Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
In general, "green hydrogen" makes the most sense if used as a chemical feedstock that replace natural gas in industrial processes - not to replace fossil fuels or be burned for heat.
On paper, hydrogen has good energy density, but taking advantage of that in truth is notoriously hard. And for things that demand energy dense fuels, there are many less finicky alternatives.
I had to Google what is green hydrogen. It is hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
The value proposition of hydrogen is energy density. Batteries have low energy per unit of volume and awful energy density by unit of mass. You will never, ever, fly across the Pacific on a battery powered aircraft. Transoceanic shipping is also not feasible with batteries (current and proposed battery powered shopping lanes are short hops of a couple hundred kilometers or less).
Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen, but smaller passenger vehicles will stay on batteries. The nature of hydrogen containment favors larger capacity, on account of better volume to surface area ratios.
Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.
And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.
Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.
Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...]
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Life expectancy. A hydrogen tank can be refilled forever. A battery is normally limited to a few thousand cycles. A truck, or airplane, is expected to be fueled/recharged daily for decades. A car is designed to survive the length of a standard lease. Those running fleets of trucks/aircraft will always care more than car owners about long-term ownership costs.
Yeah, Li-ion batteries already have comparable life cycles to hydrogen tanks 1-2k fills/recharges, _but_ batteries are improving rapidly and tanks are already a mature technology.
This isn't necessarily true. Most cylinders storing compressed gasses need to be hydrostatically tested in regular intervals to ensure continued safety and will need replacement when they fail. Other kinds of composite cylinders have fixed ages where they should be replaced.
Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means extra expense. A tank that needs inspection every decade is a known problem. A battery that looses 1% to 5% capacity every year, depending on weather/use factors, is harder math.
Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
I worked in one of the top 5 logistics companies in the world and I can recall them investing in electric trucks and charging infrastructure. Idea was to have strategically placed overhead lines that could recharge trucks without need for them to stop. Can't recall any mentions of hydrogen.
I have seen at least one stretch of highway in Germany that has overhead power lines for trucks. I think it's a very interesting concept: the big downside of batteries is slow charging (compared to diesel) and limited range. Charging while driving on highways would largely solve these downsides.
> If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
Yes, if you actually have the batteries.
Between around 2014-2024, the common talking point was "we're not making enough batteries", and the way the discussions went it felt like the internal models of people saying this had the same future projections of batteries as the IEA has infamously produced for what they think future PV will be: https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
I've not noticed people making this claim recently. Presumably the scale of battery production has become sufficient to change the mood music on this meme.
To be fair, there are still plenty of people on HN talking about lack of battery capacity as a reason to delay solar/wind rollout; I suspect it'll take a bit more time for the new reality to sink in fully.
The fossil industry was always suspiciously keen on green hydrogen - partly because the path to green hydrogen would likely have involved a long detour through grey and blue hydrogen, and partly because it gave them an excuse to lobby against phasing out natural gas for domestic heating/cooking ("we need to retain that infrastructure to enable the hydrogen economy!").
You can see the same thing happening in their support for Carbon Capture and Storage - "we're going to need the oil producers to enable carbon sequestration, so we might as well keep drilling new wells to keep their skills fresh!"...
I think that is the way it is headed. But you never know. Sometimes when comparing it helps me to reduce these things down to lower levels.
What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.
As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.
Before the introduction of 800V charging architectures, long charge-time for EVs was a big con. Hydrogen Cell vehicles were supposed to be EVs with drastically faster fill-up times. The tradeoff was more complex delivery infrastructure.
I don't know why you prefixed with "Yet" when I clearly spelt out the trade-offs and contrasts in distribution between H2 and electricity.
The Mirai goes from empty to full in 5 minutes or less - which compares very well with fossil-fuel burners. Now that every OEM has abandoned battery-swapping, how fast can EV batteries be safely charged with the said 3 phases? How long were the charging time when the Mirai was debuted? That was the trade-off Toyota was hoping to fall on the good side of, nevermind the Japanese government bet on hydrogen and whatever incentives are available for Toyota.
Green hydrogen is a way to ship solar power elsewhere that doesn't have it, similar to a battery, but with the advantage of being able to be piped/pumped/liquified etc.
For that purpose and for long-term storage of energy and for aircraft/spacecraft, synthetic hydrocarbons are much better.
Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.
So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).
Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.
A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.
I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.
That was extremely stupid of them then. Hydrogen has been very good at one thing: subsidy extraction. But I don't think it was or ever will be a viable fuel for planetary transportation.
The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.
Hydrogen burning could have a place in an all-renewable grid: it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries. The last 5-10% of the grid becomes much cheaper to do with renewables if something like hydrogen (or other e-fuels) is available.
A competitor that might be even better is very long duration high temperature thermal storage, if capex minimization is the priority.
Good context. It's a shame none of these people did high school chemistry.
I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.
I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.
Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.
I know, I have one of those weird H shaped flasks with the plat electrodes.
I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.
Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50% and at worse half that. You have the horrendous efficiency of electrolysis and then the equally bad efficiency in the fuel cell.
Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.
Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.
> Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50%
In fact, even this level of efficiency may be sufficient. Solar panels are so cheap that if we had affordable, long-term energy storage options, even with such efficiency, we would have completely abandoned fossil fuels. But, unfortunately, storing hydrogen is difficult and dangerous. It is not like natural gas.
> It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security. It's like a placeholder for real corn so that if there's a crop failure for a couple of years, the low-iq idiots who think it's stupid to make ethanol from corn don't starve to death.
Well... How successful is the US in cutting ethanol consumption on the years the corn production is lower?
Meat usually does that stabilizing. Fuel consumption not even is almost completely inelastic, but corn ethanol on the US is subsidized on every stage to the point that market forces become meaningless.
> Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security
Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
> Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"
I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.
Same with nuclear. The most expensive form of electricity generation there is. No grid operator wants to touch it, but the nuclear industry has been very busy lobbying congress and both the current and last administration.
Nuclear is incredibly energy dense, can be stockpiled for a long time and is extremely safe.
Yes its expensive but its one those industries any serious nation needs to subsidise for the energy security it offers and the countless high skill jobs it fosters.
Well, no it's never been extremely safe by any stretch of the imagination.
That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.
Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.
Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.
Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.
Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.
10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.
The numbers say that nothing is extremely safe, and experience has shown that having more maturity may not be necessary to recognize that, but it helps.
It just hurts the case for positive progress to mindlessly exaggerate. Especially to the absolute max.
Plus I'm not one of the ones who follow any boomer lunatic trends when I can come up with my own which people of many ages have adopted quite a bit.
Remember wacky lunatic science turns into regular science more often than you think once the dust settles.
But the advantage of that doesn't really depend on elderliness, mainly dedication to science.
Any age can do it if you try.
Well, maybe not if you're completely non-gifted in some way or another.
There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which makes the world warmer on average. It also lowers the PH levels of the oceans.
If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.
The major problem with hydrocarbons today is that we are releasing carbon dioxide stored hundreds of millions of years ago.
If, theoretically, you could produce hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere, then it could be a substantial reduction in net carbon dioxide being added; and it would be compatible with the fuel infrastructure of today.
What must have been the composition of the atmosphere all those hundreds of millions of years ago for all that carbon dioxide to have been removed from the atmosphere and sequestered as biological matter, to then be buried and reacted to form vast quantities of hydrocarbons.
2.5 billion years ago the earth would have been uninhabitable to most modern life. Single celled life evolved in those conditions and began creating glucose and oxygen from CO2 and water. When those primitive lifeforms died some of them became oil and the CO2 was sequestered.
Over time the CO2 levels dropped until about 20 million years ago the CO2 levels fell to about 300ppm. That's when life as we know it really took off. Yes, it took BILLIONS of years to get there.
Humans have only existed for about 200k years. During that time our CO2 levels have mostly been below about 280ppm. The are now at 429ppm and are rising exponentially. [0]
In the beginning, the oceans were acidic, because they were formed by the condensation of volcanic gases, which consisted of water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride (i.e. hydrochloric acid) and a few other less abundant acids.
In time, the oceans have become less and less acidic, by dissolving from the volcanic silicate rocks the oxides of the alkaline metals and alkali earth metals, i.e. mainly of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. This dissolution has affected both the rocks on the bottom of the oceans and the continental rocks, where rain has washed the soluble oxides, transporting them through rivers to the oceans.
At some point, so much of the alkaline and alkali earth metals from the volcanic rocks have been dissolved that the oceans have become slightly alkaline instead of acidic, like they are today.
At that time, the carbonates of calcium and magnesium have precipitated from sea water, forming sedimentary rocks. Also around that time, many living beings have evolved mechanisms for controlling this precipitation process, in order to build skeletons for themselves. This has resulted in the fact that many sedimentary rocks are not formed by direct precipitation from sea water, but by precipitation from sea water into skeletons, followed by depositing on the bottom the skeletons of dead living beings.
Now, with increasing concentration of CO2, there is the danger that the oceans will become so acidic as to reverse this, dissolving again a part of the carbonate rocks, including the skeletons of many living beings that are made of carbonates.
There is an equilibrium between the concentration of CO2 in water and in air, depending on temperature and pressure. When the CO2 from water precipitated with calcium or magnesium into rocks, that has drawn more CO2 from air into the water, until a new equilibrium was reached, at a reduced concentration of CO2 in the air. If carbonates would be dissolved by acidic sea water, that would liberate CO2, a part of which would go into the air, further increasing the concentration there.
Thus the formation or destruction of carbonate rocks and skeletons adds a positive feedback to the changes of the CO2 concentration in the air, which has the potential to be bad for us.
Even worse is the fact that this is only one of multiple positive feedback mechanisms that can be triggered by changes in the CO2 concentration in the air, which make very difficult or impossible any long term predictions.
It's possible to synthesise hydrocarbon analogues of petroluem-based fuels. The problem to date has been that this isn't cost-competitive with petroleum, though the difference is narrower than you might expect. Most famously, a Google X Project attempted this and succeeded technically, but the economics were unfavourable: Project Foghorn: <https://x.company/projects/foghorn/>. Both Germany and South Africa have performed synfuel production (from coal) at industrial scale since the 1930s / 1950s, respectively. Using non-fossil carbon is largely the same chemistry; the process does in fact scale.
Fischer-Tropsch and Sabatier process can both operate with scavenged CO2. There's been some work since the 1990s utilising seawater as a CO2 source, with CO2 capture being far more efficient than from atmospheric sources.
Whilst hydrocarbons have numerous downsides (whether sourced from fossil or renewable sources), they are also quite convenient, exceedingly well-proven, and tremendously useful. In some applications, particularly marine and aviation transport, there are few if any viable alternatives.
Bad news, there has been a fourth great bleaching event going on since January of 23. This time 80+% of all reefs have been impacted and the consensus seems to be that its unlikely there will be any reefs left at all before too long.
All the more reason to give our ounce great nation away to fuck wits who think shooting up Jews is a reasonable idea, making electricity expensive chasing a target that will have approximately no impact on global carbon emissions and further drive manufacturing out of the country, all the while making even my generation (Xillenials) worse off now than we were ten years ago.
Young people and the working poor? They can freeze in the dark on the streets, fuck them.
Turn up unannounced and utter the shibboleth asylum seeker and we roll out the red carpet. Low interest loans so they can start businesses, and priory social housing. Fuck the locals.
And you cum guzzlers keep voting for more of it.
There’s only so much ideology we can take. Check One Nations recently polling.
I’m encouraging young people to get in to the trades, especially brick laying and masonry because if things keep going they way they are…
I like the false equivalence between reducing air pollution and not doing hate crimes against Jewish people. I haven’t asked them all individually, but I’m pretty sure my Jewish friends all enjoy breathing clean air.
Right, don’t address the substance of the message, just drive-by-dismiss the concerns of a growing segment of voters.
My comment you responded to didn’t happen overnight.
You’re welcome to go through my comment history and address my concerns as detailed over the previous thirteen years, many of which are much more level headed and many contain references to thinkers much more intelligent and way more eloquent than anything I’ll ever write.
I do, and if I were you I would stop to think about your priors. You have stacked an awful lot of ideas on top of each other to build a world view that has lies, misinformation, and unsound science at the base of it. Worse, a lot of it is selfish, but in a way that only works if the entire global economy is a zero sum game. Enlightened self-interest can be right, and even noble, but only if you know the game well enough to comprehend why altruism is still important, and you don't. The world is NOT a zero sum game, and this kind of self-interest is the bad kind.
Some of the logic at the top of your pyramid would be sound, if the bottom wasn't a pile of mush. A few minor points:
1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity). It's been that way for awhile now, but one particular bubble tries really hard to stop people from learning that. If cost is your concern you should be pushing for more solar, and less of the fuel you literally set fire to and have to keep digging up forever until it runs out.
2) Giving money to hostile Arab nations who hate you is not going to stop anyone from "took 'er jorbs"ing you. In fact, you would have more money if your car didn't literally burn your money constantly and also require expensive oil changes and other maintenance constantly.
3) Pretty much everything you said about loans and housing is based on absolute fabrications, or extreme exaggerations. Even if it weren't, other people receiving assistance doesn't actually cost you anything. The national debt has INCREASED at a record pace under Trump, exactly as it does during every Republican presidency, and it's not because Trump loves helping people so much.
Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913. During my lifetime there has never been a Republican president who was fiscally conservative in the slightest. Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades, if your body can physically handle it for 40-50 years. It's good and honest work, and we need more folks to go into them. It's also likely to be more stable and less demanding than the kind of work most of us here do.
5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots. Robots are getting cheaper every day. Moving them here will get us a few (even richer) billionaires. Not more jobs (at least not the kind you're probably thinking of). It will also increase the cost of ALL THE THINGS.
The worst part of this mistake is that while normal people spend most of their money billionaires spend only a miniscule fraction of their income. Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time, or is engaged in parasitic interest gathering via obscure financial instruments. Giving money to billionaires is kind of like throwing it in the garbage. Giving it to the middle class is good for everyone, because they buy things and drive demand.
Lastly, I'm also a Xennial, and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now
No, that's simply not true.
It's cheaper for MOST of the year, but overall, it's more expensive. Because you can't just tell people, "Well, now, during this cold January, please don't waste electricity because our panels are producing almost nothing." You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
> Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
It's very strange. In all cases of interaction with the USAID that I know about directly from those interacting with it, and not from media sources, in EVERY case it was liberal propaganda or direct anti-Trump propaganda. And none of the starving children that I know about directly from those who interacted with them, and not from the media, have ever received any food aid from.
I know, of course, that this is an anecdotal case, but I prefer to trust people with whom I am at least superficially acquainted, rather than media companies that are apparently run by pedophiles.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots.
Because the era of US hegemony is ending, and at some point you simply won't be able to live off the rest of the world. At that point, you'll either have production or you'll simply starve to death. Because food (and robots) don't fall from the sky. And if you don't produce it (and don't take it from the rest of the world through your hegemony), you'll starve and die.
> Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time
American workers spend as much money EACH YEAR as billionaires accumulated over generations (mostly in the form of productive capacity, not idling in the piles)
> and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
The best choice is to rob the rest of the world and live off them? Well, congratulations on making the better choice that allows you, unlike the REST OF THE WORLD, not work for less than $2 an hour (as 90% of the Earth's population does, thanks to American hegemony).
You need backup with hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from water and CO2, like all the living beings have done for billions of years.
Storing energy in hydrocarbons has a lower efficiency for short term storage, but it has a better efficiency for long term storage, in which case batteries would auto discharge.
So energy storage must use a combination of batteries for short term (for a few days at most) together with methods useful for long term (from a few months to many years), including hydrocarbon synthesis, pumped water, etc.
Synthesizing hydrocarbons from concentrated CO2 has already been done at large scale almost a century ago. Now there are much better methods, e.g. using the electrolysis of CO2.
The most difficult part remains capturing the CO2 from normal air and not from exhaust gases where it is concentrated.
This is a difficult engineering problem, but one solved by bacteria billions of years ago, and which probably would already have some good solution if any serious and well-funded research effort would have been done in this direction, instead of only talking about how it would be desirable but without any concrete action.
> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.
I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas.
How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark.
As you said, in practice you either need batteries that don’t exist and would be prohibitively expensive because they would sit idle most the year where only hours to days of backup are required, but in winter you need weeks of storage and the output from the panels are significantly reduced so you need to massively overbuild…
OR you need to build gas peaker plants, which also sit idle most the year, but need to be run frequently and maintained to ensure they’re ready to run when needed.
The real world data is available for anyone who wants to run the numbers.
I was in Adelaide and participated in the discussions where Dr Barry Brook[1] and others ran the numbers over ten years ago. Exhaustively ran the numbers, both with real world data from recently built solar and wind, and optimistic projections of future improvements
The fundamentals haven’t changed. Even if the panels themselves were free, the amount or steel and concrete required to replace total global energy requirements with solar and wind is… it’s incomprehensible.
If I recall correctly, it worked out to requiring something absurd like more copper, steel, and concrete, than humans have produced to date (2013 figures) since the start of the Industrial Revolution, every year for the next fifty years just to replace existing energy production and distribution infrastructure, and in so doing we would double or triple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We’d then have to work out how to pull those emissions back out of the atmosphere, which wound require further resource use to produce the infrastructure to generate the energy required to extract and sequester the carbon dioxide.
Compare to what we’re doing now which has barely scratched the surface in replacing global energy requirements, with no reduction in carbon dioxide levels.
It all makes a pretty strong case for existing nuclear technology (Gen IV / Gen IV+) to give us time (hundreds of years with existing know uranium reserves) to perfect fast breeder technology so we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel for thousands of years.
> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity)
You’re going to have to show your calculations with references for LCOE - Levelised Cost of Electricity. I’ve run the numbers, you can find them and references in my comment history, and I’m not impressed with solar. Solar needs batteries, or some other type of storage, and there are roughly none of those in service so we can only theoretically predict life time costs. I can’t be fucked repeating myself here at the moment for the benefit of someone who thinks I’m a right wing nut job or whatever. Wind too.
> 2) Giving money <blah blah> more money
Again, you’re going to have to show the numbers here. Prove that an equivalent electric vehicle I need for my job is going to be cheaper on a total cost of ownership basis. This is going to be difficult to prove as there isn’t an equivalent EV that can do the miles per day required. And even if there is, can it do it for 500,000km on the same engine and gearbox / battery whatever? Without getting StacheD[1] in my garage while I sleep? It remains to be seem.
> 3) Pretty much …
No no no. The correct answer is: I’m an Australian living in Australia, reading my own governments policies, the social welfare entitlements to new arrivals, seeing the result of zoning restrictions across the road, and experiencing the results of the locals having a fertility rate below replacement, 100,000 abortions a year, resulting in the “need” to import 500,000 foreigners a year from counties no one wants to live in. I actually prefer white culture, I think it’s better, and that we should import more people from the countries we traditionally have, including India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, and the Europeans too. I’m not racists, I just like the level of multiculturalism we had not this shoot up a Jewish festival / pro Palestine bullshit.[2]
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades
No shit cunty. I am a tradesman with … 28 years experience in and adjacent to fabrication / manufacturing / primary industries. I’ve also worked as remote-hands for the likes of Google and Akamai in data centres, so a bit of technical experience. I also have some higher education qualifications, and acquaintances in academia.
> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs?
Now listen here mate ;) because lots of people, but particularly men, some women too, enjoy making things, breaking things, building things, and getting dirty. We’ve been doing it for millennia and it’s got us this far. It’s my belief that taking that away from society is going to turn out to be a general bad idea, if it ever eventuates.
> I'm better off now than 10 years ago
So am I, for various reasons. Mostly luck really. But that doesn’t negate the numbers. Houses cost more years of income, food costs more hours of labour, eggs cost more than chickens! on a per kg basis. Rent around here tends to cost more than one third of income, which is the definition of housing stress. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a young person starting out today. The young people around here who are winning are in the trades and come from families who made at least some good choices and can offer finance from the Bank of Mum & Dad, so there’s some hope for ‘em.
I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke.
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Edited to add:
> Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
It sort of doesn’t though. Most of the effects of alcohol consumption that result in a hangover are caused by an accumulation of acetaldehyde[5] in the blood, the clearance of which is rate limited by an aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme[6]. That is to say, the clearance of acetaldehyde isn’t rate limited by water …
And the dehydration hypothesis can be debunked empirically by anyone who drinks, for example, beer, which, around here, tends to contain less than 7% alcohol by volume, so beer drinkers are getting a lot of water already and yet they get hungover too. So it can’t be the water.
You can’t say I’m not thorough, and if you check my comment history you’ll find a multi-year period where most of my comments contained extensive references, because that used to be the done thing around here.
_____
Try not to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, uneducated, out of touch, or whatever. Some of us have been watching and living this slow moving train wreck and we reckon our country deserves better. We’re not uneducated, we are politically engaged, we don’t place all the blame on brown people or whatever. We voted No to the Voice[3] because we see ourselves and each other as literally one nation. We’re not racists, we’re not homophobic or whatever, but the + can go fuck themselves.[3]
Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and appreciate the conversation (Y)
6. aldehyde dehydrogenase ADLH2 - ALDH2 plays a crucial role in maintaining low blood levels of acetaldehyde during alcohol oxidation.[7] In this pathway (ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate), the intermediate structures can be toxic, and health problems arise when those intermediates cannot be cleared.[3] When high levels of acetaldehyde occur in the blood, facial flushing, lightheadedness, palpitations, nausea, and general "hangover" symptoms occur. It also is thought to be the cause of a medical condition known as the alcohol flush reaction, also known as "Asian flush" or "Oriental flushing syndrome". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase
"The picture is complex. Recovery here, fresh losses there.
While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."
This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions
"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.
Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."
Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage
Unless you have other evidence that this particular report is exaggerating without justification you can't solely rely on the fact that their opinions/results would benefit them as evidence they are providing misinformation.
It's possible for information to be factual and opinions to be justified from a source while that source also benefits from the information/opinions existing.
I can easily provide counter examples from countless situations that occur each year.
----
If you feel that all scientists and researchers have a lower level of trust because of negative actions of some, that's wrong of course because their reputations aren't connected, but you try to confirm it. For example, find out if a cooler than normal El Nino season would help coral feeds (or whatever)
What you did was tell us you don't trust the information, not because of something specific, but a concept/rule you believe.
Considering you originally misrepresented their findings, perhaps by accident, you should have done more to make your case.
We live (or at least used live) in a very nice climate equilibrium with the CO2 level we had. Pushing us into another climate equilibrium looks very dangerous for human civilization. However I concede that it might be advantageous for certain plants, but I am not a plant so I am mostly concerned about human civilization.
> However I concede that it might be advantageous for certain plants
Plants are highly dependent on their climactic settings, upending a climate equilibrium is awful to the average plant. And looking at past climactic change events, "another climate equilibrium" is something that happens on kiloyear scales (ages, in geochronologic units).
Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains, and aircraft where the energy density is a big plus. Those are where you'd expect to see hydrogen take off first, not passenger cars. Same as how diesel started in trucks - expensive engines but economical when amortized and worth it for heavy usage applications.
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
Trucks and busses would be better off with battery swaps at depo like electric forklifts do. More mileage more towing weight for trucks, just stack more batteries. Overweight? Use a diesel.
Trains is an easy one, over head lines.
Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.
With the upcoming MCS charging standard you won't need battery swaps for trucks or busses. Even today you have trucks that can charge with up to 400 kW, which is good enough for charging during mandatory pauses or downtimes.
> Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains
Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).
Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.
And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.
Yeah, it might make sense for some industrial processes as natural gas or coal replacement, but not really anywhere else just because all the tricky leaks and invisible fire hazards.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
> the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.
What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!
Diesel, kerosene, rocket propelled RP1, and fuel oil / bunker fuel in the case of cargo ships.
It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
We do? Where? Using what fabrication technologies.
I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.
As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.
There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.
And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.
There is hydrogen all over the place in exactly where you'd expect to see it: petroleum refineries and petrochemical process plants. The metallurgy of handling and storing hydrogen is well understood and has been for a long time. You just have to use alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen is squirrelly - it doesn't like to stay put but you can make it stay put long enough to make it useful.
When you are specifying valving or piping in a refinery one of the big things you have to find out is how much hydrogen is in the process because a lot of stuff in a refinery has at least some hydrogen and it will destroy common alloys.
> Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?
No. Not for using Hydrogen for transportation. People have been trying to use Hydrogen for transportation for more than 50 years. These people are trying to bend the laws of physics. And there are a lot of con artists in the mix who prey on the gullible. See the convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.
WTF , you are commenting about FCEV - these things dont have engines!
The strategy clearly stated by Akio Toyoda is multiple power train technology. You can listen to his interviews on the subject, some are in Japanese, but as you have stated a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Toyota's policy I will assume you have that fluency.
(Automotive OEMs are assemblers, the parts come from the supply chain starting with Tier 1 suppliers. In that sense TMC does not do "making engines", but possibly the nuance and consequences here of whether not it "wraps it's head" to "makes things", vs if it has the capability to specify, manufacture distribute something at scale with a globally localized supply chain AND adjust to consumer demand/resource availability changes 5 years after the design start - in this context i ask you, can you "wrap your head" around the latest models that are coming out in every power train technology fcev, (p)hev to bev)
The point I was trying to make was I'm not sure it was ever about making something happen completely, but being prepared on all fronts for whatever the outcome is.
Kaizen and JIT are not good for revolutionary change. So I expect by bootstrapping different options early enough they can act on real market pressure once the condition to accurately assess the evidence is available.
For hydrogen getting to that point was a multi decade lead time.
I suspect most western commentary on this topic comes from people not understanding both how numerical/empirical based Toyota are, how self aware of their potential weaknesses they are, plus the ability of a Japanese business to hold to a multi decade hedging initiative.
All of the bz* models you listed are Chinese models, and while the Woodland and C-HR are listed on their US website, they aren't really available for purchase (though I did find one C-HR if I'm willing to drive 500 miles to buy it). Obviously the world auto market is greater than the US, but the US is the leading market for Toyota in terms of total units sold, so it's odd to me that if I drive to the Toyota dealership 10 minutes from my house, their game of selling cars only leaves me with one model to purchase if I'm committed to buying a BEV.
China is the biggest EV market, Europe is the second biggest, and North America is third.
For EVs the US will remain lower priority than China and Europe for a while yet. Toyota understands how to sell cars.
It's funny how this thread has gone from "Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines" to "Toyota is not prioritizing small EV markets first".
You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined. That's an odd way to define a small EV market. Funny thing is, in terms of rankings, the US is actually a "small market" when it comes to gas-only cars.
Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.
The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.
> The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold
Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
> it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry
Dodge's Charger EV has been a sales flop [1] and pretty much universally panned by critics as something that nobody asked for.
The Camry and Corolla were the best-selling sedan and compact sedan of 2025 [2]. I think this shows that Toyota is listening to what Corolla and Camry drivers want - something inexpensive and reliable to get them to and from work every day without issue.
Some day Toyota will make an EV sedan. I think their 2026 bZ Woodland [3] shows that they are starting to figure out how make compelling EVs. And Toyota's EV strategy seems pretty reasonable to me overall - their delays to develop a decent EV don't seem to put them under threat from any legacy automakers. They are being threatened by Chinese EV makers, but so is Tesla - so even a huge head start likely wouldn't have benefited Toyota much either in that regard.
The difference is probably philosophical. A (non-phev) hybrid is primarily an ICE car in every way. Building hybrids is building ICE cars with a little extra. Building EVs is different.
Honda and Toyota invested a lot in hybrid tech, they probably want to milk that investment more and the hydrogen distraction kept them from also investing in BEV tech. China was basically starting a car industry from scratch so didn’t have those sunk costs to worry about.
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
> So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x.
Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.
Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).
Not to mention that jet planes routinely take off heavier than their max safe landing weight today too, relying on the weight reduction of consuming the fuel to return the plane to a safe landing weight again while enjoying the extra range afforded. This trick doesn't work well with batteries either.
You could do it with a ground effect plane for inland sea jaunts, like Seattle to Victoria. If you can float, then you don’t technically need a huge reserve like is normally needed.
Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster...
However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.
Well, there's also burning regular fuel in a fuel cell, a FCEV. That doubles the efficiencies over ICE, so I guess that bumps it back up to 8x away?
Given the great energy densities and stability in transport of hydrocarbons, there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources, so that could be a solution if we don't manage to increase battery densities by another order of magnitude.
The problem isn't CO2 it's pulling carbon out of geological deposits. Thus the carbon atoms in synthetic fuel can be considered "green" provided an appropriate energy source was used.
You misunderstand the problem. The act of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is not a problem.
Significantly increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem. This happens when geological sources are used.
Unfortunately, burying dead trees in a landfill doesn't solve the problem because they decompose to methane which escapes. But you're right that geological CO2 production could be balanced by geologic CO2 sequestration, done properly.
The point is that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere was never the problem. Adding geological carbon back into the carbon cycle is the root cause of the entire thing.
You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?
But if the CO2 recently came from the atmosphere it's still a net zero impact though.
Like, take 5 units of carbon out of the atmosphere to create the fuel. Burn it and release 5 units of carbon to the atmosphere. What's the net increase again? (-5) + 5 = ?
FWIW I'm not saying these processes actually achieve this in reality. Just pointing out that it could be carbon neutral in the end.
And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.
Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.
Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.
From Wikipedia:
The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.
Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.
Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.
Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.
"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."
We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.
You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.
> burn petrol.
Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?
Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.
How is that supposed to help?
I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.
Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.
I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.
With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.
Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.
Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.
For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.
More accurately, the calculation needs to factor in the fact that battery weight doesn’t decrease as charge is used.
Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.
How can batteries compete with that constraint?
Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.
I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.
An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.
Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.
The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).
One of the trade offs is that engines are actually ridiculously heavy. Compact, extreme high power electric motors are starting to be commercialised. But also, fuel burns so you lose weight as you’re flying whereas batteries stay the same.
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
Structural batteries were supposed to be the solution where the density wasn't so important. I don't really have a good understanding of the ration of fuel weight to structural weight in existing aircraft though.
casing is around 25% of the mass of a cylindrical cell, with the rest being actual battery bits that can't have any stresses applied. is 25% weight saving that significant?
Turbofans and supercritical airfoils are done to the point of engine manufacturers looking to propfans and alternative materials (carbon fibre) to eke out further efficiencies.
Biofuel makes more sense for airplanes. No conversion even necessary. You could fuel up a 737 with properly formulated biofuel and fly it now, though a lot of validation would be needed to be generally allowed especially for passenger flights.
If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.
Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.
Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.
LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.
LNG aviation does not make any more sense than H2 aviation. Even LPG does not make any sense since you neither can haul 16 bar fuel tanks, nor can you realistically maintain temperature for 1-2atm pressure. And any leak is not 'oh. look, a kerosene stain on tarmac', it's ready-made fuel-air explosion.
On the plus side we would be able to retire airport fire engines because they would never be able to get to a crash before it completely burns out.
Hydrogen only makes electric vehicles look good and the only alternative. In fact, if this purposeful which I doubt, it probably helped stopped other companies from making hydrogen
Green hydrogen makes sense as a way to ship solar power to places that don't have it.
Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.
Politics has a habit of being very insular once elections are finished.
There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks. When the money dries up the public tends to go back to "what's practical and affordable?".
> There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks.
Well, it can be made to work, you know. Late (in the XX century) industrialization stories are like that: competitive (dis)advantages make any such attempts simply unprofittable for any businessman (or even a group of them), but if the government keeps skewing the market for decades... The Japanese car manufacturing has been heavily subsidized for most of the XX century, even after their several disastrous attempts to enter the US market. But it all worked out in the end.
Pointing to the Hindenburg as an example of why hydrogen is a bad idea is the same as pointing to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear is a bad idea.
Ehh, the Hindenburg had a flammable skin. Barrage balloons from the World Wars were most often filled with hydrogen and yet were extremely difficult to ignite or take down even with purpose build incindiary ammo for that purpose shows hydrogen balloons can be safe. Often they would be riddled with dozens of holes but still take many hours for them to lose enough hydrogen to float back down to the ground.
The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.
That's because regular bullets are actually pretty cold, especially by the time they reach the height of anti-air balloons.
But hydrogen itself is SCARY. It has an extremely wide range of ignitable concentrations, and it has very low ignition energy. It also tends to leak through ~everything.
But hydrogen is also so easy to produce on demand that you can design your balloon to be at small positive pressure all the time and always leaks outwards into the open air. If oxygen is allowed to leaked in undetected, yeah that's a death trap. The same if hydrogen leaked into semi contained oxygen enclosures. But leaking through the skin of the balloon to open sky even with decent size holes and a bit of positive pressure doesn't ignite particularly well, despite hydrogen's wide range of ignition conditions.
It is not such a fool proof technology that everybody should have one, but to me building and operating a hydrogen balloon isn't dissimilar to running a steam locomotive. It can be dangerous if done badly or incorrectly, but it can also be done safely with pretty well known and understood technologies and methods and practices. And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport I find it hard to dismiss its potential even so long after their heyday and previous problems.
> And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport
What efficiency? You still need to orient it and propel it in the desired direction, unless you don't mind to simply float around on the wind (in which case, yes, we have weather balloons precisely for that and nothing much else).
Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
It's the everything, yeah. There's a lot working against using hydrogen as the local energy source for automotive propulsion in the world that we presently have.
Some advantages are that a fuel cell that accepts hydrogen and air at one end and emits electricity and water at the other can be lighter-weight than a big battery, and it can [potentially] be refueled quickly for long trips.
Some disadvantages: We need a compressed hydrogen tank -- which isn't as scary to me as it may be for some people, but that's still a new kind of risk we need to carry with us wherever we drive. And we still need a big(ish) battery and the controls for it in order for regen braking to do its thing (which hybrids have shown to be very useful).
And, again, the grid: If it were cheaper/better/efficient to move energy from electrical generating stations to the point of use using buckets [or trucks or trains] of hydrogen, we'd already be doing that. But it isn't. So we just plug stuff in, instead, and use the grid we already have.
A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving. There's far faster methods, but that's something that lots of regular people with a normal commute and normal working hours can already accomplish very easily if they have private parking with an outlet nearby.
For most folks, with most driving, that's all they ever have to do. It shifts concerns about refueling speed from "Yeah, but hydrogen is fast! I waste hardly any time at all while it refills!" to "What refueling stops? I just unplug my car in the morning and go. I haven't needed to stop at gas station in years."
The main advantages of hydrogen are real, but they just aren't very useful compared to other things that we also have.
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Hydrogen mixed with air has a very wide range of concentrations where it is explosive. It accumulates inside containers or just the roof of the car… where the passengers are. It takes just one lit cigarette for it to go boom.
Zubrin's "Hydrogen Hoax" from 2007[1] is basically an ironclad critique. The physics are inescapably poor, and always will be. (Zubrin makes other points in that article which should probably be taken with more salt, but his critique of hydrogen stands).
It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).
Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
Remember that China briefly embargoed Japan for rare earth metals in 2010, and Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014. My theory was that it was developed as a national fallback for Japan in case that embargo continued or got worse. Think 1930s Volkswagen. Anyone can comment on that?
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
I'm pointing out that the timeline of continuing funding it, to the point of a major model design and launch, and nationwide network of hydrogen stations, might well be linked to China's emergent REE dominance and that Japan doesn't have those raw materials.
(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)
I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.
Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.
It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.
The basic point is that a material that is highly flammable, needs to be compressed to high pressure in order to be useful, but also will seep through and damage steel containers because of the fundamental fact that the atoms and charged ions are just too small, is never going to be easy to work with. Compared to electrical battery tech now being widely and cheaply rolled out.
This goes some way to answering the "Why is it such a terrible idea?" question. Or at least it's an idea whose time has passed, due to the abovementioned battery tech maturing.
That’s not a thing. Anyone who’s seen hydrogen being split from electrolysis knows it takes a lot lot lot of electricity and is very slow. If two people needed to fill up in the same day it would run the well dry.
Sorry, building surveillance and control infrastructure isn't intended to "help the children," that's just a confusing part of the name. Our mistake whoops.
If it’s causing issues you can just ask the ai to improve that part. Shit, it will often even identify problematic areas.
And if migrating from a complete dumpster fire to a cleaner working system sounds hard, I’ve got news. AI can do that for you too! Just get it to write the migration files.
This is what it means to be a developer from today onwards…
The equation has a ^4 to the temperature. If you raise the temperature of your radiator by ~50 degrees you double its emission capacity. This is well within the range of specialised phase change compressors, aka fancy air conditioning pumps.
Next up in the equation is surface emissivity which we’ve got a lot of experience in the automotive sector.
And finally surface area, once again, getting quite good here with nanotechnology.
Yes he’s distracting, no it’s not as impossible as many people think.
The inner side of the radiator would be metallized, an anti black body. Together with a bit of vacuum it would thermally be quite far from the PV&GPU. Thermal insulation is easy in space.
You still can't get more surface area than a sphere without crumpling things up. And given the thermal insulation, you can only lose heat via radiation. Radiating heat from a crumpled boundary means radiating it towards another part of the boundary. If there's an "inner side", then it's a sphere (or some other convex shape, all of which have at most the surface area of a sphere).
I don't think you'd want any vacuum at all between the radiator and the heat sources! Thermal insulation is the problem, not the solution. You want the radiator as thermally close to the heat sources as possible, probably via some highly heat conductive metal.
Though the optimal approach might be to ditch the vacuum and use a more terrestrial configuration with circulating air or water or mercury to conduct the heat away. Space is a horrible place to do this in all ways except for... well, space. You do have plenty of room up there. (Well, and power. Lots of solar energy to play with. Which in turn causes its own problems with heat and radiation.)
With a heatpump the PV and GPU would have the evaporators, the radiator would have the condenser. You do this for two reasons, so you can run the radiator hotter (4th power and all) and because the refrigerant is a good heat spreader (better than pure liquid cooling).
With a heatpump, you don't want a thermal bypass, hence the isolation.
Space is not a great place to get rid of heat, but if you need lots of surface area any way for PV that almost solves itself.
Raise the temperature of your radiator by 50 degrees and you double its emission capacity. Or put your radiator in the atmosphere and multiply its heat exchange capacity by a factor of a thousand.
It's not physically impossible. Of course not. It's been done thousands of times already. But it doesn't make any economic sense. It's like putting a McDonald's at the top of Everest. Is it possible? Of course. Is it worth the enormous difficulty and expense to put one there? Not even a little.
For thousands of years we never even looked to Mount Everest, then some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot. Nowadays anyone with the cash and commitment can get the job done.
Same with datacenters in space, not today, but in 1000 years definitely, 100 surely, 10?
As for the economics, it makes about as much sense as running jet engines at full tilt to power them.
If we define a data center as a place where computers run primarily to serve distant users, then we've had data centers in space for decades.
Nobody should doubt that it's possible, since it's been done. It just doesn't make any sense to do it purely for the sake of having computers do things that could be done on the ground.
There's nothing weird about using jet engines to make electricity. The design of a turbine designed to generate thrust isn't necessarily that different from a turbine designed to generate electricity. You can buy a new Avon gas turbine generator today, the same engine used in the Canberra, Comet, Draken, and many others. It makes about a million times more economic sense than putting GPUs in space to run LLMs.
> some bloke on the fiver said he’d give it a shot
Hillary (he features on the NZ Five Dollar note) was one of those guys who does things for no good reason. He also went to both poles. This only tells us that it is indeed possible, but not that it's desirable or will become routine.
Even if you create a material with surface emissivity of 1.0:
- let's say 8x 800W GPUs and neglect the CPU, that's 6400W
- let's further assume the PSU is 100% efficient
- let's also assume that you allow the server hardware to run at 77 degrees C, or 350K, which is already pretty hot for modern datacenter chips.
Your radiator would need to dissipate those 6400W, requiring it to be almost 8 square meters in size. That's a lot of launch mass. Adding 50 degrees will reduce your required area to only about 4.4 square meters with the consequence that chip temps will rise by 50 degrees also, putting them at 127 degrees C.
No CPU I'm aware of can run at those temps for very long and most modern chips will start to self throttle above about 100
Yes, that’s what we’re talking about. Data centers in space.
You put the cold side of the phase change on the internal cooling loop, step up the external cooling loop as high temp as you can and then circulate that through the radiators. You might even do this step up more than once.
Imagine the data center like a box, you want it to be cold inside, and there’s a compressor, you use to transfer heat from inside to outside, the outside gets hot, inside cold. You then put a radiator on the back of the box and radiate the heat to the darkness of space.
This is all very dependent on the biggest and cheapest rockets in the world but it’s a tradeoff of convenience and serviceability for unlimited free energy.
Overprovision solar and add batteries for the night, then. Whatever amount of money and effort is required to make space data centers feasible (launching, cooling, etc) cannot possibly be lower than just building solar powered terrestrial data centers + batteries or alternative power sources. It is just not as sexy a story to sell to investors as magic space computers.
Avoid it as much as possible. They'll circle the earth around an axis approximately in line with the earth-sun vector. In practice they might see some eclipse, but only for a small percentage of their orbit.
Sure and it all routes to dump the heat to...where again? A vacuum? Or to a radiator with a fan with some kind of cooler fluid/gas from the environment constantly flowing through it?
Hyper custom software can allow your business flows to sync together a lot better than the alternative, using zapier to glue a bunch of mostly poor fits and ending up with Frankenstein processes.
Also, it allows you to pick and choose what you want from where.
We’ve just completed the first month of our internal CRM that has replaced about 500$ a month in subs with something that flows much better and enforces our own internal processes.
> Saying that, I wouldn’t be too surprised if robotaxi replaces 90% of taxis and Ubers in the next 5-7 years.
How about we start with 0.00076% first before we start throwing insane numbers like 90% (chance of which happening are in-line with me marrying Beyonce)
Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”
“Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene,” Waymo wrote in the post.
If a human were driving that child could be in much worse shape. You are being disingenuous by leaving out context.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
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