A Hydrogen Perpetual Motion Machine.

[NNadir]

Here's a fun paper: Enhanced CH4 Production from CO2 Hydrogenation on γ-AlOOH-Supported Cobalt Catalyst with Abundant Surface Coordination Unsaturated Oxygen Atoms Hongmin Ma, Yiyi Zhao, Sha Li, Jiajun Zheng, Peng Liu, Yu-Long Men, Xiaoliang Yan, and Yun-Xiang Pan Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (41), 17512-17520.

I'm not even going to bother with the text, but merely comment on the title.

The title refers to making methane from CO₂ and hydrogen.

Here's the problem: Most of the hydrogen on this planet is currently made from the steam reforming of dangerous natural gas, which is, of course, mostly methane.

This process is therefore a perpetual motion machine, methane makes hydrogen by steam reforming (dumping CO₂ into the planetary atmosphere, thereby killing it), and then according to the paper, CO₂ is hydrogenated to make methane.



The caption:

Figure 1. Global current sources of H2 production (a), and H2 consumption sectors (b).

Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]

Of course, this will not work in the production of energy, exergy is destroyed in the process, perpetual machines do not, and never will, exist.

Why then has a prominent journal published this work? The reason is that in China, as opposed to the rest of the world, makes hydrogen not from natural gas, of which it has only limited supplies. It makes it by the steam reforming of coal. The process is designed to make natural gas from coal because of the utility of gaseous methane as opposed to coal which must be transported as a solid.

Like all modern applications of hydrogen, this is an extremely dirty process, of course, if offering some convenience in shipment.

Exergy is destroyed in this process, and the atmosphere is dirtied. One should note that methane in terms of convenience of use, is vastly superior to hydrogen, since hydrogen is incompatible with many metals, including iron alloys, and methane has a much higher critical temperature than hydrogen and while it is thermodynamically problematic to liquify methane, the situation is far worse for hydrogen.

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

Have a nice Sunday.

[marble falls]

1. There are very few processes that come to a dead end. Unintended/unforseen consequences is the sea we swim in.

[NNadir]

3. Unfortunately, the hydrogen scam is being sold, widely, as "green" and sustainable. It is no such thing. It's filthy.

[marble falls]

4. No one ever sees a downside to grasping at straws to eliminate the net zero conclussion at the runaway use of energy ...

... until it's at the brink of too late.

Salvation will only come with a huge step back in the American lifestyle. I'm no Luddite, but I see more and more problem bearing solutions.

[hunter]

9. Why do you say it would be "huge step back in the American lifestyle?"

Most proposals to reduce the environmental footprint of humans are huge steps forward and will improve the lives of everyone in terms of health and happiness.

Many environmentally destructive things that supposedly makes us happy (according to the smiling faces on television) are actually great sources of misery to many people.

Automobiles are no source of happiness for people who can't really afford to keep them in good repair but need them to work. They are no source of happiness when people killed or maimed in automobile accidents. If we dismantle our automobile culture by rebuilding our cities to make car ownership unnecessary people might be happier and healthier. That would be a step forward, not a step back.

Having more children than one can comfortably support is often a source of great misery. If birth control and realistic sex education is readily available to all then people might be healthier and happier and human population growth halted. That's a step forward, not back.

Factory farm meat and dairy production is bad for the environment, bad for the people who work in that industry, and worse for the animals...

Etc.. I can easily go on.

[marble falls]

11. Sounds like you already know the answer to your question. We need a huge step back in the American lifestyle ...

... we over consume energy and resources in an extraordinarily lopsided and more and more unsustainable fashion.

[hunter]

12. I still don't see what you mean by "step back."

Quitting a bad habit like smoking would be a "step forward" to a healthier life.

Taking up smoking again, after quitting, would be a "step back."

Today is not any kind of golden age and yesterday was only worse. There is no golden age of humanity, even when earth's human population was measured in the millions.

When I was a kid my grandma would drive me and my siblings around Los Angeles in her Cadillac. That car got terrible gas mileage and had no smog control systems. The gasoline sold then contained toxic lead that damaged people's brains and nervous systems. The air in the city was often brown and obviously poisonous, it burned your eyes, throat, and lungs. Does anyone want to "step back" to that?

Hydrogen was being proposed as a solution to the smog problem in the 'sixties. It was bullshit then as it is now. Cleaning up one place, let's say Los Angeles or Beijing, by sacrificing another place, the Mojave or Mongolian deserts, is not a step forward, it's a step back.

[Think. Again.]

2. I completely agree that we need to build out Green Hydrogen as much and as quickly as possible.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Culprit here is not your nemesis H2, but rather coal and methane

Coal sourcing is de-sequestration.

Methane is a "greenhouse gas" dozens of times more potent than CO2.

[NNadir]

6. My point is that hydrogen is a scam designed to greenwash fossil fuels. Mechanistic details are trivial.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. The hydrogen here is not greenwashing. As an intermediate, net production is zero. . . . . nt

[NNadir]

8. You're entitled to your own wrong opinion.

I invite you to look at the first sentence in the abstract, which is publicly available.

[Think. Again.]

10. Yes, we need to build out GREEN Hydrogen which is made and used without any CO2 emissions.

[hunter]

13. China is envious of the U.S.A. natural gas pipeline network.

Lacking the natural gas resources the U.S.A. has, China would like to synthesize gas from coal in Inner Mongolia (which is part of China, not the nation of Mongolia) for transport to major cities across China.

Inner Mongolia has about a quarter of the world's known coal reserves and would become, by analogy, China's Texas in terms of gas production.

This would also leave most of the pollution in Inner Mongolia away from the Chinese elite in other places, except for the greenhouse gasses which everyone on earth will suffer.

If we humans had any common sense we would quit fossil fuels entirely. Unlike the U.S.A., China is enthusiastically building nuclear power plants which are the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels.

U.S.A. natural gas, from Wikipedia:

[NNadir]

14. It would be (very slightly) less odious if instead of methane, they chose DME. (They have industrial DME plants.)

At least that would be less of a greenhouse gas threat.

DME has an atmospheric half life of about 5 days.

Interestingly the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to make methanol, DME, and/or methane is exothermic, even if the entropy may be assumed to slightly negative as five gas molecules are reduced to three gas molecules in the methane case, nine gas molecules to seven in the DME case. If the generated heat is not recovered in some way, the exergy loss is increased, although I often reflect on using these reactions to drive heat engines, thus recovering exergy.

The point is, all the fossil fuel marketing going on here rebranding those fuels as "hydrogen" notwithstanding, all this will only make the climate disaster worse, faster.

[OKIsItJustMe]

15. We mock what we cannot use a rational argument against

Obviously no one would suggest using hydrogen from methane to make methane. Well, except you of course.