ADDENDUM : At 12:48 an animated graphic shows the cost of Hydrogen to be $3 per tonne. This is of course NOT CORRECT and does not match what Paul is talking about, which is a scenario where hydrogen costs $3 per kg, NOT per tonne. Apologies for this error.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. Their are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
You can run hydrogen through low-pressure pipes. Town gas was 50% hydrogen, but that was back in the day of metal popes, not polypropylene. All the gas pipes were changed to plastics, back in the 6ps, when we changed to methane. The burner jets were changed too. R
It's already outlawed in Victoria, Australia and will almost certainly be outlawed in the other states. I'd prefer not to go back to electric stoves, thank you. Hopefully it'll get canned.
in Germany, people still get mad and crazy because the very same thing was proposed by the Greens. Media successfully told the lie, that everybody had to tear out their old heating systems in favour of heat pumps. I had a big fight with my faily over this a few days ago. Nobody wanted to hear the facts. Everybody was just angry.
Modern flat top electric stoves are better than gas, and they don't damage people's health like breathing in combustion products from gas stoves. Old style electric stoves with the coil hobs were terrible, but I got a modern Zanussi electric stove and it's great. I really don't like gas stoves from the health reasons, and the danger, and all the pots and pans are so precarious, and easy to knock them off the burner. Gas stoves are more likely to burn the food too, from localised hot spots.
@@ricardodelzealandia6290 I'm fairly certain your desire to avoid returning to electric stoves is based on resistance heating stoves that are horrible. Induction heating stoves/ranges are far superior to either gas or resistance units. Check it out.
What a coincidence. Yesterday I was at a ‘climate symposium’ and the first presentation was on why hydrogen is indispensible for the future energy system and that current gas infrastructure makes it quick to implement. I already thought it sounded too good to be true…
They were using the right words but they got them in the wrong order. Hydrogen is indispensable for the future of the current gas infrastructure, and make it quick.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I could see using hydrogen to turn carbon dioxide back into methane to feed back into the natural gas infrastructure where gas is truly indispensable, but not as wholesale replacement.
@@willythemailboy2 why on earth would you waste renewable energy to produce massively inefficient green hydrogen hydrogen, only to use more energy to turn it back into greenhouse gases???
Some years ago a simulation was run to consider the total mass of hydrogen needed to replace our current sources of heat energy. The fugitive emissions at each step from production,storage, distribution and consumption was estimated. The natural content of our atmosphere's hydrogen is oxidized by sunlight near the surface before it can diffuse upwards in the air column. The higher concentration from fugitive emissions would now reach the upper atmosphere. Hydrogen would destroy ozone at a rate far higher than CFCs ever have caused. Why is this hazard never included in hydrogen-economy discussions?
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Oh. Oh dear. I'd never heard of that issue. I knew that fugitive emissions are a major concern in terms of efficiency, but I had no idea that they're a threat to the ozone layer. Thanks for pointing that out.
Simple, it's another inconvenient truth explaining how supplementing one burnable gas for another, when we should be working at eliminating BURNING ALTOGETHER.
There are considerable error bars, but the global warming potential over 100 years of H2 released to the atmosphere is thought to be about 12x that of CO2, kg for kg.
Very useful video and confirmed what I kinda figured. I liked the comment about "if your using electricity to make hydrogen to burn, why not just use the electricity to do the work you want the hydrogen for"...basic physics! Great job Dave.
Because it's energy storage. The electricity from solar is abundant in the summer when you don't need heating and insignificant in the winter when you do need the heating. Storage for half a year is necessary to bridge that gap. Only problem is that Hydrogen is not even close to being the best solution for energy storage.
@@thulyblu5486 battery technology is developing fast right now. There are already alot of stationary storage solutions that even were discussed on this channel...
So if you need to talk to somebody, just visit him. Easy physics. Why using a complicated mobile phone, a cell tower, a international network ..... If things would be easy, we would do them the easy way. Of course using electricity directly (mabe even for a heatpump) is more efficient then producing hydrogen and distributing it. But the challenge is somewhere else: storage capacity, fluctuations in availability, change of infrastructure and more. People often expect that there is ONE solution, but it could be ten or more depending on the use case.
@@thulyblu5486 Wind peaks at mostly opposite times of both day & year from solar & together they mostly solve all 3 peaks in demand-summer days in hot places; winter nights in cold places; the daily duck curve. You dramatically, wildly, ridiculously overstate the storage necessary. Also, there’s hydro, geothermal, CSP, some tidal...pumped hydro storage, & batteries whose capacity is increasing exponentially. Hydrogen is not even close to being the best for anything. Michael Barnard has written extensively about it at Cleantechnica & elsewhere.
Yay! No clickbait. I really appreciate that the title and thumbnail are unambiguous. The US went through a round of experimentation with hydrogen powered vehicles in the 1990's. Hydrogen was a very bad idea back then too. The automotive engineers figured it out pretty quickly. Their management kept trying for way too long. Every step in the process from production, through transportation, to end use is stupidly expensive.
Then you crash, the tank fractures and you blow up into 1000's of pieces, super explosive. They did a nice job of trying to make them safe, but its practically impossible to be totally safe. Can you imagine going past a crash which turns into a mini mushroom cloud.
It ought to be a no-brainer that using the electricity directly in your home is going to be more efficient than diverting that electricity to create hydrogen to pipe to homes.
@@langdons2848 "a highly efficient heat pump" with a theoretical maximum heating efficiency of greater than 100%, because all the power to run it adds to the heat pumped from outside. Beat that, hydrogen!
@@TerryClarkAccordioncrazyeven then I'd probably use it for something like pumped hydro over hydrogen production for energy storage. Unless you had some special niche use for hydrogen.
As a kid some day in the ‘80s I electrolysed water and stored the hydrogen in a plastic bottle, properly sealed (I thought), just to enjoy the explosion💥 the next day. Well, next day the bottle was squished completely flat: the H2 had diffused out through the plastic, but air could not diffuse in. This result made me slightly sceptic about the possible future hydrogen-based energy storage system already a few decades ago. Anyway: Thank you for “burning it down” completely. Makes me think, it might not be such a bad idea after all to install my own large PV system plus home-made battery pack for energy (close-to-)independence, despite all the insecurity that certain guys in my country’s (D) media landscape tend to distribute among our people…
That a interesting properies you discover. So we can make olmost perfect vacume in the enclose space just be filling and displacing the air, and we do not need vacuum pomp. I wonder what vacume level can be made. I also woner if sombody used such methode to make a vacuum..
PET is highly permeable to hydrogen (as is polyethylene). Unfortunately most modern gas networks are polyethylene… Gold is impervious so a literally gold plated steel solution is best… (tantalum works too but is more expensive).
@@Llortnerof Aluminum is cheaper than gold and also impermeable to hydrogen and not affected by hydrogen embrittlement, unlike many heavier and/or more expensive metals.
My home town in the UK was going to be the Guinea pig town for 100% hydrogen piped into the existing gas mains of 2000 homes one of them being mine, the locals protested and they put a stop to it. Whitby, Ellesmere Port is the town I’m so glad hydrogen wasn’t forced upon us, especially now I’ve seen this.
2 місяці тому
The insane governments of Europe are trying to find a substitute for all that cheap Russian natural gas that was ended by Jo Biden blowing up the biggest pipeline for it to Europe..
Interesting, an example of political capture by interested parties. The lack of understanding of simple science by local or national political representatives is scandalous. You can see the appeal, as noted above, it's easier to keep things as they are. Don't upset your constituency by suggesting no more gas, when in the UK 75% of them use gas to heat their homes. Good that it didn't proceed, someone eventually clicked that a few dead voters mightn't do their prospects for continued political employment much good.
Being Swedish it's strange to see that houses are still being heated by burning gas. I have an air/water heatpump and think that's a bit too inefficient.
Well countries who have the gas infrastructure in place and the price of gas is cheap it do make lot of sense, where i live for example there is no pipeline nor a company shipping CNG cylinder to your home and the ones available on gas pumps are sufficient only for cooking (unless you want to go there every few days to replace if you heat your home). My aunt only uses it for cooking and shower, and we have 1 small gas heater at home if we ever run out of electricity (the CNG tank have been full for years).
Well, I'm just as astonished about using NG to heat homes. Here we have district heating in most cities. Also when there aren't district heating choises have been oil, wood, wood pellets and electricity. Usually electrocity's efficiency is also augmented with heat pumps, be it air-air, air-water, ground-water or combination of those.
@@ristekostadinov2820 There are a ton of reasons not to use it. Leak hazards, fire hazards, pipe hazards in the ground, CO2 emissions, methane emissions (27 times more powerful than CO2), Explosion hazards, sound issues from bad pipes, increased maintenace etc. Electric heatpump heating is simple, pump go brrr, electrons do the heavy lifting. No need for miles and miles of pipes containing a flamable gas at high pressures which can create explosion hazards, and if they leak just a little they can induce a health risk AND an enviromental risks.
@@TheEsseboyThis seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I always thought souls burning for lying and spreading misinformation was a fairy tale too then I watched a man named Hydrogen get called a name one night in a bar 🍸 🙃 lost it and went thermonuclear on two men, taking their souls to the furnace of hell for not believing in hydrogen...
We absolutely need green hydrogen to decarbonize a lot of industrial processes (but not hydrogen used in fossil fuel production, which will decline). It's the new dubious uses for hydrogen cynically promoted by fossil fuel companies that are crazy. They only want to increase demand for their dirty hydrogen during the decade it will take to ramp up green H2 production. It seems the only people still fooled by this are politicians.
This is a simple and brilliant example of the basic principle that, nothing is as simple as some might like it to be! To be an answer it has to be economically viable. If it isn’t, it aren’t gunna fly don’t matter how much you’d like it to be. 15:41
Hi Dave - Another great episode. I have looked at hydrogen and agree 100% with the assessment of Paul Martin. I have seen that 30% hydrogen/ 70% methane is the highest ratio you can burn in household appliances. The gas suppliers will market this as "green" having you think that in the future you can burn 100% hydrogen; the future! But, how do you transition a household to pure hydrogen without replacing all the appliances? It's not practical! Another problem with burning hydrogen is that it burns hot. This produces NOx gases which are not good for your lungs. In fact, NOx are heavier than air, so if you burn it in the kitchen, your pets and toddlers will be exposed to higher concentrations. To make it burn cooler, it has been proposed to mix the H2 with CO2! Converting electrical energy into hydrogen presently is only about 50% efficient and batteries are around 90% efficient. The only future I see for hydrogen is in industrial processes, like steel and cement, some large vehicle transportation and maybe aviation. That's it. I hate to see investment in hydrogen in other areas as it takes away from solar, wind, batteries and other storage methods. Wayne from across the pond.
in relative terms, it is greener than 100% methane. Rather than an absolute position, let's take some of the smaller wins which in the round would contribute to a significant saving and play a part in the longer term transition.
20% by volume is only 7% by energy content and that's its absolute maximum decarbonization potential. And that's the most you can put in the gas network before the end use devices need to be replaced.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 - it's not a small win though, it's a dead end as the 100% hydrogen is a pipedream as per the video. For the upfront cost of a new H2 ready boiler it can be replaced with a heat pump (initially using government incentives but as volume grows on their own) and then save the home owner money by remvoing the need to pay for the 3x renewable energy generation to power the hydrogen generation.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859no, unless the H2 is made with 90+% renewable electricity, it's WORSE than burning methane due to the inefficiencies and fugitive emissions in production, storage, and delivery. These hare-brained schemes to increase use of hydrogen are a transparent attempt by "natural" gas and fossil fuel companies to delay the replacement of their dirty products with electrification.
Nailed it. I've been following Paul for quite a while on Linked In as he makes it his daily task to rebuff these snake oil salesmen. I'm in Vancouver, Canada, and when Fortis BC (gas company) said they were going to start a hydrogen blending trial I picked up the phone and started the process to remove natural gas / Fortis from my home, which is now completed, heat pumps (Daikin) replaced the gas furnace and water heater (Rheem), an induction oven replaced the gas cooker, I stopped using electric baseboard heaters and used the heat pump instead, and got rebates and a 0% loan to pay for it all (Greener Homes). Gas bill went away - very satisfying - including the fixed standing charge, and my electricity bill went from $250/month to $150/month for a family of 4 and that includes local use of an EV. Air conditioning is new to me, and will become increasingly important even this far north. Paul describes Green Hydrogen to be like Champagne - expensive, and to be used on special occasions! Heating and transport are better served with direct electrification. Great video, as always, with some excellent and much needed diagrams - the energy in to heat out diagram, hydrogen vs. heat pumps needs to be shown over and over again, a heat pump mostly uses the air for it's source of energy (the sun's heat, consumed at point of use), anything else has to bring all it's energy with it, a heat pump will win on efficiency, wherever it is applicable - which is certainly the UK climate and most of Canada for that matter. Keep banging this drum, maybe we can get politicians to listen, the BC Government certainly needs to get more opinions into it's collective brain than the current distract and delay hydrogen subsidy farmers that lobby them (Ballard, HTEC, Fortis)
It sounds like your switch away from gas and onto a heat pump worked out great for you. That's interesting how your total energy bill is lower, but it makes sense, because heat pumps are much more efficient than burning gas.
@@davidestabrook5367 more efficient than the baseboard heaters too - which is where the electricity bill saving came from. The gas bill was $75 per month, $13 of which was a standing charge, because heat pumps multiply the input energy, and because a GJ of gas is not comparable to a kWh of electricity directly (appliance efficiency matters a lot, you can’t compare chemical energy) it’s hard to compare the two. I did not expect such a large drop in my electricity bill, we’ll have to wait to and see what a cold snap costs, the heat pumps have lower efficiency in the cold, but it’s still better than a baseboard as I understand it.
That's really impressive! A lot of Canadians should follow your example, but Vancouver is one of the warmest places in the country. Would heat pumps still be effective as far north as Edmonton, where I live?
@@Kevin_Street there are very cold weather heat pumps, yes, I didn’t go for one, as you say, Vancouver is fairly mild, but for very cold climes, having a backup heat, which might be fossil fuel or electrical heat strips covers you for the cold snaps. Plenty of cold weather UA-cam’s about heat pump limits and costs in very cold temperatures, whether the cost and effort of a ground source is worth it (it seems mostly not) - my understanding is air source very cold weather heat pumps work, but they cost more to run in the winter, the efficiency goes down, but still cost no more than baseboards do. Gas is cheaper in the cold, and can be used to supplement a central air heat pump system, but that means you can’t dump gas and it’s $14/month standing charge - probably not a deal breaker - and the truth is, they are not actually going to start blending hydrogen, they know is doesn’t work.
Energy providers want to keep the network so they can use "network maintenance" as an excuse for the standing charges on our bills. No network, no maintenance costs, plus a markup, to pass on to the customer. I like the idea of ripping out the gas mains, no more gas explosions for a start and so lower household insurance premiums (LOL).
The gas mains could simply be converted to sending heated water, instead of gas and the water could be heated from burning unrecyclable wastes for communal heating. This would give them purpose and would be a win win for so many. Just never seems to be part of the conversation. And yet they do this across the other side of the North Sea, in almost every major city. 🤔 Lol 😂
@@dandantheideasman In my neighborhood, the gas main feeds houses through a half inch PEX tube. The mains and the little PEX lines are uninsulated, so what little water got to the houses would probably be cold by the time it got there. Some locations might have more appropriate lines, but in general I think it would take a lot of work to repurpose them for district heating.
Finally somebody mentioned HDPE pipelines in natural gas distribution network. It is widely used in Europe for decades. Feeding hydrogen in them will cause massive leaks.
Thankfully we haven't had "burn hydrogen to heat your home" type proposals in the US, but it very much reminds me of one of our own homegrown climate delay tactics of growing corn to then convert into liquid fuels. It suffers from the exact same problem of "wouldn't it be vastly more efficient and cheaper to convert that corn lot into a solar park and get direct electric energy that way?" Yes, yes it would.
No soil erosion. No nitrate fertilizer, with its emissions and pollution of rivers and sea. More biodiversity existing under the panels. Less land for the energy so saving the rain forest. It's a puzzle!
Even in the UK the pilot projects have been problematic - two closed down due to lack of public interest and safety concerns, and another one refused to publish a report on the safety findings, it took a freedom of information request to get the documents. The company involved stated publishing the information would prevent the project from going ahead. The explosion test video was publish, which shows the deflagration impact, but the company placed it on YT without a link on their website and made the video unsearchable. However, the press released the link to the video so it can be found.
I could take that liquid fuel and store it easily. Where/how will I store the Electricity from the solar farms? Solar and wind power are not always available when people want to use them.
The reason people complain about not being allowed to connect a new house to piped natural gas is because electric heating is much more expensive. Heat Pumps are about four times as efficient as combi boilers at converting watts to heat, but blow me, electricity costs about four times per watt as gas! This means there are no significant current cost savings and the enormously greater capital cost sinks the prospect financially. I may be wrong, but I believe in the UK at least the reason for this price difference is largely political: electricity has been made to carry the costs of decarbonization while gas has not. The political difficulty is that the cost of heating (which is largely gas at the moment) is a lot more sensitive than the cost of electricity. Relatively cheep, in the wider context subsidized, gas is also sandbagging the financial case for investing in insulation improvement.
The main problem in the UK is that the least energy efficient homes are owned by the poorest people who are least able to afford to switch to heat pumps etc. and the government does not have the money to pay for it for them. Any switch from gas for heating is therefore politically impossible and will be until electricity is much much cheaper
@@SmileyEmoji42 The answer is leasing. We already have the situation where most people get their gas and electricity from the same retail energy company. Those companies should be 'encouraged' to own and operate the boilers and heat pumps on customer premises as well. They should charge by metering temperature x volume x time for space heating and temperature x volume for water heating. Designed right the switch from gas to electricity and improvement of insulation becomes a pretty safe investment for the company. The government just has to intervene at the wholesale level to ensure the full carbon costs are paid.
It's easier to compare the cost per kWh; if we assume that $3/kg (very optimistic) for green hydrogen, that would be about 7.6 cents/kWh. And that's just the cost of producing the gas - storage, distribution, maintenance, ... taxes ... add on top (at least another 5 cents/kWh). So even in the most optimistic scenario for the future, that would be about 13 to 15 cents per kWh of heat produced in a condensing boiler. Is there a cheaper alternative? You guessed it: home insulation and heat recovery do the same job for less than 5 to 7 cents per kWh (BTW: a very good idea, even with current fuel prices). Electricity in winter (yes, that's a challenge too) will not be much more expensive in the future than today (some say it will be less... but there are also challenges if the heat load in the area increases too much; so the actual cost in the same range is the most likely forecast): that's, depending on your grid, 18 to 33 cents/kWh including taxes. With a heat pump SPF = 3 (average winter COP) that gives 6 to 11 cents/kWh of heat; much cheaper than H2 heating. One last "by the way": the combination of better insulation AND heat pump offers the most cost-effective solution - the small heat pumps are much cheaper and an easy to install alternative, with no problems at maximum electricity load during peak heating weeks. As always: thanks to both of you, Dave and Paul, for explaining the technical information on H2. Yes, you are right: the "heating with H2" hype was and is mainly intended to deliberately mislead consumers and make them believe that sticking with fossil gas is a future-proof solution. It is not - major industries that announced they would "develop" green and blue hydrogen in Norway have just pulled out (well, that was fast!).
A great point of view! Thanks for doing the calculations. I've already known that H2 is a very inefficient idea for cars, but never thought about the heating calculations.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@simhedgesrex7097 Yes, it would, but that tells you how optimistic that price is. If you use electricity to produce hydrogen, the hydrogen should be expected to cost more than the electricity. Also if you use that electricity in a heat pump, you get 3 or 4 times as much heat.
Paul Martin's analysis is spot on. One minor observation. The brine cavity storages I am familiar with run at virtually constant pressure to preserve the physical integrity of the roof. The pressure is defined by the depth of the cavity and the difference in density between the fluid being stored and brine. Adding more gas displaces brine to a pond at the surface and pumping brine from the pond into the well pushes the product back out. Using excess energy to produce hydrogen and push it down a local cavity for use by nearby industry may make sense, but the compression costs and losses will be significant.
As a postie working in Shropshire, I whiteness industrial modifications going on in our street for the last 2 years, which I might add has upset many people living through it, including Fibre, Water mains, and Gas. The countries metal gas mains is being upgraded to slip a Yellow plastic pipe inside the metal pipe. The machines they use are alarming to say the least, one such machine was a massive vacuum used to clean up tarmac from the road side, and every so often it would become blocked. To clear the blockage they reverse the air flow, resulting in a huge dust cloud coming from the top of the machine, it completely enshrouded the street behind that I had just delivered in. The next morning all the cars and house where covered in this black pounder. If what you are saying is true then why is our Government allowing such modifications to our gas mains? Nearly all the machines are petrol based, and all the vans the workers used were left running all day long. The Gas industry is a massive polluter from end to end.
Simple fact: Pumping an explosive gas into everyones' homes would NEVER take off if someone first invented it today. It is basically a bonkers dangerous idea and Hydrogen would make it even more dangerous and bonkers.
They allow it because inefficiency in energy literally creates larger economic burdens and therefore more money for the government and polluters. There is no thought at all put into ANY aspect of the energy transition from the government perspective in terms of effectively and properly doing ANYTHING. It is purely profit driven... the same profit drive that's caused the destruction and inefficiencies in the first place.
@@jbiasutti No they have been replacing all metal gas pipes with a inner plastic core. Did it to our village 5 years ago. None were leaking at the time but it's done to reduce future leaks.
@@jbiasutti They are relining the pipe to stop the problems that were talked about in the video. plastic does not suffer from fatigue or hydrogen embrittlement issues the same was that iron or steel pipes previously used did. (as it turns out the switch to hydrogen bends of gas has been a huge project that has been thought out, planned and funded over a really really long time.) Which is kind of a weird thing about this video, most of the arguments around delivery, (pipe embrittlement and fatigue) have already been dealt with. - in fact suppliers reported earlier this year that the network is now ready for 100% hydrogen delivery. He says that appliances aren't just a replace the jet issue, - but they are, it's almost impossible now to buy a new boiler that is not also able to use hydrogen a a fuel. - actually literally just by replacing the jet. it was 2020 (almost half a decade ago) that Worcester Bosch unveiled their 100% hydrogen boiler, and launched their (drop in replacement/upgradeable) boiler ranges - that are now installed in loads of places! He talks about the gas delivery pressures, and the 1/3rd per volume energy problem, - but this point is weirdly disingenuous, because there is not plans to have a 100% hydrogen gas network, in fact the plan is to provide a 20% blend, (specifically to aid with the backwards compatibility with older boilers. (and this also deals with the gas capacity issues also.) It's like he's heard something, not bothered to really find out anything about it, and run off into a load of mad theories about why everyone else is dumb...
There's a small mistake apparently for the explosive range of hydrogen. The range presented is for it's combustible range, it's explosive range is 18%-59%, still a lot bigger than the range for methane.
The range is bigger, but I don't think the width of the range matters much. How likely is it that you would displace half the air in your house with hydrogen? The key figure is the Lower Explosive Limit, and if it's 18%, that's three+ times higher than fossil gas. You have to balance this against the greater power of a hydrogen explosion versus gas, and the fact that hydrogen is much less dense than gas and diffuses faster, so it's harder to reach the explosive limit. There are plenty of good reasons not to use hydrogen as an energy carrier, but explosion safety is not as bad as a lot of people think.
@@incognitotorpedo42 I had a gas leak under the kitchen bench top, inside the closed space behind the drawers and oven and under the gas hotplate. Enough gas accumulated that when I turned off the gas having finished cooking, the flame continued to burn alongside the burner I had turned off. The gas flow was sufficient, and the concentration sufficient to sustain a flame in the gas/air interface at the escape point alongside the gas burner. The gas concentration inside the hotplate unit and under the bench top was too high to support combustion (otherwise the kitchen would have exploded). So, yes, a domestic gas leak can be fast enough to displace all of the air in a large space.
@@incognitotorpedo42You would get a less powerful explosion from hydrogen than natural gas. A cubic meter of methane contains far more energy potential than a cubic meter of hydrogen
@@joshua43214 Wtf are you talking about? I said equal volumes of methane contain more energy potential than hydrogen. So more energy would be released in an explosion. I can't dumb it down any more than that.
I have 2 power sources connected to my home (gas and electricity). During a recent power cut we lost electricity. However we were unable to use any gas appliances because they are all electrically controlled. Plus at the time of the power cut I had a battery in the garage at 90% fully charged. Couldn't use that either as current UK regulations (pun intended) mean that domestic batteries have to be diconnected during power outage to prevent them back feeding into the grid for safety reasons. So in effect although having 3 energy sources connected, I rely completely on mains electricity.
Absolutely agree, hydrogen is just crazy as a fuel, outside some non-domestic scenarios perhaps. We have ditched gas entirely and got a heat pump in the UK, and - shock horror, someone call the Daily Mail - it is *better* then the old gas boiler. The home temperature is more consistent, and my wife is not constantly reaching for the 'boost' button.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Ugh, rub it in, why don't you... just kidding, but yeah, I wish I could ditch gas. But I live in a block of flats, there's nowhere to install a heat pump unless building management provides the infrastructure for it, which doesn't look very likely. Still, at least I've chucked out the gas hob and replaced it with an induction one.
@@juliusapweiler1465heat pumps can be wall mounted. It's just a pain installing them high up. In hot countries it's common for blocks of flats to have individual AC units mounted on the wall outside each flat. Do you have a balcony? There are companies that install heat pumps on balconies.
A very fine presentation! As an engineer who works across several disciplines, I have been long aware of the significant barriers to using Hydrogen as an energy delivery means. Hydrogen is only seen as a good fuel for vehicles etc by people totally unaware of how miserable it is in every way. Not really touched on is how little can be stored on board a personal vehicle even under VERY high pressures. The video does cover the important problem of how (as I say it) Hydrogen goes EVERYWHERE and is very difficult to store or send through even short hoses.
I also think that it's important to remember that hydrogen, once released into the atmosphere breaks down molecules in atmosphere called 'the hydroxyl radical' that acts as a methane sync, breaking down methane. By breaking these molecules down, you risk making climate change worse. So now hydrogen is being called an 'indirect' greenhouse gas. There is literally no reason to go down the hydrogen path other than to save the incumbent energy providers profits.
In a domestic gas leak the resultant 'explosion' will blow all the window out and probably the roof off. If it was Hydrogen it will take half the street out in a radius all round the leak.
Exactly what the quantitative risk assessment prior to the (now canceled) trials of hydrogen for home heating in the UK, found. They had to add excess flow devices to reduce the chance of hydrogen explosions not just destroying the house where the leak was, but both houses on either side of a terraced (row) housing unit.
one of my co workers neighbours house BLEW UP from a gas leak and my co workers house was destroyed roof blown clean off most of the windows gone and the whole structure now leans and my co worker has NOT lived in his home for months now as the insurance companies destroy and build a NEW home
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@jasonriddellThis seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I can't disagree with many (any?) of the points Paul Martin notes, and his points were framed quite simply and clearly. The one key omission would be addressing the upstream issue of the clean-water supply problem for Green Hydrogen production at any meaningful scale - sufficient to support wide-spread consumption at volume. The world is facing a growing clean water crisis. Even for human consumption, desalination is a problematic process with poor operational cost economics, including considerable sunk costs and maintenance problems. Alternative's aren't yet proven to be economically viable, certainly not at scale. Desalination at scale also has unexplored / poorly understood impacts on marine life and global water cycles - for example the effects that increased salt content from brine dumping will have on the earth's ocean circulation system, sea life, etc. And that excludes consideration of the fact that the worlds oceans are already under stress from climate transition environmental factors. Waste-water purification has similar economic challenges (in terms of the economics at scale, and the resulting costs of the Hydrogen to the end consumer), though arguably less systemic impacts than desalination. If not salination or purification of waste water, how could any government sanction using limited clean-water assets to produce Hydrogen at scale in the face of a growing water crisis?
A very informative video once again. I have just one thought: The UK goverment has just announced £22 Billion for carbon capture and storage. Another unproven (at a large scale) technology. Much of this will be to capture carbon from the production of hydrogen from natural gas. THIS IS TAXPAYERS MONEY which could be spent helping the rollout of heatpumps. It would be good if Ed Milliband could watch this video and then explain to the UK population why he is pushing hydrogen and carbon capture. I think we deserve answers.
I wonder if the gas grid could be used as a "right of way" that exists for stuffing electricity cables down? That would mean that the assets would still be useful, even if they aren't shifting CH4 (or heaven forbid H2) down them.
To decommission larger gas pipelines you have to fill them with some foam or other filler material otherwise they would collapse on the long-term with no gas pressure inside. So in a study in Germany they said that putting fiberoptics in them is a good solution along the foam. But not as good as power lines.
A good summary of the situation. Interestingly, of course, the old town gas to which you made reference was predominantly hydrogen with some carbon monoxide and a potpourri of organic compounds which gave it its characteristic smell. However, town gas was made by heating coal in the absence of air producing coke, the original ‘smokeless fuel’, as a byproduct together with a range of chemical feedstock. Today we burn domestic and industrial waste to generate electrical energy and, while this may be preferable to sending the waste to landfill and using fossil fuels to create the equivalent amount of energy, it is still generating CO2 and using a relatively inefficient process. It makes me wonder whether it might be possible to heat domestic and industrial refuse in the absence of air to produce hydrogen? The waste is largely organic, in the form of plastics, paper, food waste et cetera and the heat necessary could be generated by burning a small (??) proportion of it. The residue would presumably be carbon char which might have agricultural or other uses? Clearly the economics of such a process would be critical, apart from the external environmental benefits, especially the cost of any hydrogen produced in this way. Nevertheless, the cost of new technology always decreases with increasing take-up. Surely, I can’t be the first person to think about this and it would be interesting to know what work, practical and/or theoretical, has been done or, alternatively, the scientific reasons why it would not be feasible? Certainly, the volume of waste produced by ‘advanced nations’ doesn’t look like decreasing any time soon.
Town gas contained about 50% hydrogen, but was never produced or distributed at high pressure. The issues with hydrogen are many, but the hydrogen assisted fatigue cracking of gas transmission pipelines is a big one. Our paper goes into details on the issues throughout the gas network.
I think it's because most people live mostly on automatic pilot, so to speak; They don't think outside their assumptions, and a common assumption seems to be fire=heat, so they assume they need something to burn. I've noticed a similar blind spot with solar power: I see a lot of people devising systems where they generate electricity with solar panels and use that power to run heat pumps, or worse, resistive heating. All the inefficiencies and conversion losses along the way waste a staggering amount of power; Much better IMHO to collect solar heat and store it as heat in thermal masses/sand batteries, rather than convert light to DC to chemical storage to AC to heat.
There is 3 main reasons: 1. Electricity supply needs to happen at the same time as demand. While we can buffer shorter mismatched with batteries, for longer mismatches, we need a chemical storage. Once the energy it is stored in the form of hydrogen, it is not that clear that reconversions to electricity is the best use. 2. Many countries do not have the electric infrastructure to deal with electric heating. So there is an argument that we need the energy in a form the infrastructure can deal with. 3. Heat pumps are thermodynamically superior but they present a higher up front investment to households. Many homeowners are hesitant to maker that investment.
Compliments on the excellent video Dave and really great graphic at 13:50. One thing that wasn’t mentioned in the video is that burning hydrogen also leads to NOx emissions, something that you could add to the graphic.
If people insist on having hydrogen to burn in their houses, they could always electrolyse water at about 60% efficiency…..OR…. they could use the same amount of electricity more efficiently heating their (insulated) house.
@@pin65371those trains may be running but have you done a cost / benefit analysis? Have you factored in the production and shipping costs of the hydrogen and compared it with other fuels or energy sources? What is the environmental impact of producing the hydrogen the trains use?
Thank you Dave for getting the truth out there on the futility of using Hydrogen as a ubiquitous fuel and energy storage source. I have studied and written about the subject like other engineers. The risks and costs are too much to overcome. There is only niche utility for hydrogen. O&G companies are using this wet dream to defer their disinvestment in GHGs due to the future “promise” of hydrogen.
I'm from the UK and finally removed the gas from my little home. Started in 1999, and slowly chipped away. Replaced single glazing with double, added extra insulation in roof and when I had flooring up to run electric cables, I put loose insulation back to slow air circulation. I fitted a simple heat pump upstairs in 2000. Bonus, cooling and dehumidifing in summer months. In 2012 I jumped on the solar bandwagon for the FIT. Extra bonus, free cooling in summer with the solar generation. Over the last couple of years, I have been fixing floor insulation on my walls and wallpapering over, to slow the heat loss to the outside. Installed electric underfloor heating down stairs and removed the gas fire and replaced hob with induction. More bonuses, in spring on wards I can usually cook for free using the solar generation, were as I was exporting my electric and paying for gas to heat n cook! Even now I still look at improving home insulation. Changed seals on windows from failing rubber to silicon. When a glazing unit fails, I now spec warm edge with Argon gas filling.
The problem with UK politicians is only 6% of them have a degree in a STEM subject, so almost by definition the majority don't even have the basic knowledge to look at this subject and know what questions to ask.
Listening to you since 2021 April. An engineer in power and O&G industry from mechanical and process design domain with 28 years of experience. Spent 5 years of my life from May 2019 to Feb 2024 passionately and analytically to develop various models of solar to elec storage and solar to H2. Their generation, storage, transmission, transportation, intermediate conversions, endusage i.e. complete solar to enduse lifecycle. By Feb 2024 I was convinced fully that H2 doesn't have the overall generation, conversion, transmission effeciancy, (thermodynamic / exergetic) effectiveness to be an alternative to replace fossil fuel based electric power generation that needs to triple. It can't contribute in double digits percentage of overall energy consumption for decades to come. Now I am more focused on electrochemistry and considering Material science to be the black box that can throw some thing that meet all boundary criteria.
Right now, Québec (which has 100% green, renewable hydro/wind power) is selling a block of megawatt hours to make green hydrogen. It would be more useful to use that power to run electric cars...
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Well, here in Denmark the first production facilities making hydrogen from water and excessive power from Wind Energy is started. It means the hydrogen is produced without coal or petrochemical materials. It is going up in scale quilte fast. And as I said just using energy that otherwise would be lost.
I don't disagree that using "Spare" Power to produced Hydrogen is a good thing. What realy matters is what is the Hydrogen going to be used for. I don;t think it's suitable to pump through pipes as a substitute for Natural Gas (Methane).
Hydrogen is way to dangerous to use in a domestic premise. It is very good at leaking / diffusing through pipes and seals. Inside a building it will be confined enough to create an explosive atmosphere.
Exactly. A friend was involved in providing piped gas systems.They tested for leaks with helium with a tracer so they could find the leaks. In his words if there's a leak helium will find it, the only thing that is better would be hydrogen and that's far too dangerous.
@@rivimeyHydrogen Embrittlement is the term for it. We need subsidies for heat pump installations, and a plan for phasing out gas. It should be made cheaper right now to install a heat pump, and changes so that running a heat pump is cheaper than running a gas boiler. There also needs to be a plan for retraining or early retirement for people working in the gas industries, so that they aren't penalised from phasing out gas boilers.
@@IMBlakeley actually helium leaks more readily than H2 because it is a smaller molecule... being a monatomic molecule whereas hydrogen forms H2 "diatomic" thus bigger... That, at least, is the simple conceptual explanation. So helium is better leak detector than hydrogen.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 did you watch the video?? electricity does every combustion job far better for LESS $$$$ and LESS equipment on the consumers side
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859how many L/kg is H2? How much energy does it take to compress hydrogen to practical densities? The video already indicates needing 3X the flow capacity for compressed H2 in existing natural gas infrastructure for the same energy content. Also: What combustion use case does H2 have where it is more cost-effective than the electricity used to make that H2?
Up until 1967 the UK’s old gas network used “town gas”, which is derived from coal and contains a high proportion of hydrogen: about 50 per cent. The Shetland Islands have replaced natural gas and oil burning with hydrogen and even run a sea ferry on it. There are ongoing negotiations with Government to include 20% hydrogen to our existing gas provision mix which may include butane and methane at times to reach the required calorific value. "This may account for a yellow or reddish tint to the blue flame normally present?"
The premier of Alberta, Canada, who has effectively killed the renewable energy industry in the province, is banking on a future hydrogen industry, extracted from natural gas. The hope is to use a technology which extracts the hydrogen and leave the carbon behind. This technology is in early development but I am skeptical about its scalability. I hope we can vote her and her party out in the next election.
the ONLY "horse Alberta has for an economy these days is oil and gas extraction and they wont rain in massive bad budgeting so they need to KEEP Milking there ONLY productive cow Manitoba investing in mining minerals for battery production
@@r.1599 It's not much better in BC, we have an active hydrogen boondoggle subsidy harvesting industrial complex based around the 'hydrogen tomorrow' promise that keeps oil and gas very much the choice of today.
One that is 99% currently made from gas, coal and petroleum, without CO2 emissions- just as it was 20 years ago. There is no spare green hydrogen to waste as a fuel.
@@spitfireresearchinc.7972 Majority of Hydrogen production comes from 1. Steam Methane Reforming (SMR): For every ton of hydrogen produced using SMR, about 9-12 tons of CO₂ are emitted. 2.Coal Gasification: Producing hydrogen from coal is even more carbon-intensive, releasing around 19 tons of CO₂ per ton of hydrogen. (CGPT)
This is probably about the 20th video I've watched which clearly and concisely goes through why hydrogen for domestic heating is stupid, for many indisputable reasons. So I admit I must be in a bit of an anti-hydrogen echo chamber. But how haven't the key policy makers like Ed Miliband found a single one of these videos? Because it really is quite overwhelmingly obvious!
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@Sekir80This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@Sekir80 hear it OFTEN electric is stuupid with H2 OR "al gore" is trying to prevent the "truth" about H2 so they can "control us" with electricity / EV cars and other really stupid conspiracy theories
I have followed Paul Martin's articles (many are on LinkedIn) and appreciate bis blunt no-BS style and substance. People need to realize that the hydrogen arena is fueled by immense subsidies ($50bn in the US alone) and the oil/gas players who lobbied hard for those are happy to syphon it off as it prolongs their game and might get them some internally useful R&D along the way.
Hydrogen is being proposed for long-duration electricity storage as solar and wind have increased from 8GW capacity in 2010 to about 30 GW today. A significant proportion is being curtailed and at other times cannot generate optimally. What is needed is long-duration storage. The last government had a study carried out that concluded that pumped storage hydro (PSH) , the only mature technology, was by far the cheapest solution especially if existing infrastructure, closed quarries and reservoirs, are used. I have carried out a survey of possible mid-sized PSH schemes and found about 120 possible sites in England and Wales using buried pipes instead of tunnels which allows them to be built in a far shorter time. The easiest schemes to get planning permission are old quarries or open cast coal pits of which there are about 20, with some 8 in the S Wales coalfield which could be an energy centre for the UK as well as providing livelihoods in a depressed area and other benefits such as a reserve source of water for summer droughts and upland fires. The problem is that there is no clear investment strategy for something that is actually an insurance system. The last government delayed implementing a cap and floor system because they were supporting the oil companies championing gas and hydrogen.
Hydrogen has always been a pretty terrible way of transferring energy. At least now we have moved past calling people who raised this “deniers” and “fossil fuel shills” and actually listening to the real world problems.
Another issue with gas, at least here in the UK, is the crazy pricing structure of domestic energy - with gas deliberately being charged at much less than electricity. Converting to heat pumps might appear to be a no-brainer, but the reality for most of us is that it is too expensive and ineffective. For instance, I live in a mid-terrace Victorian house - very common in the UK - with very poor insulation, which cannot really be improved, and no space for a hot water tank. A heat pump simply wouldn't give us the on-tap hot water or level of heating we are used to - even if I could afford the conversion. But, with the assumption that all electricity will be produced by renewable sources in the near future, heat pumps aren't actually necessary in all cases. Normal resistive electric heating and hot water is just as effective (if not as efficient). It may not be an ideal solution, but it would be a much easier and quicker transition away from gas than heat pumps. But it is simply impossible to implement at the moment - not because it's expensive to convert or difficult to do, but because, with the high cost of electricity, it would be cripplingly expensive to run. And yet this is an entirely artificial problem. The government could solve this overnight, just by making electricity as cheap as gas.
I was once on a zoom meeting with engineers and experts from the Netherlands and Denmark, run by a lobby man who was expecting them to back him up around the use of hydrogen for everything. It didnt work. There was a quote engrained in my mind now: The only way you'll heat homes with hydrogen, is by capturing the waste heat from production and putting it into a district heat network. Heat networks being common across Europe.
People latch to hydrogen, “clean” coal, carbon capture, and especially nuclear, anything to avoid the fact that renewables are the cheapest, most environmentally friendly, and the safest.
@@marksmit8112 How many of those reactors are there in the world? How many of them are economically viable without subsidies? If it was a viable solution someone would have built one by now. Nuclear is the most expensive source of energy.
@@fakestory1753 I’m not sure if you mean hydrogen or hydroelectric but solar and wind are cheaper than both. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity I’m not sure that a form of energy which created the largest single environmental disaster in history can truly be considered “safe”. Newer plants have better safety measures but it’s still the most expensive. There’s never been a wind farm or solar field that’s contaminated an area with radiation and forced evacuations.
You don’t understand Hydrogen has greater opportunity for us to need big companies to supply. Storage of electricity is dangerously close to economic independence.
Not for all applications. When hydrogen is used to replace fossil fuel and no other method is possible. Like Coal from steel making, diesel of heavy road transport, kerosine from airplane traffic etc. Of course there are places where hydrogen is only opition like before. Thing is, hydrogen creation needs to be electrolytic. If transported it needs to be converted to other molecules like methane.
@@playyourturntodieatvgperson I still don't know why or where fuel cells could be better than any alternative. Could you give me an example? For what use cases are useful?
I love this channel as much as I love Consumer Reports because of its unbiased analysis. With this out of then way I loved this analysis and will certainly dig deeper. Geopolitics will certainly throw a major wrench at the electricity transition efforts and potentially the US elections as well. But that apart I’m still wondering about green H2 given enormous generation in places like China and India that do most of our manufacturing. These countries are exploring generation at consumption point thereby eliminating transportation issues. Finally the majority of the use is industrial and not home heating in those countries
Another excellent video. I have been racking my brain for possible uses for hydrogen, for some years. I came up with 3 possibilities. 1. Long distance heavy boat transportation. 2. Cooking where a flame is desired. 3. Mood lighting. Boat transportation could be done with electricity, but significant floating charging infrastructure would be needed. 2. Cooking with a flame is almost never required to reach the goal, but often desired. A simple propane torch could be used by chefs, to create the perfect food presentation. I have not cooked in a kitchen with a flame since 2011. Mood lighting can be done with video, LED tea lights, or possibly plasma made from electricity. One reality is that fire, is close to humanity's heart. It is has been a mainstay in human cooking and heating for many thousands of years.
Batteries have about 1/36th the energy as diesel per volume. The batteries you would need to move a large boat would be immense. Check out what shipping companies are doing with green ammonia as a fuel.
Oh wow, when I saw this title my jaw dropped when I got to "home heating". Memories of experiments in second year chemistry and air travel came to mind, along with my ever growing hopeless feeling from the lack of knowledge in the general population.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I feel the same way. It's said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Ignorance is a thousand times more dangerous and, unfortunately, it's extremely widespread and spreading.
disagree. for certain vehicles it works well. The Toyota Mirai has shown what can be done. As a range extender Hydrogen is a useful energy store which can be carried on board a car. The cost of producing green hydrogen is falling fast and this will accelerate.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 The Mirai fuel cell car has ½ the range of my BEV, but costs 30 times as much to fuel for the same distance. Not to mention the fuel cell has a life of under 100k miles, and they have a battery on board anyway. Fun fact, in the UK, you can't drive between H2 filling stations in the range of the vehicle, so it's absolutely pointless, especially as it's effectively a fossil fuel powered vehicle anyway. I'll be sticking with BEV thanks.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 Guess what's better to do with the energy you create and distribute said hydrogen: using it to propel cars via electric motors.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign. There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it. Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell. You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen. On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier. STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I to have NO "fuel" and have NO solar/ battery OR ANY cost intensive add on in my 100 year old home and do NOT miss gas service and my utiltiy bills are inline with by GAS equipped friends and neighbours AND I have NO modern insulation OR Windows
Cost to produce green hydrogen should be close to 0 per kg in summer. That is main idea. You can't produce green hydrogen from electricity from grid. So electricity from Sahara Africa, summer Europe or when electricity is close to 0
I Love the work you do. There is a glairing incongruity that occurs when all UA-camrs discus these topics. First they say "What we are doing is wrong, and must stop". Agreed. Then they say " It has always been done Thus, and so it will continue." What? Yes it is agreed that Scientists are not talking about Burning Hydrogen. The 3 things that were done in the past that must stop are 1) Using Petrochemicals. 2) Producing energy in a central location(Factory} to be then 3) Mass Distributed from the central Location to the end user. Energy can be much more efficiently and usefully produced at the point of use, eliminating the need for Mass storage and distribution. I Thank you for listening. Please Continue the Great Work !
Thank you for sharing Paul Martin’s excellent engineering analysis and very understandable presentation. I believe the best phrase that he employed was ‘predatory delay.’ I see the same tactic being employed by much of the funding behind the rapid proliferation of nuclear fusion energy startup companies who promise to soon build an economically competitive nuclear fusion demonstration power plant.
The byproducts are nitrous oxide and water. Nitrous oxide also burns, with the byproducts being Nitrogen and Oxygen. We just need a 16 stroke engine that also separates all the atoms perfectly and ditches the water, then burns the Hydrogen, then NO2, and then O2 in separate chambers, one after the other with different compression and spark timing. Easy stuff /s.
I think the greatest idea in home heating comes from the Netherlands, they have a furnace that burns Iron powder. The furnace collects the spent iron oxide waste for reprocessing into fresh iron powder. BTW, you can strip the oxygen out of it with a simple vinegar solution.
You can't "strip the oxygen out with a simple vinegar solution". Burning iron powder requires you to reduce iron oxide back to iron metal to close the loop. By the time you've done that, you've wasted most of the energy you fed. By the way, the primary method of decarbonized production of iron metal from iron oxide is via hydrogen...so really, iron powder as a fuel is a hydrogen derived fuel or worse still, a fossil derived fuel.
Great to see you at Everything Electric South this weekend. As ever you did a great job hosting the panels and also made known your opinions on Hydrogen there (rightly so!)
The old town gas made from coal was about 50% hydrogen and we were delivering it by pipe to consumers all over the country reliably, so it's viable. And while we might need to update gas infrastructure, if we're going to replace gas appliances with electrial ones then we'll be needing to update and increase a lot of electrical infrastructure as well. Old gas appliances are equally obsolete if we switch to hydrogen or electric replacements. So I don't think hydrogen is as unrealistic as some people claim, but I also don't doubt it's being grabbed on to by a gas industry who are very keen to stay in business.
Good video. I work in hydrogen and consider myself a realist in it. Hydrogen for heat is a non starter and the legacy gas networks are the industry's own worst enemy. Hydrogen has its place, primarily because even after we've done everything else that's economical with electricity storage, there will be curtailed power. If there's enough otherwise curtailed power (and electrolysers are cheap enough to be economical at low capacity factors - something which is not true today), then some of that could instead be used to displace natural gas in ammonia and methanol production. If that's happens (big 'if') , then salt caverns have their place and gas networks are a necessity. However, the hydrogen gas networks will never be remotely as extensive as the methane networks in Europe and North America - they will be a far more limited network over short distances connecting specialist industrial users.
A major point about the distribution network that gets widely missed (including here) is even if the network could be upgraded to handle hydrogen there will be a significant changeover period (years) during which which both natural gas and hydrogen appliances will need to receive their respective fuels and a single network can't handle two gasses at the same time so the only options are to either build temporary local supply stations for hydrogen until the conversion is complete (hugely expensive and can you be 100% certain that absolutely everyone/thing has been fully converted?) or build a second dedicated hydrogen network and retire the old gas network after conversion. People point to the town gas conversion when trying to say it's possible but they did exactly that, build a second entirely new national network for natural gas (before that town gas was mostly supplied by local generators isolated from everywhere else) and there were far fewer appliances to convert, if an appliance or house didn't get converted then it also didn't get connected to the new network so no safety issues from missed properties..
One of the best overviews as hydrogen as a renewable energy solution I've seen. The only thing that I think could have been made clearer is that hydrogen use will produce something like >10x as much CO2 than the electric equivalent because of the inefficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen, then compressing and storing it, then converting it back into useful work. with a heat pump you get more than 3x as much energy out as you put in, on top of the rest of the energy savings of electricity vs hydrogen as an energy storage and transportation medium. That's all it is: "an energy storage and transportation medium". It's downright ridiculous in the places where you convert it back into electricity before the work is done. Having said all that, there are some instances where hydrogen does make sense: Like where it's naturally occuring. But that will run out eventually and has limited capacity so that's not a long term solution. Then you need an enormous storage tank. The bigger the cheaper per kWh stored due to the square cube relation of skin area to volume. Also if you have a substancial excess of power generation not when you need it, then it could make sense to store it as hydrogen, rather than use batteries. But that is a very niche situation when your electrical grid connections are unusually low capacity, like remote islands, maybe.
Thank you for clarifying why methane will not be replaced by hydrogen. It seems to me that a much better way to de-carbonize methane is to grow it with methane-producing bacteria (technically they are anaerobic archaea) called methanogens. That's called "biogas" and Nature produces a LOT of it in all rotting processes and CO2 is a feedstock for these microorganisms....
propane off gird, for heating, and cooling, but on gird, natgas lines could be deconstructed, in favor of directly burning the natural gas, with high efficiency generators that then sell the energy in the form of electricity to the clients. Early on, regulators will charge clients to have any lines removed, but maybe one day they will be deconstructed, or rebuilt completely. You have to scrub, and capture emissions while producing as much energy that is also readily available, so it makes more sense to centralize the burning and use of nat gas, than it does to replace it.
Thank you very much, Dave. Since water is a product of hydrogen combustion, I've had this dreamy outlook towards it for many years. This excellent video, in 15 short minutes, has given me a much-needed education. Again, I say THANK YOU.
It's hard to get to in most places because of the insane depth. There were some efforts to drill deeper than the Earth's crust which were nightmarish. But the energy there is mind boggling and it's very overlooked. Where geothermal is available or close to the surface, it should absolutely be exploited to the maximum. Iceland's utility energy is 100% geothermal.
This ties into my thinking. There are three general types of energy. 1/ Extraction. That’s coal, NG, and oil. But also uranium. 2/ Captured energy. Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric are all examples of this. 3/ Manufactured fuels. This is hydrogen. Where the energy cost of producing, compressing, transporting, liquifying if required, storage, distribution, and delivery to end user all take far more energy then can be gathered from consuming hydrogen. The simple fact that we need to “make” hydrogen shows how inherently inefficient it is a fuel for anything more than industrial processes. A couple of other examples is coking coal, and bio fuels. But both are specialty use materials for niche markets.
Thanks for the great video. Just to highlight what a delay strategy this is. 1. There is only one gas pipe running in your street. 2. All your neighbours would need the appropriate boiler. 3. Some old (poor) granny does not see the point in investing in a new boiler/ cannot afford it -> either the conversion will be stopped or poor granny will live in the cold. Guess what's going to happen In reality the energy distribution runs over many streets and you cannot feed hydrogen in at any of those distributors.. absolute delay tactics.
I live in the Noth of England, where a lange percentage of housing stock is the older high density housing. Heat pumps and solar are completely impractical for the vast majority of these properties. The conversion from the current gas boilers to electric is both expensive to performe and expensive to run afterwards, a real problem in these lower income areas. Leeds is set to become the UK's first 100% hydrogen city and is currently in the process of upgrading all of the gas network to allow this. Every pipe is being replaced wth large diameter plastic. My particular are is underway now and we have already had the pipe upgrade. I personally am quite happy to give it a try especially with the green hydrogen LCC are promising. A secondary advantage that no one talks about is the enhanced ability to provide hydrogen fueling stations for cars, be these personal domestic pumps or larger commercial ones. Hopefully the move to hydrogen will mean I never have to own a Tesla, which on its own is justification enough for me.
If you think direct electric heating is expensive then wait until you have the cost of green hydrogen which has to be 50% more expensive than the electricity used to create it given the unavoidable losses.
I'm glad people like you are bringing these issues to light. It's a shame that the gas industry has gotten away in stalling our clean future for so long. Thank you for your work!
It's better to keep the methane pipes and gradually replace the natural gas with biogas (both are methane but biogas is renewable, unlike natural gas). This is just a short term solution and in the long run methane should be almost completely replaced by electricity, with a few exceptions.
ADDENDUM : At 12:48 an animated graphic shows the cost of Hydrogen to be $3 per tonne. This is of course NOT CORRECT and does not match what Paul is talking about, which is a scenario where hydrogen costs $3 per kg, NOT per tonne. Apologies for this error.
Thanks for the correction!
The issue is the availability of a heat source to heat a home when there is no electricity!
@@peacepoet1947 wind/solar & batteries?
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
Their are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Predatory delay strategy. That sums it up perfectly.
You can run hydrogen through low-pressure pipes.
Town gas was 50% hydrogen, but that was back in the day of metal popes, not polypropylene.
All the gas pipes were changed to plastics, back in the 6ps, when we changed to methane.
The burner jets were changed too.
R
@@RalphEllis
Tell me more about the metal popes!
@@RalphEllis you cannot go above 20 percent due the delivery system/pipes
The same is true of electricity surely...
@@shazzz_land Can’t go above 20% popes?
In the Netherlands, new housing has to use heat pump or central heating and cannot be connected to the gas network for the last 3 years or so
In the UK, we're starting to do that next year. It was going to cover boiler replacements for existing homes too, but that's been pushed back to 2035.
It's already outlawed in Victoria, Australia and will almost certainly be outlawed in the other states. I'd prefer not to go back to electric stoves, thank you. Hopefully it'll get canned.
in Germany, people still get mad and crazy because the very same thing was proposed by the Greens.
Media successfully told the lie, that everybody had to tear out their old heating systems in favour of heat pumps. I had a big fight with my faily over this a few days ago. Nobody wanted to hear the facts. Everybody was just angry.
Modern flat top electric stoves are better than gas, and they don't damage people's health like breathing in combustion products from gas stoves.
Old style electric stoves with the coil hobs were terrible, but I got a modern Zanussi electric stove and it's great.
I really don't like gas stoves from the health reasons, and the danger, and all the pots and pans are so precarious, and easy to knock them off the burner. Gas stoves are more likely to burn the food too, from localised hot spots.
@@ricardodelzealandia6290 I'm fairly certain your desire to avoid returning to electric stoves is based on resistance heating stoves that are horrible. Induction heating stoves/ranges are far superior to either gas or resistance units. Check it out.
What a coincidence. Yesterday I was at a ‘climate symposium’ and the first presentation was on why hydrogen is indispensible for the future energy system and that current gas infrastructure makes it quick to implement. I already thought it sounded too good to be true…
They were using the right words but they got them in the wrong order.
Hydrogen is indispensable for the future of the current gas infrastructure, and make it quick.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I could see using hydrogen to turn carbon dioxide back into methane to feed back into the natural gas infrastructure where gas is truly indispensable, but not as wholesale replacement.
@@willythemailboy2 why on earth would you waste renewable energy to produce massively inefficient green hydrogen hydrogen, only to use more energy to turn it back into greenhouse gases???
Some years ago a simulation was run to consider the total mass of hydrogen needed to replace our current sources of heat energy. The fugitive emissions at each step from production,storage, distribution and consumption was estimated. The natural content of our atmosphere's hydrogen is oxidized by sunlight near the surface before it can diffuse upwards in the air column. The higher concentration from fugitive emissions would now reach the upper atmosphere. Hydrogen would destroy ozone at a rate far higher than CFCs ever have caused. Why is this hazard never included in hydrogen-economy discussions?
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Oh. Oh dear. I'd never heard of that issue. I knew that fugitive emissions are a major concern in terms of efficiency, but I had no idea that they're a threat to the ozone layer. Thanks for pointing that out.
@@juliusapweiler1465 I just did a search. Scientifically confirmed.
Simple, it's another inconvenient truth explaining how supplementing one burnable gas for another, when we should be working at eliminating BURNING ALTOGETHER.
There are considerable error bars, but the global warming potential over 100 years of H2 released to the atmosphere is thought to be about 12x that of CO2, kg for kg.
Very useful video and confirmed what I kinda figured. I liked the comment about "if your using electricity to make hydrogen to burn, why not just use the electricity to do the work you want the hydrogen for"...basic physics! Great job Dave.
Because it's energy storage. The electricity from solar is abundant in the summer when you don't need heating and insignificant in the winter when you do need the heating. Storage for half a year is necessary to bridge that gap.
Only problem is that Hydrogen is not even close to being the best solution for energy storage.
@@thulyblu5486 except that most renewables come from wind...
@@thulyblu5486 battery technology is developing fast right now. There are already alot of stationary storage solutions that even were discussed on this channel...
So if you need to talk to somebody, just visit him. Easy physics. Why using a complicated mobile phone, a cell tower, a international network .....
If things would be easy, we would do them the easy way.
Of course using electricity directly (mabe even for a heatpump) is more efficient then producing hydrogen and distributing it. But the challenge is somewhere else: storage capacity, fluctuations in availability, change of infrastructure and more.
People often expect that there is ONE solution, but it could be ten or more depending on the use case.
@@thulyblu5486 Wind peaks at mostly opposite times of both day & year from solar & together they mostly solve all 3 peaks in demand-summer days in hot places; winter nights in cold places; the daily duck curve. You dramatically, wildly, ridiculously overstate the storage necessary.
Also, there’s hydro, geothermal, CSP, some tidal...pumped hydro storage, & batteries whose capacity is increasing exponentially.
Hydrogen is not even close to being the best for anything. Michael Barnard has written extensively about it at Cleantechnica & elsewhere.
Yay! No clickbait. I really appreciate that the title and thumbnail are unambiguous.
The US went through a round of experimentation with hydrogen powered vehicles in the 1990's. Hydrogen was a very bad idea back then too. The automotive engineers figured it out pretty quickly. Their management kept trying for way too long.
Every step in the process from production, through transportation, to end use is stupidly expensive.
Then you crash, the tank fractures and you blow up into 1000's of pieces, super explosive. They did a nice job of trying to make them safe, but its practically impossible to be totally safe. Can you imagine going past a crash which turns into a mini mushroom cloud.
I second your comment about clickbait. Way too many videos on Utube have little to do with their headline.
It ought to be a no-brainer that using the electricity directly in your home is going to be more efficient than diverting that electricity to create hydrogen to pipe to homes.
Especially when you can use that electricity to run a highly efficient heat pump.
@@langdons2848 "a highly efficient heat pump" with a theoretical maximum heating efficiency of greater than 100%, because all the power to run it adds to the heat pumped from outside. Beat that, hydrogen!
@@markchapman6800 exactly. Heat pumps are black magic physics.
The only benefit might be to use excess electricity during low demand periods to make hydrogen as an energy storage method
@@TerryClarkAccordioncrazyeven then I'd probably use it for something like pumped hydro over hydrogen production for energy storage. Unless you had some special niche use for hydrogen.
As a kid some day in the ‘80s I electrolysed water and stored the hydrogen in a plastic bottle, properly sealed (I thought), just to enjoy the explosion💥 the next day. Well, next day the bottle was squished completely flat: the H2 had diffused out through the plastic, but air could not diffuse in. This result made me slightly sceptic about the possible future hydrogen-based energy storage system already a few decades ago. Anyway: Thank you for “burning it down” completely. Makes me think, it might not be such a bad idea after all to install my own large PV system plus home-made battery pack for energy (close-to-)independence, despite all the insecurity that certain guys in my country’s (D) media landscape tend to distribute among our people…
That a interesting properies you discover. So we can make olmost perfect vacume in the enclose space just be filling and displacing the air, and we do not need vacuum pomp. I wonder what vacume level can be made. I also woner if sombody used such methode to make a vacuum..
PET is highly permeable to hydrogen (as is polyethylene). Unfortunately most modern gas networks are polyethylene…
Gold is impervious so a literally gold plated steel solution is best… (tantalum works too but is more expensive).
Sorry you are septic, I hope your sepsis heals. Lol so many say sceptic instead of skeptic.
@@allangibson8494 Wow, something gold is actually good for.
@@Llortnerof Aluminum is cheaper than gold and also impermeable to hydrogen and not affected by hydrogen embrittlement, unlike many heavier and/or more expensive metals.
My home town in the UK was going to be the Guinea pig town for 100% hydrogen piped into the existing gas mains of 2000 homes one of them being mine, the locals protested and they put a stop to it. Whitby, Ellesmere Port is the town
I’m so glad hydrogen wasn’t forced upon us, especially now I’ve seen this.
The insane governments of Europe are trying to find a substitute for all that cheap Russian natural gas that was ended by Jo Biden blowing up the biggest pipeline for it to Europe..
Interesting, an example of political capture by interested parties. The lack of understanding of simple science by local or national political representatives is scandalous. You can see the appeal, as noted above, it's easier to keep things as they are. Don't upset your constituency by suggesting no more gas, when in the UK 75% of them use gas to heat their homes. Good that it didn't proceed, someone eventually clicked that a few dead voters mightn't do their prospects for continued political employment much good.
Lol i write software for those boilers
Lucky escape, there was a pretty effective campaign to stop it. Not sure if it's been canned in all the guinea-pig towns.
Being Swedish it's strange to see that houses are still being heated by burning gas. I have an air/water heatpump and think that's a bit too inefficient.
Yess, we need seasonal thermal storage, then we could use that to heat the cold side of our heatpumps!
Well countries who have the gas infrastructure in place and the price of gas is cheap it do make lot of sense, where i live for example there is no pipeline nor a company shipping CNG cylinder to your home and the ones available on gas pumps are sufficient only for cooking (unless you want to go there every few days to replace if you heat your home). My aunt only uses it for cooking and shower, and we have 1 small gas heater at home if we ever run out of electricity (the CNG tank have been full for years).
Well, I'm just as astonished about using NG to heat homes.
Here we have district heating in most cities. Also when there aren't district heating choises have been oil, wood, wood pellets and electricity.
Usually electrocity's efficiency is also augmented with heat pumps, be it air-air, air-water, ground-water or combination of those.
@@ristekostadinov2820 There are a ton of reasons not to use it. Leak hazards, fire hazards, pipe hazards in the ground, CO2 emissions, methane emissions (27 times more powerful than CO2), Explosion hazards, sound issues from bad pipes, increased maintenace etc.
Electric heatpump heating is simple, pump go brrr, electrons do the heavy lifting. No need for miles and miles of pipes containing a flamable gas at high pressures which can create explosion hazards, and if they leak just a little they can induce a health risk AND an enviromental risks.
@@TheEsseboyThis seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I always thought the burning methaine-hydrogen was a crazy idea, and the dream of green hydrogen is a fairy tale.
Fairies have tails?😉
@@r.1599 yes quite, an even greater fiction.
I always thought souls burning for lying and spreading misinformation was a fairy tale too then I watched a man named Hydrogen get called a name one night in a bar 🍸 🙃 lost it and went thermonuclear on two men, taking their souls to the furnace of hell for not believing in hydrogen...
Steam reforming nuts 🤪
We absolutely need green hydrogen to decarbonize a lot of industrial processes (but not hydrogen used in fossil fuel production, which will decline). It's the new dubious uses for hydrogen cynically promoted by fossil fuel companies that are crazy. They only want to increase demand for their dirty hydrogen during the decade it will take to ramp up green H2 production. It seems the only people still fooled by this are politicians.
Thanks for covering this hydrogen big oil con
This is a simple and brilliant example of the basic principle that, nothing is as simple as some might like it to be! To be an answer it has to be economically viable. If it isn’t, it aren’t gunna fly don’t matter how much you’d like it to be. 15:41
Hydrogen is also a greenhouse gas, which becomes detrimental if you plan on having it leak everywhere out of your gas network.
Hi Dave -
Another great episode. I have looked at hydrogen and agree 100% with the assessment of Paul Martin. I have seen that 30% hydrogen/ 70% methane is the highest ratio you can burn in household appliances. The gas suppliers will market this as "green" having you think that in the future you can burn 100% hydrogen; the future! But, how do you transition a household to pure hydrogen without replacing all the appliances? It's not practical!
Another problem with burning hydrogen is that it burns hot. This produces NOx gases which are not good for your lungs. In fact, NOx are heavier than air, so if you burn it in the kitchen, your pets and toddlers will be exposed to higher concentrations. To make it burn cooler, it has been proposed to mix the H2 with CO2!
Converting electrical energy into hydrogen presently is only about 50% efficient and batteries are around 90% efficient.
The only future I see for hydrogen is in industrial processes, like steel and cement, some large vehicle transportation and maybe aviation. That's it. I hate to see investment in hydrogen in other areas as it takes away from solar, wind, batteries and other storage methods.
Wayne from across the pond.
in relative terms, it is greener than 100% methane. Rather than an absolute position, let's take some of the smaller wins which in the round would contribute to a significant saving and play a part in the longer term transition.
20% by volume is only 7% by energy content and that's its absolute maximum decarbonization potential. And that's the most you can put in the gas network before the end use devices need to be replaced.
@@spitfireresearchinc.7972 plus the CO2 released in generating the H2 to pump into the gas service
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 - it's not a small win though, it's a dead end as the 100% hydrogen is a pipedream as per the video. For the upfront cost of a new H2 ready boiler it can be replaced with a heat pump (initially using government incentives but as volume grows on their own) and then save the home owner money by remvoing the need to pay for the 3x renewable energy generation to power the hydrogen generation.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859no, unless the H2 is made with 90+% renewable electricity, it's WORSE than burning methane due to the inefficiencies and fugitive emissions in production, storage, and delivery. These hare-brained schemes to increase use of hydrogen are a transparent attempt by "natural" gas and fossil fuel companies to delay the replacement of their dirty products with electrification.
Nailed it. I've been following Paul for quite a while on Linked In as he makes it his daily task to rebuff these snake oil salesmen.
I'm in Vancouver, Canada, and when Fortis BC (gas company) said they were going to start a hydrogen blending trial I picked up the phone and started the process to remove natural gas / Fortis from my home, which is now completed, heat pumps (Daikin) replaced the gas furnace and water heater (Rheem), an induction oven replaced the gas cooker, I stopped using electric baseboard heaters and used the heat pump instead, and got rebates and a 0% loan to pay for it all (Greener Homes).
Gas bill went away - very satisfying - including the fixed standing charge, and my electricity bill went from $250/month to $150/month for a family of 4 and that includes local use of an EV. Air conditioning is new to me, and will become increasingly important even this far north.
Paul describes Green Hydrogen to be like Champagne - expensive, and to be used on special occasions! Heating and transport are better served with direct electrification.
Great video, as always, with some excellent and much needed diagrams - the energy in to heat out diagram, hydrogen vs. heat pumps needs to be shown over and over again, a heat pump mostly uses the air for it's source of energy (the sun's heat, consumed at point of use), anything else has to bring all it's energy with it, a heat pump will win on efficiency, wherever it is applicable - which is certainly the UK climate and most of Canada for that matter.
Keep banging this drum, maybe we can get politicians to listen, the BC Government certainly needs to get more opinions into it's collective brain than the current distract and delay hydrogen subsidy farmers that lobby them (Ballard, HTEC, Fortis)
@@brushlessmotoring nailed it? Lol 😄 😆 🤣 more like he shot the nail through his hand ✋ nailed it 🤣
It sounds like your switch away from gas and onto a heat pump worked out great for you. That's interesting how your total energy bill is lower, but it makes sense, because heat pumps are much more efficient than burning gas.
@@davidestabrook5367 more efficient than the baseboard heaters too - which is where the electricity bill saving came from. The gas bill was $75 per month, $13 of which was a standing charge, because heat pumps multiply the input energy, and because a GJ of gas is not comparable to a kWh of electricity directly (appliance efficiency matters a lot, you can’t compare chemical energy) it’s hard to compare the two. I did not expect such a large drop in my electricity bill, we’ll have to wait to and see what a cold snap costs, the heat pumps have lower efficiency in the cold, but it’s still better than a baseboard as I understand it.
That's really impressive! A lot of Canadians should follow your example, but Vancouver is one of the warmest places in the country. Would heat pumps still be effective as far north as Edmonton, where I live?
@@Kevin_Street there are very cold weather heat pumps, yes, I didn’t go for one, as you say, Vancouver is fairly mild, but for very cold climes, having a backup heat, which might be fossil fuel or electrical heat strips covers you for the cold snaps. Plenty of cold weather UA-cam’s about heat pump limits and costs in very cold temperatures, whether the cost and effort of a ground source is worth it (it seems mostly not) - my understanding is air source very cold weather heat pumps work, but they cost more to run in the winter, the efficiency goes down, but still cost no more than baseboards do. Gas is cheaper in the cold, and can be used to supplement a central air heat pump system, but that means you can’t dump gas and it’s $14/month standing charge - probably not a deal breaker - and the truth is, they are not actually going to start blending hydrogen, they know is doesn’t work.
Energy providers want to keep the network so they can use "network maintenance" as an excuse for the standing charges on our bills. No network, no maintenance costs, plus a markup, to pass on to the customer.
I like the idea of ripping out the gas mains, no more gas explosions for a start and so lower household insurance premiums (LOL).
near zero carbon monoxide risk inside family homes as a bonus
The gas mains could simply be converted to sending heated water, instead of gas and the water could be heated from burning unrecyclable wastes for communal heating. This would give them purpose and would be a win win for so many.
Just never seems to be part of the conversation.
And yet they do this across the other side of the North Sea, in almost every major city. 🤔
Lol 😂
@@dandantheideasman In my neighborhood, the gas main feeds houses through a half inch PEX tube. The mains and the little PEX lines are uninsulated, so what little water got to the houses would probably be cold by the time it got there. Some locations might have more appropriate lines, but in general I think it would take a lot of work to repurpose them for district heating.
Can always go off grid, you don’t have to whinge about the fact it costs money to maintain infrastructure then.
The reason for all bad ideas in the modern age is stupidity or greed.
Finally somebody mentioned HDPE pipelines in natural gas distribution network. It is widely used in Europe for decades. Feeding hydrogen in them will cause massive leaks.
Thankfully we haven't had "burn hydrogen to heat your home" type proposals in the US, but it very much reminds me of one of our own homegrown climate delay tactics of growing corn to then convert into liquid fuels. It suffers from the exact same problem of "wouldn't it be vastly more efficient and cheaper to convert that corn lot into a solar park and get direct electric energy that way?" Yes, yes it would.
lots of lawsuits over regional natural gas bans on new builds and even LAWS mandating GAS service be provided in ALL NEW developments
No soil erosion. No nitrate fertilizer, with its emissions and pollution of rivers and sea. More biodiversity existing under the panels. Less land for the energy so saving the rain forest. It's a puzzle!
The US corn lobby is like the mafia. 🌽
Even in the UK the pilot projects have been problematic - two closed down due to lack of public interest and safety concerns, and another one refused to publish a report on the safety findings, it took a freedom of information request to get the documents. The company involved stated publishing the information would prevent the project from going ahead. The explosion test video was publish, which shows the deflagration impact, but the company placed it on YT without a link on their website and made the video unsearchable. However, the press released the link to the video so it can be found.
I could take that liquid fuel and store it easily.
Where/how will I store the Electricity from the solar farms?
Solar and wind power are not always available when people want to use them.
The reason people complain about not being allowed to connect a new house to piped natural gas is because electric heating is much more expensive. Heat Pumps are about four times as efficient as combi boilers at converting watts to heat, but blow me, electricity costs about four times per watt as gas! This means there are no significant current cost savings and the enormously greater capital cost sinks the prospect financially. I may be wrong, but I believe in the UK at least the reason for this price difference is largely political: electricity has been made to carry the costs of decarbonization while gas has not. The political difficulty is that the cost of heating (which is largely gas at the moment) is a lot more sensitive than the cost of electricity. Relatively cheep, in the wider context subsidized, gas is also sandbagging the financial case for investing in insulation improvement.
The main problem in the UK is that the least energy efficient homes are owned by the poorest people who are least able to afford to switch to heat pumps etc. and the government does not have the money to pay for it for them. Any switch from gas for heating is therefore politically impossible and will be until electricity is much much cheaper
@@SmileyEmoji42 The answer is leasing. We already have the situation where most people get their gas and electricity from the same retail energy company. Those companies should be 'encouraged' to own and operate the boilers and heat pumps on customer premises as well. They should charge by metering temperature x volume x time for space heating and temperature x volume for water heating. Designed right the switch from gas to electricity and improvement of insulation becomes a pretty safe investment for the company. The government just has to intervene at the wholesale level to ensure the full carbon costs are paid.
Your guest explained things so well👍’predatory delay tactics’ sums it up nicely
It's easier to compare the cost per kWh; if we assume that $3/kg (very optimistic) for green hydrogen, that would be about 7.6 cents/kWh. And that's just the cost of producing the gas - storage, distribution, maintenance, ... taxes ... add on top (at least another 5 cents/kWh). So even in the most optimistic scenario for the future, that would be about 13 to 15 cents per kWh of heat produced in a condensing boiler.
Is there a cheaper alternative? You guessed it: home insulation and heat recovery do the same job for less than 5 to 7 cents per kWh (BTW: a very good idea, even with current fuel prices). Electricity in winter (yes, that's a challenge too) will not be much more expensive in the future than today (some say it will be less... but there are also challenges if the heat load in the area increases too much; so the actual cost in the same range is the most likely forecast): that's, depending on your grid, 18 to 33 cents/kWh including taxes. With a heat pump SPF = 3 (average winter COP) that gives 6 to 11 cents/kWh of heat; much cheaper than H2 heating.
One last "by the way": the combination of better insulation AND heat pump offers the most cost-effective solution - the small heat pumps are much cheaper and an easy to install alternative, with no problems at maximum electricity load during peak heating weeks.
As always: thanks to both of you, Dave and Paul, for explaining the technical information on H2. Yes, you are right: the "heating with H2" hype was and is mainly intended to deliberately mislead consumers and make them believe that sticking with fossil gas is a future-proof solution. It is not - major industries that announced they would "develop" green and blue hydrogen in Norway have just pulled out (well, that was fast!).
A great point of view! Thanks for doing the calculations. I've already known that H2 is a very inefficient idea for cars, but never thought about the heating calculations.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
15 cents per kWh would be about half the commercial price of electricity to the customer in the UK at present.
@@simhedgesrex7097 Yes, it would, but that tells you how optimistic that price is. If you use electricity to produce hydrogen, the hydrogen should be expected to cost more than the electricity.
Also if you use that electricity in a heat pump, you get 3 or 4 times as much heat.
Paul Martin's analysis is spot on. One minor observation. The brine cavity storages I am familiar with run at virtually constant pressure to preserve the physical integrity of the roof. The pressure is defined by the depth of the cavity and the difference in density between the fluid being stored and brine. Adding more gas displaces brine to a pond at the surface and pumping brine from the pond into the well pushes the product back out. Using excess energy to produce hydrogen and push it down a local cavity for use by nearby industry may make sense, but the compression costs and losses will be significant.
As a postie working in Shropshire, I whiteness industrial modifications going on in our street for the last 2 years, which I might add has upset many people living through it, including Fibre, Water mains, and Gas. The countries metal gas mains is being upgraded to slip a Yellow plastic pipe inside the metal pipe. The machines they use are alarming to say the least, one such machine was a massive vacuum used to clean up tarmac from the road side, and every so often it would become blocked. To clear the blockage they reverse the air flow, resulting in a huge dust cloud coming from the top of the machine, it completely enshrouded the street behind that I had just delivered in. The next morning all the cars and house where covered in this black pounder. If what you are saying is true then why is our Government allowing such modifications to our gas mains? Nearly all the machines are petrol based, and all the vans the workers used were left running all day long. The Gas industry is a massive polluter from end to end.
Simple fact: Pumping an explosive gas into everyones' homes would NEVER take off if someone first invented it today. It is basically a bonkers dangerous idea and Hydrogen would make it even more dangerous and bonkers.
They allow it because inefficiency in energy literally creates larger economic burdens and therefore more money for the government and polluters. There is no thought at all put into ANY aspect of the energy transition from the government perspective in terms of effectively and properly doing ANYTHING. It is purely profit driven... the same profit drive that's caused the destruction and inefficiencies in the first place.
If they are relining the pipe it is because the pipe is leaking!
The choice is repair the pipe or abandon it.
@@jbiasutti No they have been replacing all metal gas pipes with a inner plastic core. Did it to our village 5 years ago. None were leaking at the time but it's done to reduce future leaks.
@@jbiasutti They are relining the pipe to stop the problems that were talked about in the video.
plastic does not suffer from fatigue or hydrogen embrittlement issues the same was that iron or steel pipes previously used did.
(as it turns out the switch to hydrogen bends of gas has been a huge project that has been thought out, planned and funded over a really really long time.)
Which is kind of a weird thing about this video, most of the arguments around delivery, (pipe embrittlement and fatigue) have already been dealt with. - in fact suppliers reported earlier this year that the network is now ready for 100% hydrogen delivery.
He says that appliances aren't just a replace the jet issue, - but they are, it's almost impossible now to buy a new boiler that is not also able to use hydrogen a a fuel. - actually literally just by replacing the jet.
it was 2020 (almost half a decade ago) that Worcester Bosch unveiled their 100% hydrogen boiler, and launched their (drop in replacement/upgradeable) boiler ranges - that are now installed in loads of places!
He talks about the gas delivery pressures, and the 1/3rd per volume energy problem, - but this point is weirdly disingenuous, because there is not plans to have a 100% hydrogen gas network, in fact the plan is to provide a 20% blend, (specifically to aid with the backwards compatibility with older boilers. (and this also deals with the gas capacity issues also.)
It's like he's heard something, not bothered to really find out anything about it, and run off into a load of mad theories about why everyone else is dumb...
There's a small mistake apparently for the explosive range of hydrogen. The range presented is for it's combustible range, it's explosive range is 18%-59%, still a lot bigger than the range for methane.
The range is bigger, but I don't think the width of the range matters much. How likely is it that you would displace half the air in your house with hydrogen? The key figure is the Lower Explosive Limit, and if it's 18%, that's three+ times higher than fossil gas. You have to balance this against the greater power of a hydrogen explosion versus gas, and the fact that hydrogen is much less dense than gas and diffuses faster, so it's harder to reach the explosive limit. There are plenty of good reasons not to use hydrogen as an energy carrier, but explosion safety is not as bad as a lot of people think.
@@incognitotorpedo42 I had a gas leak under the kitchen bench top, inside the closed space behind the drawers and oven and under the gas hotplate. Enough gas accumulated that when I turned off the gas having finished cooking, the flame continued to burn alongside the burner I had turned off. The gas flow was sufficient, and the concentration sufficient to sustain a flame in the gas/air interface at the escape point alongside the gas burner. The gas concentration inside the hotplate unit and under the bench top was too high to support combustion (otherwise the kitchen would have exploded). So, yes, a domestic gas leak can be fast enough to displace all of the air in a large space.
@@incognitotorpedo42You would get a less powerful explosion from hydrogen than natural gas. A cubic meter of methane contains far more energy potential than a cubic meter of hydrogen
@@roywarriner8441 So, you are arguing that immolation is better than explosion?
@@joshua43214 Wtf are you talking about? I said equal volumes of methane contain more energy potential than hydrogen. So more energy would be released in an explosion. I can't dumb it down any more than that.
As an electrician, having your house connected to a single energy source is a recipe for disaster.
I have 2 power sources connected to my home (gas and electricity). During a recent power cut we lost electricity. However we were unable to use any gas appliances because they are all electrically controlled.
Plus at the time of the power cut I had a battery in the garage at 90% fully charged. Couldn't use that either as current UK regulations (pun intended) mean that domestic batteries have to be diconnected during power outage to prevent them back feeding into the grid for safety reasons.
So in effect although having 3 energy sources connected, I rely completely on mains electricity.
Absolutely agree, hydrogen is just crazy as a fuel, outside some non-domestic scenarios perhaps. We have ditched gas entirely and got a heat pump in the UK, and - shock horror, someone call the Daily Mail - it is *better* then the old gas boiler. The home temperature is more consistent, and my wife is not constantly reaching for the 'boost' button.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Ugh, rub it in, why don't you... just kidding, but yeah, I wish I could ditch gas. But I live in a block of flats, there's nowhere to install a heat pump unless building management provides the infrastructure for it, which doesn't look very likely.
Still, at least I've chucked out the gas hob and replaced it with an induction one.
@@juliusapweiler1465heat pumps can be wall mounted. It's just a pain installing them high up. In hot countries it's common for blocks of flats to have individual AC units mounted on the wall outside each flat. Do you have a balcony? There are companies that install heat pumps on balconies.
A very fine presentation! As an engineer who works across several disciplines, I have been long aware of the significant barriers to using Hydrogen as an energy delivery means.
Hydrogen is only seen as a good fuel for vehicles etc by people totally unaware of how miserable it is in every way. Not really touched on is how little can be stored on board a personal vehicle even under VERY high pressures.
The video does cover the important problem of how (as I say it) Hydrogen goes EVERYWHERE and is very difficult to store or send through even short hoses.
Brought up some issues I didn't know about. The fatiguing of the gas pipelines .. hmmm.
I also think that it's important to remember that hydrogen, once released into the atmosphere breaks down molecules in atmosphere called 'the hydroxyl radical' that acts as a methane sync, breaking down methane. By breaking these molecules down, you risk making climate change worse. So now hydrogen is being called an 'indirect' greenhouse gas. There is literally no reason to go down the hydrogen path other than to save the incumbent energy providers profits.
Yes...And it has a half-life of
Thank you for the continued research for us all!
In a domestic gas leak the resultant 'explosion' will blow all the window out and probably the roof off. If it was Hydrogen it will take half the street out in a radius all round the leak.
Exactly what the quantitative risk assessment prior to the (now canceled) trials of hydrogen for home heating in the UK, found. They had to add excess flow devices to reduce the chance of hydrogen explosions not just destroying the house where the leak was, but both houses on either side of a terraced (row) housing unit.
one of my co workers neighbours house BLEW UP from a gas leak and my co workers house was destroyed roof blown clean off most of the windows gone and the whole structure now leans and my co worker has NOT lived in his home for months now as the insurance companies destroy and build a NEW home
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@jasonriddellThis seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
Whilst a Methane deflagration is in hundreds of mph, hydrogen very rapidly accelerates into a detonation at thousands of mph!!
I can't disagree with many (any?) of the points Paul Martin notes, and his points were framed quite simply and clearly.
The one key omission would be addressing the upstream issue of the clean-water supply problem for Green Hydrogen production at any meaningful scale - sufficient to support wide-spread consumption at volume.
The world is facing a growing clean water crisis. Even for human consumption, desalination is a problematic process with poor operational cost economics, including considerable sunk costs and maintenance problems. Alternative's aren't yet proven to be economically viable, certainly not at scale. Desalination at scale also has unexplored / poorly understood impacts on marine life and global water cycles - for example the effects that increased salt content from brine dumping will have on the earth's ocean circulation system, sea life, etc. And that excludes consideration of the fact that the worlds oceans are already under stress from climate transition environmental factors.
Waste-water purification has similar economic challenges (in terms of the economics at scale, and the resulting costs of the Hydrogen to the end consumer), though arguably less systemic impacts than desalination.
If not salination or purification of waste water, how could any government sanction using limited clean-water assets to produce Hydrogen at scale in the face of a growing water crisis?
A very informative video once again. I have just one thought: The UK goverment has just announced £22 Billion for carbon capture and storage. Another unproven (at a large scale) technology. Much of this will be to capture carbon from the production of hydrogen from natural gas. THIS IS TAXPAYERS MONEY which could be spent helping the rollout of heatpumps. It would be good if Ed Milliband could watch this video and then explain to the UK population why he is pushing hydrogen and carbon capture. I think we deserve answers.
I wonder if the gas grid could be used as a "right of way" that exists for stuffing electricity cables down? That would mean that the assets would still be useful, even if they aren't shifting CH4 (or heaven forbid H2) down them.
Had the same thought....and I see from the energy network association (EIP 127) that others have too. Can't find any outcome from this.
My thought was that they would make more sense as a right of way for a heat network.
Or even FTTP?
hm, thats an interesting idea. could protect them from the weather. i wonder if its worth more than turning them into scrap.
To decommission larger gas pipelines you have to fill them with some foam or other filler material otherwise they would collapse on the long-term with no gas pressure inside. So in a study in Germany they said that putting fiberoptics in them is a good solution along the foam. But not as good as power lines.
A good summary of the situation. Interestingly, of course, the old town gas to which you made reference was predominantly hydrogen with some carbon monoxide and a potpourri of organic compounds which gave it its characteristic smell. However, town gas was made by heating coal in the absence of air producing coke, the original ‘smokeless fuel’, as a byproduct together with a range of chemical feedstock. Today we burn domestic and industrial waste to generate electrical energy and, while this may be preferable to sending the waste to landfill and using fossil fuels to create the equivalent amount of energy, it is still generating CO2 and using a relatively inefficient process. It makes me wonder whether it might be possible to heat domestic and industrial refuse in the absence of air to produce hydrogen? The waste is largely organic, in the form of plastics, paper, food waste et cetera and the heat necessary could be generated by burning a small (??) proportion of it. The residue would presumably be carbon char which might have agricultural or other uses? Clearly the economics of such a process would be critical, apart from the external environmental benefits, especially the cost of any hydrogen produced in this way. Nevertheless, the cost of new technology always decreases with increasing take-up. Surely, I can’t be the first person to think about this and it would be interesting to know what work, practical and/or theoretical, has been done or, alternatively, the scientific reasons why it would not be feasible? Certainly, the volume of waste produced by ‘advanced nations’ doesn’t look like decreasing any time soon.
Town gas contained about 50% hydrogen, but was never produced or distributed at high pressure. The issues with hydrogen are many, but the hydrogen assisted fatigue cracking of gas transmission pipelines is a big one. Our paper goes into details on the issues throughout the gas network.
If it uses more electricity to make hydrogen than making electricity to power something then why bother? Just use the electricity in the first place.
I think it's because most people live mostly on automatic pilot, so to speak; They don't think outside their assumptions, and a common assumption seems to be fire=heat, so they assume they need something to burn.
I've noticed a similar blind spot with solar power: I see a lot of people devising systems where they generate electricity with solar panels and use that power to run heat pumps, or worse, resistive heating. All the inefficiencies and conversion losses along the way waste a staggering amount of power; Much better IMHO to collect solar heat and store it as heat in thermal masses/sand batteries, rather than convert light to DC to chemical storage to AC to heat.
There is 3 main reasons: 1. Electricity supply needs to happen at the same time as demand. While we can buffer shorter mismatched with batteries, for longer mismatches, we need a chemical storage. Once the energy it is stored in the form of hydrogen, it is not that clear that reconversions to electricity is the best use. 2. Many countries do not have the electric infrastructure to deal with electric heating. So there is an argument that we need the energy in a form the infrastructure can deal with. 3. Heat pumps are thermodynamically superior but they present a higher up front investment to households. Many homeowners are hesitant to maker that investment.
Baseload stability? Remember renewable electricity is really renewable and natural gas at the moment apart from nuclear which is slow
Compliments on the excellent video Dave and really great graphic at 13:50. One thing that wasn’t mentioned in the video is that burning hydrogen also leads to NOx emissions, something that you could add to the graphic.
Does it lead to more NOx compared to hydrocarbons?
@@lharsay I don’t have the numbers, but in this comparison that is irrelevant since it is compared to a technology with zero NOx emissions.
If people insist on having hydrogen to burn in their houses, they could always electrolyse water at about 60% efficiency…..OR…. they could use the same amount of electricity more efficiently heating their (insulated) house.
Good to have the case made out succinctly in one hit. Thanks.
In 2022 I got involved in a hydrogen train project in Scotland. After 3 months I decided it was never going to work economically and I quit.
Aberdeen by any chance? They seem to have gotten the hydrogen mind virus along with a few others.
In Canada they are already running a couple hydrogen freight trains. So far it's been successful.
@@pin65371cost per mile?
@@pin65371those trains may be running but have you done a cost / benefit analysis? Have you factored in the production and shipping costs of the hydrogen and compared it with other fuels or energy sources? What is the environmental impact of producing the hydrogen the trains use?
Thank you Dave for getting the truth out there on the futility of using Hydrogen as a ubiquitous fuel and energy storage source. I have studied and written about the subject like other engineers. The risks and costs are too much to overcome. There is only niche utility for hydrogen. O&G companies are using this wet dream to defer their disinvestment in GHGs due to the future “promise” of hydrogen.
and H2 allows these companies to STAY in power by being the gate keepers to the worlds economy
The problem of cracks will quickly degrade the entire gas pipeline to too dangerous to use.
I'm from the UK and finally removed the gas from my little home. Started in 1999, and slowly chipped away. Replaced single glazing with double, added extra insulation in roof and when I had flooring up to run electric cables, I put loose insulation back to slow air circulation. I fitted a simple heat pump upstairs in 2000. Bonus, cooling and dehumidifing in summer months. In 2012 I jumped on the solar bandwagon for the FIT. Extra bonus, free cooling in summer with the solar generation. Over the last couple of years, I have been fixing floor insulation on my walls and wallpapering over, to slow the heat loss to the outside. Installed electric underfloor heating down stairs and removed the gas fire and replaced hob with induction. More bonuses, in spring on wards I can usually cook for free using the solar generation, were as I was exporting my electric and paying for gas to heat n cook!
Even now I still look at improving home insulation. Changed seals on windows from failing rubber to silicon. When a glazing unit fails, I now spec warm edge with Argon gas filling.
I have a burning desire to express my gratitude, in a non explosive way,
Kind regards,
Carl Hindenburg
Yet another excellent episode that I will highly recommend.
Bet not one UK politician watches this great explanation..😂
The problem with UK politicians is only 6% of them have a degree in a STEM subject, so almost by definition the majority don't even have the basic knowledge to look at this subject and know what questions to ask.
Listening to you since 2021 April. An engineer in power and O&G industry from mechanical and process design domain with 28 years of experience.
Spent 5 years of my life from May 2019 to Feb 2024 passionately and analytically to develop various models of solar to elec storage and solar to H2. Their generation, storage, transmission, transportation, intermediate conversions, endusage i.e. complete solar to enduse lifecycle. By Feb 2024 I was convinced fully that H2 doesn't have the overall generation, conversion, transmission effeciancy, (thermodynamic / exergetic) effectiveness to be an alternative to replace fossil fuel based electric power generation that needs to triple. It can't contribute in double digits percentage of overall energy consumption for decades to come. Now I am more focused on electrochemistry and considering Material science to be the black box that can throw some thing that meet all boundary criteria.
Right now, Québec (which has 100% green, renewable hydro/wind power) is selling a block of megawatt hours to make green hydrogen.
It would be more useful to use that power to run electric cars...
As some wise man once said, and others followed.... 'Back to the drawing board'. I feel 'deflated'.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
There is no point using electricity to generate hydrogen for home heating - it's easier to use electricity directly and avoid the conversion losses.
This is why I’m sticking with tried and tested coal. It’s even locally sourced.
And is in the process of destroying our civilization, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable. Great solution!!!!
Well, here in Denmark the first production facilities making hydrogen from water and excessive power from Wind Energy is started. It means the hydrogen is produced without coal or petrochemical materials. It is going up in scale quilte fast. And as I said just using energy that otherwise would be lost.
I don't disagree that using "Spare" Power to produced Hydrogen is a good thing. What realy matters is what is the Hydrogen going to be used for. I don;t think it's suitable to pump through pipes as a substitute for Natural Gas (Methane).
@@shilks8773 They are building new lines optimized for hydrogen. So not reusing any old lines.
Hydrogen is way to dangerous to use in a domestic premise. It is very good at leaking / diffusing through pipes and seals. Inside a building it will be confined enough to create an explosive atmosphere.
41 years in the gas industry and we put profit ahead of saving the planet for our grandchildren. Time some CEO's were held to account....
H2 leaks through solid steel
Exactly. A friend was involved in providing piped gas systems.They tested for leaks with helium with a tracer so they could find the leaks. In his words if there's a leak helium will find it, the only thing that is better would be hydrogen and that's far too dangerous.
and as it does so makes the steel brittle.
@@rivimeyHydrogen Embrittlement is the term for it. We need subsidies for heat pump installations, and a plan for phasing out gas.
It should be made cheaper right now to install a heat pump, and changes so that running a heat pump is cheaper than running a gas boiler.
There also needs to be a plan for retraining or early retirement for people working in the gas industries, so that they aren't penalised from phasing out gas boilers.
@@IMBlakeley actually helium leaks more readily than H2 because it is a smaller molecule... being a monatomic molecule whereas hydrogen forms H2 "diatomic" thus bigger... That, at least, is the simple conceptual explanation. So helium is better leak detector than hydrogen.
@@Jarrah_Kilgour Okay thks. Just going on a remembered casual conversation fro years ago.
There is no win in hydrogen!
no win? how about clean combustion? how about being much more energy dense (J/kg)?
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 did you watch the video??
electricity does every combustion job far better for LESS $$$$ and LESS equipment on the consumers side
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859how many L/kg is H2? How much energy does it take to compress hydrogen to practical densities? The video already indicates needing 3X the flow capacity for compressed H2 in existing natural gas infrastructure for the same energy content.
Also: What combustion use case does H2 have where it is more cost-effective than the electricity used to make that H2?
Bring back coal.
Up until 1967 the UK’s old gas network used “town gas”, which is derived from coal and contains a high proportion of hydrogen: about 50 per cent.
The Shetland Islands have replaced natural gas and oil burning with hydrogen and even run a sea ferry on it. There are ongoing negotiations with Government to include 20% hydrogen to our existing gas provision mix which may include butane and methane at times to reach the required calorific value. "This may account for a yellow or reddish tint to the blue flame normally present?"
Just replaced my 9 year old gas heater with a nice heat pump. Carbon free showers and warm rooms never felt better! 😁
The premier of Alberta, Canada, who has effectively killed the renewable energy industry in the province, is banking on a future hydrogen industry, extracted from natural gas. The hope is to use a technology which extracts the hydrogen and leave the carbon behind. This technology is in early development but I am skeptical about its scalability. I hope we can vote her and her party out in the next election.
the ONLY "horse Alberta has for an economy these days is oil and gas extraction and they wont rain in massive bad budgeting so they need to KEEP Milking there ONLY productive cow
Manitoba investing in mining minerals for battery production
See Hazer Group - an Australian company that has a scalable process to convert methane into h2 and graphite.
As someone living in Ontario where Ford is eager to kill us all with sprawl and fossil fuels, I wish you the best of luck in 2027.
As a resident of Ontario, whose premier is doing his be$t to render the planet uninhabitable, I wish you the best in 2027.
@@r.1599 It's not much better in BC, we have an active hydrogen boondoggle subsidy harvesting industrial complex based around the 'hydrogen tomorrow' promise that keeps oil and gas very much the choice of today.
H2 is an industrial gas
One that is 99% currently made from gas, coal and petroleum, without CO2 emissions- just as it was 20 years ago. There is no spare green hydrogen to waste as a fuel.
@@spitfireresearchinc.7972 Majority of Hydrogen production comes from 1. Steam Methane Reforming (SMR): For every ton of hydrogen produced using SMR, about 9-12 tons of CO₂ are emitted. 2.Coal Gasification: Producing hydrogen from coal is even more carbon-intensive, releasing around 19 tons of CO₂ per ton of hydrogen. (CGPT)
This is probably about the 20th video I've watched which clearly and concisely goes through why hydrogen for domestic heating is stupid, for many indisputable reasons. So I admit I must be in a bit of an anti-hydrogen echo chamber. But how haven't the key policy makers like Ed Miliband found a single one of these videos? Because it really is quite overwhelmingly obvious!
Don't underestimate how much lobbying the gas distribution industry is doing in order to pretend that it has a future...
Fossil lobby is powerful. I have a friend who still thinks hydrogen will be the future, somehow.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@Sekir80This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
@@Sekir80 hear it OFTEN electric is stuupid with H2 OR "al gore" is trying to prevent the "truth" about H2 so they can "control us" with electricity / EV cars and other really stupid conspiracy theories
I have followed Paul Martin's articles (many are on LinkedIn) and appreciate bis blunt no-BS style and substance. People need to realize that the hydrogen arena is fueled by immense subsidies ($50bn in the US alone) and the oil/gas players who lobbied hard for those are happy to syphon it off as it prolongs their game and might get them some internally useful R&D along the way.
Hydrogen is being proposed for long-duration electricity storage as solar and wind have increased from 8GW capacity in 2010 to about 30 GW today. A significant proportion is being curtailed and at other times cannot generate optimally. What is needed is long-duration storage. The last government had a study carried out that concluded that pumped storage hydro (PSH) , the only mature technology, was by far the cheapest solution especially if existing infrastructure, closed quarries and reservoirs, are used. I have carried out a survey of possible mid-sized PSH schemes and found about 120 possible sites in England and Wales using buried pipes instead of tunnels which allows them to be built in a far shorter time. The easiest schemes to get planning permission are old quarries or open cast coal pits of which there are about 20, with some 8 in the S Wales coalfield which could be an energy centre for the UK as well as providing livelihoods in a depressed area and other benefits such as a reserve source of water for summer droughts and upland fires. The problem is that there is no clear investment strategy for something that is actually an insurance system. The last government delayed implementing a cap and floor system because they were supporting the oil companies championing gas and hydrogen.
What an extremely biased article, posing as the truth. Need to investigate who this person is and who is paying for this content.
Hydrogen has always been a pretty terrible way of transferring energy. At least now we have moved past calling people who raised this “deniers” and “fossil fuel shills” and actually listening to the real world problems.
Another waste of energy following false hopes into dead end!!
Another issue with gas, at least here in the UK, is the crazy pricing structure of domestic energy - with gas deliberately being charged at much less than electricity.
Converting to heat pumps might appear to be a no-brainer, but the reality for most of us is that it is too expensive and ineffective.
For instance, I live in a mid-terrace Victorian house - very common in the UK - with very poor insulation, which cannot really be improved, and no space for a hot water tank. A heat pump simply wouldn't give us the on-tap hot water or level of heating we are used to - even if I could afford the conversion.
But, with the assumption that all electricity will be produced by renewable sources in the near future, heat pumps aren't actually necessary in all cases. Normal resistive electric heating and hot water is just as effective (if not as efficient). It may not be an ideal solution, but it would be a much easier and quicker transition away from gas than heat pumps.
But it is simply impossible to implement at the moment - not because it's expensive to convert or difficult to do, but because, with the high cost of electricity, it would be cripplingly expensive to run.
And yet this is an entirely artificial problem. The government could solve this overnight, just by making electricity as cheap as gas.
You jest! The government would make gas as expensive as electricity and make a fast buck.
I was once on a zoom meeting with engineers and experts from the Netherlands and Denmark, run by a lobby man who was expecting them to back him up around the use of hydrogen for everything. It didnt work. There was a quote engrained in my mind now:
The only way you'll heat homes with hydrogen, is by capturing the waste heat from production and putting it into a district heat network.
Heat networks being common across Europe.
People latch to hydrogen, “clean” coal, carbon capture, and especially nuclear, anything to avoid the fact that renewables are the cheapest, most environmentally friendly, and the safest.
Nuclear is an option depending on location. SMB Molten Thorium reactors offer great opportunity for baseload energy
i thought hydro is cheapest and nuclear is most environmentally friendly and one of safest
I seems strange that people hate nuclear with a passion.
@@marksmit8112 How many of those reactors are there in the world? How many of them are economically viable without subsidies? If it was a viable solution someone would have built one by now. Nuclear is the most expensive source of energy.
@@fakestory1753 I’m not sure if you mean hydrogen or hydroelectric but solar and wind are cheaper than both.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
I’m not sure that a form of energy which created the largest single environmental disaster in history can truly be considered “safe”. Newer plants have better safety measures but it’s still the most expensive.
There’s never been a wind farm or solar field that’s contaminated an area with radiation and forced evacuations.
You don’t understand
Hydrogen has greater opportunity for us to need big companies to supply.
Storage of electricity is dangerously close to economic independence.
They want all eggs in one basket.. They want us weak and dependable
HYDROGEN for ______ is a REALLY DUMB idea.
Green steel sounds solid so far.
Not for all applications.
When hydrogen is used to replace fossil fuel and no other method is possible.
Like Coal from steel making, diesel of heavy road transport, kerosine from airplane traffic etc.
Of course there are places where hydrogen is only opition like before.
Thing is, hydrogen creation needs to be electrolytic. If transported it needs to be converted to other molecules like methane.
eh, there are a couple cases where it makes sense. its a good rocket fuel, and hydrogen fuel cells are quite usefull.
it might also find a role in short distance air travel, though i think lithium air batteries have a better shot at that
@@playyourturntodieatvgperson I still don't know why or where fuel cells could be better than any alternative. Could you give me an example? For what use cases are useful?
I love this channel as much as I love Consumer Reports because of its unbiased analysis. With this out of then way I loved this analysis and will certainly dig deeper. Geopolitics will certainly throw a major wrench at the electricity transition efforts and potentially the US elections as well. But that apart I’m still wondering about green H2 given enormous generation in places like China and India that do most of our manufacturing. These countries are exploring generation at consumption point thereby eliminating transportation issues. Finally the majority of the use is industrial and not home heating in those countries
Another excellent video. I have been racking my brain for possible uses for hydrogen, for some years. I came up with 3 possibilities. 1. Long distance heavy boat transportation. 2. Cooking where a flame is desired. 3. Mood lighting. Boat transportation could be done with electricity, but significant floating charging infrastructure would be needed. 2. Cooking with a flame is almost never required to reach the goal, but often desired. A simple propane torch could be used by chefs, to create the perfect food presentation. I have not cooked in a kitchen with a flame since 2011. Mood lighting can be done with video, LED tea lights, or possibly plasma made from electricity. One reality is that fire, is close to humanity's heart. It is has been a mainstay in human cooking and heating for many thousands of years.
You didn’t notice the explosivity graph!?
Batteries have about 1/36th the energy as diesel per volume. The batteries you would need to move a large boat would be immense.
Check out what shipping companies are doing with green ammonia as a fuel.
Oh wow, when I saw this title my jaw dropped when I got to "home heating". Memories of experiments in second year chemistry and air travel came to mind, along with my ever growing hopeless feeling from the lack of knowledge in the general population.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I feel the same way. It's said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Ignorance is a thousand times more dangerous and, unfortunately, it's extremely widespread and spreading.
Thank you. Don’t even get me started on H2 for cars. Just idiotic.
disagree. for certain vehicles it works well. The Toyota Mirai has shown what can be done. As a range extender Hydrogen is a useful energy store which can be carried on board a car. The cost of producing green hydrogen is falling fast and this will accelerate.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859
The Mirai fuel cell car has ½ the range of my BEV, but costs 30 times as much to fuel for the same distance. Not to mention the fuel cell has a life of under 100k miles, and they have a battery on board anyway.
Fun fact, in the UK, you can't drive between H2 filling stations in the range of the vehicle, so it's absolutely pointless, especially as it's effectively a fossil fuel powered vehicle anyway.
I'll be sticking with BEV thanks.
@@eugenecreightongriffiths3859 Guess what's better to do with the energy you create and distribute said hydrogen: using it to propel cars via electric motors.
@@johnnodge4327 Not to mention BEVs are getting better and cheaper by the day, while H2 are far less safe than EVs.
This seems like another prime example of a hydrogen hit piece propaganda campaign.
There are many other methods using hydrogen for heat outside of burning it.
Hydrogen catalytic combustion heating, flameless oxidation
Hydrogen LENR reactor technology for heating applications, see brillioun energy nickel hydrogen lenr hot tube or Brilliantlight Powers hydrogen Sun Cell.
You can pull massive amounts of excess heat from fuel cells being ran that is just a by product of generating electricity from hydrogen.
On demand hho generator technology coupled with electrolyzer lenr principles can be combined to create cop 3 or better electric heaters utilizing lenr as a energy output amplifier.
STOP GASLIGHTING YOUR AUDIENCE
I don't need gas when I can use Electricity for cooking, heating/cooling, appliance, EV charging.
And I have solar to power all of these.
Way to go
I to have NO "fuel" and have NO solar/ battery OR ANY cost intensive add on in my 100 year old home and do NOT miss gas service and my utiltiy bills are inline with by GAS equipped friends and neighbours AND I have NO modern insulation OR Windows
@@jasonriddell So, how do you heat your home?
Cost to produce green hydrogen should be close to 0 per kg in summer. That is main idea. You can't produce green hydrogen from electricity from grid. So electricity from Sahara Africa, summer Europe or when electricity is close to 0
I Love the work you do. There is a glairing incongruity that occurs when all UA-camrs discus these topics. First they say "What we are doing is wrong, and must stop". Agreed. Then they say " It has always been done Thus, and so it will continue." What? Yes it is agreed that Scientists are not talking about Burning Hydrogen. The 3 things that were done in the past that must stop are 1) Using Petrochemicals. 2) Producing energy in a central location(Factory} to be then 3) Mass Distributed from the central Location to the end user. Energy can be much more efficiently and usefully produced at the point of use, eliminating the need for Mass storage and distribution. I Thank you for listening. Please Continue the Great Work !
Thank you for sharing Paul Martin’s excellent engineering analysis and very understandable presentation. I believe the best phrase that he employed was ‘predatory delay.’ I see the same tactic being employed by much of the funding behind the rapid proliferation of nuclear fusion energy startup companies who promise to soon build an economically competitive nuclear fusion demonstration power plant.
The byproducts are nitrous oxide and water. Nitrous oxide also burns, with the byproducts being Nitrogen and Oxygen. We just need a 16 stroke engine that also separates all the atoms perfectly and ditches the water, then burns the Hydrogen, then NO2, and then O2 in separate chambers, one after the other with different compression and spark timing. Easy stuff /s.
I think the greatest idea in home heating comes from the Netherlands, they have a furnace that burns Iron powder. The furnace collects the spent iron oxide waste for reprocessing into fresh iron powder.
BTW, you can strip the oxygen out of it with a simple vinegar solution.
You can't "strip the oxygen out with a simple vinegar solution". Burning iron powder requires you to reduce iron oxide back to iron metal to close the loop. By the time you've done that, you've wasted most of the energy you fed. By the way, the primary method of decarbonized production of iron metal from iron oxide is via hydrogen...so really, iron powder as a fuel is a hydrogen derived fuel or worse still, a fossil derived fuel.
Great to see you at Everything Electric South this weekend. As ever you did a great job hosting the panels and also made known your opinions on Hydrogen there (rightly so!)
Go Michael L. Not many people with a better grasp of this thing than he does.
The old town gas made from coal was about 50% hydrogen and we were delivering it by pipe to consumers all over the country reliably, so it's viable. And while we might need to update gas infrastructure, if we're going to replace gas appliances with electrial ones then we'll be needing to update and increase a lot of electrical infrastructure as well. Old gas appliances are equally obsolete if we switch to hydrogen or electric replacements. So I don't think hydrogen is as unrealistic as some people claim, but I also don't doubt it's being grabbed on to by a gas industry who are very keen to stay in business.
Good video. I work in hydrogen and consider myself a realist in it. Hydrogen for heat is a non starter and the legacy gas networks are the industry's own worst enemy.
Hydrogen has its place, primarily because even after we've done everything else that's economical with electricity storage, there will be curtailed power. If there's enough otherwise curtailed power (and electrolysers are cheap enough to be economical at low capacity factors - something which is not true today), then some of that could instead be used to displace natural gas in ammonia and methanol production.
If that's happens (big 'if') , then salt caverns have their place and gas networks are a necessity. However, the hydrogen gas networks will never be remotely as extensive as the methane networks in Europe and North America - they will be a far more limited network over short distances connecting specialist industrial users.
A major point about the distribution network that gets widely missed (including here) is even if the network could be upgraded to handle hydrogen there will be a significant changeover period (years) during which which both natural gas and hydrogen appliances will need to receive their respective fuels and a single network can't handle two gasses at the same time so the only options are to either build temporary local supply stations for hydrogen until the conversion is complete (hugely expensive and can you be 100% certain that absolutely everyone/thing has been fully converted?) or build a second dedicated hydrogen network and retire the old gas network after conversion. People point to the town gas conversion when trying to say it's possible but they did exactly that, build a second entirely new national network for natural gas (before that town gas was mostly supplied by local generators isolated from everywhere else) and there were far fewer appliances to convert, if an appliance or house didn't get converted then it also didn't get connected to the new network so no safety issues from missed properties..
One of the best overviews as hydrogen as a renewable energy solution I've seen. The only thing that I think could have been made clearer is that hydrogen use will produce something like >10x as much CO2 than the electric equivalent because of the inefficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen, then compressing and storing it, then converting it back into useful work.
with a heat pump you get more than 3x as much energy out as you put in, on top of the rest of the energy savings of electricity vs hydrogen as an energy storage and transportation medium. That's all it is: "an energy storage and transportation medium".
It's downright ridiculous in the places where you convert it back into electricity before the work is done.
Having said all that, there are some instances where hydrogen does make sense: Like where it's naturally occuring. But that will run out eventually and has limited capacity so that's not a long term solution. Then you need an enormous storage tank. The bigger the cheaper per kWh stored due to the square cube relation of skin area to volume. Also if you have a substancial excess of power generation not when you need it, then it could make sense to store it as hydrogen, rather than use batteries. But that is a very niche situation when your electrical grid connections are unusually low capacity, like remote islands, maybe.
I was waiting to hear a round up of the facts about this subject. Great work by all and appreciated. Much love from Northern Ireland
Thank you for clarifying why methane will not be replaced by hydrogen.
It seems to me that a much better way to de-carbonize methane is to grow it with methane-producing bacteria (technically they are anaerobic archaea) called methanogens. That's called "biogas" and Nature produces a LOT of it in all rotting processes and CO2 is a feedstock for these microorganisms....
propane off gird, for heating, and cooling, but on gird, natgas lines could be deconstructed, in favor of directly burning the natural gas, with high efficiency generators that then sell the energy in the form of electricity to the clients. Early on, regulators will charge clients to have any lines removed, but maybe one day they will be deconstructed, or rebuilt completely. You have to scrub, and capture emissions while producing as much energy that is also readily available, so it makes more sense to centralize the burning and use of nat gas, than it does to replace it.
Thank you very much, Dave. Since water is a product of hydrogen combustion, I've had this dreamy outlook towards it for many years. This excellent video, in 15 short minutes, has given me a much-needed education. Again, I say THANK YOU.
I still don't understand why we don't see more research and use of geothermal technology?
It's hard to get to in most places because of the insane depth. There were some efforts to drill deeper than the Earth's crust which were nightmarish. But the energy there is mind boggling and it's very overlooked. Where geothermal is available or close to the surface, it should absolutely be exploited to the maximum. Iceland's utility energy is 100% geothermal.
This ties into my thinking.
There are three general types of energy.
1/ Extraction. That’s coal, NG, and oil. But also uranium.
2/ Captured energy. Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydroelectric are all examples of this.
3/ Manufactured fuels. This is hydrogen. Where the energy cost of producing, compressing, transporting, liquifying if required, storage, distribution, and delivery to end user all take far more energy then can be gathered from consuming hydrogen. The simple fact that we need to “make” hydrogen shows how inherently inefficient it is a fuel for anything more than industrial processes.
A couple of other examples is coking coal, and bio fuels. But both are specialty use materials for niche markets.
Thanks for the great video. Just to highlight what a delay strategy this is.
1. There is only one gas pipe running in your street.
2. All your neighbours would need the appropriate boiler.
3. Some old (poor) granny does not see the point in investing in a new boiler/ cannot afford it
-> either the conversion will be stopped or poor granny will live in the cold. Guess what's going to happen
In reality the energy distribution runs over many streets and you cannot feed hydrogen in at any of those distributors.. absolute delay tactics.
I live in the Noth of England, where a lange percentage of housing stock is the older high density housing. Heat pumps and solar are completely impractical for the vast majority of these properties. The conversion from the current gas boilers to electric is both expensive to performe and expensive to run afterwards, a real problem in these lower income areas. Leeds is set to become the UK's first 100% hydrogen city and is currently in the process of upgrading all of the gas network to allow this. Every pipe is being replaced wth large diameter plastic. My particular are is underway now and we have already had the pipe upgrade. I personally am quite happy to give it a try especially with the green hydrogen LCC are promising. A secondary advantage that no one talks about is the enhanced ability to provide hydrogen fueling stations for cars, be these personal domestic pumps or larger commercial ones. Hopefully the move to hydrogen will mean I never have to own a Tesla, which on its own is justification enough for me.
If you think direct electric heating is expensive then wait until you have the cost of green hydrogen which has to be 50% more expensive than the electricity used to create it given the unavoidable losses.
Does all this change if we actually pull the hydrogen out of the ground in pure form? Apparently there are a lot of hydrogen deposits on earth.
I'm glad people like you are bringing these issues to light. It's a shame that the gas industry has gotten away in stalling our clean future for so long. Thank you for your work!
It's better to keep the methane pipes and gradually replace the natural gas with biogas (both are methane but biogas is renewable, unlike natural gas). This is just a short term solution and in the long run methane should be almost completely replaced by electricity, with a few exceptions.