[evilgenius]

Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

[AdamB]

One more dance for oil, before EVs bloom.

Oil demand could grow at its fastest rate since the 1970s for the next three years, BofA Global Research has said in a note.

The commodity’s future is limited, though, the analysts said, expecting global oil demand to peak around 2030. The rise of electric vehicles (EVs) drives this change.

[eclipse]

Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

There are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen.

That's 1 100 000 BILLION tons. Bill McKibben in Do the Math said there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves left. That's 2795 BILLION tons. 1100 000 / 2795 = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. So even if we allowed a direct 1:1 locking away of hydrogen per ton fossil fuel (and it doesn't work like that at all!), we would lose only 1/393th of our oxygen! And that's if we burned away every last bit of coal and oil and gas we have on the reserves right now.

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

Why don't you look up how many tons of oxygen are in the atmosphere and how many tons of oxygen per year it would take to replace ALL oil with the WRONG hydrogen before sounding this rather ridiculous alarm? Go on, tell us what tiny, infinitesimal percent of our atmospheric oxygen we'd be locking away as water? Do the math and tell us how much TOTAL oxygen would be locked away as water if we actually burned all the remaining fossil fuels to get all the hydrogen we needed? What percentage of Earth's free oxygen would be locked away in that scenario? Hint: there are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen. Bill McKibben in do the math suggested there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves. It takes lots of energy to create hydrogen from fossil fuels, so we would need to deduct that. But let's not. Let's pretend - for the sake of argument - that one ton of fossil fuels = 1 ton of oxygen locked away if we convert said fossil fuels to hydrogen and burned it! 1100 000 BILLION tons of oxygen / 2795 BILLION tons of fossil fuels = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. Converting it all - every last bit of conventional coal and oil and gas reserves into hydrogen and burning it would lock away about 1/393th of our breathable oxygen! Call the newspapers it's the end of the world!

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

Hey, his ilk likes to throw out random nonsense with an alarmist tone, and hope some of it sticks.

Math, science, logic, etc. need not apply.

And don't plants use water? And exhale oxygen? So it's not like there aren't natural cycles, etc.

Even if this did end up an issue (NOT that I'm buying it), AGW is in our face and this one is millennia down the road.

[StarvingLion]

final plan decades from now

...buried in the earth with those who created it.

Its all moot. The stock market will crash 3 months from now. You will get a "vaccine" and then its sleepy bye.

[eclipse]

A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.

[StarvingLion]

A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.

We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.

[eclipse]

A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.

We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.

D'uh! Just thought you'd bait and switch hey? Changing the topic much? Not so fast my little ray of sunshine!

Is this a fact or not?

It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

Debating doomers can be like debating climate deniers. I've found climate deniers don't debate, they rotate. It's like they know they are firing blanks, but just keep firing new blanks at a forum in the hope that someone will get distracted by all the noise and start to think there's real ammo in there. EG:-
Denier: "It's the sun!"
Peer-reviewed response: "No it's not as the sun was in a cooling phase during the second half of the 20th Century and yet the planet kept warming. We know from basic physics in a lab how much energy CO2 traps!"
Denier: "There's warming on Mars!"
Peer-reviewed response: "No, there are seasons on Mars and sometimes those seasons look like climate change on Mars. But if we look back here on earth, we can see that CO2 was at 280ppm then jumped to 400ppm today - and we know from the simple maths of the Radiative Forcing Equation that this ads about 4 Hiroshima bombs of heat to our planet per second! We also know it's our fossil fuel use by the isotopes of carbon!"
Denier: "Well, what about.... xyz...."

Note: the denier never really engages substantively with a single reply or disproves any of the science. They just keep rotating. I've seen forums where a denier probably went through as many arguments as there are letters in the alphabet - and eventually came back to asserting A again. It happened over several months, but when I realised what was happening I had to call it out.
DENIERS DON'T DEBATE - THEY ROTATE! But we don't need to worry. They're only firing blanks.

Now, doomers? Well, they use the same strategy. Hey - they might get real lucky and someone might push the big red button that says "End of the world - do not push this button!" Ever since we invented The Bomb there's been a Doomsday clock. It's just doomers are arrogant enough to think they know when that clock is going to hit midnight. Sorry pal but according to the many doomers I debated in 2004, we should have hit Mad Max about 20 times by now. 20 huge "I know this with all my mind body and soul!" predictions have turned to smoke and mirrors against the actual forces of history. I'm not saying I KNOW we're going to make it - but I am saying there's every chance that we'll have tens of thousands of people gradually building a new world on Mars and the asteroid belt as much as there is also every chance that we'll be digging our way through the rubble of a nuclear war. Oh, and if that happens? Industrial civilisation would be back within a generation or two! There's just no unlearning the stuff we've learned.

[jedrider]

A stock-market-crash like the Great Depression can actually stimulate huge government investment in energy systems. EG: Look up the Hoover Dam! Huge things can still be built during a Depression. Indeed, sometimes they are the fastest way out of said Depression.

We've been in a depression for the past 20 years. Now we're in a permanent collapse. Nothing is fundable period.

Commercial real estate building is (or was) crazy here in silicon valley. Now people are working from home, so it looks to be a boom/bust cycle, with the bust probably starting about now. We'll know when they leave construction projects half-finished, I guess. The presumption of all this building is that the workforce is zipping around in electric cars, of course. That must be the presumption.

[evilgenius]

Isn't the danger with hydrogen more the one where we do a switchover, even just for long haul trucking, and discover it has breached some sort of critical point that is having an effect upon the atmosphere? Think about it, the hydrogen burning results in water as an output, which binds so much oxygen. It, therefore, makes a difference, to the balance of oxygen, whether you get your hydrogen from electrolysis of water, or from natural gas. All we need to do is set up a system where the economics of it force us to decide in the wrong direction!

There are 5.5 QUADRILLION TONS of atmosphere, and 1/5th of that is oxygen. That's about 1.1 QUADRILLION TONS of oxygen aka 1,100 TRILLION tons of oxygen aka 1.1 MILLION BILLION tons of oxygen.

That's 1 100 000 BILLION tons. Bill McKibben in Do the Math said there was 2,795 gigatons fossil fuel reserves left. That's 2795 BILLION tons. 1100 000 / 2795 = 393. That means there is 393 TIMES more oxygen than all our fossil fuels. So even if we allowed a direct 1:1 locking away of hydrogen per ton fossil fuel (and it doesn't work like that at all!), we would lose only 1/393th of our oxygen! And that's if we burned away every last bit of coal and oil and gas we have on the reserves right now.

But with the big banks like the European Investment Bank declaring "Gas is over" - I doubt dirty hydrogen will get funding. Green hydrogen comes from water, and back to water it will go. There are enormous plans in Australia to use renewable energy to produce green hydrogen, with the final plan decades from now to be something like 8 times our grid capacity to produce vast amounts of exportable energy.

Thanks for the information. Do you know if your confidence is justified over an extended period of time? If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.

[Plantagenet]

If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.

Thats a very good point.

As far as I can learn, the only emissions emitted from a FCV (fuel cell vehicle) are water vapor and some heat.

epa: hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles

Water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, and so creation of more water vapor might theoretically drive more Greenhouse warming. Indeed some climate models suggest that global warming due to CO2 is putting more water vapor into the air, resulting in a feedback effect that slightly increases global warming.

However, the hydrologic cycle for the entire planet is so huge, that the amount of water coming from FCVs would be really tiny in comparison to the natural hydrologic cycle. This is contrast to CO2, where human generated CO2 has greatly increased the amount of CO2 in the atmophere.

So, yes there might be a very tiny effect. But it would probably be very tiny, and more then offset by reducing lifetime CO2 emissions from ICE and EV vehicles.

Cheers!

[eclipse]

Yes - but it's CO2 that's driving the extra water vapour feedback.
The whole effect works out to be 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of extra heat trapped per second!

[Tanada]

If we went with hydrogen for 200 years, would that alter the balance, in other words? Does anything add up, like carbon, and take a long time to go away? It seems right to contemplate such things now. It seems like it should be no threat, but we didn't anticipate what carbon dioxide would do either.

Thats a very good point.

As far as I can learn, the only emissions emitted from a FCV (fuel cell vehicle) are water vapor and some heat.

epa: hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles

Water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, and so creation of more water vapor might theoretically drive more Greenhouse warming. Indeed some climate models suggest that global warming due to CO2 is putting more water vapor into the air, resulting in a feedback effect that slightly increases global warming.

However, the hydrologic cycle for the entire planet is so huge, that the amount of water coming from FCVs would be really tiny in comparison to the natural hydrologic cycle. This is contrast to CO2, where human generated CO2 has greatly increased the amount of CO2 in the atmophere.

So, yes there might be a very tiny effect. But it would probably be very tiny, and more then offset by reducing lifetime CO2 emissions from ICE and EV vehicles.

Cheers!

Water vapor is not a concern because air can only hold a certain humidity at any given temperature and pressure so if humans add water vapor over here it just precipitates out more water vapor over there. The concern is the hydrogen source. If you use electrolysis of purified water to source your hydrogen you have to get the electricity somewhere. If you get the electricity from nuclear or renewable sources than you come out ahead using the hydrogen as an energy storage medium. However today the common practice is to strip hydrogen from methane and vent the resulting CO2 that is created by the cheapest methods of doing this transformation. Hydrogen sourced from Methane where the CO2 is released is worse than just burning the methane because energy is lost in every step of the process resulting in a net increase in CO2 emissions. There is a lot of fast talk about a carbon sequestration version of using methane as a hydrogen source but it is expensive and wasteful of energy. To produce the kind of Hydrogen supply needed for a fleet of fuel cell vehicles the costs would be sky high, and outer space is the limit on that sort of pricing scheme.