flamming_python Fri Oct 21, 2022 5:38 pm
lancelot wrote:Hydrogen energy is basically a waste of time. Russia has loads of natural gas which is a lot more energy dense than hydrogen.
You can't generate more natural gas on the fly in the manner of charging a battery from your spare power generation capacity however.
I mean you can, technically. But you'd need a ready supply of coal or other more or less pure carbon nearby. Then figure out some way of turning it into a gas. Burning coal in the atmosphere binds the carbon atoms with oxygen to produce carbon monoxide. But what you would need is for the carbon to bond with hydrogen. Which doesn't happen in the way of some quick chemical reaction. One route would be liquefying the carbon into oil, and then degrading & evaporating it into a hydrocarbon gas such as methane.
If you have a spare empty coal mine then you can try for underground gasification, pumping hot air in to oxydise the coal and then drilling some wells to get impure natural gas out.
All of these methods though are pretty complicated and expensive. And wasteful with potentially a lot of by-products that can pollute unless you reprocess or use them as well.
Whereas to generate hydrogen, all you need is a supply of water nearby; either fresh or sea-water. If it's sea-water then you might want to distill it first, but that's the only complication. Then it's just a matter of electrolysis - which is an incredibly simple and cheap process. One electrode at one end and another at the other end. And you'll generate as much hydrogen as you have both power and a water supply to spare. The only by-product you'll get is oxygen, which solves itself.
Last edited by flamming_python on Fri Oct 21, 2022 5:51 pm; edited 7 times in total