Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

I find it weird how hostile to hydrogen the &quot;renewable energy gang&quot; is.<p>The story of how renewables take over the world and displace fossil fuels and nuclear totally relies on storage, in some cases seasonal storage, IE overproducing in summer and holding on to the energy til the end of winter.<p>Does hydrogen work for it? Well, maybe, it could, there are unresolved issues but hey we are trying to do science here. It&#x27;s not like batteries work, they are fine for short term storage, but even then, they aren&#x27;t displacing, say, pumped hydro. And yet hydrogen bad, batteries good. And don&#x27;t even get me started on nuclear.<p>It feels like the &quot;save the planet&quot; movement, or at least some shards of it, come with a very specific notion of how exactly it is ok to save the planet, and what fails on style points.

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a &quot;green energy&quot; world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a &quot;zero pollution fuel&quot; while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal.<p>If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they&#x27;re always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indirectly. That, or fossil fuel powered vehicle manufacturers that are reluctant to completely retool their factories.<p>Hydrogen has a few legitimate use cases, such as iron ore refining and chemical feedstock, but that&#x27;s about it. In all other scenarios, battery-based technology is <i>vastly</i> superior along multiple metrics.

I&#x27;ll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It&#x27;s a bad battery.<p>After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I&#x27;m in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there&#x27;s been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been slow but steady. It&#x27;s not really clear to me what advantages H has over Li as an electron donor, at this point.

This article mostly quotes a report by a Tokyo-based think tank. The report is here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renewable-ei.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;activities&#x2F;reports&#x2F;20220922.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renewable-ei.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;activities&#x2F;reports&#x2F;20220922....</a>

On the context of the report which this whole piece is about, skybrian linked to it, here&#x27;s the english partial translation:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renewable-ei.org&#x2F;pdfdownload&#x2F;activities&#x2F;REI_JapanHydrogenStrategy_EN_202209.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.renewable-ei.org&#x2F;pdfdownload&#x2F;activities&#x2F;REI_Japa...</a><p>I was wondering what this &quot;renewable energy institute&quot; was, and it&#x27;s founded and chaired by Masayoshi Son, who&#x27;s latest notable investments includes huge solar projects here and there.<p>Perhaps there&#x27;s a lot of valid ideas in it...and I&#x27;m all for more renewable energies, but I&#x27;d take a lot of this with a shovel of salt.

We can&#x27;t give up on hydrogen. A transfer to EV will not be practical for all current fossil fuel vehicles so we need an alternative for them. Hydrogen is not practical now but it has potential. I think electric and hydrogen are the only alternatives to fossil fuels. Are there others?

Sabine Hossenfelder recently made a video on hydrogen: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE</a>

Spoiler alert, this is the fate of all Hydrogen strategies not based on massive investment into nuclear.<p>But since when did physics ever stop anybody from believing in fairy tales?

So fun to see hydrogen landing on the front page of HN again. We have a team of software engineers working in a hydrogen company (focused mostly in medium to ultra-heavy duty sectors). Curious if people would be interested in an AMA? For questions we don’t know the precise answers to, like the actual financial modeling for hydrogen use cases where it makes sense, we can also easily pull people sitting, virtually, across the hall.

Seems like the “sunk cost fallacy” Wikipedia page might need an update.<p>The choice to pursue hydrogen-fuelled combined heat and power is particularly mystifying, given that Japanese companies are market leaders in heat pumps. Tokyo’S climate is also ideally suited for heat pumps, given the need for air conditioning in summer and the fact they’ll heat just fine in the coldest conditions greater Tokyo ever experiences.

For example, Toyota makes good reliable cars, and saw massive success with the Prius because it was the only good alternative to a full internal combustion engine.<p>Now, years after that success, Toyota has only a very limited selection of fully electric plug in vehicles, and all their competitors are a decade in front of them because they continue to chase some pipe dream of hydrogen, is just disappointing.

I would imagine somebody has floated this idea before, but I wonder if the distraction of hydrogen rather than electric cars was a ploy by Japanese automakers to give them time to build up the cars &#x2F; supply chain etc to switch to electric. Typically cars (at least in the US) take around 4-5 years of development to get to market, so rather than assuming the Japanese policy makers just made a dumb decision, it could be that they wanted to wait until domestic electric cars were widely available before pushing heavily on the transition.

This is the board of directors behind the entity that publishes this website [1]. I can see mostly Norwegian people, so I suspect there&#x27;s Norwegian money powering this website, hence Norwegian interests. Norway is very active on the renewables energy market, i.e. it has lots and lots of interests on that market. All that to say that I wouldn&#x27;t take this article at face value, just another way to try and shift opinion in order to make more money for its owners.<p>Later edit: The chairman of the board from that website is this lady Anette S. Olsen [2], who&#x27;s sole proprietor of this company&#x2F;group, Fred. Olsen &amp; Co. [3], which interests also include the energy market. The company&#x2F;group is into renewables, this is their website [4], lots of wind farms on their website, I suppose they&#x27;re into selling that, not hydrogen. As I said, it&#x27;s easier to follow the money.<p>[1] [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhst.no&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-nhst&#x2F;board-of-directors-holdings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhst.no&#x2F;en&#x2F;about-nhst&#x2F;board-of-directors-holding...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Anette_S._Olsen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Anette_S._Olsen</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fred._Olsen_%26_Co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fred._Olsen_%26_Co</a>.<p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fredolsenrenewables.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fredolsenrenewables.com&#x2F;</a>

The EV push is marketing. It&#x27;s someone trying to sell something. If countries were interested in solving anything they&#x27;d just install more electric trains. Even less of a commitment would be just use diesel commuter trains until the electric comes online. Until this happens everything else is just someone trying to sell stuff.

Hydrogen powered vehicles are like natural gas vehicles, but worse. Pressurized fuel tanks expire, and your vehicle becomes a pumpkin, because parts+labor to replace the tank on 15-20 year old vehicle doesn&#x27;t make sense. But hydrogen is even harder to work with than natural gas. And it&#x27;s yet another fueling network to build.

Hydrogen I think has a few good advantages over batteries. Storage is cheaper and faster. Quick charging would be good for buses, trucks and trains. The cheap storage is good for things like ships. Also long term storage for the winter - you could use sunny &amp; windy seasons to build up gas supplies for winter months.

Is Japan’s political power just completely captured by industry at this point? I live here and I can often not distinguish between pr and matketing of private interests and pr and policy directions of government.. I&#x27;m not even really trying to be rhetorical here.. I want to understand this beter.

Here is an interesting but sad documentary from 2020. (1h40m).<p>It addresses the concerns about hydrogen.<p>&quot;Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth because we are following leaders who have taken us down the wrong road — selling out the green movement to wealthy interests and corporate America. This film is the wake-up call to the reality we are afraid to face: that in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement’s answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It&#x27;s too little, too late. &quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE</a>

One thing opposition to any chemical electricity storage (hydrogen and other fuels) doesn&#x27;t answer is: _how to transfer electricity across distances?_<p>HVDC are typically presented as the solution, but even if technically possible, they do not seem to actually materialize. Constant cooperation and reliance between countries for their energy seems like a bad idea in 2023. There are numerous solar project plans stuck because of lack of such transmission lines.<p>We did not start our current energy infrastructure with expensive pipelines. We started with batched shipments (tankers), and when supply and demand were stable enough we built a gas pipeline. Not sure why electricity requires the optimal solution or nothing.

1) How would we compare Porsche&#x27;s gasoline experiment [0] with Hydrogen? Because the Hydrogen article seems to suggest that it&#x27;s useful just not expedient in the entire landscape of energy.<p>2) The hydrogen insight has what looks to be interesting articles. I&#x27;m going to read through them more.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;porsches-synthetic-gasoline-factory-comes-online-today-in-chile&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2022&#x2F;12&#x2F;porsches-synthetic-gaso...</a>

Hydrogen is just a &quot;mobile&quot; energy storage... but a really hard one to deal with, actually so hard it may be not worth it (too dangerous, and not long term enough) in the end. See Sabine H. video about it, I am sure she&#x27;ll show you things about hydrogen storage you did not think about).<p>Ofc, we are talking about the &quot;lowest green-house gas produced&quot; hydrogen (hydro&#x2F;solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;nuclear).<p>That said Japan is maybe one of the only countries in the world serious and rigorous enough to pull that off.

Hydrogen is a storage technology. When I looked at it last, it was largely planned to be produced by electrolysis, so the greenness of that depends on the power source for that operation. So it could be green if powered by solar? Or brown, if powered by coal.

Weirdly, not a single mention of the &quot;Red Hydrogen&quot; plans. Apparently, Japan plans to use nuclear to produce H2 at scale, and it makes lots of sense from a cost-effectiveness POV.

This youtube video does a good job explaining a few problems about hydrogen in cars.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE</a>

&quot;Hydrogen Will Not Save Us&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34386155" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34386155</a>

The developing world, where Toyota sells a lot of cars, isnt going to EVs anytime in the foreseeable future. It&#x27;s only the G7 countries that are really pushing it.<p>Both EVs and hydrogen fuel cells really need modern nuclear power to make sense. Hydrogen is less efficient, but storage is much cheaper and easier than it is with batteries. They&#x27;re complementary technologies, not competitors.<p>People need to get over the idea that aggressive decarbonization will ever spread past the 500 million citizens of the G7 states. That&#x27;s delusional. We should really be more aggressively planning mitigation than Hail Mary green transitions with multiple substantial challenges.

I heard somewhere that trying to make hydrogen from water was like trying to make wood from ash. It doesn&#x27;t make sense.

Michael Liebreich&#x27;s clean hydrogen ladder is a good reference here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-michael-liebreich&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;clean-hydrogen-ladder-v40-mic...</a><p>It ranks hydrogen use cases by their economic feasibility. The core issue in Japan: they are focusing on things with the least economic potential at the bottom of the ladder and they are doing it with dirty grey hydrogen even.<p>It&#x27;s a double fail. Basically they are expending more carbon to magically become cleaner. Which isn&#x27;t working for obvious reasons and quite obviously so. And then they are using that hydrogen for the least economical use cases. It&#x27;s not an energy strategy but a let&#x27;s bail out our car manufacturers strategy.<p>This article is stating the obvious: this isn&#x27;t working. Not even a little bit. There&#x27;s nothing there. Hydrogen cars are a fantasy. Nobody is buying them and even the world&#x27;s largest hydrogen cheer leader (Toyota) of these things is barely producing and selling any. And as reluctant as they are to produce and sell battery electric vehicles, they still sell more of those than hydrogen cars.<p>Hydrogen for domestic use also ranks at the bottom in the hydrogen ladder for very good reasons. Yes you can do it. But it&#x27;s just stupidly inefficient in terms of hydrogen generation and transport losses.<p>These are not problems you can just wave away with some innovation magic. There is no magical solution just around the corner that will make all of this go away and improve things by 10x. The issues are pretty fundamental and have to do with hydrogen just having a very low energy density by volume (it&#x27;s the first element in the periodic table), energy conversions having a cost (second law of thermodynamics), and the bonds between hydrogen and carbon or oxygen atoms being very strong.<p>It takes more energy to break those chemical bonds than you get back in the form of hydrogen. There&#x27;s a theoretical maximum efficiency to that. Once you have hydrogen, you have to convert it again to do something useful with it. That too has a maximum theoretical efficiency. These inefficiencies multiply. What happens if you multiply two fractions? You get a smaller fraction. Compressing and cooling also takes energy. And if you introduce conversion to ammonia or some other susbtance, that&#x27;s another conversion, which is lossy. That just multiplies the problem.<p>So, that means hydrogen should be prioritized for those use cases where you can minimize the losses. Anything involving transporting hydrogen over long distances is a problem. Because of the volumetric density. It&#x27;s just not very efficient. You need to move a lot of volume of it. And it&#x27;s a tough substance to contain. Leaky valves, boiling of liquid hydrogen to keep it cool, etc. The losses accumulate rapidly. And even when you contain that, you need to ship about 18x more of it in compressed gas form to match a single tanker of petrol or about 3x in liquid form (cooled to near absolute zero). Compression and cooling take energy btw.<p>Because of all that, the vast majority of hydrogen produced right now, is produced and consumed on site. Mostly for things at the top of the hydrogen ladder like fertilizer production or use in various chemical processes.

That&#x27;s the beauty of it!

Green hydrogen, blue hydrogen, grey hydrogen, clean hydrogen.<p>I’m glad everyone agreed English words are meaningless now. It makes trying to understand articles so much more fun.