Hydrogen – See Animals Wild

June 13, 2024June 11, 2024

Natural hydrogen at 95.8% purity found at drill site in South Australia

The vast majority of hydrogen on earth is locked into water. While splitting water and then recombining it can be done, and is in some forms can be thought of as a battery, it has long been postulated, that there might be hydrogen deposits in the earths crust. Not considered valuable until recently, few were looking for hydrogen.

This has changed dramatically, and after writing several months ago about a find in the USA, another has been made in South Australia. This find has 95.8% pure hydrogen, greatly reducing the purifying costs (the same company has also found deposits of helium at 17.5% pure).

This hydrogen should not be used for passenger cars, but instead in applications where nothing else can do (like air travel) . Even shipping, currently highly polluting, does not need to be. A mixture of kite sailing, new retractable sails of various kinds, and even electric motors with batteries, means that shipping should be able to rapidly decarbonize over the next few decades. This hydrogen must be used carefully – while these deposits might be large, they are not endless. As such, we want to use this for uses which cannot use batteries.

January 1, 2024January 1, 2024

Do not buy a hydrogen boiler!

The UK watchdog (amongst many other groups) have concluded that hydrogen boiler is a stupid idea. It is true that its only waste product is water and oxygen, but the cost of making the hydrogen is very high.

Should there be large quantities of hydrogen sitting around, then this might make sense – burning hydrogen is generally a very clean fuel. The problem is, that it is almost impossible to store or transport it without loosing much on route, and it is incredibly expensive to split water – the current form for the vast majority of the hydrogen on the planet. Fossil fuel companies are keen, because their old methods can extract and split hydrogen, but it will mean large carbon emissions as well, so is useless – there is a reason that it is called grey hydrogen. Green hydrogen is the only kind that will give us any profit as a world.

So why is the government supporting the switch (alongside gas focused industry). The department for energy security and net zero stated this week that the gas network ” will always be part of our energy system”. I am not sure why anyone would look at it, given an air-source heat pump is likely to be around price parity, and ground source heating even cheaper.

Installation, at the cheap end will be far cheaper than a heat-pump, but this will be more than made up for over the lifetime of the device. Furthermore, with the grants currently available, you are far better off going straight to a heat pump. This is a waste of time and money, and it would not be remotely surprising, if you had to remove it before the end of its life,as it would be costing too much

February 11, 2022June 28, 2022

Montpelier a city in France realized its error, and dropped an order for 51 hydrogen buses for electric instead

Montpelier had set aside $33 million for this project, over 2 years. This decision was made, after local officials realized that electric buses would be 6 times cheaper to run. This price included the building of a plant to make the hydrogen.

In terms of cost, it was estimated that the buses (for which the council was given help buying but not for running costs) would cost 3 million euros to run, yet only 500,000 for electric. The per mile price was 0.15 euro instead of 0.95.

Although they were going to be helped in purchasing, the hydrogen buses are also between 150000-200000 euros more to buy in the first place.

The myriad reasons that hydrogen is not a good idea have been obvious for some time. Green hydrogen (much of hydrogen is taken out of gas- obviously a nonstarter if your aim is reducing carbon emissions) requires a great deal of electricity to split water, and it would be far more efficient to just put that electricity in batteries and use them. Another issue is the compression of the gas. The only possible place where hydrogen might be useful is in aeroplanes.

November 23, 2021June 29, 2022

I wrote about blue hydrogen earlier this year, one current suggestion is to replace gas with hydrogen in heating – bad idea?

It is thought that when you add in all the unaccounted emissions, emissions from using hydrogen could be 20% higher than using gas itself.

We must make sure that current gas and oil producers are not able to move forward their idea of changing to blue hydrogen from gas. Green hydrogen – made by splitting water (if done with clean electricity) is completely clean. There is no point in ceasing to use oil and gas if we still need these things in order to create hydrogen.

Instead we must look to green hydrogen either using electricity, or indeed if progress continues, using catalysts.

There is no point in eradicating the use of fossil fuels if its replacement is worse.

July 19, 2021June 30, 2022

A hydrogen powered world?

Hydrogen is an incredibly energy rich fuel. When Hydrogen is mixed with oxygen, a large amount of energy is released and the only waste is pure water.

The problem for many years has been that virtually all the hydrogen on earth is locked up as water. For a long time, it has been known that by running a current through water you can split the oxygen and hydrogen. Unfortunately, this process is incredibly energy intensive. Indeed it takes more energy than it gives.