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 […]
Category: Energy and Decarbonization
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Chemical Recycling of Plastics
People hate plastics, or at least often say they do. In fact they are happy to have their lives saved by single use medical plastics, and they reward the convenience of plastics at the cash register whenever they’re offered, unless somebody gets in the way with regulations, but they still claim to hate them. Why […]
The Ocean Cleanup is as Dumb as DAC- and that’s saying something
photo credit: Ocean Cleanup UPDATED: 7 Aug 2025, to fix typos and to repeat myself about real solutions, because commenters simply will not click on the links to other articles where I deal with these solutions in depth To some, this one is a really sacred cow for some reason. And frankly I find the […]
Green Steel = Green Iron
Image credit: Google Gemini What is “green steel”? Simple. It’s a misnomer. Iron in nature is rarely found alone. We mine its oxides as iron ores. These oxides need to be chemically reduced (gaining electrons = reduction) to take the Fe+2 and Fe+3 ions in the iron oxides, to Fe metal. And the oxygen needs […]
Will Green Hydrogen Save the Cement Industry?
Image credit: Google Gemini TL&DR summary: hydrogen can be used in cement production as a natural gas replacement, but that doesn’t solve the entire CO2 emissions of cement production. There are other problems like the lack of hydrogen flame radiance, but the deal killer is the cost per tonne of CO2 emissions averted. Hydrogen may […]