Hiding behind hydrogen

[hunter]

4. It's a polite way of saying that the use of hydrogen...

...as a fuel, or for energy transmission, or as an energy storage medium, is largely a scam, one promoted by the same fossil fuel industry that wants you to believe carbon capture is a viable and important technology.

I'm not so nice. I started thinking about hydrogen as a fuel and doing the math more than forty years ago. I knew personally some of the early promoters of hydrogen fuel. I couldn't make the math work then, and I can't make it work now.

It's not a simple technical problem that can be solved with more engineering -- it has to do with the thermodynamic and physical properties of hydrogen itself.

If you've got an economical carbon-free source of hydrogen, say from a high temperature nuclear reactor running a sulfur-iodine cycle, it's best to use that hydrogen to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers and much easier-to-handle conventional fuels.

There were people who believed human powered ornithopters would be as common as bicycles in the 21st century. Why not?