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A comment on How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Industries Blog.

Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by thereisnospork on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @08:10PM (#37155557)
So really, really cheap electricity with a side of really, really cheap hardware[0] coupled with an absence of operations, maintenance, storage, or transport costs. Noting for the latter direct energy from panels must be used with a high locality to the panels themselves, which means a distributed collection and transportation for the produced hydrogen.

[0]Plausibly viable, non precious metal catalysts typically have less than stellar lifetimes but there is a lot of fat to plausibly trim out of an electrolyzed.

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by 0cf8612b2e1e on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @09:15PM (#37155946)
I too was missing the punchline of how they reduced the capital costs so much. The writing implied it was inevitable engineering, but the real world is seldom so simple.
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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by aaronax on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @09:22PM (#37155995)
Collection and transportation for natural gas, not hydrogen. Which is very easy to imagine since it is already widely done.
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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by rsaesha on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @10:05PM (#37156277)
LNG =/= LPG

Totally different logistics requirements

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by amluto on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @11:42PM (#37156905)
Natural gas transport and storage is lossy (which is a serious problem), but it’s mostly a solved problem at very large scale.

(The lossy part may be a genuine climate issue if the cheap solar methane economy takes off.)

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by angiosperm on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @09:56PM (#37156221)
Tankage and sea-surface shipping are both dirt-cheap.
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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by ianburrell on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @10:10PM (#37156310)
I like how the Terraform's electrolyzers (80 kWh/kg) are less efficient than legacy systems (50 kWh/kg). He compares legacy with current electricity to their system with cheap solar when they need to be compared with the same input.

Their problem is that solar power isn't cheap yet. The other big problem is that electrical transmission lines are way more efficient than hydrogen, which 30% efficient on whole cycle. It makes no sense to use hydrogen as energy transport. Cheap hydrogen production at every use point, airport, factory, port, would make sense.

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by ricardobeat on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @10:27PM (#37156440)
> Cheap hydrogen production at every use point

They don’t address this directly, but is probably what they’re going for given the low deployment cost, no maintence, size, and comparison against other energy sources.

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by ianburrell on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @11:25PM (#37156784)
The article talks about converting to hydrogen at the solar panel. They don’t mention the expense of shipping the hydrogen where it is needed. And that much of the need is electricity so have to burn it for even more waste.

Their proposed device would be really good for distribution if it is cheap and simple. Scale up to port, scale down to truck stop.

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by robbiep on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @11:40PM (#37156885)
TI's thesis is essentially that we are still going to be a carbonised economy, but the carbon source should be renewable (see [0]). So, essentially allowing us to 'hot-swap' our energy source without having to modify all the existing infrastructure.

Ie: can we make the fastest possible switch to just utilising the atmospheric carbon to power our civilisation, which at least means we aren't going to be burning dead dinosaurs anymore?

The Hydrogen gas is the byproduct of electrolysis/feedstock for the generation of carbon neutral methane (or push up the carbon atoms a bit, if you like).

Conceivably, at a later date, if H2 really does become a viable fuel source/the infrastructure exists, you can then cease compiling to Methane and use the Hydrogen directly.

[0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-ter...

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Re:How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/Kg – Terraform Indus... by D_Alex on Wednesday August 16, 2023 @11:12PM (#37156705)
Storage costs should be considered, particularly for an intermittent process. Otherwise, you need an end user that can accept intermittent and somewhat unpredictable supply.
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