31/10/26 TL&DR Summary: green hydrogen’s water use is not a meaningful environmental impact. Green hydrogen, if made truly green, may actually reduce water use when it replaces black (fossil derived) hydrogen for use as a chemical. Green hydrogen’s problem- and it’s a big one- is energy use, not water use- even when that hydrogen is […]
Author: spitfireresearch
Hydrogen is a Structurally Bad Battery
TL&DR Summary: poor cycle efficiency, low energy density per unit volume, and the poor use of capital which plagues all long term energy storage means, more or less kills the use of hydrogen as an energy storage medium One of the few uses of green hydrogen as a fuel that remains on the upper tiers […]
Popular Myths I’ve Never Believed (and which you shouldn’t, either)
Castle in the Pyrenees- one of my favorite Rene Magritte paintings. I often felt that many of my customers were asking me to build them such a castle. My recent article about things I’ve gotten wrong and had to change my mind about, got me thinking about things that other people seem to believe and […]
Where I’ve Gone Wrong- And Changed My Mind
My disclaimer always says that my articles are written by a human, and humans have been known to make mistakes from time to time. Point me to where I’ve gone wrong, with good references and analysis to change my mind, and I will gratefully edit my work- and my mindset too. I actively try, though […]
CO2 Utilization- an Empty Promise
Image produced by generative AI, using the stolen works of millions of artists. TL&DR summary: CO2 is a low Gibbs free energy product of energy producing reactions. That fact makes it a thermodynamically unfavourable feedstock from which to make more than a handful of useful chemicals. The notion of widespread use of CO2 as a […]
Mark Carney’s Speech- Interpreted for 5 yr olds
The authorship of this piece is unknown to me- I came across it in my Facebook feed. “There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about our Prime Minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum. I believe he delivered remarks that will be remembered and referenced for years to come, and […]
Why Can’t Batteries Store More Than 4 Hours of Energy?
TL&DR Summary: they can. But the economics of energy storage depend on the application, and no energy storage option makes cheap kWh unless it is used to deliver enough kWh. Long term storage must have an ultra-low capital cost to be affordable, because otherwise its cost is not distributed over a large enough number of […]
A Short Screed About Biofuels
Apologies to the millions of artists whose work was scraped by Google to make their generative AI tool possible. TL&DR Summary: we’ll need biofuels for shipping and aviation, which need rather than merely want liquid fuels. We’ll also potentially need biofuels to serve as our reservoir of stored fuels to serve periods of renewable electricity […]
Blue Hydrogen Reconsidered?
TL&DR Summary: blue hydrogen will be cheaper than green hydrogen for the foreseeable future. But the risk remains that the product will be much cheaper if we ignore the fact that it’s not blue, but rather blackish-blue and bruise coloured due to methane and uncaptured CO2 emissions. But that can also be said about green […]
The Circular Economy is a Thermodynamic Myth
TL&DR Summary: all real systems have energy and matter inputs, and generate waste streams of both matter and “entropy” (i.e. the entropy of the universe always increases). A “circular economy” is a thermodynamic impossibility. We should instead talk about optimal recycle, where the environmental impacts of matter waste are balanced against energy input and its […]