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gelgoog

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ZeEa5KPul said:
Being able to use hydrogen from electrolysis to produce nitrogen fertilizers is crucial to China's national security. Yes, it can get gas to do this from Russia and yes, Russia is a reliable partner, but I'll sleep a little easier if China can do this for itself.
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Hydrogen can be produced with coal and water. This has been done in large scale since the XIXth century:
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And it was made more efficient in the XXth century:
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The only reason it is usually produced with natural gas today is that it is even cheaper. There is no need for this green hydrogen except to fulfill some spurious environmental criteria.

Electrolysis hydrogen is typically way more expensive than either of those. Especially in a place like Inner Mongolia where you are right next to the coal mines.
 
tphuang

tphuang

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If you haven't looked into the economics of green hydrogen generation in china, I would suggest you don't make overly sweeping statements based on experiences from western countries.

China is fast forwarding with green hydrogen regardless of whether you like it or not.
 
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gelgoog

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This is simple physics. Without massive government subsidies no one will build this outrageously expensive boondoggle.
Using hydrogen in steel instead of coal is another example of pandering to the green lobby.
 
tphuang

tphuang

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gelgoog said:
This is simple physics. Without massive government subsidies no one will build this outrageously expensive boondoggle.
Using hydrogen in steel instead of coal is another example of pandering to the green lobby.
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You have not looked at any of the data, so stop making shit up on something you have no idea about.

I see what's going on here. You are concerned about Russia losing demand for its hydrocarbon.

This is not about Russia, this is about economics of green hydrogen generation in china. Go look up the cost renewables and efficiency of electrolysis and operating cost of hydrogen production. Show me the math that it doesn't work.

I really despise it when people don't do the math and just claim to know something. I have an entire spreadsheet of calculations on green vs grey hydrogen cost.
 
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gelgoog

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I said it right on the first post. And the video explains the boondoggle it is perfectly.
For transportation you lose 25% of the energy in the electricity with electrolysis and storage costs, and you lose another 50% just on the fuel cells to convert it back to motive power.

The video also explains how using heat pumps is 6x more energetically efficient than using green hydrogen for residential heating.

As for steel and fertilizer usage coal is much cheaper to use than green hydrogen. Which is why it is used in the first place. And China has no lack of coal resource. Steel mills and chemical plants don't need to be located close to urban centers, so the pollution isn't a major issue either.

My comment has nothing to do with Russian sales for hydrocarbons. Green hydrogen is just an extremely dumb idea except in very, very limited use cases. You need to have a huge electricity resource, more than you know what to do with it, which is certainly not the case for China or any other large nation. Perhaps it can work on Iceland or Norway. But not in China.
 
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tphuang

tphuang

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gelgoog said:
I said it right on the first post. And the video explains the boondoggle it is perfectly.
For transportation you lose 25% of the energy in the electricity with electrolysis and storage costs, and you lose another 50% just on the fuel cells to convert it back to motive power.

The video also explains how using heat pumps is 6x more energetically efficient than using green hydrogen for residential heating.

As for steel and fertilizer usage coal is much cheaper to use than green hydrogen. Which is why it is used in the first place. And China has no lack of coal resource. Steel mills and chemical plants don't need to be located close to urban centers, so the pollution isn't a major issue either.

My comment has nothing to do with Russian sales for hydrocarbons. Green hydrogen is just an extremely dumb idea except in very, very limited use cases. You need to have a huge electricity resource, more than you know what to do with it, which is certainly not the case for China or any other large nation. Perhaps it can work on Iceland or Norway. But not in China.
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you have no idea what you are talking about and neither does that video. You don't know how green hydrogen is put to use in China at all. You are just clueless on this topic.
 
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Deleted member 24525

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gelgoog said:
You need to have a huge electricity resource, more than you know what to do with it, which is certainly not the case for China or any other large nation.
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Hence investing in renewables and energy storage technology to unlock a source of power that has diminishing marginal costs, as opposed to gas and coal (and oil) which are subject to increasing marginal costs. The whole point of green hydrogen is that it allows for this radically cheaper and vaster source of energy to be used for chemical purposes. Of course it's going to start out expensive just like renewables themselves did, and just like fossil apologists lambasted China's renewable industrial policy a decade ago for pouring money into "economically unviable" energy technologies, those people are now doing the exact same thing with green hydrogen. And just like before with renewables, there will be an extraordinarily rapid decline in unit costs of green hydrogen once the relevant technologies are sufficiently scaled up. In fact this is already well under way with electrolyzers and beginning to happen with fuel cells too.
 
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gelgoog

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tphuang said:
you have no idea what you are talking about and neither does that video. You don't know how green hydrogen is put to use in China at all. You are just clueless on this topic.
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Just clueless you say. They are already testing hydrogen powered trains in China using fuel cells as we speak. And you say the video's argument with regards for example about transportation use don't apply. Sure right.

Just look at this chart from the IEA:

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It is way cheaper to generate hydrogen from coal than making it with electricity from renewables. Like a fourth the price. And hydrogen from natural gas is half the price of generating it from coal. The expectation is that this might not be the case... in 2060!

If you want hydrogen for energy security making it from renewable electricity and electrolysis is definitively the wrong choice.
 
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