Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
for peaker plants i’ve always assumed we’d do fuel cells. just plumbing it in to existing gas infra (aka just fucking boiling water again) seems like it doesn’t really solve the problem.
but yeah for applications that require heat rather than electricity it’s a good idea. i think having generators on site is probably the more likely solution there.
i still find it strange to build out a technology with such a low efficiency. but with CHP plants it could probably be more economical.
Thing about hydrogen efficiency is that we use the wrong reference.
It’s not that hydrogen is that inefficient. Big parts of the losses happen when burning it to produce electricity, exactly as with oil, gas or coal. It only is low efficiency when compared to batteries filled with green electricity from solar, wind an hydro (the only production methods that are not a rather primitve “boil water and run a turbine”).
Batteries and electrification in general are just so much better.
But if your requirement is burning gas for process heat in industries where electrification doesn’t work and as peaking power plants to meet demand spikes the alternative would be natural gas (or sometimes coal) with also huge losses from production to transport to getting burned for heat.
for peaker plants i’ve always assumed we’d do fuel cells. just plumbing it in to existing gas infra (aka just fucking boiling water again) seems like it doesn’t really solve the problem.
but yeah for applications that require heat rather than electricity it’s a good idea. i think having generators on site is probably the more likely solution there.