+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
maybe someone can enlighten me:
why is/was hydrogen as energy storage torpedoed for decades now (that it is too late)? it's clean after burning it, can be produced from either electrolysis or natural gas. storage is a bit complicated, but manageable. why should this be worse than batteries?
i've read so many shitty reasons why H2 is "bad":
- "converting natural gas isn't green": yes no shit, but it helps to fill the gap. should've started earlier.
- "not enough power to do electrolysis": every other energy storage solution seems worse at large scales, especially batteries.
- "not enough platinum to use as catalyst for fuel-cells": i bet you can throw enough research on it and find another catalyst. hell, _we_ are full of catalysts that don't contain platinum.
I also suspect the general problem of storage are the 2/3 wasted for storage... as long as oil just jumps out of the ground it always wins.
@CapitalB
you can even make methane out of H2 in a bioreactor. i left that out ;)
it just smells funny that for decades H2 was written off as too problematic etc. and not we get batteries shoved down our throats. where 9/10 are wasted storage and problematic waste. H2, while more complicated, requires "something to pressurize gas in".
@CapitalB s/and not/and now
@bonifartius Bioreactors are done but heating or cooling will be more urgent than frivolous driving around.
I also think H2 is a dead end. What use is a
"storage" with a few percent/week loss?
I seriously expect more wood gasifier cars than H2 in 20 years.
@bonifartius batteries are the rage bc of the tonnage of stuff needed. Fuel cels&tank are a fraction.
More stuff, more revenue.
As much as I am skeptical about increasing Li-on battery production, @bonifartius @CapitalB, their use cases are rather different. Usually you don’t want a highly explosive and pressurized gas being mobile. Li-on battery can also go brrr, but at least it gives you time to run away. Using hydrogen in place of organic gases might alright, albeit not profitable enough for there to be an incentive for the moment.
On a side note, @bonifartius and @CapitalB, I am a bit confused how the Wikipedia article on salt water battery describe it as an invention of this century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_water_battery
I swear on the grave of my dead hares and overgrown bunnies that the rabbit batteries in Việt Nam (might be named after different animals elsewhere) are exactly the same thing and have been around for forever.
@cnx
@ulintl@mstdn.io has linked an article to which energy storage is good for farmers who have solar panels on their barns etc. where salt batteries were also discussed. the only manufacturer in europe i found was an austrian company iirc.
would sure be interesting if there is a low tech way to build them. the austrian one was rocket science full of special materials etc.
@CapitalB
@bonifartius @cnx @ulintl@mstdn.io @CapitalB
@khird @iron_bug
Also, electricity can come from just about any source. H2 would come from the same multi-national industry that forces countries to invade other countries like Iraq, Syria, Ukraine... just to protect their interests and keep their commodity scarce and expensive.
If we were on H2 right now, we'd be facing the same high fuel prices because it's tied to oil market.
You can buy an electic car today that has a 1000 mile range.
It costs me $2.63 to fill up my car. (not $2.63 per gallon, that's $2.63 total cost in electricity to fill it up.)
@Pat simple electrolysis of water produces hydrogen gas; oil might be important for hydrogen as an energy source, but not as an energy storage medium (which is what @bonifartius asked about). If you have cheap electricity and access to water you can make H2 gas in your own country, and there's nothing particularly exotic needed to make an engine that burns it. I would guess that some of the rare elements involved in constructing high-performance electrical components are more burdened with the negative geopolitical effects you describe than hydrogen is.
What car were you referring to, actually? The max range I see in production vehicles is less than half that - a search turns up a few concept vehicles (Alcoa+Phinergy, Aptera, Mercedes) but nothing I could "buy today" that's even close to a thousand miles.
@cnx
> Usually you don’t want a highly explosive and pressurized gas being mobile
well, here in germany there are cars which use natural gas/LPG. the only restriction is that you can't park them in underground garages.
the nice thing with hydrogen is that you might either use it for combustion or with fuel cells. only toyota bothered using fuel cells so far (afaik). safety doesn't seem to be the problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai#Safety . it still has a battery, but that's 1.6 kWh instead of teslas 100 kWh.
@bonifartius H2 gas has a reasonable energy density in J/kg, but since it has such a low density in kg/m³, it has a poor volumetric energy density in J/m³.
Another way to look at this is to say H2's enthalpy of combustion in kg/mol is very low (propane's is about eight times higher), so you need far more moles of hydrogen to store equal amounts of energy. But here you run into the ideal gas law P=ρRT. To get many moles into a reasonable amount of space, we need a high density ρ. R is a physical constant, and so you either need to drop T by refrigerating your storage, or raise P by physically reinforcing it. Both of those options are too heavy to be competitive for mobile applications - even if you don't have to carry around as many kg of fuel, you're losing more than the difference in carrying around the tank to hold it in. For static applications where you can tolerate the weight, there are other cheaper ways (notably, pumped-storage hydro) to store your energy.
@khird
i can see that the density isn't ideal which makes the processing into methane etc. interesting. i can't find the paper on that now, but i swear the stuff i read about wasn't very complicated.
the problem with things like pumped storage is that they need the right geology for that. e.g. in northern germany there aren't that many places which are hilly and not populated.
my point is: _if_ we put wind and solar everywhere it's dumb to turn of those things because there is "too much power" (which happens frequently). would make more sense to just run electrolysis with it, maybe convert that H2 into methane or whatever. i don't see that big batteries are a good solution for this, even if all the car manufacturers want us to believe that using old car batteries for storage is a great solution ;)
not poer storage: what makes H2 interesting too is that it can be used for other things like haber-bosch.
@bonifartius bc methanol AND ethanol
- stays in a metal box
- is not pressurized
- can burn clean too in fuel cells
- can be produced and stored decentrally
- can made from waste products with MORE energy left in the fuel
- is not earing into most plastics
- burns very slow with no explosion
(And batteries suck donkey dick)
That was the plan. Then physics floored it at the agricultural limit...