Environment & Energy

Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 10:50 AM - Edit history (1)

...made in the 1980s and even before.

The use of the word "expected" is soothsaying. Having been exposed to energy soothsaying for decades, I don't credit it at all.

I'm quite sure if I leafed through back issues of the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, which started publication in 1976, and with which I've been familiar since the 1990s, I could find loads of these "Hydrogen is expected to..." statements from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and beyond. In fact I'm sure I've come across many in this century. They're almost impossible to avoid.

In 2025, which is now despite all these "Hydrogen is expected to..." statements going back half a century, the main use for hydrogen is to make ammonia, methanol and in petroleum refining, the latter which unlike antinukes, I oppose.

Right now despite all the "green hydrogen" bullshit flying around, which I regard as an outright lie, hydrogen is made by exergy destruction everywhere, dominated in quantities well above 95% by fossil fuels. Thus it is contributing to the destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

I fully concede that it is possible, often spending time thinking deeply about these processes, that thermochemical hydrogen cycles using nuclear heat are feasible under conditions of process intensification schemes, wherein electricity would be a side product rather than the main product of nuclear reactor operations. Under these conditions captive hydrogen would represent exergy recovery rather than loss.

These conditions do not exist however despite my ruminations and those of many others smarter than I am and thus hydrogen remains a dirty chemical process, one necessary to prevent world wide famine because of the need for industrial nitrogen fixation but still dirty. Thus the promotion of hydrogen toys here and everywhere elseis an appalling obscenity to my mind.

There's nothing "false" about the fact that hydrogen is overwhelmingly made with fossil fuels. As for the "appeal to authority" argument (the reference to GIF) that again boils down to soothsaying, I reject this common logical fallacy rather regularly as it's well understood to represent poor thinking. I'm more concerned with what's happening now than I am about cute little fantasies, including even my own about exergy recovery, about what could be but isn't.

My fantasies by the way, depend intimately on issues in materials science, resistance to corrosion and heat in particular, and I am very proud to have raised a young man on the research front lines involved with these topics. It's going quite well. He had lunch last week with a guy whose work in materials science papers have had well over 30,000 citations and who has published with my son's boss, who has an h index in the 80s.

Maybe my son will be in a position to help the world recover from the fuck ups associated with the disastrous and deadly success of the antinukes whose ignorance and selective attention has left the planet in flames.

I won't live to see it. I'll die listening to even more fraudulent "green hydrogen" bullshit to be sure, but people like my son and his colleagues will leave me, at the last breath, some modicum of hope for an end to this energy madness.