My Energy Storage Report: Hydrogen As An Alternative To Batteries - Highlighted Article

From: Manhattan Contrarian

By: Francis Menton

Date: December 4, 2022

My Energy Storage Report: Hydrogen As An Alternative To Batteries

As mentioned in the last post, my new energy storage report, The Energy Storage Conundrum, mostly deals with issues that have previously been discussed on this blog; but the Report goes into considerable further detail on some of them.

One issue where the Report contains much additional detail is the issue of hydrogen as an alternative to batteries as the medium of energy storage.  For examples of previous discussion on this blog of hydrogen as the medium of storage to back up an electrical grid see, for example, “The Idiot’s Answer To Global Warming: Hydrogen” from August 12, 2021, and “Hydrogen Is Unlikely Ever To Be A Viable Solution To The Energy Storage Conundrum” from June 13, 2022.

At first blush, hydrogen may seem to offer the obvious solution to the most difficult issues of energy storage for backing up intermittent renewable generation.  In particular, the seasonal patterns of generation from wind and sun require a storage solution that can receive excess power production gradually for months in a row, and then discharge the stored energy over the course of as long as a year.  No existing battery technology can do anything like that, largely because most of the stored energy will simply dissipate if it is left in a battery for a year before being called upon.  But if you can make hydrogen from some source, you can store it somewhere for a year or even longer without significant loss.  Problem solved!

Well, there must be some problem with hydrogen, or otherwise people would already be using it extensively.  And indeed, the problems with hydrogen, while different from those of battery storage, are nevertheless equivalently huge.  Mostly, to produce large amounts of hydrogen without generating the very greenhouse gas emissions you are seeking to avoid, turns out to be enormously costly.  And then, once you have the hydrogen, distributing it and handling it are very challenging.

Unlike, say, oxygen or nitrogen, which are ubiquitous as free gases in the atmosphere, there is almost no free hydrogen available for the taking.  It is all bound up either in hydrocarbons (aka fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas), carbohydrates (aka plants and animals), or water.  To obtain free hydrogen, it must be separated from one or another of these substances by the input of energy.  The easiest and cheapest way to get free hydrogen is to separate it from the carbon in natural gas.  This is commonly done by a process called “steam reformation,” which leads to the carbon from the natural gas getting emitted into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.  In other words, obtaining hydrogen from natural gas by the inexpensive process of steam reformation offers no benefits in terms of carbon emissions over just burning the natural gas.  So, if you insist on getting free hydrogen without carbon emissions, you are going to have to get it from water by a process of electrolysis.  Hydrogen obtained from water by electrolysis is known by environmental cognoscenti as “green hydrogen,” because of the avoidance of carbon emissions.  Unfortunately, the electrolysis process requires a very large input of energy. (continue reading)

My Energy Storage Report: Hydrogen As An Alternative To Batteries