The Truth About Hydrogen's Dirty Problem - Green Hydrogen Explained

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[davidtee]

Never apologize for puns. You don't choose the pun life, pun life chooses you.

[mackfisher]

There is no simple answer to complex issues, only through diverse innovative engineering will we conquer our energy problems, thank you for bringing some of those to my attention.

[IamtheDill]

Alot of things being thrown at the wall to see what sticks...but that's a good thing.

[patreilly]

I used to work in a chemical plant that made Hydrogen as a waste product from electrolysis of Salt Water. The hydrogen was gathered from the the Cells into a large pipe header and sent to a building with two water ring compressors. It was pressurized and sent to two other processes where it was used to produced acid and an enrichment for another product. The rest was sent to vent stacks to be dispersed to the atmosphere. The two biggest problems with this gas is it is such a small molecule that it will leak out of EVERY flange or connection the other is it has a very low explosive limit at low concentrations. The first problem of the flange leaks caused the hydrogen to accumulate inside the compressor building till it reached the explosive limit then it would explode. This was happening even though the building had ventilation fans. This building had the metal "Skin" blown off twice in six months. After the second explosion we just left the skin off and the building was basically just the support structure for the equipment. In a cold weather environment this meant we had to insulate and heat trace everything to prevent it from freezing. The low explosive limit was scary because one day during a wet snow storm the static electricity from the snow hitting the 48" steel vent stack caused the stack to light off and start burning. Exciting next hour does not do it justice. We had to shutdown the whole process plant without blowing up the hydrogen system.

One other problem is Hydrogen embrittlement of just about any Stainless steel or steel product. This causes cracking and line failures in a system that is already prone to leaks. Trying to store this slippery molecule is a real challenge and John Q public is not going to be happy when hydrogen powered cars tend to go boom with little warning.

[alanmay]

Some companies have also been working on a better hydrogen storage solution. In Germany they already have prototypes of hydrogen powered houses.

[tiesbakker]

The video is quite informative about production of H2, but I do miss the storage part. This is as far as I know the main concern for its feasibility as a general fuel. Of course hydrogen is used today. for certain applications and making it renewable is important, but the link from renewable creation to broad utilisation does skip over the quite significant storage problem.

[rickdees]

Hydrogen is not cost effective fuel with present methods existing today. If it was an economically viable option today saying it "could be" or "might be" in years 2030 to later wouldn't be heard or said in this video.

[icyknightmare]

Hydrogen got a bit of a bad rep from the early push for fuel cell vehicles that lost hard to BEVs. It's still a pretty bad idea for a civilian road vehicle fuel because of the insane infrastructure buildout necessary to make it viable. Where Hydrogen could do very well is in aviation because the infrastructure can be more concentrated. It's also worth looking into for military vehicles, especially for countries without a good internal source of oil. Japan in particular, being a leader in hydrogen tech, would benefit greatly from that capability since they don't need as much logistics integration with allies.

[xiaowei]

Hi Matt, this sounds all very interesting, i like your videos, and i enjoy the content, but i am quite skeptical of a few of the things raised. @6:20 for example, you mentioned a solar panel used to create hydrogen. I read the article (2 years old), and then researched their claims. The company they created is called the Solhdy project. Their claims have not changed. 210w panels can create 250L of hydrogen on average for each day of the year. This is quite hard to beleive, and here is why:

At room temperature of 25C at 100% humidity you can expect around 23g of water per cubic meter. So 1Kg water = 43.478 cubic meters of air (with 100% efficiency
of water extraction).

H2O(l) → 2 H2(g) + O2(g) . 1kg of water, being 1 litre of water, will produce 111.19g of hydrogen (calculating for their atomic weight). This means for 250L of hydrogen, we need 2, 248L of water to create the hydrogen needed. To get all that water and extract all that hydrogen, we will need 97, 756 cubic meters of air. Let that sink in. The claim is a 210w panel can suck in, and then convert the 97, 756 cubic meters of air to create 250L of hydrogen on average every day. This is accepting 100% average humidity 24 hours every day of the year, and then a conversion of air to hydrogen at 100% effectiveness. This simply cannot happen. It gets even worse when we consider there is not 100% humidity every day (far from it), and it is not possible to get 100% extraction of the humidity which happens to get sucked into the device.

[gregcollins]

I did a similar report on hydrogen to my social studies class in 1973. Not much has changed I'm sad to say....

[andrewcbartlett]

Hi from the UK. Thank you for the excellent video. The future is bright.

[nicolaslemay]

Before even thinking about everything we could do with hydrogen, green hydrogen needs to replace the enormous quantity of gray hydrogen we already use for industrial purpose. Only there can we really think about all the possibilities, otherwise we will end up with buses/trucks/planes fuel by nature gas.

[bali]

You missed to mention LAVO, a company which has created a power wall kind of system for your house with green hydrogen generation

[fauzirahman]

There is a currently a home "battery" storage solution touted by an Australian company called Lavo offering to store excess solar power in the form of metal hydride storage of hydrogen. The first delivery is sometime later this year, so it'll be interesting to see how it performs in domestic environments.

[atohms]

Stoked you looked into my link towards the solar hydrogen panel! 🤗

[Sacto]

The biggest problem with hydrogen: how are we going to distribute it. Unlike natural gas, petroleum and even electricity, the lack of a distribution infrastructure is a big downside to a potential hydrogen economy.

[Winnetou]

I think that at this point you can safely go with "Undecided with Matt 'Dad Jokes' Ferrell" :D
Then you won't have to apologize anymore.

[rdtschannen]

Matt, you’ve only addressed the costs of production. The real elephant in the room is costs of storage for the user… but you may cover this in another video.

[mohammadwasilliterate]

Hydrogen is a cryogenic liquid that must be compressed which uses a lot of energy

[davidmoore]

Sun Hydrogen also has a hydrogen solar panel in development. The seem to be getting close to commercialization. As far as storage goes I'm not sure hydrogen is the best storage medium. There is a promising liquid metal battery from Ambri that is being deployed commercially for the first time.