Green Hydrogen Skepticism
Comments debate the viability of hydrogen as a clean fuel source, criticizing that most production relies on fossil fuels with high CO2 emissions and that electrolysis methods are inefficient and uneconomical compared to direct electricity use.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
There is no naturally occurring source of hydrogen. That’s why you see ads for HFC from Shell and Chevron. Hydrogen must be made from oil or gas. Salt water electrolysis doesn’t really work at scale as it requires even more oil and gas. Even if you do SWE with renewable energy, it’s about 22x less efficient than putting the electricity in a battery. We have fusion. It’s in the sky. We don’t need it on earth.
If this produces co2, then doesn’t this make the entire case for hydrogen pointless?
How would the hydrogen be used? Directly as a fuel, or as a means to create electricity ?
Where do you expect to get that hydrogen? Electrolysis is too inefficient to be economically practical. Currently most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, which rather defeats the purpose.
The problem is that it is cheaper to produce hydrogen using fossil fuels, instead of using clean energy + eletrolysis.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production> As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (∼95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas, partial oxidation of methane, and coal gasification.
That's all great, except that it simply doesn't exist at the moment. Nearly all of our hydrogen comes out of oil refineries as a byproduct. If you're going to use electricity to make hydrogen you might as well use it to make synthetic fuel and skip the whole hydrogen nonsense.
Isn't most Hydrogen made from Breaking up Methane anyway?
Just convert electricity to hydrogen.
I fail to see an economic future for hydrogen as a fuel source. If it is produced from e.g. methane (the blue version), then we are burning more methane than we would have if we had been using the methane directly. If it is produced from electricity and water (the green version), then we are wasting electricity that could have been used directly in BEVs. At the end of the day, hydrogen is always going to cost more than the energy source that was used to produce it, and it will not be competitive
More than 90% of hydrogen produced today comes from fossil fuels. If your intent is to reduce CO2, hydrogen is not the path you want to go.Also quite hilarious that to produce hydrogen(inefficiently)you must first produce electricity.You know what you could have done instead? Skip the hydrogen step and just use the electricity.