Scrutable

It's actually remarkable how slow the markets are to respond to big-picture changes.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 11:27 am

It's actually remarkable how slow the markets are to respond to big-picture changes.

Because until things start affecting your investment 'horizon' you don't care. Climate, technological and regulatory changes are now affecting expected returns for current or near term investments, so the money people are starting to care. If they did care before such a point, some one else wouldn't care, and so make their business less competitive, and so get less investment. Yay capitalism.</s>.

The only way to make them care before tech/climate change gets them to care about returns is more regulations that affects profits, so forcing them to care.

Fossil fuel companies looking to take over European regulation of hydrogen fuels.

They're not going to go down without a fight.

https://euobserver.com/environment/149443

It's nice that market forces are going to give us renewables instead of nukes and especially instead of digging up dinosaurs and burning them, but market forces aren't going to give us resilience as that's an extra cost. If not new nukes, what are we going to have in 20 years for weeks when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow?

Martin Y wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 1:50 pm

It's nice that market forces are going to give us renewables instead of nukes and especially instead of digging up dinosaurs and burning them, but market forces aren't going to give us resilience as that's an extra cost. If not new nukes, what are we going to have in 20 years for weeks when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow?

Overbuilding, interconnects and storage, people have modelled this. Nukes can't cut it as dispatchable power because of their economics, you aren't going to spend bazillions on them to use them for a few weeks per year.

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:32 pm

Fossil fuel companies looking to take over European regulation of hydrogen fuels.

They're not going to go down without a fight.

https://euobserver.com/environment/149443

H2 is a dead end anyway. All that will happen is that bazillions will be pissed up against the wall and nothing will come of it.

bjn wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 1:56 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:32 pm

Fossil fuel companies looking to take over European regulation of hydrogen fuels.

They're not going to go down without a fight.

https://euobserver.com/environment/149443

H2 is a dead end anyway. All that will happen is that bazillions will be pissed up against the wall and nothing will come of it.

I don’t know. I think it’s plausible that lorries and ships will benefit from hydrogen - it’s hard to recharge in the middle of the ocean after all. (On the other hand sailing ships may come back.

https://jalopnik.com/swedish-company-un ... 1845027646)

Also for applications where burning a fuel is necessary as part of redox reactions, like smelting.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... -hydrogen/

I can’t see a benefit for cars using hydrogen though.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 2:10 pm

bjn wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 1:56 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:32 pm

Fossil fuel companies looking to take over European regulation of hydrogen fuels.

They're not going to go down without a fight.

https://euobserver.com/environment/149443

H2 is a dead end anyway. All that will happen is that bazillions will be pissed up against the wall and nothing will come of it.

I don’t know. I think it’s plausible that lorries and ships will benefit from hydrogen - it’s hard to recharge in the middle of the ocean after all. (On the other hand sailing ships may come back.

https://jalopnik.com/swedish-company-un ... 1845027646)

Also for applications where burning a fuel is necessary as part of redox reactions, like smelting.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... -hydrogen/

I can’t see a benefit for cars using hydrogen though.

I've been hearing recently about the idea of generating H2 from methane and using a mixed H2/methane fuel instead of natural gas.
The methane -> H2 process would be done in a way that the Carbon would be sequestered, and the mix would have lower GG emissions overall.

I have to say I've not followed it up to find out more about the chemistry or economics of it, but I seem to be hearing that much of the existing gas distribution infrastructure can be reused (much as when Natural gas replaced Town gas in the 70s).

Gfamily wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 2:32 pm

I've been hearing recently about the idea of generating H2 from methane and using a mixed H2/methane fuel instead of natural gas.
The methane -> H2 process would be done in a way that the Carbon would be sequestered, and the mix would have lower GG emissions overall.

That definitely sounds like a fossil fuel industry idea. H2 is currently 99% generated from methane, but if they can make that process cleaner then that’s great.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 2:10 pm

bjn wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 1:56 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 12:32 pm

Fossil fuel companies looking to take over European regulation of hydrogen fuels.

They're not going to go down without a fight.

https://euobserver.com/environment/149443

H2 is a dead end anyway. All that will happen is that bazillions will be pissed up against the wall and nothing will come of it.

I don’t know. I think it’s plausible that lorries and ships will benefit from hydrogen - it’s hard to recharge in the middle of the ocean after all. (On the other hand sailing ships may come back.

https://jalopnik.com/swedish-company-un ... 1845027646)

Also for applications where burning a fuel is necessary as part of redox reactions, like smelting.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... -hydrogen/

I can’t see a benefit for cars using hydrogen though.

H2 is just horrid stuff to use for any form of transportation fuel, it's hard to store, it's expensive to generate electrically and a pain to distribute/transport. I'm not buying it for any form of land transportation, and I have severe doubts about its utility in marine transportation.

A large container ship has something like 16,000 m^3 of fuel oil, which is roughly 16,000 tonnes. Assuming a fuel cell instead of burning the H2, and allowing fudge factors for differences in efficiency, you need about 5,000 tonnes of H2 to get the equivalent amount of energy spinning your propellers. Now if that is kept as liquid H2, it needs something like 3.5X the volume of your fuel oil, but you need to keep that liquid H2 at −252.87 °C. I don't see that working for weeks at sea. So you'll need to keep it highly compressed instead. The Toyota Mirai has a fuel load of 5kg, but its tanks weight 87kg and are at 10kpsi. Applying the same ratio for our container ship, you are looking at tank+H2 weighing in at 95,000 tonnes. This is on a ship that has a total capacity (fuel, cargo, ballast, crew etc..) of 185,000 tonnes. And those tanks are large for the amount of H2 they hold, so you won't have much space left either. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near one should it pop. There's probably a bunch of things that could be done to make it a bit better, but back of the envelope says it's not viable. Possibly for ferry crossings, where you can have small tanks and refuel at each end, but they already do that with batteries.

Using it chemically is fine, you can create and use it on site on demand if there are no other alternatives. It's been demonstrated to work for iron smelting, but it is still being generated by steam reformation of methane. Making it economic enough so you can use low carbon sources has yet to be shown. Instituting a f.ck-tonne of carbon taxes might do the trick.

You can’t simply apply the same ratio from a little tank to a big one, but I agree it’s a big tank any way you cut it. However if you cut fuel use down in the first place by using wind maybe there’s a place for hydrogen in the backup/manoeuvring motors.

Also, 10kpsi? I assume you got those figures from Toyota but why the imperial units?

Grumble wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:04 pm

You can’t simply apply the same ratio from a little tank to a big one, but I agree it’s a big tank any way you cut it. However if you cut fuel use down in the first place by using wind maybe there’s a place for hydrogen in the backup/manoeuvring motors.

Also, 10kpsi? I assume you got those figures from Toyota but why the imperial units?

Wiki says minimum mass of a pressure vessel scales with pressure and volume, so the same ratio would apply. Half of your ship is a H2 pressure tank if you want it to have the same range as a fuel oil ship. You might get some material science magic to drop the weight, but not by the amount you'd need to make it viable. We need some other form of H2 storage if you want it to work.

Synthesised hydrocarbons could be a thing for use in aviation and long range shipping. Just a drop in replacement for existing infrastructure. Making the cost of synthesis cheap enough will be a problem.

If I was building a new generation of sailing cargo ships, I'd stick to a known technology for all the other bits for the first few versions at least. So I'd expect standard marine engines for a decade or so until they'd try anything else.

10kpsi, because it's from the wiki and I couldn't be arsed to convert it, ~69Mpa, ~680 bar.

ETA : those Mirai tanks are from fancy spun carbon fibre and are very very expensive. ~80,000 tonnes of it at $20 per kg is $1.6Bn in material cost alone.

Gfamily wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 2:32 pm

I've been hearing recently about the idea of generating H2 from methane and using a mixed H2/methane fuel instead of natural gas.
The methane -> H2 process would be done in a way that the Carbon would be sequestered, and the mix would have lower GG emissions overall.

I have to say I've not followed it up to find out more about the chemistry or economics of it, but I seem to be hearing that much of the existing gas distribution infrastructure can be reused (much as when Natural gas replaced Town gas in the 70s).

The sequestering is still wholly unproven as well.

bjn wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 7:23 pm

Grumble wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:04 pm

You can’t simply apply the same ratio from a little tank to a big one, but I agree it’s a big tank any way you cut it. However if you cut fuel use down in the first place by using wind maybe there’s a place for hydrogen in the backup/manoeuvring motors.

Also, 10kpsi? I assume you got those figures from Toyota but why the imperial units?

Wiki says minimum mass of a pressure vessel scales with pressure and volume, so the same ratio would apply. Half of your ship is a H2 pressure tank if you want it to have the same range as a fuel oil ship. You might get some material science magic to drop the weight, but not by the amount you'd need to make it viable. We need some other form of H2 storage if you want it to work.

Synthesised hydrocarbons could be a thing for use in aviation and long range shipping. Just a drop in replacement for existing infrastructure. Making the cost of synthesis cheap enough will be a problem.

If I was building a new generation of sailing cargo ships, I'd stick to a known technology for all the other bits for the first few versions at least. So I'd expect standard marine engines for a decade or so until they'd try anything else.

10kpsi, because it's from the wiki and I couldn't be arsed to convert it, ~69Mpa, ~680 bar.

ETA : those Mirai tanks are from fancy spun carbon fibre and are very very expensive. ~80,000 tonnes of it at $20 per kg is $1.6Bn in material cost alone.

You are right but it depends how much of the mass of the Mirai tank is for pressure considerations and how much is for attachments and crash proofing etc. But yes, it will more or less scale, and even if half the mass of the Mirai tank is for other reasons than simply holding pressure, scaling mass at 1.5 times volume or greater will soon get you to a bigger tank than feasible. Also I’m not sure I’d want to get on a ship with a massive 700 bar tank in its hold.

Required tank wall strengths scale as cross-sectional area, not volume. The mass of the wall scales as the square root of area, giving the total mass scaling with volume

A ship tank doesn't have to be light or crash proof though. A car tank is completely irrelevant engineering.

There's already big ocean going gas tanks.

dyqik wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:17 pm

Required tank wall strengths scale as cross-sectional area, not volume. The mass of the wall scales as the square root of area, giving the total mass scaling with volume

A ship tank doesn't have to be light or crash proof though. A car tank is completely irrelevant engineering.

There's already big ocean going gas tanks.

Not 700 bar ones there aren’t.

There are already big ocean going liquefied natural gas tanks.

(Not 20 Kelvin ones there aren't.)

dyqik wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:17 pm

Required tank wall strengths scale as cross-sectional area, not volume. The mass of the wall scales as the square root of area, giving the total mass scaling with volume

A ship tank doesn't have to be light or crash proof though. A car tank is completely irrelevant engineering.

There's already big ocean going gas tanks.

LNG tanks are pressurised 22kPa a tad less than the ~70MPa H2 tanks in a Mirai. You could reduce the pressure, but you’d end up in increasing the volume and need just as much mass for the tanks.

Not crash proofing will save you some weight, but the weight of the tank still matters as it eats into your cargo capacity. You could make it “cheaper” by making it from mild steel like an LNG tank. Steel has a quarter the tensile strength of carbon fibre laminate and is over four times as dense, so an equivalent tank would weigh 16x a carbon fibre tank. Which would sink our purported H2 powered container ship, even if you quartered the weight by not crash proofing it.

Edit for emphasis.

bolo wrote: ↑

Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:33 pm

There are already big ocean going liquefied natural gas tanks.

(Not 20 Kelvin ones there aren't.)

Keeping big vessels cold is pretty easy once they are cold.

How much transport of H₂ in tankers will be needed? It's required for oil because oil only turns up in certain spots. But water is a tad more abundant than that.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:54 am

How much transport of H₂ in tankers will be needed? It's required for oil because oil only turns up in certain spots. But water is a tad more abundant than that.

It’s not transport of H2 we’re talking about though, it’s transport of goods in a H2 fuelled ship.

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:15 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:54 am

How much transport of H₂ in tankers will be needed? It's required for oil because oil only turns up in certain spots. But water is a tad more abundant than that.

It’s not transport of H2 we’re talking about though, it’s transport of goods in a H2 fuelled ship.

Right, yep. Makes more sense, that.

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:17 am

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:15 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:54 am

How much transport of H₂ in tankers will be needed? It's required for oil because oil only turns up in certain spots. But water is a tad more abundant than that.

It’s not transport of H2 we’re talking about though, it’s transport of goods in a H2 fuelled ship.

Right, yep. Makes more sense, that.

You simply aren’t going to make a battery big enough to sail trans-Atlantic with a cargo ship. It looks implausible that you can do it just with hydrogen either. I think sail could come back though, as the Swedes are trying to prove
(https://jalopnik.com/swedish-company-un ... 1845027646).

Is there any future to a combination of technologies? Wind, solar, hydro all on board at once?

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:23 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:17 am

Grumble wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:15 am

It’s not transport of H2 we’re talking about though, it’s transport of goods in a H2 fuelled ship.

Right, yep. Makes more sense, that.

You simply aren’t going to make a battery big enough to sail trans-Atlantic with a cargo ship. It looks implausible that you can do it just with hydrogen either. I think sail could come back though, as the Swedes are trying to prove
(https://jalopnik.com/swedish-company-un ... 1845027646).

My problem with sail powered merchant ships is that I’ve been reading articles like that since the 70s. They seem to be like dirigibles in that it’s the cool technology that never gets beyond a small niche.

This one might work though.