To be clear: we’re going to use renewable hydrogen for some things, such as fertilizer manufacturing — there isn’t any other way to do them sustainably. There are applications for which it’s one of the most expensive choices, such as home heating, and a whole host of industrial processes and aviation sitting in between.
It is not a ‘gamble’ right now. It is just ‘plain stupid’ right now.
The opposite is true. There is no alternative to carbon neutrality and hydrogen will be needed in huge amounts to decarbonize certain sectors in industry and transport.
The problem are the insane amounts of story tellers that either pretend it will not work at all or that it’s some magic solution so people can keep burning just another kind of gas without having to change anything. And both actually tell the same story: give up and stick with fossil fuels because it makes us rich.
There are 2 key messages in the article:
In most countries we are NOT at the point to able to spend excess electricity.
Gas & oil companies do not care what you put into your cars, machines, etc. As long as you buy it from them. And if it does not work… oh well, they can continue selling Gas&oil as long as needed, damn the consequences😉
Bonus: All planned ‘green hydrogen’ facilities worldwide until 2035 will cover about 10% of Germany’s demand: https://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/Ueckerdt/E-Fuels_Stand-und-Projektionen_PIK-Potsdam.pdf
Why are you expecting that hydrogen to be made into electricity? While there are silly ideas like using it in small scale applications like cars or buses, most hydrogen is used to produce things like fertilizer or steel, and while there are newly developed processes that are less reliant on hydrogen, we are unlikely to be able to scale them up drom lab sized for decades.
Being able to replace this hydrogen with stuff made from solar power rather than methane steam reformation would present a major reduction in emissions, and at the rate we are building out renewables it is far more likely that we will have the necessary renewables long before we have scaled up the alternative processes.
That’s wrong. There are enough countries that already have problems getting rid of excess electricity several hours a day in most of the summer half. And this will increase constantly over the next years. Oh… and we are actually paying for that electricity to be discarded already. Which is exactly why the slow buildup of power-to-gas as well as short-term storage needs to start now. Or do you believe the increase in excess electricity will just go on for a decade without a way to use it and then we snap our fingers an the power-to-gas production and infrastucture magically appears out of nowwhere?
Of course they care. They already know that 10 years from now no ICE-based car will be produced anymore. And they are panicking enough to spend a lot of money on bullshit propaganda to revert legislation that bans co2-emitting cars in the near-future. and if that doesn’t work we they hope to confuse enough people to cling to their oil and gas longer than is good for them (and their wallets).
Speakling of bullshit… that’s eFuels, not hydrogen. And what you call “demand” are the numbers if we follow some insane “it will not work and is all a scam”-fairy tale (or the “oh, you don’t need to change anything. Just stick with your combution engine”-alternmative), do nothing and then suddenly need gasoline for millions of cars. Which will not happen. There is no future for combustion engines. Producers have stopped development years ago. The latest generation of car engines burning gasoline to be build is already on our streets today.
So of course eFuels are not a solution. Because it’s a scam to foul people into clinging to a technological dead-end and so people can tell those fairy tales about how our energy transition will fail and we should really just give up. In reality eFuels are a niche topic exclusively for long-range ship and air traffic at best and for a few specific industries (like chemical production nowadays using natural gas as a raw material instead of energy).
Seriously… how often will people parrot the same bullshit again and again? It’s always the same moronic arguments simplifying facts ad absurdum and then repeating them again and again knowing that explaininmg why it’s wrong will take much more time:
But batteries do not work because we can’t build that much for storage!!! And now I need to explain people that long-term storage and short-term storage are two completely separate things and how they actually work. Also how solar and wind are actually complementary and the amount of short-term storage needed is so much smaller… not even half a day to get a stable day/night cycle but even less (~3 hours to shift production peak -mid day- to demand peak -early evening).
But lithium!!! No, grid storage is not a hand-held that needs maximised energy-density. Quite the opposite actually with lithium-ion batteries being exceptionally bad for big fixed installations because of their heat issues. Cheap and thermally stable are the main requirements for grid storage. No one cares if that warehouse-sized installation is 20% bigger and 40% heavier… (Speaking of different requirements: lithium batteries are used for some of that storage today… used lithium batteries to be specific, because those cheap batteries bought slightly over their recycling value because they too used up to run a car anymore fits the specifications well already…)
But there is no long-term storage!!! Yes, there is. Countries nowadays already store enough gas to bridge several months if necessary. We can do the same with hydrogen.
But hydrogen is so inefficient and will be far too expensive!!! No… burning it isn’t more inefficient that burning natural gas. Producing it isn’t more inefficient that producing natural gas either if you start including the actual production costs and transport (often over vast distances) today. And regarding the price. The EU just had the first auctions for member’s first national green hydrogen production projects just last week… and before any scaling and with our electricity production just starting to generate overproduction in limited time frames the auctioned costs are already on par with natural gas.
And I could go on like this for hours. The whole “argument” of how the planned energy transition will not work is basically a giant Gish gallop… only with the exact same chain of non-issues brought up again and again simply hoping that the majority will fall for it because the actual facts are more complex to explain and can not be brought down to just two sentences filled with buzzwords.
Your bonus is for e-fuels, which is not hydrogen, but basically currently oil based fuels, like petrol, kerosin and so forth made from hydrogen and CO2 using electricity.