ephbit (u/ephbit) - Readit News

ephbit commented on Prevented from reading/verifying Bitcoin-core tx/block encoded msgs · Posted by u/cc-d

ephbit · 5 months ago

I am either under equipped with intelligence .. or your question is too confusing to be easily understood.

If your intention is to get any kind of useful feedback on your message here .. I suggest you try to rephrase it or explain further what you're asking.

ephbit commented on Clean hydrogen at a crossroads: Why methane pyrolysis deserves attention c2es.org/2025/09/clean-hy... · Posted by u/georgecmu

burnt-resistor · 6 months ago

The other commenters are myopically, dangerously wrong in the worst possible way. We must stop pulling carbon out of the ground yesterday. Climate change isn't a hoax, isn't going away, and is an existential crisis that must be addressed by eliminating carbon extraction to the greatest degree possible sooner rather than never.

ephbit · 5 months ago

Looks like you yourself are dangerously wrong here.

You know which way we will not solve the problem?

By failing to recognize technologies that are going to help solve the problem.

It's the same with CCS.

The "green" mantra of "this is all just a strategy to help the fossil industry survive and we must boycott it" is shooting in one's foot.

As long as the world's energy infrastructure can not be built solely on renewables - which will still be the case in at least 2-3 decades - it makes sense to develop/use technologies that make the footprint of fossil energy smaller.

ephbit commented on Clean hydrogen at a crossroads: Why methane pyrolysis deserves attention c2es.org/2025/09/clean-hy... · Posted by u/georgecmu

kumarvvr · 6 months ago

If there is a good, easy way to generate methane using atmospheric CO2, then, we could have a chemical battery in the form of methane, which is far easier to handle than Hydrogen.

But I wonder what the round trip efficiency of such a system would be. Current lithium batteries have it at around 80%

ephbit · 5 months ago

The key feature of hydrogen as energy storage wouldn't necessarily be round trip efficiency but cost effectiveness (compared to batteries) of long-term storage over months.

Think about transporting peaks of renewables electricity generation that are not economically usable at the time when they're produced to times when renewables produce too little to meet demand. (Mostly in regions where generation depends significantly on seasons.)

ephbit commented on Clean hydrogen at a crossroads: Why methane pyrolysis deserves attention c2es.org/2025/09/clean-hy... · Posted by u/georgecmu

georgecmu · 6 months ago

Never trust anything written by lawyers/economics/MBAs on climate change - only analysis by chemical or mechanical engineers is worth reading.

Just so we know if we should keep reading, which one are you?

Methane pyrolysis is an old technology from early days of oil refining for production of hydrogen & Ammonia/fertilizer/Methanol. it yields half as much H2 than SMR/ATR so it can't compete on cost, unless there is carbon tax/CO2 penalty.

It's not appropriate to call it "technology," in the same way it's not appropriate to call "combustion" a "technology." There's a very wide variety of technological solutions to realize this family of chemical processes, and some are going to be better than other, depending on the use case or scenario. The report actually covers those pathways reasonably well.

Also, coke produced by pyrolysis is lower quality than that produced by Delayed Coking of crude oil refining.

Ideally, you would not be producing coke at all, but a higher value material. However, even coke will be of much higher purity than petcoke (before calcining) -- i.e. it would be intrinsically zero-sulfur carbon material, - but I'm not sure what applications it would have that don't involve production of CO2.

But obviously the carbon co-product should have value, which would provide a cost offset to the hydrogen. With a high-quality co-product (> $1/kgC), this offset would be significant enough to provide that hydrogen essentially free of charge.

SMR and ATR generate significant amounts of CO2 (~10 kgCO2/kgH2), which does not provide a cost offset, and in a fair world would instead incur a significant added cost.

Electrolysis requires 4x more energy (also electric, not thermal) and does not have a marketable/valuable co-product. Just on the energy cost alone (50 kWh/kgH2 * 0.12 USD/kWh = 6 USD/kgH2 > 40 USD/MMBTU) electrolyzer hydrogen is not competitive with any of the above.

Commonsense should tell you e- generated by H2 can't compete with CH4, because Ch4 is the feedstock & H2 is the product!

Didn't parse this statement, sorry. Can you rephrase?

ephbit · 5 months ago

> > Commonsense should tell you e- generated by H2 can't compete with CH4, because Ch4 is the feedstock & H2 is the product!

> Didn't parse this statement, sorry. Can you rephrase?

They might have meant something like: if you process A through B to C while you could also process A to C directly, then the latter direct process will usually be more economically viable.

While this heuristic sounds broadly reasonable, it neglects so many details of any real production processes and value chains that it seems hardly applicable to real world situations.

ephbit commented on Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen ft.com/content/69422656-7... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

DriftRegion · a year ago

> By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it

I understand the policy around hydrogen (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $8 billion to hydrogen production) as a technological pivot for the United States which leads the world in oil and gas extraction and logistics tech. The US has a lot of gas handling experience.

Optimistically, green hydrogen will diversify the energy supply, bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase. Batteries and pumped hydro are undeniably superior in round trip efficiency, but hydrogen does have some desirable properties such as relative ease of overland transport, very long term storage, and being a chemical precursor for some industrial processes.

Pessimistically, green hydrogen is a way for oil and gas companies to siphon many taxpayer dollars while doing superficial work similar to the compliance EVs of the 90s and 00s.

I'm optimistic mainly because my PhD in electrical engineering is being funded partly with the green hydrogen taxpayer dollars. Shout-out to my fellow taxpayers and my advisor's grant writing skills! I'm working on power electronics which are fundamental in renewable energy and by extension green hydrogen electrolysis.

ephbit · a year ago

> ... bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase.

The word "buzzphrase" implies that you think energy resilience is not as relevant as the proponents want to make it seem. Correct?

I've been thinking for years that resilience of the overall energy system is a factor that many green energy transition people appear to systematically overlook.

As I see it, chemicals based energy systems have a huge advantage over electricity based energy systems through their property of bringing large amounts of storage (and thus capacity to bridge outages) with them basically inherently.

The electrical grid is a delicate life support system and I'm convinced that it will - even in the far future - depend heavily upon chemical energy storage and transportation to give it resilience.

As far as I've heard the electrical grids in the US and Europe have come close to breaking points a lot more often over the last few years, compared to before. And even though huge sums of money are being invested in their build-out and maintenance, the supply situation with critical components such as transformers is apparently dire.

Alltogether makes me think that chemical energy storage (and thus, hydrogen, power-to-gas, ammonia, and such) will have a dead-sure place in energy systems.

ephbit commented on Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/minin... · Posted by u/adrian_mrd

k__ · a year ago

I just saw the BTC ROI over the years.

https://x.com/Audiodidakt314/status/1867216724413522281/phot...

Either it will become more stable in the future or the interest will fade and it will dump.

ephbit · a year ago

Any graph with a linear scale where the low numbers contain the most important information is meaningless if you include the huge outlier numbers.

Whoever made this graph doesn't seem to know what they're even looking for.

ephbit commented on Low-carbon ammonia offers alternative for agriculture and hydrogen transport techxplore.com/news/2024-... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

ephbit · a year ago

> ... new technique by creating tiny liquid metal droplets containing copper and gallium ... as the catalyst to break apart the raw ingredients of nitrogen and hydrogen.

> "Liquid metals allow us to move the chemical elements around in a more dynamic way that gets everything to the interface and enables more efficient reactions, ideal for catalysis," Daeneke said. "Copper and gallium separately had both been discounted as famously bad catalysts for ammonia production, yet together they do the job extremely well."

ephbit commented on Ask HN: Why do ActivityPub and Nostr not encrypt an "event" content and metadata · Posted by u/ahmedbaracat

ephbit · 2 years ago

Each post could be encrypted (before publishing) using a unique key (derived from the private key of the poster) and then signed with the private key (of the poster) before publishing.

Then the poster could later choose to selectively publish (or make them available to individuals) some of these unique keys, to make posts readable.

ephbit commented on A chemist explains the chemistry behind decaf coffee theconversation.com/retai... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

littlestymaar · 2 years ago

> Try eating eating 300 g of cheese/meat/tofu in one meal, it'll be difficult. Eating 300 g of chips/fries is something many people can absolutely do

I don't know where you get the idea that eating 300g of meat is difficult …

> A carb rich diet is usually fine as long as you expend the energy via physical activity.

Any balanced diet is fine if you ingest no more energy than you spend, which is exactly what I said: people today are eating too much.

ephbit · 2 years ago

> .. don't know where you get the idea that eating 300g of meat is difficult.

You're right, 300 g of meat isn't much of a challenge. The more appropriate comparison would be between 300 g of chips and an equal amount of calories in some protein rich food like meat. That should be much more challenging.

> .. people today are eating too much.

Yeah, the important question is: why are they eating too much?

I assume that a lot of it is unintentional. Overeating mostly happens because people aren't aware of a few simple mechanisms or are misunderstanding them, not because the world is hard. Mechanisms which they could quite easily use to overeat less or avoid it altogether, instead of falling prey to them.

Just telling people that they're eating to much doesn't help in any way. People need to know why and how they can quite easily change it.