Hydrogen is a gas too and you can make it without emitting carbon. If you want you can also make methane from atmospheric carbon and water.

FWIW, the latest analysis I've seen seems to suggest that biomethane is probably the way to go for last-resort long term backup. Hydrogen is just too fickle.

biomethane aka methane from rotting plants? extremely inefficient and requires intensive agriculture

Alternatively: captured cow farts, rotting food waste.

Remember, it is only needed for a few dozen hours a year. It doesn't need to scale.

What does it mean for a gas to be 'fickle'? Hydrogen gets stored long term all the time. It's made in refineries and used in chemical plants all over the world every day. It's expensive to store, but it's certainly doable with the right metallurgy. If your goal is reducing carbon emission as much as possible, it's way better than methane, regardless of source.

Thank goodness that around 99% of our current hydrogen is made from fossil fuels!

If your going to burn the power turning it into hydrogen then you save a shitload of that power by putting it in batteries instead.

Hydrogen is a storage medium. It's fundamentally different than natural gas. Think of it more like a more complex, expensive, and inefficient battery; with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.

Of course. But the point was that it could also be burned in these turbines, and is also storable underground like methane.

The very small molecule makes it much harder to store than methane, and unlike anything else on the planet other than Helium, lost hydrogen is lost forever.

Hydrogen leaked into the troposphere is quickly oxidized back to water. Only very little makes it to the very upper atmosphere where it can escape.

Storage of hydrogen in underground caverns is demonstrated technology.

Interesting, thanks. I really should have double checked before posting on HN.

Well, not really.

Methane is basically just hydrogen gas, but with one carbon for every 4 hydrogens. This means you can do stuff like liquefy it at higher temperatures and lower pressures, and it doesn't diffuse out of materials or otherwise destroy the materials (or seals) it's stored by.

>with the only advantage being that you can store more energy per unit volume at large scales.

In a vacuum, maybe; in real life, absolutely not. Hydrogen that is stabilized by a sufficient number of associated carbon atoms can be stored in plastic containers at standard temperature and pressure; naturally, we use the fuel that has just enough carbons that, while nominally a liquid, but would really rather be a vapor.

Because that stabilizer is part of that reaction, the best one from a CO2 perspective is the one that has as little of that stabilizer as possible. Which is what methane is.

With enough stabilizing carbon you can even store hydrogen as plastic containers.

I don't think parent was against gas because of its physical but rather because it's a fossil fuel

but not all gas is fossil

Just almost all of it to a staggering percent.

not sure about the accuracy of that, but it can change anyways.

i suspect that thinking is similar to the ideas people had that got them to buy hybrid cars because of EV range anxiety.

but hybrid cars are saddled with a maintenance heavy complex system that isn't used much.

nowadays we know the solution is just a bigger EV battery.

Studies have shown that hybrids have fewer issues than ICE or BEV, though for different reasons. BEVs have new technology issues, and ICE has maintenance issues. Having a mostly understood ICE car that rarely uses the ICE and has the most reliable (battery+motor) part of the BEV makes a better solution short term.

hmmm... looked up current stuff. I didn't know all the issues.

Looks like 5 year reliability: ICE > non-plugin hybrid > pure EV > plugin hybrid

But EVs seem ok 5+ years

I found this article interesting:

https://autoedgeview.com/ev-reviews/consumer-reports-ev-reli...

Still significantly better than running everything on fossil fuels burned by the power company.

Are you saying that gas turbines don't burn fossil fuels?

No, I'm saying that using a gas generator as a backup for solar is better than not using solar at all.

They can burn non-fossil fuels.

A non-carbon containing fuel that is almost entirely created by burning fossil fuels is effectively the same (and often worse) than just using the fossil fuels directly.

Biodiesel or biomethane looks at first glance to escape this, but it has serious other costs.

Is almost entirely fossil-fuel created doesn't mean it has to be almost entirely fossil-fuel created. You know, just like observing that cars are almost entirely burning fossil fuels doesn't mean cars must burn fossil fuels.