The shipping industry is investigating making ammonia from the hydrogen and then using that in fuel cells; it has the advantage that it's easier to handle. https://maritime-executive.com/article/highest-power-output-...
I am glad that decentralised electrical from solar and wind can fully replace the old system and look foward to a new many-noded culture which can allow all humanity to flourish.
This doesn't make any sense: free trade is not a magic spell against the desires of imperialism, and the US embargoed Japan slightly before Japan attacked the US (but long into Japan's war with China).
Is the problem that wind isn't reliable and you might go days without it? Or you wouldn't fit in ports or other areas with a big turbine sticking out? Or is there some other practical problem.
Might solve problems for countries that have lost their own manufacturing capacity because shipping products gets way less appealing.
Further, the ships take a significant amount of energy to get going, so much of that initial acceleration could be handled by strong tug boats which would then be immediately recharged.
Aircraft will remain liquid-hydrocarbon-fueled for the foreseeable future, even if the fuel production transitions to a synthetic process vs. refined crude oil.
Making more room for the tanks means either less cabin/storage and/or bigger cross-section and increased drag.
"Long-distance" is a subjective term. There is an ever-increasing distance for which batteries are doable. Everything else is will be liquid biofuels, rather than efuels.
Biofuels are as green as the process making them. Electrify the equipment being used (something that's being done for reasons orthogonal to this) and you're already made the process more green.
Again, biofuels are not green. The process that makes them involve vast quantities of land and resources. It is in fact a very inefficient and resource intensive idea. It is actually much worse than what it takes to make e-fuels.
Ammonia (a toxic gas) as a fuel is an insane idea and will lead to needless deaths.
Efuels are incredibly inefficient. Hard to justify paying 10x the price.
Ammonia or synfuels are not the only alternative. The elephant in the room, the one fuel that is being used today is biofuel.
I was merely stating why cellulosic ethanol is not the major source of biofuel; because corn is heavily subsidized and produces a cheaper product, hence nobody wants to buy the more expensive product.
That's not a technical problem, it's an economic one. And the subsidies where to change we would see less from corn and more from other sources.
Cellulosic ethanol is any idea brought up as an alternative to the problems of corn ethanol. Ironically, by the George W. Bush administration. Unfortunately, nothing has materialized in any meaningful quantity.
And FYI, they’d be subsidizing it heavily if any meaningful quantity of cellulosic ethanol could be produced. So bringing up that part doesn’t mean much. But cellulosic ethanol production never happened and so far there is no reason to believe it is possible.
I'm not so sure. That would introduce competition for the corn ethanol, and there's a fairly large constituency (those having their corn production subsidised) that would oppose this kind of measure.
Sorry. But there’s no reason so many people need to fly (consultants, I used to be one racked up a few hundred thousand miles) besides leisure or critical travel. And it should reflect in the price so tickets aren’t $150 to be crammed in like cattle.
And yes it should be rare to fly until we figure out cleaner fuel methods. Just my hot take.
If I were to bet, I would say that converting hydrogen to kerosene will be far cheaper and more efficient than trying to power long distance flight with hydrogen
Jet fuel is ludicrously energy dense, to the extent that it's easy to underestimate how much energy you need: at any reasonably-sized airport, if you want to replace the current fleet then you need to be talking about roughly a power station's worth of continuous energy delivery into aircraft fuel tanks. That's doable with jet fuel because you're not climbing out of an energy well just to get hold of the fuel. You just separate it out, and the problem becomes pure logistics.
With H2, the volume you need and the added storage complexity means the current logistics becomes a rounding error in comparison to how on earth you get the gigawatts to churn feedstock into gas.
You could do it, but you'd want nukes on-site to do it.
H2 molecules are extremely small -- storing them without loss is heavy and volumetrically expensive, making it implausible for any aircraft.
The same factors apply to ships, pipelines etc because space for fuel is space that does not contain high value cargo.
Ships don't care about weight. The cooling infrastructure or heavy steel tanks are possible.
Have you looked at how high the containers are stacked on a container ship? Space taken up by fuel is space that can't be sold.
Source: we partner with commercial shipping companies and spend time not just talking to the commercial people but on the ships themselves.
Similarly, cargo ships can't run on batteries, but could fairly trivially be switched to hydrogen with only minor loss in storage capacity (1-5%).
The benefit of hydrogen is that it was functioning just fine in the 1960s, there aren't any outright technical showstoppers here; just financial problems and technical problems that are hard to solve cheaply.
I'm not saying that hydrogen is the best solution (if synthfuel pans out then it'll be a perfect drop-in replacement for existing jet fuel), but it's a solution that exists today. It's there if we care.
Obviously we don't care, since coal plants are still around, but if we genuinely wanted to stop using fossil fuels ASAP then it would permit us to keep using planes/cargo ships.