This article is a companion to my recent article about why I think battery electric trucks are the future of freight: Electric Trucks- the Future of Freight TL&DR: hydrogen trucks are largely just a retreat position for people who previously thought hydrogen cars were going to be a thing. They won’t be. There is no […]
Author: spitfireresearch
Why Direct Air Capture (DAC) Sucks- and Not in a Good Way!
UPDATED August 8, 2023 You’ve likely heard the sales pitch before: What am I talking about? Direct air capture- the act of using active mechanical/chemical equipment and vast quantities of renewable energy, in a totally pointless fight against entropy, to try to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere for either durable burial or “use”. You’ve […]
E-Methane: Exergy Destroyer, On Steroids
TL&DR: grinding up electricity to make heating fuel is just a way to waste energy and capital, by destroying exergy (the potential to do thermodynamic work). It’s obviously worse than just making hydrogen. It is wasteful, and wasteful means expensive. It also means higher emissions than if you did something sensible, like feeding a heatpump. […]
Breakthrough in Electrolyzer Efficiency!
“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE This isn’t just a step forward; it’s a colossal leap towards a future brimming with sustainable energy! Our team of wizard-like scientists and technical magicians have unlocked the secrets of hydrogen electrolysis, achieving unprecedented levels of energy efficiency that were previously considered the stuff of dreams. The newly discovered process, affectionately dubbed […]
Scaling Example #2: Water Electrolysis
Scaling Object Lesson #2: Water Electrolyzers For Hydrogen Production We learned about vertical scaling in the 1st article in this series: …and about horizontal scaling or “numbering up” in the 2nd: Now we’ll use these tools to examine the scaling future of an extremely important decarbonization technology: electrolyzers for producing hydrogen from renewable electricity. My readers will […]
Scaling Example #1: Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
Now, let’s used the tools we’ve learned, to took at some examples from the effort to decarbonize our economy. The first example to take a swing at with our new understanding of vertical and horizontal scaling is the small modular nuclear reactor, or SMNR for short. SMR means something else to me- steam methane reformer- […]
Horizontal Scale- Numbering Up
An article written while I worked at Zeton may be instructive in relation to this topic as a backgrounder: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scaling-up-down-paul-martin/ Once we reach a certain maximum practical vertical scale for a particular piece of equipment, it becomes impractical to build a bigger unit, or to transport and erect it once it’s built, as noted in […]
Economy of Vertical Scale
There are lots of proposals emerging seemingly every day, based around the notion that we will mass produce some device, plant or process, and then use those mass-produced devices to produce some commodity product- frequently a product made by devices, plants or processes already operated commercially at much larger scale. A few examples seemingly popular […]
Are German Gas Pipelines “Fundamentally Suitable” for Hydrogen?
A recent study https://www.dvgw.de/medien/dvgw/forschung/berichte/g202006-sywesth2-steel-dvgw.pdf carried out by Open Grid Europe GmbH with the assistance of the University of Stuttgart, paid for by DVGW (Deutscher Verein des Gas- und Wasserfaches- the German Association for Gas and Water) did rather careful, extensive and thorough testing of a wide and characteristic variety of pipeline steels in hydrogen atmospheres of […]
The Myth of Hydrogen as an Energy Export Commodity
There is a popular myth in the marketplace of ideas at the moment: the notion that hydrogen will become a way to export renewable electricity in a decarbonized future, from places with an excess of renewable electricity, to places with a shortage of supply and a large energy demand. It seems that the hydrogen #hopium […]