Limitless ‘white’ hydrogen under our feet may soon shatter all energy assumptions
There’s a real possibility that vast reserves of this clean fuel can be extracted at competitive costs
Vast amounts of geologic H2 would be both a surprise and a game changer.
Wonder if the EU will manage to ban drilling for it?
I wonder. I used to think that hydrogen would be “the future” , but it all seems so impractical. No one can really make it work safely.
It is not efficient enough and too dangerous to be used domestically and the strorage costs are too high ( not only monetary but also again in terms of safety ). I guess an exploding hydrogen powered car is probably a better way to go than in an inextinguishable lithium fire.
The downside of burning H2 is of course it produces the greatest greenhouse gas of all : water vapour.
Now if we could just convert that H2 into something with fewer problems of storage, safety, for which we have existing distribution systems, and not requiring mass premature replacement of perfectly functional machinery / heating etc …
Hmmm… maybe throwing the ban hammer around wasn’t such a great idea eh?
This is very bad news for environmentalists who believed that they were close to shutting down all economic activity barring flint-chipping and the burying of mastodons to make future generations think that the world is older than 6000 years.
One of the reasons that petrol was able to surpass its competitors was the ability to buy cans of petrol in general stores. Pratt’s Motor Spirit, as I recall, among other brands. As it became more popular it was easy to create a network of deliveries of cans then transition to pumps and tankers. All of which were within contemporary tech. H2 is a different proposition. I suppose you could do it with cylinders round the back of Tesco’s but the tankers, pipes and everything aren’t there. They’d have to be built everywhere to encourage anyone to have a H2 car. Nobody is going to allow the equivalent of Pratt’s to be used unstrangled by regulation. Upfront costs would be immense. Although I suppose they’ll need a new pile o’ money after HS2.
It’s strange how these promises of energy Nirvana being just round the corner crop up at regular intervals, it’s almost like we’re being distracted from realising the drive to end fossil fuels is costing us dearly in the short term.
Town gas is a mix of H2 and carbon monoxide, why could we cope with the technical difficulties of H2 in the fifties but not now?
Rhoda wasn’t there a large hydrogen container that went poof at Lakehurst New Jersey on May 6 1937?
Difficult stuff to produce and store.
Town gas is a mix of H2 and carbon monoxide, why could we cope with the technical difficulties of H2 in the fifties but not now?
Because it was manufactured locally to the consumer and delivered at very low pressure…
The gas used now is delivered over very large distances at high pressure.
Or in Cyprus collected from the supermarket in a 15kg cylinder…
The Hindenburg kept the hydrogen mostly in by just fabric, oiled silk or was it intestine material, no supply problem with sausage skin in Germany [insert worst/wurst pun here]. At low pressure because it wasn’t for storage it was for maximum displacement. Town gas similarly was low pressure. The storage/piping problem is real but can be done with tech. The problem is the capital expense and the need to have it in place before you can use a car optimised for H2. I suppose one might have a petrol/h2 switchable car but you lose efficiency that way.
@Ottokring
The downside of burning H2 is of course it produces the greatest greenhouse gas of all : water vapour.
Given that just one strong hurricane holds around 15 billion tonnes of water the additional amount from burning hydrogen should not be a concern.
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4404/ch8-8.htm
If you change the last number up to 9, through to 13 in the link, there’s more.
Lots of money spent, not too dangerous is H2 but they took a lot of precautions, in the end not economic.
Later in 12 we have:
we have crammed the maximum amount of hydrogen in the fuselage that it can hold. You do not carry hydrogen in the flat surfaces of the wing,” he explained.42 Johnson turned to Perry Pratt for estimated improvements in the 304 engine and his answer was equally pessimistic: no more than 5 or 6 percent improvement in specific fuel consumption could be expected over a five-year period. The very low growth estimates were compounded by operational logistics problems of liquid hydrogen. As Ben Rich asked: “How do you justify hauling enough LH2 around the world to exploit a shortrange airplane
Must be a reason you don’t store hydrogen in flat surfaces but I can’t recall it.
Rhoda, are you sure Pratt’s Motor Spirit wasn’t a lubricant for a piston in a bonus hole?
Didn’t town gas have all sorts of problems? Tendency to blow up houses, suicide by oven, pollution by producing sites etc?
And folk largely sucked this up as better than the available at the time alternatives?
But now we do have better… Just some of us want to dismantle all the quality of life gained
Surely we can take this abundant* source of H2, combine with CO2 from -say- the ocean, and produce a fuel close enough to current fuels to use existing distribution, engines, heating etc?
The environmental saving both on pollution and energy consumption in not replacing everything, everywhere would seem immense.
*original article being from AEP, the whole thing may well be orchids.
Burning hydrogen doesn’t just produce water, it burns so hot it also produces a lot of Nitrogen oxides NOx.
These are nasty pollutants and a leading cause of the anti-diesel campaign.
The best thing one can say about ‘The Hydrogen Economy’ is that it is self correcting by removal: Boom Boom!
“original article being from AEP, the whole thing may well be orchids.”
Of course it will be, AEP has been producing articles about ‘significant turning points’ in the economy for the last 30 years and I doubt he’s got any of the actual turning points and issues that will cause trouble right once. I mean he wasn’t writing his portents of doom epistles during lockdowns decrying all the money that was being printed and spent was he? Nor was he pointing out that NATO backing Putin into a corner over Ukraine might just be a problem for a continent that ran their economies on Russian gas.
Hydrogen car in the States.
Not as insane as an EV to fill up and it appears the gas is manufactured on site.
Still not sure about having an unexploded bomb behind me though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lUkOHnjLsM
Sweet Ambrose is the chump who reckons a return to negative real interest rates is both necessary & inevitable. History graduate at Cambridge of course. Father was an Oxford professor of social anthropology. Being a chump runs in the family.
I’m surprised that Hillary didn’t have AEP bumped off, all the exposes he was making about the Clinton Crime Family in the 1990s. He was right about the impending financial disaster when he spotted it coming in 2005, but stopped clocks and all that…
Not exactly calling bullshit on this, but at a depth of >20KM it might as well be on the Moon.
If I were able to dig >4KM I would have access to reasonable geothermal temperatures and run a geothermal power plant, so why not do that than the logarithmically harder >20KM hydrogen reserves that may or may not be there and even if they are there might be too diffuse to be of use.
The Kola Superdeep borehole was being intermittently drilled for decades and only goes down 12KM. Since the Russians stopped drilling our ability to dig deep wells hasn’t increased that much, it would still take decades to drill a new hole down to >20KM.
Didn’t town gas have all sorts of problems? Tendency to blow up houses, suicide by oven, pollution by producing sites etc?
Indeed. Those were the days gas explosions were fairly common. And gas was usually put through heavy steel pipe with threaded joins put together with sealing compound. Can’t see them doing that now. Make retrofitting a helluva task. You need all straight runs.
Yeah but AndyF an hurricane is a localised event and most of it happens at sea anyway. This is steam being produced by millions of cars over a huge area of land, causing a steady-state cloudy day.
“Didn’t town gas have all sorts of problems? Tendency to blow up houses, ”
Aren’t you guys thinking of V2s ?
🙂
“I aim for the stars, but keep hitting London” by Werner von Braun.
😀
If there really was H2 in quantity wouldn’t that tend to support the abiotic oil theory and therefore recategorise fossil fuel as green fuel. No need to re-equip for H2 then.
I mean, you could probably develop plug in hydrogen cylinders for your car that would work the same way, but instead of the low pressure 15KG cylinders you have right now they’d have to be some form of COPV (Composite overwrapped pressure vessel) like they have for storing liquid hydrogen in rockets at pressure densities of hundreds of atmospheres.
So you’d have to have some process of manufacturing these COPV “bottles”, filling them at a depot somewhere and then distributing them around the country like we do with the 15KG gas bottles.
The problem with this is if you’ve got a dodgy one you’ll likely only find out when you’ve got it plugged into your hydrogen fuel cell and running. If it suddenly bursts then that multiple hundreds of atmospheres of pressure has to go somewhere and that right quick.
BIG BADDA BOOM! …and nothing left of the car you were in other than rather small bits of high velocity metal or as grandad would have called it “Shrapnel”.
I suppose it would make life easier for the Mussies terror bombing campaign. Butane and propane never really cut it as explosive devices.
Can’t see that being a vote winner.
pollution by producing sites
Bit of family mythology. Great-great grandfather was horse trader. Used to graze the stock at Beckton in E. London. The field was bought by the Beckton Gas Light & Coke company to dump the fly ash on. Now generally known locally as the Beckton Alps. Had a dry ski run, last time I was there. So if we ever had a family coat of arms, we’d be entitled to put a mountain on them. The only one in London if you don’t count Mount Pleasant.
If they go for hydrogen, no doubt some family will be putting a crater on theirs.
Must be a reason you don’t store hydrogen in flat surfaces but I can’t recall it.
Greater surface area = greater evaporation* through the container walls.
*wrong word, insufficient tea.
It may not be ideal as a transport fuel but I can imagine it as part of a localised electricity/heating system. You build a fuel cell, get a decent thermodynamic efficiency for generating the electricity, and use cooling water to keep the cell at operating temperature, the heated water being used for district heating.
If that were costed and proved wildly impractical then I’d admit defeat. Mind you, in a rational world lots of cheap hydrogen could be used for turning the heavy end of the oil barrel into petrol and diesel, for manufacturing ammonia and methanol, and so on.
Come to think of it you could use the hydrogen and the CO2 recovered from fossil fuel flue gases to manufacture methanol as a transport fuel. How about that? Would that keep the greenies happy?
(Answer: no, because they don’t suffer from a rational anxiety but from a religious disposition looking for a modern form of puritanism to force on the rest of us.)
“Aren’t you guys thinking of V2s ?”
Around 1,400 V2s were launched at Britain and caused nearly 2,800 deaths. Which is 2 per rocket on average which isn’t really much of a return. Several hundred landed in open countryside, possibly killing a few cows and sheep although no-one counted.
The biggest loss of life from a single rocket in the UK was 160 when a rocket hit a Woolworth’s store in New Cross.
More V2s were actually aimed at Belgium (over 1,600) and 567 people were killed in Antwerp when a rocket hit a cinema. I’m not sure what film was on at the time.
The Plainsman (1936)
@John Galt
Thanks.
@Bongo
Must be a reason you don’t store hydrogen in flat surfaces but I can’t recall it.
You can, but cylinders/spheres are a lot better. Hydrogen will be at really high pressure — even liquid there will be a high propensity to boil off, creating massive pressures — and flat pouches are really hard to keep in shape, cylinders/spheres pretty much do it by themselves.
Secondly, I believe this is referring to aircraft/spacecraft where mass is a really big deal: surface area / volume ratio is really low for flat tanks, and the mass of the tank is proportional* to the surface area. The only reason kerosene fuelled aircraft use wing tanks is because the wing is the tank (which is doable because there’s no pressure to contain) and even the baffles in the tank double as structure for the wing, so the marginal extra mass required to turn the wing into a fuel tank is negligible. This would not be so if the wing had to contain something that needed to be kept cold or at above ambient pressure.
*for any given shape/pressure. Anything with a circular section can be built much lighter as previously mentioned.
But quite attractive with some plausible deniability for those politiscum trying to turn this country into New Shitholistan.
Not really. Just throw a bag of flour in some diesel for a couple of days, dry it out and viola! Redneck C4.
@ dearieme
In a hydrogen economy, there’d certainly be no shortage of margarine. Maybe toast …
Not really. Just throw a bag of flour in some diesel for a couple of days, dry it out and viola! Redneck C4.
Uh? You not do chemistry at school? You need an oxidiser. Flour isn’t. Even rednecks know that. Fertiliser yes. Hence anfo. At a pinch flour & fertiliser, maybe. But certainly not two hydrocarbons.
@BiS – You’ve never worked in an environment subject to dry powder explosions, obviously.
AndyF
July 14, 2023 at 8:01 am
@Ottokring
The downside of burning H2 is of course it produces the greatest greenhouse gas of all : water vapour.
Given that just one strong hurricane holds around 15 billion tonnes of water the additional amount from burning hydrogen should not be a concern.
_____________
Well if that 15 billion tons is inside a hurricane, then there are 15 billion tons less free in the atmosphere.
But the whole carbon dioxide scam is predicated on increased water vapour. Allegedly atmospheric C02 attenuates outgoing long wavelength infrared and scatters it to collide with water vapour molecules which absorb the energy as heat.
This raises atmospheric temperatures a tad which causes a tad more water vapour and the atmosphere thereby heats up a tad more. This in turn, egged on by a bit more scatter from CO2 causes more water vapour in the atmosphere, more heat, more water vapour, more heat… then Yikes!… a feedback loop, tipping point and run away global warming.
So burning H2 in air to produce more water vapour is just doing what the evil CO2 is doing, but much more quickly and efficiently.
This is the madness of ‘global warming’ scammers.
@BiS – You’ve never worked in an environment subject to dry powder explosions, obviously.
Curiously I have. Very much so. And yep, you could get one with dry flour. In fact there’s a party trick can be done with a biscuit tin, some flour, a candle & a length of hosepipe will cause amusement or alarm depending. And of course a fine spray of diesel in air is how a diesel engine works. But all mixing flour with diesel will achieve is binding the flour together. Preventing a dry powder explosion. And diesel doesn’t “dry”. It evaporates. Eventually. All you’d have left is rather smelly flour from the heavy oil & detergent residuals. Best it will make is a very poor quality firelighter.
I think you’ve got confused with home brew napalm. But that’s done with gasoline & sugar. Although there are far better adherents. Polystyrene’s a favourite. But not with diesel. Diesel’s not particularly flammable. At a pinch you can put fires out with it.
Flour milling (as done up to Victorian times, at least) created large amounts of dust, in a potentially explosive mixture with air. Plenty of windmills were lost in this way, even though they took precautions (e.g. wooden shovels, so you couldn’t strike a nail and create a spark).
You can get the same with any fine dust of a flammable material. Sawmills for instance. Pigeon shit is particularly nasty because it contains its own oxidiser.
“Evans-Pritchard recorded the tendencies of Azandes to blame or attribute witchcraft as the cause of various mis-happenings. The most notable of these issues involved the deaths of eight Azande people due to the collapse of a termite infested door frame”
Somehow I’m reminded of Just stop oil campaigners and Greenpeace
As dearieme points out, some people certainly push the idea of an Ammonia Economy. And yes the tech to make the stuff is over a century old. Naturally I’d rather not have the garage at the end of the street flogging this smelly stuff, so I’m opposed.
There’s also the lower energy density as compared to petrol or diesel fuels. Though that’s not as bad as H2.
One imagines the anti-bacon lobby that Tim mentioned on the 12th would also shriek in horror at the nitrates caused by burning it. Though of course all combustion can produce this.
The only vaguely sensible approach is to combine the stuff with carbon, as Line Noise has pointed out. Of course we’d have to suck up to Putin, as the Russkies are the only ones who are ready to build lots and lots of breeder reactors to provide the power to run all this. An advantage of these is that the sodium used as a working fluid is so radioactive that any leaks quickly decay to harmless levels. One loves to imagine how this’d go down with the Greens. A disadvantage is that the molten sodium reacts violently with air and especially water.
I’d still argue that a simpler and cheaper way is to not refine so carefully the fossil fuels that Holy Mother Gaia has so benevolently provided. The sulphur contained in them would automatically provide the necessary clouds to reflect the sun’s heat and keep us cool.
If God had meant us to cook, He wouldn’t have invented smog!!!
Given that just one strong hurricane holds around 15 billion tonnes of water the additional amount from burning hydrogen should not be a concern.
Apple and oranges. A hurricane is a local, temporary, extreme event. If there’s any greenhouse component at all it’ll be utterly swamped by the grand cooling caused by the physical processes driving the hurricane. This is completely different to globally distributed, well-mixed greenhouse gasses doing their thang with long wave radiation.
“Apple and oranges. A hurricane is a local, temporary, extreme event.”
And (mostly) in the wrong layer of the atmosphere to cause a greenhouse effect to begin with…
Sort of the same for most CO2 as well…
But since Faith and Feelz trump thermodynamics nowadays…
But the whole carbon dioxide scam is predicated on increased water vapour.
They’re happy to stick with CO2 until pressed on the fact that its effect is logarithmic not linear, such that you get less and less greenhouse backscatter per increase in concentration until after a point there’s no further effect. That’s usually when the water vapour feedback gets trotted out. If you challenge them from the start about water vapour being way more abundant and greenhousy than CO2, they say it doesn’t matter because the atmosphere can only hold so much and it gets rained out, etc.
As Scott Adams pointed out, it’s very difficult for laymen on either side to follow the science. We can go down the reading well of claim and counterclaim as deep as we like but in the end we’ll probably stop at a level of understanding that will be associated with the prejudices we went in with.
The doozy that demolishes the atmospheric CO³ warming argument is that, historically, higher temperatures have always preceded increases in CO² levels. Going back as far as you like to go. Although, of course, the CO² we emit must be in some way different. Maybe it prefers the pronoun O²C & we’ve been deadnaming it.
Incidentally, actually reading the chump Amrose’s article, he’s constantly talking about percentages of hydrogen in gasses, not the pure stuff. So presumably you’d need to separate. He talks about “corrosive gasses”. Heaven knows what that means. The most likely gas is CH4, methane. Well yeah. Methane – natural gas – does contain a percentage of hydrogen. Another is of course helium. Also found in natural gas. But that’s about as non-corrosive as anything gets. Being chemically non-reactive at any normally achievable pressures & temperatures.
So what you going to do with this gas when you’ve separated it? If it’s CH4 it be just put down the natural gas pipelines. Except we’re not supposed to do that are we? On threat of being JSO’d to a crawl. And if it’s helium we can’t just release it. We’ll be releasing billions of tons of a gas we’re constantly told is irreplacably rare, unrenewable & a crime to blow up balloons with.
Needs more thought I think.
Sabine Hossenfelder does a Youtube telling us why hydrogen won’t save us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE
“it’s very difficult for laymen on either side to follow the science.”
The solution is easy: everyone should attend a lengthy lecture course on infra-red spectroscopy, then do a few hundred hours in the lab using it, and then learn how the combustion engineers who do furnace radiation calculations cope with the CO2 and H2O in their flue gases.
Mind you, I doubt if one “climate scientist” in a hundred has that sort of practical engineering/science background. Nah, make that one in a thousand. Nah, make that none of the buggers. I suspect few of them have much lab or industrial experience measuring temperatures either. Not just cunts but amateur bleedin’ cunts.
fact there’s a party trick can be done with a biscuit tin, some flour, a candle & a length of hosepipe will cause amusement or alarm depending.
Sounds interesting. Care to share.
CO₂ not CO²
O² is an oxygen atom with an atomic weight of 2 – so 8 protons and minus 6 neutrons!
Thanks guys, I read AEP article and thought
Another AEP fantasy
Came here to see if Mr TW picked up. Great work again by all
Related:
Has a Real scientist, engineer spoken to Shapps? Or maybe he’s read this blog
Fine pendantry, jgh.. 🙂
Now … how the ruddy hell did you get that subscript to appear? Been chasing a method/code to have that appear consistently for ages…
Test 1
Test2
Oh yeah. The normal html codes don’t work. Never noticed that ( actually never tried ).
How gay is WordPress ?
Care to share.
Would have thought the apparatus would have defined the experiment Cherneyy. But…
Tin, candle, hole so hose pipe can enter tin at bottom, hose pipe, flour. I found it’s better to put 3 or 4 inches of flour down hose end before assembly. Light candle, put lid on tin, blow sharply down house. Done right, candle ignites cloud of flour & explosion blows lid 20 ft into air. Loud satisfying bang & ball of flame. Better not to have hose too short or you can get same in the teeth.
QED
Another method to conduct it is with a belt sander without vacuum extraction in a confined space. Pine’s no good. Too much water content. MDF’s perfect. Result’s looking like you’ve landed a part in the Black & White Minstrel Show