GB manages a day without coal

[Onoff]

2 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

Dead easy to do, electrolysis is about as simple a process as you can get, and reasonably efficient.  The snag is finding a way to store the hydrogen and, ideally, the oxygen, too.  If you could store both and then feed them into a fuel cell you have a pretty efficient energy storage system.

 

Dangerous as hell, mind................

 

I was getting at point of use production in quantities that don't require storage say for use in a boiler. 

 

A la Chain Reaction

[Stones]

There's a small hydrogen project up here using the excess electricity generated at the EMEC test site:

 

http://www.surfnturf.org.uk/

 

Huge potential but needs a lot of capital to scale up.

 

 

[Onoff]

That's the thing with hydrogen storage. The big boys will just see it as another medium like gas or oil that they can base an infrastructure around and charge the masses.

[Crofter]

31 minutes ago, Onoff said:

That's the thing with hydrogen storage. The big boys will just see it as another medium like gas or oil that they can base an infrastructure around and charge the masses.

 

The existing hydrocarbon infrastructure seems pretty efficient and competitive- if we can get a hydrogen infrastucture to operate the same way, that would be a good thing.

 

 

[Onoff]

7 minutes ago, Crofter said:

 

The existing hydrocarbon infrastructure seems pretty efficient and competitive- if we can get a hydrogen infrastucture to operate the same way, that would be a good thing.

 

 

But in grand scale of things the consumer won't pay any less than they do now.

[Crofter]

19 minutes ago, Onoff said:

But in grand scale of things the consumer won't pay any less than they do now.

Why should we expect to? We are currently devouring an unsustainable resource that has already been paid for in millions of years of growth by long dead organisms. Changing over to a renewable based system is always going to end up costing more. At the very least, with hydrogen you not just have to store and distribute the stuff, you have to actually manufacture it, putting in more energy than you get out.

[MikeSharp01]

3 hours ago, Crofter said:

The existing hydrocarbon infrastructure seems pretty efficient and competitive

Not for domestic LPG it isn't @Crofter that is still, it seems to me to be, a rather uncompetitive market. 

[Onoff]

3 hours ago, Crofter said:

Why should we expect to? We are currently devouring an unsustainable resource that has already been paid for in millions of years of growth by long dead organisms. Changing over to a renewable based system is always going to end up costing more. At the very least, with hydrogen you not just have to store and distribute the stuff, you have to actually manufacture it, putting in more energy than you get out.

 

It doesn't matter what the commodity is that government can control and charge for whether it be oil or hydrogen. 

 

The only real winners will imo increasingly be those who consume less...like people in passive houses.

[SteamyTea]

Is electrolysis efficient really, I thought it was a pretty poor conversion in reality. Even worse if you have to cool it/compress it to store it.  Why we make if by steam reformation from natural gas.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water

Edited April 22, 2017 by SteamyTea

[Onoff]

10 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Is electrolysis efficient really, I thought it was a pretty poor conversion in reality. Even worse if you have to cool it/compress it to store it.  Why we make if by steam reformation from natural gas.

 

I think the key is to crack rapid yield of gas with the process to get the lpm up to run say an engine without storage.