[HN Gopher] India's biggest businesses are tapping green hydroge...
___________________________________________________________________
India's biggest businesses are tapping green hydrogen as a future
fuel
Author : akmittal
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-07-03 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fortuneindia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fortuneindia.com)
| lelag wrote:
| I don't understand India. They stand to loose everything to
| global warming as large part of India could become inhabitable
| but they are making all the wrong decisions. They were mainly
| responsible for the failure of COP26 as they refused to commit on
| getting rid of coal when most other countries were about to reach
| an agreement on the matter.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| most emission were made by developed countries, already
| screwing India. The omly chance for india is to industrialise
| rapidly, so either debeloped nations offer money ans technology
| transfer, or India uses the same resources Europe and US did
| arcen wrote:
| I really do not understand what your argument is here. COP26
| wanted two countries to stall their development + projects to
| help the poor in the nation. In addition, no real alternative
| was offered.
| sbmthakur wrote:
| You cannot "get rid" of coal when 70% of your energy comes from
| it and there's not enough renewable energy infrastructure.
| anon20220703 wrote:
| ummonk wrote:
| > For energy-starved India, which is aiming for carbon neutrality
| by 2070, the path to energy security goes through a mix of oil,
| coal, blended fuels, natural gas, renewables and electricity.
|
| Kind of conspicuous omission not to mention India's nuclear plan
| to bootstrap to thorium reactors.
| julosflb wrote:
| Hydrogen as such can't replace fossil fuels as it needs to be
| produced first using energy. It is only a vector. So many people
| make the confusion thinking that hydrogen is the solution.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I don't think ever had been suggested as a source of energy,
| only as a form of storage.
| epistasis wrote:
| The article goes into deep discussion about this, and is
| actually fairly reasonable, and the plan looks fairly realistic
| (except perhaps fuel).
| epistasis wrote:
| The article is much better than the headline. But headlines
| always have weaknesses, and can never convey it all.
|
| Hydrogen will be a great chemical feedstock, and be used in all
| sorts of chemical processes that need to be decarbonized.
|
| But thinking it will be a fuel is pretty clearly not going to
| happen. At best it will be one step towards a fuel. Or it will be
| a fuel in a few areas with very special geography: salt caverns.
|
| Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody comes up with an easy and cost
| effective way to store significant amounts of hydrogen. That
| would be a wonderful way to be wrong.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| What is hard with storing hydrogen? I've heard that they plan
| to use tanks that currently are used to store natural gas.
| regularfry wrote:
| Hydrogen leaks much more easily than bigger molecules. It's
| entirely possible that existing storage systems designed for
| natural gas would be completely unusable for H2.
|
| You've also got to account for hydrogen embrittlement, where
| the small size of the hydrogen molecule means that under
| pressure it works its way into the crystal lattice of the
| metal of the container itself, and changes its mechanical
| properties.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Basically, everything about it is hard. Very high pressure
| and low temperature, leakage, steel walls get brittle, etc.
| It's a nightmare, doable, but very hard to scale.
|
| The most promising solutions I've seen are taking advantage
| of the fact that single H+ "dissolves" into metal under
| pressure. You store that saturated metal and heat it when you
| want to release it. That way energy density starts to make
| sense. This video shows one such approach:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0fnEsz4Ks0
|
| Binding it with carbon seems promising as well, but I
| wouldn't bet on simply trying to jam it as a gas in a tank.
|
| But I'm not an expert, just very interested on the subject
| for many decades.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody comes up with an easy and
| cost effective way to store significant amounts of hydrogen.
| That would be a wonderful way to be wrong.
|
| Liquefaction is the way. We already do it for natural gas
| (LNG), we just need to build similar infrastructure for LH2.
| tonmoy wrote:
| Since this article talks about using renewable electricity to
| produce hydrogen, the H2 storage and distribution has to be
| more efficient and safer than transmission lines + Li ion
| batteries. Note Li ion battery technology is likely to keep
| improving for the next decade as well
| gruez wrote:
| >> Or maybe I'm wrong and somebody comes up with an easy and
| cost effective way to store significant amounts of hydrogen
|
| >We already do it for natural gas (LNG), we just need to
| build similar infrastructure for LH2.
|
| That doesn't address the "easy and cost effective" part.
| Current estimates say that the energy required is 30% of the
| energy value of the hydrogen itself.
|
| >But whereas liquefying natural gas only requires
| temperatures of -160degC, to liquefy hydrogen you need
| refrigeration systems capable of getting down to -253degC.
| That is an expensive proposition. Using current technologies
| the energy required is 30% of that in the hydrogen being
| liquefied.
|
| https://www.economist.com/technology-
| quarterly/2022/06/23/ma...
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _"Liquefaction is the way. We already do it for natural gas
| (LNG), we just need to build similar infrastructure for
| LH2."_
|
| It take a lot more energy to liquify hydrogen compared to
| natural gas. At least 10 kWh per kg. And storing/transporting
| it is expensive: you need to maintain cryogenic (-253 deg C)
| conditions.
|
| Even the Space industry has given up on LH2 in favour of
| liquid CH4, partly due to all the costs and difficulties in
| handling it.
| dang wrote:
| Submitted title was "India plans to replace fossil fuels with
| hydrogen". We've replaced it with a more neutral subtitle from
| the article.
| themitigating wrote:
| Do you record users who modify titles which you later
| replace?
| epistasis wrote:
| Many outlets A/B test headlines, or otherwise change them,
| so it can be hard to know what the article's headline was
| at submission compared to the eventual headline.
| politician wrote:
| Ammonia?
| epistasis wrote:
| We will definitely be making a ton of that for fertilizer,
| and use green hydrogen as a feedstock for that.
|
| Using green ammonia a fuel would be, as I said, using
| hydrogen as a step towards other fields. But I sincerely hope
| ammonia is never allowed as a fuel near cities, because the
| NOx pollution would be horrifying. I think ammonia as a fuel
| for shipping might be more realistic.
|
| But then, I'm just a random guy on the internet who spends an
| hour or two a day learning about the energy transition, I
| could be very wrong.
| franckl wrote:
| Low NOx ammonia burner have been demonstrated, and you can
| add an SCR filters to filter the rest. Our team at Airthium
| is working on a low NOx external ammonia burner tailored to
| our energy storage system.
| tyronehed wrote:
| Hydrogen is not the answer.
|
| This decision will eventually be seen as a colossal mistake.
|
| If they plan to use solar photovoltaic to make hydrogen, then
| it's much more efficient to just use the electricity directly,
| without going through hydrogen.
|
| They will end up making brown hydrogen and won't admit it, doing
| absolutely nothing to help the climate catastrophe--but they will
| be able to claim in public that they are.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I'm not sure - I could see both India and Australia become
| massive energy exporters if they make proper use of their
| available resources. In which case Hydrogen makes sense.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| From the article they're already using brown hydrogen:
|
| >> Almost all of this demand came from oil refining and
| industrial sectors, mainly for production of ammonia and
| methane. Hydrogen produced from fossil fuels for these
| applications results in close to 900 MT CO2 emissions per year,
| according to IEA data. Oil refiners are largest consumers (40
| MT). The gas they use is usually produced onsite by either
| steam methane reforming, separated from by-product gases
| through petrochemical processes or sourced externally as
| merchant hydrogen. Since use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining
| is not economically viable yet, refiners are trying to move to
| carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies to
| lower carbon footprint. In this process, carbon monoxide and
| carbon dioxide formed during the 'coal to hydrogen' process are
| trapped and stored in an environmentally sustainable manner.
| Estimates say use of low-carbon hydrogen in refining rose from
| 250 KT in 2019 to more than 300 KT in 2020, and based on the
| current pipeline of projects, 1.2-1.4 MT low-carbon hydrogen is
| likely to be used in refining by 2030.
| jl6 wrote:
| Renewables->electrolysis->hydrogen->ammonia could be a viable
| energy storage and transport system, regardless of efficiency,
| as long as it can be made cheap enough. Not all energy demand
| is easy to run a wire to, and those demands will be willing to
| pay the cost of inefficiency as long as the absolute price is
| bearable.
| [deleted]
| uthinter wrote:
| It is just one of the legs of diversification. India is also
| investing heavily into Na-ion batteries. It already has swathes
| of solar farms and twenty two working nuclear reactors and 13
| more in the pipeline .
| pfdietz wrote:
| You are repeating a common, but very flawed and invalid,
| argument there.
|
| Yes, batteries are more efficient than power-to-hydrogen-to-
| power. But the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the
| number of charge-discharge cycles of the storage system over
| its economic lifespan. For diurnal storage, you'd be correct,
| hydrogen is a poor choice. But diurnal storage is only one
| storage use case. For other storage use cases, such as seasonal
| storage, or backup against rare prolonged outages of renewable
| sources, there are relatively few charge/discharge cycles. For
| those uses, hydrogen is vastly superior to batteries.
|
| The argument that hydrogen would imply use of fossil fuels is
| nonsense. Fossil fuels are going to have to be kept in the
| ground in general by punishing legal sanction. What makes
| production of hydrogen somehow immune to that?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean seasonal storage near the polar circles and
| emergency generation?
|
| Because in general it's much cheaper to deal with seasonal
| variations by adding generation than with storage, and 'rare
| prolonged outages of renewables resources' doesn't even begin
| to make sense to me.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Let's look at the cost of providing "synthetic baseload" in
| Germany (with production via renewables just in Germany) in
| a toy model using real weather data and plausible cost
| assumptions for wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen.
|
| https://model.energy/
|
| If you use just wind/PV/batteries, the cost is almost TWICE
| that if you use wind/PV/batteries/hydrogen. This is for a
| cost optimized system relative to real historical weather
| data, in a solution where one is allowed to overproduce if
| that helps.
|
| So, no, it's not true at all in general that it's much
| cheaper to deal with seasonal variations with
| overgeneration rather than including storage.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Seasonal storage of electricity will never be a thing because
| nowadays it's easier to just build a large solar array
| somewhere sunny and a long HVDC line. The UK is planning on
| doing just that:
|
| https://www.power-technology.com/projects/morocco-uk-
| power-p...
|
| The project is projected to cost close to $22bln, which
| sounds like a lot, but is still less than the cost of yet-to-
| be-finished Hinkley Point C.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Seasonal Gas storage will never be a thing, you can just
| rely on a gas pipeline from Russia, nothing will ever go
| wrong
| konschubert wrote:
| That's an idea that would make even Gerhard Schroder blush.
| ben_w wrote:
| The best thing hydrogen has going for it is that it's easy to
| scale up without needing significant increases in mining and
| processing various minerals.
|
| If you _are_ willing to increase mining, and want the
| cheapest solution, and you can ignore or solve geopolitics,
| the "best" solution is neither hydrogen or batteries, it's to
| make a several square meter cross-section HVDC loops around
| the planet, because nighttime winter is never more than 20 Mm
| from daytime summer and the losses are low enough that it is
| still worthwhile.
|
| But: you probably still want hydrogen and batteries for the
| vehicles, and vehicles use so much power that solving
| transport almost automatically gives you enough used parts to
| build the storage capacity for the electricity grid, and that
| even with batteries (and over-provisioning PV, which is fine
| because of how cheap it is), there would be enough storage
| for winter.
| WJW wrote:
| > and you can ignore or solve geopolitics
|
| That's a hell of an "if" statement there my friend :)
|
| I agree though, in a thousand years there will be a
| worldwide electricity grid that takes care of the "big
| picture" energy flows; hydrogen will be created as needed
| to serve as chemical feedstock to make eg plastics or
| hydrocarbons for specialized purposes. That or we kill
| ourselves in the meantime, but since killing everyone is in
| nobody's best interest I don't think that'll happen.
| Hopefully.
| danuker wrote:
| > several square meter cross-section HVDC loops
|
| Let's take one half-way around the world.
|
| That's 1 sq m * 20000 km = 20000000 m^3. Let's take
| aluminum because it's cheap. 2.7 tons/cubic meter = 54 Mt.
|
| Multiply by price: $2444 x 54M = $132B for just the wire.
| That's $16.5 per capita.
|
| But you also need insulators, labor, machinery, design, and
| so on.
| [deleted]
| tmaly wrote:
| I still think it would be cool to have zeppelins again. I am sure
| they could improve the safety of them today.
| abraae wrote:
| I don't know - it would only take one nutter with a sniper
| rifle and an incendiary bullet to cause the next Hindenberg.
| You-Are-Right wrote:
| jl6 wrote:
| I don't recognize the article's definition of blue hydrogen,
| which I believe is normally used to refer to hydrogen derived
| from natural gas, not "from water"
| CyanBird wrote:
| Correct, blue hydrogen is hydrogen derived from fossil fuels,
| tho it doesn't need to necessarily be directly obtained from
| natural gas, could be just that natural gas or even coal is
| used for driving electrolysis
| shagie wrote:
| There's an entire spectrum of hydrogen "colors" -
| https://hydrogen-central.com/cummins-hydrogen-rainbow-colors...
| and https://rail.ricardo.com/news/opinion-decoding-the-
| hydrogen-...
|
| Getting hydrogen from water is one of: red or purple (nuclear -
| depending on process), yellow (solar), green (other
| renewables).
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Question because I'm not familiar: if you need water to make
| hydrogen, isn't that an issue in countries that are having water
| issues, like India?
| kristjank wrote:
| I am not familiar either, but I imagine the answer is similar
| to the vegan argument against grazing cattle: not all water
| sources are made equal.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| As a very rough approximation (just to get a proper order of
| magnitude), to make enough hydrogen fuel through electrolysis
| to run a car, you need about as much water as you would need
| gasoline. Compared to daily household needs, it's
| insubstantial, and compared to agricultural needs, it's less
| than rounding error.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-03 23:00 UTC)