Hydrogen station explodes in Norway, fuel cell car sales suspended [View all]

I've been hearing all about the wonders of the hydrogen energy fantasy - which I kind of love to describe as a wasteful scheme to rebrand fossil fuels, which it is - for some decades, most recently here. Regrettably, the fantasy persists, year after year, decade after decade.

We hear all about "first hydrogen" this and "first hydrogen" that all the time, but the thermodynamically destructive scam is actually very old, and has been around a long time, and was, for example, very popular with the energy idiot Amory Lovins around the dawn of the 21st century. The 21st century, as far is energy is concerned, will be known as the era in which the planet started to burn because of extreme global heating, driven by fossil fuel waste, to which the manufacture of hydrogen contributes somewhere between 1% to 3%, said production being mostly connected with ammonia synthesis, not hydrogen cars, buses, trucks, trains blah, blah, blah.

Thus this is a long running scam, I feel no particular constraints to producing a five year old article (2019) on an exploding hydrogen station from a few years back, five years back, about 10% of the way in the long discussed "hydrogen revolution" that has been going nowhere for the last 50 years, for a reason.

Hydrogen station explodes in Norway, fuel cell car sales suspended

I'm not likely to believe that a hydrogen nirvana has broken out in Norway in the last five years or whether it is even possible to permit a hydrogen station in Norway.

(Using hydroelectricity, Norway historically manufactured the majority of the world's heavy water exploiting the isotope effects of electrolysis to produce hydrogen's protium form, leaving the deuterium behind. Famously, a Norwegian/British mission blew up the plant that did this during World War II, this to slow the German development of nuclear weapons, which in any case, proved not to be serious anyway.)

The horrible physical properties of hydrogen mean only disaster if treated as a consumer product. It isn't one and shouldn't be one.

Hydrogen is an essential commodity industrially, currently manufactured on industrial scale overwhelmingly by the exergy destroying steam reformation of dangerous fossil fuels, largely for the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, as well as for petroleum refining (an application I'd like to see ended) and, to a lesser extent, chemical hydrogenations, including the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide to make methanol and/or the wonder fuel DME. It should only be handled by trained chemical engineers on an industrial scale, and, at lab scale (I performed hydrogenations many times myself) trained chemists.

In theory, albeit not industrially practiced, hydrogen could be manufactured using nuclear heat in stepwise thermochemical cycles, the most famous of which, and probably still the best, the SI (sulfur iodine) cycle. I believe China has piloted, or is piloting, a nuclear driven SI cycle using its HTR10 nuclear reactor.

Could however is a very different word than is. As a fuel hydrogen is both dangerous and, currently being dependent on fossil fuels, dirty.

Have a nice evening.