Isn’t this just absolutely great from Porsche?
PORSCHE HAS JUST SOLVED CLIMATE CHANGE FOR US
No, really:
As we’ve been saying for some time now if we can have cheap green hydrogen then we are indeed done. True, there then has to be some Stinks work but nothing difficult. If we’ve hydrogen and CO2 then we can make methanol, gasoline, aviation fuel and, obviously, methane. All of which will be net zero carbon.
The synthetic e-fuel won’t be exactly cheap—Steiner thinks at current prices, it works out to around $8 per gallon ($2/L),
We’d not want to run the world’s airfleet on something at that cost but we most certainly could do. And it would almost certainly be cheaper to do so than to junk everything we’ve already got and start using Zeppelins instead. Most of Europe has been paying €2 a litre recently and while it’s a dent to the pocketbook internal combustion engines are still cheaper than electric cars right now covering all running costs.
Don’t worry. Georgie Monbiot and Auntie Greta will soon be on the case explaining why this is in fact bad for the climate and why we need to protest outside Porsche headquarters, write to our MPs, glue ourselves to the roads and generally act like spoiled children.
Am I wrong?
Probably more useful as “Green Methane” though, since it doesn’t have the storage and transport problems of hydrogen. Sure, in the environment methane increases Warble Gloaming, but generated sustainably through solar power, stored, transported and then consumed in a suitable ICE vehicle, it’s the cleanest of all natural fuels save hydrogen.
I heard the most intendely depressing docu last night on Austrian radio.
They compared the phenomenal success of British wartine rationing ( their words) with what is required to solve the climate crisis.
In other words the market cannot be trusted to prevent us all dying from spontaneously combusting. Governments have to set carbon and energy rationing for industries and consumers, but still allow private enterprises to operate within parameters set by Authority.
This was postulated by some dozy bint called Ulrike Hermann who writes for the Betlin Tageszeitung. I have seen her on telly in the past, but always switched her off because she is some hectoring Lagarde/VD Leyen lookalike who is always wrong about everything.
Any Germanists who fancy half an hour of self flagellation can get it here
https://oe1.orf.at/programm/20221221#702392/Streng-limitiert
But which products would be rationed and which would not be? In WW2 Spam was not rationed.
Has anyone (Paul Homewood possibly?) worked out how expensive it is to create Hydrogen for fuels? $8 a gallon for petrol alternative mentioned above, but what about replacing LNG/Natural gas?
Bloke who serviced my boiler yesterday said the boiler manufacturers are already gearing up for hydrogen. I mentioned the problem that Hydrogen will seep through / corode steel pipes and he said they are going to lay new plastic pipes (Where does plastic come from again?) or line all the existing pipes with plastic.
All to solve a non-problem.
In the future, our descendants will look back on this generation (and the one before it) and wonder how a group of adults so deeply retarded ever managed to breathe and chew gum at the same time.
Blimey, it isn’t a secret, THEY don’t want US to drive anything, or fly, or eat proper nosh. They must be resisted, not accommodated or pandered to.
I seem to remember suggesting exactly this in these comments a year ago. And get the energy from photovoltaics laid across N. Africa’s deserts. Start in Mauritania & work east. The root of the problems in the area are all poverty. Once it got going it’d be more like Bahrain. And an opportunity to green the desserts underneath the solar panels.
And get the energy from photovoltaics laid across N. Africa’s deserts.
The amount of water needed to clean solar panels is quite significant.
Hydrogen: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64028510.
“more than 99% of the world’s supply is currently made from fossil fuels, creating CO2 emissions”.
“But is hydrogen safe? The government and gas companies say it can be, even though hydrogen is both more leaky and combustible than natural gas. Both the gas companies and the government say residents are worrying needlessly about safety. They say that though hydrogen is more explosive, additional measures will be in place making the risk similar to that of natural gas.
That doesn’t wash with Professor Tom Baxter, an expert in hydrogen at the University of Strathclyde: “Would you buy a car from a salesman who said, ‘This car will crash more often but because of the safety features, we will be just as safe?” he asks. “You wouldn’t do it.”
Not green, not as safe, and certainly won’t be as cheap. You of course, will not be allowed to have a choice…….
Well of course they could build the hydrogen crap without subsidy and let it compete in the market. How would that be?
Fossil fuels are vital to civilisation.
CO2 doesn’t cause much warming compared to other causes outside human knowledge or control.
Warming is not a catastrophe, it’s a benefit. There’s no climate crisis.
It’s a scam and the ones who are pushing it despise you.
Remember when Porsche built that electric tank with a couple of V10 petrol engines making the leccy? Those were the days.
If we can have cheap green hydrogen then we are indeed done
In the same way that a steak is “done”?
@PJF
Deserts are more a lack of precipitation than an actual water problem. Where I live actually gets less rain than the Sahara. But we have some useful precipitators, look good on holiday snaps, to collect what we get.
If you’ve got sufficient energy you can mechanically precipitate water straight out of the air. I’ve seen them running in Algeria. Also if green a desert you can set up a self sustaining water cycle. What gets evaporated here gets precipitated there. What may have been in the Sahara before the locals started grazing goats. It wasn’t always desert.
Town gas was produced from coal before North Sea Gas (NSG). Older people will remember the smelly gasworks in most towns, where coal was turned into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, with methane added (for flame stability?) and also mercaptans so leaks would be smelly. Despite being fed through steel pipework, most of the H2 reached houses safely.
Gas stove and boiler burners were replaced when NSG arrived.
So, it’s possible to alter the mix of domestic gas and still supply by pipework. And since there’s lots of coal under our feet, bringing this method back could actually be ‘greener’ than inventing new ways with H2, when all the production and distribution costs are included.
F Greta – coal to gas is just fine! (As if it really mattered, as man-made CO2 is not a real climate problem.)
Stop Press
Climate Change denier takes a 20 mile trip yesterday, on his own, in a gas guzzling Berlingo just (wait for it) to watch fvcking birds and take a picture of the sunset which he proudly posts on a blog.
I imagine after he’d come home, he switched the power on for a hour or so of model railway relaxation.
This while people in Pakistan are literally drowning as a consequence of first world CO2 emissions.
You misspelt “Weather”.
@BraveFart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods apparently floods are not just something that have happened since the industrial revolution.
An important thing to add to the story is that $2 per liter is the price for the good locations where renewable energy works i.e. not in the UK where renewable energy is a rubbish solution. Made in the UK it would cost several times more. There are fortunately many good locations in the world. International trade is a good thing.
Another point is that you’re paying 2 Euro/liter after taxes, which likely at least double the price at the pump.
Replace that with a cost to manufacture of 2 Euro/liter (before distribution) and do you think the taxes (many of which are percentages added on at the end) will be any less?
Salamander
A good example that Ulrike Herman-Goering suggested was that rather than flying to Malaga for a few days, people would travel to Italy for 3 weeks instead. Of course they would have to travel by train and not drive or fly.
@AndyF
Looking at that Wiki page, one could be left with the impression that floods were getting more prevalent. One in the entire period up to the C14th. About one of two a century until the C18th. 2020 had 21!!! Disaster!!!! Solely a product of communications deveopment of course…
‘If we can have cheap green hydrogen then we are indeed done’
The ‘if’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But I garee – ‘if’ we can get cheap green hydrogen then YAY!
agree
I can’t see town gas coming back. The elfnsafety mob will have kittens about the CO, and they aren’t wrong either.
A small comment on the hydrogen component of town gas. Anyone was around at the time town gas used to go through the pipes would be aware of the regularity of gas explosions in those days. Everyday events.
“PJF
December 22, 2022 at 11:27 am
And get the energy from photovoltaics laid across N. Africa’s deserts.
The amount of water needed to clean solar panels is quite significant.”
Only where labor is expensive.
Where it’s cheap you just have a bunch of guys out there with little brushes sweeping off the dust every day.
Think of the jobs created!
Hydrogen + Oxygen (from air) + heat = H20.
Atmospheric water vapour produces nearly all the Earth’s ‘greenhouse’ effect to produce a near constant global daytime/night-time average of +/- 14C. So considering C02 on its own has zero ‘greenhouse’ effect (see Mars 93% atmospheric C02) but in our atmospheric mix because of its feedback effect on water vapour, produces no more than 1C increase with doubling of concentration, using hydrogen as a replacement will cut out the middle-man (CO2) and do the Full-Monty greenhouse, global warming, climate doom thingy directly.
But of course ‘The Science’ which told us masks and lockdown would ‘flatten the curve’… vaccination – just one dise would work, but two would be better – would end lockdowns and masks because it would save granny and stop you getting the disease.
“regularity of gas explosions in those days. Everyday events.”
Tsk. BiS. Thay was the cover story for the V2s
What cheap green hydrogen?
Who is going to produce it and where? Where and how will it be stored and transported?
If you cover the desert with solar panels, the most efficient and low carbon use of that power is to electrify the African economy. Otherwise you end up making hydrogen inefficiently, then storing and transporting it expensively so European motorists can feel smug, while the nations which produce the electricity are powered by fossil fuels and wood.
Of course, legislative insanity could mean that convoluted process is profitable, but it’s still fucking stupid.
. . . in our atmospheric mix because of its feedback effect on water vapour, produces no more than 1C increase with doubling of concentration . . .
Up to a point. It has a relatively strong effect at lower concentrations but beyond a certain level it makes little difference (to warming feedbacks) how much you add. We’re already at the upper level of the making a difference phase.
Hydrogen + Oxygen (from air) + heat = H20.
To be clear, in the Porsche/Siemens notion, hydrogen fuel is not the final product. The aim is to use the “green” derived hydrogen with “green” derived CO2 to make hydrocarbon fuels that we will use as we currently use “fossil” hydrocarbons. They’ll just be “carbon neutral” hydrocarbons.
I’ve no idea if their ideas are feasible or scaleable. I do know government subsidies are involved, which makes me a little suspicious.
Instead of flushing my turds, I’m going to start saving and drying them in a shed to use as fuel for future winters under St Greta’s policies.
I think the 1930s holds the record for most deaths from natural disasters with around 500k worldwide per year.
It’s around 50k for the 2010s.
Not so much because there are more or less natural disasters but because we have the infrastructure to cope with them better.
I guess once we are banned from travelling more than a mile from our mud huts, that might change.
. . . our mud huts . . .
Funnily enough, just before you posted that, YouTube threw up a video for me called:
“Why We Should Be Building with Dirt”.
Being a closed-minded bigot, I didn’t watch.
Tsk. BiS. Thay was the cover story for the V2s
Sheesh Ottokring, I maybe getting on a bit but I’m not that old. I’ve told the story before here about the Ascot in the bathroom of where I lived when I first left home. A visitor turned the hot tap on without the required finesse. Came out like someone been auditioning for the Black & White Minstrels. In retrospect & now understanding how these things function I’d guess the lighter hydrogen would rise into the flue without intersecting the pilot light. Monoxide isn’t particularly flammable on its own. So you get a build up of gas until the air/gas mixture reaches the critical level and….boom. Natural gas is much more well behaved.
I’m surprised only M saw the “deliberate”(?) mistake. The 8 bucks a gallon is the cost of producing motor fuel from hydrogen. The $2/lt is a price including tax. Motor fuel is actually around ¢60 a litre pretax, isn’t it? You can forget any “carbon tax” element to fuel taxes because as I’ve been saying all along, governments just treat it as revenue. There is no connection whatsoever between carbon emitted & any “carbon tax”. And never will be. The revenue requirement is built in. So now what happens?
@BiS: God forbid that the government could reduce it’s own spending to require less from us in extortion.
@JG
It’s what I’ve been saying all along with Tim’s carbon tax. If it does what it is supposed to, it deters energy users producing carbon. As he always says, tax something you get less of it. If energy users produce less carbon the government will get less taxes. Except it won’t because it’s budgeted for the tax. So it’ll increase the tax rate. If you took carbon emissions to zero, it still needs the tax. At some point on the tax curve the taxes will do economic damage far greater than the problem you’re supposed to be solving. Looks like we got there this year, doesn’t it?
@BiS: Sure, but at some point you end up doing your own production to avoid/evade the taxes. Like making your own beer / wine / vodka to avoid alcohol duties. We all know there is industrial evasion going on as the customs boys (i.e. old pre-HMRC “Heavy Mob”) knock over a bunch of entrepreneurial Poles running an illegal still in the back of some industrial estate. If the duty wasn’t so excessive there would be no money to be made in doing that.
Same applies to those who take unrefined cooking oil and turn it into low grade diesel. They don’t do it to “Save Gaia”, they do it to “Save Wonga”, again, it’s not the manufacturers price differential, it’s the gouging amounts of tax, duty and still more tax on top.
The government is perhaps fortunate that illegal petrol stations (like those that proliferate in Northern Ireland, run by ex-paramilitaries) haven’t crossed over to the mainland.
I took it to be a very early (or perhaps even later) April fool!