Hydrogen - what do you guys think?

[Fedorgasm]

the issue is that you'll need a gigantic power source for that conversion, and instead of converting, why not just turn the wheels

Yeah it's like that famous cartoonist that would draw these big complicated machines that would perform a humorously simple task

 

[StonedLemur]

Here in Germany where the energy transformation is really the biggest topic in society, hydrogen became a huge talking point over the last couple of years.

If I understand the topic properly, to produce hydrogen you elecrolyse water to isolate the H atoms in H2O. The product is highly combustible but you need a FUCKTON of energy to pull it off.

The idea is that hydrogen would become the energy storage medium for solar energy but it needs to be scaled to be economically viable. Going further on that thought, the further step would be to create gigantic solar farms in the desert in say North Africa, which would feed Yurrp in hydrogen, which would phase out fossil fuels.

Leaving politics and ideology aside, please, do you have thoughts on the matter as per its technical and economic feasibility.

Im pretty sure water is important to humans.
Im not sure this will end well sir.

 

[lifelessheap]

Nuclear power + batteries that can be recycled.

Done. It is over. Nuclear is green, stable and amazing.

 

[Your Salad]

I love hydrogen, hanging out with hydrogen is a good time.
Hydrogen is such a gas!

 

[djacobox372]

I think Germany shouldn't have gotten rid of their nuclear power.

 

[jx820]

The use of hydrogen is very practical. It's already becoming a popular option in material handling because a tank can be swapped in a minute rather than charging a bunch of batteries and they can run all day indoors completely clean.

The production and logistics are the challenge.

• Free hydrogen (unbound to any other element) isn't all that common on earth. So you can't just harvest it from the air, it has to be taken from a compound (like H2O) and as previously stated breaking a hydrorgen particle off of a comound requires a good bit of energy.
• The conversion wont be 1 to 1 so there will be some energy loss.
• The molicules are so small they are incredibly difficult to seal so there will be a great deal of loss over time. To the extent that a hydrogen molicule can leak through the walls of a steel bottle over time. Not counting the seals and valves.

That sealing issue isn't a big deal for a small amount of production, but on the scale of a daily power source for 250 million people living 2000 miles away from the point of production... it's a lot.

I think local production of hydrogen for vehicles using clean energy sources could be a fantastic way to make clean, energy efficient vehicles. Far more so than electric cars and not much more dangerous than liquid gasoline.

 

[AGGAMEMNON66]

Dangerous?

The Germans just never learn..

 

[GSP_37]

I'll wait until they harness the power of hamsters to power a car. Get a 10,000 hamster power engine bro.

 

[WarHawk]

Natural energy, reduced plastic, and environment restoration. Most important issues. Solar power, digital (no paper), plastic rellacement.

 

[davidlemonparty]

Thanks a lot. Ok so hydrogen makes little sense for small storage like in cars or trucks. What about large scale like say, a 100 megawatt solar farm that is next to an energy intensive industrial facility like steel manufacturing? You can store the hydrogen produced in summer and pipeline it a hundred meters to the steel factory over winter? OR, to a public utility which then burns it into electricity?

That makes more sense, but unfortunately it makes much more sense to do the same but with natural gas.
a 100MW solar farm might seem large, but then consider that solar farm is only actuslly 35% productive across the year (due to... Night time and weather) and then consider the losses involved in all the complex steps to make hydrogen into a thermal fuel. Whether that be for direct combustion in a turbine for electrical generation Or process use like heating, steam, or steel production.
It's just simply, currently, an order of magnitude cheaper and easier to use fossil fuels. So we need that social quantum shift and extreme scale to reduce costs. I'm talkin EXTREME global scale

 

[Jack Reacheround]

Dangerous?

This is what immediately comes to mind.
Germany + Hydrogen = disaster

 

[fungi]

Haven't really had a good read but maybe it was the cost of helium..... That's a lot of gas to put in..... Wonder what the gas mileage was........

Beliebe it or not, UNLIMITED.

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

I'm sure it has some niche uses, but I think batteries are a much better solution.

I read that batteries are inadequate for example for city busses that need to drive around in very hilly cities.

 

[fica]

Here in Germany where the energy transformation is really the biggest topic in society, hydrogen became a huge talking point over the last couple of years.

If I understand the topic properly, to produce hydrogen you elecrolyse water to isolate the H atoms in H2O. The product is highly combustible but you need a FUCKTON of energy to pull it off.

The idea is that hydrogen would become the energy storage medium for solar energy but it needs to be scaled to be economically viable. Going further on that thought, the further step would be to create gigantic solar farms in the desert in say North Africa, which would feed Yurrp in hydrogen, which would phase out fossil fuels.

Leaving politics and ideology aside, please, do you have thoughts on the matter as per its technical and economic feasibility.

Nothing is going to.happen hydrogen on high scale use is not managable

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

Hydrogen is very challenging to work with.
A few issues:
It is extremely light, so it means you need to compress it extensively to get enough energy in a given volume. So for example to use it as a mobile fuel in a truck or car the storage tank needs to be at extreme pressure which is an engineering and manufacturing challenge and also a high-risk.
This leads to its energy density - very low. So you need fukn heaps of it to do useful work.
on risk : it's very explosive across a wide range. Other explosive fuels need quite specific mixture levels with atmosphere before they can explode, whereas hydrogen is very happy to go bang in any mixture.
It's a tiny atom so it physically leaks out of seals, pipes, tanks, valves, etc. More engineering challenges and dollars.
Chemically, it degrades steel via a chemical reaction called hydrogen embrittlement. So existing piping and storage infrastructure needs to be largely replaced. This is a mammoth task. Maybe impossible.
so it's overall high risk, difficult to transport, has low energy content and requires largely new global infrastructure. All big challenges.

there are possible solutions though. It can be combined with nitrogen (main constituent of air) to form ammonia, which is an easily transported liquid. Ammonia can then be burned directly in engines as a liquid fuel or reconverted to hydrogen at remote point of use.
Also if we practically limit hydrogen to use cases such as stationary large scale plant I.e power plants, those engineering challenges scale down to be very manageable.

Jury is out basically. It's a real coin flip and requires political and social will.

Batteries are not effectively comparable they store and move power they do not create it

Going back to that thought,tractors, busses and boats that run on hydrogen already exist, though?

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

Nothing in life is free. Always a tradeoff.

The more potent energy source, at least in everything I have seen, will also require a more stringent grasp of physics and the more advanced technology to support it.

We haven't even slightly approached the limits of what we could do with nuclear power. High risk, monumental reward, BUT... not maybe monumental profit

As to the OP request to keep politics out of it, that is noble and I support the notion of an honest debate of physical characteristics ... but like it or not we are bound in a world governed by money and politics and the suppression of technologies which threaten the bottom line of profitable industry is a VERY real thing.

Absolutely. Energy is by definition extremely political. You just need to look at the German decisions to phase out nuclear following fukushima or stopping natural gas imports from Russia. These shape industries permanently. Just wanted to avoid partisan shit slinging. So far surprisingly it has worked out.

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

It sounds dangerous to drive a car with a gas tank full of hydrogen. Accidents will be way more deadly.

But if you could drive around with a gas tank full of water, and have it converted to hydrogen right before it burns, that would at least eliminate the safety issue.

Plus how cool would it be to get stranded in the desert and be able to drink from your gas tank?

You mean to have a tank full of water and electryse it as you go to produce just the right amount of hydrogen for your engine? Yeah that would be insane.

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

Storage remains a serious problem. It's a lot less dense than natural gas along with being way more leaky so the storage tanks will need to be absolutely huge and perfectly sealed. In theory it's possible but the cost & difficulty will be astronomical. You're likely better off running some kind of carbon capture system on the steel factory and using the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn it into gasoline & diesel.

Ok so in your view, stationary storage is the biggest challenge?

 

[KBE6EKCTAH_CCP]

The use of hydrogen is very practical. It's already becoming a popular option in material handling because a tank can be swapped in a minute rather than charging a bunch of batteries and they can run all day indoors completely clean.

The production and logistics are the challenge.

• Free hydrogen (unbound to any other element) isn't all that common on earth. So you can't just harvest it from the air, it has to be taken from a compound (like H2O) and as previously stated breaking a hydrorgen particle off of a comound requires a good bit of energy.
• The conversion wont be 1 to 1 so there will be some energy loss.
• The molicules are so small they are incredibly difficult to seal so there will be a great deal of loss over time. To the extent that a hydrogen molicule can leak through the walls of a steel bottle over time. Not counting the seals and valves.

That sealing issue isn't a big deal for a small amount of production, but on the scale of a daily power source for 250 million people living 2000 miles away from the point of production... it's a lot.

I think local production of hydrogen for vehicles using clean energy sources could be a fantastic way to make clean, energy efficient vehicles. Far more so than electric cars and not much more dangerous than liquid gasoline.

Could you expand upon why you think local hydrogen production for vehicles could be more adequate than electric?

 

[davidlemonparty]

Going back to that thought,tractors, busses and boats that run on hydrogen already exist, though?

Yes, some do. Some utilise fuel cells directly.
unfortunately none of these are very efficient. There will need to be sustained technology breakthroughs and adoptions to displace fossil fuels.
heavy shipping, trains, and heavy road transport are likely candidates first. They can offer the scale, weight, and discrete engineering to make hydrogen /alternative fuels successful