How a Hydrogen Breakthrough is Closer Than Ever

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Chapters
00:00 - Intro
02:15 - Hysata
06:03 - Hydrogen Lightning Round

[iseolake]

I live in Japan and have just purchased my second hydrogen fuel cell to heat hot water and generate some of the electricity for my home. The fuel cell is the Enefarm from Tokyo Gas. As the company name suggests, the primary fuel is natural gas that is reformed in the Enefarm to created hydrogen. It’s far from a really green solution, but the system efficiency is significantly better than a traditional gas boiler, when you consider the electric power offset. Right now the system is filling its tank with hot water as it knows that bath time is coming in a couple of hours. At the same time it’s generating 550 - 600 watts that is taking care of all of my current electricity needs. A big breakthrough is great, but let’s take small steps in energy savings and efficiency that use current technology.

[greendale]

The production side is eventually solvable. An entire video should be done on hydrogen storage, because it interacts with everything. IMHO, this is the real blocker.

[andrewc]

Not holding my breath. These companies are always going to make it sound like they are close to a breakthrough to get more funding.

[johno]

I’m in Australia, lately all I have heard is how large companies are stepping back from their hydrogen plans, origin energy was just the latest. The Australian government has held many press conferences spruiking how green hydrogen is the future only to have most projects scaled back or cancelled altogether. It’s just doesn’t stack up.

[mateusbmedeiros]

I have to admit I found it a bit ironic that you quoted "I'm not dead" from The Holy Grail to make a point about not counting out hydrogen just yet, but in that scene the old man shouting dies immediately after. 😂

[Paul-yhkm]

The problem with hydrogen isn't the efficiency of a single point in the hydrogen network/system, it's the accumulative losses that add up from the start to the vehicle wheels or burner in the home heating system.

The 95% electrolyser efficiency is one point and the losses are carried through to the end use along with all the other losses, one of them you mentioned and that is the compressor losses to compress the gas for storage.

[gianluigicassin]

As a chemist I believe we should keep h2 for the industry, where it’s used as a reactant.
The demand there is huge, incredibly huge. Think about steel, pharmaceutical and all chemical processes where a reduction reaction is needed.
That would really be a change.
Turning h2 back into energy is a big waste imho

[OpticalMan]

It's not the production or storage of hydrogen that is the biggest problem although these are significant, it is the distribution of hydrogen that will limit it's use. You can't put it in our existing gas pipes because they are plastic and more than 10% hydrogen leads to the plastic being attacked and becoming brittle. To distribute it via pipes we would need to build an all metal network with very expensive metal valves and even then because Hydrogen is such a small molecule these lose a significant amount of gas. Such a network would be extremely expensive to build particularly when compared to costs of distributing energy in the form of electricity. If you try to distribute it on a tanker lorry then to carry any significant amount of the stuff it needs to be highly pressurized and that means it has to be stored in very heavy tanks. The result is that a 40 ton tanker lorry can only carry 600kg of hydrogen which has an equivalent energy storage that is just 16% of a petrol tanker lorry. If the tanker lorry is itself powered by the hydrogen it is carrying, on any long journey when it reaches its destination there will be almost no hydrogen left in its tanks. If you try to liquify hydrogen this takes the equivalent of 30% of the energy stored in the hydrogen and transporting cryogenic liquids is very expensive making this also economically unviable. As a result the only solution is to make it close to where it is used which might be OK at an airport, however it doesn't work for cars. To make green hydrogen you are going to need a lot of electricity and if you have to put in special high current electric supplies to your local hydrogen filling station then you would be better off put a rapid electric charging station there, because it is a lot simpler, reliable and efficient to charge a vehicles battery than to build and run a unit that creates hydrogen from water by electrolysis.

[dh]

Awesome timing.
In Europe, most plans to make and distribute hydrogen as a fuel source have been completely scrapped just now, because it simply wouldn't work.

[henrikstenlund]

I recall designing a Hydrogen generator for a company I worked for in 1974. It was based on a sending out Oxygen and Hydrogen. It never became a product. That was the oil crisis time.

[handsofdoubt]

It's pretty widely accepted now that hydrogen use cases will be pretty much limited to industrial process where we need the gas. Making ammonia for example. Pretty much all other use cases have already been ruled out. There could be some usage in storage....but even there it's likely to fall by the way side compared to other options. It's good to explore cleaner ways to generate it does "fuel" those who still believe or have a vested interest in hydrogen for transportation.

[schsch]

The basic problem with electrolytic H2 is the unbreakable 50 kw/hrs of electricity needed per kg of H2 output from the electrolyzer. So the cost of H2 is based on the kw-hr cost which at the low end these days would be $0.02-0.04/ kw-hr. Some producers rely on the fact that at certain times PV or wind is so productive that the farms have to be curtailed, or shut down and essentially in these instances the power is 'free' (not really, but sort of). The unrecognized part of this is you have to massively overbuild PV/wind capacity to meet the demand, so the curtailment episodes of low cost energy would be more common, OTOH the opposite scenario when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow you end up with the Cuban scenario. Also the water needed to feed the electrolyzers must be run through the equivalent of a desalination plant first, a not inexpensive pretreatment. Electrolyzing sea water is a good way to get chlorine or HCl.

[KevinLyda]

Green hydrogen will be great for certain chemical processes. Not for energy storage.

[timmmurray]

Hydrogen seems to be struggling with the same issues it did 20 years ago. End-to-end efficiency is poor, and storage is difficult. There are advancements, sure, but not the way solar/wind/batteries have.

We're already past the point where we'll see hydrogen in cars. Batteries have won that. Will we see it in larger applications where batteries aren't good enough, like large trucks or construction equipment?

The trouble is that batteries keep getting better, too. Take the 5-8%/year improvement we've been seeing in battery tech and run it forward another 10-15 years, and you have something good enough to cover most of the uses above. Will hydrogen be able to solve its problems and become established in those niches before then? Maybe, but given that it's still struggling with problems we've known about for a while, I have my doubts.

[moletrap]

In the last 30 days there have been multiple major green hydrogen products canceled (Repsol, Hy Stor Energy, Energint, Nel, etc.) and multiple new studies indicating green hydrogen is a pipe dream (Harvard, Joule, etc.). I usually count on you for a more balanced report. Why did you not include that in your update?

[paperburn]

Having worked with Hydrogen gas; material science are not up to snuff and people are generally not safe enough to be around the gas. IMHO

[mm-qdho]

I think a lot of fossil fuel companies are using hydrogen to preserve their infrastructure and remain in business. In other words, they are pursuing it to try to remain profitable, not because it is a good solution.

[petewright]

Another really interesting Australian company is Hazer Group. They have a method for splitting methane, either fossil or from biogenic sources, into solid carbon and H2. It's energy efficient and uses iron ore as a catalyst which is cheap. What's more the carbon is in the form of Graphite - a critical material that currently is in short supply and has a large carbon footprint to produce. It's definitely a disruptor technology.

[hobblyjig]

I don’t know what it is about this channel, but I feel like the comment section here attacks the creator more than most other channels I watch. I just wanna say I appreciate your content Matt. I wouldn’t hear about most of this stuff if it wasn’t for you.

[brianhabing]

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