Germany is paying for the station and paying for enough trucks to give the station some customers. That is more than solving a chicken-and-egg problem. It is buying the chicken, the egg and the first few breakfasts.
This would be less interesting if it were an isolated transport experiment. It sits at the end of a much longer effort to give Germany’s gas institutions, infrastructure and industrial constituencies a future after the collapse of Russian gas.
Gerhard Schröder remains the most visible symbol of how close the relationship became. Gazprom owned 51% of the original Nord Stream company and appointed four of the eight members of its shareholders’ committee. Schröder, who had just left the German chancellery, was one of Gazprom’s appointees and became chairman.
There have been 100’s of years geopolitical fighting going on, (even today) over oil.
People have put out TRILLIONS in $$$ in large sophisticated long term projects like pipelines, oil-rigs, etc.
You know what has been absolutely abundant that entire time? Hydrogen.
Do you know what crazy physics technology has recently been created related to Hydrogen? None.
Hydrogen doesn’t work. It’s never worked, and its never going to work. The math isn’t there.
Unless you are talking fusion, or some fundamentally new physics has been found that completely upends everything we know about chemistry.
Hydrogen will never be a thing. It’s already being carried and store in the best possible manner. Through large chains of carbon.
Hydrogen is needed for some porcesses. We just need to start producing real green H2, instead of extracting it from natural (fossil) gas.
its super hard to store, super hard to move about and is a dangerous GHG and fugitive emissions from processing and a storage are high.
it’s just a distraction from the necessity of electrification and changed lifestyles
It can work for some things that need direct burnable gas. Otherwise EU will stop using polluting NG and go electric and electric only isn’t good for some things. And no, there’s no special reason that makes hydrogen impossible to use, it’s just finicky with seals and needs more energy to produce. Green hydrogen is basically just solar power converted to chemical energy, and you can use ammonia as simple carrier liquid for long distance transit.
Is there suddenly a clean way to produce hydrogen? Because otherwise it’s just extracted from natural gas, making it a fossil fuel.
Yes, there is. Search for green hydrogen or Power-to-Gas. It uses water and splits it into H20 and O2:
This takes a lot of energy of which a lot is wasted. But if you use renewable energy to feed the system, that’s totally ok. The big problem is that those people in the german government pushing that are total fuckwits who are totally in bed with the fossil fuel companies. They will not build something that is actually green, but all of this shit is just a way to postpone the energy revolution
This takes a lot of energy of which a lot is wasted. But if you use renewable energy to feed the system, that’s totally ok.
That’s just a battery but worse in pretty much every way.
As energy storage hydrogen is much worse than a battery, but where it could be a great, green replacement is as reducing agent for steel production. You need a chemical agent for the refining process in a furnace and currently carbon is used for that, producing CO2. In fact 25 % of global CO2 production is from iron and steel plants (that statistic includes all energy used in there as well though). So we definitely need a replacement for that carbon.
There are steel smelters that don’t want to shut down and they don’t run on batteries.
As @[email protected] has mentioned, using a battery doesn’t help much as, for producing raw iron, a reduction agent, carbon or hydrogen, is needed to absorb the oxygen contained in the ferreous oxides of the iron ore.
Yes?
That is the point I was making.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?I just want to emphasize that they don’t run on batteries because they are unwilling to, but because they can’t.
It’s useful for some things, e.g industrial applications; heating homes isn’t one of them.
Hydrogen is a lot higher density than batteries, but nowhere on the scale of diesel.
Under about 150 mile range batteries are winning due to minimum equipment needs, above that hydrogen has a place in mobile storage.
It kind of makes sense: There are pipes delivering natural gas to a lot of homes here. So if you can somehow produce a lot of green hydrogen, you can just feed clean energy into the existing system without changing everything, installing heat pumps everywhere and so on. The problem is that I do not see them building that capacity to produce that green hydrogen. Those facilities are not being planned as far as I know right now
there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of hydrogen pipelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
According to the operators, the German gas pipelines are capable of transporting hydrogen.
for a while, yeah.
Not really different than for natural gas:
The comparative analysis revealed that there is a high degree of agreement – including in quantitative terms – between the crack propagation relationships specified by ASME and those derived as part of the SyWeSt H2 project. To assess suitability for hydrogen service, a representative cross-section of the steels used in German and, in some cases, European pipelines was subjected to extreme operational and ageing conditions in a hydrogen environment and technically tested. Furthermore, it was found that there are no differences in terms of the fundamental suitability for transporting hydrogen compared with natural gas. The operational ageing and the required fracture toughness meet the expectations for safe availability over several decades.
Ingenieur.de is the news outlet of the Association of German Engineers (VDI).
It doesn’t make sense, as the efficiency is gross. For heating purpose, battery storage and heat pumps are much better.
It can be stored as stable ammonia and move by tanker or pipeline, batteries are hourly to daily storage, only chemical storage can handle seasonal and annual level storage at much higher amounts. Good for winter heating or seasonal high power use. Now it is worse in ways and won’t need to be used everywhere but in certain areas and uses it is great.
Very insightful, thanks! It still goes in a very disappointing direction politically, but it’s cool that the tech is there
Certainly, are these methods efficient and practical?
… that is a different question
