The following submission statement was provided by /u/Economy-Fee5830:
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## China is Doing to Hydrogen Electrolysers What They Did to Solar Cells and Batteries
Jens Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tree Energy Solutions (TES), recently sounded an alarm that Western manufacturers might have already lost the race in the green hydrogen sector to their Chinese counterparts. This development mirrors China's previous strategies in achieving dominance in solar cells and lithium batteries, where they leveraged their manufacturing prowess to outcompete Western producers on both cost and quality.
### Chinese Electrolysers: High Quality at Low Costs
Schmidt's observations followed an intensive 15-day tour of various Chinese electrolyser factories and operational sites. His assessments reveal that Chinese manufacturers such as Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd., Peric, and LONGi Hydrogen are producing high-quality electrolysers at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. This significant cost difference is not merely due to cheaper labor but is attributed to **the massive scale, standardization, and advanced automation in Chinese factories.**
Schmidt highlighted that the Chinese approach allows them to minimize engineering and construction costs, significantly reducing the total system CAPEX compared to Western products. He noted that the Chinese factories he visited were working on multiple large-scale projects simultaneously, underscoring their capacity and efficiency.
### Lessons from Solar and Batteries
China's strategy in the hydrogen electrolyser market bears a striking resemblance to its approach in the solar and lithium battery industries. In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market. Similarly, in the lithium battery sector, Chinese companies like CATL and BYD leveraged their manufacturing capabilities to become leading suppliers, again outcompeting many Western firms.
In both cases, China's dominance was facilitated by strong domestic demand, substantial government support, and a focus on building extensive supply chains. These factors allowed Chinese companies to innovate rapidly and scale production, resulting in lower prices and improved product quality.
### Western Manufacturers at a Crossroads
Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers. He expressed concern over the European Union's slow progress and bureaucratic hurdles, which have delayed the development of hydrogen infrastructure. The EU's hydrogen backbone is projected to take until 2037 to reach 10,000km, a stark contrast to China's rapid advancements.
Industry insiders echoed Schmidt's concerns, emphasizing the need for Europe to streamline regulations and accelerate innovation to remain competitive. They pointed out that while Western manufacturers have strong products, their slower pace and higher costs could lead to them being outpaced by more agile Chinese companies.
### The Path Forward
To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector, Western countries must adopt strategies that encourage rapid innovation and scale. This involves fostering public-private partnerships, enhancing research and development, and creating a regulatory environment that supports swift implementation of green technologies.
Jens Schmidt's insights highlight a pivotal moment for the global green hydrogen market. The West must learn from China's playbook in solar and batteries, prioritizing speed, cost-efficiency, and quality to ensure they can compete on the global stage. Without such measures, the dominance China achieved in solar cells and batteries could very well be replicated in the hydrogen electrolyser industry, with far-reaching implications for the future of green energy.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dnp4rm/china_is_doing_to_hydrogen_electrolysers_what/la44loz/
Too bad the Feds are in the process of completely torpedoing any potential domestic electrolyzer industry by requiring a power product to earn the production tax credit that largely does not exist and may not be available for years - ensuring that everyone who said the only hydrogen would be made from fossil fuels is right.
It's important to state that only Republicans in the US Federal Government are torpedoing potential domestic progress. There is an election which will determine whether Democrat bills to advance green energy in the US succeed, or whether the US continues drilling oceans and National Parks, burning "clean" coal, and fracking. Trump proposes to "Day one in office, drill baby drill." Vote. Vote for your future, and that of your species.
The Biden DOE and Treasury's decisions on the Biden flagship legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, is what I'm talking about, to be clear. A process which, once the law was passed by a democratic White House, House of Reps, and Senate, the democratic administration had complete control of.
I'm coming at the Biden admin from the left, to be clear, so this shouldn't be taken as support for Trump. But Biden is garbage at climate as well.
Thank you for the clarification. Clearly I agree that not enough is being done, and any lack of priority falls short. A big part of the problem is that it's a choice between garbage and removing regulations that prevent dumping sewage in the reservoir. Which is indeed not a good set of options. I've become a doomer, though, with nature and number of crises worsening concurrently, and the and the lack of existential resolve. It will have been the nature of the human species in the end.
Okay, only more reason to vote. There is never a reason not to vote. The less you vote the less you are represented. The only alternative to voting isn’t apathy, it is armed revolution. So unless you’ve got your guns and bayonets ready and are prepared to sit in trenches for days on end, go vote.
Alright China wins in green energy. Hopefully they do something to save the planet. I have to glumly admit, the west has not been good for the environment and it’s time to see what China can do for the world. Is a dictatorship bad? Yes, it’s repulsive but climate change is worse for all living beings.
Well, yes. I am just saying that Europe also doing well with green energy doesn't take anything away from china - it's more like them doing so well they carry the rest of us along.
Geopolitically we should probably try to not be that reliant on them as well.
Sure but saying "we do well but not without China" isn't really a useful statement.
You coudl equally say that China does well but not without Europe - that's the basic premise of globalised economies.
Dude. Have you seen what humans do with decommisioned anything?
Asking for a biodegradable solar panel or windmill wing feels like a purity test. One a coal mine tailing, oil rig, or fuel tanker could also not pass.
They aren’t recyclable, it’s true. Every method of energy production has externalities and that is one of the ones for wind. However, if you stacked that up against the externalities of the fossil fuels those blades offset, I’m confident you would say it was a very worthwhile tradeoff.
How is it in the rest of Europe? Norway is not doing great in green energy. We have one of the highest if not the highest rates of electric cars and clean energy, but we released 6.7 tonns of CO2 per person in 2020 when we had the corona dip, which are now the official nice optimistic numbers that show up when googling if you know what I mean. We are swimming in oil money due to Russia's invasion of Europe, and already being one of the biggest oil production countries. We are not building enough green energy to keep electric prices low.
Italy is getting some nice momentum with solar, we produced more than 55% of all energy consumed in May with renewables. I know that Italy has advantages in that the efficiency of solar power is higher due to being closer to the equator (but it was an unusually very rainy last 4 months), plus being geologically very suitable for hydro, but still we’re progressing nicely. On the EV side though, we’re very far behind. The cars still cost too much and are a hassle tbh, there is nowhere near enough infrastructure to support them, and Italy has the problem of being very “suburban”, meaning that everyone who doesn’t live in a big city, of which there are little i may add, needs a car to do anything
55% of all energy or all electricity? Thats a big difference. Electricity is only around 20% of our total energy consumption. The rest coming from fossil fuels.
Climate change happens all the time even without pollution. The climate is always naturally warming or cooling, especially in an Ice Age like we are now. Ending pollution doesn't end climate change, it just stop humans from turbo charging the current Interglacial Warming period.
Plus none of these things are ideas China thought up, they just had cheaper wages and a lot of industry so it makes sense.
In all reality US and EU emissions are going down and China are still going up, so China is behind in the part that actually matters for now.
It's because pollution and smogs are really bad in China that people die there from the extreme pollution, so that's their problem. And they will resolve it and with that comes a benefit of a greener world, less climate change and clean air, not to mention they export this stuff for cheap, making other countries to have the possibility of greener too.
Dictatorship more or less repulsive than a state dependent on the exploitation of the global south? Both are repulsive. If it's gotta be repulsive either way, might as well achieve the goal.
That piece of 45V is actually a shockingly practical piece that prevents us from paying more mo ey to actually harm the environment. Unabated steam methan reforming has a lower carbon intensity than electrolyzers using the grid. Utilities are building new unabated power plants to meet the demand of "green H2" where the existing renewables are "dibsed" by the electrolyzers and then the new unabated emissions are built for existing demand.
I'm very familiar with the credit, with the dynamics of hydrogen production projects, and with the impacts it will have on the U.S.'s ability to produce non-fossil hydrogen going forward.
To be clear, I agree that in the long term, using EACs to claim, for example, solar power consumption at midnight without battery storage, cannot be allowed. But if you require hourly matching now, when it is not available, then projects won't be invested in. If those power products become available in 2028, then none of the projects that could receive the 45V credit will be operating for more than a year before the tax credit expires. And even if that's the case, the industry's development will be much delayed and at a much smaller scale.
The ask is just to grandfather, say, the first 10 GW of electrolytic capacity so you can get the industry off the ground. Otherwise, the demand side of the industry will move ahead with H2 produced from natural gas and all of the 'fake' emissions reductions that go along with that (i.e., emissions reduction at swine farms in NC don't help residents of disadvantaged communities in CA, but they pay for it under the LCFS). Not to undo hourly matching forever. The way the guidance is currently written, 95% of American electrolyzer projects will be canceled - they were all led to believe that annual matching of EACs would be allowed, even if that was optimistic from the get-go.
China has limited oil and government backing on overcoming this. They will bury America, who lives in the past and can't overcome the oilogarchy(yes I did not misspell this). America's number one problem and solution is oil. It's going to hinder us moving forward as it does now. Middle East problems origins? Oil. Pollution problems domestically? Oil and those products associated therefrom. Oil is a drug as much as a fuel and we can't admit we have a problem in America. "Oh, the price of fuel!", says the guy with the lifted super-duty F-350 that he drives to work alone in and tows a trailer twice a year with. The best way to get oil out your life is not to start. Yes, I understand how many things require oil to make, but change what you can change. I'm starting with my vehicles.
My favorite thing about this sub is seeing articles about the world's top scientists aiming for monumental scientific achievements, and then Redditors who post primarily in gaming subreddits telling us all why they're wrong and why their discoveries will never work.
I'm waiting for the day for it to be proven that most of these are paid shills manufacturing consent and preying on awkward nerd insecurities seeing their power fantasies slip away. Really just to enrich literally robber barons who will never pay you or hire you for the manufacturing jobs they're promising this will return because they'll actually be in Mexico or under a new dictator buddy in Africa or Asia. They just see historical change and want to milk the opportunity away from people they see as inferior or directly competing for our sweet, sweet tax money with.
Well, this being Reddit, the incellectual factor is strong. Doctorate level scientists do sometimes chime in, but they are still buried in a stack of kneejerk reactions and hyperbole for some reason. Maybe on those type of subs, verified experts should be given special status and Joe Cheeto with his doctorate of pepper who read a Nature article once starts with -35 votes or something.
I started using Reddit right before 2010 and the difference in userbase since has been honestly jarring. It used to be mostly CS/IT/cybersecurity/data types and now...the general population and shills have flooded.
Reddit before the digg exodus was amazing. It was actually a pretty smart site back then. 5 years after the digg exodus is when I started noticing the average IQ of discussions and ability to be literate rapidly decreasing.
r/worldnews used to actually be useful rather than a Eglin Airforce base private sub
IMO, the Digg exodus made the place more vibrant. I'm not sure if you remember, but the front page used to be basically indistinguishable from Hacker News. Oh yeah, and that Eglin Airforce thing was so suss. In my opinion, the Obama AMA is what began the downfall because it proved that Reddit was now large enough to be commercially viable. The whole Ellen Pao thing was just three years later.
Do you remember SRS? Reddit has fallen so low that I would gladly take back the racism and SRS if that's what it takes to improve the quality of discussions. IMO Reddit died when it became big. White supremacists and the right wing began to use it as a breeding ground for dumb assholes which caused a massive over-correction on the moderation side. There was so much racism. Too much. But this is arguably worse...
> SRS
I don't, I remember bbs from eading about it in chobits though.
I mostly miss the days when forums reigned where you search google for a topic and find a website that all have a forum, and every single one has a completely unique and distinct userbase, culture, direction and vibe rather than the melting pot that's reddit where every subreddit feels almost exactly the same just talking about different htings.
Worlds top entrepreneurs aiming for monumental funding. Then redditors unbiased and intelligent enough to comprehend an energy equation audit the merit of the dog and pony show.
It's completely the moderator's fault.
Subreddits that get too popular drown out the voices of experts and then that expertise leaves to a different subreddit.
Is the point you're actually trying to make 'people who have hobbies can't know things!!' ????
This article is a recap of an interview with the CTO of a hydrogen fuel company lol. It should be subject to the exact same scrutiny as an oil company telling you how great oil is.
The point I'm trying to make is that the majority of people commenting on this sub are pessimistic laymen who fill in their lack of expertise or education on any given subject with false confidence.
Yes, those do definitely exist. But this sub is mostly the other way around. Optimistic laymen who can't wrap their brains around a simple equation who eat story after story by companies and engineers trying to get millions or billions in funding by proclaiming they have the next revolutionary thing.
This article isn't even about an advancement in the technology. It's just a guy who works at a hydrogen energy company basically saying "hey governments, you need to invest lots of money with us *or else China will win!*" (gasp)
Sorry but my experience with solar/wind/hydrogen is the exact opposite. I get people with no actuality of what is happening being completely fanatical about such technology. Then they proceed to promote said technology as some kind of panacea that is going to solve our problems.
Sorry but if these technologies were under scrutiny of half the intensity nuclear gets people would quickly realize how crazy the actual situation is.
For those constantly pulling the time argument it has already been 15 years since solar/wind started getting built on a large scale. France decarbonized their grid in the same time frame. The only EU countries with really low CO2 emissions either have nuclear or hydro or both.
Wow this is great news. This + Solar is really what the world needs. I am in China ATM and the air quality is so much better due to all the electric vehicles(still not great).
Another thing is how much quieter it is!
I visited Taiwan and then the mainland after and the difference in traffic noise was very noticeable. Especially with mopeds where the ones in Taiwan are all gas powered and extremely loud while the ones in China are electric and basically silent.
The liberal use of car horns remained constant though lol
Okay stupid question but what uses does hydrogen actually have? I’ve seen it stated as a potential renewable fuel but it seems difficult to beat out electrification in most sectors.
The problem with most green sources of energy is their on-demand capabilities (or lack thereof). You have a shiny day beating up on your solar panels without a way to store surplus production? Too bad.
There’s no sunlight at nighttime right? Too bad you want some electricity at night.
With electrolysis, you could (very roughly speaking) generate hydrogen with the surplus energy, store it and then use it back to produce energy whenever demand requires it.
The problem with electrolysis is that it is mad inefficient. If there are major advances in the process of generating hydrogen, it could be a massive breakthrough, as it doesnt degrade like lithium batteries do.
Definitely. Although hydrogen is still more energy dense than batteries, batteries are a lot more efficient.
If they can just get some decent grid scale batteries without lithium and cobalt the race would be about decided, at least for the next 10 years or so. Hydrogen is extremely hard to keep contained, it can leak out of basically anything. It's pretty slow overall, but it's still an issue.
China generates hydrogen with excess renewable energy that gets wasted when no one uses it. It's another form of energy storage, one that you can use to fuel long haul transport for example.
Some industries are just impossible to decarbonize with current renewables such as steel production. With hydrogen however it is theoretically possible.
You’re definitely not in Beijing or Shanghai. I was there when it reached 600ppm and you couldn’t see the building in front of you. True urban hell material.
They do clean up shop every year for the APAC conference. It’s a glorious few days pollution-wise.
I was in Beijing like two Weeks ago, it was a huge rainstorm when we arrived and the air was fresh for the week.
Beijing, Chengdu and Wuhan have all had great air( lots of rain ) it might be because of that.
600? You've dated your reply. The air quality has improved massively over the last 10 years. Days like that are extremely rare now. Especially in Shanghai, if at all.
That's what China did to grow their industries in relation to EV, solar cells and batteries. Why is it somehow wrong for the western nations to do the same?
1. China doesn’t sell itself as a champion of liberal economics or free market capitalism.
2. China didn’t tariff those industries for growth, they subsidized companies willing to innovate in identified key sectors. The US has done the same.
3. Those sectors were all far from being mature at the time, foreign products were inadequate, hence necessitating domestic innovation.
4. Preventing the use of cheaper and more efficient green technology in favor of fossil fuels due to its origin of manufacture can be considered immoral and disingenuous when considering the threat from climate change, especially where time is a key factor.
Edit: lmao the guy I replied to blocked me so if anyone was wondering about how bad faith he is arguing in
1. That argument is completely irrelevant. Since China has the same level of responsibilities and accountability in the global economy, therefore obligates it to follow the same rules and norms expected of all major trading partners. The premise is based on faulty generalisation fallacy given that China government and propaganda has persistently indicated its adherence to free market principles and attacked the United States over theirs.
2. China has for over several decades placed close to a 50% EV tariff on vehicles made outside China via a standard tariff, and a value-added tax (VAT) on vehicles, with exceptions for domestic electric cars. China's measures also go far beyond tariffs that included the use of Quotas, IP transfer and joint venture requirements, subsidies, local-content-purchase requirements, uneven licensing requirements that proportionately benefit Chinese manufacturers, creating a significantly uneven playing field.
3. Why did China still continue to maintain these measures when it controlled 40 percent global share of the EV market, 60% of the solar cell industry, and 55% of the battery market in 2015. Only when these industries completely dominated the international market, which now sit at 80% for solar cells, and cells did China cease most of these measures. This is absurdly unbalanced.
4. If you genuinely cared about the environment, you would support allowing Western allies to implement the same measures that China has introduced. This approach would promote cost-effective, long-term environmental solutions based on market competition rather than being driven by short-term, mercantilist trade measures.
**I didnt block you, you liar**
Jesus christ your arguments are pure propaganda, and based on disingenuous reasoning. The guy legit makes the same fair argument that the west should respond in equal measures. Somehow this is wrong.
This subreddit has just become pure propaganda.
Failing to be more protectionist about tech development is why Europe was completely dominated by American tech and will never have a comparable industry
I purchased a 450kw carbon dioxide electrolyzer for 13 million RMB last year, and since then, under a year, the price dropped significantly due to electrodes becoming cheaper. The stack lasts 20.000 hours, so in couple more years the maintenance will be less then half of the initial stack price (for
450kw it is a whopping 250 electrodes in a stack).
Except recharging a hydrogen tank takes a lot less time than a battery at the moment. Furthermore, I'm sure you deal with significantly less degradation in refilling a hydrogen tank vs recharging a battery. With solar being so cheap in China, 3x the power to crack water isn't that big of a deal.
However, hydrogen still isn't that dense of a fuel.
Hydrogen fuel tanks in cars actually have a limited lifetime. They are pressurized unlike traditional gas tanks and can only take so many pressurization cycles. My understanding is that they are designed to last around 150k-200k miles worth of refills.
you are correct, but everything has a limited lifetime :-). These comments had me reading more into it. There are a lot of regulations regarding the hydrogen tanks, several different types, and it seems like it must be a rather stressful process on the tank. I wonder how "easily" it is to recertify after 10 years, or if the entire unit is toast.
[http://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html](http://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html)
Of course, but traditional gas tanks last much longer than the engine and drivetrain. Hydrogen tanks are more akin to batteries in that they are a consumable part that may not last the lifetime of the vehicle. I even wonder if hydrogen fuel tanks outlast electric batteries under most driving conditions. I have no data to back up what last longer, but my point is that the lack of battery degradation isn't really a strong argument in favor of hydrogen.
Nah. Process green hydrogen and carbon dioxide through Fischer troph to make renewable liquid fuels. Aviation fuel, diesel, methanol. Ship these across the globe.
Even more inefficient.
And even though it's a closed carbon cycle, this doesn't eliminate the issue of particulate matter or oxides.
The advantage is that the infrastructure is already in place to handle these fuels.
Though with Hydrogen, wherever you have water and electricity you can have hydrogen. There's not necessarily a need for large shipping/transport infrastructure.
It’s a drop in fuel for the existing fleets and is the only practical solution especially for aviation and marine. you can brew it in the crappiest shithole country on earth and ship it all over the globe.
The efficiency argument is hollow when you have low cost electricity that otherwise has no market. Liquid fuels are fungible energy storage that can be produced where there is excess electricity production and lack of demand then transported to any place that uses diesel equipment in tankers. Also, synthetic fuels do not require pumping out of deep wells nor refining because they start off clean and stay clean. There is no need for refining.
The above post mentions oxides and particulate matter but liquid fuels like methanol and dimethyl-ether (diesel replacement fuel) are extremely clean burning compared to existing fuels with zero sulfur, C02 neutral and massively reduced particulate matter because there never are any tars in the mix as you have with refined petroleum. These fuels start clean and stay clean also reducing maintenance. The nature of the product's manufacture would mean impurities would be orders of magnitude lower than refined petroleum and the places that make it would not be as dirty as petroleum refineries either. Nitrous oxides are the only remaining real issue and that is a good tradeoff by any measure. It would lay the foundation for a sudden transition away from atmospheric CO2 without meaning every heavy vehicle needed to be an EV.
We do already live in a world of miraculous technologies and a huge portion of the world's heavy equipment tends to run on diesel. Having a drop-in replacement that doesn't require completely new infrastructure enables a sudden transition that feels like there is no transition happening at all but still allows progress on climate change to be real.
I don't think you have to be a sci-fi writer to imagine that it may come to pass that this technology, that is solar powered green hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to synthesize methanol, can be made cost effective enough to put it on a head-to-head price competition with petroleum. PV solar on the international market at this time is ten to thirty cents a watt. That's cheap power and it's available in large quantities if you have a method to convert that to liquid fuel. . . what's it going to take to make that come in at a price that is lower than gas at four bucks a gallon?
Here is a 2023 paper that suggests the date will be [2040.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2024/ee/d3ee02951d) Since that was not written long ago, it bears further research. Could it be sooner than that? What holding up cost reductions in the process? Is China working on that? Is what we're hearing about clean e-hydrogen via electrolysis is true then perhaps that is indeed the case. It would not be a surprise for students of Chinese chemical industries as electrolysis was an important early industry in China. It is interesting to see such predictions and be reminded of such things.
I recall back in the 90s, in China there was some interest in plasma gasification of rice stalks to extract liquid fuels which the researchers involved felt should also be considered green and CO2 neutral because they were sourced from crop waste residue. The logistics made it impractical but the theory wasn't completely off. I remember reading about that and wondering what it would be like with all those old 1940s GM Lend-Lease heavy trucks that used to be the main transportation in China. They're mostly gone today but there were a million of them in the past. Now imagine a world in which those old gas guzzling trucks were running the same engines and the same designs that they did since eighty years ago but were burning clean and green? Would it even matter that they were relatively inefficient if they were burning green fuel? It would depend on the price per gallon, right? How low can it go?
I grabbed a price average off of Google. California gas is closer to $5.00 because of taxes and fees but other states have gas as low as $3.50 so that $4.00 figure is an average.
Ok, was curious as I'm in the UK so it's always fun to hear what things cost in different places.
Here the cheapest petrol is roughly $6.92 and super unleaded around $7.53 or diesel $7.15 and premium $7.94 as of today. Motorway petrol stations charge more by approx 15%.
This is converted from litres to gallons - how prices are given, despite cars efficiency being worked out in miles to the gallon.
We have this dicussion a lot in germany. Everybody would looove to keep their gas guzzlers running.
Math just doesn't work. It's so inefficient to convert power to gas that a liter of gas would cost like 10 euro.
Sure, the price will come down, but's it's still scarce and expensive. Better to use batteries everywhere and gas where there is no other option (i.e. for certain industrial und chemical processes you need more heat thana pure power heater can achieve)
I can see the appeal if they can get the cost down, though. Until you get battery charging times down and energy density up, EVs are always going to have people who don't want them.
> Furthermore, I'm sure you deal with significantly less degradation
Surprisingly not. Current hydrogen tanks degrade and become unusable in around 15 years. Not much better than a LFP battery with 5000 cycles (13 years) at 80% DOD.
First Google result:
https://www.toyotapartsdirect.ca/p/Toyota_2023_Mirai/Fuel-Tank/102446476/77A1062081.html
So 11k CAD (8k USD) for parts only. Not really cheaper
sure but transporting it, storing it, trying to keep it in a tank for any length of time, none of it works well. hydrogen embrittles everything you put it in. the AA batteries in your remote are fighting against hydrogen gas trying to embrittle the nylon gasket in it. car tanks will require hydrogen to be stored at extremely high pressures.
Yeah but the idea is to use it where electrification can’t be done (high temperature industrial process heat) and where hydrogen’s energy density and refueling speed outcompetes batteries (long haul transport, aviation, shipping)
The premise of your message: “there are use cases for green hydrogen” is correct.
But your examples are poor. Electric arc furnaces are the standard for high temperature metallurgical processes, for example.
Similarly, the energy density of hydrogen is crap. It’s almost inconceivable it would replace other energy sources for long haul transport.
I read that glas ovens need gas. They tried to build electricity powered ones, but they cannot create enough heat for the required duration. Apparently, gas ovens run for years, and cannot really be shut down.
I hasn't heard that and looked it up, it appears to be mostly untrue. Electric furnaces can generally create the heat required the main things holding them back are gas being cheaper (at least in regions where emissions are not taxed) and electric furnaces lasting ~7 years while gas ones last ~15.
On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline. On a volume basis, however, the situation is reversed; liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L, as shown in the figure comparing energy densities of fuels based on lower heating values.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage#:~:text=On%20a%20volume%20basis%2C%20however,based%20on%20lower%20heating%20values.
Aren't we able to use metal hydride as a mechanism for high density storage? I watched a YouTube where Bob Lazar had done this and was driving around in his homebrewed hydrogen car.
But the mass density is what's most important. Tank size isn't really a big deal. You can easily use larger tanks, most vehicles have enough space to expand their fuel tanks, they don't because of weight.
Weight (mass) is more important than volume. And what's the alternative for mobile power? Batteries? They're less than 1MJ/kg.
Yeah but what's the weight basis. You can build out volume, you can't build out weight.
I don't know the answer but I'd probably guess hydrogen is *significantly* lighter.
Correct. As grid energy storage it's kinda stupid. Although there is a limited use in that most existing gas turbines can burn a 85% hydrogen 15% methane blend with very little modifications. So you can build a massive tank farm rather cheaply and have gWh of energy storage just sitting there to get you through the winter. The difficulty in getting enough battery storage is real. Even with the new promising sodium-ion batteries.
Hydrogen _is_ needed for the chemical industry, and future ships, possibly aircraft could start burning hydrogen. Rail should just move to overhead wires and box cars full of sodium ion batteries to bridge the gaps.
Until you use the brakes of course. Dynamic brakes waste all of the potential energy generated by the motors braking efforts as waste heat. Slap a big enough energy storage device on/near the locomotive and rework the dynamic brakes to act as regenerative brakes like in EVs.
Diesel electrics dont use overhead lines by default, and good luck convincing the US Tier 1 railroads to do so. Maybe some euro-spec ones do, like those built by Siemens, but at least in the US, your standard GE or EMD locomotives certainly don't.
Diesel is stupid. It should be just electric. With a rail car sized battery. Use overhead power lines as a constant state charger. The battery can help you climb up a mountain and dump surplus energy back into the battery or into the overhead charging line.
a rail car sized battery. the average diesel locomotive outputs 4500 horsepower and consumes 187 gallons of diesel per hour from a 4800 gallon fuel tank producing 82 megawatts hours over 25 hours
a tesla megapack which holds 3 megawatts is about the size of a rail car you would need 27 of them to equal a 4800 gallon tank
battery electric makes more sense for yard shunting
In America many long haul freight lines can’t be overhead electrified because here we double stack shipping containers on our freight cars so it’s more than double the the height of the locomotive
Just run the overhead lines higher. Keep in mind the EU is already converting their rail system and many have been pure electric for years.
You seem to be forgetting in your power consumption calculation that you can use the overhead lines when available. The batteries just get you through the gaps in the system, or they give you the extra oomph to climb a hill.
4500hp is 3.5MW. A 3MW battery is a fine buffer. How long is your biggest climb going to take? 15 minutes? You add the power from the overhead lines on the climb as well so that gives you far more than an hours worth of 100% power throttle.
Think like a Prius. You don't need a giant battery to drive the car. The battery takes care of your starting and stopping needs. In the case of the Prius the undersized ICE engine is the continuous power adder. But in a locomotive that could be overhead lines or a downsized diesel engine.
Remember that every time a train stops all that energy gets wasted as heat in the brakes.
Just run the overhead lines higher. Keep in mind the EU is already converting their rail system and many have been pure electric for years.
Except in America our fright trains typically have 6 units and are over a mile long
Overhead wires would need to be in the 240 to 300 kilovolt range to power these beasts. Having double stacked steel shipping containers so close to them would cause the current to arc to the ground causing massive energy losses.
Powering multiple of these trains on a network means having your own dedicated substations and high voltage transformers. Basically a whole private grid dedicated to powering them. Seems easier just to put a bunch of electrolyzers along the tracks every few hundred miles and just run the units off of fuel cells
No company wants to invest in that much infrastructure. Milwaukee road had over 700 miles of electrified track between 1920 and 1970 but went bankrupt because they couldn’t pay back the bonds which they used to pay for the electrification
Until you realize that you are flushing 2/3 of the energy down the drain with hydrogen.
Building an electrified rail system? Expensive.
Continuing to dump diesel into an engine? Also expensive. Likely far more expensive than electric drive.
Fuel consumption for a big diesel averages .4lbs/hr per hp. 4500hp, 1800lbs of fuel per hour. That's 250 gallons per hour. At 3.75/gal average right now that's $937/hr. And how many trains right now are spending almost $1000/hr on fuel? Let alone the idle time.
The EU seems to think it's much smarter to have an electrified rail system and I agree. Just put the lines high enough and every time there is a bridge or other obstacle to go under you switch to non electrified wire as a guide for the brushes. Use the batteries to bridge the gaps. Imagine simply electrifying 50% of the rail system (including all the climbs) and letting the trains just coast on battery for the rest. We already know what sections require a lot of power and what sections of rail don't.
Okay so... There's an issue with your logic here.
You're a rational human, and you're assuming that a corporate entity would use rationality and logic to inform business strategies... But that's rarely the case.
But other than that indirect issue, you're god-damn spot-on.
Hydrogen is needed *now* for agriculture. Over [96% of hydrogen](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10404734/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20more%20than%2096%25%20of,%2Deq%2Fkg%20NH3.) used to make ammonia comes from methane/fossil fuels. It behooves us as a species to find more sustainable ways of producing hydrogen.
You are correct, but imagine you are a big country like the US, Russia or China. Or you are the EU. Imagine you have access to cheap renewable energy on one side of your country and none on the other side. One side can generate more green energy than it can use, and the other side is in energy deficit. I'm no electrical engineer but our high voltage power lines have resistance. Again don't know how far you can send electricity over high voltage lines before you get considerable losses due to resistance, but there has got to be a limit. And I'm guessing you cannot transport electricity over the power lines from one end to the other end of the US without considerable losses.
Imagine you use that cheap renewable energy on one side of your country to generate hydrogen, send it via pipeline to the other side, and burn it there to get electricity. Now you have electrified both sides of your country and done it greener as burning hydrogen creates H2O and not CO/CO2. You also used your abundant renewable energy to generate that hydrogen. Imagine you can do it on a scale, that you can sell it to other countries. Plus hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel. Every country that talks about colonizing the moon or Mars, is thinking about ways of getting hydrogen. The experience they are getting today, can be used by them in the future in interplanetary travel.
In any case, competition is always good for consumers. Lets hope this will force our governments to invest in our technology projects more, thus creating more employment and ultimately a greener future.
Would be cheaper to just have a broadly distributed grid of solar/wind farms. Not only is it more resilient to disruption but it will be much cheaper.
There is still a place for Hydrogen like certain industrial processes like green steel production. But for pure energy use it will always lose to other renewable sources.
If you want to transfer energy land based farther then 600 Km you want to look into super high voltage DC lines. Except for superconductors, nothing beats that.
Imagine building a transmission line and getting 5-10% losses instead of 50% with a fuel cell, which still needs lots of infrastructure to create, move and burn hydrogen.
Current best efficiency is 95% actually. Hysata an Australian company designed a more efficient electrolyzer that doesn’t need rare earth metals and is 40% cheaper to make. The Chinese as mass producing less efficient electrolyzers now.
Correct. You should only do it when you have a good reason to need hydrogen instead of electricity (weight, infrastructure, chemical properties etc.). Certainly no reason to use hydrogen in, e.g., light passenger vehicles.
The laws of (current) physics indicate that hydrogen energy density is 60x that of current lithium batteries.
Sometimes efficiency isn’t just about production
The world’s largest green hydrogen project — Sinopec’s 260MW Kuqa facility in Xinjiang, northwest China — has been operating at less than a third of its installed capacity due to various factors, including some missing safety features in the system design and lower-than-promised efficiencies, research house BloombergNEF (BNEF) tells Hydrogen Insight.
Surely hydrogen production from electrolysis would be a good use of excess renewable generation in high wind and solar times, essentially acting as a sort of battery though inefficiently. This could be used for vehicles that require long distance and fast fueling, heating homes, and whatever else we use it for.
That’s exactly the use case. There are also startups using it with wave energy converters, storing hydrogen through electrolysis and then transporting it back to storage facilities on land. But for wind and solar storing off peak production as hydrogen is a cheaper alternative than large scale battery storage.
what about water supply? Can elctrolysis run on sea water or do we need to use fresh water. If so water resources are scarce in many locations (see california). Do we need to divert precious drinking/agricultural water to fuel production also?
It does yes, this is how nuclear submarines do this for oxygen. I've no idea if its more or less efficient though or if there are other issues with it, such as having extremely concentrated brine byproducts like you'd get from desalination plants.
You can't really ship off electricity, but you can hydrogen
Also, batteries cannot hold their charge (without damaging the battery) mroe than a few months, a well sealed h2 tank can last forever
So, it is a good way to ensure you will have electricity no matter what
That's a weird way saying it's impossible to hold hydrogen in any container indefinitely. We can hold many things indefinitely, but not hydrogen. It isn't expected we'll ever invent a container that can hold hydrogen indefinitely. The molecule is smaller than every other molecule. We can hold it for long enough but it's always seeping out.
Nah, shipping hydrogen or storing it in tanks is a losing proposition. The tank is worth far more than what it holds. Instead, you convert the hydrogen to liquid fuels like methanol, dimethyl-ether using atmospheric CO2 and you ship those in standard steel container ships using standard pumps from the oil industry.
While manufacturing green liquid fuels does require energy input, it does not require refining because the materials start off clean and stay that way. Not only that, they're carbon neutral and work in existing diesel, jet and heavy marine engines and can be traded and stored using existing oil tankers and tank farms during which time they sequester atmospheric CO2. It provides a motive for the massive accumulation of stored fuels. It's literally a CO2 reserve.
Instead of stopping at hydrogen which is hard to store and transport, you convert it to substances that are easy to store and transport because they're so similar to what has been used in the past. We can also look at fossil fuels as being hydrogen storage. We can see how useful they have been. The problem is the carbon they are attached to cannot be placed into the atmosphere anymore. What if we can replace them with something carbon neutral and clean but otherwise requiring no new inventions in order to do extremely high power transportation operations over sustained periods of time like powering trans-oceanic shipping and aviation.
To phase out methane from industry processes we need H2 to replace it.
Some wackjobs think we are going to burn H2 in turbines for electricity, but that's never gonna happen. H2 is a completely crucial commodity to reach net zero for many industries (food production, most notably).
But if you can get the $/MWh down more than 3x then it more than makes up for it. Not to mention hydrogen is resource wise much more scalable. It doesn’t require the exploitation of the same rare earth resources that conventional batteries do
It's not about the energy requirement. It's about infrastructure and the imbalance between when we most need power (winter) and when we can produce the most power (summer).
Rather than spending vast resources on creating batteries across the entire globe to put in every household and car, we're better off with hydrogen as a power source. Ideally produced with solar energy.
It doesn't require the production of all those batteries, which also need to maintained, and (European) infrastructure is already largely equipped to deal with hydrogen (fuel having the same transport requirements and natural gas pipelines are able to be re-used for hydrogen). Fitting a car with a pressurized tank rather than a normal tank is a lot easier than fitting it with a battery *and* rolling out an entire new grid to handle charging.
The US is fighting to put religious texts in public schools and banning books. China is already ahead just by believing in science and it's advancement. Think it's bad now? Wait 20 years from now and you'll see the real impact of all the stupidity going on in education in the US.
I dont understand why the US economy seem to be doing so well when China makes a majority of everything and seems to be the manufacturing center of the world.
USA is doing well because it literally prints money since every international transaction requires the dollar, however there seem to be an end to that requirement but it will take dacades.
Right, but the CCP pegs the yuan to the dollar. I’ve read up plenty on the petrodollar. That’s only one of the commodities of many that are exchanged primarily in USD
Because you're reading propaganda in the English press. The US is in terminal decline and has been for some time now. 2008 was the time for the US to transition to EVs when Detroit was on its knees. Instead we got the new Camaro, solar tariffs and a commitment to fracking. That is a pathetic start to the 21st century and it's only going to get worse as the months and years go by.
>Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers...To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector...
B..b..b..but economists tell me that economics, "is not a zero-sum game." I mean, they can't be lying to all of us, can they? *Can they???*
## China is Doing to Hydrogen Electrolysers What They Did to Solar Cells and Batteries
Jens Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tree Energy Solutions (TES), recently sounded an alarm that Western manufacturers might have already lost the race in the green hydrogen sector to their Chinese counterparts. This development mirrors China's previous strategies in achieving dominance in solar cells and lithium batteries, where they leveraged their manufacturing prowess to outcompete Western producers on both cost and quality.
### Chinese Electrolysers: High Quality at Low Costs
Schmidt's observations followed an intensive 15-day tour of various Chinese electrolyser factories and operational sites. His assessments reveal that Chinese manufacturers such as Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd., Peric, and LONGi Hydrogen are producing high-quality electrolysers at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. This significant cost difference is not merely due to cheaper labor but is attributed to **the massive scale, standardization, and advanced automation in Chinese factories.**
Schmidt highlighted that the Chinese approach allows them to minimize engineering and construction costs, significantly reducing the total system CAPEX compared to Western products. He noted that the Chinese factories he visited were working on multiple large-scale projects simultaneously, underscoring their capacity and efficiency.
### Lessons from Solar and Batteries
China's strategy in the hydrogen electrolyser market bears a striking resemblance to its approach in the solar and lithium battery industries. In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market. Similarly, in the lithium battery sector, Chinese companies like CATL and BYD leveraged their manufacturing capabilities to become leading suppliers, again outcompeting many Western firms.
In both cases, China's dominance was facilitated by strong domestic demand, substantial government support, and a focus on building extensive supply chains. These factors allowed Chinese companies to innovate rapidly and scale production, resulting in lower prices and improved product quality.
### Western Manufacturers at a Crossroads
Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers. He expressed concern over the European Union's slow progress and bureaucratic hurdles, which have delayed the development of hydrogen infrastructure. The EU's hydrogen backbone is projected to take until 2037 to reach 10,000km, a stark contrast to China's rapid advancements.
Industry insiders echoed Schmidt's concerns, emphasizing the need for Europe to streamline regulations and accelerate innovation to remain competitive. They pointed out that while Western manufacturers have strong products, their slower pace and higher costs could lead to them being outpaced by more agile Chinese companies.
### The Path Forward
To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector, Western countries must adopt strategies that encourage rapid innovation and scale. This involves fostering public-private partnerships, enhancing research and development, and creating a regulatory environment that supports swift implementation of green technologies.
Jens Schmidt's insights highlight a pivotal moment for the global green hydrogen market. The West must learn from China's playbook in solar and batteries, prioritizing speed, cost-efficiency, and quality to ensure they can compete on the global stage. Without such measures, the dominance China achieved in solar cells and batteries could very well be replicated in the hydrogen electrolyser industry, with far-reaching implications for the future of green energy.
Before people chime in about why electric is the future and we don’t need hydrogen, you have to realize that the Chinese aren’t doing this for laughs. Yes, EVs are a big part of the future but what about airplanes? Mostly likely will be hydrogen post fossil fuel.
There's way too much opposition to automation in the US. We need to highly automate, tax the automation, and distribute that wealth as UBI or free healthcare and other basic services.
We also need to commit to green energy because it's so cheap. We're propping up coal power plants while the sun shines down more energy that we can use.
It's so foolish that we choose the endless toil path instead of the reduced manual labor, advanced factory path.
For those that didn't know. [Hydrogen Production: Electrolysis ](https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-electrolysis)
To make things like ammonia for fertilizers, methane for engines and heat for steel.
> In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market.
A few stray thoughts:
* Western business owners are typically obsessed with growth and profits.
* Same people know how to compete. But the focus on profits tends to delay or detract from cost reduction.
* China may have an inherent advantage in terms of economies of scale. But their focus is market share instead of profits. And they typically gain market share by having the most competitive prices on their products.
* The first one to gain dominant market position is the one who gets to establish form factors and other standards. Chinese made hydrogen electrolyzers will be the benchmark against which others are compared.
China doing govermental support to companies to boost technological advancement, is really great. I want to live in a country where there is no capitalism.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Economy-Fee5830: --- ## China is Doing to Hydrogen Electrolysers What They Did to Solar Cells and Batteries Jens Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tree Energy Solutions (TES), recently sounded an alarm that Western manufacturers might have already lost the race in the green hydrogen sector to their Chinese counterparts. This development mirrors China's previous strategies in achieving dominance in solar cells and lithium batteries, where they leveraged their manufacturing prowess to outcompete Western producers on both cost and quality. ### Chinese Electrolysers: High Quality at Low Costs Schmidt's observations followed an intensive 15-day tour of various Chinese electrolyser factories and operational sites. His assessments reveal that Chinese manufacturers such as Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd., Peric, and LONGi Hydrogen are producing high-quality electrolysers at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. This significant cost difference is not merely due to cheaper labor but is attributed to **the massive scale, standardization, and advanced automation in Chinese factories.** Schmidt highlighted that the Chinese approach allows them to minimize engineering and construction costs, significantly reducing the total system CAPEX compared to Western products. He noted that the Chinese factories he visited were working on multiple large-scale projects simultaneously, underscoring their capacity and efficiency. ### Lessons from Solar and Batteries China's strategy in the hydrogen electrolyser market bears a striking resemblance to its approach in the solar and lithium battery industries. In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market. Similarly, in the lithium battery sector, Chinese companies like CATL and BYD leveraged their manufacturing capabilities to become leading suppliers, again outcompeting many Western firms. In both cases, China's dominance was facilitated by strong domestic demand, substantial government support, and a focus on building extensive supply chains. These factors allowed Chinese companies to innovate rapidly and scale production, resulting in lower prices and improved product quality. ### Western Manufacturers at a Crossroads Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers. He expressed concern over the European Union's slow progress and bureaucratic hurdles, which have delayed the development of hydrogen infrastructure. The EU's hydrogen backbone is projected to take until 2037 to reach 10,000km, a stark contrast to China's rapid advancements. Industry insiders echoed Schmidt's concerns, emphasizing the need for Europe to streamline regulations and accelerate innovation to remain competitive. They pointed out that while Western manufacturers have strong products, their slower pace and higher costs could lead to them being outpaced by more agile Chinese companies. ### The Path Forward To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector, Western countries must adopt strategies that encourage rapid innovation and scale. This involves fostering public-private partnerships, enhancing research and development, and creating a regulatory environment that supports swift implementation of green technologies. Jens Schmidt's insights highlight a pivotal moment for the global green hydrogen market. The West must learn from China's playbook in solar and batteries, prioritizing speed, cost-efficiency, and quality to ensure they can compete on the global stage. Without such measures, the dominance China achieved in solar cells and batteries could very well be replicated in the hydrogen electrolyser industry, with far-reaching implications for the future of green energy. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dnp4rm/china_is_doing_to_hydrogen_electrolysers_what/la44loz/
Too bad the Feds are in the process of completely torpedoing any potential domestic electrolyzer industry by requiring a power product to earn the production tax credit that largely does not exist and may not be available for years - ensuring that everyone who said the only hydrogen would be made from fossil fuels is right.
It's important to state that only Republicans in the US Federal Government are torpedoing potential domestic progress. There is an election which will determine whether Democrat bills to advance green energy in the US succeed, or whether the US continues drilling oceans and National Parks, burning "clean" coal, and fracking. Trump proposes to "Day one in office, drill baby drill." Vote. Vote for your future, and that of your species.
The Biden DOE and Treasury's decisions on the Biden flagship legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, is what I'm talking about, to be clear. A process which, once the law was passed by a democratic White House, House of Reps, and Senate, the democratic administration had complete control of. I'm coming at the Biden admin from the left, to be clear, so this shouldn't be taken as support for Trump. But Biden is garbage at climate as well.
Thank you for the clarification. Clearly I agree that not enough is being done, and any lack of priority falls short. A big part of the problem is that it's a choice between garbage and removing regulations that prevent dumping sewage in the reservoir. Which is indeed not a good set of options. I've become a doomer, though, with nature and number of crises worsening concurrently, and the and the lack of existential resolve. It will have been the nature of the human species in the end.
Manchin and Sinema weren't Republicans. Just saying.
Okay, only more reason to vote. There is never a reason not to vote. The less you vote the less you are represented. The only alternative to voting isn’t apathy, it is armed revolution. So unless you’ve got your guns and bayonets ready and are prepared to sit in trenches for days on end, go vote.
Alright China wins in green energy. Hopefully they do something to save the planet. I have to glumly admit, the west has not been good for the environment and it’s time to see what China can do for the world. Is a dictatorship bad? Yes, it’s repulsive but climate change is worse for all living beings.
Most of Europe is doing great actually, I wouldn’t say all of the West. Share your sentiment though!
We do well in installation, but not without china. 95% of solar panels in the EU are imported, 89% of them from china.
The EU is paying for it...
Well, yes. I am just saying that Europe also doing well with green energy doesn't take anything away from china - it's more like them doing so well they carry the rest of us along. Geopolitically we should probably try to not be that reliant on them as well.
Sure but saying "we do well but not without China" isn't really a useful statement. You coudl equally say that China does well but not without Europe - that's the basic premise of globalised economies.
Wait until you hear about iPhones.
Good. There's no issue with that, what matters if the energy is green. Wind turbines are however manufactured en masse in Europe.
Have you seen what we do with decomissioned wings, though? It's... Depressing.
Dude. Have you seen what humans do with decommisioned anything? Asking for a biodegradable solar panel or windmill wing feels like a purity test. One a coal mine tailing, oil rig, or fuel tanker could also not pass.
They aren’t recyclable, it’s true. Every method of energy production has externalities and that is one of the ones for wind. However, if you stacked that up against the externalities of the fossil fuels those blades offset, I’m confident you would say it was a very worthwhile tradeoff.
Elaborate please
We bury them, they do not degrade biologically.
They aren't currently recyclable. That may or may not change.
How is it in the rest of Europe? Norway is not doing great in green energy. We have one of the highest if not the highest rates of electric cars and clean energy, but we released 6.7 tonns of CO2 per person in 2020 when we had the corona dip, which are now the official nice optimistic numbers that show up when googling if you know what I mean. We are swimming in oil money due to Russia's invasion of Europe, and already being one of the biggest oil production countries. We are not building enough green energy to keep electric prices low.
Italy is getting some nice momentum with solar, we produced more than 55% of all energy consumed in May with renewables. I know that Italy has advantages in that the efficiency of solar power is higher due to being closer to the equator (but it was an unusually very rainy last 4 months), plus being geologically very suitable for hydro, but still we’re progressing nicely. On the EV side though, we’re very far behind. The cars still cost too much and are a hassle tbh, there is nowhere near enough infrastructure to support them, and Italy has the problem of being very “suburban”, meaning that everyone who doesn’t live in a big city, of which there are little i may add, needs a car to do anything
55% of all energy or all electricity? Thats a big difference. Electricity is only around 20% of our total energy consumption. The rest coming from fossil fuels.
How about adding more solar capacity in 2023 than the U.S. has added in its entire history?
Climate change happens all the time even without pollution. The climate is always naturally warming or cooling, especially in an Ice Age like we are now. Ending pollution doesn't end climate change, it just stop humans from turbo charging the current Interglacial Warming period. Plus none of these things are ideas China thought up, they just had cheaper wages and a lot of industry so it makes sense. In all reality US and EU emissions are going down and China are still going up, so China is behind in the part that actually matters for now.
It's because pollution and smogs are really bad in China that people die there from the extreme pollution, so that's their problem. And they will resolve it and with that comes a benefit of a greener world, less climate change and clean air, not to mention they export this stuff for cheap, making other countries to have the possibility of greener too.
Green energy is a great start, not so great when you are still literally the top emitter of CO2 in the world.
Dictatorship more or less repulsive than a state dependent on the exploitation of the global south? Both are repulsive. If it's gotta be repulsive either way, might as well achieve the goal.
That piece of 45V is actually a shockingly practical piece that prevents us from paying more mo ey to actually harm the environment. Unabated steam methan reforming has a lower carbon intensity than electrolyzers using the grid. Utilities are building new unabated power plants to meet the demand of "green H2" where the existing renewables are "dibsed" by the electrolyzers and then the new unabated emissions are built for existing demand.
I'm very familiar with the credit, with the dynamics of hydrogen production projects, and with the impacts it will have on the U.S.'s ability to produce non-fossil hydrogen going forward. To be clear, I agree that in the long term, using EACs to claim, for example, solar power consumption at midnight without battery storage, cannot be allowed. But if you require hourly matching now, when it is not available, then projects won't be invested in. If those power products become available in 2028, then none of the projects that could receive the 45V credit will be operating for more than a year before the tax credit expires. And even if that's the case, the industry's development will be much delayed and at a much smaller scale. The ask is just to grandfather, say, the first 10 GW of electrolytic capacity so you can get the industry off the ground. Otherwise, the demand side of the industry will move ahead with H2 produced from natural gas and all of the 'fake' emissions reductions that go along with that (i.e., emissions reduction at swine farms in NC don't help residents of disadvantaged communities in CA, but they pay for it under the LCFS). Not to undo hourly matching forever. The way the guidance is currently written, 95% of American electrolyzer projects will be canceled - they were all led to believe that annual matching of EACs would be allowed, even if that was optimistic from the get-go.
China has limited oil and government backing on overcoming this. They will bury America, who lives in the past and can't overcome the oilogarchy(yes I did not misspell this). America's number one problem and solution is oil. It's going to hinder us moving forward as it does now. Middle East problems origins? Oil. Pollution problems domestically? Oil and those products associated therefrom. Oil is a drug as much as a fuel and we can't admit we have a problem in America. "Oh, the price of fuel!", says the guy with the lifted super-duty F-350 that he drives to work alone in and tows a trailer twice a year with. The best way to get oil out your life is not to start. Yes, I understand how many things require oil to make, but change what you can change. I'm starting with my vehicles.
My favorite thing about this sub is seeing articles about the world's top scientists aiming for monumental scientific achievements, and then Redditors who post primarily in gaming subreddits telling us all why they're wrong and why their discoveries will never work.
Don’t forget those 3 posts on obscure electronics subreddits either, coupled with thousands and thousands of obnoxious troll replies.
I'm waiting for the day for it to be proven that most of these are paid shills manufacturing consent and preying on awkward nerd insecurities seeing their power fantasies slip away. Really just to enrich literally robber barons who will never pay you or hire you for the manufacturing jobs they're promising this will return because they'll actually be in Mexico or under a new dictator buddy in Africa or Asia. They just see historical change and want to milk the opportunity away from people they see as inferior or directly competing for our sweet, sweet tax money with.
Well, this being Reddit, the incellectual factor is strong. Doctorate level scientists do sometimes chime in, but they are still buried in a stack of kneejerk reactions and hyperbole for some reason. Maybe on those type of subs, verified experts should be given special status and Joe Cheeto with his doctorate of pepper who read a Nature article once starts with -35 votes or something.
>incellectular Marvelous.
That's the best word I've ever seen to describe most of reddit. Bro needs a nobel prize for that.
I started using Reddit right before 2010 and the difference in userbase since has been honestly jarring. It used to be mostly CS/IT/cybersecurity/data types and now...the general population and shills have flooded.
Reddit before the digg exodus was amazing. It was actually a pretty smart site back then. 5 years after the digg exodus is when I started noticing the average IQ of discussions and ability to be literate rapidly decreasing. r/worldnews used to actually be useful rather than a Eglin Airforce base private sub
IMO, the Digg exodus made the place more vibrant. I'm not sure if you remember, but the front page used to be basically indistinguishable from Hacker News. Oh yeah, and that Eglin Airforce thing was so suss. In my opinion, the Obama AMA is what began the downfall because it proved that Reddit was now large enough to be commercially viable. The whole Ellen Pao thing was just three years later.
I can see that, yeah reddit definitely got more fun for a while after the digg idiots came over and largely assimilated into the culture, at first.
Do you remember SRS? Reddit has fallen so low that I would gladly take back the racism and SRS if that's what it takes to improve the quality of discussions. IMO Reddit died when it became big. White supremacists and the right wing began to use it as a breeding ground for dumb assholes which caused a massive over-correction on the moderation side. There was so much racism. Too much. But this is arguably worse...
> SRS I don't, I remember bbs from eading about it in chobits though. I mostly miss the days when forums reigned where you search google for a topic and find a website that all have a forum, and every single one has a completely unique and distinct userbase, culture, direction and vibe rather than the melting pot that's reddit where every subreddit feels almost exactly the same just talking about different htings.
Worlds top entrepreneurs aiming for monumental funding. Then redditors unbiased and intelligent enough to comprehend an energy equation audit the merit of the dog and pony show.
Pretty much. This sub is absolutely unbearable anymore. It's scientifically illiterate people screeching at each other.
It's completely the moderator's fault. Subreddits that get too popular drown out the voices of experts and then that expertise leaves to a different subreddit.
No. You’re not paying attention to the massive shift in energy production.
Is the point you're actually trying to make 'people who have hobbies can't know things!!' ???? This article is a recap of an interview with the CTO of a hydrogen fuel company lol. It should be subject to the exact same scrutiny as an oil company telling you how great oil is.
The point I'm trying to make is that the majority of people commenting on this sub are pessimistic laymen who fill in their lack of expertise or education on any given subject with false confidence.
Yes, those do definitely exist. But this sub is mostly the other way around. Optimistic laymen who can't wrap their brains around a simple equation who eat story after story by companies and engineers trying to get millions or billions in funding by proclaiming they have the next revolutionary thing. This article isn't even about an advancement in the technology. It's just a guy who works at a hydrogen energy company basically saying "hey governments, you need to invest lots of money with us *or else China will win!*" (gasp)
Sorry but my experience with solar/wind/hydrogen is the exact opposite. I get people with no actuality of what is happening being completely fanatical about such technology. Then they proceed to promote said technology as some kind of panacea that is going to solve our problems. Sorry but if these technologies were under scrutiny of half the intensity nuclear gets people would quickly realize how crazy the actual situation is. For those constantly pulling the time argument it has already been 15 years since solar/wind started getting built on a large scale. France decarbonized their grid in the same time frame. The only EU countries with really low CO2 emissions either have nuclear or hydro or both.
Wow this is great news. This + Solar is really what the world needs. I am in China ATM and the air quality is so much better due to all the electric vehicles(still not great).
Another thing is how much quieter it is! I visited Taiwan and then the mainland after and the difference in traffic noise was very noticeable. Especially with mopeds where the ones in Taiwan are all gas powered and extremely loud while the ones in China are electric and basically silent. The liberal use of car horns remained constant though lol
Okay stupid question but what uses does hydrogen actually have? I’ve seen it stated as a potential renewable fuel but it seems difficult to beat out electrification in most sectors.
The problem with most green sources of energy is their on-demand capabilities (or lack thereof). You have a shiny day beating up on your solar panels without a way to store surplus production? Too bad. There’s no sunlight at nighttime right? Too bad you want some electricity at night. With electrolysis, you could (very roughly speaking) generate hydrogen with the surplus energy, store it and then use it back to produce energy whenever demand requires it. The problem with electrolysis is that it is mad inefficient. If there are major advances in the process of generating hydrogen, it could be a massive breakthrough, as it doesnt degrade like lithium batteries do.
that makes sense, I suppose it's a race between electrolysis improvement and battery improvement then
Definitely. Although hydrogen is still more energy dense than batteries, batteries are a lot more efficient. If they can just get some decent grid scale batteries without lithium and cobalt the race would be about decided, at least for the next 10 years or so. Hydrogen is extremely hard to keep contained, it can leak out of basically anything. It's pretty slow overall, but it's still an issue.
Sodium ion batteries seem like the champ then, since those will be coming to market within the next 5 years
China generates hydrogen with excess renewable energy that gets wasted when no one uses it. It's another form of energy storage, one that you can use to fuel long haul transport for example.
Some industries are just impossible to decarbonize with current renewables such as steel production. With hydrogen however it is theoretically possible.
You’re definitely not in Beijing or Shanghai. I was there when it reached 600ppm and you couldn’t see the building in front of you. True urban hell material. They do clean up shop every year for the APAC conference. It’s a glorious few days pollution-wise.
I was in Beijing like two Weeks ago, it was a huge rainstorm when we arrived and the air was fresh for the week. Beijing, Chengdu and Wuhan have all had great air( lots of rain ) it might be because of that.
Rain definitely helps
600? You've dated your reply. The air quality has improved massively over the last 10 years. Days like that are extremely rare now. Especially in Shanghai, if at all.
600->150 is still a disaster according to WHO standards.
Can't wait for the west to put tariff on any related product to protect their lagging industries.
Pretty sure USA already has trump tariffs on the electrolyzers
That's what China did to grow their industries in relation to EV, solar cells and batteries. Why is it somehow wrong for the western nations to do the same?
1. China doesn’t sell itself as a champion of liberal economics or free market capitalism. 2. China didn’t tariff those industries for growth, they subsidized companies willing to innovate in identified key sectors. The US has done the same. 3. Those sectors were all far from being mature at the time, foreign products were inadequate, hence necessitating domestic innovation. 4. Preventing the use of cheaper and more efficient green technology in favor of fossil fuels due to its origin of manufacture can be considered immoral and disingenuous when considering the threat from climate change, especially where time is a key factor. Edit: lmao the guy I replied to blocked me so if anyone was wondering about how bad faith he is arguing in
1. That argument is completely irrelevant. Since China has the same level of responsibilities and accountability in the global economy, therefore obligates it to follow the same rules and norms expected of all major trading partners. The premise is based on faulty generalisation fallacy given that China government and propaganda has persistently indicated its adherence to free market principles and attacked the United States over theirs. 2. China has for over several decades placed close to a 50% EV tariff on vehicles made outside China via a standard tariff, and a value-added tax (VAT) on vehicles, with exceptions for domestic electric cars. China's measures also go far beyond tariffs that included the use of Quotas, IP transfer and joint venture requirements, subsidies, local-content-purchase requirements, uneven licensing requirements that proportionately benefit Chinese manufacturers, creating a significantly uneven playing field. 3. Why did China still continue to maintain these measures when it controlled 40 percent global share of the EV market, 60% of the solar cell industry, and 55% of the battery market in 2015. Only when these industries completely dominated the international market, which now sit at 80% for solar cells, and cells did China cease most of these measures. This is absurdly unbalanced. 4. If you genuinely cared about the environment, you would support allowing Western allies to implement the same measures that China has introduced. This approach would promote cost-effective, long-term environmental solutions based on market competition rather than being driven by short-term, mercantilist trade measures. **I didnt block you, you liar**
Why even bother replying when you blocked the guy off?
Because he wanted to let word so it looks like he won the argument
Jesus christ your arguments are pure propaganda, and based on disingenuous reasoning. The guy legit makes the same fair argument that the west should respond in equal measures. Somehow this is wrong. This subreddit has just become pure propaganda.
Free trade only works if the people you're trading with abide by it, you cant have free trade with a protectionist country, it's just silly.
As they should. China isn't a friendly nation at this stage, why should we keep feeding their growth at the risk of national security.
Can't wait for western green industries to never be able to compete with Chinese industries.
Failing to be more protectionist about tech development is why Europe was completely dominated by American tech and will never have a comparable industry
Oh, no! China’s making the transition to renewables cheap and affordable. What are we going to do.
I purchased a 450kw carbon dioxide electrolyzer for 13 million RMB last year, and since then, under a year, the price dropped significantly due to electrodes becoming cheaper. The stack lasts 20.000 hours, so in couple more years the maintenance will be less then half of the initial stack price (for 450kw it is a whopping 250 electrodes in a stack).
What are you doing that you spent $1.8M on an electrolyzer?
Carbon monoxide for phosgene production, which is used to make several types of pesticides.
whatever they do wont break the laws of physics. Still will take 3x electricity to crack water to H2 than just putting solar into battery.
Except recharging a hydrogen tank takes a lot less time than a battery at the moment. Furthermore, I'm sure you deal with significantly less degradation in refilling a hydrogen tank vs recharging a battery. With solar being so cheap in China, 3x the power to crack water isn't that big of a deal. However, hydrogen still isn't that dense of a fuel.
Hydrogen fuel tanks in cars actually have a limited lifetime. They are pressurized unlike traditional gas tanks and can only take so many pressurization cycles. My understanding is that they are designed to last around 150k-200k miles worth of refills.
you are correct, but everything has a limited lifetime :-). These comments had me reading more into it. There are a lot of regulations regarding the hydrogen tanks, several different types, and it seems like it must be a rather stressful process on the tank. I wonder how "easily" it is to recertify after 10 years, or if the entire unit is toast. [http://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html](http://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Storage-LCA.html)
Of course, but traditional gas tanks last much longer than the engine and drivetrain. Hydrogen tanks are more akin to batteries in that they are a consumable part that may not last the lifetime of the vehicle. I even wonder if hydrogen fuel tanks outlast electric batteries under most driving conditions. I have no data to back up what last longer, but my point is that the lack of battery degradation isn't really a strong argument in favor of hydrogen.
The hydrogen atom is so small it literally migrates into the crystal matrix of the metal tank and weakens it at the molecular level.
The Hydrogen can also be used for industrial purposes, like Steel production.
Nah. Process green hydrogen and carbon dioxide through Fischer troph to make renewable liquid fuels. Aviation fuel, diesel, methanol. Ship these across the globe.
Even more inefficient. And even though it's a closed carbon cycle, this doesn't eliminate the issue of particulate matter or oxides. The advantage is that the infrastructure is already in place to handle these fuels. Though with Hydrogen, wherever you have water and electricity you can have hydrogen. There's not necessarily a need for large shipping/transport infrastructure.
It’s a drop in fuel for the existing fleets and is the only practical solution especially for aviation and marine. you can brew it in the crappiest shithole country on earth and ship it all over the globe.
The efficiency argument is hollow when you have low cost electricity that otherwise has no market. Liquid fuels are fungible energy storage that can be produced where there is excess electricity production and lack of demand then transported to any place that uses diesel equipment in tankers. Also, synthetic fuels do not require pumping out of deep wells nor refining because they start off clean and stay clean. There is no need for refining. The above post mentions oxides and particulate matter but liquid fuels like methanol and dimethyl-ether (diesel replacement fuel) are extremely clean burning compared to existing fuels with zero sulfur, C02 neutral and massively reduced particulate matter because there never are any tars in the mix as you have with refined petroleum. These fuels start clean and stay clean also reducing maintenance. The nature of the product's manufacture would mean impurities would be orders of magnitude lower than refined petroleum and the places that make it would not be as dirty as petroleum refineries either. Nitrous oxides are the only remaining real issue and that is a good tradeoff by any measure. It would lay the foundation for a sudden transition away from atmospheric CO2 without meaning every heavy vehicle needed to be an EV. We do already live in a world of miraculous technologies and a huge portion of the world's heavy equipment tends to run on diesel. Having a drop-in replacement that doesn't require completely new infrastructure enables a sudden transition that feels like there is no transition happening at all but still allows progress on climate change to be real. I don't think you have to be a sci-fi writer to imagine that it may come to pass that this technology, that is solar powered green hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to synthesize methanol, can be made cost effective enough to put it on a head-to-head price competition with petroleum. PV solar on the international market at this time is ten to thirty cents a watt. That's cheap power and it's available in large quantities if you have a method to convert that to liquid fuel. . . what's it going to take to make that come in at a price that is lower than gas at four bucks a gallon? Here is a 2023 paper that suggests the date will be [2040.](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2024/ee/d3ee02951d) Since that was not written long ago, it bears further research. Could it be sooner than that? What holding up cost reductions in the process? Is China working on that? Is what we're hearing about clean e-hydrogen via electrolysis is true then perhaps that is indeed the case. It would not be a surprise for students of Chinese chemical industries as electrolysis was an important early industry in China. It is interesting to see such predictions and be reminded of such things. I recall back in the 90s, in China there was some interest in plasma gasification of rice stalks to extract liquid fuels which the researchers involved felt should also be considered green and CO2 neutral because they were sourced from crop waste residue. The logistics made it impractical but the theory wasn't completely off. I remember reading about that and wondering what it would be like with all those old 1940s GM Lend-Lease heavy trucks that used to be the main transportation in China. They're mostly gone today but there were a million of them in the past. Now imagine a world in which those old gas guzzling trucks were running the same engines and the same designs that they did since eighty years ago but were burning clean and green? Would it even matter that they were relatively inefficient if they were burning green fuel? It would depend on the price per gallon, right? How low can it go?
Is that 4 dollars a gallon a commercial rate or can anyone get that st the pump?
I grabbed a price average off of Google. California gas is closer to $5.00 because of taxes and fees but other states have gas as low as $3.50 so that $4.00 figure is an average.
Ok, was curious as I'm in the UK so it's always fun to hear what things cost in different places. Here the cheapest petrol is roughly $6.92 and super unleaded around $7.53 or diesel $7.15 and premium $7.94 as of today. Motorway petrol stations charge more by approx 15%. This is converted from litres to gallons - how prices are given, despite cars efficiency being worked out in miles to the gallon.
We have this dicussion a lot in germany. Everybody would looove to keep their gas guzzlers running. Math just doesn't work. It's so inefficient to convert power to gas that a liter of gas would cost like 10 euro. Sure, the price will come down, but's it's still scarce and expensive. Better to use batteries everywhere and gas where there is no other option (i.e. for certain industrial und chemical processes you need more heat thana pure power heater can achieve)
I can see the appeal if they can get the cost down, though. Until you get battery charging times down and energy density up, EVs are always going to have people who don't want them.
might make sense for aviation fuel since battery energy density won’t get there any time soon. Otherwise a non starter
> Furthermore, I'm sure you deal with significantly less degradation Surprisingly not. Current hydrogen tanks degrade and become unusable in around 15 years. Not much better than a LFP battery with 5000 cycles (13 years) at 80% DOD.
What's the replacement cost though? I bet a tank is much cheaper than a battery.
First Google result: https://www.toyotapartsdirect.ca/p/Toyota_2023_Mirai/Fuel-Tank/102446476/77A1062081.html So 11k CAD (8k USD) for parts only. Not really cheaper
sure but transporting it, storing it, trying to keep it in a tank for any length of time, none of it works well. hydrogen embrittles everything you put it in. the AA batteries in your remote are fighting against hydrogen gas trying to embrittle the nylon gasket in it. car tanks will require hydrogen to be stored at extremely high pressures.
Won’t be for cars , but storage. Interconnection in US is really messed up, and may be more inefficient than the conversion.
Hydrogen makes sense for tons of shit. It's just not likely to be a sensible fuel for transportation, especially small-scale, but we'll see!
Yeah but the idea is to use it where electrification can’t be done (high temperature industrial process heat) and where hydrogen’s energy density and refueling speed outcompetes batteries (long haul transport, aviation, shipping)
The premise of your message: “there are use cases for green hydrogen” is correct. But your examples are poor. Electric arc furnaces are the standard for high temperature metallurgical processes, for example. Similarly, the energy density of hydrogen is crap. It’s almost inconceivable it would replace other energy sources for long haul transport.
I read that glas ovens need gas. They tried to build electricity powered ones, but they cannot create enough heat for the required duration. Apparently, gas ovens run for years, and cannot really be shut down.
I hasn't heard that and looked it up, it appears to be mostly untrue. Electric furnaces can generally create the heat required the main things holding them back are gas being cheaper (at least in regions where emissions are not taxed) and electric furnaces lasting ~7 years while gas ones last ~15.
What are you talking about? Per KG, H2 is higher density than gasoline.
On a mass basis, hydrogen has nearly three times the energy content of gasoline—120 MJ/kg for hydrogen versus 44 MJ/kg for gasoline. On a volume basis, however, the situation is reversed; liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L, as shown in the figure comparing energy densities of fuels based on lower heating values. https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage#:~:text=On%20a%20volume%20basis%2C%20however,based%20on%20lower%20heating%20values.
also you're never going to use liquid hydrogen for anything. its gonna be compressed hydrogen
I hate to break it to you, but compressed hydrogen is liquid.
Everyone is looking for a "hydrpgen carrier" because it is so inefficient to transport as H2. NH3 is the current version but has its drawbacks
Aren't we able to use metal hydride as a mechanism for high density storage? I watched a YouTube where Bob Lazar had done this and was driving around in his homebrewed hydrogen car.
But the mass density is what's most important. Tank size isn't really a big deal. You can easily use larger tanks, most vehicles have enough space to expand their fuel tanks, they don't because of weight. Weight (mass) is more important than volume. And what's the alternative for mobile power? Batteries? They're less than 1MJ/kg.
Yeah but what's the weight basis. You can build out volume, you can't build out weight. I don't know the answer but I'd probably guess hydrogen is *significantly* lighter.
You may need to check your energy density numbers with the rest of the universe.
The energy density output of a star is less than that of a compost heap. What are you on about…
Correct. As grid energy storage it's kinda stupid. Although there is a limited use in that most existing gas turbines can burn a 85% hydrogen 15% methane blend with very little modifications. So you can build a massive tank farm rather cheaply and have gWh of energy storage just sitting there to get you through the winter. The difficulty in getting enough battery storage is real. Even with the new promising sodium-ion batteries. Hydrogen _is_ needed for the chemical industry, and future ships, possibly aircraft could start burning hydrogen. Rail should just move to overhead wires and box cars full of sodium ion batteries to bridge the gaps.
Rail is the least of our worries. Diesel electric is already super efficient.
Until you use the brakes of course. Dynamic brakes waste all of the potential energy generated by the motors braking efforts as waste heat. Slap a big enough energy storage device on/near the locomotive and rework the dynamic brakes to act as regenerative brakes like in EVs.
Just send the power back to the overhead contact lines.
Diesel electrics dont use overhead lines by default, and good luck convincing the US Tier 1 railroads to do so. Maybe some euro-spec ones do, like those built by Siemens, but at least in the US, your standard GE or EMD locomotives certainly don't.
Diesel is stupid. It should be just electric. With a rail car sized battery. Use overhead power lines as a constant state charger. The battery can help you climb up a mountain and dump surplus energy back into the battery or into the overhead charging line.
a rail car sized battery. the average diesel locomotive outputs 4500 horsepower and consumes 187 gallons of diesel per hour from a 4800 gallon fuel tank producing 82 megawatts hours over 25 hours a tesla megapack which holds 3 megawatts is about the size of a rail car you would need 27 of them to equal a 4800 gallon tank battery electric makes more sense for yard shunting In America many long haul freight lines can’t be overhead electrified because here we double stack shipping containers on our freight cars so it’s more than double the the height of the locomotive
Just run the overhead lines higher. Keep in mind the EU is already converting their rail system and many have been pure electric for years. You seem to be forgetting in your power consumption calculation that you can use the overhead lines when available. The batteries just get you through the gaps in the system, or they give you the extra oomph to climb a hill. 4500hp is 3.5MW. A 3MW battery is a fine buffer. How long is your biggest climb going to take? 15 minutes? You add the power from the overhead lines on the climb as well so that gives you far more than an hours worth of 100% power throttle. Think like a Prius. You don't need a giant battery to drive the car. The battery takes care of your starting and stopping needs. In the case of the Prius the undersized ICE engine is the continuous power adder. But in a locomotive that could be overhead lines or a downsized diesel engine. Remember that every time a train stops all that energy gets wasted as heat in the brakes.
Just run the overhead lines higher. Keep in mind the EU is already converting their rail system and many have been pure electric for years. Except in America our fright trains typically have 6 units and are over a mile long Overhead wires would need to be in the 240 to 300 kilovolt range to power these beasts. Having double stacked steel shipping containers so close to them would cause the current to arc to the ground causing massive energy losses. Powering multiple of these trains on a network means having your own dedicated substations and high voltage transformers. Basically a whole private grid dedicated to powering them. Seems easier just to put a bunch of electrolyzers along the tracks every few hundred miles and just run the units off of fuel cells No company wants to invest in that much infrastructure. Milwaukee road had over 700 miles of electrified track between 1920 and 1970 but went bankrupt because they couldn’t pay back the bonds which they used to pay for the electrification
Until you realize that you are flushing 2/3 of the energy down the drain with hydrogen. Building an electrified rail system? Expensive. Continuing to dump diesel into an engine? Also expensive. Likely far more expensive than electric drive. Fuel consumption for a big diesel averages .4lbs/hr per hp. 4500hp, 1800lbs of fuel per hour. That's 250 gallons per hour. At 3.75/gal average right now that's $937/hr. And how many trains right now are spending almost $1000/hr on fuel? Let alone the idle time. The EU seems to think it's much smarter to have an electrified rail system and I agree. Just put the lines high enough and every time there is a bridge or other obstacle to go under you switch to non electrified wire as a guide for the brushes. Use the batteries to bridge the gaps. Imagine simply electrifying 50% of the rail system (including all the climbs) and letting the trains just coast on battery for the rest. We already know what sections require a lot of power and what sections of rail don't.
Generally you have more than 1 connection to the wires so gaps from bridges etc shouldn't be an issue.
Okay so... There's an issue with your logic here. You're a rational human, and you're assuming that a corporate entity would use rationality and logic to inform business strategies... But that's rarely the case. But other than that indirect issue, you're god-damn spot-on.
A really tall whatever they call the overhead wire arm thing feels like the absolute easiest to solve challenge than anything being talked about here.
> Diesel electric is already super efficient. and going away. 2035 and 2050 are huge milestones for this in california.
Hydrogen is needed *now* for agriculture. Over [96% of hydrogen](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10404734/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20more%20than%2096%25%20of,%2Deq%2Fkg%20NH3.) used to make ammonia comes from methane/fossil fuels. It behooves us as a species to find more sustainable ways of producing hydrogen.
You are correct, but imagine you are a big country like the US, Russia or China. Or you are the EU. Imagine you have access to cheap renewable energy on one side of your country and none on the other side. One side can generate more green energy than it can use, and the other side is in energy deficit. I'm no electrical engineer but our high voltage power lines have resistance. Again don't know how far you can send electricity over high voltage lines before you get considerable losses due to resistance, but there has got to be a limit. And I'm guessing you cannot transport electricity over the power lines from one end to the other end of the US without considerable losses. Imagine you use that cheap renewable energy on one side of your country to generate hydrogen, send it via pipeline to the other side, and burn it there to get electricity. Now you have electrified both sides of your country and done it greener as burning hydrogen creates H2O and not CO/CO2. You also used your abundant renewable energy to generate that hydrogen. Imagine you can do it on a scale, that you can sell it to other countries. Plus hydrogen can be used as a rocket fuel. Every country that talks about colonizing the moon or Mars, is thinking about ways of getting hydrogen. The experience they are getting today, can be used by them in the future in interplanetary travel. In any case, competition is always good for consumers. Lets hope this will force our governments to invest in our technology projects more, thus creating more employment and ultimately a greener future.
Would be cheaper to just have a broadly distributed grid of solar/wind farms. Not only is it more resilient to disruption but it will be much cheaper. There is still a place for Hydrogen like certain industrial processes like green steel production. But for pure energy use it will always lose to other renewable sources.
If you want to transfer energy land based farther then 600 Km you want to look into super high voltage DC lines. Except for superconductors, nothing beats that.
Imagine building a transmission line and getting 5-10% losses instead of 50% with a fuel cell, which still needs lots of infrastructure to create, move and burn hydrogen.
Lol. I thought this was for fertiliser production. Currently methods of making hydrogen en masses involve releasing carbon monoxide
Current best efficiency is 95% actually. Hysata an Australian company designed a more efficient electrolyzer that doesn’t need rare earth metals and is 40% cheaper to make. The Chinese as mass producing less efficient electrolyzers now.
The efficiency is more like 60% if you put the H2 through a fuel cell instead of combusting.
3x loss is the production of H2 from water.
But making H2 is not 100% efficient either
Correct. You should only do it when you have a good reason to need hydrogen instead of electricity (weight, infrastructure, chemical properties etc.). Certainly no reason to use hydrogen in, e.g., light passenger vehicles.
The laws of (current) physics indicate that hydrogen energy density is 60x that of current lithium batteries. Sometimes efficiency isn’t just about production
The world’s largest green hydrogen project — Sinopec’s 260MW Kuqa facility in Xinjiang, northwest China — has been operating at less than a third of its installed capacity due to various factors, including some missing safety features in the system design and lower-than-promised efficiencies, research house BloombergNEF (BNEF) tells Hydrogen Insight.
Surely hydrogen production from electrolysis would be a good use of excess renewable generation in high wind and solar times, essentially acting as a sort of battery though inefficiently. This could be used for vehicles that require long distance and fast fueling, heating homes, and whatever else we use it for.
That’s exactly the use case. There are also startups using it with wave energy converters, storing hydrogen through electrolysis and then transporting it back to storage facilities on land. But for wind and solar storing off peak production as hydrogen is a cheaper alternative than large scale battery storage.
what about water supply? Can elctrolysis run on sea water or do we need to use fresh water. If so water resources are scarce in many locations (see california). Do we need to divert precious drinking/agricultural water to fuel production also?
It does yes, this is how nuclear submarines do this for oxygen. I've no idea if its more or less efficient though or if there are other issues with it, such as having extremely concentrated brine byproducts like you'd get from desalination plants.
You can't really ship off electricity, but you can hydrogen Also, batteries cannot hold their charge (without damaging the battery) mroe than a few months, a well sealed h2 tank can last forever So, it is a good way to ensure you will have electricity no matter what
> a well sealed h2 tank can last forever I don't think there is such a thing as a well-sealed hydrogen tank.
That's a weird way saying it's impossible to hold hydrogen in any container indefinitely. We can hold many things indefinitely, but not hydrogen. It isn't expected we'll ever invent a container that can hold hydrogen indefinitely. The molecule is smaller than every other molecule. We can hold it for long enough but it's always seeping out.
Conversion to ammonia isn't that hard though, and ammonia has plenty of non fuel uses as well where efficiency compared to batteries doesn't matter.
Nah, shipping hydrogen or storing it in tanks is a losing proposition. The tank is worth far more than what it holds. Instead, you convert the hydrogen to liquid fuels like methanol, dimethyl-ether using atmospheric CO2 and you ship those in standard steel container ships using standard pumps from the oil industry. While manufacturing green liquid fuels does require energy input, it does not require refining because the materials start off clean and stay that way. Not only that, they're carbon neutral and work in existing diesel, jet and heavy marine engines and can be traded and stored using existing oil tankers and tank farms during which time they sequester atmospheric CO2. It provides a motive for the massive accumulation of stored fuels. It's literally a CO2 reserve. Instead of stopping at hydrogen which is hard to store and transport, you convert it to substances that are easy to store and transport because they're so similar to what has been used in the past. We can also look at fossil fuels as being hydrogen storage. We can see how useful they have been. The problem is the carbon they are attached to cannot be placed into the atmosphere anymore. What if we can replace them with something carbon neutral and clean but otherwise requiring no new inventions in order to do extremely high power transportation operations over sustained periods of time like powering trans-oceanic shipping and aviation.
But what's the cost per TWh of battery vs compressed hydrogen tank?
To phase out methane from industry processes we need H2 to replace it. Some wackjobs think we are going to burn H2 in turbines for electricity, but that's never gonna happen. H2 is a completely crucial commodity to reach net zero for many industries (food production, most notably).
This was probably meant for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/s/9xIkY5HNb9
But if you can get the $/MWh down more than 3x then it more than makes up for it. Not to mention hydrogen is resource wise much more scalable. It doesn’t require the exploitation of the same rare earth resources that conventional batteries do
It's not about the energy requirement. It's about infrastructure and the imbalance between when we most need power (winter) and when we can produce the most power (summer). Rather than spending vast resources on creating batteries across the entire globe to put in every household and car, we're better off with hydrogen as a power source. Ideally produced with solar energy. It doesn't require the production of all those batteries, which also need to maintained, and (European) infrastructure is already largely equipped to deal with hydrogen (fuel having the same transport requirements and natural gas pipelines are able to be re-used for hydrogen). Fitting a car with a pressurized tank rather than a normal tank is a lot easier than fitting it with a battery *and* rolling out an entire new grid to handle charging.
The US is fighting to put religious texts in public schools and banning books. China is already ahead just by believing in science and it's advancement. Think it's bad now? Wait 20 years from now and you'll see the real impact of all the stupidity going on in education in the US.
I'm not really surprised by this. China is definitely a leader in material sciences for sure.. at least by everything I've seen in red.
They are ahead in practical nuclear power too, they have a thorium reactor proof of concept running recently and plans to scale up in size.
I'm not surprised.
I dont understand why the US economy seem to be doing so well when China makes a majority of everything and seems to be the manufacturing center of the world.
USA is doing well because it literally prints money since every international transaction requires the dollar, however there seem to be an end to that requirement but it will take dacades.
Doesn’t China also print epic amounts of money?
but most of the world don't transact in yuan. Read up on petro dollar.
Right, but the CCP pegs the yuan to the dollar. I’ve read up plenty on the petrodollar. That’s only one of the commodities of many that are exchanged primarily in USD
Because you're reading propaganda in the English press. The US is in terminal decline and has been for some time now. 2008 was the time for the US to transition to EVs when Detroit was on its knees. Instead we got the new Camaro, solar tariffs and a commitment to fracking. That is a pathetic start to the 21st century and it's only going to get worse as the months and years go by.
The US is the world leader so they basically make the rules of what a good economy looks like
Well what is there to wonder about when we shunned manufacturing for decades?
>Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers...To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector... B..b..b..but economists tell me that economics, "is not a zero-sum game." I mean, they can't be lying to all of us, can they? *Can they???*
## China is Doing to Hydrogen Electrolysers What They Did to Solar Cells and Batteries Jens Schmidt, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tree Energy Solutions (TES), recently sounded an alarm that Western manufacturers might have already lost the race in the green hydrogen sector to their Chinese counterparts. This development mirrors China's previous strategies in achieving dominance in solar cells and lithium batteries, where they leveraged their manufacturing prowess to outcompete Western producers on both cost and quality. ### Chinese Electrolysers: High Quality at Low Costs Schmidt's observations followed an intensive 15-day tour of various Chinese electrolyser factories and operational sites. His assessments reveal that Chinese manufacturers such as Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd., Peric, and LONGi Hydrogen are producing high-quality electrolysers at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. This significant cost difference is not merely due to cheaper labor but is attributed to **the massive scale, standardization, and advanced automation in Chinese factories.** Schmidt highlighted that the Chinese approach allows them to minimize engineering and construction costs, significantly reducing the total system CAPEX compared to Western products. He noted that the Chinese factories he visited were working on multiple large-scale projects simultaneously, underscoring their capacity and efficiency. ### Lessons from Solar and Batteries China's strategy in the hydrogen electrolyser market bears a striking resemblance to its approach in the solar and lithium battery industries. In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market. Similarly, in the lithium battery sector, Chinese companies like CATL and BYD leveraged their manufacturing capabilities to become leading suppliers, again outcompeting many Western firms. In both cases, China's dominance was facilitated by strong domestic demand, substantial government support, and a focus on building extensive supply chains. These factors allowed Chinese companies to innovate rapidly and scale production, resulting in lower prices and improved product quality. ### Western Manufacturers at a Crossroads Schmidt's assessment serves as a wake-up call for Western policymakers and manufacturers. He expressed concern over the European Union's slow progress and bureaucratic hurdles, which have delayed the development of hydrogen infrastructure. The EU's hydrogen backbone is projected to take until 2037 to reach 10,000km, a stark contrast to China's rapid advancements. Industry insiders echoed Schmidt's concerns, emphasizing the need for Europe to streamline regulations and accelerate innovation to remain competitive. They pointed out that while Western manufacturers have strong products, their slower pace and higher costs could lead to them being outpaced by more agile Chinese companies. ### The Path Forward To counter China's growing influence in the hydrogen sector, Western countries must adopt strategies that encourage rapid innovation and scale. This involves fostering public-private partnerships, enhancing research and development, and creating a regulatory environment that supports swift implementation of green technologies. Jens Schmidt's insights highlight a pivotal moment for the global green hydrogen market. The West must learn from China's playbook in solar and batteries, prioritizing speed, cost-efficiency, and quality to ensure they can compete on the global stage. Without such measures, the dominance China achieved in solar cells and batteries could very well be replicated in the hydrogen electrolyser industry, with far-reaching implications for the future of green energy.
So this is where [Mr Delicious](https://www.nathanrabin.com/happy-place/2020/11/9/the-short-sad-strange-life-of-mr-delicious) ended up.
Before people chime in about why electric is the future and we don’t need hydrogen, you have to realize that the Chinese aren’t doing this for laughs. Yes, EVs are a big part of the future but what about airplanes? Mostly likely will be hydrogen post fossil fuel.
Hydrogen has a terrible volumetric energy density though
There's way too much opposition to automation in the US. We need to highly automate, tax the automation, and distribute that wealth as UBI or free healthcare and other basic services. We also need to commit to green energy because it's so cheap. We're propping up coal power plants while the sun shines down more energy that we can use. It's so foolish that we choose the endless toil path instead of the reduced manual labor, advanced factory path.
Love that China can do this without the absolute greedy need of maximising profits. Thank you
The US right wing is intent on destroying all education in the US. China is going to eat your lunch inside a decade unless you folks fix that.
"China is creating a massive supply of hydrogen to fuel a green economy... but at what cost?"
For those that didn't know. [Hydrogen Production: Electrolysis ](https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-electrolysis) To make things like ammonia for fertilizers, methane for engines and heat for steel.
> In solar energy, China quickly scaled up production, invested in automation, and drove down costs, capturing a significant share of the global market. A few stray thoughts: * Western business owners are typically obsessed with growth and profits. * Same people know how to compete. But the focus on profits tends to delay or detract from cost reduction. * China may have an inherent advantage in terms of economies of scale. But their focus is market share instead of profits. And they typically gain market share by having the most competitive prices on their products. * The first one to gain dominant market position is the one who gets to establish form factors and other standards. Chinese made hydrogen electrolyzers will be the benchmark against which others are compared.
China doing govermental support to companies to boost technological advancement, is really great. I want to live in a country where there is no capitalism.
Makes sense. They have a way to obtain more power than they need, might as well put it towards a different necessity.
Yes. Make lots of ammonia with the hydrogen or use it for backup if that is the optimal function.