02-05-2023, 08:39 AM
When methane burns in air there’s a fair bit of O available to produce carbon dioxide. In fact, AFAIK it won’t burn unless oxygen is present.
If blue hydrogen is going to be a little niche market, why bother with it? Why would industry be willing to invest considerable funds into improving the technology and setting up the infrastructure if it won’t be scaled up dramatically? Just look at the blue hydrogen facility in the Latrobe Valley. It will need to implement a large scale CCS to deal with the greenhouse gas emissions and that is a Herculean undertaking. The hydrogen will then be transported to the Port of Hastings where another facility will convert it into liquid ammonia, whereupon it will be shipped offshore in special pressurised tankers. And you’re telling me that will just be a little operation which won’t create large quantities of methane which, when aggregated with similar facilities around the world, won’t make much of dent in methane demand?
In particular, it’s odd that you would bang on about how hydrogen should be widely used in transportation as well as fuelling power-hungry industries but then claim byproducts would be minimal because hydrogen won’t be a major source of energy.
Investment in blue hydrogen doesn’t seem to me to be a transient operation which will melt away when green hydrogen comes on line. It might if we were talking about some global operation where optimal environmental outcomes were more important than making money. But there’s no global operation. Operators of blue hydrogen facilities will defend their patch to the death (of the planet, if necessary). The Latrobe Valley plant is there because of access to coal and presumably disused mines which might be sites for carbon capture. Neither is of any benefit to a plant that will create green hydrogen. Instead, green hydrogen plants would be sited close to water. That blue hydrogen plant would just be another disused building. It’s not too hard to imagine blue hydrogen operators would try to kill off competition from green hydrogen operators. That would involve trying to tie up government funding and challenging the scientific and business cases presented by those new entrants. That’s the same sort of thing that we see the fossil fuel industry doing already. And in the case of the Latrobe Valley plant, the Victorian Government (no matter whether it’s Labor or Liberal) may side with the blue hydrogen suppliers as they monetise Victoria’s coal supplies and create employment in an area that depended on coal-fired power generation.
I
If blue hydrogen is going to be a little niche market, why bother with it? Why would industry be willing to invest considerable funds into improving the technology and setting up the infrastructure if it won’t be scaled up dramatically? Just look at the blue hydrogen facility in the Latrobe Valley. It will need to implement a large scale CCS to deal with the greenhouse gas emissions and that is a Herculean undertaking. The hydrogen will then be transported to the Port of Hastings where another facility will convert it into liquid ammonia, whereupon it will be shipped offshore in special pressurised tankers. And you’re telling me that will just be a little operation which won’t create large quantities of methane which, when aggregated with similar facilities around the world, won’t make much of dent in methane demand?
In particular, it’s odd that you would bang on about how hydrogen should be widely used in transportation as well as fuelling power-hungry industries but then claim byproducts would be minimal because hydrogen won’t be a major source of energy.
Investment in blue hydrogen doesn’t seem to me to be a transient operation which will melt away when green hydrogen comes on line. It might if we were talking about some global operation where optimal environmental outcomes were more important than making money. But there’s no global operation. Operators of blue hydrogen facilities will defend their patch to the death (of the planet, if necessary). The Latrobe Valley plant is there because of access to coal and presumably disused mines which might be sites for carbon capture. Neither is of any benefit to a plant that will create green hydrogen. Instead, green hydrogen plants would be sited close to water. That blue hydrogen plant would just be another disused building. It’s not too hard to imagine blue hydrogen operators would try to kill off competition from green hydrogen operators. That would involve trying to tie up government funding and challenging the scientific and business cases presented by those new entrants. That’s the same sort of thing that we see the fossil fuel industry doing already. And in the case of the Latrobe Valley plant, the Victorian Government (no matter whether it’s Labor or Liberal) may side with the blue hydrogen suppliers as they monetise Victoria’s coal supplies and create employment in an area that depended on coal-fired power generation.
I