Hydrogen Story Falling Apart

Engineering Energy Storage
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A review of methane pyrolysis technologies for hydrogen production

Authors: Shashank Reddy Patlolla, Kyle Katsu, Amir Sharafian, Kevin Wei, Omar E. Herrera, Walter Mérida

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Highlights

• Methane pyrolysis technology can produce low-cost, low-emission hydrogen.

• Methane pyrolysis can produce hydrogen at scale.

• Methane pyrolysis requires high temperatures to overcome activation energy barriers.

• The safety, reliability, and durability of pyrolysis technologies remain open to improvements.

Abstract

Clean hydrogen can help mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while accommodating the projected increase in global energy demand. Methane pyrolysis is a technology that can produce low-cost, low-emission hydrogenIn the absence of oxygen, this process can use endothermic reactions that split C–H bonds to produce gaseous hydrogen and solid carbon. Thermodynamically, methane pyrolysis produces a lower amount of GHG emissions compared to steam methane reforming (SMR) and it requires high temperatures (800–1600 °C) to overcome activation energy barriers. The methods used to overcome operational challenges, while improving thermal efficiency, include using solid catalysts, molten metals and molten salts. This study evaluates recent developments in methane pyrolysis technologies, including their advantages, limitations, and development status. Specifically, alternative energy transfer methods (e.g., microwave, plasma, induction, shockwave, radiation heating), reactor designs (e.g., bubble column, plug, fluidized-bed, packed-bed, pulse tube, tubular, fluid wall, honeycomb monolith and moving carbon-bed) and combinations of two or more technologies are analyzed and compared. This work discusses the commercialization challenges to achieve high-purity hydrogen and solid carbon with facile separation methods. The analysis indicates that the most prominent barriers to methane pyrolysis are trelated to the challenges under high-temperature and high-pressure operation, as well as corrosive reaction environments. These challenges will require additional research and investment in reactor design and fabrication solutions.

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You overenthusiastic yet gullible bible-school kids won’t find any more success in hydrogen as a form of energy storage than you are presently finding in wind energy. It’s all about global warming derangement syndrome, sort of like covid derangement syndrome - incite panic and all rational reasoning goes out the window. Anything goes - it doesn’t have to make sense or pencil out in any way. But illogical engineering doesn’t last forever. It dies when it hits reality.

For decades I’ve read one press-release breakthrough after another about new ways to make hydrogen suddenly viable. For probably 20 years it was all about adsorptive nanoporous materials that “solved the storage problem”. Haven’t heard much about that in the last 20 years though - maybe an occasional mention, like a dead bug still wiggling its legs.

Newsflash: There is, however, A GREAT way to store, transport, and use hydrogen, which happens to be attaching the hydrogen to a chain of carbon atoms! It’s then called a “hydrocarbon”. Pretty useful for storing energy - powers most of the planet, lasts millions of years, and is renewable if we just collect the methane clathrates at the bottom of the ocean before it gets subducted under the continents, so we don’t have to wait millions of years to use it!!

The whole hydrogen thing is so stupid, it’s hard to believe anyone with a 3rd grade education could fall for it. Ever heard the saying “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”? Yeah, especially when spending other people’s money on bad ideas!

Toyota? Are they insane? Who is paying them to pretend they are developing hydrogen cars, and why? Did you hear California has now shut down Arnold’s “Hydrogen Highway?” If hydrogen is so great, why did they just shut down all the stations in California, of all places??? Could it be nobody had a use for them? “Your tax dollars at work”.

Energy storage needs to be efficient enough to be worthwhile, otherwise you are simply throwing away otherwise valuable energy! This is not rocket science! Tests have been done, specifically using wind-generated electricity to produce hydrogen, store it, then turn it back into electricity. Every step loses about half the energy, which is multiplied by all 3 steps, so the most you can theoretically get back is around 1/8th of the original electrical energy, or 12.5%, but of course real-world results are worse. And that doesn’t even include the fact that the wind-generated electricity already threw away half the energy in the wind itself.
If you spent the time and money to fully-charge your car, but when finished it was only charged to 12%, you would consider that a complete failure. And if you had to use that system, You’d go broke, while spending all day, every day, just charging, with no time left to drive anywhere anyway.
When everyone around you is losing their minds, stay calm, and don’t fall for their insanity! :slight_smile:

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I think that the opinion of an industrialist in the sector can be useful. Here is the link to a response that I reproduce below.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_nuclear_power_have_a_future_or_will_new_technologies_of_renewable_energy_be_developed_in_the_energy_sector#view=666b7e30f86c34087602260c

Daniel Fruchart added an answer

3 hours ago

@ Pierre and Chahed…

Don’t open too much your ears to those blablating on the enconomy (cost) of “hydrogen energy”, indeed promised elegantly green . Effectively those blablaters are influenced by the “Air of the Times”, either those annoucing the great decline of humanity versus exceeding CO2 production, or those expecting a great deal in terms of renewable energy and great profits…

At all, hydrogen is A chemical element, absolutely fundamental for specific industrial uses… ammoniac synthesis, light oil fractions reforming, reduction process (metals etc) glass floating technology, plastics synthesis and other… comprising Moon and Mars tourism (for a small part, this being mobility).

70 millions tons are yearly produced in the world almost exclusively via the very dirty process of craking oils, gases even coals… The feed-back is that now “we have decided” to pay lots for that, making in a worldwide (?) decabonation of our atmosphere… Here I will not comment such a position…but… climate is a very difficult matter to handle well !

Back to hydrogen, France needs and produces 1 million tons hydrogen a year via the “dirty and cheaper route”… almost exclusively for industrial uses (except cat pee for the said car mobility).

One nuclear unit plant - which in realty is an intermittent tool since by night one have lots of sleepers, and then over production - can converses excceeding electrons to ~50 t hydrogen by electrolysis. So, 50 t x 60 nuclear units x 365 days makes close to the total demand for our industrial uses… Moreover hydro-electricity is as well welcome when operable.

I am not against the hydrogen car mobility… in the future it can appear quite better than the EV-battery mobility… Anyway, before that we needs to produce more and more électrons…By the way, the nuclear route(s) make a part of the solution…

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Just saw this contrary opinion on future fuels, for what it’s worth:

The world is using more oil, coal and gas than ever before and will use more. Net Zero is dead

Story by David Blackmon

• 3h • 4 min read

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-world-is-using-more-oil-coal-and-gas-than-ever-before-and-will-use-more-net-zero-is-dead/ar-BB1odlEh

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This is demonstrated by the graph I have already provided.

We see that renewables are progressing, but constitute a tiny part of fossil fuels which are increasing.

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Check your sources.

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It was on my screen from Microsoft.

Just saw another article on the same screen saying the exact opposite, but lost track of it before I could post a link. All clickbait. Anyone can make predictions… But i will say, if you’ve been around as long as me, you’ve seen all this before. 50 years ago, “all the experts agreed” we had basically run out of oil! :slight_smile:

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Hi Pierre: Either this passage lost a lot in translation, or this guy can neither write or spell, because this is harder to read, and makes less sense, than my esteemed friend (God love him) Joe Faust’s posts! :slight_smile:

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OK here it is:
Jim Cramer: It’s possible we’ve reached peak oil output in the U.S. | Watch (msn.com)
Turns out it also predicts MORE oil use, not less!

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Daniel Fruchard makes very good remarks on the use of hydrogen which is aimed much more in specialized industries than for hydrogen cars. He also points to nuclear surpluses as a source of hydrogen production.

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Is that electricity usable in long haul ships or airplanes? The fact is for long distance travel the high roundtrip efficiency battery systems is not viable because they would have to be to big and heavy. And if you don’t want CO2 emissions you are basically left with the low roundtrip efficiency hydrogen that is a challenge to store (really high pressure, or cryogenic temperatures), or the even lower roundtrip efficiency ammonia that is easier to store (in much lower pressure tanks, or much easier attainable temperature to store it as a liquid) but that need more safety measures because of it’s toxicity.

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That is the wrong analogy. The correct one would be that you still get 100% charge but you have to pay for 8X the electricity you get to use for driving.

1 Like
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A critical video about hydrogen. At the end something on lobbying by fossil fuel companies: https://youtu.be/fiJy65WwsMM?t=326

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My computer already had this video watched halfway through.

When I was a kid in the '60’s, and The Flintstones were a new hit show, so the promoters made a pet fuzzy purple robotoc “Dino the dino” moving dinosaur on little unseen wheels, as a battery-powered toy for kids.

So this “Dino the dino” toy (of course we had one too) had a pretty simple program. It would go forward until it hit resistance, then back up and steer into a different direction, then go forward again til it once again hit any object, then back up again, re-steer, on and on.

That simple program reminds me of the thinking that goes into this.kind of decision to keep promoting hydrogen as energy storage, which most adherents do not even realize they are doing. They just think they are “replacing fossil fuels”. What they are really doing is taking a highly-refined, ready-for-use, end product in the energy chain, electricity, then trying to turn that highly-refined energy into a less refined type of energy, kind of like taking the gold you just mined and throwing it back into the mine tailings it came from.

Like Dino the dino, they are unable to actually think. Their bumper-sticker-level mantra is simple: go forward until you hit resistance. There is no planning, no middle-school student to run the simple numbers. Nope, forget it. The bumper sticker says “replace fossil fuels with hydrogen until you hit resistance”. Not enough processing power to run the numbers ahead of time to see if it’s worth messing with.

But un-scientifically-trained bureaucrats, who thrive on bumper-sticker reasoning anyway, are even easier to fool than wannabe technology people. Politicians will believe any slogan, cuz, well, hey, they gotta win the next election, and bumper-sticker slogans are how to do that.

Well, they are hitting resistance. So they have to change direction.

They couldn’t do the math to see that nobody really wants to throw away 87.5% of their electricity for the sake of fulfilling a bumper-sticker slogan that makes no sense in the first place. The best carrier for hydrogen is… a carbon chain. Almost like it was made for the job. :slight_smile: