Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Beggars can't be choosers. The whole idea is to replace gasoline and diesel. The added expense is academic since the expense of climate change cannot be willy nilly excluded. The ammonia is supposed to be produced using windmill and solar panel power plants thereby resolving the intermittency and timing problem with these alternative power sources. Their biggest drawback aside from short term deployment costs. Using a liquid fuel storage approach is self-evident. But using H2 instead of NH3 to do this is not smart. Handling H2 is not going to be any cheaper than handling NH3.

But we are in another idiotic race for time where enough propaganda from H2 fuel boosters can commit us to some sub-optimal solution. NH3 has substantially less drawbacks compared to H2.

Yes - but if the Aussie ammonia studies actually bear fruit they'll be so cheap that the H2 boosters just won't be able to compete. The advantages in easier storage and transport would be self-evident. Then it would be an economic competition between EV's and ammonia. Interesting times!

I am seeing what is considered green bifurcate these days now that TDS has mostly disappeared. We have the technos and the tree huggers going at it. Hydrogen is mostly blue these days not green.

“The hydrogen hoax”
https://theecologist.org/2020/dec/18/hydrogen-hoax

“Hydrogen is used in chemical processes that remove sulphur and other impurities from crude oil. Hydrogen used in refineries produces about 230 million tonnes per year of CO2 emissions - that is a bit more than the entire economy of Singapore, a bit less than France. Another 27 percent of the hydrogen, including a good chunk of hydrogen embedded in another chemicals, goes into the production of ammonia. That in turn is used mainly to make chemical fertilisers - such as urea and ammonium nitrate: a smaller amount goes into explosives, synthetic fibres and other chemical products. The next biggest use of hydrogen, 11 percent of the total, is to produce methanol, a type of alcohol used to make solvents, fuel products and antifreeze. About three percent of the world’s hydrogen is used in the direct reduction of iron (DRI) process to make steel. Hydrogen is used in other chemicals processes, and to supply high-temperature heat to industry. The IEA report aggregates useful information about hydrogen production, and its mammoth carbon footprint, that is hard to glean from statistics. The fuels used, and the associated emissions, are spread across statistical categories covering refineries, petrochemicals, steelmaking and so on, obscuring the scale of the problem.”

I would not call this legitimate criticism of hydrogen. Even if hydrogen is produced from CH4 initially to bootstrap the "hydrogen economy" this article is not making its case. CO2 will be produced regardless so spazzing out "because CO2 emissions" is moronic. The objective is to reach the energy regime where CO2 is not a substantial emission. Maybe the existing transition proposals are all smoke and mirrors to keep BAU going. But then, why bother doing anything at all?

dissident wrote:I would not call this legitimate criticism of hydrogen. Even if hydrogen is produced from CH4 initially to bootstrap the "hydrogen economy" this article is not making its case. CO2 will be produced regardless so spazzing out "because CO2 emissions" is moronic. The objective is to reach the energy regime where CO2 is not a substantial emission. Maybe the existing transition proposals are all smoke and mirrors to keep BAU going. But then, why bother doing anything at all?

There is a second aspect as well. "Blue Hydrogen" made by using steam reformation of methane results in a concentrated CO2 stream which can be more easily filtered out and sequestered than almost any other CO2 from industrial services which are normally mixed with 70% nitrogen fromn the standard atmosphere diluting the CO2 to low levels.