Just going to say it, anyone using the mystery colour labels in their comments here, comes off to me (and I suspect others) as combinations of joking, obfuscating and even a little condescending since I’m familiar with the use of this sort of linguistic abstraction as a mechanism for gatekeeping, limiting the size of the audience that can speak to those that have kept up with current shibboleths.
Blue, black, green, grey, white, translucent, gold, purple polka dot… this is a stupid way to name things…
If it’s hydrogen derived from oil by industrial petrochemical processes like steam reforming or catalytic cracking, can we just use these terms… it’s not like we’re trying to explain which pump handles to fill up a car with, we’re talking about issues with a proposed concept and obfuscation of what that concept truly is and what it’s competing against, with cutesy colours labels… frankly just puts me off the entire hydrogen industry …
Hydrogen is pretty easy to get ahold of chemically speaking because it’s everywhere. If we need to differentiate let’s just use the additional nouns necessary. “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Carbon Neutral electricity” and “Hydrogen by thermochemical decomposition of organic waste powered by Carbon Neutral fuels” are ecologically better than “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Coal” and “Hydrogen captured as a waste gas from existing oil refineries, with no other effort to reduce Carbon emissions“
I don’t normally come across a HN thread that reads so “cliquey” outside of the crypto community stuff… seeing this sort of stuff about Hydrogen is just weird.
> I don’t normally come across a HN thread that reads so “cliquey” outside of the crypto community stuff… seeing this sort of stuff about Hydrogen is just weird.
Really. Hydrogen in general is just a weird prospect. Hydrogen from SMR of natural gas has like way higher emissions than just burning natural gas, and massively higher emissions than just using diesel. It has exactly zero uses energy-wise other than as a medium for moving a ridiculous amount of energy quickly. Makes it real nice in things like rocketry and real useless for anything else. The most efficient way to produce it is by using electricity and water, which can make a no-emissions solution for that one niche. If you use gas or oil for electricity, reforming is technically slightly more efficient. In any case, it's always worse than fossil fuels by themselves, unless you use green energy. And cramming greenhouse gases underground doesn't make the situation any better, which everybody knows but for some reason pretends is not true. Digging tunnels and caves and building facilities to store monoxide in is far worse than just burning fossil fuels as fuel in the first place. This is a fairly doomed industry, because it has no point in an environmentally sustainable future.
Hydrogen has potential to replace natural gas in area that need serious heating. Where I am standing it is currently very cold, days are short, and the sun is very low on the horizon. Electric heating is possible, but without any green power sources nearby that just means more burning fossil fuels, a horrible conversion of energy. And the electrical infrastructure needed to move sufficient power from sunny/windy areas to heat homes in the north would be immense. But "green" hydrogen shipped over the existing natural gas infrastructure could work. So in those circumstances where you need to move energy for purposes of heating, hydrogen has its place.
Yeah but, gas is more power-dense. Burning hydrogen made from fossil fuels, be it with microbes (more emissions) or SMR (less emissions) in any case produces more emissions than just burning natural gas.
Only "green" hydrogen works. I live in the north, the very north, like constantly above the hudson bay north. Insufficient electrical infrastructure where gas infra exists isn't really a big niche anyway.
Don't even think about carbon capture. Affording it any thought as a production process in the current world is "conservation of energy forbids it" level of impossible. Technology doesn't make it better either, it's just not feasible with the current energy output of the human race, not with (the very impressive) biogas pyrolysis nor with literal "air plastic".
Existing processes are the best use of hydrogen, and for those I'm fine with anything. It just makes little sense for energy applications.
The problem with carbon capture usually is extracting CO2 from the air and storing it without being emitted again.
Methane pyrolysis uses hardly more energy than steam reforming and leaves solid carbon as a side product. You don't need to concentrate carbon from the atmosphere, that was already done, solid carbon can be stored way more easily than the gas CO2. It has a very limited scale though, as you want to only use waste products for biogas production.
While I agree that hydrogen for electricity generation/storage doesn't really make sense, there are some industries that either can use or must use large amounts of hydrogen for chemical purposes. For example, the production of ammonia for fertiliser needs hydrogen, and refining metals from ore can use hydrogen.
That's obviously necessary, yes. It still really doesn't make much sense to do it with microbes when compared with SMR, though. It's entirely possible to store the CO from SMR as with microbes producing CO₂, but there's more CO₂ compared to CO from SMR.
Proton Technologies (mentioned in the article) claims to solve the problem by using a membrane that only lets hydrogen pass through. That way all the co2 just stays in the well. If that works that sounds way superior to SMR plus carbon capture.
Not really? It's not different from SMR. Hydrogen is tiny and non-polar, so it's easy to filter only for such small molecules, making storing it a pretty big issue. SMR produces a mixture of methane, water, hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which is just as easily filtered into plain dihydrogen. Nevertheless, it's still just storing it somewhere in a cave, not really worth the effort most of the time, and since CO / CO₂ is a lot smaller than methane, it'll find its way out by other means way easier.
The reason for this taxonomy is the same reason you use consts instead of plain numbers in computer code. You change the definition of “green” in just one place when someone invents a new loophole, or someone invents a new green method of obtaining sustainable hydrogen.
Also, the descriptions would be too long in some cases. To be green, according to the new taxonomy, it’s not enough for hydrogen to be generated using renewables. It has to be generated by renewables built specifically for this purpose, and from water that is not drinking water - so that we don’t drain lakes and rivers to produce it.
Now, gold hydrogen is just a marketing gimmick. It’s just brown or black, unless they store generated co2 safely and permamently - then it can become green.
We use color to describe non-color things all the way from fundamental physics (eg quark "color") to emotional metaphors (eg feeling blue, seeing red, green with envy, yellow as a substitute for being a candidate, white for both rage and fear). We use color for political leanings (eg red states, blue states, green parties)
We use color for when we have no other language or concept that might apply (eg color and spin for particles) but we also use it as a form of abstraction. We can label something with a particular color because it shares some essential qualities without necessarily understanding all those properties or verbosely enumerating all those properties. Those meanings can change over time.
Jargon can be useful and important. Don't be a Literal or Gatekeeper Andy.
Sure but using non-sequitur rainbow pieces to reference complex processes seems like the extreme end of uselessness. Wouldn't words that reflected stand-out parts of the process be more intuitive?
Stuff like this is why the fossil fuel industry keeps pushing for hydrogen rather than solar + batteries as a replacement for the current fuel system.
Hydrogen can be created cleanly, but once the infrastructure is in place, the cheapest and most profitable sources will all be fossil fuel sites, depleted or otherwise.
I'm glad electric cars are already taking off. Hydrogen may have a future for storage for excess renewable energy eventually, but as a simple replacement for gas tanks it's simply dangerous.
> Once inside the well, the microbes began breaking down the residual oil hydrocarbons in there—dregs that would be unprofitable to extract—to generate hydrogen and CO2.
Effectively. Less efficient than SMR (ideally 253 kJ/mol against 206 kJ/mol, microbes consume more, so even less so), produces literal CO₂, uses fossil fuels and is in any case has higher emissions than green hydrogen ever will. Or diesel. Or gasoline. Seems like a fairly bad idea.
profitable ideas are not always good ideas. child slavery is pretty profitable and a common practice underlying modern silicon age society. still not good.
Proton Technologies (mentioned in the article) claims to solve the problem by using a membrane that only lets hydrogen pass through. That way all the co2 just stays in the well.
> It will be important to prevent the CO2 byproduct from leaking into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change, however. Cemvita Factory argues that it can keep the CO2 locked underground, use other microbes to fix it somehow, or find commercial uses for the greenhouse gas… Exactly what solution Cemvita would use in each location—and how successfully—isn’t yet known.
Seems like a bit of a dealbreaker to me. CO2 storage is a huge unsolved problem. This is about as close to a climate friendly solution as saying “we’ll do traditional hydrogen and put the CO2 somewhere.” Theoretically fine but not a practical idea at the moment.
Proton Technologies (mentioned in the article) claims to solve the problem by using a membrane that only lets hydrogen pass through. That way all the co2 just stays in the well.
Yeah, this is just another flavor of blue hydrogen -- h2 generated in a way that releases co2 and they're suuuuper sure they'll figure out a way to capture it.
Hydrogen tech is just a scam to greenwash the legacy fossil fuels industry.
This.. It stuck me when I saw Aramco (Saudi oil major) advertising Hydrogen tech on TV.
The brown and black hydrogen will be far cheaper than green hydrogen for some time. They also have the advantage of existing subsidised infrastructure for drilling and pumping.
And when the hydrogen vehicles and Power stations become common, the common man have no choice but to purchase this cheaper hydrogen
The common man has no choice but to purchase what is available to them. With regulation, that will be Green. Without regulation, its unlikely retailers will even bother to stock Green until it is cheaper. Free Market, meet Tragedy of the Commons.
Yes, but the idea is that it could be better at long term bulk storage of power than eg. Batteries. Now the question is how it measures vs pumped water.
"a biotech firm in Texas, had spritzed a carefully selected combination of bacteria"
Would this spritz be measured in gallons or tons?
As much as it's worth considering the co2 byproduct and it's affect, doesn't pumping large volumes of liquids into the earth like this lead to all sorts of unintended consequences as well?
This is not what an oil well looks like, and the article doesn't help with phrasing like "depleted cavern". An oil well is not a big cave filled with black, bubbling oil and a big "straw" poked into it. The hydrocarbons are held in the porosity of the rock, and pressures (both natural and introduced) force them to the wellbore. A very poor sponge is a better visible analogy, but even that over-represents the voids.
That's what fracking is. It doesn't sound like this new company would be pumping anywhere near as much water, under as much pressure or with as toxic a mix.
An innovative energy tech that increases co2 emissions is not that exciting. Kind of hope it is not economical for this reason. Unless they can trap the co2 it but not
sure how?
It does produce CO2. They just hope to store or contain it.
Please don't. You can generate the H2 once. We need the infrastructure to produce our worldwide energy demand regeneratively anyway, so why take this risk?
My god the hydrocarbon industry is shameless. "Our hydrogen got dumped on with this color grading system." "Not with out gold tier ultra premium deluxe hydrogen."
And what happens to the carbon that hydrogen is bonded to?
>Capturing or otherwise neutralizing the CO2 must be done safely, says Stephen Wallace, who runs a microbiology lab at the University of Edinburgh. But he adds that Cemvita Factory’s idea of
OK so no plans.
The most inexpensive thing possible will happen. This is grey hydrogen with branding.
Yeah, burning oil (with microbes this time) to make hydrogen while wasting the rest of the energy in the oil (to sustain microbes) while generating the same emissions as oil (but using microbes instead of burning it in engines) so that when the hydrogen (which has less energy than oil because microbes) can be used without harmful emissions in the cityscape (but overall double the emissions of hydrocarbons per mile because microbes).
It doesn't sound good when you put it like that, so you call it gold instead, supplanting the """"actual"""" meaning of "gold hydrogen" which is emissionless hydrogen pockets underground. Fuck the colour system though, it's ridiculous obfuscation. This is just plain old "hydrogen we made by wasting half the energy from oil (using microbes)".
PS. For a little substantiation to those "less energy" claims, dihydrogen has a heat of combustion of ~290 kJ/mol. Methane has 890 kJ/mol, and ideally decomposes into two hydrogen molecules at 580 kJ/mol. Add in the fact that such a reaction literally cannot exist and whatever reaction the microbes do, they probably do to gain energy as they release the carbon, we can expect a lower ratio of hydrogen molecules to methane in. With longer hydrocarbons, the super ideal ratio drops, as well as with switching to more complex hydrocarbons, so we're talking hyper idealised scenario here. This is overall a pretty bad idea, probably not far from SMR in efficiency, if not worse.
EDIT: I've gone and balanced it out, assuming that the microbes use water to pull the oxygen from (as they do with extreme likelihood), the ideal reaction is CH₄ + 2 H₂O → CO₂ + 4 H₂ with an enthalpy of 252.8 kJ/mol. That's more endothermic than SMR, which sits at 206 kJ/mol. Both are very strongly endothermic. _It would, genuinely be way more efficient to just burn natural gas or your output hydrogen to make ""grey"" hydrogen._ This is garbage and results in higher emissions than existing, widespread technology accounting for ~78% of global hydrogen production. What the hell! Not to mention that both of these are a horrible idea beacuse it's genuinely more environmentally friendly to just burn natural gas. This causes more emissions in every case than just natural gas.
I'm assuming tax payers will be on the hook to give oil corporations billions of dollars in "carbon credits" for capturing the carbon that they would otherwise have otherwise polluted in the course of their petroleum profiteering.
No. Carbon credits are meant to create a market for the right to emit carbon dioxide, ideally where the total credits are fixed and reducing per year. What you're talking about are carbon offsets, which in turn increase the the total pool of credits per year. Ideally, these offsets permanently lock an equivalent amount of CO2 away in some form (permanent forests, etc.). But increasingly, they do nothing of the sort.
Your example of handling CO2 emissions from hydrogen reserves is a case in point.
I have no quarrel with the engineering. "Hydrogen" the industry moniker is a big oil trojan horse and an attempted "big lie". If it were enacted at any substantive policy level outside of niche applications, you would then add "inevitable massive funding boondoggle".
Outside of research and prototypes, absolutely no funding should go to hydrogen infrastructure or production/use. It's wasted money and funding that should be applied to grid, alternative energy, and EV infrastructure projects.
If research produces economical use cases for hydrogen, great. But this article is the best example of what "The Hydrogen Movement" is: greenwashing fossil fuels and carbon accounting fraud.
I've been arguing for two years now that the "grey/blue/green" hydrogen labels are pure marketing bullshit. While they may in the beginning refer to legitimate categorizations of hydrogen "sourcing", in reality they will be used to greenwash fossil fuel hydrogen production through fraud, lies, obfuscation, or switcheroo.
"Gold" Hydrogen. The industry is drinking their own kool aid.
Sure, but planes aren’t going to run on batteries for long haul flights. The nice trick with fuel is the plane gets lighter the farther it goes. Batteries aren’t like that. They stay heavy.
We need something for this issue and marketing and lies aside, my admittedly limited understanding of the science is that there are actually ways to make hydrogen without negative externalities.
But yes, this article feels like a totally load of bollocks.
I wish people stop fantasizing about battery powered planes completely. All EV planes are ultra-lights without pressurized fuselages and no ability to fly in the tropopause. So they can never be particularly comfortable or safe aircrafts. All commercial airliners will run on some kind of chemical for the foreseeable future. If not hydrogen, it will be synfuels/e-fuels or something similar.
Producing desalinated water and hydrogen from seawater using solar energy.
•Performing a multi-objective optimization to achieve the highest performance.
•Considering low, high, and no solar radiation operational modes during a day.
•Producing 4.33, 2.62, and 3.54 g/s of hydrogen for mentioned modes, respectively.
•Attaining 81.5%, 27.9% and 50.61% of energy efficiency for mentioned modes, respectiv
Sure, lets make hydrogen with solar. Now we have ultraflammable gas prone to leaking that requires high pressures and/or extremely low temperatures to have some energy density. Where's the infra for that?
Have you ever considered why there are no home hydrogen generator/storage units to be hooked to solar? Because it's just too technically challenging and in the end not competitive to batteries or thermal storage.
Only if they can do something with the CO2 other than releasing it into the atmosphere. Like trapping it underground or storing it somehow.
It's not a totally crazy idea, carbon capture from the atmosphere is very hard - there's only 400 parts per million. Carbon capture from concentrated sources, like the smokestacks of coal power plants is a real thing. It remains to be seen if it's done responsibly.
We've taken the biosphere to the brink of devastation through this kind of carefree approach with CO2.
The precautionary principle needs to at the forefront any large project involving hydrocarbons. Maybe instead of trusting the companies that got us into this mess we should, do the opposite, and not trust their claims?
We have caused devastation by CO2 emissions, not CO2 capture and storage.
Reflexively opposing green tech that isn't up to your environmental standards is not useful. Nothing I said involved "trusting" these companies, I think they should be better regulated.
We've caused devastation by over confidently assuming that we know what we're talking about and that there won't be any unintended consequences from our actions.
I don't get the strong opposition to it. Yes, CO2 is a byproduct. And yes, that CO2 might leak out of the wells. But it would still be much better than the status quo, which is hydrogen from fossil fuels, with the CO2 being emitted 100%.
Hydrogen is very much needed for chemical synthesis (ammonia for fertiliser), and can also be used to make steel. Using this would be much better than blue hydrogen. A good pragmatic solution until we have green hydrogen.
> But it would still be much better than the status quo, which is hydrogen from fossil fuels, with the CO2 being emitted 100%.
This produces the same amount. Actually, steam reforming is more efficient energy-wise, consuming 206 kJ/mol instead of the 253 kJ/mol this ideally consumes. Since the microbes are not being fed electricity, that comes out of the same fossil fuels, giving us an even worse, actually much worse, carbon / hydrogen ratio. The emissions are higher and storing the gas is no easier or harder than with ordinary SMR from natural gas or oil. We absolutely can and do store the CO from SMR, consuming many times the energy stored in the hydrogen coming out.
It's really no solution at all and just a worse, less efficient version of hydrogen from fossil fuels. No matter how you seal it, nowhere close to the produced amount of CO₂ can fit in the well and it will nearly in its entirety just find alternative routes out. It's a waste of time, mostly.
Blue, black, green, grey, white, translucent, gold, purple polka dot… this is a stupid way to name things…
If it’s hydrogen derived from oil by industrial petrochemical processes like steam reforming or catalytic cracking, can we just use these terms… it’s not like we’re trying to explain which pump handles to fill up a car with, we’re talking about issues with a proposed concept and obfuscation of what that concept truly is and what it’s competing against, with cutesy colours labels… frankly just puts me off the entire hydrogen industry …
Hydrogen is pretty easy to get ahold of chemically speaking because it’s everywhere. If we need to differentiate let’s just use the additional nouns necessary. “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Carbon Neutral electricity” and “Hydrogen by thermochemical decomposition of organic waste powered by Carbon Neutral fuels” are ecologically better than “Hydrogen from Electrolysis powered by Coal” and “Hydrogen captured as a waste gas from existing oil refineries, with no other effort to reduce Carbon emissions“
I don’t normally come across a HN thread that reads so “cliquey” outside of the crypto community stuff… seeing this sort of stuff about Hydrogen is just weird.