EST: Chinese Hydrogen Production Is Making Climate Change Worse.

[NNadir]

Discussing climate change around here is often an exercise in delusion; whatever it is we think we're doing is making things worse, not better, and it's making things worse faster than ever.

2024's Unprecedented Terror At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory Continues. In all the years I've monitored the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory, I've never seen anything like 2024.

We have around here, a fossil fuel sales team, including an apparent bot, working to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen," this to encourage fossil fuel sales by greenwashing them, often juxtaposing, in a bait and switch fashion, advertising graphics of useless solar farms next to slick similar pictures of hydrogen stations in China to promote the lie that hydrogen is made using so called "renewable energy," which despite trillions of dollars and worldwide enthusiasm has done nothing to address the use of dangerous fossil fuels, and has, in fact, entrenched them.

I have noted that in China, as elsewhere, in my own words, just as is the case everywhere else on this planet, hydrogen is made overwhelmingly by the use of fossil fuels, including the tiny amounts made by using grid electricity, with exergy destruction, the term "exergy destruction" being a thermodynamic term for "wasted energy," i.e. low energy efficiency, waste, a consequence of the inviolable 2nd law of thermodynamics.

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

Here's a publication by Chinese scientists, more or less saying exactly what I've been saying:

Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195

The text is clear enough.

From the introductory text:

... Currently, nearly all hydrogen in China is either produced directly from fossil fuels (55% from coal gasification and 14% from steam methane reforming (SMR)) or as a byproduct of petroleum refining (28%), with only 1% coming from water electrolysis. (2) Producing 1 kg of coal- or SMR-based hydrogen emits roughly 19 and 10 kg of CO2, respectively. (3) In 2020, hydrogen production from fossil fuels in China emitted ∼322Tg of CO2, equivalent to 25% of total CO2 emissions from industrial processes, a number expected to rise with increasing hydrogen demand. (4) Industrial processes include production of nonmetallic mineral products, chemical, and metal products, as well as production and consumption of halocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. (4)

Electrolytic hydrogen can be categorized by its electricity source: grid-based hydrogen generated using electricity from the power grid and renewable-based hydrogen generated directly from renewable electricity. Grid-based hydrogen is cheaper than renewable-based hydrogen in most provinces, requiring lower subsidies for its development. However, grid-based electricity generation relies heavily on coal and, thus, has substantial GHG emissions. Subsidizing grid-based hydrogen production would likely increase GHG emissions relative to coal-based hydrogen production, whereas hydrogen directly generated from renewable energy has minimal GHG emissions.

China aims to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2060. To minimize cumulative carbon emissions, accelerating the transition to decarbonized hydrogen production is crucial. However, high production costs are a significant barrier to the adoption of clean electrolytic hydrogen. Currently, renewable-based hydrogen and grid-based hydrogen cost 2–6 times and 1.6–3 times more than coal- or SMR-based hydrogen, respectively. (2,5−7) Until renewable-based hydrogen becomes cost-competitive, large-scale development of hydrogen is likely to increase GHG emissions by expanding fossil- and grid-based electrolytic hydrogen production. To rapidly decarbonize the hydrogen production process, it is essential to accelerate the shift from fossil- to renewable-based hydrogen. While some provincial governments (e.g., Inner Mongolia and Gansu) have established hydrogen production goals, their plans lack a specific focus on renewable-based electrolytic hydrogen. Moreover, there is little research at the provincial level that compares life cycle GHG emissions and levelized costs of hydrogen (LCOH2) across all hydrogen production technologies. Our work provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between subsidies and GHG emissions in the development of the hydrogen industry at the provincial level in China.

Subsidies play a significant role in developing emerging technologies. To accelerate the electrolytic hydrogen transition, subsidies on hydrogen-related devices and hydrogen used for transportation have been deployed in different regions as pilot projects. (8,9) Since renewable-based hydrogen costs 2–6 times more than coal- or SMR-based hydrogen, (2,4,5) greater subsidies are required to make renewable hydrogen cost competitive and to drive commercial production...

I added the bold, underline and italics. I note that we have lots of people around here who embrace consumer balderdash about cost all the time, particularly with respect to the alleged cost of nuclear energy, because investments in nuclear energy will accrue benefits to future generations and not the assholes whining about pennies in their pockets now. Notably, the fossil fuel sales people and sales bots around here embrace antinuke rhetoric enthusiastically, which is unsurprising, because, well, the reason they greenwash fossil fuels is to sell them, not because its hard to sell fossil fuels, but because they want to extend sales indefinitely.

The argument these people make is that nuclear energy is "too expensive" but climate change isn't "too expensive."

In the State of New York, led by the actor Mark Ruffalo, whose environmental science qualifications seem to include being filmed having simulated (or perhaps real) sex with the actress Emma Stone, this decision to indicate that climate change isn't "too expensive" or "too dangerous" but nuclear power is "too dangerous" and "too expensive" has been described in the newspaper The Guardian, hardly a source of "right wing talking points."

A nuclear plant’s closure was hailed as a green win. Then emissions went up.

One would need an education in a subject other than acting in soft porn films to know what "green" means, that it might have something to do with climate change which is a serious matter, something deaths from radiation at Indian Point never was.

In defense of China, and its efforts to address climate change, I note that China has the best operating nuclear power plant construction infrastructure in place right now, and while it is squandering money, vast sums, on so called "renewable energy" it is also building nuclear plants at a pace not seen anywhere on Earth since the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and France in the 1980's. China will surpass France as one of the largest producers of nuclear power in short order, and in slightly longer order, the United States, still the world's leader in nuclear power production, owing to a scientific, engineering, and industrial infrastructure that built nuclear power plants nearly half a century ago, leaving a gift to our generation.

I note that making hydrogen from nuclear electricity is just as wasteful as making it from any form of electricity, as the cited EST article points out. One hears of high "faradaic efficiencies" but the more important "thermodynamic efficiency" is often buried in texts and requires calculation from the over voltages. (It isn't pretty.)

Like all "hydrogen will save us" marketing that is in effect the marketing of dangerous fossil fuels, there's all kinds of soothsaying in the paper cited at the outset about what "could" be done with hydrogen to address the appalling effort to accelerate the destruction of the planetary atmosphere that existing hydrogen technology involves everywhere on the planet. That appalling effort is succeeding spectacularly since the acceleration is underway, the first derivative, second derivative and third derivative with respect to time of carbon dioxide accumulations in the planetary atmosphere are all positive. (When I integrate the second derivative twice to obtain a crude quadratic, substitute the boundary conditions represented by the present data, and solve for 500 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, it seems, by this crude model, we'll hit that figure around 2046.)

One of the appalling ideas advanced (in the soothsaying part) in this otherwise interesting paper describing current reality is to use existing gas pipelines as hydrogen pipe lines from some magical so called "renewable energy" nirvana off in some Chinese wilderness somewhere. I would suggest that the people writing this sort of thing take an introductory course in metallurgy to learn what the term "hydrogen embrittlement" means.

Anyway...

If you're a Christian who embraces the phenomenological bit about people rising from the dead, have a very happy Easter. I'm not sure a stable planet can be resurrected, but have a happy holiday anyway irrespective of what I think.