BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen as it dumps diesel

https://thedriven.io/2023/06/23/bhp-says-battery-electric-cheaper-than-hydrogen-as-it-dumps-diesel-for-haul-trucks/

by _aavaa_ • 3 years ago

100 150 3 years ago

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adrianN2• 3 years ago

Was that ever controversial in the last fifteen years or so?

fnord77• 3 years ago

there's some still clinging to fuel cells despite the numbers showing the edge to BEVs

I can think of one major car maker...

jillesvangurp3• 3 years ago

Only to those without a firm grasp on the laws of thermodynamics. There are a lot of those people. They fall into two categories:

- those genuinely confused about this (most of the general public)

- those representing oil and gas lobbies that have been using hydrogen lobbying as a way to stay in the fossil fuel industry a bit longer. Because most hydrogen is made from natural gas and they love the idea of growing the market for that.

In short, there's a lot of waffle about stored energy by people who don't get (or refuse to acknowledge) that most of that 1) needs to come from somewhere (which is a lossy process) and 2) needs to be transformed into a usable form of energy (which is also a lossy process).

That's before you take into account the logistics of moving hydrogen around, which is challenging because it takes up a lot of space. You can either compress it to a few hundred bar (which takes energy) or cool it to a few degrees of kelvin (which takes energy, and keeping it there costs you more energy). And once you do that, you need to keep it contained for extended periods of time (which isn't 100% efficient, especially in liquid form), and use about 18x more trucks for hydrogen in gas form compared to methane in liquid form; or only about 3x more trucks is you actually do cool it down to liquid form.

In short, you end up loosing a lot of energy in various lossy energy transformations, compression, storage, and transport of hydrogen before you even get to extract energy from it. All these inefficiencies multiply to a very significant cost disadvantage over simple battery electric.

And even if you do all go down this path you end up charging a battery with a hydrogen fuel cell. Because fuel cells suck at producing variable output that you would need for a vehicle. Which is why most hydrogen vehicles today that use a fuel cell are fully functional battery electric vehicles that happen to have a tiny battery.

You could just rip out the hydrogen bits and replace them with a bigger battery and you end up with a vehicle that's cheaper to operate. By about 2-3x. A better vehicle in other words.

Vehicles like the ones BHP produces are huge. So, shoving a few mwh of battery in them is not going to be that big of a deal. Charging them is a logistical challenge but also a solvable one. Multi mw charger technology already exists. And of course not having to truck in lots of diesel/hydrogen trucks to the remote places where these things are used might also be a benefit. The main challenge for companies like this is access to enough battery and electricity.

_aavaa_16• 3 years ago

Funnily enough, if you mine underground you spend an incredible amount of electricity trying to keep the air fresh down there, mostly due to whatever combustion reaction is powering your vehicles.

I’ve seen reports claiming you break even or even use less electricity when operating electric vehicles since your ventilation requirements are significantly reduced.

_hypx23• 3 years ago

Only to those without a firm grasp on the laws of thermodynamics.

You are the one completely confused by the laws of thermodynamics.

A hydrogen fuel cell is an electrochemical system. So are electrolyzers. They represent the equivalence of charging and discharging a battery. There is no fundamental reason why this must be less efficient. You can potentially reach 100% efficiency at least in theory.

What people really are saying is that “in practice,” it is less efficient than a battery setup. But this is also mostly made-up and filled with exaggeration. Electrolyzers are reaching 98% efficiency. Fuel cells, at least in large installations, can already reach 85% efficiency or battery (assuming heat recapture).

In short, it is already pretty close to what batteries can do. Future advancements will eliminate the efficiency gap almost entirely.

Furthermore, it is actually more efficient to store and move around hydrogen than it is with electricity. Energy storage at scale is very difficult, and enough of a problem that we are looking at using hydrogen for long-duration energy storage. That alone basically kills the argument that batteries have any advantages in this respect.

Finally, as the economics of hydrogen production scale up, we can expect cost to approach zero. That’s because it is very much like wind and solar: We’re using a basically free resource (wind, sunlight and water) and turning it into a fuel. People criticized the efficiency of photovoltaics in the past, but the fundamental advantage of not having to pay for fuel means that costs can drop to nearly zero, and it did. This is the same story again. Except nearly free green hydrogen in the long-run.

Qwertious3• 3 years ago

You don't need to transport hydrogen - you can generate it on-site from water at the fuel station. Although this will require upgrading the electrical grid.

Hydrogen is already in use in e.g. forklifts that need to operate 24/7 (because recharging is slow), so while the logistical problem could be solved, I don't think it's worth doing so in all cases. Hydrogen has it's niche.

(tl;dr below: there's stuff that hydrogen is bad at but batteries literally cannot do, so if we prioritize ditching oil then hydrogen wins by default in those specific niches.)

IMO hydrogen also makes sense for large vehicles that need a long range - planes flying the New York to London trip will need to either be synthfuel or hydrogen, and we haven't figured out how to make synthfuel at scale yet. So while synthfuel will eventually be better than hydrogen, it might not be available in time for our climate deadline.

Similarly, hydrogen might be a better option for multi-man trucks on a long haul (i.e. a truck with a bed in the back and a second (or even third) driver, so they can drive for two 10-hour shifts without stopping for a break) through low-infrastructure areas. Yes, that is a bit niche.

Also, cargo ships could use hydrogen right now with only a 1-5% loss in cargo capacity. Batteries wouldn't get 100KM let alone across the pacific and synthfuel doesn't exist.

In theory biofuels are also a drop-in solution, but modern farming is very heavily reliant on oil, so biofuels are mostly just fossil fuels with extra steps (and speaking of which: tractors need high uptime, you can't be constantly charging the tractor batteries on harvest day so once again, hydrogen tractors win by default). Also, unnecessarily straining our food supply is really dumb.

_aavaa_16• 3 years ago

It’s controversial now. There are many people smoking the hopium pipe claiming that fuel cell vehicles are the solution of the future.

brnt• 3 years ago

Question is always: what's externalized and what isn't?

Grid storage, required if you want to ensure your energy source is renewable, is usually not taken into account. Sure, diesel and commercial hydrogen isn't either, and an energy reduction even if not renewable is still great, but I'd be keen on knowing the number when taking it into account. That's the end goal after all.

beej71• 3 years ago

I think in this particular case the question might be "what is cheaper to operate?"

bee_rider3• 3 years ago

Who pays for grid storage? Is it really externalized or does it just become part of the cost of doing business for the power company?

marcosdumay2• 3 years ago

The answer for "who pays for X" is always similar. If no government intervenes, people that use electricity when its most expensive pay for it; or if the power company keeps the price constant, it gets included on the average price.

pjc503• 3 years ago

You can significantly reduce grid storage requirements for high-renewables scenarios if you can include demand-response in a big fleet of EV chargers to say "if your charge is not urgent, please delay it a bit".

gruez• 3 years ago

Question is always: what's externalized and what isn't?

In many (most?) electricity markets this is a non-issue because on the producer side, the price they get is determined by a spot market. Rather than every producer getting paid $0.05/kWh (or whatever) all the time, the price is calculated every hour/minute according to supply and demand. That means producers that generate electricity when there's an abundance (eg. renewables on a windy/sunny day) are penalized accordingly, and producers that generate electricity when there's a shortage (eg. peaking fossil fuel plants) are awarded accordingly.

Qwertious3• 3 years ago

Grid storage isn't needed before the grid is at least 50% renewable (and I don't mean "once in a blue moon more than 50% of demand is satisfied by renewable electricity, I mean baseline"); in fact it's hard to justify building a lot of storage out before renewables give them lots of stuff to balance.

Grid storage is eventually needed, but the discussion around batteries is kind of like demanding your website be "web scale" when you've had less than 100 visitors a day for the past year. Like, I'm all for planning ahead but is this really our priority?

Meanwhile, if we reduce our emissions by 10% today, then we have 10%(ish) more time to get rid of the remaining 90%. Our deadline isn't time, it's CO2e emitted.

In other words: Grid storage should not be taken into account, because the only way it becomes important soon is if we buy ourselves a lot of time to deal with it by majorly cutting emissions. People focus too much on "100% renewables by 20XX" and not enough on "50% renewables by ASAP".

I'm sure there's a better way of phrasing that, because "[thing] should be taken into account" is basically an applause light and I'm contradicting it, but you get the idea.

logifail4• 3 years ago

Q: Where is the electricity coming from to recharge the batteries?

"Powered by electricity" doesn't necessarily mean "clean", years ago I visited friends in Germany who were within cycling distance of an open-cast lignite mine. It had its own (lignite-fueled) power station on-site, which powered much of the equipment.

Will never forget climbing steps up the earthen embankment at the edge of the mine to reach a viewing platform. The scale of the destruction was literally breathtaking.

adrianN2• 3 years ago

It’s talking about Australia. If they have one thing it’s sunlight.

pluies• 3 years ago

Also a looooot of coal. https://www.energy.gov.au/data/australian-electricity-genera...

ImaCake• 3 years ago

I imagine a mix of solar and natural gas. A lot of natural gas is mined in Western Australia and Australian mines tend to be in hot sunny places. Coal mining isn’t BHPs business so that seems unlikely.

gimmeThaBeet2• 3 years ago

Uhhh, BHP is like one of the largest coal miners on the planet. Though, it's just one of their operating units (mainly iron and copper).

CharlieDigital• 3 years ago

"Powered by electricity" doesn't necessarily mean "clean"

"Powered by electricity" is an abstraction that lets you move towards clean sources of energy over time and zero emissions. Even if the source of that electricity is dirty today and shifts emissions, it can become clean and zero emission.

On the other hand "Powered by gasoline" or "Powered by diesel" will always be dirty, even with bio-diesel.

hardware2win• 3 years ago

Thats interesting point, thanks.

runako• 3 years ago

Came to say this. I would add that "powered by electric" also typically means that power was generated at an industrial-scale facility and so is likely inherently more efficient than on-site generation. Powering a vehicle with electricity generated from diesel is (or can be upgraded to be, over time) more efficient than powering the same vehicles using diesel powertrains.

a_c_s• 3 years ago

An electric car powered by coal is still cleaner overall than one powered by gasoline.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/10/26/analysis/dirty-e....

https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2018/08/19/myths-an...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...

gambiting• 3 years ago

Yes, almost always. But it's important to point out the edge cases.

Where I'm from the largest power plant in the country is also insanely polluting - Bełchatow power plant burns lignite for electricity and the CO2 emissions are just bananas. The official number is around 1.7kg(!!!!!!!) Of CO2 for every kWh of electricity produced[1]. If you run your electric car using energy from that power plant then yes, it pollutes more than almost any petrol/diesel vehicle bar some sports cars and large trucks.

But that's a curiosity, an edge case, and if anything it proves that Bełchatow should be closed down immediately and not that EVs are a bad thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...

logifail4• 3 years ago

An electric car powered by coal is still cleaner overall than one powered by gasoline

I'm sceptical that we know enough about the energy and resource mix in use across our global supply chains to be anywhere near that confident.

Look up Enrico Mariutti and his thoughts on the photovoltaic lifecycle figures ( mentioned in "China's dirty fuel advanage" - https://public.substack.com/p/solar-panels-more-carbon-inten... )

causi2• 3 years ago

Electric fueled by coal produces less CO2 than gasoline. It's not cleaner by a long shot. The pollution produced by a coal plant, especially a brown coal plant, is insane even when they don't have an ash pond breach that kills more wildlife than a tactical nuclear explosion.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

I've been there too, it's the saddest view, maybe only on par with the destruction in Northern Canada due to fracking. And likely in Africa there are similar sites but I haven't seen those in person, just online and photos do not do this kind of damage any justice. If you haven't seen any of this try anyway:

https://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2012/07/tar_sands.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Panorama...

_hypx23• 3 years ago

This story is Tesla propaganda by a Tesla propagandist. The author of the piece wants every EV maker other than Tesla to go fail. Look at the history of articles the person wrote. No surprise, it’s another attack on an alternative green technology. I doubt the guy even cares about green technology other than what can promote Tesla.

There’s no reason to believe that this a serious attempt to go green. The vehicles are already diesel-electric so it is simply a matter of hooking them up to electricity. And since diesel is not that cheap, you can get save money with an electrified system, provided you have no interest in ensuring green electricity.

atourgates3• 3 years ago

I thought this sentence at the end was quite interesting:

BHP’s modelling shows that battery charging time may be the biggest cost on the electric side, something that dynamic charging can reduce significantly.

For an industry like mining, the biggest cost of switching to electric isn’t buying vehicles, or batteries or setting up charging stations: it’s the downtime they experience while charging.

audunw• 3 years ago

Very interesting. Makes me imagine a battery swapping station for a huge mining truck. Probably not feasible but I’m sure it would look awesome if it was.

pixl974• 3 years ago

They have hybrid test trucks that can power themselves via overhead lines for the uphill loaded portion of the trip. I wonder if something like that could reduce battery usage and time to charge.

pixl974• 3 years ago

A fair portion of their huge equipment is already connected to a power cord, so electricification isn't a problem itself. But pretty much everything is moving 24/7. For things like heavy shovels uptimes are commonly 88% per year. When you look at how much maintenance is needed to keep running in these rough environments it's a pretty amazing number.

algo_trader2• 3 years ago

Please see my sibling comment.

Do we really use 2000A cables running around a work site? Are they buried ?

defrost5• 3 years ago

The mining trucks are 100+ tonne (carry capacity) Haul Paks with a (say) 30 minute turn around time from excavator to loadout (dumping into train) and back again.

The trucks are already "electric" having diesal generators that power electric axle motors.

Dynamic charging probably means auto hooking a charger at the excavator (which are often electric - they don't move much and can have fat ass HV cables running to them that are dragged when the excavator moves) to boost batteries on the trucks while they park as they're loaded.

Optimal performance is no truck idle save when being loaded - dumping is relatively quick.

algo_trader2• 3 years ago

fat ass HV cables running to them

Do you a more exact specs?

Maybe MV 10kV-40kV ?

And how thick are these cables?

Do they carry 2000A snaking around the site?

zardo• 3 years ago

I would guess overhead lines and catenaries for some portion of the route rather than dragging cables around.

defrost5• 3 years ago

BHP Australia Operational Decarbonisation 'Report' (30 slides)

June 2023

https://www.bhp.com/-/media/documents/media/reports-and-pres...

    Recently appointed as Principal Power Decarbonisation, Tamahra Kierath and her team are focused on exploring options to provide renewable energy to BHP's Western Australia Iron Ore operations. 

    To achieve our aim of eliminating emissions from diesel by electrifying our truck and locomotive fleets, we will require more electricity to support that transition. Our Pilbara operations are not connected to the power grid, so my team are exploring a range of opportunities for renewable energy solutions. The transition will start with proven renewable technologies such as wind and solar and we will continue to explore long duration energy storage options as technology advances.

( yep, that's it so far )

from: https://www.bhp.com/news/articles/2023/06/tamahra-is-focused...

gumby3• 3 years ago

Process H2 generated at point of use makes sense (e.g. for steel production), but the whole “H2 as a fuel” story is simply nonsense to keep the legacy fossil fuel companies happy.

Qwertious3• 3 years ago

It makes sense for large vehicles - a passenger plane from New York to London will never make sense for batteries, but could be done with hydrogen.

Similarly, cargo ships can't run on batteries, but could fairly trivially be switched to hydrogen with only minor loss in storage capacity (1-5%).

The benefit of hydrogen is that it was functioning just fine in the 1960s, there aren't any outright technical showstoppers here; just financial problems and technical problems that are hard to solve cheaply.

I'm not saying that hydrogen is the best solution (if synthfuel pans out then it'll be a perfect drop-in replacement for existing jet fuel), but it's a solution that exists today. It's there if we care.

Obviously we don't care, since coal plants are still around, but if we genuinely wanted to stop using fossil fuels ASAP then it would permit us to keep using planes/cargo ships.

martincmartin• 3 years ago

Couldn't cargo ships use wind? A wind turbine on the ship? A kind of modern re-imaging of how sailing ships of old were powered.

Is the problem that wind isn't reliable and you might go days without it? Or you wouldn't fit in ports or other areas with a big turbine sticking out? Or is there some other practical problem.

jackmott422• 3 years ago

How would a hydrogen powered passenger plane work? How big and or heavy would the fuel tanks need to be? As I understand it you either need very big tanks to store it as gas, or very heavy insulated tanks to store it liquefied. Would a passenger plane still work?

pjc503• 3 years ago

Synthfuel apparently exists already and the US Navy has a solution. It's just very energy-intensive.

The shipping industry is investigating making ammonia from the hydrogen and then using that in fuel cells; it has the advantage that it's easier to handle. https://maritime-executive.com/article/highest-power-output-...

_hypx23• 3 years ago

It will make sense for nearly all transportation that can’t be directly electrified. The problem with batteries is that it is a massive resource hog, and one that is fundamentally unsustainable. It will have be abandoned. The only alternatives are ideas like synfuels or ammonia, but those require green hydrogen production anyways.

moomoo11• 3 years ago

The best solution for large airplanes is remote meetings and realistic remote experiences.

Sorry. But there’s no reason so many people need to fly (consultants, I used to be one racked up a few hundred thousand miles) besides leisure or critical travel. And it should reflect in the price so tickets aren’t $150 to be crammed in like cattle.

And yes it should be rare to fly until we figure out cleaner fuel methods. Just my hot take.

epistasis• 3 years ago

Liquid hydrogen takes 4x the volume of standard aviation kerosene. Coming up with on-jet liquid storage of hydrogen of that volume is a rather steep engineering hurdle. And hydrogen, liquid or not, will require some rather impressive storage and handling techniques at the airport.

If I were to bet, I would say that converting hydrogen to kerosene will be far cheaper and more efficient than trying to power long distance flight with hydrogen

regularfry• 3 years ago

The problem isn't doing one plane. It's doing enough of them to make a difference.

Jet fuel is ludicrously energy dense, to the extent that it's easy to underestimate how much energy you need: at any reasonably-sized airport, if you want to replace the current fleet then you need to be talking about roughly a power station's worth of continuous energy delivery into aircraft fuel tanks. That's doable with jet fuel because you're not climbing out of an energy well just to get hold of the fuel. You just separate it out, and the problem becomes pure logistics.

With H2, the volume you need and the added storage complexity means the current logistics becomes a rounding error in comparison to how on earth you get the gigawatts to churn feedstock into gas.

You could do it, but you'd want nukes on-site to do it.

gumby3• 3 years ago

...there aren't any outright technical showstoppers here

H2 molecules are extremely small -- storing them without loss is heavy and volumetrically expensive, making it implausible for any aircraft.

The same factors apply to ships, pipelines etc because space for fuel is space that does not contain high value cargo.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

Another place where it could make sense is trains. Building overhead power lines could be expensive, especially if we are talking about high speed trains. Because of the square cube law, large pressurized tanks could be economically quite efficient. A train could carry an extra car with a pressurized tank at 700 bar. At this pressure the hydrogen density is 42 kg/m3. A typical oil car has a volume of 131 m3, so assuming the same volume, we'd get about 5.5 tons of hydrogen. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel fuel, and hydrogen cells about twice the efficiency of diesel engines, so all in all 5.5 tons of hydrogen would be the equivalent of about 33 tons of diesel. That's more than enough to move a train from one train station to another one, even if the stations are hundreds of miles apart.

gary_02• 3 years ago

I keep waiting for everyone to wake up to the hydrogen scam. Do you see any practical consumer hydrogen infrastructure going up? Has it even been invented yet? Electrical infrastructure is a solved problem, we need to scale it up anyways, and it hooks into everything (industry, consumer use, consumer solar panels, public transport, renewable generation) because it just wires together and there are lots of electricians and engineers you can hire. There is electrical infrastructure almost everywhere there is human settlement! But hydrogen is a bunch of exploding leaking embrittling bullshit, and it will only ever have niche uses.

Fun fact: currently 95% of hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. This might be a clue as to why such a dumb idea is still around.

nicholassmith• 3 years ago

Do you see any practical consumer hydrogen infrastructure going up? Has it even been invented yet?

It has been invented, the majority are in China and Japan if I remember rightly.

Manuel_D4• 3 years ago

Hydrogen becomes more attractive once electricity is decarbonized. It's really the only fuel that has both the energy density to power flight and transoceanic travel and does not emit carbon. Batteries are fine for cars, and trains can be electrified. But you'll never fly across the Atlantic on a battery powered passenger plane.

Synthetic methane and other hydrocarbons are also ideas that are floated. But those need hydrogen as an input anyway. They also need a source of carbon, which is too difficult to extract from the atmosphere. So using the hydrogen directly may be more feasible.

nsavage• 3 years ago

I can see it being a useful battery tech as well to be used with wind power: offshore wind to generate electricity and generate hydrogen from ocean water to be burned when the wind isn't blowing.

martinald• 3 years ago

Well it doesn't in some ways, but I think many overlook the fact there is going to be trillions (quadrillions?) of kWhs of free/negative price electricity in the coming decades - when there is too much solar and/or wind on the grids.

There needs to be more productive uses of this free electricity and I imagine H2 is one of them.

NB: Batteries won't solve this unless prices dropped astronomically. The issue isn't overcapacity on a day by day basis, it's seasonal overcapacity. Areas further south are less affected by this, as there is less seasonal variation in solar output. You're not going to charge a battery then discharge it weeks later - the economics don't make sense.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

It's now pretty clear that chemical fuel systems, i.e. any system based on the combustion of a fuel with oxygen to generate heat/pressure/motive force, are going to be fairly niche markets in the future. International jet travel and orbital launch rockets, and maybe long-distance commercial shipping, are about it.

The real value of renewable-energy-powered chemical synthesis will be in the production of things like fertilizers, dyes, carbon fiber, etc. Basically you can take the entire fossil-fuel-sourced front end of the petrochemical industry and replace it with hydrogen and carbon inputs from water and atmospheric CO2 respectively.

major5052• 3 years ago

Well if theres a sector that can benefic form eletric vehicles, this would be big machines. They would have lighter engines, because they would not need a transmission.

pixl974• 3 years ago

Cat is one of the few manufacturers that make direct drive trucks. Most are diesel-electric.

daydream• 3 years ago

Same with locomotives. Most are diesel-electric in that a diesel engine drives a generator, which generates electricity to power an electric motor that actually turns the wheels. Less mechanical wear and tear this way, though it adds some inefficiency as the article says.

legitster• 3 years ago

Not part of the official analysis, but BHP is a huge player in many of the raw resources of electric drivetrains. So they have a lot of personal stake in advancing electrification.

sbradford26• 3 years ago

I will say that they would also be a player in many of the metals utilized in hydrogen fuel cells as well.

ortusdux• 3 years ago

Hydrogen is a battery.

jillesvangurp3• 3 years ago

Just not a very good one.

_hypx23• 3 years ago

It’s the theoretically best one possible. BEV fanatics are just spreading propaganda against it.

jansan• 3 years ago

Thanks, I did not know the definition of an accumulator or battery is that broad.

"A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage

iamflimflam1• 3 years ago

There seems to be a lot of lobbying going on around hydrogen and unfortunately politicians seem to think:

Hydrogen is a gas - therefore everywhere you use gas you can use hydrogen instead.

I’m not sure it’s quite so simple.

adolph• 3 years ago

The US has seemed to "hit the gas" [0] with large expenditures to support hydrogen use as a fuel.

In November 2021, Congress passed, and President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). This historic, once-in-a-generation legislation authorizes and appropriates $62 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), including $9.5 billion for clean hydrogen. [1]

the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $1.5 billion to support hydrogen electrolysis and $8 billion to fund a broad Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs program. [1]

0. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hit%20the%20gas

1. (largish pdf) https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/us-national-clean-hydro...

2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/07/05/...

causi2• 3 years ago

BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen

Well, duh. Hydrogen is just a (terrible) liquid battery you have to re-manufacture every time you discharge it. You lose a third of the energy making the hydrogen, another quarter moving it around, and then half of it converting from hydrogen to electricity.

tivert2• 3 years ago

I wasn't sure who "BHP" were, it turns out it's an Australian mining company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BHP:

BHP Group Limited (formerly known as BHP Billiton) is an Australian multinational mining, metals, and natural gas petroleum public company headquartered in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
The Broken Hill Proprietary Company was founded on 16 July 1885 in the mining town of Silverton, New South Wales.[3] By 2017, BHP was the world's largest mining company, based on market capitalisation,[4][5] and was Melbourne's third-largest company by revenue.[6]

Kon5ole• 3 years ago

Storing hydrogen in vehicles has never seemed like a good idea to me. The risk is too high since the gas tanks can't be made indestructible and hydrogen goes boom quite spectacularly.

But as a grid storage medium it could make a lot of sense. The fundamental equation is just too good to ignore - energy plus water becomes hydrogen, hydrogen becomes energy plus water - and only water.

The world needs both energy and clean water, so it seems like a potentially perfect "twofer". (I must admit that I have no idea if the amount of water generated from combustion is relevant).

The inefficiency doesn't seem to be a fundamental problem, as we get increasingly more surplus energy from solar and wind. This summer utility companies have had to "pay" customers to use electricity in Europe, a mere 6 months after they had the highest electricity prices on record. Any method to store even a fraction of the current surplus so that it can be sold for 50+ cents per kwh in 6 months should be very interesting.

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

That's what I have been saying for the last 2-3 years that solar, renewables and batteries are making ice vehicles uncompetitive. The coming electric revolution will be interesting almost everything will use electricy motors while the variable cost to run those motors ie electricity will be getting cheaper.

BHP says battery electric cheaper than hydrogen as it dumps diesel

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