this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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not now, but if hydrogen were to be used as an energy source/storage, then it'd be used plenty. same with batteries
We can make hydrogen everywhere, we can't 'make oil'.
Yeah, there's no reason to be transporting hydrogen long distances. You can make it anywhere that has water and electricity. And if you've transitioned to a hydrogen based economy (which is a big if), ships wouldn't run on oil any more anyway, so there's no problem there.
there absolutely is? What if i can buy hydrogen at 1$ per ton, from the hydrogen production empire, meanwhile in the manufacturing empire hydrogen is produced at 2$ per ton. Economically, it would make sense to buy that hydrogen from the hydrogen production empire.
It's not going to be as significant as a trade as something like coal and LNG obviously, but the market IS going to do this in some capacity. And it's a beneficial thing for everybody.
Sure, there'd be some arbitrage, but pretty much every country that has a functional government will invest in domestic capacity for strategic reasons. You won't have countries that have none at all and have to import everything.
obviously not, and that's mostly going to be military contracts more than anything. Regardless, this doesn't change the economics here, if you can buy it from the hydrogen empire cheaper, and your business isn't the US military, then it doesnt fucking matter. Just buy it from them.
Strategic doesn't mean just military. It means strategically investing in this capacity so you don't get caught with your pants down when Russia turns off the tap and destroys your economy overnight. We're past the globalist world now, and if your country is still making decisions as if we are, you're not doing it right.
that's only true if you're a trump supporter, it's absolutely true if you're not. There are most definitely concerns to be had, as there always are, but globalism is fundamentally good for the economy. There is no world in which this isn't true, so you should push towards globalism, even if there is some risk, because it will likely stabilize relations significantly.
The pandemic and Ukraine shows you can't just count on global markets in a crisis, and we're heading into a world with more, not less crises. Countries everywhere are onshoring critical industries, and the BRICS countries are working on getting off the dollar. That's happening whether Trump is President or not (and unfortunately he is).
the pandemic was really the only significant player here, since it stopped world trade.
Sure russia is a fair example, but here in the US we barely felt it, and we did pretty quickly close up the trade problems.
i'm sure countries are moving away from it, and ensuring industry a bit, that's not surprising, it happens everytime. It's going to get outsourced later eventually. And they're not going to onshore every single industry either, it's simply not possible.
Yeah but your electricity also needs to be produced by reusable manners, which commonly results in solar power. And since the intensity of solar rays and the amount of sunny hours per day vary on the global scale there are some countries which are capable of producing more hydrogen and cheaper than producing locally. I know that the German government is looking at Marocco to establish a hydrogen production and import.
We absolutely can 'make oil'. Been doing it since world war II. Synthetic oil is extremely common.
I mean, yeah, but also, that's not really efficient or effective for burning.
Neither is hydrogen.
I'm not disagreeing, but if the energy is surplus, might as well make hydrogen, at least we don't end up with pollution.
Oh certainly. Power storage is a real problem, especially with up-down renewables. I just didn't understand why you were saying oil can't be produced but hydrogen can. Synthesizing oil for power storage is a terrible idea 😄
Same for hydrogen really. The only case where it really matters is flight, which requires energy densities that will only ever be achieved by hydrocarbons or maybe hydrogen.
arguably, compressing natural gas into LNG is fucking stupid, but apparently the market rates work out, so it's economically viable. And here we are compressing a gas into a liquid just to ship it over the ocean lol.
market economies are just funny.
you really think this is going to stop the globalism aspect from happening? If you can ship something, and get better market rates on it, you're going to do it. Economics follows the cheapest route, not the most efficient.
It also just makes sense if you think about it. Places like alaska are going to struggle to generate green energy compared to another place like, texas for example. If you can ship in green hydrogen much cheaper than you can locally produce energy, why wouldn't you? It's a reasonable solution to the problem of supply and demand scaling.
Yeah, but Alaska uses dramatically less energy than... like, everywhere. Given that there are no people and the only industries are either oil or resources.
oil and resource industries are pretty well known for being energy intensive no?
last i checked industry is the primary energy consumer. Sure there's less people in alaska, but it was just an example i picked, and the market economics would still be applicable there. If it's cheaper to buy hydrogen, than it is to produce locally sourced power, that's going to be what happens.
Not in comparison to... normal things like people and manufacturing.
And oil is oil, it's self-powering. Many/most are powered off of the propane out-gassing to dedicated turbines.
no we can't make hydrogen everywhere, there will be regions with large excess of renewable energy compared to population. these places could export hydrogen. you also don't need a lot of transport if crude is extracted near place where it's used, like for example heavy crude from alberta
The problem with the comparison is hydrocarbons are the energy source, hydrogen is no it's just the energy carrier. It is very inefficient to convert energy to hydrogen then convert it back again. Something like 60% round trip efficiency. Not to mention the cost and loss in loading into containers and shipping it around the world. It's also not a very dense fuel per volume especially compared to oil. It's just way easier and cheaper to have cables that run from one place to another. They are already building one from Australia to Singapore and if it's successful that will probably open the floodgates. There aren't many places that are more than 2000 miles away from large sources of renewable energy even if your thinking places like Alaska which could do hydro if there ever was dense enough populations anywhere that would consume it.
this is less of a problem when you don't use it for energy, but instead as a feedstock like in synthesis of ammonia or steelmaking. you can make ammonia in many places, but it's not the case for steel
That implies that we can make electricity everywhere, which is technically true but not really the case because there's countries with more and with less free space, with more suitable places and less suitable places to put renewables.
Those ammonia tankers will happen. At that point btw we're not just talking about electricity, but also chemical feedstock.
While true, it's very unlikely we'll use hydrogen. It's very impractical for this use compared to alternatives
If you have water you have hydrogen.
there's no reason to transport hydrogen if they build infrastructure to use it as a fuel they will build a process to make it on site