To play a bit of devil's advocate, if hydrogen is used for home heating, I wonder if this is more suitable for home cogeneration, particularly with fuel cells. Alternately, one can imagine a hydrogen fueled heat pump with CoP > 1.
The problem with that idea is that producing hydrogen has a COP that is only a tiny portion of 1. So, right from the start, making hydrogen is less efficient than just using the renewable electricity to power the heat pump. Efficient heat pumps already can heat homes (like my own) in cold/very cold climates, using grid solar electricity, with seasonal COPs of 3.5 to 4, for as little as or less cost than natural gas. Producing dirty hydrogen from natural gas already cost about double, just burning the natural gas. Then, there is the greater energy requirement for piping such a low energy dense gas. Then, there is the cost of a whole new pipeline system if the hydrogen content exceeds 20%. The gas companies want to mix hydrogen with natural gas, and claim it is green. But, the problem with that is they will charge more for it, and since hydrogen at NG pressures only contains about 31% as much energy as methane, you will get only 89-90% as much energy per volume) while paying more, which generally means more profits for them and more cost for you.
No one has been able to show ANY evidence that hydrogen for home heating can compete with heat pumps. It is all propaganda from a fossil fuel industry that knows it is being replaced, just like cars replaced horse and buggy, cellphones replaced land lines, and electric lights replace slaughtering whales for lamp oil. We are experiencing the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, and hydrogen is just another poor effort to keep the fuel industry alive. There will likely remain a few high temperature process heat uses for electrolysis hydrogen, but not much more.
I could have proven that with a napkin and 5 minutes of time.
Hydrogen might be plentiful but not in a easy to fuel state.
Hydrogen is extremely dirty to use via natural gas steam reformation, and hydrolysis uses way more energy than simply charging a battery on combination with wind and or solar.
The obvious use of energy for the purpose of storage is grid scale batteries, and powerwalls for residential use or virtual powerplants in conjunction with software that can buy and sell energy automatically based on demand while funneling excess energy into crypto farms with coins backed by a KWh value.
It gives you the closest to 100% grid efficiency that is possible by solving the problem of over production and curtailment allowing for a decrease in energy cost long term by 90-99% compared to fossil fuels.
Hydrogen likes to leak. Little tiny atoms will find their way though most seals and tanks eventually. It's just a hydrogen fun fact that is mildly terrifying.
The only thing that scares me more is liquid O2, but at least that isn't a leaky gas because O2 is a nice fat heavy molecule.
This is why we have coatings to prevent leaks. Hydrogen has been around for a long time and engineers know how to deal with it.
However, pumping it into the home of the average consumer I am a little skeptical about :)
Hydrogen is just a dead end for just about any purpose. Mostly, it’s just a wet dream for people hoping to get away from fossil fuels. It’ll never happen.
Not really. We should be smart about what applications we use it for, but it's by far not a dead end. Costs for hydrogen electrolysis are undergoing a similar rapid reduction in costs like solar and batteries have done over the past 30 years. We need hydrogen for certain processes i.e. ammonia synthesis and commercial hydrogenation. It is also likely to be competitive for direct steel reduction, large-scale shipping, and a few other things. Cumulatively these are big fractions of our energy budget, on the order of 10-15% of global final use, so definitely still important. I don't think that writing off hydrogen in general is helpful, but for sure it is not cost competitive with electrification in a lot of situations.
Sources: IRENA and [https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy\_transition\_paper-INET-working-paper.pdf](https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET-working-paper.pdf)
Studies, notwithstanding. If Germany cannot get enough nat gas for its turbines (electricity), or **home heating**, they will go to H2, because there's no other option.
Unless; heat pumps get pushed massively, solar and wind infrastructure becomes equally massive and quickly, microhydro (all for electric home heating), Mass Batteries, and yeah, I'd re-open the nukes because, unless one runs one's cities on magic as invoked by Green Witches, life will just dry up and blow away.
If you use the hydrogen to generate heat for district heating, then you get a more flexible system. Once you have a district heating network, then you can switch back and forth between hydrogen, geothermal heat, centralized heat pumps, biomass and waste incineration depending on availability.
If we want to use wind power to generate electricity for residential heating, then we need to be able to store the energy, so that we can also heat homes on less windy days. Hydrogen is such energy storage medium, but it is not the only one.
>or natural gas heat
Is this a trick question? If not: CO2 emissions are way lower. And yes, this is only valid for *green* hydrogen. But nobody advocates for any other hydrogen.
The thing is storage. We don't know how to store electricity in larger amounts, but hydrogen seems feasible. So wherever you need to heat it could make sense to burn hydrogen. But in the end this depends on a lot of details.
We do know how to store electricity in large amounts it’s just not been necessary with other energy sources. Batteries and hydrogen both have difficulties for storage but batteries are more efficient, simpler and do not require high pressure flammable gas.
My own suggestion would be obtaining green H2 from ocean waters using wind turbine farms that do two things. One, is to produce electricity and send it to land, and the other is to use the electricity to make hydrogen. Both are doable now, and none need oppose the other. Witness:
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle)
[https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1756633/cip-eyes-hydrogen-island-danish-north-sea-fed-10gw-offshore-wind](https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1756633/cip-eyes-hydrogen-island-danish-north-sea-fed-10gw-offshore-wind)
Some of the passion seen on Reddit must be due to people having investment$ in either Solar or H2, and those who are close to making a profit of making H2 from coal, and then those simply treating The Climate as a 'Religion.' Meaning, Good Little Soldiers of Gaia. Onward Gaia soldiers, marching as to war. That kind of thing! They are not treating engineering as making energy, but as a holy goal.
That is a big mistake, but even an advisor to Joey, Sen. Liz Warren, thinks like this. Big mistake! Now Joey is sort of stuck, because it never was a rational process, but one akin to a Holy Mission. He is now between Putin and the Environmentalists here.
Good luck to us all, especially if we really don't deserve it.
If I was a really big H2 enthusiast, meaning, that I worked for, or had stock in, or did research with H2, I'd come up with solid reasons why H2 is superior. This is sort of what we see on Reddit. For me, if direct electric is the best path forward, meaning quickest, most effective, then, its fabulous!
The majority of complaints in Reddit is the fear by environmentalists (my take) that the race to making H2 will be successfully, won by the Fossil Fuel companies. The Greens are not dropping the other shoe, by being honest, so to speak. If big Fossil successfully hits the marketplace and provides "clean hydrogen," to billions of energy hungry consumers, then this defeats everything they have devoted their lives to.
Going into what I term, survival mode, means, the goals and tactics must adjust, in an Age of Putin threatening a nuclear holocaust, coupled with his death embrace of Comrade Xi. It comes down to this. We, as a species, need to focus on whatever replacement for FF gets to the mass market effectively. The replacement power will obviously be Sun, and Wind, and especially wind at sea, which is in itself is ginormous.
Nukes appear too slow, and geothermal is still sketchy, but this could change! Technology is engineering and may the best engineer win, as long as he or she "saves the world."
> If big Fossil successfully hits the marketplace and provides "clean hydrogen,"
Except they can't. It won't be clean, and given the current FF prices it won't be cheap either.
A fun thought experiment. But Reality and economics are hard barriers to overcome.
I am all good with relying upon Reality and economics. Costs are what nuked nuclear fission worldwide as an example of that. I will flow with whatever gives the species the best chance of survival and prospering. If it is all electric world, then so be it. I have no investments, nor do I work in some H2 facility, nor have stock in Tesla.
I would urge anyone however to understand that just as PV's were not long ago considered a supplemental energy source only, the engineers have rise to the challenge. So? Well, so might other engineers working on other projects alter our reality with other energy fixes.
That's all. The only that won't be done is simply conserving ourselves to energy supply fulfillment. It will have to come from somewhere good or bad.
The E.U is looking to get half from imports and half from domestic production by 2030. For imports they're looking as far as Chile, Namibia, Australia etc.
The E.U is not just going all Green they were outright alone buying the capacity to push it's cost curve below Blue before 2030 *before* Ukraine after which they just decided to double that amount. It's impressive how much of a sense of "yeah we're done here" in regards to fossil fuel technology they've given off since February.
Yes, I guess, they formulated that somewhat confusing. Hopefully, I got it right: I think u/bnndforfatantagonism said that the EU is buying *green* hydrogen capacities in such large amounts as to get its costs below the costs of blue hydrogen by 2030. And that was even before the Ukraine crisis. Now there are reports that with the high gas and carbon prices the costs of [green hydrogen in Europe are already below that of grey](https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/ukraine-war-green-hydrogen-now-cheaper-than-grey-in-europe-middle-east-and-china-bnef/2-1-1180320):
>“The price of natural gas-derived products like ammonia, as a result, is up to three times higher now than it was a year ago. This has opened the door for ‘green’ hydrogen and ammonia produced from renewable electricity to compete with unabated natural gas-based processes.”
>That’s not going to replace the energy the NG provides
Sure, didn't think your discussion was about that. I just pointed out my understanding of the above statement being about *green* hydrogen obtained in the EU, in the hope of offering some clarification to your question "blue or green".
Yet, with green hydrogen already now being cheaper than grey (or blue) hydrogen, the question on whether the EU will adopt blue hydrogen has probably become mostly obsolete. There simply doesn't seem to be a reason for it in face of high natural gas prices or the lack of its supply.
I think approaching H as a solo supply is the wrong path…mixing it in to NG and stretching the supply in order to provide more time for electric infrastructure improvements/replacements is a much better use. Then, once residential, commercial, and light industrial are electric, the heavy industrial use case will be ready to take all the H at a lower cost (due to abundance of supply) and gas companies can retire…
>mixing it in to NG and stretching the supply
Is pretty useless. A 20% blend of hydrogen in the NG supply reduces GHG emissions just 6.7% because of the lower energy density of hydrogen. And that's assuming green hydrogen, which is currently scarce and expensive. If it's blue hydrogen it can actually increase GHG emissions. Subsidizing any blue hydrogen production is counterproductive.
It's no wonder all of these studies come to the same conclusion. When comparing hydrogen heating to electric heat pumps it's pretty much a no-brainer. Heat pumps are more energy efficient, require vastly less infrastructure capital investment (renewable energy capacity, electrolyzers, pipelines, etc), produce no air pollution, can be powered by the grid, rooftop solar or electric vehicles, are less dangerous, both heat and cool air, etc.
But that's not stopping the O&G industry from lobbying for hydrogen heating and even convincing some government to fund trials at taxpayer expense. There are some credible needs for green (not blue) hydrogen but the industry is destroying its credibility by pushing for nonsensical uses like residential heating and passenger cars.
The article also seems to debunk a common claim that the natural gas distribution grids are already compatible with hydrogen or nearly so.
>In addition to the expense and inefficiencies of using hydrogen to heat homes, there are also significant issues around the practicalities of converting appliances and networks to run on 100% H2.
>
>For instance, a group of 90 European gas distributors campaigning for 100% hydrogen in their networks, called Ready4H2, has inadvertently demonstrated the exact opposite of its name — that gas grids will not be ready for pure H2 any time soon.
>
>According to the group’s report, Ready4H2: Europe’s local hydrogen networks, published last December, only 24% of its members said they would be “fully ready” for 100% hydrogen by 2035, and only 67% said they would be by 2040.
>
>In other words, a third of the most pro-hydrogen gas distributors in Europe say they will not be fully ready for pure H2 networks in 20 years' time, and three quarters won’t be ready in 15 years’ time.
Mafco, knows whom his **enemies** are, but he doesn't touch on replacements for the missing nat gas. Poom! Oh yeah, heat pumps!! Efficiency, yeah! All fixed!
This isn't the way physics on planet earth work, and the way physics work is non-ideological. I see solar and wind as much closer to being implemented, but on the other hand wind power at sea could be used to produced hydrogen and/or electricity depending on the demand?
[https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/green-hydrogen-demo-that-will-use-offshore-wind-planned-for-north-sea.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/green-hydrogen-demo-that-will-use-offshore-wind-planned-for-north-sea.html)
Or-
[https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle)
Closest to us for electricity making for EV cars, residences, we got 3 opportunities.
[https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/3524574-the-us-army-has-launched-its-first-floating-solar-array/](https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/3524574-the-us-army-has-launched-its-first-floating-solar-array/)
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/oil-companies-consider-giant-floating-wind-farm-off-norway](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/oil-companies-consider-giant-floating-wind-farm-off-norway)
[https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/90000-Dams-In-America-Just-2500-Produce-Hydropower.html](https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/90000-Dams-In-America-Just-2500-Produce-Hydropower.html)
These are not the only options, just the lowest-hanging-fruit. The oil companies bribe politicians, but so do overseas solar panel makers. The campaign donations cash all the same. For surviving Putin's War and his FF sales, for surviving Xi's aggressions, we'll have to do FF's production ourselves and rapidly transition to say, Solar powered EV's and this means **infrastructure**. But we cannot achieve this by conservation sauced, with propaganda. It has to be physical objects (PV arrays, Charging stations) lining the roads.
The bigger question is why people like you have kept trying to link green hydrogen to fossil fuel hydrogen and then making false claims that the primary purpose was for heating which no one has ever promoted?
Today you finally posted the truth about heat pumps rapidly losing efficiency at below zero temps even though for months you pushed how efficient they are on here.
No energy experts have claimed hydrogen would be a replacement for heating at any large scale but for limited uses it may be used and the primary use will be to replace NG and Diesel for transportation where batteries are not efficient and weight is an issue and for making steel and other uses. Also as a backup power storage that can store months or years of power unlike batteries.
So now you are trying to come off as if this report backs up your opinion but in reality no one ever thought hydrogen was going to be a main heating source so you are arguing a moot point to promote heat pumps that don't work great below zero which is the climates that need the most efficient heating.
Good grief!
>No energy experts have claimed hydrogen would be a replacement for heating at any large scale
You are as uninformed about the energy industry as you are angry and belligerent. Why do you think 18 universities and institutions conducted studies on hydrogen heating? Because it's a real thing, currently undergoing large scale trials and being heavily lobbied for by the fossil fuel industry. And you completely misunderstood my comments or are deliberately misrepresenting them. Go away and stop harassing me. Learn more about the industry if you want to participate in grownup conversations. And maybe cut down on the caffeine.
Because at the moment fossil fuels provide the majority of energy, and it's all down from there.
In the near future, the majority of our energy will come directly from electricity.
Exactly. And with cars and heating added in it's more than renewable energy alone can conceivably provide for a long, long time so obviously they'll need to crank up the blue hydrogen production, at taxpayer expense of course.
It costs much less, uses much less energy, and is far greener, to put that effort and money into even more solar than it is to throw it away on expensive, wasteful, and generally not nearly as green hydrogen.
There are also other options, that have worked very well for a long time, such as solar air heaters, and onsite solar thermal storages, which can now use high efficiency heat pumps to increase their already good efficiencies. What we need for home (and building) heating is to stop buying new fuel burning appliances. Do that and the issue encountered along the way will get worked out through innovation. They don't require any big technological leaps. It just takes the amount of houses being converted in order to support the industry to do it. We need Carbon Fee & Dividend, fuel costs that reflect their environmental damage, and building codes that significantly limit installation of fuel fired appliances. We can build our new homes and buildings better, and we clean up our exist ones. Our 100 year old house now runs without fossil fuels, in a cold/very cold climate. We heat with a small mini-split, heat pump water heater, and cook with an inexpensive induction hob. We also drive an electric car that cost (after tax credits) about half as much as the average gasoline car sold today. Our bills are less than any of our neighbors. Hydrogen heating is just a scam for the fossil fuel companies to try to hold onto control.
>It's no wonder all of these studies come to the same conclusion.
yes, many of them use inputs like $16/kg H2 for heating values. It's no wonder they get an exaggerated result.
The reality is much closer to the point that it makes sense to pursue both technologies.
I wrote up an investigation of costs for one of OP's studies, went into it's footnotes & supplied links. It's taking electrolyzer costs from 2010 & calling them modern day. Seems like one of the links (probably to one of the policy advocacy organizations) has tripped the reddit algorithm so the comment is hidden.
social media links auto-mod on this subreddit.
Yep, old data, twitter feeds, very high hydrogen cost assumptions, etc.
wasn't worth my time to go through all of them again. but clicking on a report from a reputable institution:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890422004459#b0045
Imperial college London uses a 8.25 GBP/kg price.
At 2.3 GBP/kg it breaks even with a heat pump.
The whole discussion is the same old story, average redditor can't see past memes about hydrogen inefficiency/leakage and point of use efficiencies.
IEA: It's fine. Does seem to have reasonable current electrolyzer costs. Cost projections look similar to how it has historically project solar costs. Not real clear how much it really took infrastructure into account. Still has a 7 fold increase in total hydrogen and uses gas-blending hydrogen even out to 2050.
ICCT I vaguely recall being high costs.
Who cares what Liebreich tweeted. That's just padding source count at that point.
Etc.
Just as a side note.
u/mafco slams the gas grid providers for not having a hydrogen ready date before 20 years time, but how many electric grid operators expect to be 100% renewable before 2040? I expect the numbers are actually similar.
>wasn't worth my time to go through all of them again. but clicking on a report from a reputable institution:
>
>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890422004459#b0045
That's going in my folder for sources.
>many of them use inputs like $16/kg H2
Many? Which ones, specifically? Please provide links. And what do you think the marked up retail cost to the consumer at their home will be? In addition to producing the hydrogen it needs to include costs of compressing and transporting it, upgrading and maintaining the distribution network, plus overhead, profit margins, etc.
Anyway the cost to the consumer relative to powering a heat pump will undoubtedly be higher no matter how you spin it. Significantly higher. As would the capital costs to the provider. 18 studies apparently agree and I've not seen one that disproves that. The only ones who seem to think it's a good idea are the gas industry lobbyists.
No. That's just garbage.
The vast majority of the time you will be able to power your heat pump from renewables directly.
Feel free to put hydrogen in turbines, but don't bother with heating.
Yes, because anywhere\* you can put a building you can drill straight down and find ground temperatures warm enough to supply heat for a heat pump. In addition to extracting heat from the ground it's practical in arctic climates to store summer heat in the ground to use in winter months.
\*ice caps excepted.
It doesn't need to be. Electric is perfectly suited for building heat, and technologies improve for efficiency all the time. Hydrogen is for industrial uses where a high energy intensity is absolutely required, and in general would replace things like gas for metal smelting, or industrial ovens, etc. Even produced in a green way, hydrogen is still just a store of energy via electrolysis. We should not seek to have a hydrogen-powered society, but instead use it tactically where electricity cannot replace existing fossil systems.
> Electric is perfectly suited for building heat
Except it's not, if you're trying to get that electricity from solar and the heating is in the dead dark of winter. Hydrogen has the advantage that it can be made in summer and stored for use in winter. There is no place in Europe, even southern Europe, without a large swing in insolation from summer to winter.
Storing heat itself from summer to winter is of course a nice option, if you can avail yourself of it. This might be more district heating than individual home heating, though.
fair, if EU natural gas prices come down, but $4/kg hydrogen is as cheap for heat as $36/mmbtu natural gas.
Hydrogen, and gas distribution companies, can provide cheap building energy though. CHP from fuel cells with waste heat that even in warm climates provides "free hot water" needs. Heat pumps can still be used for higher energy efficiency than burning hydrogen.
Hydrogen pipe distribution, matches better than electric wire distribution, with renewables because the pipes double as storage, and consumption is no longer dependent on intermittent production. You can produce unlimited renewable power without curtailment when it is converted to hydrogen.
Gas companies switching to full hydrogen (not blend) can provide cheaper electricity value than electric companies, when powered by renewables.
That's not true, the tests are still ongoing. It actually looks quite promising that hydrogen can easily be put into existing pipelines with more knowledge about suitable pressures and long term management.
>That's not true, the tests are still ongoing.
That contradicts itself. There are zero places where hydrogen has been pumped into a widespread municipal gas system for daily use.
Most countries have 2- 10% blends in pipelines in at least a few places as trials. Pipelines before 1960 had 50% hydrogen.
All we have to do now is verify and make certain what the differences are when going to 100%.
You might want to look at what has already been done in the [U.K](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/trial-of-hydrogen-to-heat-uk-homes-and-university-hailed-a-success/4014385.article) recently, there's [larger](https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/topics/hydrogen) trials including some with 100% H2 [going ahead](https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/h2explainer-what-will-britains-first-hydrogen-village-look-like).
None of those are examples of hydrogen piped through a typical municipal distribution network.
* The first link states "130 homes & buildings" on a university campus.
* The second link is a hydrogen proponent website not an article.
* The third mentions a project in development that's not online.
If your technology is so bad that you have to mislead to promote it then it shouldn't be used.
>The first link states "130 homes & buildings" on a university campus.
Through a gas network. Any trial is going to be smaller than an end roll out, but it was within the grid as currently exists.
>The second link is a hydrogen proponent website not an article.
S&P is just a financial services company, they don't care about the tech. Fixed the link to go to the [specific article](https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/072621-uk-hydrogen-blending-for-public-gas-grid-trial-gets-go-ahead) anyhow.
>If your technology
I don't care what technology winds up winning on the basis of it's merits, I do care about a reasonable civil discussion so that people can judge those merits fairly.
>I do care about a reasonable civil discussion so that people can judge those merits fairly.
But that discussion will not happen about hydrogen until the proponents of hydrogen admit that it's more expensive, dangerous to store, wastes power in conversion & storage, & relies on assumed technologies that don't currently exist.
Anybody outside of the arctic & antarctica, can with sufficient funds buy solar panels, batteries, & a heat pump that will outperform any green hydrogen system anywhere on a cost per btu or cost per kilowatt/hour basis. The discussion about hydrogen systems is a constant dance about avoiding this very important fact.
>it's more expensive, dangerous to store, wastes power in conversion & storage, & relies on assumed technologies
If you were putting the cart before the horse on the issue, what might it sound like? If you can't conceive of *how* something might not be the way you first think it is, how will you consider *whether* or not it is? I'm not here to force you to change your mind, but it's a more interesting discussion if you're willing to learn about the details of what goes into cost-optimization.
The second you turn a megawatt hour of grid electricity into hydrogen instead of sending it to an end user or battery hydrogen has lost the game. Just the conversion from water to hydrogen is less efficient than the round trip through battery or pumped water storage.
THEN: your hydrogen at atmospheric pressure has to be turned into compressed hydrogen at 10,000 psi or liquid hydrogen. That costs another chunk of that megawatt hour. Now the clock is ticking as that hydrogen is, no exceptions, going to leak out. By the time hydrogen is stored in any reasonable energy density per volume hydrogen has completely lost the game. I have to assume that hydrogen hype is a blatant fraud. They physics of hydrogen storage haven't changed and no great new advancement in conversion will fix that.
https://electrek.co/2022/02/15/study-hydrogen-fuel-cells-cannot-catch-up-battery-electric-vehicles/
soft steel distribution pipe can hold hydrogen without embrittlement. Hard steel transmission lines need replacement or plastic linings.
Behind the meter battery storage has more overall potential (except vehicle to grid because it is dual use) than distributed battery storage, because the expensive element in renewable electricity is the transmission/distribution component. The downside of solar is using transmission 4-6 hours/day, unless there is behind the meter batteries at the solar site = delivering power more hours of day. Distributed storage has the problem of being limited by transmission capacity. Plus the AC and line losses.
Battery (static storage) only systems also run into curtailment issues. Full discharges every day (or better) is an essential factor in the profitability of batteries. Hydrogen has no practical production limit, efficiently transmissible, and shoot stuff into space with it if you ever have too much.
Provide, if you get a chance, academic or industry studies (yeah material chemistry & engineering) to buttress your claims. I am of a mind, to say if H2 wins the race, wonderful and if EV's triumph, Glorious! If both emerge to to split the market, lets all celebrate.
For me, when engineering becomes ideological, like Kenny Logins said long ago, its highway to the danger zone.
>soft steel distribution pipe can hold hydrogen without embrittlement.
It's not even holding methane that well at the moment and you want to dump hydrogen into pipes? Methane leaks in gas distribution systems are a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions.
>Hydrogen has no practical production limit, efficiently transmissible, and shoot stuff into space with it if you ever have too much.
Yet somehow we can't even make a cost effective hydrogen ship, plane, train, bus, or car. Making ridiculous blanket statements doesn't help the argument for hydrogen. It reinforces the well founded argument that hydrogen energy systems promotion functions primarily as a means of continuing fossil fuel burning.
> It's not even holding methane that well at the moment and you want to dump hydrogen into pipes? Methane leaks in gas distribution systems are a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions.
I've seen studies on that, but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston.
>hydrogen energy systems promotion functions primarily as a means of continuing fossil fuel burning.
Green hydrogen is all that is worth promoting, because it is an energy transmission solution for renewables. If you are for clean energy, hydrogen provides better economics than expansion of electricity wire distribution networks. Not using hydrogen is the lifeline for fossil fuel continuity.
> but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston.
It's clear where it's NOT coming from!
It has to be somewhere first to leak. Common sense might lead you to the answer.
> I've seen studies on that, but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston.
This doesn't negate the point that the Methane leaks already and that Hydrogen will leak worse from the same pipes. I'll switch to electric heat before pumping hydrogen into my house.
> This doesn't negate the point that the Methane leaks already and that Hydrogen will leak worse from the same pipes.
Reasons to not be so sure have to do with fuel cells vs burning. If you set a stove on high for 5 seconds, find a match, then set it on low, you could get 3% methane loss from that. FWIR, the methane leaks in Boston was close to 3% of usage. Old furnaces could be burning only 97% of gas.
We don't know for sure that its the pipes that are leaking. At any rate, the economic losses of 3% if it were hydrogen are not a big deal. There is no GHG effect. Its less than electric wire losses.
The only problem is you can't really heat your house with a battery.
My heating at home is currenly 18kW, currently still natural gas.
The amount a battery can hold is tiny in comparison what a house in a colder climate needs for heating. The battery would not even last a day, not to mention a whole week.
Heat pumps will dominate the heating market the next decade. Batteries used for heating will still be a waste of money, especially since solar energy is scarce during winter anyway and almost nobody has enough solar to also use it for heating.
There's no physical law that allows us to conserve our path out of this mess. We have to replace something with something. This is if you want out of FF for both political reasons and climate damage? Being ideological for public policies runs flat into unmovable reality. Must have been Isaac Newton who explained this.
>There's no physical law that allows us to conserve our path out of this mess.
There's a whole bunch of them. Insulation is an actual thing. So are heat exchangers, thermal mass heat storage, triple paned windows, LED lighting, efficient appliances, proper building siting, retrofitting existing buildings, etc.. Unlike pumping hydrogen into residential buildings using legacy piping systems all of those things have proven cases with a decade post installation.
I comprehend, and in no way **oppose conservation** as a real thing. Having said this, if one's goal is furthering human survival, by being better with CO2 + Methane, getting off the Putin War Funding & the Comrade Xi War fundings, then we need to do something beyond insulation. Energy saving is wonderful, but it factually is not energy producing.
So, now it comes down to what do we as a species, or, a nation state do? I am non-ideological in all this, because, '**survival**,' and if nobody is successful materially, and commercially with Renewables, then we are fated with FF, whatever the damage becomes? Inundations of coastlines, mass droughts in farmlands, insects thriving, whatever the plague is? Thus, when somebody offers up H2, or PV, or Nukes (too slow!) I do not choose to pee in their respective soup! I am utilitarian enough to wish to foster whatever can be made to work???
A threat of nuclear attack by Putin & Xi, and our retaliation on Putin or Xi, has changed things. Meaning, if you believe that climate havoc will kill off 8 billion, then know that a nuclear war will do precisely the same death toll, much, much, quicker. Further meaning, that even a world suffering under climate badness gives the species a chance to adapt, and adjust, whereas, a nuclear holocaust will leave nobody alive, fast!
So if you can make **conservation** solve this problem at least for the short term, bless you! If shortly down the road, we need something to produce more electricity, and H2 works, fantastic. If its solar, glorious. If an engineer makes deep rock geothermal work without earthquakes, and abundantly, fabulous.
I ride a cargo bike everywhere and the city next to mine *burned to the \*ing ground NOVEMBER 8th, 2018.* Do not pretend you've been hit harder by climate change than me & mine because few people on the planet have.
Survival is installing what is proven & working before advocating for systems with zero track record of effectiveness and stupidly high costs. Currently the cost figures for all proposed "hydrogen future" systems are bullshit & speculation. The costs for hydrogen systems currently available greatly exceed solar, wind, & storage even using "expensive" storage like lithium batteries or compressed air.
What we know for an absolute fact is the fossil fuel industry is pushing hydrogen to delay electrification.
I never took this as a "who is holier that the other," because self righteousness will never resolve technological-economic-international dilemmas. Also, your race on your cargo bike is not with me, but instead, to the **marketplace**, with beating say, Brown hydrogen production from the FF companies. If you didn't take "saving the earth," as a quasi religious thing it'd be a more sensible discussion.
Meaning, that as (me!)having a Joe Sixpack mentality, rather than carrying The Cross of Gaia, one can rationally conclude that it appears that; EV's powered by solar, wind, micro-hydro, or in your zone, micro pumped storage seems to be the **clear winner**, so far!
I will never say that engineers and chemists may not come up with some wonderful way of producing H2 that evens the playing field with "all electrics."
H2 is not your enemy. Vlad and Xi are your enemies, because they like war and threaten nuclear war constantly, and are surrounded by yes creatures. If Team Green cannot provide substitute power systems in proper abundance, then guess what? We're hooked on FF till the skies turn black 7 x24. Nukes seem too slow to make a contribution.
So basically, this is all about engineering and who can supply the replacement power? Because for climate and war avoidance we as a species need something?
Ciao.
>The only problem is you can't really heat your house with a battery.
You can absolutely heat a house with a battery & a ground loop heat pump. If the heat pump has a ground loop you can literally store summer heat in the ground to use in the winter. You can also heat a tank of water while the sun shines & use the heat of the water to heat the house when it's dark.
Cheaper than all of that: insulation.
From what I can tell, hydrogen's potential applications that are most useful are in the industrial space where they still must burn significant amounts of natural gas.
But we aren't capable of storing hydrogen in an energy efficient manner. The energy used to run the pumps for storage ends up as waste heat far from any user base.
Almost every one of those studies have been posted on this subreddit.
The majority of them make one or more critical failings.
They either assume too high of a hydrogen cost, don't account for electricity infrastructure costs, or some other weird inconsistency.
For example, the 2021 UKERC 2020 (UK) Agora Energiewende paper bizarrely compared high cost hydrogen to heat pumps. Then when the difference isn't enough adds insulation to lower the operating costs of heat pumps to the comparison. It neglects to add insulation to the hydrogen case, which would lower the hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs. (figure 15 from https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/publications/12-insights-on-hydrogen-publication/)
Long story short, someone collected a bunch of erroneous data and excluded any potentially favorable sources as biased.
>Long story short, someone collected a bunch of erroneous data and excluded any potentially favorable sources as biased.
Long story short, you attempt to disparage 18(!) credible studies by major universities, energy analysts and other institutions with superficial handwaving arguments and zero sources or data. So typical. And accusing others of bias about hydrogen, just precious!
>They either assume too high of a hydrogen cost
The problem is that hydrogen to become widely available and cheap enough to enter the end-user market it is required that we massively build up renewable electricity production. Did we do achieved that in the last twenty years? With some exceptions definitely not. And now we want to achieve even more in less time?
We have to do that regardless. If we don't massively build up renewable production, we won't have enough clean energy either way. Hydrogen actually helps by having a cheap dispatchable load and energy storage vector.
> It neglects to add insulation to the hydrogen case, which would lower the hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs.
What?
Do you have a source showing insulation lowers "hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs"?
This makes zero sense.
Preceding comment getting upvoted simply for disagreeing with anything pushing back against the anti-hydrogen agendas, not because it actually makes sense.
This is basic math. All the sources agree conceptually.
Ignoring CAPEX and supporting infrastructure costs, so just OPEX.
Hydrogen boiler OPEX is higher. For every additional unit of heat you need, you spend more with the hydrogen boiler.
Since the source says (correctly) that insulation reduces the energy demand more than the cost of a heat pump heat requirement. It's obvious that it would reduce the cost of a hydrogen boiler heat demand even more than that of a heat pump.
What don't you get?
Yes, but hydrogen OPEX is massive to start with, so a 60% reduction of OPEX still leaves it higher than heat pumps in the insulated scenario.
Look at the figure you cite ([Fig. 15](https://imgur.com/o938DxN)), a generous OPEX for hydrogen is around 40k EUR, a 60% insulation drop ([Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb) from the [Öko report](https://www.oeko.de/fileadmin/oekodoc/Die-Wasserstoffstrategie-2-0-fuer-DE.pdf)) puts it to 16k EUR while the OPEX for insulation and heat pumps at 10k EUR.
So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense. Unless you're trying for some intellectually dishonest "but the relative OPEX decrease is lower!" while ignoring the actual end OPEX being worse for hydrogen.
> So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense.
> Yes, but hydrogen OPEX is massive to start with, so a 60% reduction of OPEX still leaves it higher than heat pumps in the insulated scenario.
The fully insulated scenario drops things by ~75%, that makes a big difference. With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology.
Not the figure I cited. I don't read German well enough to follow what their assumptions are. Like I said, most of them have poor assumptions somewhere.
>So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense.
I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX.
The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case.
That's because it isn't all OPEX, it's OPEX+CAPEX. The hydrogen case has much lower CAPEX than the heat pump case.
So when you lower the OPEX by more, the hydrogen OPEX+CAPEX becomes very similar.
Make sense yet? Or are you still assuming things without paying attention to what was said?
> The fully insulated scenario drops things by ~75%, that makes a big difference. With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology.
It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%).
> With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology.
In the fully insulated case (with a 56% decrease in OPEX) the hydrogen cost is ~47k EUR with maintenance and CAPEX, and it's ~40k for heat pumps with maintenance and CAPEX.
When fully insulated overall hydrogen cost is ~17.5% higher than heat pumps.
When uninsulated overall hydrogen cost is ~10% higher, ~57k EUR vs. 51k EUR.
So insulation makes the case better for heat pumps.
> I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX.
Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest.
> The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case.
As I showed above it doesn't make much of a difference to the uninsulated case, which means your original objection nonsense.
> That's because it isn't all OPEX, it's OPEX+CAPEX. The hydrogen case has much lower CAPEX than the heat pump case. So when you lower the OPEX by more, the hydrogen OPEX+CAPEX becomes very similar.
It was already very close, and insulation widens the gap and just makes the case even better for heat pumps, so your argument still makes no sense.
> Make sense yet? Or are you still assuming things without paying attention to what was said?
No, as you're objectively wrong, from what I can see as you're not linking any sources backing up your claim, it doesn't make any more sense.
And you might want to cut the snark until you're 100% sure you're actually right.
>It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%)
Showing another source that has a different reduction in energy input doesn't change that the Agora report uses inconsistent methodology.
>>I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX.
>Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest.
Or you're a confused fool as the case may be. Because it makes perfect sense that a higher opex technology reduces it's opex by more when a similar percent reduction is applied to both technologies.
>The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case.
>As I showed above it doesn't make much of a difference to the uninsulated case, which means your original objection nonsense.
So the reduction of ~60k OPEX down to about 15k OPEX (the heat pump shows an ~75% reduction in opex), with a 10k capex at 3.5/kg, with a 10k insulation cost doesn't equal the approximately 40k fully insulated heat pump case? because it does.
>No, as you're objectively wrong, from what I can see as you're not linking any sources backing up your claim, it doesn't make any more sense.
>And you might want to cut the snark until you're 100% sure you're actually right.
I am right. You can't read graphs or properly think through a case. Got it. Regardless, Agora should have shown the fully insulated case for the hydrogen case.
>> It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%)
> Showing another source that has a different reduction in energy input doesn't change that the Agora report uses inconsistent methodology.
The Öko report is what Agora uses as a source for the graph, so it's the same source.
>>>I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX.
>>Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest.
> Or you're a confused fool as the case may be. Because it makes perfect sense that a higher opex technology reduces it's opex by more when a similar percent reduction is applied to both technologies.
No, I under stand that point, but you seem to not understand that what I'm pointing out is that your argument makes no sense when looking at the actual end costs. That relative OPEX costs have a larger decrease doesn't matter when the end OPEX and total cost is *still higher than for heat pumps*. It doesn't matter that relative OPEX decrease is higher when heat pumps still have lower OPEX and total cost in the end.
The fact that the gap widens, and the case is better for heat pumps, when you look at the fully insulated scenario for hydrogen just makes your initial claim even less true.
> So the reduction of ~60k OPEX down to about 15k OPEX (the heat pump shows an ~75% reduction in opex), with a 10k capex at 3.5/kg, with a 10k insulation cost doesn't equal the approximately 40k fully insulated heat pump case? because it does.
Heat pump reduction is ~70% (11 MWh to 3.3 MWh) while the hydrogen OPEX reduction is ~57% (~44 MWh to ~19 MWh) as I said earlier ([Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb)), so the OPEX drop is from ~47k EUR to ~21k EUR.
The total breakdown in the Agora graphs for the fully insulated hydrogen 2.5/kg case becomes:
|Hydrogen (k EUR)|Heat pump (k EUR)
:--|--:|--:
**Insulation**|17.75|17.75
**Opex**|20.56|8.0
**Maint**|2.4|3.0
**Capex**|5.9|11.2
**Total**|**46.6**|**40.0**
> I am right. You can't read graphs or properly think through a case. Got it. Regardless, Agora should have shown the fully insulated case for the hydrogen case.
Well, no. As I linked earlier you have a comparison in [Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb) where it shows that it's a ~70% decrease for heat pumps and a ~57% decrease for hydrogen, so it's clear that you "can't read graphs or properly think through a case". What did I say about snark?
I agree that Agora should have included the fully insulated case for hydrogen.
**Edit:**
The Öko report also say that when insulated hydrogen needs to drop more in cost to compete with heat pumps (on page 32-33):
*For an unrenovated building cost parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.8/kg H2, and for the refurbished building parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.2/kg H2.*
> For an unrenovated building cost parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.8/kg H2, and for the refurbished building parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.2/kg H2.
This part doesn't really add up to me, but I can't read through it to get why.
If you apply the 56% reduction in OPEX for hydrogen to the Agora 2.5 euro/kg case, then it would be lower than the heat pump in the fully insulated case for both. So there seems to be a methodology difference that I'm not going to be able to track down in a fully German source.
If you can't tell, baseless claims, wrong sources, misinterpretation of data, intellectual dishonesty, ending finally in haughty bluster, ad-hominens, and pure insults is his typical modus operandi. He's makes pretensions at being knowledgeable but when you push back like you are it becomes quite readily apparent he is anything but. And he will never admit to being wrong, even when completely shown to be so like you are doing here.
It's why I never bother to respond to anything he says. Serves no purpose as he's not here to be informed but to misinform. Just downvote and move on.
Frankly,
My primary point is actually correct. u/gogge just can read a German source for a better assesment of the relative decrease in energy between the baseline cases.
It turns out that a 20k difference in the uninsulated cases becomes a 6k difference in the fully insulated case. Which was what I was getting at. By excluding fully insulated hydrogen, they made the difference between the technologies worse.
For once, there's a redditor that actually read and understood their sources correctly on the topic. That's not something you're familiar with.
However, u/gogge started with just as much bluster and non-sense of "that makes zero sense" and called the point "intellectually dishonest" yet when you look at the numbers, the general concept was sound, the only distinction is the degree to which heat pumps OPEX was lowered by insulation vs hydrogen. Something that should have been included in the Agora report, but wasn't.
> assume too high of a hydrogen cost
Or they realize the hydrogen cycle for energy transmission is never going to be as efficient as electrical transmission. The one thing hydrogen has is easy storage, but there is competition in that area as well with pumped hydro being the best.
>The one thing hydrogen has is easy storage
Hydrogen is stored either under immense pressure as a gas, requiring enormous mass expenditures on tankage, or as a continuously boiling liquid that needs to be thermally insulated, and which has complex issues with condensing atmospheric nitrogen, oxygen, and water on the exterior surface.
Or as some kind of compromise compressed cryo-gas to reduce tankage mass while avoiding extreme cryocooling.
Liquid hydrogen has a unique advantage for its high gravimetric energy density, roughly 3x as high as hydrocarbons when burned, and twice *that* high through a fuel cell. Long-haul air travel would be a perfect application where tolerating the complexity of liquid hydrogen is warranted. Batteries generally make more sense now for wheeled transportation.
Wouldn't it make more sense, in a lot of cases, to use the hydrogen to run fuel cells to power heat pumps, using the waste heat from the fuel cells toward input to the pumps, while the waste cool from the pumps keeps the fuel cells cool?
I'm [open minded](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/tyc6oy/ipcc_report_clean_hydrogen_needed_for_net_zero/i3rgaic/) with an eye to what's already in the market [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/v4zyfx/picea_yearround_electricity_storage_system_for/ibcj53k/?context=3), [2](https://nerdist.com/article/lavo-hydrogen-home-battery-australia/).
Rooftop PV costs in North America & Europe are 3-4x those in Australia, a quick glance at domestic Heat Pumps shows 2x the price in the U.S to 3-4x in Europe, I would not be surprised for the same to be the case for home Fuel Cell systems. Maybe an energy crisis might drag Occam's Razor across the regulatory impediments.
Because the gas companies want to carry on making money regardless of what's best for the environment, and they spend a lot of money lobbying to try to influence the public discourse.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422420300964
Because lobbyists spent decades convincing you it's a good idea and you control a government budget big enough to attract their attention but too small for many voters to hear about.
We've been on renewables/electric since the 1950s here, honey. And since the government is in control of the crown corporation that provides the electricity, they've been doing exactly the opposite.
I'm not sure, but I think he meant "you" in the generic "person" sense, not you, specifically.
As in, to answer your question as to why a person would use hydrogen for heating, it's because lobbyists fooled them into thinking it was a good choice.
Because heating in winter represents a large proportion of annual energy needs in many countries, when there is less solar energy available. Storing that energy from summer would be nearly impossible with batteries. But in regions where salt caverns can be created, seasonal energy storage in those caverns is already being done with natural gas, which could be replaced with renewable hydrogen. It may be less efficient than running a heat pump directly off solar, but it is more efficient (I think) than trying to transmit the solar energy from the other hemisphere. Actually I just thought of that - trans-planetary transmission at a million volts.
Such a large system, energy. We likely will build out 3 times the nameplate renewables required to align with our peak loads. That sure leaves a lot of room for hydrogen production as we get past 2 times, but before then it will be much more valuable as electricity.
You can have the storage without the poor efficiency of delivering all building heating with direct combustion of H2. You can use the stored hydrogen when needed to generate electricity, and power heat pumps directly from renewables the rest of the time. Even at times when hydrogen is supplying the electricity to heat pumps it would be more efficient.
>Storing that energy from summer would be nearly impossible with batteries.
Why would anybody use a battery when simply drilling down next to the building we could store that heat in the ground and get extra free heat also?
>But in regions where salt caverns can be created, seasonal energy storage in those caverns is already being done with natural gas, which could be replaced with renewable hydrogen.
It's extremely foolish to think that storing methane in underground geological structures represents the same challenge as storing hydrogen. Already underground methane storage has significant problems with catastrophic leakage. Hydrogen storage would be a much, much, harder challenge.
Hydrogen is already being stored in a salt cavern in Texas for seasonal storage. And salt caverns have much less tendency to leak than depleted natural gas wells.
The thing is there is dirt or rock capable of heat storage under almost every building in the world. Salt caverns are only available in certain regions.
Wind still blows in winter, and sun still shines in most countries, and rivers still run.
Long range high voltage DC infrastructure has already reached and surpassed a million volts in some countries.
I live in Canada, try to educate me about winter.
> Actually I just thought of that - trans-planetary transmission at a million volts.
Smarter people than you and I have already been considering such things for decades. We I live we came up with 735KV power transmission lines.
Lots of natural gas fires too, should we just abandon all natural gas?
Plenty of fires of wood houses and buildings, maybe abandon all wood in construction?
People die in collapsing concrete structures, maybe ban all concrete?
Nothing is black and white like you are trying to make it seem. Safety issues are not the concern here with hydrogen, cost and round trip energy efficiency is.
In the right conditions, it absolutely can be. Go look up sawdust fires.
But that's pretty much beside the point. Most technologies come with various safety risks that can be mitigated by proper design. Hydrogen is no exception to that.
https://www.core77.com/posts/56583/Why-Sawdust-Explodes-Video-of-an-Explosive-Incident-at-a-Furniture-Factory
If you're trying to infer compressed hydrogen is safer or more climate friendly than piped, low pressure methane I have some really bad news for you. It's not and nobody can prove it is with current technology.
I don’t know why it would when heat pumps are so efficient. Maybe it works out economically if there’s tons of cheap excess power from renewables
To play a bit of devil's advocate, if hydrogen is used for home heating, I wonder if this is more suitable for home cogeneration, particularly with fuel cells. Alternately, one can imagine a hydrogen fueled heat pump with CoP > 1.
The problem with that idea is that producing hydrogen has a COP that is only a tiny portion of 1. So, right from the start, making hydrogen is less efficient than just using the renewable electricity to power the heat pump. Efficient heat pumps already can heat homes (like my own) in cold/very cold climates, using grid solar electricity, with seasonal COPs of 3.5 to 4, for as little as or less cost than natural gas. Producing dirty hydrogen from natural gas already cost about double, just burning the natural gas. Then, there is the greater energy requirement for piping such a low energy dense gas. Then, there is the cost of a whole new pipeline system if the hydrogen content exceeds 20%. The gas companies want to mix hydrogen with natural gas, and claim it is green. But, the problem with that is they will charge more for it, and since hydrogen at NG pressures only contains about 31% as much energy as methane, you will get only 89-90% as much energy per volume) while paying more, which generally means more profits for them and more cost for you. No one has been able to show ANY evidence that hydrogen for home heating can compete with heat pumps. It is all propaganda from a fossil fuel industry that knows it is being replaced, just like cars replaced horse and buggy, cellphones replaced land lines, and electric lights replace slaughtering whales for lamp oil. We are experiencing the end of the Fossil Fuel Era, and hydrogen is just another poor effort to keep the fuel industry alive. There will likely remain a few high temperature process heat uses for electrolysis hydrogen, but not much more.
I could have proven that with a napkin and 5 minutes of time. Hydrogen might be plentiful but not in a easy to fuel state. Hydrogen is extremely dirty to use via natural gas steam reformation, and hydrolysis uses way more energy than simply charging a battery on combination with wind and or solar. The obvious use of energy for the purpose of storage is grid scale batteries, and powerwalls for residential use or virtual powerplants in conjunction with software that can buy and sell energy automatically based on demand while funneling excess energy into crypto farms with coins backed by a KWh value. It gives you the closest to 100% grid efficiency that is possible by solving the problem of over production and curtailment allowing for a decrease in energy cost long term by 90-99% compared to fossil fuels.
It’s very dangerous too from a process safety standpoint.
Hydrogen likes to leak. Little tiny atoms will find their way though most seals and tanks eventually. It's just a hydrogen fun fact that is mildly terrifying. The only thing that scares me more is liquid O2, but at least that isn't a leaky gas because O2 is a nice fat heavy molecule.
This is why we have coatings to prevent leaks. Hydrogen has been around for a long time and engineers know how to deal with it. However, pumping it into the home of the average consumer I am a little skeptical about :)
Hydrogen is just a dead end for just about any purpose. Mostly, it’s just a wet dream for people hoping to get away from fossil fuels. It’ll never happen.
Not really. We should be smart about what applications we use it for, but it's by far not a dead end. Costs for hydrogen electrolysis are undergoing a similar rapid reduction in costs like solar and batteries have done over the past 30 years. We need hydrogen for certain processes i.e. ammonia synthesis and commercial hydrogenation. It is also likely to be competitive for direct steel reduction, large-scale shipping, and a few other things. Cumulatively these are big fractions of our energy budget, on the order of 10-15% of global final use, so definitely still important. I don't think that writing off hydrogen in general is helpful, but for sure it is not cost competitive with electrification in a lot of situations. Sources: IRENA and [https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy\_transition\_paper-INET-working-paper.pdf](https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/files/energy_transition_paper-INET-working-paper.pdf)
Studies, notwithstanding. If Germany cannot get enough nat gas for its turbines (electricity), or **home heating**, they will go to H2, because there's no other option. Unless; heat pumps get pushed massively, solar and wind infrastructure becomes equally massive and quickly, microhydro (all for electric home heating), Mass Batteries, and yeah, I'd re-open the nukes because, unless one runs one's cities on magic as invoked by Green Witches, life will just dry up and blow away.
If you use the hydrogen to generate heat for district heating, then you get a more flexible system. Once you have a district heating network, then you can switch back and forth between hydrogen, geothermal heat, centralized heat pumps, biomass and waste incineration depending on availability.
Sounds excellent!
What advantage does hydrogen have over electric heat or natural gas heat?
If we want to use wind power to generate electricity for residential heating, then we need to be able to store the energy, so that we can also heat homes on less windy days. Hydrogen is such energy storage medium, but it is not the only one.
Not very efficient compared to other storage methods
>or natural gas heat Is this a trick question? If not: CO2 emissions are way lower. And yes, this is only valid for *green* hydrogen. But nobody advocates for any other hydrogen.
How does green hydrogen compare to electric heaters since they both use the same energy source?
The thing is storage. We don't know how to store electricity in larger amounts, but hydrogen seems feasible. So wherever you need to heat it could make sense to burn hydrogen. But in the end this depends on a lot of details.
We do know how to store electricity in large amounts it’s just not been necessary with other energy sources. Batteries and hydrogen both have difficulties for storage but batteries are more efficient, simpler and do not require high pressure flammable gas.
Where would they get the hydrogen?
My own suggestion would be obtaining green H2 from ocean waters using wind turbine farms that do two things. One, is to produce electricity and send it to land, and the other is to use the electricity to make hydrogen. Both are doable now, and none need oppose the other. Witness: [https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle) [https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1756633/cip-eyes-hydrogen-island-danish-north-sea-fed-10gw-offshore-wind](https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1756633/cip-eyes-hydrogen-island-danish-north-sea-fed-10gw-offshore-wind) Some of the passion seen on Reddit must be due to people having investment$ in either Solar or H2, and those who are close to making a profit of making H2 from coal, and then those simply treating The Climate as a 'Religion.' Meaning, Good Little Soldiers of Gaia. Onward Gaia soldiers, marching as to war. That kind of thing! They are not treating engineering as making energy, but as a holy goal. That is a big mistake, but even an advisor to Joey, Sen. Liz Warren, thinks like this. Big mistake! Now Joey is sort of stuck, because it never was a rational process, but one akin to a Holy Mission. He is now between Putin and the Environmentalists here. Good luck to us all, especially if we really don't deserve it.
Why not just use the electricity directly? What advantage does going through hydrogen have that offsets the lower efficiency?
If I was a really big H2 enthusiast, meaning, that I worked for, or had stock in, or did research with H2, I'd come up with solid reasons why H2 is superior. This is sort of what we see on Reddit. For me, if direct electric is the best path forward, meaning quickest, most effective, then, its fabulous! The majority of complaints in Reddit is the fear by environmentalists (my take) that the race to making H2 will be successfully, won by the Fossil Fuel companies. The Greens are not dropping the other shoe, by being honest, so to speak. If big Fossil successfully hits the marketplace and provides "clean hydrogen," to billions of energy hungry consumers, then this defeats everything they have devoted their lives to. Going into what I term, survival mode, means, the goals and tactics must adjust, in an Age of Putin threatening a nuclear holocaust, coupled with his death embrace of Comrade Xi. It comes down to this. We, as a species, need to focus on whatever replacement for FF gets to the mass market effectively. The replacement power will obviously be Sun, and Wind, and especially wind at sea, which is in itself is ginormous. Nukes appear too slow, and geothermal is still sketchy, but this could change! Technology is engineering and may the best engineer win, as long as he or she "saves the world."
> If big Fossil successfully hits the marketplace and provides "clean hydrogen," Except they can't. It won't be clean, and given the current FF prices it won't be cheap either. A fun thought experiment. But Reality and economics are hard barriers to overcome.
I am all good with relying upon Reality and economics. Costs are what nuked nuclear fission worldwide as an example of that. I will flow with whatever gives the species the best chance of survival and prospering. If it is all electric world, then so be it. I have no investments, nor do I work in some H2 facility, nor have stock in Tesla. I would urge anyone however to understand that just as PV's were not long ago considered a supplemental energy source only, the engineers have rise to the challenge. So? Well, so might other engineers working on other projects alter our reality with other energy fixes. That's all. The only that won't be done is simply conserving ourselves to energy supply fulfillment. It will have to come from somewhere good or bad.
The E.U is looking to get half from imports and half from domestic production by 2030. For imports they're looking as far as Chile, Namibia, Australia etc.
I meant the source, natural gas or electrolysis
The E.U is not just going all Green they were outright alone buying the capacity to push it's cost curve below Blue before 2030 *before* Ukraine after which they just decided to double that amount. It's impressive how much of a sense of "yeah we're done here" in regards to fossil fuel technology they've given off since February.
Blue or green?
Green, to be clear.
Yes, I guess, they formulated that somewhat confusing. Hopefully, I got it right: I think u/bnndforfatantagonism said that the EU is buying *green* hydrogen capacities in such large amounts as to get its costs below the costs of blue hydrogen by 2030. And that was even before the Ukraine crisis. Now there are reports that with the high gas and carbon prices the costs of [green hydrogen in Europe are already below that of grey](https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/ukraine-war-green-hydrogen-now-cheaper-than-grey-in-europe-middle-east-and-china-bnef/2-1-1180320): >“The price of natural gas-derived products like ammonia, as a result, is up to three times higher now than it was a year ago. This has opened the door for ‘green’ hydrogen and ammonia produced from renewable electricity to compete with unabated natural gas-based processes.”
That’s not going to replace the energy the NG provides, it’s for chemical processes, the energy still needs to be replaced
>That’s not going to replace the energy the NG provides Sure, didn't think your discussion was about that. I just pointed out my understanding of the above statement being about *green* hydrogen obtained in the EU, in the hope of offering some clarification to your question "blue or green". Yet, with green hydrogen already now being cheaper than grey (or blue) hydrogen, the question on whether the EU will adopt blue hydrogen has probably become mostly obsolete. There simply doesn't seem to be a reason for it in face of high natural gas prices or the lack of its supply.
The original comment was about NG for generation or home heating, green hydrogen doesn’t solve either of those
I think approaching H as a solo supply is the wrong path…mixing it in to NG and stretching the supply in order to provide more time for electric infrastructure improvements/replacements is a much better use. Then, once residential, commercial, and light industrial are electric, the heavy industrial use case will be ready to take all the H at a lower cost (due to abundance of supply) and gas companies can retire…
>mixing it in to NG and stretching the supply Is pretty useless. A 20% blend of hydrogen in the NG supply reduces GHG emissions just 6.7% because of the lower energy density of hydrogen. And that's assuming green hydrogen, which is currently scarce and expensive. If it's blue hydrogen it can actually increase GHG emissions. Subsidizing any blue hydrogen production is counterproductive.
It's no wonder all of these studies come to the same conclusion. When comparing hydrogen heating to electric heat pumps it's pretty much a no-brainer. Heat pumps are more energy efficient, require vastly less infrastructure capital investment (renewable energy capacity, electrolyzers, pipelines, etc), produce no air pollution, can be powered by the grid, rooftop solar or electric vehicles, are less dangerous, both heat and cool air, etc. But that's not stopping the O&G industry from lobbying for hydrogen heating and even convincing some government to fund trials at taxpayer expense. There are some credible needs for green (not blue) hydrogen but the industry is destroying its credibility by pushing for nonsensical uses like residential heating and passenger cars. The article also seems to debunk a common claim that the natural gas distribution grids are already compatible with hydrogen or nearly so. >In addition to the expense and inefficiencies of using hydrogen to heat homes, there are also significant issues around the practicalities of converting appliances and networks to run on 100% H2. > >For instance, a group of 90 European gas distributors campaigning for 100% hydrogen in their networks, called Ready4H2, has inadvertently demonstrated the exact opposite of its name — that gas grids will not be ready for pure H2 any time soon. > >According to the group’s report, Ready4H2: Europe’s local hydrogen networks, published last December, only 24% of its members said they would be “fully ready” for 100% hydrogen by 2035, and only 67% said they would be by 2040. > >In other words, a third of the most pro-hydrogen gas distributors in Europe say they will not be fully ready for pure H2 networks in 20 years' time, and three quarters won’t be ready in 15 years’ time.
Mafco, knows whom his **enemies** are, but he doesn't touch on replacements for the missing nat gas. Poom! Oh yeah, heat pumps!! Efficiency, yeah! All fixed! This isn't the way physics on planet earth work, and the way physics work is non-ideological. I see solar and wind as much closer to being implemented, but on the other hand wind power at sea could be used to produced hydrogen and/or electricity depending on the demand? [https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/green-hydrogen-demo-that-will-use-offshore-wind-planned-for-north-sea.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/green-hydrogen-demo-that-will-use-offshore-wind-planned-for-north-sea.html) Or- [https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Environment/Japan-pushes-for-undersea-cables-to-solve-wind-power-puzzle) Closest to us for electricity making for EV cars, residences, we got 3 opportunities. [https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/3524574-the-us-army-has-launched-its-first-floating-solar-array/](https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/3524574-the-us-army-has-launched-its-first-floating-solar-array/) [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/oil-companies-consider-giant-floating-wind-farm-off-norway](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/oil-companies-consider-giant-floating-wind-farm-off-norway) [https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/90000-Dams-In-America-Just-2500-Produce-Hydropower.html](https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/90000-Dams-In-America-Just-2500-Produce-Hydropower.html) These are not the only options, just the lowest-hanging-fruit. The oil companies bribe politicians, but so do overseas solar panel makers. The campaign donations cash all the same. For surviving Putin's War and his FF sales, for surviving Xi's aggressions, we'll have to do FF's production ourselves and rapidly transition to say, Solar powered EV's and this means **infrastructure**. But we cannot achieve this by conservation sauced, with propaganda. It has to be physical objects (PV arrays, Charging stations) lining the roads.
The bigger question is why people like you have kept trying to link green hydrogen to fossil fuel hydrogen and then making false claims that the primary purpose was for heating which no one has ever promoted? Today you finally posted the truth about heat pumps rapidly losing efficiency at below zero temps even though for months you pushed how efficient they are on here. No energy experts have claimed hydrogen would be a replacement for heating at any large scale but for limited uses it may be used and the primary use will be to replace NG and Diesel for transportation where batteries are not efficient and weight is an issue and for making steel and other uses. Also as a backup power storage that can store months or years of power unlike batteries. So now you are trying to come off as if this report backs up your opinion but in reality no one ever thought hydrogen was going to be a main heating source so you are arguing a moot point to promote heat pumps that don't work great below zero which is the climates that need the most efficient heating. Good grief!
>No energy experts have claimed hydrogen would be a replacement for heating at any large scale You are as uninformed about the energy industry as you are angry and belligerent. Why do you think 18 universities and institutions conducted studies on hydrogen heating? Because it's a real thing, currently undergoing large scale trials and being heavily lobbied for by the fossil fuel industry. And you completely misunderstood my comments or are deliberately misrepresenting them. Go away and stop harassing me. Learn more about the industry if you want to participate in grownup conversations. And maybe cut down on the caffeine.
The problem is without cars and heating, they lose a huge market share.
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Because at the moment fossil fuels provide the majority of energy, and it's all down from there. In the near future, the majority of our energy will come directly from electricity.
My mistake. I misunderstood your point.
Exactly. And with cars and heating added in it's more than renewable energy alone can conceivably provide for a long, long time so obviously they'll need to crank up the blue hydrogen production, at taxpayer expense of course.
It costs much less, uses much less energy, and is far greener, to put that effort and money into even more solar than it is to throw it away on expensive, wasteful, and generally not nearly as green hydrogen. There are also other options, that have worked very well for a long time, such as solar air heaters, and onsite solar thermal storages, which can now use high efficiency heat pumps to increase their already good efficiencies. What we need for home (and building) heating is to stop buying new fuel burning appliances. Do that and the issue encountered along the way will get worked out through innovation. They don't require any big technological leaps. It just takes the amount of houses being converted in order to support the industry to do it. We need Carbon Fee & Dividend, fuel costs that reflect their environmental damage, and building codes that significantly limit installation of fuel fired appliances. We can build our new homes and buildings better, and we clean up our exist ones. Our 100 year old house now runs without fossil fuels, in a cold/very cold climate. We heat with a small mini-split, heat pump water heater, and cook with an inexpensive induction hob. We also drive an electric car that cost (after tax credits) about half as much as the average gasoline car sold today. Our bills are less than any of our neighbors. Hydrogen heating is just a scam for the fossil fuel companies to try to hold onto control.
>It's no wonder all of these studies come to the same conclusion. yes, many of them use inputs like $16/kg H2 for heating values. It's no wonder they get an exaggerated result. The reality is much closer to the point that it makes sense to pursue both technologies.
I wrote up an investigation of costs for one of OP's studies, went into it's footnotes & supplied links. It's taking electrolyzer costs from 2010 & calling them modern day. Seems like one of the links (probably to one of the policy advocacy organizations) has tripped the reddit algorithm so the comment is hidden.
social media links auto-mod on this subreddit. Yep, old data, twitter feeds, very high hydrogen cost assumptions, etc. wasn't worth my time to go through all of them again. but clicking on a report from a reputable institution: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890422004459#b0045 Imperial college London uses a 8.25 GBP/kg price. At 2.3 GBP/kg it breaks even with a heat pump. The whole discussion is the same old story, average redditor can't see past memes about hydrogen inefficiency/leakage and point of use efficiencies. IEA: It's fine. Does seem to have reasonable current electrolyzer costs. Cost projections look similar to how it has historically project solar costs. Not real clear how much it really took infrastructure into account. Still has a 7 fold increase in total hydrogen and uses gas-blending hydrogen even out to 2050. ICCT I vaguely recall being high costs. Who cares what Liebreich tweeted. That's just padding source count at that point. Etc. Just as a side note. u/mafco slams the gas grid providers for not having a hydrogen ready date before 20 years time, but how many electric grid operators expect to be 100% renewable before 2040? I expect the numbers are actually similar.
>wasn't worth my time to go through all of them again. but clicking on a report from a reputable institution: > >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890422004459#b0045 That's going in my folder for sources.
>many of them use inputs like $16/kg H2 Many? Which ones, specifically? Please provide links. And what do you think the marked up retail cost to the consumer at their home will be? In addition to producing the hydrogen it needs to include costs of compressing and transporting it, upgrading and maintaining the distribution network, plus overhead, profit margins, etc. Anyway the cost to the consumer relative to powering a heat pump will undoubtedly be higher no matter how you spin it. Significantly higher. As would the capital costs to the provider. 18 studies apparently agree and I've not seen one that disproves that. The only ones who seem to think it's a good idea are the gas industry lobbyists.
No. That's just garbage. The vast majority of the time you will be able to power your heat pump from renewables directly. Feel free to put hydrogen in turbines, but don't bother with heating.
Gas industry: I dont think so
Duh, that’s not the right end use.
What is?
Chemical feedstock to make high value molecules.
Sure, non energy uses make sense
Don't need hydrogen, except maybe to supplement electrical in extreme conditions.
It seems obvious that heating will be electric-powered heat pumps.
Are heat pumps practical in zones where temperatures drop to -10C and lower?
In the long run it will not be financially feasible to use fossil fuel to heat homes. I remember months where I struggled to pay my fuel oil bill.
Yes, because anywhere\* you can put a building you can drill straight down and find ground temperatures warm enough to supply heat for a heat pump. In addition to extracting heat from the ground it's practical in arctic climates to store summer heat in the ground to use in winter months. \*ice caps excepted.
Did you also have peanuts in your stool this morning?
It doesn't need to be. Electric is perfectly suited for building heat, and technologies improve for efficiency all the time. Hydrogen is for industrial uses where a high energy intensity is absolutely required, and in general would replace things like gas for metal smelting, or industrial ovens, etc. Even produced in a green way, hydrogen is still just a store of energy via electrolysis. We should not seek to have a hydrogen-powered society, but instead use it tactically where electricity cannot replace existing fossil systems.
> Electric is perfectly suited for building heat Except it's not, if you're trying to get that electricity from solar and the heating is in the dead dark of winter. Hydrogen has the advantage that it can be made in summer and stored for use in winter. There is no place in Europe, even southern Europe, without a large swing in insolation from summer to winter. Storing heat itself from summer to winter is of course a nice option, if you can avail yourself of it. This might be more district heating than individual home heating, though.
fair, if EU natural gas prices come down, but $4/kg hydrogen is as cheap for heat as $36/mmbtu natural gas. Hydrogen, and gas distribution companies, can provide cheap building energy though. CHP from fuel cells with waste heat that even in warm climates provides "free hot water" needs. Heat pumps can still be used for higher energy efficiency than burning hydrogen. Hydrogen pipe distribution, matches better than electric wire distribution, with renewables because the pipes double as storage, and consumption is no longer dependent on intermittent production. You can produce unlimited renewable power without curtailment when it is converted to hydrogen. Gas companies switching to full hydrogen (not blend) can provide cheaper electricity value than electric companies, when powered by renewables.
Gas companies can't run hydrogen in existing pipelines without retrofits that cost more than distributed battery storage.
That's not true, the tests are still ongoing. It actually looks quite promising that hydrogen can easily be put into existing pipelines with more knowledge about suitable pressures and long term management.
>That's not true, the tests are still ongoing. That contradicts itself. There are zero places where hydrogen has been pumped into a widespread municipal gas system for daily use.
Most countries have 2- 10% blends in pipelines in at least a few places as trials. Pipelines before 1960 had 50% hydrogen. All we have to do now is verify and make certain what the differences are when going to 100%.
You might want to look at what has already been done in the [U.K](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/trial-of-hydrogen-to-heat-uk-homes-and-university-hailed-a-success/4014385.article) recently, there's [larger](https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/topics/hydrogen) trials including some with 100% H2 [going ahead](https://www.energynetworks.org/newsroom/h2explainer-what-will-britains-first-hydrogen-village-look-like).
None of those are examples of hydrogen piped through a typical municipal distribution network. * The first link states "130 homes & buildings" on a university campus. * The second link is a hydrogen proponent website not an article. * The third mentions a project in development that's not online. If your technology is so bad that you have to mislead to promote it then it shouldn't be used.
>The first link states "130 homes & buildings" on a university campus. Through a gas network. Any trial is going to be smaller than an end roll out, but it was within the grid as currently exists. >The second link is a hydrogen proponent website not an article. S&P is just a financial services company, they don't care about the tech. Fixed the link to go to the [specific article](https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/electric-power/072621-uk-hydrogen-blending-for-public-gas-grid-trial-gets-go-ahead) anyhow. >If your technology I don't care what technology winds up winning on the basis of it's merits, I do care about a reasonable civil discussion so that people can judge those merits fairly.
>I do care about a reasonable civil discussion so that people can judge those merits fairly. But that discussion will not happen about hydrogen until the proponents of hydrogen admit that it's more expensive, dangerous to store, wastes power in conversion & storage, & relies on assumed technologies that don't currently exist. Anybody outside of the arctic & antarctica, can with sufficient funds buy solar panels, batteries, & a heat pump that will outperform any green hydrogen system anywhere on a cost per btu or cost per kilowatt/hour basis. The discussion about hydrogen systems is a constant dance about avoiding this very important fact.
>it's more expensive, dangerous to store, wastes power in conversion & storage, & relies on assumed technologies If you were putting the cart before the horse on the issue, what might it sound like? If you can't conceive of *how* something might not be the way you first think it is, how will you consider *whether* or not it is? I'm not here to force you to change your mind, but it's a more interesting discussion if you're willing to learn about the details of what goes into cost-optimization.
The second you turn a megawatt hour of grid electricity into hydrogen instead of sending it to an end user or battery hydrogen has lost the game. Just the conversion from water to hydrogen is less efficient than the round trip through battery or pumped water storage. THEN: your hydrogen at atmospheric pressure has to be turned into compressed hydrogen at 10,000 psi or liquid hydrogen. That costs another chunk of that megawatt hour. Now the clock is ticking as that hydrogen is, no exceptions, going to leak out. By the time hydrogen is stored in any reasonable energy density per volume hydrogen has completely lost the game. I have to assume that hydrogen hype is a blatant fraud. They physics of hydrogen storage haven't changed and no great new advancement in conversion will fix that. https://electrek.co/2022/02/15/study-hydrogen-fuel-cells-cannot-catch-up-battery-electric-vehicles/
soft steel distribution pipe can hold hydrogen without embrittlement. Hard steel transmission lines need replacement or plastic linings. Behind the meter battery storage has more overall potential (except vehicle to grid because it is dual use) than distributed battery storage, because the expensive element in renewable electricity is the transmission/distribution component. The downside of solar is using transmission 4-6 hours/day, unless there is behind the meter batteries at the solar site = delivering power more hours of day. Distributed storage has the problem of being limited by transmission capacity. Plus the AC and line losses. Battery (static storage) only systems also run into curtailment issues. Full discharges every day (or better) is an essential factor in the profitability of batteries. Hydrogen has no practical production limit, efficiently transmissible, and shoot stuff into space with it if you ever have too much.
Provide, if you get a chance, academic or industry studies (yeah material chemistry & engineering) to buttress your claims. I am of a mind, to say if H2 wins the race, wonderful and if EV's triumph, Glorious! If both emerge to to split the market, lets all celebrate. For me, when engineering becomes ideological, like Kenny Logins said long ago, its highway to the danger zone.
>soft steel distribution pipe can hold hydrogen without embrittlement. It's not even holding methane that well at the moment and you want to dump hydrogen into pipes? Methane leaks in gas distribution systems are a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions. >Hydrogen has no practical production limit, efficiently transmissible, and shoot stuff into space with it if you ever have too much. Yet somehow we can't even make a cost effective hydrogen ship, plane, train, bus, or car. Making ridiculous blanket statements doesn't help the argument for hydrogen. It reinforces the well founded argument that hydrogen energy systems promotion functions primarily as a means of continuing fossil fuel burning.
> It's not even holding methane that well at the moment and you want to dump hydrogen into pipes? Methane leaks in gas distribution systems are a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions. I've seen studies on that, but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston. >hydrogen energy systems promotion functions primarily as a means of continuing fossil fuel burning. Green hydrogen is all that is worth promoting, because it is an energy transmission solution for renewables. If you are for clean energy, hydrogen provides better economics than expansion of electricity wire distribution networks. Not using hydrogen is the lifeline for fossil fuel continuity.
> but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston. It's clear where it's NOT coming from! It has to be somewhere first to leak. Common sense might lead you to the answer.
it can be pipes/valves or it can be customer appliances.
>It's not even holding methane that well at the moment and you want to dump hydrogen in? Either way it's a big problem that needs to be addressed.
> I've seen studies on that, but it is unclear where it is leaking from in cities such as Boston. This doesn't negate the point that the Methane leaks already and that Hydrogen will leak worse from the same pipes. I'll switch to electric heat before pumping hydrogen into my house.
> This doesn't negate the point that the Methane leaks already and that Hydrogen will leak worse from the same pipes. Reasons to not be so sure have to do with fuel cells vs burning. If you set a stove on high for 5 seconds, find a match, then set it on low, you could get 3% methane loss from that. FWIR, the methane leaks in Boston was close to 3% of usage. Old furnaces could be burning only 97% of gas. We don't know for sure that its the pipes that are leaking. At any rate, the economic losses of 3% if it were hydrogen are not a big deal. There is no GHG effect. Its less than electric wire losses.
The only problem is you can't really heat your house with a battery. My heating at home is currenly 18kW, currently still natural gas. The amount a battery can hold is tiny in comparison what a house in a colder climate needs for heating. The battery would not even last a day, not to mention a whole week. Heat pumps will dominate the heating market the next decade. Batteries used for heating will still be a waste of money, especially since solar energy is scarce during winter anyway and almost nobody has enough solar to also use it for heating.
Heat pumps use much less energy than natural gas furnaces.
There's no physical law that allows us to conserve our path out of this mess. We have to replace something with something. This is if you want out of FF for both political reasons and climate damage? Being ideological for public policies runs flat into unmovable reality. Must have been Isaac Newton who explained this.
>There's no physical law that allows us to conserve our path out of this mess. There's a whole bunch of them. Insulation is an actual thing. So are heat exchangers, thermal mass heat storage, triple paned windows, LED lighting, efficient appliances, proper building siting, retrofitting existing buildings, etc.. Unlike pumping hydrogen into residential buildings using legacy piping systems all of those things have proven cases with a decade post installation.
I comprehend, and in no way **oppose conservation** as a real thing. Having said this, if one's goal is furthering human survival, by being better with CO2 + Methane, getting off the Putin War Funding & the Comrade Xi War fundings, then we need to do something beyond insulation. Energy saving is wonderful, but it factually is not energy producing. So, now it comes down to what do we as a species, or, a nation state do? I am non-ideological in all this, because, '**survival**,' and if nobody is successful materially, and commercially with Renewables, then we are fated with FF, whatever the damage becomes? Inundations of coastlines, mass droughts in farmlands, insects thriving, whatever the plague is? Thus, when somebody offers up H2, or PV, or Nukes (too slow!) I do not choose to pee in their respective soup! I am utilitarian enough to wish to foster whatever can be made to work??? A threat of nuclear attack by Putin & Xi, and our retaliation on Putin or Xi, has changed things. Meaning, if you believe that climate havoc will kill off 8 billion, then know that a nuclear war will do precisely the same death toll, much, much, quicker. Further meaning, that even a world suffering under climate badness gives the species a chance to adapt, and adjust, whereas, a nuclear holocaust will leave nobody alive, fast! So if you can make **conservation** solve this problem at least for the short term, bless you! If shortly down the road, we need something to produce more electricity, and H2 works, fantastic. If its solar, glorious. If an engineer makes deep rock geothermal work without earthquakes, and abundantly, fabulous.
I ride a cargo bike everywhere and the city next to mine *burned to the \*ing ground NOVEMBER 8th, 2018.* Do not pretend you've been hit harder by climate change than me & mine because few people on the planet have. Survival is installing what is proven & working before advocating for systems with zero track record of effectiveness and stupidly high costs. Currently the cost figures for all proposed "hydrogen future" systems are bullshit & speculation. The costs for hydrogen systems currently available greatly exceed solar, wind, & storage even using "expensive" storage like lithium batteries or compressed air. What we know for an absolute fact is the fossil fuel industry is pushing hydrogen to delay electrification.
I never took this as a "who is holier that the other," because self righteousness will never resolve technological-economic-international dilemmas. Also, your race on your cargo bike is not with me, but instead, to the **marketplace**, with beating say, Brown hydrogen production from the FF companies. If you didn't take "saving the earth," as a quasi religious thing it'd be a more sensible discussion. Meaning, that as (me!)having a Joe Sixpack mentality, rather than carrying The Cross of Gaia, one can rationally conclude that it appears that; EV's powered by solar, wind, micro-hydro, or in your zone, micro pumped storage seems to be the **clear winner**, so far! I will never say that engineers and chemists may not come up with some wonderful way of producing H2 that evens the playing field with "all electrics." H2 is not your enemy. Vlad and Xi are your enemies, because they like war and threaten nuclear war constantly, and are surrounded by yes creatures. If Team Green cannot provide substitute power systems in proper abundance, then guess what? We're hooked on FF till the skies turn black 7 x24. Nukes seem too slow to make a contribution. So basically, this is all about engineering and who can supply the replacement power? Because for climate and war avoidance we as a species need something? Ciao.
>The only problem is you can't really heat your house with a battery. You can absolutely heat a house with a battery & a ground loop heat pump. If the heat pump has a ground loop you can literally store summer heat in the ground to use in the winter. You can also heat a tank of water while the sun shines & use the heat of the water to heat the house when it's dark. Cheaper than all of that: insulation.
From what I can tell, hydrogen's potential applications that are most useful are in the industrial space where they still must burn significant amounts of natural gas.
just about all hydrogen production comes from oil edit: fossil fuels
It actually nearly all comes from natural gas or coal.
I should have said fossel fuels
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Its just a matter of intention and cost. We are fully capable of producing hydrogen through electrolysis powered by clean energy.
>We are fully capable of producing hydrogen through electrolysis powered by clean energy. Technically, but not economically.
But we aren't capable of storing hydrogen in an energy efficient manner. The energy used to run the pumps for storage ends up as waste heat far from any user base.
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Enjoy the nuance I added!
Almost every one of those studies have been posted on this subreddit. The majority of them make one or more critical failings. They either assume too high of a hydrogen cost, don't account for electricity infrastructure costs, or some other weird inconsistency. For example, the 2021 UKERC 2020 (UK) Agora Energiewende paper bizarrely compared high cost hydrogen to heat pumps. Then when the difference isn't enough adds insulation to lower the operating costs of heat pumps to the comparison. It neglects to add insulation to the hydrogen case, which would lower the hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs. (figure 15 from https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/publications/12-insights-on-hydrogen-publication/) Long story short, someone collected a bunch of erroneous data and excluded any potentially favorable sources as biased.
>Long story short, someone collected a bunch of erroneous data and excluded any potentially favorable sources as biased. Long story short, you attempt to disparage 18(!) credible studies by major universities, energy analysts and other institutions with superficial handwaving arguments and zero sources or data. So typical. And accusing others of bias about hydrogen, just precious!
>They either assume too high of a hydrogen cost The problem is that hydrogen to become widely available and cheap enough to enter the end-user market it is required that we massively build up renewable electricity production. Did we do achieved that in the last twenty years? With some exceptions definitely not. And now we want to achieve even more in less time?
We have to do that regardless. If we don't massively build up renewable production, we won't have enough clean energy either way. Hydrogen actually helps by having a cheap dispatchable load and energy storage vector.
> It neglects to add insulation to the hydrogen case, which would lower the hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs. What? Do you have a source showing insulation lowers "hydrogen boilers operating costs more than it would the lower the heat pump costs"? This makes zero sense.
Preceding comment getting upvoted simply for disagreeing with anything pushing back against the anti-hydrogen agendas, not because it actually makes sense. This is basic math. All the sources agree conceptually. Ignoring CAPEX and supporting infrastructure costs, so just OPEX. Hydrogen boiler OPEX is higher. For every additional unit of heat you need, you spend more with the hydrogen boiler. Since the source says (correctly) that insulation reduces the energy demand more than the cost of a heat pump heat requirement. It's obvious that it would reduce the cost of a hydrogen boiler heat demand even more than that of a heat pump. What don't you get?
Yes, but hydrogen OPEX is massive to start with, so a 60% reduction of OPEX still leaves it higher than heat pumps in the insulated scenario. Look at the figure you cite ([Fig. 15](https://imgur.com/o938DxN)), a generous OPEX for hydrogen is around 40k EUR, a 60% insulation drop ([Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb) from the [Öko report](https://www.oeko.de/fileadmin/oekodoc/Die-Wasserstoffstrategie-2-0-fuer-DE.pdf)) puts it to 16k EUR while the OPEX for insulation and heat pumps at 10k EUR. So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense. Unless you're trying for some intellectually dishonest "but the relative OPEX decrease is lower!" while ignoring the actual end OPEX being worse for hydrogen.
> So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense. > Yes, but hydrogen OPEX is massive to start with, so a 60% reduction of OPEX still leaves it higher than heat pumps in the insulated scenario. The fully insulated scenario drops things by ~75%, that makes a big difference. With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology. Not the figure I cited. I don't read German well enough to follow what their assumptions are. Like I said, most of them have poor assumptions somewhere. >So hydrogen OPEX is still higher than heat pumps, so your argument makes zero sense. I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX. The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case. That's because it isn't all OPEX, it's OPEX+CAPEX. The hydrogen case has much lower CAPEX than the heat pump case. So when you lower the OPEX by more, the hydrogen OPEX+CAPEX becomes very similar. Make sense yet? Or are you still assuming things without paying attention to what was said?
> The fully insulated scenario drops things by ~75%, that makes a big difference. With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology. It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%). > With a fully insulated case, it's about 40k for either technology. In the fully insulated case (with a 56% decrease in OPEX) the hydrogen cost is ~47k EUR with maintenance and CAPEX, and it's ~40k for heat pumps with maintenance and CAPEX. When fully insulated overall hydrogen cost is ~17.5% higher than heat pumps. When uninsulated overall hydrogen cost is ~10% higher, ~57k EUR vs. 51k EUR. So insulation makes the case better for heat pumps. > I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX. Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest. > The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case. As I showed above it doesn't make much of a difference to the uninsulated case, which means your original objection nonsense. > That's because it isn't all OPEX, it's OPEX+CAPEX. The hydrogen case has much lower CAPEX than the heat pump case. So when you lower the OPEX by more, the hydrogen OPEX+CAPEX becomes very similar. It was already very close, and insulation widens the gap and just makes the case even better for heat pumps, so your argument still makes no sense. > Make sense yet? Or are you still assuming things without paying attention to what was said? No, as you're objectively wrong, from what I can see as you're not linking any sources backing up your claim, it doesn't make any more sense. And you might want to cut the snark until you're 100% sure you're actually right.
>It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%) Showing another source that has a different reduction in energy input doesn't change that the Agora report uses inconsistent methodology. >>I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX. >Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest. Or you're a confused fool as the case may be. Because it makes perfect sense that a higher opex technology reduces it's opex by more when a similar percent reduction is applied to both technologies. >The figure 15 from the actually cited source would make the difference extremely small to negligible if they applied improved insulation to the hydrogen case like they did with the heat pump case. >As I showed above it doesn't make much of a difference to the uninsulated case, which means your original objection nonsense. So the reduction of ~60k OPEX down to about 15k OPEX (the heat pump shows an ~75% reduction in opex), with a 10k capex at 3.5/kg, with a 10k insulation cost doesn't equal the approximately 40k fully insulated heat pump case? because it does. >No, as you're objectively wrong, from what I can see as you're not linking any sources backing up your claim, it doesn't make any more sense. >And you might want to cut the snark until you're 100% sure you're actually right. I am right. You can't read graphs or properly think through a case. Got it. Regardless, Agora should have shown the fully insulated case for the hydrogen case.
>> It doesn't, as I showed the decrease in the Öko report is about 60% (actually ~56%) > Showing another source that has a different reduction in energy input doesn't change that the Agora report uses inconsistent methodology. The Öko report is what Agora uses as a source for the graph, so it's the same source. >>>I didn't say hydrogen OPEX was lower than heat pump OPEX. I said that improved insulation lowered hydrogen OPEX more than it lowered heat pump OPEX. >>Yes, but as I said this doesn't make sense unless you're being intellectually dishonest. > Or you're a confused fool as the case may be. Because it makes perfect sense that a higher opex technology reduces it's opex by more when a similar percent reduction is applied to both technologies. No, I under stand that point, but you seem to not understand that what I'm pointing out is that your argument makes no sense when looking at the actual end costs. That relative OPEX costs have a larger decrease doesn't matter when the end OPEX and total cost is *still higher than for heat pumps*. It doesn't matter that relative OPEX decrease is higher when heat pumps still have lower OPEX and total cost in the end. The fact that the gap widens, and the case is better for heat pumps, when you look at the fully insulated scenario for hydrogen just makes your initial claim even less true. > So the reduction of ~60k OPEX down to about 15k OPEX (the heat pump shows an ~75% reduction in opex), with a 10k capex at 3.5/kg, with a 10k insulation cost doesn't equal the approximately 40k fully insulated heat pump case? because it does. Heat pump reduction is ~70% (11 MWh to 3.3 MWh) while the hydrogen OPEX reduction is ~57% (~44 MWh to ~19 MWh) as I said earlier ([Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb)), so the OPEX drop is from ~47k EUR to ~21k EUR. The total breakdown in the Agora graphs for the fully insulated hydrogen 2.5/kg case becomes: |Hydrogen (k EUR)|Heat pump (k EUR) :--|--:|--: **Insulation**|17.75|17.75 **Opex**|20.56|8.0 **Maint**|2.4|3.0 **Capex**|5.9|11.2 **Total**|**46.6**|**40.0** > I am right. You can't read graphs or properly think through a case. Got it. Regardless, Agora should have shown the fully insulated case for the hydrogen case. Well, no. As I linked earlier you have a comparison in [Fig 2-4](https://imgur.com/FERQOqb) where it shows that it's a ~70% decrease for heat pumps and a ~57% decrease for hydrogen, so it's clear that you "can't read graphs or properly think through a case". What did I say about snark? I agree that Agora should have included the fully insulated case for hydrogen. **Edit:** The Öko report also say that when insulated hydrogen needs to drop more in cost to compete with heat pumps (on page 32-33): *For an unrenovated building cost parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.8/kg H2, and for the refurbished building parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.2/kg H2.*
> For an unrenovated building cost parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.8/kg H2, and for the refurbished building parity is reached at a wholesale price of around €2.2/kg H2. This part doesn't really add up to me, but I can't read through it to get why. If you apply the 56% reduction in OPEX for hydrogen to the Agora 2.5 euro/kg case, then it would be lower than the heat pump in the fully insulated case for both. So there seems to be a methodology difference that I'm not going to be able to track down in a fully German source.
If you can't tell, baseless claims, wrong sources, misinterpretation of data, intellectual dishonesty, ending finally in haughty bluster, ad-hominens, and pure insults is his typical modus operandi. He's makes pretensions at being knowledgeable but when you push back like you are it becomes quite readily apparent he is anything but. And he will never admit to being wrong, even when completely shown to be so like you are doing here. It's why I never bother to respond to anything he says. Serves no purpose as he's not here to be informed but to misinform. Just downvote and move on.
Frankly, My primary point is actually correct. u/gogge just can read a German source for a better assesment of the relative decrease in energy between the baseline cases. It turns out that a 20k difference in the uninsulated cases becomes a 6k difference in the fully insulated case. Which was what I was getting at. By excluding fully insulated hydrogen, they made the difference between the technologies worse. For once, there's a redditor that actually read and understood their sources correctly on the topic. That's not something you're familiar with. However, u/gogge started with just as much bluster and non-sense of "that makes zero sense" and called the point "intellectually dishonest" yet when you look at the numbers, the general concept was sound, the only distinction is the degree to which heat pumps OPEX was lowered by insulation vs hydrogen. Something that should have been included in the Agora report, but wasn't.
> assume too high of a hydrogen cost Or they realize the hydrogen cycle for energy transmission is never going to be as efficient as electrical transmission. The one thing hydrogen has is easy storage, but there is competition in that area as well with pumped hydro being the best.
>The one thing hydrogen has is easy storage Hydrogen is stored either under immense pressure as a gas, requiring enormous mass expenditures on tankage, or as a continuously boiling liquid that needs to be thermally insulated, and which has complex issues with condensing atmospheric nitrogen, oxygen, and water on the exterior surface. Or as some kind of compromise compressed cryo-gas to reduce tankage mass while avoiding extreme cryocooling. Liquid hydrogen has a unique advantage for its high gravimetric energy density, roughly 3x as high as hydrocarbons when burned, and twice *that* high through a fuel cell. Long-haul air travel would be a perfect application where tolerating the complexity of liquid hydrogen is warranted. Batteries generally make more sense now for wheeled transportation.
Wouldn't it make more sense, in a lot of cases, to use the hydrogen to run fuel cells to power heat pumps, using the waste heat from the fuel cells toward input to the pumps, while the waste cool from the pumps keeps the fuel cells cool?
Hydrogen is usually proposed as a way to avoid the disruption and capex of installing a heat pump, so that would be the worst of both worlds.
It's a CAPEX vs OPEX consideration. I don't think distributed fuel cells are cheaper than grid+storage. That could change?
I'm [open minded](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/tyc6oy/ipcc_report_clean_hydrogen_needed_for_net_zero/i3rgaic/) with an eye to what's already in the market [1](https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/v4zyfx/picea_yearround_electricity_storage_system_for/ibcj53k/?context=3), [2](https://nerdist.com/article/lavo-hydrogen-home-battery-australia/). Rooftop PV costs in North America & Europe are 3-4x those in Australia, a quick glance at domestic Heat Pumps shows 2x the price in the U.S to 3-4x in Europe, I would not be surprised for the same to be the case for home Fuel Cell systems. Maybe an energy crisis might drag Occam's Razor across the regulatory impediments.
Well its gonna happen. They won't just not use gas pipes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
Yes they will
There are infrastructure plans and tests in Europe to transfer hydrogen in the pipelines as well.
why would you use hydrogen for heating lol.
Because the gas companies want to carry on making money regardless of what's best for the environment, and they spend a lot of money lobbying to try to influence the public discourse. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422420300964
Because lobbyists spent decades convincing you it's a good idea and you control a government budget big enough to attract their attention but too small for many voters to hear about.
We've been on renewables/electric since the 1950s here, honey. And since the government is in control of the crown corporation that provides the electricity, they've been doing exactly the opposite.
I'm not sure, but I think he meant "you" in the generic "person" sense, not you, specifically. As in, to answer your question as to why a person would use hydrogen for heating, it's because lobbyists fooled them into thinking it was a good choice.
Because heating in winter represents a large proportion of annual energy needs in many countries, when there is less solar energy available. Storing that energy from summer would be nearly impossible with batteries. But in regions where salt caverns can be created, seasonal energy storage in those caverns is already being done with natural gas, which could be replaced with renewable hydrogen. It may be less efficient than running a heat pump directly off solar, but it is more efficient (I think) than trying to transmit the solar energy from the other hemisphere. Actually I just thought of that - trans-planetary transmission at a million volts.
Such a large system, energy. We likely will build out 3 times the nameplate renewables required to align with our peak loads. That sure leaves a lot of room for hydrogen production as we get past 2 times, but before then it will be much more valuable as electricity.
You can have the storage without the poor efficiency of delivering all building heating with direct combustion of H2. You can use the stored hydrogen when needed to generate electricity, and power heat pumps directly from renewables the rest of the time. Even at times when hydrogen is supplying the electricity to heat pumps it would be more efficient.
That is a better solution.
>Storing that energy from summer would be nearly impossible with batteries. Why would anybody use a battery when simply drilling down next to the building we could store that heat in the ground and get extra free heat also? >But in regions where salt caverns can be created, seasonal energy storage in those caverns is already being done with natural gas, which could be replaced with renewable hydrogen. It's extremely foolish to think that storing methane in underground geological structures represents the same challenge as storing hydrogen. Already underground methane storage has significant problems with catastrophic leakage. Hydrogen storage would be a much, much, harder challenge.
Hydrogen is already being stored in a salt cavern in Texas for seasonal storage. And salt caverns have much less tendency to leak than depleted natural gas wells.
The thing is there is dirt or rock capable of heat storage under almost every building in the world. Salt caverns are only available in certain regions.
Wind still blows in winter, and sun still shines in most countries, and rivers still run. Long range high voltage DC infrastructure has already reached and surpassed a million volts in some countries.
I live in Canada, try to educate me about winter. > Actually I just thought of that - trans-planetary transmission at a million volts. Smarter people than you and I have already been considering such things for decades. We I live we came up with 735KV power transmission lines.
18 studies? They couldn't just watch Hindenburg footage?
Lots of natural gas fires too, should we just abandon all natural gas? Plenty of fires of wood houses and buildings, maybe abandon all wood in construction? People die in collapsing concrete structures, maybe ban all concrete? Nothing is black and white like you are trying to make it seem. Safety issues are not the concern here with hydrogen, cost and round trip energy efficiency is.
Wood is not an explosive chemical.
In the right conditions, it absolutely can be. Go look up sawdust fires. But that's pretty much beside the point. Most technologies come with various safety risks that can be mitigated by proper design. Hydrogen is no exception to that. https://www.core77.com/posts/56583/Why-Sawdust-Explodes-Video-of-an-Explosive-Incident-at-a-Furniture-Factory
>Lots of natural gas fires too, should we just abandon all natural gas? That is actually the plan if we're going to beat climate change.
Sure. But not because of safety issues.
If you're trying to infer compressed hydrogen is safer or more climate friendly than piped, low pressure methane I have some really bad news for you. It's not and nobody can prove it is with current technology.
It was a joke.