There is hope yet!

and claims to the contrary

https://www.sustainabletruckvan.com/quantron-hydrogen-refueling-station-augsburg/

Emphasis added

Edited to add the direct-to-Quantron links and the direct from Quantron excerpt:

https://www.quantron.net/en/

https://www.quantron.net/en/q-news/press-releases/
https://www.quantron.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/EN-PM-H2-filling-station-GVZ.docx

..."renewable energy." There isn't someone checking electrons to show that they're sorted according to the source propelling them. People are full of shit if they think the extra money they pay is really for 100% renewable energy; it's all about often dishonest accounting tricks about "offsets" and other crap.

So called "100% renewable energy" electricity cannot be audited, and thus there is no definitive way to address whether it's a lie.

Similarly, hydrogen molecules do not come labeled with certificates of origin.

Every damned paper one opens - and there are oodles and oodles of them - that is remotely honest, begins with a statement that the overwhelming bulk of the world's hydrogen is produced using steam reforming of fossil fuels. Then they proceed with but, in theory we could do x, or y, or z (where x, y, and z are claimed to be "green" usually). The italicized words in the last sentence are the operative words, whether it's steam reforming of biomass, or making electrolysis systems that aren't incredibly expensive and wasteful, high temperature electrolysis, blah, blah, blah, or even (the focus of my interest) thermochemical cycles.

Any commercial or Potemkin hydrogen system for hydrogen trucks, cars, buses, trains, blah, blah, blah, on this planet right now is either extremely wasteful, highly subsidized, or based on an outright lie, or all of the above.

I consider all of these hydrogen schemes as to be, like so called "renewable energy" itself, to be largely an effort to be a marketed diversion intended to support the use of fossil fuels, on which all of these schemes depend for viability. Nobody really lives in the dark when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

The International Journal of Hydrogen Energy has been in continuous publication since 1976, almost half a century. I've personally been to it many times over the years, in connection with my interest in thermochemical water and carbon dioxide splitting cycles driven by nuclear energy, although thermochemical cycle papers are often funded by pretending its all about solar thermal energy.

The "hydrogen economy" has not come, is not here, and won't come, frankly, because hydrogen has abysmal physical properties, the third lowest critical temperature of any known gas, extremely low viscosity, an insignificant heat of vaporazation, low explosive limits, incompatibility with many metal alloys, difficulties with detection, and, most critically, is produced entirely in every case via exergy destruction.

The latter problem might be addressed by process intensification using heat networks, and I'm beginning to see this discussed more and more in the literature, but basically all this horseshit about "green hydrogen" for now and for the foreseeable future, has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with marketing fossil fuels in a "bait and switch" fashion. Hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, and to the extent it is, albeit in tiny amounts, produced by electrolysis, it diverts already thermodynamically degraded electricity from use for better purposes.

I assembled some numbers from a sample of the literature and I often link to that post:

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

I then engage one of my favorite chants (which actually comes, with expansion, from the writings of Vaclav Smil): "Numbers don't lie. People lie, to themselves and each other, but numbers don't lie."

To be clear, I support nuclear energy because it's primary energy, and scalable pretty much infinitely, but I would never support using clean nuclear energy for an idiotic scheme to produce consumer hydrogen via electrolysis of nuclear electricity. If we must limit nuclear energy to electricity production (and there are lots of reasons we shouldn't) it would be far better to use that electricity to shut coal and gas power plants. Not doing so because we're electrolyzing water to make hydrogen is not merely stupid, it's obscene.

Thanks for your comment.

especially when people are selective in the numbers that bolster their ideology "numbers don't lie", while disparaging other numbers that don't fit their ideology (edit: or their pocketbook as you rightly point out in your response below /end edit).

On accounting, I'm sure a lot of claims aren't true. But at Northern State Power (now part of Xcel Energy) my office was next door to the superintendent whose section kept track of what utilities we bought from and sold to and even what power plants they came from when we had participation deals and jointly owned units. And they are audited by the power pools and of course the other utility(ies) on the other side of the transaction have to agree with the numbers. I never heard of problems or controversies in that system (edited to add -- at that time in the 1980's, this was before the time when the market marginal pricing bullshit began that Angwin Merklin's "Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid" discusses. A book by the way that you brought to our attention /end edit).

That said, I too am suspicious that if I sign up for the "wind source" program, that the electricity I get is going to come from an increment of wind energy production that would not have otherwise occurred.

And certainly, a lot of the "carbon offsets" one reads about are dubious if not completely laughable

...but usually it's not about ideology so much as about career advancement, and in the case of seeking grants especially, money.

That said, I am fully aware that it is possible to audit the source of electricity, and I often refer to these figures from reputable sources, in which I include the EIA, IEA, and reputable journals, based on consensus. If one spends a lot of time in the literature, and I do, consensus is easily identifiable.

I'm not going to credit that the numbers from the EIA and IEA are lies told for purposes of supporting ideology.

However, if the point you are making is that the wind is always blowing when the sun isn't shining, and their really are people paying for "100% renewable energy" and getting it without accounting tricks, I am not likely to believe you. Fossil fuels are burned to keep their lights on reliably and all the time; that is undeniable.

I think, in particular, to look at the results one might look at the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere, which is available at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory. There's a wonderful description on the site detailing the rigor of the analytical chemistry involved in it. As a scientist involved in analytical chemistry, I find it beautiful, and undeniably accurate. I note that the work always includes error bars as it should, but the numbers there surely don't lie.

Last edited Tue Oct 1, 2024, 09:46 PM - Edit history (1)

OK, don't. But if they use 100 MWH to produce the hydrogen and run the station, and produce 100 MWH or more from dedicated green(er) sources, then I'm going to give their claim a pass. At NSP we didn't consider it an "accounting trick" when we purchased power from a specific unit operated by another utility, nor did the other utility.

I realize those are big ifs. As I said before (some may have come in late edits like the thing about NSP's Windsource), I am dubious about any claim, but maybe if you write Quantron a letter showing that some must come from fossil fuel (and that isn't made up for by causing equal fossil fuel reduction at other times), they will concede that they made it all up.

I am also dubious about counterclaims, especially linkless assertions of opinion as fact (it's an accounting trick), especially ones along the lines of "since most ... therefore all".

...I really, really, really, really am being dishonest in believing that the majority of this bullshit is anything but "an accounting trick," i.e. that these people whose hydrogen station blew up after a week, thus eating all of the external costs to build it, have shut their electrolyzers during long periods of dunkelflaute, and rush out, when the wind comes up to try to get the electrolyzers to get past the thermodynamic and economic penalty of electrolyzer hysteresis for a few hours, I admit that I am as unable and unwilling to provide an answer these quibbles that any quibbler is likely to accept.

I'm certainly not going to waste time "auditing" anyone to find out if their Potemkin hydrogen plant for fueling 40 or 50 vehicles on a planet with hundreds of millions of vehicles is really run on so called "renewable energy," because long experience - which may go beyond knowing what the person in the next office over is doing - tells me it's a waste of time. I have, for myself at least, a fairly reliable sense of bullshit. Even were I interested in doing so, they may not have time to address me, given that they have to clean up their exploded facility.

The planet is burning, and all the quibbles, and all the half a century of pursuing the putative hydrogen economy, which I am unwilling to stop asserting will not come, consistent with the reality that it did not come and is not here, has not changed that fact: The planet is burning.

Thanks for your mildly interesting remarks, but they don't mean doodley squat to me and it's best, if not for anyone else, then for me, to drop discussion of them. I stand by my remarks, the hydrogen game, like the "renewable energy" game it pretends is its source, is useless, if one defines, as I do, being useful as doing something to address extreme global warming. I am unconvinced that it is anything but fossil fuel apologetics.

I've never said that, although my excerpts did use the word green without qualification, which is problematic.

ALL sources of energy, including nuclear, have some greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental costs over their life cycles.

I did use the word "green(er)" in #7 above, the " (er) " part is in acknowledgement that it's all relative, and nothing is completely green, even green paint.


I'm sure with that accident after just a week of operation, they aren't going to claim that they netted out carbon neutral or anything like that.

I read about gasoline station fires too. I haven't read that they are less common or more common than hydrogen station fires on a per station basis, so whatever.

Terrible about that electrolyzer hysteresis and all that (and the exergy and all that), but there's penalties and inefficiencies in gasoline production and usage too. Since nothing is 100% whole and pure, what I try to do is compare the full lifecycle of greenhouse gas emissions of gasoline fueling vehicles -- with hydrogen (produced from solar or wind, with payback of any fossil-fuel-produced electricity used) Dunkleflauts and nighttime's and all.


Well, you got me there. Yes, the time I spent getting my M.S.E.E. in the power engineering field, and professional experience in the generation and transmission planning and operational planning departments and working in and researching in that field for decades, admittedly just all boil down to knowing what's going on in the office next door.


I'll just respond that I'm not a fan of hydrogen, since I haven't said that before. I've posted about the negatives of hydrogen before. I just don't have patience with the argument that boils down to almost all hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, therefore it's all produced by fossil fuels, and anything that says otherwise is just an exercise in accounting tricks. That's not the argument of a scientist, but rather of a polemicist ideolog.

Interesting that everything you oppose, other than nuclear, seem to be very popular with the current administration. Here is just one example since the topic is hydrogen.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-releases-first-ever-national-clean-hydrogen-strategy-and

And I can't resist this example from our Secretary of Energy Granholm -
“When the winds of change blow, some build walls, others build windmills.”


So the solar and wind electricity produced hasn't reduced fossil fuel consumption at all? I explain here that any electricity that enters the grid causes dispatchable units (mostly fossil) to reduce their outputs. And that's not an accounting trick that I learned from the office next door, it is the reality of the situation, physics and all that. https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127175065

Citing a post from a hydrogen bot here is unimpressive, at least to me. (I have that particular bot in question on my ignore list, but the link circumvented it apparently.)

I haven't said that there aren't Potemkin quantities of hydrogen produced with electricity, although the use thereof is incredibly stupid from a thermodynamic sense. The issue is one of scale, and in particular, given the exergy destruction that generating hydrogen involves, it causes the use of more fossil fuel energy than it creates.

I have, once again, made a referenced effort to discuss the scale of the exergy destruction involved:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels. Given that electricity is, by its nature, thermodynamically degraded, with prodigious exergy destruction, the quantities produced using electricity are not worth even a mote of consideration. As a fuel - as opposed to a captive intermediate - it's more filthy than the fossil fuels whose exergy is destroyed in generating it.

Now...

Somehow, I think the data from the IEA's annual "World Energy Outlook," which always has optimistic "scenarios" about the outbreak of a "renewable energy" paradise that never arrives, is better than the bot's post claiming to speak for VP Harris, who all of us enthusiastically support, me especially because of the Biden administration's outstanding efforts to promote nuclear energy.

I have issues of the WEO in my files going back to 1995. Thirty or so years later, the scenarios from back then would be amusing, were the realities of the situation not so dire, so tragic.

I post the latest data tables often, year after year, usually in November, when the annual addition is released.

The numbers are here: 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Table A.1a on Page 264.



The 2024 Edition should come out soon and when it does, I'll be posting from its tables. Having followed these for decades, I'm not expecting any qualitative difference with the last 20 or so editions, the Covid era notwithstanding. Without a Covid or similar outbreak, I'm confident that the use of dangerous fossil fuels will rise again.

About the numbers in the table, at least those that are not soothsaying, but represent collected data:

I'm generally under the impression that 144 is bigger than 115, and that 187 is bigger than 173, and 170 is bigger than 153, the numbers corresponding to the primary energy produced by the three very dangerous fossil fuels. The unit of (primary) energy in these tables is the Exajoule. The entire solar industry, after trillions upon trillions of squandered money, is at 7 Exajoules, less than the growth of dangerous natural gas alone, less than the growth of coal as well. Note that hydrogen and batteries are not listed, as they shouldn't be, on the grounds that they are not primary energy. They waste energy. (It's called the 2nd law of thermodynamics.) The period of growth to which I refer is ten years, all during the often advertised growth of the magic "renewable energy" nirvana that has had no effect on the accelerating growth of concentrations of carbon dioxide, which can also be delineated by numbers, like these:

Week beginning on September 22, 2024: 421.71 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.28 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.47 ppm
Last updated: October 01, 2024

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

I don't know though, let me know, producing some credible evidence: Are these numbers lies?

If they aren't lies, may I note that when I joined DU in November of 2022, they were 49.03 ppm lower as of this writing? Should this reality fill me with joy and optimism?

Note the numbers here, fossil fuel waste concentrations in the atmosphere and energy consumption using dangerous fossil fuels have taken place in a time of endless crowing about the coming so called "renewable energy" nirvana, and the expenditure of trillion dollar sums on it.

But let's not kid ourselves. Any representation that the reactionary impulse to return to the early 19th century's dependence on the weather for energy supplies had nothing to do with addressing the extreme global heating now being observed. Recent claims to the contrary, that the trillion dollar useless solar and wind industry have something to do with climate change, are an afterthought. They were always about attacking nuclear energy, and as such, they worked to cause the growth of fossil fuels, as recorded in the numbers. Extreme global heating was not prevented. It is now a reality, one that didn't have to take place, but did, in my opinion because of appeals to fear and ignorance, coupled with rich dollops of wishful thinking and delusion.

The carbon intensity of antinuke Germany and nuclear powered France are available. Which numbers are higher? One can stick to an order of magnitude to describe the difference, unless, of course, one wishes to say the numbers are lies produced for an agenda.

I covered aspects of the rate of growth of concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in many posts about the numbers at the observatory, particularly in 2024, which is shaping up to be the worst year ever, hydrogen, solar, wind, batteries, blah, blah, blah, year after year, decade after decade.

A recent example in this series of posts is here:

The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update.

I compare these series posts to the tired clicking of a clock, as the numbers uniformly, without interruption, increase with time.

Or are these numbers lies for a political agenda as well? Really?

Now I suspect that you may be an energy engineer or involved in the power industry which doesn't make you infallible on the subject of power generation, just as my understanding of mass spectrometry make me infallible in interpreting the molecular biology evaluated with that tool. If you are such a person, can you tell me whether one lights a coal fire under a boiler that's been idled because the wind is blowing, whether the turbine turns instantaneously as soon as the fire is lit, or does it take time (and energy) to bring the steam pressure up, time during which the pollutants are released for no benefit? Does a shut combined cycle plant reach maximum efficiency in a few minutes, or does it take time for the steam pressure on the Rankine cycle portion of the plant to come up? Suppose these devices are started twice a day, or three times a day, according to the weather, clouds, rain or snow, or wind or because of demand because air conditioners need to save lives from the extreme heat fossil fuel waste is causing. Does this increase energy efficiency or does it cost it? What is the economic and material cost of keeping the O&M systems up to speed when they are not available for revenue generation because the wind is blowing on a sunny day?

Where on this planet has there been sustained so called "renewable energy" excesses that persisted long enough to make the thermodynamic nightmare of electrolysis economically or environmentally profitable?

I'd like to believe that I'm less credulous than people may wish to represent, although I'm unafraid to claim that credulity is hardly unknown here. Mostly, speaking only for myself, I attribute this disaster - and extreme global heating is nothing if not a disaster - to credulity, denial, and an unhealthy dose of wishful thinking.

I'm not sure that poster is a "bot", and calling a DU member a "bot" is well... but for sure the person strikes me as a hydrogen ideolog. I have mixed feelings about that poster.

If you are sure enough to accuse them of being a "bot", then there are ways to let your concern be known to where it can lead to bot removal.

I don't see anywhere in this thread where I cited a post from a hydrogen bot.


Good. I've used them in many of my posts. I find it particularly interesting that even if (a huge and extremely unlikely if) stated policies are actually followed,fossil fuel use would decline by only 11% by 2050 https://democraticunderground.com/1017845732#post1


No disagreement from me.


No, but I do know that correlation is not causation.

It looks to me like the main cause is that energy consumption is increasing (from 541 EJ in 2010 to 632 EJ in 2022 using the top line of the table), as one would expect from growing populations and some net economic development per capita. And not that "renewables" (or some subset like solar+wind) consume more energy than they produce. (I should subtract off the "non-energy use" numbers (25 in 2010 and 32 in 2022), but it would not qualitatively change the picture -- the corrected energy consumption numbers would be 541-25 to 632-32 = 516 to 600 EJ if I did that)

Some would argue the problem is that not enough wind and solar is being produced to keep up with the increase in energy consumption. And of course a lot more than that needs to be done to actually start bringing down the atmospheric CO2 levels.


As for "the bot's post claiming to speak for VP Harris", I couldn't find that one in recent threads.

Seems to me there's a lot more money and lip service being thrown at solar, wind, hydrogen, and batteries by this administration, than on nuclear ($8 billion or so for research on new reactor technologies and loans to help existing plants to restart or keep from shutting down, and some streamlining of regulations, and what else?). You've written in a number of posts that that's just shrewed, even Lincolnesque politics, for the administration to speak up for and spend money on so-called renewables. Myself I think that they think that all of the above are helpful in achieving climate goals, and that it is not just "politics" but what their staffs tell them.

If they really and truly believed that all the things you think are harmful -- solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen, EVs -- are truly harmful, but are ballyhooing them with money and words for altruistic political reasons (somehow) -- I'd at least expect a little bit of slowly preparing us for a transition away from those harmful things with at least some mention of some of the downsides of these technologies. But I don't hear even a little bit of that. It's more plausible that they truly believe that all of the above are helpful.


It also depends on the end use efficiency, e.g. fuel cells and electric motors are much more efficient at converting the energy in the hydrogen to energy applied to turning the wheels, than are internal combustion engines in turning the energy in the gasoline into wheel-turning energy. So I need to see the entire cradle to grave lifecycle of both the hydrogen pathway and gasoline pathway to make that determination. (I haven't made that determination one way or the other because I only see data and arguments that cover part of the life cycle)

By the way, we utility operators love storage, even though it wastes energy, because marginal system production costs are often 10X higher at peak times than at low load times. So from a cost standpoint, its a huge operating savings, but of course the cost of building the pumped storage or battery system or whatever has to be factored in on any decision to purchase and install these systems in the first place.

And the stored energy is used to keep from having to run our least efficient units, along with the costs dollar-wise and emissions-wise of their startup/shutdown cycle. (But the emissions and other negative externalities of building and at end-of-life must also be considered).


We have data on the minimum up and down times and ramp rates and shutdown and startup costs of units (both their fuel costs and O&M) as well as costs at various loading levels and we simulate the operation of the power system to determine the best course of action, We don't shut down units and start them up unless that's the economic path to follow.

My days at NSP were before there were signficant amounts of non-dispatchable energy resources, but from what I read, and would reasonably expect, they shut down the solar or wind resource if it's going to cost money overall and can't be economically sold.


I haven't seen the numbers on what it costs dollar-wise or environmentally to produce hydrogen with so-called renewable energy to fuel a fuel cell and produce wheel-turning energy vs. the thermodynamic nightmare of the internal combustion energy producing energy from gasoline, which in turn is produced at considerable dollar cost and expense and emissions from crude oil etc.

Like I say, I'm not a fan of hydrogen, I'm just sifting through what's being posted and what I find, to try to understand it all.