It doesn’t appear that pyrolysis is being used at scale to split methane into hydrogen and carbon. Given that, your warnings about using blue sky announcements are extremely pertinent to attempts to construct an economic case for employing it at scale.
Here’s an example of a company channeling Trump - only we can do it:
‘We will make zero-CO2 hydrogen from natural gas so cheaply we could give it away for free’, rechargenews.com.
Of course, the company boasts of having a secret sauce that can overcome crippling problems in producing “Turquoise Hydrogen”. Until they prove they can scale up, we only have their word for it.
But the spokesman does at least acknowledge a nagging problem that you just wave off, LP:
Remember that if this process aims to produce as much hydrogen as possible, then there will be 3 times as much carbon to sell off. Without resorting to the magic pudding approach you favour, LP, there’s a fairly stark choice. Either scale down the amount of hydrogen produced so that the byproduct can be sold off at a decent market price or crash the market and destroy the economic case for that process. Perhaps part of the carbon produced could simply be buried to maintain prices but there are political and perhaps legal issues with that. Would there need to be something like OPEC to ensure some producers don’t flood the market and would that attract scrutiny from corporate regulators who would regard it as oligopolistic price-fixing?
Anyway, just saying something is scientifically possible doesn’t mean it is economically viable. Let’s wait until we see a working model. After all, you’re quick to doubt that breakthroughs in battery technology will make it into real world production processes.
Here’s an example of a company channeling Trump - only we can do it:
‘We will make zero-CO2 hydrogen from natural gas so cheaply we could give it away for free’, rechargenews.com.
Of course, the company boasts of having a secret sauce that can overcome crippling problems in producing “Turquoise Hydrogen”. Until they prove they can scale up, we only have their word for it.
But the spokesman does at least acknowledge a nagging problem that you just wave off, LP:
Quote: The limits of the H Quest process
It would be easy to assume that H Quest’s process of making CO2-free hydrogen from natural gas could revolutionise the fast-growing H2 sector, that it would eliminate any need to produce blue hydrogen and allow a hydrogen economy to develop at speed, but the technology does have two small drawbacks.
One is that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that often leaks upstream (see panel below), and the other is that there is a limit to the size of H Quest’s market, even if it is potentially large. For instance, the carbon black market, which the company wants to target first, requires 14 million tonnes of the stuff each year.
“What we're limited by is the market of the carbon co-product,” says Skoptsov. “We’re making three times as much carbon products [by weight] as hydrogen products. So we have to balance those. That’s the fundamental problem we have to solve, but we are already working on new use cases for our materials.”
Remember that if this process aims to produce as much hydrogen as possible, then there will be 3 times as much carbon to sell off. Without resorting to the magic pudding approach you favour, LP, there’s a fairly stark choice. Either scale down the amount of hydrogen produced so that the byproduct can be sold off at a decent market price or crash the market and destroy the economic case for that process. Perhaps part of the carbon produced could simply be buried to maintain prices but there are political and perhaps legal issues with that. Would there need to be something like OPEC to ensure some producers don’t flood the market and would that attract scrutiny from corporate regulators who would regard it as oligopolistic price-fixing?
Anyway, just saying something is scientifically possible doesn’t mean it is economically viable. Let’s wait until we see a working model. After all, you’re quick to doubt that breakthroughs in battery technology will make it into real world production processes.