And yet , we in the oil industry use multiple million tonnes of it, and transport it hundreds of miles every day all along the Gulf Coast.
Save it you are living in the past. I have a tank of H2 gas in one of my labs it just sits there it’s carbon fiber lined with aluminum and polymer that is impervious to H2.
H2 is not a boogieman it’s a well used industrial chemical.
Should it be used at the consumer level nah there are better means for storing energy.
It takes 52-56 kWh to make a kg of H2 which holds the equivalent to 1 US gallon of octane on a BTU for BTU level LHV not HHV know the difference.
Octane is 34kWh LHV per gallon so right there you see the losses in the electrolysis machine not including compression or absorption into a hydride or adsorption into a MOF based material again know the differences from absorption to adsorption.
Compression to 300bar adds 10% more energy costs, going cryogenic temperatures for LH2 is 16% or more energy costs.
It’s moot at the consumer level a Model 3 Tesla only needs 250 watt hours to go 1 mile this is 4 miles per kWh and that’s with the AC ripping at hey speeds my Model 3 has done 90 watt hours per mile in city grid lock traffic. There is no idling and regenerative braking grabs 80% of what would be wasted as heat in brake pads, I will never need to replace brake pads they don’t get used very often the motors bring the car to a halt.
So 56kWh takes a Model 3 224 miles or more.
Hydrogen is a crappy way to store energy for anything other than niche applications once you have battery tech that’s 97% round trip eff like sodium ion cells are lithium is in the 90-95% range NMC OR LFP
Any engine burning anything even H2 is subject to the first law of thermodynamics and Carnot demands his due as well.
Electric motors and batteries are second law machines they may no Carnot due.
This is why a Model 3 goes 224 miles on the same energy input a hydrogen ICE engine would struggle to go 50 miles and that’s in a hybrid like a Prius a pure ICE engine car of Toyota Camry size would get 35 mpg at best and since 1kg of H2 holds the same BTU as one gallon of pure octane the distance traveled would be equal a BTU is a BTU in a first law machine.
Hydrogen combustion is just dumb once you have LFP, Sodium Ion , and soon to be aluminum ion which is a 3+ valence electron ion triple Li, and Na. Magnesium ion is also coming it’s a 2+ valence electron metal Ca too. All paired to silicate cathodes look up see that pie chart we are never running out of silicates or sodium and iron silicates it’s not possible the earths hard shell is a giant silicate.
Once the boomers are dead and stop being able jam up the energy transition the whole planet is going to forever energy. Nukes, solar, wind, and frac’d deep dry rock and magma based geothermal. With massive sodium ion, and iron ion BES at the terawatt scale. China already has not giga factories they have city sized tera factories CATL has a single factory with more interior area than the city of San Francisco has square miles of area yeah that big.
It’s not coming it’s here and we are being left behind because of bitter clinger boomers the sooner y’all kick off the better the youngers will be in the energy race.
At least Texas has told the clingers shove it we are building out solar , wind and batteries as fast as we can while also massively building AI tech it’s the only way to compete with China and they are winning hands down right now. Texas will have 35,000 more megawatts worth of one the second demand BES by 2030 that’s just what is already funded and approved by ERCOT more is coming as the AI race really kicks off. I have engineering friends and alumni working at Aalo they are building sodium cooled reactors for AI centers they expect at full scale to be 90days from the signing of a PPA to first bus bar voltage with $30 per megawatt hour delivered. 24/7 and on-site BES using megapacks for peak demands on the server farms.
They chose sodium cooling specifically to be able to switch to the fast spectrum and burn plutonium in the long term. Anyone who is not doing fast spectrum will be left behind when nukes scale past 15% of the power market. There simply is not enough U235 to scale to the terawatt level that A planet with 8+ billion all demanding EU levels of energy use let alone tera scale AI. Fast fission, solar, and deep geothermal are the only sources that can do 5000 exajoules worth of consumption we do 600 today bringing the other 6 billion humans to near EU levels takes 5000 EWh, oil can’t , coal can’t, natural gas can’t all would be burnt out in under two decades at 5000 EJ annual consumption.
In terms of solar power falling to earth per year, this translates to about 1.5 million exajoules 1.5x10^24J
We only need 5000 of those 1.5 million per year.
There is 2,000,000+ exajoules of heat in the top 8km of the earth’s crust and it is replenished continuously from below humans couldn’t possibly extract enough fast enough to change the thermal heat flow balance. A single geothermal EGS well is 15MW you can stack 24 to a pad just like shale wells and directional drill them like a spider web for miles and miles around the energy in a 5mi wide by 5 mile deep cylinder of scorching hot rock is immense. Two drilling tech has opened this up, plasma drill bits and microwave masers, high pressure mud PCD bits also can get to 8km now more than one company is drilling ultrahard granites with PCDs it’s when not if any more. Frac’d deep geo is 24/7/365 power too it never runs out after 50 years you let it sit and heat back up again as you exploit another dozen cubic miles of hot rocks come back and it’s hot again a few decades later a blink in geological time and species time too. Forget individual lifetimes they are insignificant at best we are doing things at the species level now. Nukes, deep geo, pumped and compressed storage are all in the species timeline. Centuries scale.
