[freeflight]

Afaik on an international level there's been a somewhat universal consent that natural gas is the "transition fossil fuel of choice" [0], due to being the fossil fuel with the lowest emissions.

It also has the added bonus that gas infrastructure can realistically be retooled for green hydrogen, and related products.

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-gas-in-todays-energy...

[realusername]

I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing.

Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise and suffers from its storage problems, the list of potential providers is also an issue in Europe as seen during the Ukraine war (and it's not like Qatar, Algeria or Azerbaijan are better than Russia)

[freeflight]

> I don't share this opinion personally, it would be only two times worse, it could be considered but at 50 to 100 times worse than non fossil tech, it's just not worth investing.

This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.

As the fossil fuel reliance doesn't only extend to the energy sector, but also manufacturing industries, where hydrocarbons, as a resource, are responsible for pretty much everything that defines modern life. [0]

> Additionally to these environmental problems, it's one of most expensive infrastructure-wise

The infrastructure is expensive, but it's also the only existing energy infrastructure which can realistically be retooled for renewable replacement through green hydrogen.

Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].

It's a dimension to this way too few people have on their radar, as most of the public debate is solely centered on electricity generation from fossil fuels, when that's actually the easiest problem to fix with renewables.

But the dependencies on fossil fuels as manufacturing resource, fixing those is a much bigger and involved task than making electricity grids green and renewable.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products...

[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/zv/de/ueber-fraunhofer...

[realusername]

> This ain't about investments for the long term, it's about having a transition fuel into fully renewable, and that is needed for any realistic approach to the problem.

Gas cannot be considered for a transition because of it's very high emissions, diplomatic issues and high infrastructure costs. It's a very polluting tech which should stay back in the 20th century along petrol. The stability problems of renewables must be solved first to be adopted, in a better way, burning fossil fuels when they do not work ain't one.

> Now you can point out how hydrogen has also expensive infrastructure and even worse storage problems, which is true. But as of right now, green hydrogen is the only plausible way to wean ourselves off our fossil fuel dependence as a manufacturing resource [1].

The whole cycle has disastrous efficiency with 70% loss, as it is now, hydrogen storage isn't that useful until we invent some better tech. There's some use for it of course but that's not a large scale solution by any means.

[_hypx]

The accusation of hydrogen having bad efficiency is just something BEV companies came up with. It is basically marketing FUD. A more realistic analysis will show that there is very little difference between using hydrogen and direct electrification strategies. This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.

[realusername]

The state of the art on the full cycle has 65% loss. No production ready tech goes below than that.

Once we said that, how you judge this very high losses depends of your personal opinion.

> This becomes much more obvious once you realize that you need energy storage for electrification to work, but this part is conveniently left out of the calculation.

Unless some better hydrogen tech is invented, that won't be useful towards this goal.

[_hypx]

It is already below 50% and rapidly dropping. There is no significant difference in efficiency already, and this will vanish entirely within time. BEVs are simply lying about this fact.

Energy storage will require hydrogen energy storage. This is the fundamental problem of direct electrification strategies. They will need vast amounts of energy storage that cannot be solved except using hydrogen.