by guest blogger Stan Thompson
updated 12/21/2020
In the late 1800s Nikola Tesla took Thomas Edison’s DC and alternated the polarity back and forth so that its voltage could be stepped up by a transformer and hauled much further by overcoming electrical resistance. Way off in the distance, at the user end, another transformer stepped it back down to a safer voltage and higher current to light places and turn stuff.
Fast forward to today and thousands of scientists, engineers and captains of industry are taking DC and AC and stepping it over to hydrogen: “HC.” Hydrogen is electric energy relaxed. Make it when you’ve got some wind, sun or hydro; use it when you need some electricity. In between, pipe it, tank it and haul it. At the user end HC’s stepped over to boutique electric power at pretty much any voltage or current or frequency that’s needed.
Tesla’s AC gave the utility of distance to electric energy. Hydrogen “HC” gives electricity the utility of spacetime.
Hydrogen, almost coincidentally, is a portal—a shared element associating two vastly dissimilar worlds.
It’s true that electrochemistry bleeds-off a lot more loss that an copper extension cord. But try to power a ship or a plane or a semi tractors with a cable! You can’t. That’s the trade-off and it’s hydrogen’s big draw.
Hydrogen’s killer aptitude is that it can be simultaneously stored and transported in pipes, moving intermittent renewable energy in spacetime.
Take the Smart Grid—able to precisely match supply with demand—and add hydrogen: you’ve got the Soft Grid, where exactness just doesn’t matter so much. Want to use solar at midnight? Want to use hydro in a dry spell? Wind in a calm? And do all this without tons of costly, fading batteries with a complex life cycle? It’s a pipe dream—in the best sense—and it’s why hydrogen is surging back.
Hydrogen today is the portal between two worlds. One—the world of fuel extraction—is characterized by energy sources that are eventually depleted; by introducing residues like coal ash, CO2 and toxic elements which must be managed; and by geopolitical baggage begetting control of extractible assets to tyrants, suppressing liberty and and triggering wars to capture neighboring countries’ extracted local assets.
On the new side of the H2 portal emerges the world of synthesis—materials drawn from the ambient environment, which includes energy-intensive perpetual recycling, air and water. Material extraction from the earth will always continue as needed—but, gradually, that becomes the last, not the first, sourcing recourse.
Pundits make it sound as though the two worlds straddling the hydrogen portal will haggle over price in some eternal bazaar. That’s just wrong. At present the two eras do overlap—a transient externality which draws far too much pundit attention. The relationship between the two is not “cheap vs. costly” but rather “before vs. after.” Price is a trend, not a fixed parameter. But the fact of eventual depletion is a fixed reality.
Pundits are constantly observing, sagely, that “We’ve seen this hydrogen bubble before.” And we have. Earlier, its development was arrested because pundits propagated an error. Their trope was “Hydrogen is the car tech of the future…and always will be.” But, absent government support, no synthesis infrastructure can be funded without a pre-existing fleet of existing consumer vehicles to buy hydrogen from it. Conversely, nobody’s going to buy H2 cars until there’s a ubiquitous support infrastructure to keep them running.
For over a decade, we quarreled pointlessly about this chicken vs. egg paradox. All this time we could have been dining on heavy H2 mobility “steak” (or soy bean cake, if that offends).
The introduction paradox is not special to hydrogen. The learning model was diesel cars.
Truck stops nurtured early adopters until pump island justification numbers were reached and the diesel car market took off.
Hydrogen will be the same. The economics are obvious but publications which buy articles from pundits don’t sell ads to train, truck, ship and airplane builders. They do, however, sell a lot of car ads. For over ten years this kept the “H2 always ten years later” myths in circulation and the present hydrogen transition avalanche in limbo.
Today truck builders Azetec, Cummins, Daimler/Freightliner, Honda/Isuzu, Hino/Toyota, Hyundai, Hyzon, Iveca, Kenworth, Nikola, PACCAR, Peterbuilt and Mack/Volvo have announced hydrogen trucks. Per Haley Zaremba in Oil Price online (10/24/2020), “The U.S. Is Backing Hydrogen Trucks With A New $100 million Initiative.” They are doomed, of course, because a Bloomberg Opinion pundit says “The case for hydrogen trucks is also weak” and quotes another Bloomberg source as believing “…hydrogen doesn’t even make sense for trains.” (This news will disappoint France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Sweden, who want all diesel trains gone in fifteen years, as well as several other countries.)
Per Russ Mitchell in the L.A. Times “…the [California Air Resources] board ordered manufacturers of medium-duty and heavy-duty commercial trucks to begin selling zero-emission versions in 2024, with 100,000 sold in California by 2030 and 300,000 by 2035.”
Pundits have a mutual pact to banish among of their number who write a piece that doesn’t acknowledge “the abundance of hydrogen.” But since exactly as much water must be released by fuel cells as is electrolyzed, none at all is consumed. That’s like celebrating the market future of cell phones because the desert is full of silicone sand.
The H2 bubble-mongers are the weirdest of all. Do the dimmest among them really believe that carbon might actually come back?
Carbon, Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa are gone. Get over it.
Sages quip that “You have to put in a huge amount of electric power to get green hydrogen out.” Do they think more power comes out of any electrical system than goes in, including a copper extension cord?
What is the incremental cost differential between one gigapuff and two gigagpuffs of wind spinning a turbine? Capital and R&D make the earliest hydrogen pricey. But wind as sun are free so, as the gear that makes then into electricity scales up, scale economics will drive the price down and down.
Short of a cataclysmic war, nothing is going to push civilization back through the hydrogen portal into the extraction era. As awful as CO2 emissions are, leaking gas wells may be a worse GHG problem. If a cheap, totally sufficient CO2 sequestration process appeared tomorrow, the extraction-synthesis transition wouldn’t blink, anymore than steam locomotives would reappear. The paradigm shifted years ago.
While substances won’t shape the future, the future has already begun to shape substances in important green ways. It’s actually the never-to-be-mentioned fertilizer production which consumes that “96% brown” fraction that the hydrogen police tout ad nauseam as a reason to scorn the present transition.
But as you read this, a vast amount of capital and smarts is being poured into zero-carbon fertilizer plants in Scandinavia, Spain and Australia. They will use wind- and sun-derived hydrogen, in place of “brown” natural gas. Making matter with energy is not just the province of particle colliders!
BNSF built the first hydrogen locomotive in 2008. That same year, Boeing flew the first manned hydrogen plane and Iceland launched their first hydrogen ship. The technology worked; the economics would have too; but uninformed punditry and advertising dynamics proved more powerful than science, technology, commerce and environmental needs combined.
By entangling extraction with the electric transmission message, pundits may slow—but will not stop—the present H2 transition this time.
H2 has lighted a spacetime path for intermittent renewable energy into the energy marketplace. It will only grow wider with use.
Tags: hydrogen pundits, most abundant element, oceans full of hydrogen, perpetual recycling, pundits, spacetime, ten years in the future
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