds of millions of people while also enabling a renaissance of supersonic transport?
That’s a false dichotomy. I don’t want any of these, I want airplane quota per capita and stopping travel growth to preserve earth and its biodiversity. Fuck growth. There’s enough planes in the sky.
> to alter the environment of (a celestial body) in order to make capable of supporting terrestrial life forms.
The abuse of English continues.
It's like calling it a "Car", or "Computer", these words have specific, concrete meanings. If you want to have a 'cool' name for your product fine, but not an already existing concept you bastardise to use in your name.
This seems to fall into a category of pitches where someone knows a secret that will upend the oil industry. The engine that runs on water instead of gasoline is probably the most famous and blatantly grift version of this pitch. During the CRISPR hype cycle there was a pitch for using genetically modified cells that were better at producing ethonal to produce cheap bio-fuels.
In this pitch, the secret sauce is using DC directly from solar cells in budget electrodes to produce cheap hydrogen fuel. I'm skeptical, but not immediately dismissive. I would like to see a prototype electrolyzer running directly off solar panel DC. This feels like a prototype that could be built for less than $1k in materials, and is probably the single largest impact thing he could do to improve his pitch deck.
> “(As an aside, it is quite obviously impossible to enforce universal adoption of more expensive carbon-free energy through, eg, mandatory carbon offsets, as higher gas prices are political suicide regardless of system of government.)”
LOL, what? This sort of seems to imply that Venezuela, where gasoline is sold for Pennie’s per liter, is better governed than, say, the Scandinavian county of your choosing.
I think higher energy prices are a perfectly valid public choice that a polity can choose to embrace if the costs and benefits represent an agreeable trade off.
Wouldn't it imply the opposite, if anything? Scandinavian countries have more political capital to expend on higher fuel prices precisely because they're better-governed.
It might imply the opposite; I think a reasonable argument could be made either way. I think most likely the two propositions (energy prices and good governance) are orthogonal at best.
But I think there’s very little support for the flat statement I quoted from the post. Higher energy prices are political suicide under any form of government? I think that’s quite obviously false.
If so, the hard part is getting the carbon capture cheap enough, not the hydrogen.
I crunched the numbers and you need around 13.6 kilograms of carbon and 4.54 kilograms of hydrogen to make enough natural gas to give you 1GJ of heat when combusted (this is how natural gas is priced in the metric world - 1 GJ is roughly 0.95 MMBTU).
If you're extracting CO2 from the air, roughly 27% of the CO2 is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
Doing the maths suggests that at current ballpark prices for CO2 direct air capture of $1000/tonne, the cost of capturing enough CO2 to make a GJ of natural gas is about $50. That's before you've done the processing to convert your CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen.
So let's assume an order of magnitude improvement in air capture costs. Even at $100 per tonne, the CO2 capture cost is around $5. When you combine that with the approximately $4.50 worth of hydrogen required, that gives an input cost of around $9.50. That's way more than domestic natural gas currently costs in the US, but it's in the ballpark that you could subsidise your way around that at scale, and the numbers look pretty reasonable compared to imported LNG in Europe and Asia.
So to me this suggests that, if your business plan is to make methane, the hydrogen part is almost a sideshow to getting direct air capture costs down.