EST: Chinese Hydrogen Production Is Making Climate Change Worse.

[NNadir]

Discussing climate change around here is often an exercise in delusion; whatever it is we think we're doing is making things worse, not better, and it's making things worse faster than ever.

2024's Unprecedented Terror At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory Continues. In all the years I've monitored the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory, I've never seen anything like 2024.

We have around here, a fossil fuel sales team, including an apparent bot, working to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," this to encourage fossil fuel sales by greenwashing them, often juxtaposing, in a bait and switch fashion, advertising graphics of useless solar farms next to slick similar pictures of hydrogen stations in China to promote the lie that hydrogen is made using so called "renewable energy," which despite trillions of dollars and worldwide enthusiasm has done nothing to address the use of dangerous fossil fuels, and has, in fact, entrenched them.

I have noted that in China, as elsewhere, in my own words, just as is the case everywhere else on this planet, hydrogen is made overwhelmingly by the use of fossil fuels, including the tiny amounts made by using grid electricity, with exergy destruction, the term "exergy destruction" being a thermodynamic term for "wasted energy," i.e. low energy efficiency, waste, a consequence of the inviolable 2nd law of thermodynamics.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Here's a publication by Chinese scientists, more or less saying exactly what I've been saying:

Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195

The text is clear enough.

From the introductory text:

... Currently, nearly all hydrogen in China is either produced directly from fossil fuels (55% from coal gasification and 14% from steam methane reforming (SMR)) or as a byproduct of petroleum refining (28%), with only 1% coming from water electrolysis. (2) Producing 1 kg of coal- or SMR-based hydrogen emits roughly 19 and 10 kg of CO2, respectively. (3) In 2020, hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China emitted ∼322Tg of CO2, equivalent to 25% of total CO2 emissions from industrial processes, a number expected to rise with increasing hydrogen demand. (4) Industrial processes include production of nonmetallic mineral products, chemical, and metal products, as well as production and consumption of halocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. (4)

Electrolytic hydrogen can be categorized by its electricity source: grid-based hydrogen generated using electricity from the power grid and renewable-based hydrogen generated directly from renewable electricity. Grid-based hydrogen is cheaper than renewable-based hydrogen in most provinces, requiring lower subsidies for its development. However, grid-based electricity generation relies heavily on coal and, thus, has substantial GHG emissions. Subsidizing grid-based hydrogen production would likely increase GHG emissions relative to coal-based hydrogen production, whereas hydrogen directly generated from renewable energy has minimal GHG emissions.

China aims to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. To minimize cumulative carbon emissions, accelerating the transition to decarbonized hydrogen production is crucial. However, high production costs are a significant barrier to the adoption of clean electrolytic hydrogen. Currently, renewable-based hydrogen and grid-based hydrogen cost 2–6 times and 1.6–3 times more than coal- or SMR-based hydrogen, respectively. (2,5−7) Until renewable-based hydrogen becomes cost-competitive, large-scale development of hydrogen is likely to increase GHG emissions by expanding fossil- and grid-based electrolytic hydrogen production. To rapidly decarbonize the hydrogen production process, it is essential to accelerate the shift from fossil- to renewable-based hydrogen. While some provincial governments (e.g., Inner Mongolia and Gansu) have established hydrogen production goals, their plans lack a specific focus on renewable-based electrolytic hydrogen. Moreover, there is little research at the provincial level that compares life cycle GHG emissions and levelized costs of hydrogen (LCOH2) across all hydrogen production technologies. Our work provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between subsidies and GHG emissions in the development of the hydrogen industry at the provincial level in China.

Subsidies play a significant role in developing emerging technologies. To accelerate the electrolytic hydrogen transition, subsidies on hydrogen-related devices and hydrogen used for transportation have been deployed in different regions as pilot projects. (8,9) Since renewable-based hydrogen costs 2–6 times more than coal- or SMR-based hydrogen, (2,4,5) greater subsidies are required to make renewable hydrogen cost competitive and to drive commercial production...

I added the bold, underline and italics. I note that we have lots of people around here who embrace consumer balderdash about cost all the time, particularly with respect to the alleged cost of nuclear energy, because investments in nuclear energy will accrue benefits to future generations and not the assholes whining about pennies in their pockets now. Notably, the fossil fuel sales people and sales bots around here embrace antinuke rhetoric enthusiastically, which is unsurprising, because, well, the reason they greenwash fossil fuels is to sell them, not because its hard to sell fossil fuels, but because they want to extend sales indefinitely.

The argument these people make is that nuclear energy is "too expensive" but climate change isn't "too expensive."

In the State of New York, led by the actor Mark Ruffalo, whose environmental science qualifications seem to include being filmed having simulated (or perhaps real) sex with the actress Emma Stone, this decision to indicate that climate change isn't "too expensive" or "too dangerous" but nuclear power is "too dangerous" and "too expensive" has been described in the newspaper The Guardian, hardly a source of "right wing talking points."

A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up.

One would need an education in a subject other than acting in soft porn films to know what "green" means, that it might have something to do with climate change which is a serious matter, something deaths from radiation at Indian Point never was.

In defense of China, and its efforts to address climate change, I note that China has the best operating nuclear power plant construction infrastructure in place right now, and while it is squandering money, vast sums, on so called "renewable energy" it is also building nuclear plants at a pace not seen anywhere on Earth since the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and France in the 1980's. China will surpass France as one of the largest producers of nuclear power in short order, and in slightly longer order, the United States, still the world's leader in nuclear power production, owing to a scientific, engineering, and industrial infrastructure that built nuclear power plants nearly half a century ago, leaving a gift to our generation.

I note that making hydrogen from nuclear electricity is just as wasteful as making it from any form of electricity, as the cited EST article points out. One hears of high "faradaic efficiencies" but the more important "thermodynamic efficiency" is often buried in texts and requires calculation from the over voltages. (It isn't pretty.)

Like all "hydrogen will save us" marketing that is in effect the marketing of dangerous fossil fuels, there's all kinds of soothsaying in the paper cited at the outset about what "could" be done with hydrogen to address the appalling effort to accelerate the destruction of the planetary atmosphere that existing hydrogen technology involves everywhere on the planet. That appalling effort is succeeding spectacularly since the acceleration is underway, the first derivative, second derivative and third derivative with respect to time of carbon dioxide accumulations in the planetary atmosphere are all positive. (When I integrate the second derivative twice to obtain a crude quadratic, substitute the boundary conditions represented by the present data, and solve for 500 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, it seems, by this crude model, we'll hit that figure around 2046.)

One of the appalling ideas advanced (in the soothsaying part) in this otherwise interesting paper describing current reality is to use existing gas pipelines as hydrogen pipe lines from some magical so called "renewable energy" nirvana off in some Chinese wilderness somewhere. I would suggest that the people writing this sort of thing take an introductory course in metallurgy to learn what the term "hydrogen embrittlement" means.

Anyway...

If you're a Christian who embraces the phenomenological bit about people rising from the dead, have a very happy Easter. I'm not sure a stable planet can be resurrected, but have a happy holiday anyway irrespective of what I think.

[Think. Again.]

1. Yes, we are being way too slow to transition away...

...from fossil fuel generated electricity, and so we are still creating H2 using CO2 emitted sources.

As the transition develops, despite the pushback from the fossil fuel industry's attempts at misinformation, we will need all non-CO2 sources of both generation and storage to power our society.

To achieve that necessary goal, the only thing we can do now is to keep pushing forward hard with every aspect of the needed non-CO2 energy industry including building out as many H2 facilities as we can, as quickly as we can.

There is no other option.

[CoopersDad]

2. "What if" question here:

I'm a fan of your posts, by the way.

Assuming a freeze on growth in population and energy use, and the opportunity to shift completely away from fossil fuels as an energy source (we can leave out uses for products, plastics, lubricants, etc. for the moment)...

Part 1:
Is there a positive role hydrogen can play as an energy carrier, and if so where is it best applied strategically? Transport? Storage?

Part 2:
Assuming there is a role, what are the best technologies to use to create it, wind/solar/nuclear/other, or a mix?

We see significant investments in hydrogen transit where I live, I've worked with some of the main players just because I'm a proponent of rail transit and public transit. Santa Cruz County is slated to get 58 hydrogen buses and the Valley Link rail system between Tracy and the Dublin Pleasanton BART station will use hydrogen fuel generated at a plant in Tracy, according to plans.

https://www.masstransitmag.com/rail/press-release/21283961/tri-valley-san-joaquin-valley-regional-rail-authority-valley-link-valley-link-purchases-property-for-hydrogen-production-facility

[NNadir]

3. Hydrogen has horrible physical properties and all efforts to ignore these because the combustion product...

...is nominally water are absurd.

Among the horrible physical properties are these: The second lowest critical temperature (33K) of any gas except helium, incompatibility with many metals, an extremely low viscosity, a positive Joule-Thompson coefficient over parts of the temperature range, a trivial heat of vaporization, and low explosive limits, and very poor thermodynamics represented by the environmental cost of production.

The popularity of the hydrogen fantasy, which is well over a half a century old, is a dangerous affectation, wasteful exercise that has been sold to the public at the expense of humanity.

To my way of thinking, it's a disgusting shell game being sold by fossil fuel interests to divert attention from the realities of their industry.

Hydrogen is a valuable captive commodity; it is essential for the world's food supply when used in the Haber-Bosch process to manufacture ammonia, and important in many industrial processes, including, interestingly, oil refining to make gasoline. In theory it can be utilized to make any component of petroleum using the Fischer-Tropsch process which was industrialized by two very awful countries, Nazi Germany and Apartheid era South Africa using hydrogen generated by the steam reforming of coal.

It can also be used to make relatively clean fuels, methanol and the wonder fuel DME (dimethyl ether) which is an easily liquified fuel that can displace all petroleum fuels, dangerous natural gas, and LPG, propane and, in fact, many refrigerants. (It is chiefly manufactured as a propellant in spray cans to displace CFCs.) The hydrogenation of CO₂ to make DME would in theory allow for an industrial closed carbon cycle, the thermodynamics of direct air capture of CO₂ notwithstanding.

The only sensible and sustainable way to make hydrogen cleanly is by thermochemical hydrogen cycles such as (my favorite as it's amenable to flow chemistry) the SI cycle. A lot of bullshit is handed out about these kinds of thermochemical processes using solar thermal energy, which is unsustainable, but I frequently read these papers because they are easily modified for a nuclear setting. A nuclear setting would allow for process intensification by which high thermodynamic efficiencies may be obtained, raising the thermodynamic efficiency of nuclear plants, now generally on the order of 33% for Rankine plants and only slightly better for Brayton plants, to levels that I crudely calculate to exceed 70%, even approaching 80%.

Hydrogen has no valid use in any consumer setting, and again, to make the point clearly, pushing it is a shell game to do what so called "renewable energy" is doing, to divert attention from the use of dangerous fossil fuels through diversionary advertising coupled with unconscionable soothsaying that is worthy of cheap tarot card readers working at the Jersey shore, but an expensive waste for all humanity, and indeed, all living things.

What's happening in Santa Cruz with respect to hydrogen buses, in a State wholly dependent on dangerous natural gas, with its last nuclear plant in danger of being shut in a paean to ignorance, is a disgrace. It is an effort to portray doing nothing other than making things worse as doing something positive, in short promoting a lie. It's garbage thinking, shallow and dishonest.

[CoopersDad]

4. Slowly but surely...

This state is coming around to the idiocy of shutting down Diablo.

Jimmy Panetta is on board, I'm pretty sure Assemblymember Addis is, as well.

I'm not sure about John Laird yet because so much of his constituency is "anything but nuclear".

Since you've listed one sensible way to produce hydrogen, I wonder if you think nuclear hydrogen production, maybe locally using SMRs, would be something worth promoting.

Thank you.

[NNadir]

5. My son is working on 3D printable materials for SMRs, and I'm inclined to support the concept.

The real issue is heat transfer at very high temperatures, a topic on which I try to challenge him to rise higher, to make an unintentional pun.

The key to the problem to my mind is in fact my son's area of expertise, materials science, specifically nuclear materials, designed for a combinatorial optimization of strength, temperature and corrosion resistance under challenging conditions, for example, neutron and other particle bombardment.

I believe that great things are possible in this era, and he challenges me to suggest why it may be so while grounding me in concepts outlining the difficulties.

I am in favor of a concept originally suggested by the model for Dr. Strangelove, Edwin Teller, so well portrayed in the movie "Oppenheimer," the breed and burn concept, further advanced by Hiroshi Sekimoto, the Japanese nuclear scientist as the "Candle reactor" and rebranded by Terrapower as a "Traveling Wave" reactor.

In this design, the reactor would burn through its core to a stop point, whereupon it might be replaced in the energy conversion device in the way light bulbs were or are changed.

At very high temperatures, "process intensification," the use of the "waste" heat from one process to drive another increases thermodynamic efficiency and lowers cost, making energy accessible to those who lack it, and allowing us to increase the use of energy for now inaccessible tasks, such as restoring the Earth's atmosphere and oceans to healthy and sustainable levels.

By the way, I didn't know that Leon Panetta's son is in Congress, following in his father's august footsteps.

I recently saw Leon himself at a live event, a "conversation" held at Lehigh University, (with the University President) whereupon he offered meaningful musings on responsibility in Government, reflecting on his own time in Congress and in the administrations in which he served, the Clinton and Obama administrations. He spoke for the importance of human decency and sanity among leaders even those who disagree.

His mind was so clear in the conversation that I had no idea that he is in his mid eighties; he certainly didn't look it. He would have been a fine President himself, and I trust that his son, who sounds sensible from your description, will reflect the values his father held, and indeed, still holds.

[CoopersDad]

6. Thanks for the detailed information!

Last July my wife and I had lunch with Congressman Panetta, a silent auction prize but we connect frequently.
He asked my opinion about nuclear energy, Diablo is just outside of his district, but he still asked if I thought SMRs were a good idea and ready for prime time. I said SMRs make sense, small and distributed, lower risk, etc., and are a maturing technology but couldn't name any operational sites.
I'm friends with Assemblymember Addis and live in her district and Diablo is in her district as well as a planned grid-scale battery facility to coordinate, eventually, with a Morro Bay offshore wind project, for better or worse.

Here in Santa Cruz County nuclear is still a shocking concept but becoming less so, I think.

Thanks again for your high quality discussions.

[NNadir]

7. You're welcome. To be clear though, grid scale batteries disgust me, particularly on fossil fuel dependent...

...grids, which, in fact, California is.