Skoltech researchers have found a way to produce hydrogen from natural gas with 45% efficiency right in the gas field by injecting steam and a catalyst into a well and adding oxygen to ignite the gas. Catalyst-assisted combustion produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, from which the latter can be easily extracted. This technology will help accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to clean hydrogen power. The study was published in Fuel.
Fuck hydrogen. Its a fake green product so oil companies can transition as slow as they want while still keeping their strangle hold on our society.
It depends a lot on where the hydrogen is sourced from. Hydrogen that is generated from electrolyzers using renewable power is completely green (and funny enough, called Green Hydrogen), and is a good way to store excess energy from solar and wind.
Oil companies however want to market hydrogen from drilling and refining, which is dirty as hell.
It’s an important differentiation to make though. Hydrogen is not inherently bad and will have plenty of green applications. We just have to make sure it’s coming from the right places.
Is it really that good of a storage method, though? The round-trip efficiency is quite bad when compared to other methods of storage.
We’ll need it anyway to produce existing chemical materials sustainably. It may not be the best energy carrier nor most efficient, but it shines in specific applications. Vehicles are a promising example.
Acording to this paper/article, its better than technologies such as batteries, but the study isn’t the most comprehensive and doesn’t consider things like pump hydro.
“That good of a storage method” in terms of what, arbitrage? We should be producing hydrogen for the practical and environmental benefits of having emissions-free vehicle fuel (that avoids the problems of battery production and disposal), steel, and fertilizer.
I don’t see any good reason why the merits of hydrogen for vehicle fuel would be any better than production and disposal of batteries. The other cases I agree that hydrogen will have a useful niche.
This article is a little old, but it explains the problems on the disposal side pretty well. This one covers the production side. Hydrogen powered vehicles avoid all that.
I disagree. We need hydrogen for GHG-free fertilizer and steel production and it’s the superior choice for powering vehicles. Regardless, this research is interesting because it could help solve the natural gas problem.
Hydrogen from gas fields is anything but GHG-free!
That’s why processes that capture or avoid the GHG component of hydrogen production are worth investigating.
Ok, but what about the ecosystems dependent on that chemical energy staying underground?
Are you implying that there are subterranean ecosystems somehow dependent on natural gas deposits that are harmed by the exploitation of these resources?
Yes.
These ecosystems are well studied.
This paper from the oil industry opens with the sentence “Methane-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) have long been recognized as an important bioindicator for oil and gas exploration.” We literally look for these ecosystems to know where to extract their food.
This isn’t controversial in the slightest. We are destroying unique ecosystems with every barrel we extract.
That’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I guess these specific bacterial ecosystems would suffer, so to speak. Perhaps there should be rules to prevent oil and gas deposits from being completely depleted, or some could be set aside as nature preserves.
Massive green hydrogen plants running on renewables now being built in Australia but hey keep being part of the problem instead of the solution.