Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the plan is to use this hydrogen in combination with CO2 captured from the air to make methane.
If so, the hard part is getting the carbon capture cheap enough, not the hydrogen.
I crunched the numbers and you need around 13.6 kilograms of carbon and 4.54 kilograms of hydrogen to make enough natural gas to give you 1GJ of heat when combusted (this is how natural gas is priced in the metric world - 1 GJ is roughly 0.95 MMBTU).
If you're extracting CO2 from the air, roughly 27% of the CO2 is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
Doing the maths suggests that at current ballpark prices for CO2 direct air capture of $1000/tonne, the cost of capturing enough CO2 to make a GJ of natural gas is about $50. That's before you've done the processing to convert your CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen.
So let's assume an order of magnitude improvement in air capture costs. Even at $100 per tonne, the CO2 capture cost is around $5. When you combine that with the approximately $4.50 worth of hydrogen required, that gives an input cost of around $9.50. That's way more than domestic natural gas currently costs in the US, but it's in the ballpark that you could subsidise your way around that at scale, and the numbers look pretty reasonable compared to imported LNG in Europe and Asia.
So to me this suggests that, if your business plan is to make methane, the hydrogen part is almost a sideshow to getting direct air capture costs down.
Or, just use the hydrogen as-is, in stationary power plants. Hydrogen can be burned in combustion turbines just like methane; why add the extra step?
At $1/kg, the fuel cost of a combined cycle power plant will be $0.05/kWh. Hydrogen is quite storable underground (just like natural gas). At this fuel cost, new construction nuclear is hopelessly uncompetitive, even for base load generation. And unlike nuclear, the hydrogen burning CC plants can be economically dispatched, turned down/off when renewables or short term storage are directly powering the grid.
The storage, transport, and existing infrastructure and machinery that already uses natural gas makes it much more attractive as a fuel.
It sure isn't efficient. But with energy sources that are intermittent and have no ability to scale up for demand, we will have a lot of intermittently very cheap energy. Anything that can use this intermittent power is valuable, because we will need overcapacity to handle the low-wind, low-sun moments
That's highly inefficient though, and therefore negates all the cost savings in the process before. How much efficiency can you get out of burning stuff, 40% of the stored energy?
There are countless opportunities to capture the CO2 from industrial applications, not from the air. I’m hoping that many of them will be replaced by carbon neutral option soon, but things like burning domestic waste might not disappear soon.
I’m not sure how expensive it would be for it to be clean and pure enough, or what purity that process would need, but most of the cost you mention would be solved by colocating with a burner plant.
Of course, if you have inexpensive direct air capture of CO2, and a way to permanently store the carbon (e.g, as a block of coal, or by injecting CO2 deep under ground), then all of a sudden, burning fossil fuels can be made climate neutral.
If the cost of sequestering the CO2 and pumping + refining oil / natural gas is less than the cost of capturing H2 and using it to synthesize fuel with the CO2, then the synthetic fuels are a dead end. (Until we run out of oil, but that will he centuries from now.)
You could simply build one of these plants next to a concrete plant, which is producing highly concentrated CO2 to reduce that cost. (A lot of similar industries exist of course.)
They’re saying that the synthetic gas will be carbon neutral.
If you’re capturing CO2 that comes from an industrial process like cement production, turning it into methane, burning the methane, and releasing the combustion products into the atmosphere, from an accounting point of view either the gas isn’t carbon neutral, or the cement plant isn’t carbon neutral, and the process is still incompatible with achieving net zero emissions.
TDLR: Combo of solar and wind for power, CO2 from industrial sources, create fuels (methane, methanol, amnonia). Use pipes or trucks as needed.
ETFuels' "secret sauce" is integration and creating fuels. They'll use best available option for electricity and CO2. They'll build where it makes most sense to optimize opex.
In the future, once direct-air capture becomes cost competitive, no problem.
Also, I'm certain they'll also adopt advanced geothermal, in combination with solar and wind, to solve their electricity problems as well as greatly expand where they can feasibly deploy.
The most sensible option would be to store the hydrogen geologically and burn it directly if you needed the power. If you want something transportable, methanol is the simplest fuel you can make, and is what typically gets used when fossil fuels aren't an option (e.g. Germany in WWII). No need for carbon capture, since any source of carbon will do, and plants will pull carbon out of the atmosphere as long as you run carbon negative.
The third part of the article compares their approach with an alternative of extracting hydrogen from methane, so they definitely aren't focused on using hydrogen to produce methane.
“ We’re developing a scalable electrolyzer to deliver the cheapest possible green hydrogen, which we use as a precursor chemical to make cheap synthetic carbon neutral natural gas in our Terraformer.”
> I am wary of exaggeration but I think it is fair to say that in terms of parts, factories, ramp rate, and energy consumption, this is the single largest technology roll out to occur in the history of humanity, and will cause the other so-called industrial revolutions to pale into insignificance.
This reminded me of various[1] vox[2] articles on scientific reports over the past decade that reinforce the central truth and challenge of the climate crisis: we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
There's somewhat a recent Planet Money episode (Green energy gridlock[1]) that talks a little bit about this. There are massive hurdles in the US to getting new energy projects actually connected to the grid because of supposed fears of overloading the infrastructure. The result is energy prices stay high and the number of green energy projects stays low.
Oh come on, one or two orders of magnitude more than our current energy system?
The energy transition will be cheaper than our current infrastructure.
The challenges are not technological nor economical, the challenge is prevent entrenched interests from preventing the best, cheapest, and most environmentally friendly system from taking its rightful place.
If renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, why do poor countries keep building coal and gas fired power stations?
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
Remember we're not just talking about power plants. We also need to replace our petrochemical distribution networks, beef up our grid in a real way, replace all of the petrochemical based heating (a majority of heating in the US, often built centrally into buildings), both replace all petrochemical-powered vehicles and make any changes required to routing, replace all on-demand power generation with non-gas-based solutions, rebuild all industrial facilities to not use petrochemicals...and so on. This is all happening concurrently and would largely focus on existing infrastructure and it would need to happen FAST.
World war two, the example raised the most often, required only increased output. It had no limits on how to get there. This requires both. I really don't think it's like anything we've ever tried to do before.
In particular it wouldn't be this hard to...replace everything eventually when it makes sense. In order to maximally dampen climate change we would need to do this as quickly as possible.
>we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
Right, which is why it's simply not going to happen. It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other. On top of that, large parts of the the global population 1) don't believe the problem exists in the first place, 2) doesn't think it's technically possible to do anything about (i.e. they think it's mostly natural, even if it's real), or 3) think they shouldn't have to change their actions at all because they're mad that the rich countries got to burn lots of oil and then stick all humanity with the problems from it.
The problem is beyond fixing. Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much when the USA and China and Russia and India are spewing out so much carbon and refuse to stop. The thing to do at this point is to understand and predict well what's coming, so that we can take measures to mitigate the effects at local scales.
The cheapest energy systems are the carbon free ones.
Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy.
Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity. And once you add in the environmental externalities on top of just the pure cost, it becomes even more egregious.
Saying that it's impossible is as ridiculous as saying it's impossible for us to have built the huge energy system we have today. Rebuilding it all will take just a few percentage of global GDP, less than would be spent on fossil fuels, and create the infrastructure for cheaper more abundant energy, laying the groundwork for more technological advancement.
Instead of repeating tired narratives of the past, it's time to start thinking critically and apply even the tiniest amount of skepticism to the received wisdom of entrenched interests. We only hurt ourselves when we wear the rose-colored glasses that let us live with the out-dated "truths" of the 20th century.
> It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other.
I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.
This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.
For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.
> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much
I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
> at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
We replace all cars every 10-ish years. We replace all infrastructure every 50-ish. All we had to do is replace them at their normal pace with carbon neutral alternative.
First, solar will not use up land. "Agrivoltaics" provide farmers a year-round revenue stream without reducing yield appreciably (on some crops, increasing yield), while improving water retention and protecting livestock from weather extremes.
Second, cost of the energy used will be zero. It will come not from bespoke solar farms, but from utility-scale production above immediate demand. Big producers will buy these things to provide themselves another revenue stream from zero-marginal-cost excess generation after their local batteries are charged up.
So... it appears in the quick scan of the article that the $1/Kg is entirely dependent on what it is planned that solar will cost in about 5-7 years. First off I'd like to credit the author for
1) recognizing the steady past improvement in solar costs
2) using the concept of LCOE
3) accepting that solar will improve for at least 10 years
4) targeting a future cost target of solar
These are things the hydrogen folks often pretend isn't going to happen.
But anyway, the theory being that as soon as hydrogen is cheaper than petrol by a sufficient margin a massive economic shift will occur. I'm assuming he means switches to FCEVs (not going to happen) or synthfuels for the ICEs.
But... batteries and EV tech are also improving on a very aggressive curve. Currently it is my belief that state of the art EV drivetrain tech has dropped under ICE costs. This is already the current state of the market, and there is likely a large amount of further cost reduction in EV drivetrains forthcoming in the next 10-20 years that will make the ICE drivetrain functionally obsolete in at least 70% of applications and perhaps 95%.
So even if a synthfuel chain based on H2 production from solar appears that is cheaper than current oil extraction in about 10 years, the fact is that, while there will be a large installed base to milk for another 10-20 years, EVs are going to eat the terrestrial vehicle drivetrain market.
I will say it would still be an enormous boon for the used equipment out there, as well as aviation. So I wish them the best. Also, grid power storage (short and long term).
And we'll still have the issue that oil extraction might still be cheaper for methane -> H2, and it sneaks into the "green" H2 market, which is a danger, but if solar is really so cheap in 7-10 years as predicted in this article, it might be economically infeasible to do grey/blue/purple/rainbow hydrogen from methane, which would be a good thing.
"Solar will not use up land"? Have you any clue how invasive large solar installs are? I know people involved in the surveying, prep, archaeology, etc. of large installs in central CA. There is a lot of churning of soil, a lot of land covered, a lot of native species disturbed, etc.
The idea that land use renders solar infeasible is a noxious lie. Simply compare the $/acre one would get from PV vs. $/acre from farming: the former is much higher (orders of magnitude). If you think land cost would rule out PV, it would rule out agriculture even more strongly.
The truth is there is far more than enough land, available very cheaply, to power the world with renewable energy.
At this point, I'm coming around to accepting that something has to be disturbed since it seems (simplified) to be a choice between either planned, somewhat bounded, localized invasiveness or unplanned, weakly bounded, global disturbances/invasiveness...
I guess he means land retains it current use (i.e. farming/grazing) and gets solar panels as well. Has been done, wouldn't vouch for "no impact", there's still less sun reaching the plants.
I find the presentation on colocating agrovoltaics inexplicably endearing: it’s the softer side of Solar-punk, I guess.
I will always fondly remember a presentation explaining that you could have strawberry fields or goat-herding under the shadow panels and how they worked together well: evaporation lowers the temperature of the panel, and goats cleared the vegetation around frames—when someone (who looked like he operated a farm) heckled, absolutely deadpan: “That won’t work. Goats are going to eat them strawberries.”
Most EVs go a lot further on the 50kwh * 0.85 = 42 kwh it would take to produce that. Most EVs with a battery that size would be doing 150ish miles or around 200km. That kind of shows the problem with hydrogen and transport. With an expensive and ideal hydrolyser (using the numbers in the article) you are still requiring twice the energy per km.
Of course things not being ideal, it's more like 4x with the 80kwh / kg hydrolyser this company advertises. Now we're talking 80*0.85 = 68 kwh. That's typical for a lot of mid range EVs (including Teslas) with a range of 250 miles or better; or about 400km. 4x the energy + all the additional cost. Sure it will only cost a 85 cents per 100 km. But you could be driving for 21 cents per 100 km.
You covered the most important detail that I think most people skip and that is that hydrogen is just a very inefficient battery if you are utilizing green hydrogen. With the intrinsic inefficiencies of generating green hydrogen and the of fuel cells you will always end up using 3-4x the amount of energy versus just charging an EV directly. That is even before you deal with transportation, storage, and pressurization of the hydrogen.
Now cheap hydrogen can be useful for industrial processes and aerospace so seeing the cost come down is still very good.
You cannot magically put electricity directly into the battery. There is a significant loss between production and powering the wheels. This is the biggest source of misunderstanding about the subject.
The main "breakthrough" the article seems to be pivoted on is: sacrificing efficiency of electrolyzer brings the capex down by and order of magnitude, thus making $1/Kg hydrogen possible. The whole downstream (to H2) value chain is a different economic argument, relevant to how they want the future to be.
So really, really cheap electricity with a side of really, really cheap hardware[0] coupled with an absence of operations, maintenance, storage, or transport costs. Noting for the latter direct energy from panels must be used with a high locality to the panels themselves, which means a distributed collection and transportation for the produced hydrogen.
[0]Plausibly viable, non precious metal catalysts typically have less than stellar lifetimes but there is a lot of fat to plausibly trim out of an electrolyzed.
I like how the Terraform's electrolyzers (80 kWh/kg) are less efficient than legacy systems (50 kWh/kg). He compares legacy with current electricity to their system with cheap solar when they need to be compared with the same input.
Their problem is that solar power isn't cheap yet. The other big problem is that electrical transmission lines are way more efficient than hydrogen, which 30% efficient on whole cycle. It makes no sense to use hydrogen as energy transport. Cheap hydrogen production at every use point, airport, factory, port, would make sense.
They don’t address this directly, but is probably what they’re going for given the low deployment cost, no maintence, size, and comparison against other energy sources.
Storage costs should be considered, particularly for an intermittent process. Otherwise, you need an end user that can accept intermittent and somewhat unpredictable supply.
I too was missing the punchline of how they reduced the capital costs so much. The writing implied it was inevitable engineering, but the real world is seldom so simple.
I didn't get why Terraforms focus on producing natural gas (CH4) instead of just hydrogen (H2)? Today we use a lot of CH4 to produce hydrogen primarily for fertilisers (ammonia) and oil refining.
The first step should be stop using CH4 for H2 production, which is 65-75% efficient (steam reforming) and instead use green hydrogen. Today, hydrogen production is $155 Bln / year market that may take even a decade to transition. Simpler and more profitable than synthesising CH4.
One more trick, would be to connect partial solar to grid at lower capacity to benefit from price surges (e.g. evening). E.g. 100 MW solar, but with grid connection of just 1 MW to profit from when grid electricity is expensive.
Also please do not worry about transporting or storing hydrogen. Just produce ammonia and sell it on the market. Till we decarbonise ammonia production (1%+ of global CO2 emission), we don't have to worry about that.
This saves on infrastructure since we already have CH4 pipelines, power plants, vehicles etc. If we stop and just produce hydrogen, we need to redesign every single pipeline and plant. Also H2 has the downsides that it is extremely explosive and not very energy dense. Only upside I can think of is that hydrogen is so light that leaks don't tend to pool around the plant.
Why bother? The main use case for hydrogen is energy storage. So you just have a big tanker next to the solar farm that fills up when its producing more than the grid needs, and then burn it when there's less than the grid needs.
You argument holds true if you want massive distribution. I believe 100% green ammnoia is first step and for that I just need green H2. No need to redesign anything.
I’ve been hoping one of Casey’s articles would get traction here. I love what he’s writing but I don’t have the context to evaluate how correct they are.
Readit News
If so, the hard part is getting the carbon capture cheap enough, not the hydrogen.
I crunched the numbers and you need around 13.6 kilograms of carbon and 4.54 kilograms of hydrogen to make enough natural gas to give you 1GJ of heat when combusted (this is how natural gas is priced in the metric world - 1 GJ is roughly 0.95 MMBTU).
If you're extracting CO2 from the air, roughly 27% of the CO2 is carbon, the rest is oxygen.
Doing the maths suggests that at current ballpark prices for CO2 direct air capture of $1000/tonne, the cost of capturing enough CO2 to make a GJ of natural gas is about $50. That's before you've done the processing to convert your CO2 and hydrogen into natural gas and oxygen.
So let's assume an order of magnitude improvement in air capture costs. Even at $100 per tonne, the CO2 capture cost is around $5. When you combine that with the approximately $4.50 worth of hydrogen required, that gives an input cost of around $9.50. That's way more than domestic natural gas currently costs in the US, but it's in the ballpark that you could subsidise your way around that at scale, and the numbers look pretty reasonable compared to imported LNG in Europe and Asia.
So to me this suggests that, if your business plan is to make methane, the hydrogen part is almost a sideshow to getting direct air capture costs down.
At $1/kg, the fuel cost of a combined cycle power plant will be $0.05/kWh. Hydrogen is quite storable underground (just like natural gas). At this fuel cost, new construction nuclear is hopelessly uncompetitive, even for base load generation. And unlike nuclear, the hydrogen burning CC plants can be economically dispatched, turned down/off when renewables or short term storage are directly powering the grid.
The attraction of synthetic methane is that it is
1) transportable in existing pipelines, including to millions of homes and small businesses.
2) usable in literally millions of existing devices
3) relatively easy to ship.
None of those things are true for hydrogen.
Or, just use the solar electricity as-is.
I understand the energy storage aspect here but it comes at a high cost.
One battery breakthrough will obsolete this entire process. Lots of time and money is being devoted to new battery technology --- very little to this.
This effectively looks like a long shot effort to salvage the internal combustion engine.
It sure isn't efficient. But with energy sources that are intermittent and have no ability to scale up for demand, we will have a lot of intermittently very cheap energy. Anything that can use this intermittent power is valuable, because we will need overcapacity to handle the low-wind, low-sun moments
Startups like ETFuels are decarbonizing other industries, like transportation and fertilizers.
We'll need all the solutions. Not either-or, but yes-to-all-and-more-of-it-please.
I’m not sure how expensive it would be for it to be clean and pure enough, or what purity that process would need, but most of the cost you mention would be solved by colocating with a burner plant.
If the cost of sequestering the CO2 and pumping + refining oil / natural gas is less than the cost of capturing H2 and using it to synthesize fuel with the CO2, then the synthetic fuels are a dead end. (Until we run out of oil, but that will he centuries from now.)
Dead Comment
If you’re capturing CO2 that comes from an industrial process like cement production, turning it into methane, burning the methane, and releasing the combustion products into the atmosphere, from an accounting point of view either the gas isn’t carbon neutral, or the cement plant isn’t carbon neutral, and the process is still incompatible with achieving net zero emissions.
You might be interested in ETFuel's strategy.
"Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables" [2023-06-28] https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...
TDLR: Combo of solar and wind for power, CO2 from industrial sources, create fuels (methane, methanol, amnonia). Use pipes or trucks as needed.
ETFuels' "secret sauce" is integration and creating fuels. They'll use best available option for electricity and CO2. They'll build where it makes most sense to optimize opex.
In the future, once direct-air capture becomes cost competitive, no problem.
Also, I'm certain they'll also adopt advanced geothermal, in combination with solar and wind, to solve their electricity problems as well as greatly expand where they can feasibly deploy.
“ We’re developing a scalable electrolyzer to deliver the cheapest possible green hydrogen, which we use as a precursor chemical to make cheap synthetic carbon neutral natural gas in our Terraformer.”
This reminded me of various[1] vox[2] articles on scientific reports over the past decade that reinforce the central truth and challenge of the climate crisis: we have all the tools we need to 'avoid it' (and have had them for some time), but it will take at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude more effort than any previous project with a completely global scope.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8748081/us-100-percent-renewabl...
[2]https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/21349200/climate-...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176462647/green-energy-trans...
The energy transition will be cheaper than our current infrastructure.
The challenges are not technological nor economical, the challenge is prevent entrenched interests from preventing the best, cheapest, and most environmentally friendly system from taking its rightful place.
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
World war two, the example raised the most often, required only increased output. It had no limits on how to get there. This requires both. I really don't think it's like anything we've ever tried to do before.
In particular it wouldn't be this hard to...replace everything eventually when it makes sense. In order to maximally dampen climate change we would need to do this as quickly as possible.
Right, which is why it's simply not going to happen. It would take far too much effort, and also far too much cooperation between different nations that all intensely hate each other. On top of that, large parts of the the global population 1) don't believe the problem exists in the first place, 2) doesn't think it's technically possible to do anything about (i.e. they think it's mostly natural, even if it's real), or 3) think they shouldn't have to change their actions at all because they're mad that the rich countries got to burn lots of oil and then stick all humanity with the problems from it.
The problem is beyond fixing. Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much when the USA and China and Russia and India are spewing out so much carbon and refuse to stop. The thing to do at this point is to understand and predict well what's coming, so that we can take measures to mitigate the effects at local scales.
Maintaining a fossil fuel based energy system will be more expensive and costly than switching to a carbon free economy.
Every single delay in the transition is wasted money, a transfer to fossil fuel interests at the expense of all the rest of humanity. And once you add in the environmental externalities on top of just the pure cost, it becomes even more egregious.
Saying that it's impossible is as ridiculous as saying it's impossible for us to have built the huge energy system we have today. Rebuilding it all will take just a few percentage of global GDP, less than would be spent on fossil fuels, and create the infrastructure for cheaper more abundant energy, laying the groundwork for more technological advancement.
Instead of repeating tired narratives of the past, it's time to start thinking critically and apply even the tiniest amount of skepticism to the received wisdom of entrenched interests. We only hurt ourselves when we wear the rose-colored glasses that let us live with the out-dated "truths" of the 20th century.
It's time for us to advance technologically.
I share your pessimistic assessment and I would frame it differently. The thing that strikes me, above all, is that this is the first project that really requires cooperation on this scale. Basically everything before was possible with smaller groups following their own incentives (basically bog standard capitalism). The cost of cooperation was not worth the returns.
This is different - we need to learn to cooperate on a previously unheard of scale - and (as you note) we need to learn to cooperate in a way where we don't totally trust others. I just saw Oppenheimer so, to draw a historic analogy, it's like you have to run the Manhatten project...but also actively share work with Russian and Nazi scientists to finish the project earlier than US science could alone. It's on an entirely different level of difficulty that we have never really needed to attempt previously.
For instance - are oil & gas companies being disruptive and acting in bad faith? Yes. Do we need them to stop? Absolutely. Probably the easiest way is to reward their bad faith action if they will really start cooperating. At this stage we need them to be winners. Justice is a luxury for people who are in less dire conditions.
> Even if, for instance, Germany manages to become 100% carbon-neutral, that isn't going to help much
I think you're totally wrong on this and I encourage you to look into the science on it. We can make the planet as hot as we want. Every bit of warming emission hurts. I'd also argue that, in the same way that California standards change things across the US (because they are so big) the developed world truly abandoning carbon would dramatically impact the rest of the world.
We replace all cars every 10-ish years. We replace all infrastructure every 50-ish. All we had to do is replace them at their normal pace with carbon neutral alternative.
First, solar will not use up land. "Agrivoltaics" provide farmers a year-round revenue stream without reducing yield appreciably (on some crops, increasing yield), while improving water retention and protecting livestock from weather extremes.
Second, cost of the energy used will be zero. It will come not from bespoke solar farms, but from utility-scale production above immediate demand. Big producers will buy these things to provide themselves another revenue stream from zero-marginal-cost excess generation after their local batteries are charged up.
1) recognizing the steady past improvement in solar costs
2) using the concept of LCOE
3) accepting that solar will improve for at least 10 years
4) targeting a future cost target of solar
These are things the hydrogen folks often pretend isn't going to happen.
But anyway, the theory being that as soon as hydrogen is cheaper than petrol by a sufficient margin a massive economic shift will occur. I'm assuming he means switches to FCEVs (not going to happen) or synthfuels for the ICEs.
But... batteries and EV tech are also improving on a very aggressive curve. Currently it is my belief that state of the art EV drivetrain tech has dropped under ICE costs. This is already the current state of the market, and there is likely a large amount of further cost reduction in EV drivetrains forthcoming in the next 10-20 years that will make the ICE drivetrain functionally obsolete in at least 70% of applications and perhaps 95%.
So even if a synthfuel chain based on H2 production from solar appears that is cheaper than current oil extraction in about 10 years, the fact is that, while there will be a large installed base to milk for another 10-20 years, EVs are going to eat the terrestrial vehicle drivetrain market.
I will say it would still be an enormous boon for the used equipment out there, as well as aviation. So I wish them the best. Also, grid power storage (short and long term).
And we'll still have the issue that oil extraction might still be cheaper for methane -> H2, and it sneaks into the "green" H2 market, which is a danger, but if solar is really so cheap in 7-10 years as predicted in this article, it might be economically infeasible to do grey/blue/purple/rainbow hydrogen from methane, which would be a good thing.
Did I miss something?
The truth is there is far more than enough land, available very cheaply, to power the world with renewable energy.
I will always fondly remember a presentation explaining that you could have strawberry fields or goat-herding under the shadow panels and how they worked together well: evaporation lowers the temperature of the panel, and goats cleared the vegetation around frames—when someone (who looked like he operated a farm) heckled, absolutely deadpan: “That won’t work. Goats are going to eat them strawberries.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/many-evs-outperform-epa...
Of course things not being ideal, it's more like 4x with the 80kwh / kg hydrolyser this company advertises. Now we're talking 80*0.85 = 68 kwh. That's typical for a lot of mid range EVs (including Teslas) with a range of 250 miles or better; or about 400km. 4x the energy + all the additional cost. Sure it will only cost a 85 cents per 100 km. But you could be driving for 21 cents per 100 km.
Now cheap hydrogen can be useful for industrial processes and aerospace so seeing the cost come down is still very good.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/11/hyd...
My renault Zoe would do about 176 miles (283km) on the same electricity put straight into the battery.
Hydrogen cars do not make sense unless the electricity is free, and even then there are lots of difficulties not present in a BEV.
[0]Plausibly viable, non precious metal catalysts typically have less than stellar lifetimes but there is a lot of fat to plausibly trim out of an electrolyzed.
Their problem is that solar power isn't cheap yet. The other big problem is that electrical transmission lines are way more efficient than hydrogen, which 30% efficient on whole cycle. It makes no sense to use hydrogen as energy transport. Cheap hydrogen production at every use point, airport, factory, port, would make sense.
They don’t address this directly, but is probably what they’re going for given the low deployment cost, no maintence, size, and comparison against other energy sources.
Totally different logistics requirements
The first step should be stop using CH4 for H2 production, which is 65-75% efficient (steam reforming) and instead use green hydrogen. Today, hydrogen production is $155 Bln / year market that may take even a decade to transition. Simpler and more profitable than synthesising CH4.
One more trick, would be to connect partial solar to grid at lower capacity to benefit from price surges (e.g. evening). E.g. 100 MW solar, but with grid connection of just 1 MW to profit from when grid electricity is expensive.
Also please do not worry about transporting or storing hydrogen. Just produce ammonia and sell it on the market. Till we decarbonise ammonia production (1%+ of global CO2 emission), we don't have to worry about that.