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How is the hydrogen made?
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To my knowledge, with plenty of carbon emisssions
Is it less than using fossil fuels for power exclusively? If so then it's a step in the right direction. Yes I know it sounds like I'm shilling for BP now but we get lost in the doom spiral so fast we forget we are indeed making progress. We just have to keep their feet to the fire or...erm... solar panel?
They're not using electrolysis and water to make hydrogen, they're using power and steam to crack petroleum products into hydrogen.
And this is still a large step in the right direction, because cheap hydrogen creates an incentive to develop hydrogen infrastructure, which increases the demand for hydrogen, and can help lay the groundwork for a future in which hydrogen is produced from renewable sources.
Also, steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, and as such it can be performed without carbon emissions.
There isn't a real need for hydrogen. We have plenty of other solutions. People have the expectation that our society changes from unsustainable to sustainable by just swapping in clean technologies in place of the dirty one's. That isn't going to happen, and hydrogen won't change that.
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Might've been a step forward 40 years ago. Today its finding a spot to dig in, so they can keep the fires of hell burning.
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In the spirit of the comic - how is the solar panel made?
Unfortunately, no. It's not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.
The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.
In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution
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It was sad when the Physics Girl took Shell's money to shill hydrogen fuel cells.
I get you need to eat but still....a very shitty move.
I can't even come close to imagining her medical bills, can you?
Is she "ok" now? The last I knew she was completely incapacitated and couldn't get out of bed. One hell of "long covid" case... :(
That video is a really hard watch. If you’ve ever been in either of their positions taking care of a family member full time or relying on someone, you know the tremendous amount of love involved in it. Usually you see it as an afterthought, but what was amazing about Destin’s video is seeing it happen in real time.
I have one of the conditions some doctors suspect is the root cause of long COVID, mast cell activation disorder, and it absolutely sucks ass if it's uncontrolled. It can make for some amazing naps, but they get old when it's all you can do.
I'm fine'ish now, although I guzzle the contents of a small pharmacy every month.
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She can't even make videos in her current state. This was done well before then. The fact that she is able to have the medical care she has now is a sign she didn't need that money though. She was obviously making enough from other more ethical sources. Now if she made that, I could excuse it, but it wasn't done now.
That said, her medical bills shouldn't be an issue for anyone. There are people out there in the same state but with much less support. They shouldn't have to suffer even more because they can't afford it.
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The videos were made before she got long covid. I don't know how well she's doing now. My only updates about her are from the host of veritasium and only when I go looking for his videos.
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I remember coming away from her videos with the perception that hydrogen fuel cells are dumb. So she did a pretty bad job shilling it, if that is the case.
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I haven't heard about this. Can you elaborate on what happened?
Kari Byron, formerly of MythBusters fame, recently put out an ad for Shell. I believe she's also committed to a 3 year "docuseries" for them. See here for a thread on Lemmy.world with a link to the video
I can't find the specific video but here is the first video in her series: https://piped.video/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY
She says that the hydrogen is sourced using water and renewables but it's highly sus that Shell (or BP; I can't remember) was sponsoring the series.
Shell does that all the time. Among the oil companies, they seem to be the biggest advocates for hydrogen.
They 100% know that electrolysis methods won't be economically viable. The path through hydrogen goes through traditional hydrocarbon sources.
One maybe possibly exception is the recent finds of underground hydrogen sources. Still unclear if that's going to be economically viable. But even if it is, we would just add it to the list of decarbonized energy sources. We're not short of solutions; we're short of political capital to implement them.
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Well, supposedly almost all hydrogen was made not long after the Big Bang went bang, with a tiny bit getting once in a while produced by the spontaneous formation of particle and anti-particle pairs, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, but then it combines with stuff and is no longer hydrogen. For example, a lot of it on earth is bound with oxygen in a from known as dihydrogen monoxide. You can input energy to separate the two hydrogen from the oxygen, but it's not freely available. This is a useful way to spend excess energy to store the energy for later or to move, but not if you don't have excess clean energy.
You can also get some from things like Methane (CH4, aka natural gas). This is how most of the gas companies are producing it, and it obviously isn't clean. They like to pretend it's clean by saying using the hydrogen just produces water, but obviously the hydrogen didn't just appear.
My favorite way to get hydrogen is mixing caustic soda, water and aluminum foil. Only cause I think it's funny you can get very explosive things from the grocery store
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With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.
That's the ideal case, but in practice much of it is directly derived from natural gas instead of electrolysis
In 2022 less than 1% of hydrogen production was low-carbon.[1] Fossil fuels are the dominant source of hydrogen, for example by steam reforming of natural gas.[2]
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Hah! It's amazing how many people are still hanging onto the delusion that hydrogen is made from renewables when almost every ounce of commercial hydrogen fuel is made by cracking petroleum products.
What you're saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we're developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
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Is there a community for green memes like this? Love it
This is it
Where do you think we are?
In a general meme community
In a meme community on a solarpunk instance.
Didn't realize what instance I was on!
Gotcha! I came here from the everything feed. I shall now subscribe!
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This is your stop, you can disembark the maglev! 😁
Oil companies really made hydrogen sound evil. Maybe that's what they wanted all along.
Exactly. Hydrogen can be produced easily with all the green energy produced during off peak that is otherwise wasted.
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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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