Green hydrogen exports from WA seen as possible power source for Europe

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-09/midwest-hydrogen-energy-to-power-rotterdam-port/101751266

This on top of the deals “Twiggy” Forest has been making with Japan and Singapore is signalling the future of this renewable at least

 

Other than for fusion, which is still some time in the future, hydrogen as energy is nonsense.

 

Is it? Then you better email Andrew Forrest because he has sunk a huge investment into this

 

Unless he gets some kind of subsidy (which is probably why he has done it), he will lose his shirt.

 

Engineers will rarely tell you something is impossible, even when your proposal is a very bad idea. Computer scientists at Stanford and MIT in the 1970s came up with a wonderful expression for this, an assignment that was technically feasible, but highly undesirable. They called it “kicking a dead whale down a beach”. The folklore compendium The Hacker’s Dictionary defines this as a “slow, difficult, and disgusting process”. Yes, you can do it like that. But you really don’t want to. . . .

The Green Hydrogen Swindle
2022 › 04 › 17 › the-green-hydrogen-swindle
The Government has a Hydrogen Strategy. The Climate Change Committee thinks hydrogen is wonderful. You may ... gas boilers with hydrogen boilers “as pretty much impossible”. ... Hydrogen has two big problems

 

And then there's this.
Could Natural Hydrogen Kill Green Hydrogen?
2022 › 07 › 24 › could-natural-hydrogen-kill-green-hydrogen
almost pure hydrogen have the potential to completely upend efforts to develop a "green hydrogen" economy ... influx as a “boom”. Natural hydrogen Until now, natural or native hydrogen has been largely overlooked

 

The skeptics are winning.
Ipsos: Climate Skepticism Rising Three Years in a Row
Eric Worrall
“… Unexpectedly, climate skepticism has consistently grown over the past 3 years (37%, +6 pts in 3 years), and is particularly striking in France this year (37%, +8 pts in one…

 

UN: Africa to Use Green Hydrogen to Produce Fertiliser
Eric Worrall
The UN has been pushing poor, fossil fuel rich African countries to embrace intolerably expensive green solutions to their food production problems. . . .

 

I vary much doubt it - there is a lot of research going on in and around this

 

Hmmmmmm

hmmmmm So it wasn’t so much the UN pushing this as two African nations saying “Hell Yeah ! Please invest in our countries”.
This is like Kenya - it could power Africa, Europe, half of Asia with clean energy BUT they do not have the money to build the geothermal power stations. You would think the Arabian nations might find it but they just see it as eating into thief profits

 

". . . So why would the UN push something like green hydrogen, which has yet to demonstrate cost competitiveness in the real world?

I suspect, and this is only a guess, that the UN would like Mauritania and Namibia to leave their fossil fuel deposits in the ground. And they might be getting some help from people inside the Mauritanian and Namibian governments.

If Mauritania and Namibia drilled a few gas wells, and used well known, commercial processes to produce Ammonia, they could vastly improve food production almost overnight, as well as producing substantial quantities of a valuable export product.

Dilute Ammonia can be applied directly to plants as fertiliser, without any further processing. . . . "

 

Perhaps the other focus on fracking for natural gas. That has been the single greatest innovation to preserve the environment in all of human history.

They're going broke trying to come up with some other method of fuel while China is buying coal from Australia and Africa by the boatload and burning it carelessly in furnaces across their country.

 

Hydrogen is converted to ammonia for export.

 

You can take human waste and use it for fertilizer. And hydrogen is the common element in all fossil fuel energy. And the atmosphere is 78 % nitrogen. Manufacture of hydrogen is not a waste it can stretch natural gas by 20%.

 

". . . Hydrogen has two big problems which turn any project into a dead whale exercise.

The first is that pure hydrogen doesn’t exist – it’s both everywhere and nowhere. We must generate all the hydrogen we can then use, and this requires a lot of energy. This is fine when the output of the process is something very valuable to us, such as fertiliser. But less so when the output of the process must compete with much cheaper commodities, as it must in an energy market.

Secondly, hydrogen’s intrinsic physical properties create a whole range of unique problems. It’s a tiny atom that easily escapes confinement. Keeping it captive for storage is expensive, and moving it around safely even more so, because in liquid form it must be very cold.

Hydrogen advocates tend to shrug off these issues – solving them will be someone else’s problem, they reckon. Individually, none of these factors make hydrogen as an energy carrier or storer impossible, but the whale-like properties are becoming harder to ignore.

To replace gas boilers with hydrogen boilers requires thousands of miles of new, much thicker, high-pressure pipes. Last year, Lord Martin Callanan, the energy minister, candidly described the plans to replace our gas boilers with hydrogen boilers “as pretty much impossible”.

Wrong, m’Lud. It’s not impossible – it’s just a supremely bad idea. And when hydrogen explodes, it is quite spectacular. Right on cue, Australia’s first hydrogen carrying ship set sail for Japan this year, and burst into flames on its maiden voyage.

Again, hydrogen powered transport is not impossible, it’s just hampered by reality. Liquified hydrogen may be as light as petrol or kerosene, but keeping it at -257C requires much heavier apparatus. Converting a two engine turboprop from kerosene to hydrogen, I noted here recently, increases the weight of the engine from two tonnes to 13 tonnes.

As for storage, the story is little better. Wind often generates electricity when it is not needed (and doesn’t generate it when it is needed). So when the wind is blowing, the hydrogen lobby argues, we can create “green hydrogen” using electrolysis. These electrolysers are expensive, and sensitive, and switching them on intermittently to produce the mythical green hydrogen isn’t economic.

So green hydrogen is really not one, but two dead whales, engaged in a gruesome act of congress. . . . "

 

Hydrogen is converted to ammonia for export.

I don't think it's ideal as a fuel, but there could be a niche market.

 

We shall see. Commercial ammonia production in the West requires vast quantities of fossil fuel.

 

But that consumes a lot of energy, it is not a source of energy.

 

Cherry-picking again?

Suggest you examine the whole process.

https://www.science.org/content/art...ir-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon

 

No.

I have. It is thermodynamic as well as economic nonsense. Even as rocket fuel, hydrogen is inferior to methane (natural gas).

 

Harvesting coal takes a lot of energy. The best energy dense substance is uranium. And it takes energy to produce. Everything we do takes energy.

 

But unlike hydrogen, coal is a source of energy. Burning it releases more energy -- a lot more -- than it takes to mine, clean and transport it to the power plant. With hydrogen you always get less energy out than you put in.

<sigh> We get (a lot) more energy out of uranium than we put in. With hydrogen, we get less. The only fuel applications hydrogen is good for are fusion power (not yet) and rocket fuel, and Musk has shown it is even inferior to methane (natural gas) as rocket fuel.

 

Another hydrogen failure in the making:
Germany’s dream of building a fleet of hydrogen-fired power plants is faltering
Guest Blogger
“If these turbines are only supposed to run when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, then they will be extremely expensive,” he added. . . . .

 

It doesn't work.
Can the Government Create a Green Hydrogen Fuel Industry?
Guest Blogger
…physics and economics strongly oppose the development of a green hydrogen fuel industry. Get ready for a spectacular failure of these government-sponsored efforts. . . .

 

Unless you are talking fusion, hydrogen is irrelevant to the energy economy: it is just a way of storing energy, not a source of energy, and not a very cheap, safe, or convenient one at that. Musk has shown that even as rocket fuel, its one practical use, hydrogen is inferior to methane.