The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

https://sustainability.crugroup.com/arti...en-in-2050

Is there is some irony in CRU arguing that Green Hydrogen is bad because SolarPV and Wind are intermittent sources for electrolysing water? Especially given CRU owns a division which is a specialist SolarPV technology consultancy, so they are hardly impartial on this issue.

I'm not going to tell anyone the future of green energy is going to be cheaper, it won't. In fact prices are already rising, this is despite all the unending claims of clean green and cheap. We have more low cost subsidised renewable energy than ever before, supposedly smashing the $/kwh rate, but tell that to many peoples recent power bills! The bill is the reality, forget all the claims.

btw., When people talk about hydrogen in steel making and chemical processing, it's not just about energy, it's required as a reductant / reagent in many industrial processes. At the moment steel mills and some chemical plants produce their own hydrogen by reformation, and green or blue hydrogen would see the carbon emissions slashed by 20% to 40% even without any other complimentary strategies.

No matter how some try to encourage a hydrogen ban, we are never going to stop making steel, fertilisers or medicines.

Finally, as an aside, a couple of years back a lobby group tried to ban nitrogen use in industry. Apparently nitrogen is the new carbon dioxide. I was involved in projects 3D printing metals using nitrogen gas. The gas we use is a waste by-product of companies making oxygen, argon and even some CO2 for drinks (beer / soft drinks). Nitrogen as a by-product is so cheap we can buy it at cubic meter pricing cheaper than air. All the nitrogen we use comes out of the air, and that is where 98% of it eventually heads back, some gets interstitially absorbed by the metals. Yet we were accused of adding to greenhouse gases, these protesters are fruit loops!