this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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oh no! think of the stock market! (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There's two problems with your last post which have to do with physics.

  1. Fuel Cells and the process of hydrolysis have a limit on their efficiency. Just like with ICEs there isn't much potential there.
  2. Between Hydrolysis and the Fuel Cell, there are other lossy processes. Usually the tanks contain pressurized H2 and depending on the usecase even liquid H2. Modern automobile cases use 700-800 bars of pressure. That process is again at around 85% efficiency in a good case. Cooling applications further deteriorate the efficiency and need more energy for storage and/or losses during storage. There are other technologies in research right now, like metal hydride storage, where we'll have to see what exactly they can do (right now we're at the stage where we are promised an all-purpose hype, but mostly through the media and not the ones doing the work)

I'm not disputing that capitalism has it's thumb on the scale; as you've written, the synergy to use H2 derived from natural gas is one effect, but it doesn't stop them from advertising it as green. The physical limits though, one cannot argue with. Their effects would mean a lot more infrastructure that is necessary, with it more materials, which are limited too. Even if possible, we have limited construction capacity, which means that it would take us longer to reach the goal, when time is of the essence. Which leads me to the same conclusion, that where the advantages like power density isn't absolutely necessary or other solutions are not available, use a better solution.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

When speaking to the overall system, there are always inefficiencies with all forms due to the conservation of energy laws.

Similar arguments can be made regarding batteries, as resistance in the wires that connect the cells in a pack together waste power as heat. While overall this may be minimal, the physics provide hard limits here. Unless a superconducting material is made commercially viable without needing to be super cooled, these limits will always be nontrivial.

My entire point is, battery tech has reached a high level of development and there is significantly more we're trying to achieve with the technology (whether solid state or otherwise), meanwhile, I would argue that hydrogen hasn't even reached the same level of development as battery technology, yet everyone seems to think it's a dead end.

It's hard to argue with the energy density per kg of hydrogen as a material. It's possibly one of the highest specific potentials of existing technology. What we should be doing is trying to create power from that with as few losses as possible. Fuel cell technology was, in my mind, the first real push in that direction, when it didn't immediately pay off, we gave up. Meanwhile, alkaline and cadmium based batteries were much worse, but we used them, and continued using them for decades before lithium based batteries became more commercially viable.

I see battery research as looking for the last, most efficient type of battery, while hydrogen isn't even half way through the possible research we could do on it. Forgetting hydrogen, while it's in the infancy of the research, for batteries that are very nearly as efficient as physics allows for, to me, is doing ourselves a disservice as a society.

I have no idea what further research into hydrogen will yield. Maybe you're right and it's going to go nowhere, maybe not. We don't know unless we keep trying, same with batteries, same with kinetic storage (flywheel/gravity systems), same with thermal storage..... There's just a lot of material science we can experiment with that wasn't really something that was possible before now.

I still think it's worthwhile, clearly you disagree. I appreciate the discussion either way.

Have a good day.