[_hypx]

These are opinions based on profound ignorance. Many sectors can never reach zero emissions without hydrogen. Things like airplanes and ships. You must invest in the infrastructure no matter what.

And how can you have hydrogen for steel production without necessarily reducing the cost to the ballpark of coal or natural gas? If you can grasp that part, you should realize that it must be a cheap fuel in the future. Cheap enough that it can be easily affordable for transportation purposes. And for those who can't afford BEVs or don't have access to chargers, that is major motivation to pursue hydrogen cars.

Ultimately, you're left with many unsolvable problems if you try to tackle climate change without looking at hydrogen where it is applicable. You also need to think seriously about the downside of alternative ideas, and not pretend they are magically perfect. Batteries are heavy and expensive, nor are they environmental friendly to produce. If you see hydrogen as a far greener type of energy storage, then you will see there are upsides too. In other words, you are only looking at the cons, not the pros and the cons.

[panick21_]

The waste majority of ships will be battery powered, even cargo ships, as most cargo transport is local and short route. Same goes for planes. For the rest hydrogen is just a in between product, directly turning it into things like methanol or jet fuel.

Steel and other metals can be made with direct Molten Oxide Electrolysis. That is a far better path forward then hydrogen.

> You also need to think seriously about the downside of alternative ideas, and not pretend they are magically perfect.

Given your absurd defense of hydrogen cars, I will just say, look in the mirror.

> Batteries are heavy and expensive, nor are they environmental friendly to produce. If you see hydrogen as a far greener type of energy storage, then you will see there are upsides too.

As a complete engineering solution end to end, batteries are far more environmentally friendly, far more efficient and far cheaper. Let alone if you also include infrastructure cost. Anybody who seriously investigates these things will come to the same conclusions.

[defrost]

Globally, annually, there is roughly 850 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) worth of containerized goods handled at ports worldwide.

Aside from container shipping there is raw bulk material shipping, eg: Western Australia ships > 800 million tonnes of raw ores to China annually (not local, not light).

Looking at just container shipping and the major major routes; there is

* 42 million TEU's intra asia (within asia, 'local' but not necc. 'short')

* 42 million TEU's 'far east' to Europe + North America.

and then a long tail of lesser volume routes, many quite lengthy (asia -> south americas, north | south americas, etc.)

Point being by "vast majority" are you talking raw ship numbers (there are many small ships) or cargo volumes | weights?

There is a truly vast amount of heavy tonnages being moved long distances and these consume the majority of shipping energy.

If this is your line of argument then it deserves some refining to move past a handwave.

[panick21_]

Maybe 'vast majority' is an overestimation but there is a quite a lot of it.

People underestimate how many routes can be done with battery powered ships.

> If this is your line of argument then it deserves some refining to move past a handwave.

My argument was not limited to that. I also said there are other solution that are not direct usage of hydrogen.

[defrost]

First up, I'm pro energy transition, so I'm essentially 'on your side'.

I'd still like to see you make better arguments and work on the real world details (if you can be bothered) which will take time if you apply yourself.

eg: batteries

Sure .. somewhere there is the future.

Right now, though, the largest installer of city scale battery parks in the world Neoen has yet to crack 10 GW installed:

   As at 31 December 2021, the company's total capacity was 5.4 GW, made up of 50% solar, 38% wind and 12% battery storage. Neoen aims to attain 10 GW in operation and under construction by 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoen

That's total globally after successively installing the three successive "biggest battery parks in the world" each larger than the other.

For a comparison point, Germany (a single mid sized European country) has a lowest overnight baseload minimum draw of 40 GW (all night long .. an then it ramps up).

Realistically batteries must scale to being able to provide 40 GW for an hour (or more!) .. which is provision of power x length of time.

And from there to scale out by a 100 and more locations.

So, there's some way to go here.

As for hydrogen and steel .. before you wave that away it might be worth looking into the concrete plans by the largest raw material providers for the largest steel plants globally.

https://www.fmgl.com.au/in-the-news/media-releases/2021/06/0...

https://www.fmgl.com.au/in-the-news/media-releases/2023/06/1...

These are the concrete plans of those who are committed to climate action, have access to world class engineers, and already provide 100's of millions of tonnes of raw iron ore per year to steel production already.

You don't have to agree with them, but they are taking action with several billion in capital backing them, so it pays to understand what they intend.

[panick21_]

Tesla has far more then 10GW installed globally.

That said, I am against using batteries, specifically lithium batteries for grid stabilization. I much rather not have grids that need that, sadly politically this is where we are going. To actually have grid stabilizing on a large scale with batteries, new battery technologies will have to come online. Things like 'Form Energy' and stuff like that. Neither batteries nor hydrogen currently are actually good solutions. Hydrogen has a bunch of issues in this application and if you look at totally deployed vs batteries its tiny. Again, reality doesn't seem to believe hydrogen is this great grid stability solution.

I rather have nuclear and not need anything other then maybe some Lithium for peak shaving and grid stabilization. But sadly we don't live in that reality, specially in Germany.

Germany has the delusional believe that they will get cheap hydrogen from Australia and Canada. Lots of plans and 'understanding' in reality Australia doesn't even have enough green electricity to make its own grid green, and they are way behind on things like electrification for cars, trains and trucks. Australia has a very, very, very long way to go, the idea that there will be some large cheap export of Green Hydrogen from Australia in my opinion is just fantasy pushed by some politically connected people in both countries who are selling a fantasy to get government money.

The claims from 2021 that by 2023 there will be all this green hydrogen from Australia, mmmhh we are in 2023 and I like to see some data on how much import there is from Australia right now. Again, lots of announcements, lots plans, lots of 'understanding' but tiny actual numbers.

Politically steel companies are under pressure to do something. They can mix hydrogen into their existing processes and make them slightly greener. Its kind of like Hybrid cars. It will make steel more expensive and many of the plans to really scale this relay on cheap green hydrogen to really be competitive. I'm not against it but I think moving to MOE is gone both cheaper and greener.

P.S:

> Germany, the country that is leading the fight against the global warming challenge in Europe

Pretty funny claims from the country with the dirtiest energy mix in Western Europe.

[defrost]

> Tesla has far more then 10GW installed globally.

Good to hear - can you provide a link to back that up?

The company I linked above installed the Tesla battery parks that are the the three largest in the world and as their current total (including those) is under 10 GW I'd like to know about the others that make up your total.

> P.S: .. Germany ..

You haven't quoted me, that's not a claim I made.

I simply used Germany as an example of one Europeans's minimum overnight baseload - feel free to pick another.

[_hypx]

This is seriously detached from reality. Cargo ships do not travel short routes, and "short-haul" airflight is far beyond the ranges of battery powered airplanes. You are completely ignoring physics here.

MOE has not actually been invented yet, and there is no evidence it will be either cheap nor scalable. It's currently very expensive and requires plenty of exotic materials to work even as a concept.

No one is claiming hydrogen cars are perfect. But you are making highly delusional claims about batteries. Many of them are totally impossible.

It's pretty obvious that you have never thought about these problems. It's just a serious of assertions from the marketing department of BEV companies designed to shut down critical thinking. The fact is, a hydrogen infrastructure is cheaper than a battery infrastructure. That is simply due to the nature of pipelines versus wire. A pipe is hollow but a wire is not.

So it is 5-10x cheaper to make and move hydrogen around compared to electricity: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-hydrogen-offshore-wind

Reality doesn't not favor batteries or excessive electrification.

[panick21_]

You are the one making argument for hydrogen powered cars and that's totally detached from actual reality.

> Cargo ships do not travel short routes

With short I mean not crossing major oceans. Battery powered ships can do a lot of routes.

> MOE has not actually been invented yet, and there is no evidence it will be either cheap nor scalable. It's currently very expensive and requires plenty of exotic materials to work even as a concept.

Both of these claims are just plain false.

> The fact is, a hydrogen infrastructure is cheaper than a battery infrastructure. That is simply due to the nature of pipelines versus wire.

That is such a terrible and utterly idiotic oversimplification.

The reality is, one of these exists and we can make realistic estimate, hydrogen infrastructure simply doesn't exist.

> So it is 5-10x cheaper to make and move hydrogen around compared to electricity: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-hydrogen-offshore-wind

A bunch of small trial projects supported by governments, that make grand claims.

You like to talk about reality, in reality of the 100s of GW of wind turbines, basically non use hydrogen as an energy transport. And the waste majority of announced new wind projects do not plan to produce hydrogen in the future.

> Reality doesn't not favor batteries or excessive electrification.

And yet in actual reality, you know the one we actually live in, electrification is happening with ever increasing speed and the hydrogen industry barley exists and as far as it does it is almost completely driven by state investments.

Its pretty fucking rich to claim 'in reality' when actual reality is suggesting the exact opposite.

[_hypx]

Except the most important routes are about crossing oceans. Asia to Europe or Asia to North America are very important routes. You pretty much hand waved major details here.

Then show me a working MOE system. I'd love to be enlightened about a working system that went beyond lab experiment.

You're the one ignoring actual expertise here. Here more people with expertise making the same claim: https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-fo...

> It is about 10 times cheaper to transport energy by a hydrogen pipeline than by an electric cable.

At some point you are simply rejecting evidence without any counterevidence of your own.

The reason why we turn use hydrogen to transport energy right now is because the technology wasn't available until recently. But that is changing: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/04/20230411-h2pipeline...

As the technology becomes available, economics will dictate more hydrogen infrastructure.

Your simply misinformed. Hydrogen investment is enormous in its totality: https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/hydrogen-projects-inve...

All you're doing is making wild assertions without evidence.

[_aavaa_]

> 10 times cheaper.

This is a bogus claim. Show us some hydrogen pipelines that are in operation which are thousands of kilometres in length.

And the cost is per energy. Which energy? Output energy when you get electricity at the other end? Or chemical potential energy in the H2, which is meaningless since we can’t get it all.

[_hypx]

Are you really going to go around and dismiss properly sourced claims? Where is your counterevidence? And no, you cannot just concern troll your way around this. There are people with real credentials making these claims. You cannot dismiss them without evidence of your own.