Nonsense Seeps Into a Scientific Journal's Editorial Rebranding Dangerous and Filthy Fossil Fuels as Hydrogen.

[NNadir]

I am a regular reader of the scientific journal Industrial Engineering and Chemistry Research and have posted commentaries on many papers in this journal.

I am very disappointed and appalled to see a comment with which I could not disagree more in an article on a new conference, the 2022 World Multiphase Transportation, Conversion & Utilizationof Energy (MTCUE-2022) I would have very much liked to have attended, were the issues therein related to my professional life, which they are not, although the conference is very much attached to my personal private interests.

The paper is this one: Multiphase Transportation, Conversion, & Utilization of Energy in Chemical Engineering: A Special Issue for MTCUE-2022 Hui Jin, Hanbin Zhong, Yi Ouyang, Qiang Guo, and Qingang Xiong, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (42), 16945-16948.

The article is open to the public to read, but I will cite the section of the paper that totally disgusts me, this:

Supercritical water (SCW) gasification is a clean and efficient utilization method of coal or biomass for hydrogen generation. Ding et al. (3) studied free radical diffusion in the SCW environment. The results illustrated that higher temperature in the SCW environment can enhance the diffusion of free radicals, especially for the ·H radical, therefore facilitating and promoting reactions for hydrogen production.

I am very interested, by the way, in the chemistry and physics of supercritical water and have, in fact, referred to it in this space:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

I can also believe that SCW may have limited utility in gasification of municipal waste and biomass. If the energy to generate the supercritical water is nuclear, this might even be a carbon negative process.

But the reality of gasification is, as the authors of this commentary is about coal. Under no circumstances is the use of coal "clean."

The issue of free radical diffusion is, in and of itself, of interest, but not what is implied by the spin is, well, obscene.

We do have here at DU, fossil fuel salespeople and sales bots selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," but it is a L-I-E that hydrogen is "clean" or "green," as I pointed out in a post in the Ennui and Excuses forum:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Most of the world's hydrogen is made from dangerous natural gas with exergy destruction, but in China - which is often mentioned by our DU fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots as a hydrogen nirvana - it is made from coal.

The authors of this commentary are, in fact, Chinese, and this may be a party line, but it is very different from truth.

China is largely dependent on coal, but nothing, absolutely nothing about coal is "clean. When hydrogen is made from coal, exergy is destroyed, and the acceleration of climate change is enhanced.

In fact, hydrogen is a dirty fuel, and all the advertising and hype cannot change that fact.

Facts matter.

It's really depressing to see an obvious lie presented in a scientific journal, appalling really.

This is deadly marketing.

Have a nice weekend.

[NCIndie]

1. Fantastic post.

I posted here years ago under another name. I always admired how a pro-nukie could survive here. I know it has been challenging for you.

Your takes on hydrogen have been, as always, bang on.

[NNadir]

6. Thanks. Views on nuclear energy are changing on the left. I may not live to be fully vindicated...

...but the reality is setting in:

Without nuclear energy there is no path to addressing climate change and so called "renewable energy" is not actually "renewable" nor is it sustainable.

[Ford_Prefect]

2. I take it there was zero critical peer review of this item?

[NNadir]

3. It''s actually a survey article, not necessarily peer reviewed, but, in any case, peer review is not a magic formula...

...that renders nonsense into truth.

Were the opposite true we would never see retractions, including those involving fraud that have made their way not only through peer review, but even to acclaim.

We forget that science is a human enterprise, subject to all the foibles of humanity, including the embrace of fallacies, including but not limited to the bandwagon fallacy.

It is a cultural phenomenon, disturbing to me and I'm sure many others, to believe that if one states the word "hydrogen" one is talking about clean energy. It is, indeed, officially endorsed around the world, including in this country. This is immediately falsifiable on inspection since hydrogen is overwhelmingly produced using fossil fuels, is not primary energy, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics has never been disproved, and, I'm sure, never will be.

[Ford_Prefect]

4. It strikes me this is but one of many such items authored by pet researchers of the extraction and petrochemical

industries . They have a long established practice of setting up so-called "research institutes" whose inmates do nothing but pump out papers like this one using similar claims which propagandize against established science the anti-climate change agenda. Another route to the same end is to endow research chairs at selected universities which are then staffed with compliant scientists. Big Tobacco used and still has similar arrangements to give cover to their false claims.

[NNadir]

5. I definitely believe that the "hydrogen is green," myth is actively supported by fossil fuel interests.

And I emphatically agree that it is very similar to tobacco advertising, only worse, because the cost is not just some people's lungs, but the entire planetary atmosphere.

The survey article I linked actually referred to another paper, this one, in the issue: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study on the Diffusion Coefficients of the •OH, •H, and •HO2 Free Radicals Related in the Hydrogen Production Process in Supercritical Water Weijing Ding, Hui Jin, and Osamu Takahashi Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (42), 16968-16976

It begins with "clean coal" rhetoric:

Efficient and clean utilization of energy has been extensively focused and investigated. Direct combustion of coal has led to negative impacts and serious pollution on the environment, especially air pollution. From this perspective, supercritical water (SCW) gasification is an efficient and clean utilization approach of coal and some other organic matter (biomass, plastics, hydrocarbons, etc.). (1,2)

Then there's this, um, interesting text after the conclusion of the paper:

Corresponding Author
Hui Jin - State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, Shaanxi, China; Orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-9216-7921; Email: [e-mail]

Authors
Weijing Ding - State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, Shaanxi, China; Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8526, Japan
Osamu Takahashi - Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima 739-8526, Japan; Orcidhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5321-1747
Author Contributions

The manuscript was written through contributions of all authors. All authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript. W.D. contributed mainly. W.D.: Conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation, visualization, writing (original draft). H.J.: Conceptualization, formal analysis, funding acquisition, methodology, validation, project administration, resources, software, supervision, writing (review and editing). O.T.: writing (review), project administration, resources, software, supervision.

Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Acknowledgments
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This work was supported by the Basic Science Center Program for Ordered Energy Conversion of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 51888103), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 51922086), the China Scholarship Council (File No. 202106280003) International Cooperation Training Program for High Efficiency and Low Carbon Energy Conversion and Power Technology Talents (program number CXXM20210095), a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Area: Aquatic Functional Materials (grant number JP22H04550) and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research B (grant number JP23H01806) of JSPS KAKENHI, and the Calculation Resource Supports from the Molecular Simulation Computing Platform in Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Now China is still overwhelmingly dependent on coal which is its largest energy resource; its government is largely independent of popular will; and it is building coal plants at a rapid rate. Thus the claim that "The Authors declare no competing interests" is highly dubious if not an outright lie.

It is easy to see that this article, while the science is somewhat interesting in terms of modeling - it is not an experimental paper but a modeling paper, is about greenwashing coal. It does not report where the carbon dioxide is going, and in fact, it is immediately clear that as coal is better than 90% carbon, the process cannot be "low carbon."

Practically all hydrogen papers written are of this nature, a shell game. There are, in my opinion, although I am in no position to prove it, at least two sales people who post a great deal about hydrogen at DU who are here at the behest of fossil fuel interests. Interestingly one of them often posts stupid videos about hydrogen use in China. They're all appalling dishonest junk.

Of course, in my blogging career over the last 20 years, to be fair, I have often been met with similar accusations that I am being paid by the nuclear industry, since I am a strong supporter of that industry. However, if I were, and I am not, this does not refute the truth of what I say, in particular about used nuclear fuels, which is that they have a spectacular record of not killing anyone, whereas this is hardly true of coal. Coal more or less kills people every time its used. That's a fact.

I believe my journal here speaks for who and what I am, not that it matters who and what I am.

The fossil fuel sales people and salesbots here often juxtapose their claims about hydrogen connected with completely fraudulent pictures of so called "renewable energy" industrial plants in China. For the record, I regard so called "renewable energy" as another scheme, similar to hydrogen, an effort to entrench and expand the use of fossil fuels. (The WEO data released by the IEA each year, along with soothsaying about so called "renewable energy's" growth demonstrates that this is the real result of the trillions of dollars foolishly thrown at it.)

If you want to know why the planet was on fire in the Northern Hemisphere Summer This Year, it may be useful to look at the following table, Table A.1a on Page 264 of the 2023 World Energy Outlook published by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

If the soothsaying in this table actually proves to be true, the planet is screwed, and along with it, all future generations.

We are currently using more fossil fuels than we have ever done before, and finally the IEA, in the most recent issue of the World Energy Outlook has finally admitted, even with the absurd soothsaying about solar and wind energy, that all of its scenarios leave the use of fossil fuels in place at unacceptable levels.

I do believe that supercritical water generated by nuclear heat may play a role - if allowed to do so - in the reformation of solid wastes and perhaps some agricultural by products. This has the potential to ameliorate some environmental insult. But it cannot play a major role in carbon removal. Photosynthesis is relatively slow at carbon capture compared to the scale at which fossil fuels emit it, and the obscene land use issues associated with so called "renewable energy" will only make this worse, not better. The supercritical water oxidation of plastics will release carbon dioxide that originated from fossil fuels.

All this said, this paper is cute, but not at all essential for understanding supercritical water, although some of the references may be interesting.