AliSaket

joined 6 months ago
[–] AliSaket@mander.xyz 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The main problem with Hydrogen is the efficiency. If we want to get off fossil fuels, we need to talk about primary energy, not only the electricity consumed today. That alone means that we need multiple of the electric production (the physicist in me shudders at that word) of what we have today.

So instead of the finite resource of oil or gas, there's a bottleneck in energy production and its infrastructure, which means that we need to be efficient with the energy we have. With Hydrogen, you first need energy for Hydrolysis, then cool it down and pressurize it which uses a lot of energy. And then converting it back in the fuel cell to usable electric energy is again lossy. On a good day that's an overall efficiency of about 30% (which is around the peak efficiency of the combustion itself in modern ICEs). A good LiPo Battery (which comes with its own problems, and for industrial applications energy density is less of a problem) has a roundtrip efficiency of 98%. So you'd need triple the production infrastructure (PV, wind mills, geothermal, etc.) for your storage, if you'd do everything with H2 compared to everything with batteries.

Which means, that if there aren't major breakthroughs, like a totally different technology (e.g. photosensitive bacteria) to produce H2 at a multiple of the efficiency of today's tech, then H2 and E-Fuels in general have to be reserved for the applications, where energy and power density are un-negotionable (like airplanes, some construction equipment, or for some agricultural applications).

[–] AliSaket@mander.xyz 22 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I'd add an overlapping step sponsored by BP in 2004: "Climate Change is real, and here's a calculator to show you, that we have nothing to do with it."

For the uninitiated: The Carbon Footprint Calculator was introduced by BP in 2004 as what can only be described as a successful attempt to shift attention and blame to the general public.

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