Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
i think that business logic goes against your first point. spatially: if you have source of cheap energy and want to make money out of it, instead of making little money (by making fuel) why not make more money? (by setting there energy intensive manufacture) this seems to be current meta, with places like iceland and norway making aluminum and nitrogen fertilizers respectively. this can continue in other places and maybe extended to some other industries.
temporally (because there are also sunny and windy days when regular people won’t consume all energy): this scheme requires cheap electricity, which is needed for cheap hydrogen. this requires massive renewables buildout, which means electricity is cheap for regular people, which means that every gas stove/heater and car will get replaced with electric ones, both residential and maybe perhaps faster for industrial users (more available loans). this means you have to reinforce transmission grid anyway. this also means cheap hydrogen, and because main input to its production is electricity, it makes more sense to use electricity when it’s cheap. this means it’s naturally suited to suck up all excess generation (both daily and seasonal), and also if electricity production is seasonal then so should be price of hydrogen. if price of electricity or hydrogen varies, then some industries can suck it up at greater rates when it’s cheap. i’m thinking here of aluminum smelting (electricity input, daily variation, already done), or ammonia synthesis, or direct reduced iron smelting. i bet there’s more. the point is, maybe you get to avoid storing hydrogen to some degree, because you can effectively store energy in finished or semi-finished goods. you can, for example, make some direct reduced iron and just store it when hydrogen is available, and then smelt it into steel in arc furnace when it’s not. fertilizers are already sold in annual cycle and stored long term, and anyway ammonia is much easier to store than hydrogen. how it plays out will depend on energy/hydrogen costs vs storage costs vs capex for overcapacity costs. all together, i think this means that because of large amount of generation needed, you don’t actually need to store energy this way at all, because when generation is low then electrolyzers turn off, and something will work at all times, probably. when you’re able to do that, you won’t need to
in terms of scale, first your lunch is eaten by EVs of various shapes, then by use of hydrogen for transportation (rocketry fits there), then you have to compete with biofuels (jet engine will take anything that burns without ash and can be pumped). then some of methanol will be used for fuel first, because it just works in engines and fuel cells, and it’s a step before hydrocarbon synthesis. only then synthetic petroleum makes sense, this basically leaves some aviation (that won’t use methanol) and military uses
Because now you have to establish a complex supply chain and potentially large worker base in a place that’s potentially quite inconvenient for both, instead of a much simpler supply chain and smaller workforce.
Well, not necessarily. Because as I said, there are places which are very sunny and/or windy which are also a long way away from the people and industries which would like to consume the power that could be produced there.
Long distance power transmission is an very expensive infrastructure to build, and unless you’re building even more expensive modern HVCD systems you can get significant transmissions losses to the point where your distant renewables aren’t really much good. If you can convert the power to something transportable, either on-site or nearby, then you can avoid the transmission losses and giant infrastructure projects.
Much as I do not like the oil industry, there is a significant amount of equipment and expertise out there for storing, transporting and converting flavours of hydrocarbons into other flavours. Some use could be made of it.
I’m not so sure about that. They’re a whole ecological catastrophe in and of themselves, and another cash crop that rich nations can extract from the poorer ones, ultimately to everyone’s detriment. They’re also going to be feeling the squeeze from climate change which is going to make them harder to grow economically as time goes on.
There might be a breakthrough ethanol-brewing algae which might suddenly change everything, but I don’t anyone has the bioengineering chops for that yet.
I strongly feel that hydrogen is even more of a dead-end technology than these e-fuels. It is a right pain to store and transport and has rubbish energy density. There’s no future in the hydrogen economy. I’d bet we’re more likely to jump to artificial photosynthesis and fancy fuel cells than we are to see any substantial hydrogen infrastructure.
i’m not sure why you think that it is the case. if you want to make aluminum, you just need a ship to come in and pile up alumina, then take up piled up aluminum. the process is decently automated these days and you avoid making hydrogen. if you want to make ammonia, then all you need is hydrogen that you use as soon as it’s made and nitrogen which is separated from air on demand. nitrogen fertilizers account for something like 2% of global primary energy use so it’s probably decently scalable. then you can ship out liquid pressurized ammonia, or convert it to ammonium nitrate which again you can pile up*. however with methanol you run into a Problem, because you need carbon dioxide, which means that you have to ship it from somewhere or capture in a massive installation. this immediately makes logistics of this entire enterprise harder. if you want to convert methanol to hydrocarbons then it takes some extra energy for little benefit (2x energy density) and some losses. to some degree, maybe it will make sense, but maybe it’ll be easier to just build up renewables where people already live
in that scenario biofuels get to serve much smaller segment than today in the first place so maybe it’s less of a problem. there are also things like biogas
and you base that on what exactly other than vibes? there are applications where you need hydrogen directly as a reagent like ammonia synthesis, and these are probably most adaptable to this approach. methane is also proper PITA in terms of storage, yet we store it anyway because it’s cheap as a fuel. if hydrogen is cheaper than that, then it will be used where applicable. it’s easier to transport coal than electricity but not lignite; i don’t know how it will play out with hydrogen, but either way you can imagine a situation where hydrogen is generated onsite, or within pipeline distance, and used immediately or maybe with some storage worth hours to days. this fits iron smelting (DRI) nicely, today the fuel used for it is methane because it’s cheapest (process common in India). if hydrogen is cheaper than that, it will be used instead. other than that, applications where high heat is needed and where no electric heating can be used would be another use of hydrogen, like glassmaking and metal objects manufacture. hydrogen might be not disastrously bad option as fuel for transportation, because every step in manufacturing other fuels introduces losses; there are other tradeoffs
what do you want to fuel these fuel cells with? hydrogen is simplest option and most efficient (60% roundtrip efficiency or so). artificial photosynthesis is not a thing currently and strictly worse than combination of any energy source + conventional electrolyzer, because you have to combine not within single device but within single material something that will work as both. this also is only applicable to solar, not to wind or nuclear. some of these direct light to hydrogen schemes also only use UV only, and hydrogen is mixed with oxygen which is suboptimal, not to mention that main output of that work seems to be grant applications, while both electrolyzers and solar panels or wind turbines are available today, in bulk, straight from factory, and even more efficiently in decarbonization terms, these can replace coal-based electricity generation
regardless, main value of electrofuels today is in propaganda
* regular process starting from gas has carbon dioxide as a byproduct, so urea is another option, but with hydrogen it would have to be provided. it’s more expensive even today. maybe liquefied gas carrier could provide carbon dioxide and load ammonia on return leg, with some other dry cargo ship picking up that urea at some other time