ephbit

I am either under equipped with intelligence .. or your question is too confusing to be easily understood.

If your intention is to get any kind of useful feedback on your message here .. I suggest you try to rephrase it or explain further what you're asking.

Looks like you yourself are dangerously wrong here.

You know which way we will not solve the problem?

By failing to recognize technologies that are going to help solve the problem.

It's the same with CCS.

The "green" mantra of "this is all just a strategy to help the fossil industry survive and we must boycott it" is shooting in one's foot.

As long as the world's energy infrastructure can not be built solely on renewables - which will still be the case in at least 2-3 decades - it makes sense to develop/use technologies that make the footprint of fossil energy smaller.

The key feature of hydrogen as energy storage wouldn't necessarily be round trip efficiency but cost effectiveness (compared to batteries) of long-term storage over months.

Think about transporting peaks of renewables electricity generation that are not economically usable at the time when they're produced to times when renewables produce too little to meet demand. (Mostly in regions where generation depends significantly on seasons.)

> Commonsense should tell you e- generated by H2 can't compete with CH4, because Ch4 is the feedstock & H2 is the product!

Didn't parse this statement, sorry. Can you rephrase?

They might have meant something like: if you process A through B to C while you could also process A to C directly, then the latter direct process will usually be more economically viable.

While this heuristic sounds broadly reasonable, it neglects so many details of any real production processes and value chains that it seems hardly applicable to real world situations.

... bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase.

The word "buzzphrase" implies that you think energy resilience is not as relevant as the proponents want to make it seem. Correct?

I've been thinking for years that resilience of the overall energy system is a factor that many green energy transition people appear to systematically overlook.

As I see it, chemicals based energy systems have a huge advantage over electricity based energy systems through their property of bringing large amounts of storage (and thus capacity to bridge outages) with them basically inherently.

The electrical grid is a delicate life support system and I'm convinced that it will - even in the far future - depend heavily upon chemical energy storage and transportation to give it resilience.

As far as I've heard the electrical grids in the US and Europe have come close to breaking points a lot more often over the last few years, compared to before. And even though huge sums of money are being invested in their build-out and maintenance, the supply situation with critical components such as transformers is apparently dire.

Alltogether makes me think that chemical energy storage (and thus, hydrogen, power-to-gas, ammonia, and such) will have a dead-sure place in energy systems.

Any graph with a linear scale where the low numbers contain the most important information is meaningless if you include the huge outlier numbers.

Whoever made this graph doesn't seem to know what they're even looking for.

... new technique by creating tiny liquid metal droplets containing copper and gallium ... as the catalyst to break apart the raw ingredients of nitrogen and hydrogen.

"Liquid metals allow us to move the chemical elements around in a more dynamic way that gets everything to the interface and enables more efficient reactions, ideal for catalysis," Daeneke said. "Copper and gallium separately had both been discounted as famously bad catalysts for ammonia production, yet together they do the job extremely well."

Each post could be encrypted (before publishing) using a unique key (derived from the private key of the poster) and then signed with the private key (of the poster) before publishing.

Then the poster could later choose to selectively publish (or make them available to individuals) some of these unique keys, to make posts readable.

.. don't know where you get the idea that eating 300g of meat is difficult.

You're right, 300 g of meat isn't much of a challenge. The more appropriate comparison would be between 300 g of chips and an equal amount of calories in some protein rich food like meat. That should be much more challenging.

.. people today are eating too much.

Yeah, the important question is: why are they eating too much?

I assume that a lot of it is unintentional. Overeating mostly happens because people aren't aware of a few simple mechanisms or are misunderstanding them, not because the world is hard. Mechanisms which they could quite easily use to overeat less or avoid it altogether, instead of falling prey to them.

Just telling people that they're eating to much doesn't help in any way. People need to know why and how they can quite easily change it.

There's apparently scientific studies that show how animals as well as humans tend to continue eating until they've satisfied a mostly fixed daily need for protein, mostly regardless of _what kind_ of food they're eating.

Now if people choose a diet low in protein/calories ratio, they'll have a tendency to ingest more calories than people who eat protein rich diets. Try eating eating 300 g of cheese/meat/tofu in one meal, it'll be difficult. Eating 300 g of chips/fries is something many people can absolutely do, if the chips aren't too salty.

One significant difference between our modern western lives and the lives of people tens to hundreds of years ago is IMO that people back then quite automatically used up all the carb calories of their comparably protein diluted diet because life required much more physical activity and came with less home heating than today. Today, most people will just not expend much of the caloric energy of carb rich diets and thus develop metabolic diseases and such.

A carb rich diet is usually fine as long as you expend the energy via physical activity.

Storing it in batteries works for short periods of up to maybe a few days.

You don't think there will be seasonal mismatch between renewable generation and electricity demand?

Because if there _is_ a seasonal mismatch, hydrogen will be needed anyway.

https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/boersen-news/id_100429438/d...

„Seit 2023 betreiben wir nun einen Bitcoin-Node und auch Bitcoin-Lightning-Nodes, und voller Stolz möchte ich ein kleines Geheimnis verraten: Wir werden bald in die digitale monetäre Photosynthese einsteigen“, so Röder.

deepl.com translation:

"We have been operating a Bitcoin node since 2023 and also Bitcoin Lightning Nodes, and proudly I would like to reveal a little secret: We will soon be entering the digital monetary photosynthesis," says Röder.

.. has a compact hydrogen generator in its product portfolio, which can produce 20 g of hydrogen from 200 ml of purified water in around five-to-six hours.

.. that hydrogen is transferred to a 25-cm-tall (9.8-in) bottle-like container at an internal pressure of 1 MPa. Popping one of these containers into the frame of one of the company's HYRYD ebikes feeds the onboard 180-W fuel cell and offers up to 60 km (37 miles) of range. Then it's just a case of removing a spent container and replacing it with a fresh one, which is said to take just 3-10 seconds.

.. by mining bitcoin you invest directly in money creation, that is, there's no hiring people, no new business creation, no research aimed at product development, therefore much less knowledge and by extension a lot less jobs.

IMO your point is somewhat valid, though "no new business creation" is obviously an exaggeration. Every application of some technology (Bitcoin mining, to mention just one aspect, is highly technological, as are other aspects of putting the equipment somewhere and operating it) involves a very deep supply/maintenance chain, which diffuses investments through society, in part local, in part elsewhere.

I would agree that with Bitcoin mining, there may be less local investment in broader ranges of businesses on average, than with many other kinds of investments. But local development of business/society is a complex topic with many many aspects generating all kinds feedback, so it's IMO very hard to make general and yet truthful statements about this.

There's another aspect that comes to my mind: in a way, letting people invest directly in money creation, as you put it, can be a benefit to the environment. How so? Money being saved instead of being reinvested or spent immediately is effectively people taking their feet off the gas pedal of the economy. As long as the worldwide economy is still > 80 % fossil carbon based (energy wise that is, material wise it might even be more), deceleration should be mostly a benefit for the ecosphere/environment.

It says ~ 2 kWh/kg (kg of iron) according to [1].

Assuming you can just store it as piles of iron dust (somehow shielded from air/oxygen) and assuming a gross density of 5 t/m³ for iron dust you'd get a volumetric energy density in the ballpark of 10,000 kWh/m³.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93air_electroche...

There are just way too many cheaper and more efficient storage methods for electricity like pumped hydro and battery storage.

Pumped hydro is cheaper and more efficient. But AFAIK there isn't much potential for new capacity in areas where it'd be needed. Batteries are more efficient. But cheaper per kWh stored for 6 months than power-to-gas-to-turbine? I don't think so. At say USD 500 per kWh battery, 1 GWh would cost USD 500 MM. But seasonal storage is likelier in the TWh magnitude. 500 billion then.

550 MW electrolyzers (* 0.5 a * gas turbine efficiency 0.4 = ~ 1 TWh electricity), methanation plants, 2.5 TWh salt caverns and say 5 GW gas turbine plants to store 1 TWh for the 6 months that have less solar+wind than the other 6 would cost a lot less than 500 billion I assume.

.. ammonia is more useful as an agrochemical than as an energy storage medium.

I think this will change. You don't transport/consume the petawatts of the world's deserts via HVDC to somewhere to 100 % immediately use them. You'll ship them in the form of some molecule. Which could well be ammonia.

With regards to seasonal storage, it isn't as big of an issue as you would think.

The combination of PV/wind isn't perfect though. The more of it there is, the larger the storage needed to flatten the seasonal fluctuations.

It comes down to whether one assumes that either (A) electricity demand will adapt to some seasonal pattern (meaning that economic activity might fluctuate in synchrony) or (B) that economic activity will drive deployment of technology such that electricity consumption can be mostly even throughout the year.

I'd guess B is more likely.

Methane appears convenient at first glance, yes. Can be burnt in regular turbines, stoves, even some cars.

But is it really the overall best way to store hydrogen?

Methane has a rather high climate impact, compared to CO2. So if you're taking CO2 to synthesize methane from hydrogen, any leakage afterwards is much worse than leaking CO2.

Why not use salt caverns (which are used to store natural gas and AFAIK can also store hydrogen directly) for seasonal storage at relatively low pressure?

And if you're going to synthesize some other molecule from H2, why not make ammonia instead?

There's already an ammonia powered FCEV semi (amogy.co).

.., you are going to have a bad time competing with battery storage.

According to what I read here and there, battery storage won't be able to compete with chemical storage for the seasonal aspect, unless it becomes another order of magnitude cheaper or even more. Also, for seasonal storage over months, batteries don't really make sense due to loss through discharge, right?

Duh.

The challenges are immense. Hydrogen fuel is expensive — as much as four times more expensive than gasoline or diesel fuel.

What a trash opening of an article about technology.

Expensive, according to what measuring scale? By weight? By energy content? By driven mile?

Without these questions answered, the cited sentence contains zero information.

Please just serve me LLM-generated articles (and I'll be happy as long as they contain actual information) instead of this kind of poetry.

Key passages:

In its analysis of different zero-­emissions rail technologies, Caltrans found that hydrogen trains, powered by onboard fuel cells that convert hydrogen into electricity, had better range and shorter refueling times than battery-electric trains, which function much like electric cars. Hydrogen was also a cheaper power source than overhead wire (or simply “electrification,” in industry parlance), which would cost an estimated $6.8 billion to install on the state’s three main intercity routes.

Electrifying all 144,000 miles of the nation’s freight rail tracks would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, according to a report by the Association of American Railroads (AAR), ..

Caltrans has a long-term plan to dramatically increase rail service and speeds, which might eventually require electrification by overhead wire, also known as a catenary system. But at least for the next couple of decades, the agency believes, hydrogen is the most feasible way to meet the state’s ambitious climate goals. The money, the political will, and the stomach for a fight with the freight railroads and utility companies just aren’t there yet.

How is this satirical or dystopian?

It baffles me, how people pretend like they're not responsible. Sure, Exxon has probably done lots of damage that could have been prevented through how they operate. But how can one be so childish to try and put all blame on the company.

How about this comparison?

You buy a t-shirt at a local shop of some renowned chain. On the label it says "Sustainably produced .. responsibility .. fair trade ..". But in fact it's one of those garments that are sewn in some sweatshop in Bangladesh by underage children. Either your renowned chain is fooling you, or some other company further up the supply chain.

Now who's the bad guy here? Who's responsible for the bad outcome?

No, it's not you buying the t-shirt, since you had reason to believe everything is fine. Yes the company's the bad guy. Or the governement, because they apparently didn't do enough checks and apply sufficient fines. But it's not you, since you intentionally bought a product that specifically advertises being less harmfull.

--

Now compare this to the following case, where you buy something else, also with a bad outcome.

You drive your car to the gas station and fill up the tank with some regular gasoline. Supplied by Exxon. In this case the bad outcome isn't child labour but instead the damage done to the environment from the whole supply chain and also from you finally emitting the CO2 by putting your foot on the pedal.

See the difference between the two cases?

The difference is: with the t-shirt, you were acting in good faith, believing your purchase didn't do any harm you didn't know about. So the child labour is not really your fault.

When you drive to the gas station on the other hand, to get yourself some gasoline, you are 100% absolutely certainly aware of the negative consequences your purchase will have on the environment. There is no sticker there, claiming the gasoline will not burn to CO2. It is 100% YOUR decision to buy the gas and burn it in your car, producing the negative outcome for the environment. If you did not buy the gas and if everyone else didn't buy the gas either, Exxon and the other companies would have a hard time making a business out of it.

Let me put it differently: you as the customer specifically bought the gasoline. You know the gas isn't some carbon neutrally produced e-fuel. Still, you bought it. There's no mysterious other way that Exxon should have produced the gas so that it magically combusts CO2-free in your car. You're not being fooled into thinking that the stuff you buy just burns to rose perfume. You made the request "Please give me some of this liquid carbohydrate mixture that turns the engine of my car while releasing CO2" and Exxon fulfilled it. The emission of CO2 doesn't happen because Exxon coerced you to buy their gas. It happens because you chose to drive a car running on gas.

You could have chosen the bicycle instead. Not Exxon's fault you didn't.

.. "no BTC, more energy storage and shifting existing production" ..

The underlying claim to this statement is: more storage could easily be built because it is economically feasible.

Which is - apparently - not the case.

Apparently, the end consumers of electricity (private households, businesses) are not willing to pay enough money for more storage. Or the other way round: storage is too expensive for it to be deployed at a significantly greater scale than it currently is.

Cheap electricity storage is a tough problem. If storage was much cheaper, we'd see much more of it being deployed.

As always, politics has all the levers to set the direction here. Subsidize storage massively and more storage is what you'll get.

What politics can not do through such policies: lower the overall cost of storage for the consumers of electricity (apart from stimulating effects such as economies of scale, ..). Why? Because the subsidies will still be paid by the consumers in their role as tax payers.

You don't get around the fundamental principle that everyone is sensitive to prices. If electricity storage were cheaper, we'd have more of it.

Not if someone paid me to do it. That's the point. If there was money in hauling ACs around the US and running them on the cheapest electricity the local market could provide, we'd have exactly the same false economy.

How is such a purely hypothetical scenario useful as an argument?

It's like saying: "If nobody ever did physical harm to anybody, we could get rid of some part of law enforcement." Not useful because it's simply not the case and very likely never will be.

They also appear to be sufficiently profitable on "retiring coal plant" prices[1], which undermines any kind of unique incentivization of renewals argument.

Bitcoin mining incentivizes any kind of generation that cannot be consumed by a more profitable process or use case. If the price of electricity on a mostly fossil powered grid is low enough, then Bitcoin mining will be profitable. Same goes for a mostly renewables powered grid.

There are two ways, politics can handle this:

A) Impose a high enough carbon tax on fossil generation. This will lead to higher electricity prices for the fossil grid, possibly making Bitcoin mining unprofitable. But it will also make other uses of electricity unviable.

B) Regulate that Bitcoin mining is prohibited under certain conditions (location, grid generation mix, ...)

B doesn't appear wise to me. Since it's highly subjective what kind of energy/electricity use one deems useful/legitimate. I personally find the use of a > 100 horsepower private car or a private jet totally illegitimate and would welcome regulation that drastically hinders these absurd uses of energy.

The carbon fee would lower and possibly sometimes completely remove the incentive to mine Bitcoin on a grid that is coincidentally emitting CO2, when the current electricity generation mix has a large share of fossil generation.

As most (if not all) uses of electricity, Bitcoin mining is sensitive to the electricity price. Introducing a a carbon tax / carbon dividend, doesn't magically make any particular use of electricity economically unviable all of the time. It just pushes the cost equilibria to different values.

The heat might also be used in a direct air capture process to regenerate the adsorbent, realeasing the CO2.

I don't like the direction the internet is going :\

Haven't read "The Internet Con" yet but apparently Cory Doctorow has some ideas what can be done about this direction.

We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. We must to seize the means of computation by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet. [1]

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/

They should focus on straight forward hydrogen combustion engines.

Why would they? A combustion engine drive-train has an efficiency that's significantly lower than that of a fuel-cell EV drive-train. Combusting hydrogen in an ICE as opposed to oxidizing it in a fuelcell is just a waste of energy.

Unlike popular messaging apps Briar doesn’t rely on the Internet in order to keep working. Due to its peer-to-peer nature it can make use of various so-called “transports” to send messages even if the Internet connection is cut. Those transports can be virtually anything that you can use to send 0s and 1s, though currently only Bluetooth and Wi-fi are supported beside the Internet.

Does "virtually anything" then also mean things like LoRa and Reticulum [1]?

Superficially Briar and LoRa/Reticulum feel like they could somehow benefit from eachother.

[1] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum

Microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) is a significantly sustainable bio-electrochemical system for biological hydrogen production. MEC is also regarded as an environmentally friendly method for producing clean biohydrogen from a variety of waste organic matters and for its low greenhouse gas emissions. This technology involves the oxidation of organic matter at the anode and the reduction of proton at the cathode under the nominal external voltage supply. However, bio-hydrogen production efficiency and operating costs of MEC still need further optimization to implement in large-scale applications.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858...

It's almost as if you wanted to deny that 'meaningful' is something highly subjective and dependent upon the individual traits of a person.

Who writes such nonsense headlines? Seems as if they're trying to throw turds at a thing they don't like, hoping something will stick. And they're failing badly.

The publisher might wish it were so but no, this does in no way hit the respectability of Bitcoin. Ridiculous.