A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8569504
How is the hydrogen made?
To save you all a google: it's made from natural gas, at a pretty significant energy loss compared to just burning the gas. It generates about 4 times more co2 than burning diesel.
Oh great, and I was wondering why some of our policians were pushing hydrogen cars as an alternative to electric cars, despite even the car industry telling them to shut the fuck up.
Are those CO2 emissions? I don't get where the CO2 comes from.
I know this is an animation, but it shows pretty well, how hydrogen is made from natural gas. No CO2 emissions. And using the hydrogen should produce H2O.
In reverse order:
1 - it needs to be tranported
2 - it needs to compressed and cooled, in order to transport it. You need to cool it down around 1700 degrees, because:
3 - methane pyrolysis is done at around 1500 degrees C, getting something that hot isn't free.
4 - methane isn't the only component in natural gas, so you need to seperate out all the impurities.
5 - methane is a very strong contributor to global warming, so any natural gas leak from the drill to the factory adds co2equivalent.
6 - you need to extract natural gas from the ground and transport it, which takes energy.
Plus the big one is that my taking the hydrogen off of the methane, you're left with carbon. And that carbon is usually reacted with oxygen to make carbon dioxide during the refining process. So for every two liters of hydrogen you make, you'd make a liter of CO2.
And we're not doing so well on the gas leak part...
I think the issue is where the energy to heat the reaction vessel comes from. The video shows green sources, but that isn't the only way to do it. The thing is, this is ultimately an energy storage tech rather than an energy generation tech. You need excess capacity to make it work, and if that means you have to make up for a shortful with conventional generators elsewhere, you aren't actually saving anything.
I don't know if the previous poster is right of course, but the planet is an almost closed system, and there really is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to energy.
Any evidence to your claim?
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-the-environment.php
Natural gas is a relatively clean burning fossil fuel
Burning natural gas for energy results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide (CO2) than burning coal or petroleum products to produce an equal amount of energy. About 117 pounds of CO2 are produced per million British thermal units (MMBtu) equivalent of natural gas compared with more than 200 pounds of CO2 per MMBtu of coal and more than 160 pounds per MMBtu of distillate fuel oil. The clean burning properties of natural gas have contributed to increased natural gas use for electricity generation and as a transportation fuel for fleet vehicles in the United States.
Burning natural gas isn't so awful but getting it out of the ground and to the place where is needs to be burned is always overlooked. It's a gas, it wants to escape and much of the infrastructure leaks and so a great deal is lost before its used. I walk around Boston and no joke you just SMELL it all the time because the infrastructure is so old. Natural gas is also mostly methane which when leaked is 80 times more potent than CO2. Furthermore much natural gas needs to be transported on ships to be uses. To summarize there is no 'greener' fossil fuels it's all to be avoided if possible.
Cleaner than coal is a very low bar. 60% of the emissions of coal is still way too much
Sure, the primary dutch co2 source website: https://www-co2emissiefactoren-nl.translate.goog/lijst-emissiefactoren/?_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Translated, because nobody speaks dutch.
That's the states for actually burned natural gas. Natural gas is basically methane and is therefore not too good for the climate when it leaks (which it does)
It does result in higher methane emissions, which have a ln ~30x larger greenhouse effect than CO2.
See here: https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw
Edit: Looks like metane's GGG co2 equivalent is 27 to 30 over 100 years.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials
Stop Doing Marketing for Fossil Fuel Companies by Calling it "Natural" Gas Challenge
You know, when a proton and electron love each other very much...
You can make hydrogen greenly with electricity and electrolysis. But I doubt BP is doing that.
Where is the electricity coming from?
Extra solar and wind capacity ideally, but again, I don't trust BP with that.
BP apparently
Hydrogen was made approximately 400,000 after the big bang in a process called recombination, as the universe cooled down enough for stable neutral atoms to exist.