What is white hydrogen? Scientists say the clean-energy gas could save the world.
What is white hydrogen? Scientists say the clean-energy gas could save the world.
White hydrogen, the newly discovered clean energy gas, could be key in mitigating the climate crisis, experts say.
Hydrogen power is an exciting form of clean energy. But hydrogen typically needed to be produced in a lab using energy-intensive methods. White hydrogen, a newly identified hydrogen source, could eliminate the need for lab production.
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So, they found one large deposit, but it's so vanishingly rare that until a few years ago they didn't even think you could find natural deposits of hydrogen. Yeah, this isn't a solution to anything, this is just the most niche natural resource ever discovered.
This is a shit article, but the exciting part is that we found a natural deposit where white hydrogen is being made in the Earth's crust. Finding that means we can study the mechanism and conditions required and look for more.
Getting away from carbon fuels and creating viable hydrogen-driven industries would be an excellent step in the right direction. We need to build out the infrastructure to be the backbone that replaces oil and gas. Finding natural deposits, even in limited amounts, will bring down the cost of production and nudge the revolution along.
Everything you said is true. This isn't a solution, and it is vanishingly rare. That doesn't mean it isn't an exciting and promising discovery. It's like landing on Mars and finding liquid water, and you're complaining that it isn't enough to go for a swim.
Getting away from carbon fuels and creating viable hydrogen-driven industries would be an excellent step in the right direction.
Logistically hydrogen is a pretty horrible fuel source. The molecule (H2) is so darn small it leaks past nearly all valves and seals except for those specifically designed (and maintained!) for hydrogen. Its also very low density so trying to store it mean GIANT containers that don't end up holding much hydrogen. You can increase the density for storage by liquefying it, but now your storage requirements for keeping extra cold in its liquid state increase costs. It also takes lots of energy to chill gaseous hydrogen to liquid, so you're spending your fuel your trying to store to make it storeable.
If France can burn this white hydrogen on-site to generate eletricity, then its a good find, but the moment you talk about trying to store hydrogen, and ship it in quantity, the value of this find is suspect.
Not that you're wrong, but you could make the same complaints of any fuel source. Crude oil is caustic and dirty, requiring filtration and chemical separation, special not to mention it must be extracted from the earth, all of which requires energy. Natural gas, nuclear fuel, even solar needs to solve for battery storage. There are storage and production costs associated eith energy. The more investment in the infrastructure, the more efficient it will become. That's why found energy is a boon for the technology in general, even if the benefit is only temporary.
Not that you’re wrong, but you could make the same complaints of any fuel source.
I'm not saying there's a perfect energy source (wind and solar come close but even they require some small amount of dirty manufacturing). What I'm referring to is the proportion of downsides. Hydrogen come with huge huge downsides, with very few upsides. In fact, I think hydrogen has only a SINGLE upside: it burns clean (no carbon).
Thats it though. Thats all. Every other measure its worse than every other mainstream electricity source, and its worse in much much larger proportions compared to other sources.
That "SINGLE upside" is the difference maker. What other criteria is more important?
What other criteria is more important?
Really?
- How about how much you have?
- How easy is it to get more?
- How cheap is it to get more?
- How much can you store?
- How cheap is it to store?
- How safe is it to handle?
- What is the spoilage rate?
- How easy is it to move?
- How cheap is it to move?
- How easy is it to consume?
Hydrogen fails on every single one of those compared to alternatives.
Additionally nuclear power is also clean in that it produces no carbon emissions. It does produce nuclear waste, but that's easily managed and can even be recycled somewhat. Just the amount of nuclear waste that we have in the US could be reprocessed to produce enough power to meet the entire power demand of the entire US for the next 100 years, to say nothing of new fuel. Nuclear waste is also easier and safer to dispose of than most of the waste that comes out of coal fired plants (which is also radioactive), and somewhat ironically nuclear power plants actually release significantly less radiation into the environment than coal plants do.
Hydrogen power, outside of maybe the highly specific circumstances at play in Japan, just doesn't make any sense. It's hard to get, hard to transport, hard to store, its energy density is relatively poor, and it's even dangerous to be around due to the risk of explosion and fire.
Hydrogen power, outside of maybe the highly specific circumstances at play in Japan, just doesn’t make any sense.
The poster's example of Hydrogen in Japan I wouldn't even call a Hydrogen solution. They're making green hydrogen from some other energy source. Japan isn't even keeping the resulting hydrogen generated, they're immediately turning it into something else for transport and storage.
The thread original premise of white hydrogen, possibly being burned in situ in France for electricity generation, I'd call a real hydrogen solution, but it is so very specific that I'm not sure its applicable anywhere else on Earth.
And yet, being carbon-free, makes it worthwhile.
I don't think you're quite grasping it. There would be an insane amount of carbon used to try to use hydrogen as a primary fuel source in overcoming all the shortcomings of hydrogen.
I read some interesting stuff about how Japan plan to create green hydrogen and convert it into ammonia to send through their existing gas infrastructure. For a variety of reasons for Japan it makes a lot of sense to go all in on hydrogen. It's also a super interesting way for grid scale Energy storage in Europe. There's plenty of sun and wind when it's sunny or windy, using existing gas infrastructure to handle renewably generated ammonia could be a quick win to be able to build up strategic reserves during net positive energy days.
I read some interesting stuff about how Japan plan to create green hydrogen and convert it into ammonia to send through their existing gas infrastructure.
That does sound interesting, but its no hydrogen as a fuel source (like the article), its used in your description as a single link in a chain. So they're creating hydrogen from a process (likely electrolysis) using some other energy source, then nearly immediately converting that hydrogen into ammonia for better storage and transport. That would be a good use of hydrogen, as an intermediate step and not a beginning and end step.
Yeah that's exactly it. Create hydrogen and convert it into ammonia in places with ready access to renewables, then send it and store it via gas infrastructure to where it's needed, and burn it to create power. It's less efficient than straight h2, but the benefits of being able to transport it and store it make up for that. Japan's grid is crazy fractured and they went heavy into gas, so for them it's kind of a no brainer to invest in that tech.
If you Google around there lots of more detailed reporting on the whole process and plan. I can try and dig up the very insightful comment I read on tildes which had lots of citations too if you're interested.
I mean yeah, it's really interesting from a scientific standpoint, although the article didn't seem to indicate anything about hydrogen being produced. I had assumed this was some kind of natural inclusion, maybe something left over from the initial formation of the planet or some super rare chemical reaction, not an ongoing process. It would have been nice to see more details about that.
My complaint was that the article is presenting this not as an interesting scientific discovery, but as some kind of energy production breakthrough that's poised to solve climate change. What we need to be doing is massively expanding our nuclear power generation as well as continuing to expand our solar, wind, and hydro power generation while decommissioning coal and gas plants.
I agree with you, the author of this article sucks, and I agree with your plan to expand cleaner energy production, including nuclear. But I would add that energy transmission is itself an infrastructure liability, and creating hydrogen distribution pathways will contribute to the progress.
Yes, the centralized nature of our energy grids are a problem. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's far easier to manage and makes investing in very expensive but very scalable energy generation systems feasible, but comes with the considerable downside that long distance power transmission includes all kinds of headaches and doesn't respond well to large shifts in demand. A very distributed system, say with some sort of neighborhood level power distribution/sharing system and per-house solar or wind power and storage would remove the need for long distance power transmission, but would be massively more complicated to manage, and still wouldn't solve all issues around large swings in demand, while introducing expensive ongoing maintenance (mostly in power storage). Ideally some kind of hybrid system where most power needs are met at the local level, with a few large systems to handle excess demand would probably be ideal, although then you're double paying for maintenance as you have to maintain both the local system and the large centralized one, but in theory the load on both would be more manageable. Unfortunately the current system is very much NOT setup to allow for local power generation and distribution and overhauling it to support something like that would be non-trivial.
The size of the recoverable deposit is also not that well known at this point.