Environment & Energy

..."renewable energy." There isn't someone checking electrons to show that they're sorted according to the source propelling them. People are full of shit if they think the extra money they pay is really for 100% renewable energy; it's all about often dishonest accounting tricks about "offsets" and other crap.

So called "100% renewable energy" electricity cannot be audited, and thus there is no definitive way to address whether it's a lie.

Similarly, hydrogen molecules do not come labeled with certificates of origin.

Every damned paper one opens - and there are oodles and oodles of them - that is remotely honest, begins with a statement that the overwhelming bulk of the world's hydrogen is produced using steam reforming of fossil fuels. Then they proceed with but, in theory we could do x, or y, or z (where x, y, and z are claimed to be "green" usually). The italicized words in the last sentence are the operative words, whether it's steam reforming of biomass, or making electrolysis systems that aren't incredibly expensive and wasteful, high temperature electrolysis, blah, blah, blah, or even (the focus of my interest) thermochemical cycles.

Any commercial or Potemkin hydrogen system for hydrogen trucks, cars, buses, trains, blah, blah, blah, on this planet right now is either extremely wasteful, highly subsidized, or based on an outright lie, or all of the above.

I consider all of these hydrogen schemes as to be, like so called "renewable energy" itself, to be largely an effort to be a marketed diversion intended to support the use of fossil fuels, on which all of these schemes depend for viability. Nobody really lives in the dark when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy has been in continuous publication since 1976, almost half a century. I've personally been to it many times over the years, in connection with my interest in thermochemical water and carbon dioxide splitting cycles driven by nuclear energy, although thermochemical cycle papers are often funded by pretending its all about solar thermal energy.

The "hydrogen economy" has not come, is not here, and won't come, frankly, because hydrogen has abysmal physical properties, the third lowest critical temperature of any known gas, extremely low viscosity, an insignificant heat of vaporazation, low explosive limits, incompatibility with many metal alloys, difficulties with detection, and, most critically, is produced entirely in every case via exergy destruction.

The latter problem might be addressed by process intensification using heat networks, and I'm beginning to see this discussed more and more in the literature, but basically all this horseshit about "green hydrogen" for now and for the foreseeable future, has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with marketing fossil fuels in a "bait and switch" fashion. Hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, and to the extent it is, albeit in tiny amounts, produced by electrolysis, it diverts already thermodynamically degraded electricity from use for better purposes.

I assembled some numbers from a sample of the literature and I often link to that post:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

I then engage one of my favorite chants (which actually comes, with expansion, from the writings of Vaclav Smil): "Numbers don't lie. People lie, to themselves and each other, but numbers don't lie."

To be clear, I support nuclear energy because it's primary energy, and scalable pretty much infinitely, but I would never support using clean nuclear energy for an idiotic scheme to produce consumer hydrogen via electrolysis of nuclear electricity. If we must limit nuclear energy to electricity production (and there are lots of reasons we shouldn't) it would be far better to use that electricity to shut coal and gas power plants. Not doing so because we're electrolyzing water to make hydrogen is not merely stupid, it's obscene.

Thanks for your comment.