World's largest green hydrogen project 'has major problems due to its Chinese electrolysers': BNEF

Below, I'll point out, how trivial, on a planet currently consuming roughly 630 Exajoules of energy each year, this "world's largest" is.

The article did not put the word "green" in quotation marks, so I won't, even though the fossil fuel dependence of so called "renewable energy" leads me to reject any implication that it is sustainable or environmentally acceptable.

The article: World's largest green hydrogen project 'has major problems due to its Chinese electrolysers': BNEF

The subtitle:

I added the bold, which was not in the original.

Some excerpts from the full article, which, among other things explains the danger of hooking up electrolyzers to unreliable energy sources:



It's an interesting technical description of why this situation is dangerous:



The issue has to do with diffusion. It is notable that hydrogen, to a first approximation, has a rather remarkable ability to diffuse, owing to the diffusion "constant" in Fick's law being a function of molecular weight and molecular size for each gas: Mass Diffusivity. (Fick's law is generally written (in one dimension) as a first order differential equation containing the diffusion constant, itself a function of the inverse of molecular weight and molecular size, of the concentration gradient with respect to distance. The lighter and smaller the gas molecules are, the faster they diffuse. Hydrogen (diprotium) is the lightest gas known. One can certainly expect that there are far more complex analyses that apply, but it's good to a first approximation.)

If one understands the capacity utilization of so called "renewable energy" one will recognize that the use of a power unit, W, (J/s) as in MW, which is typical of the dishonesty associated with wind and solar advertising hype, one will understand exactly how little energy this "world's largest" "green" hydrogen plant is producing, how fucking trivial it is on a planet in flames, largely because of "bait and switch" scams like the "hydrogen economy."

At the 30% capacity utilization the article implies - generous for solar, but generally close, if only a little generous, for wind, depending on the climate, the "240 MW" of so called "renewable energy" is actually 80 MW of average continuous power, assuming the electrolyzers don't blow up from diffusion effects. If the electrolyzers avoid too much hysteresis, not always a good bet with unreliable energy, generally lasting about an hour on start up, we can say, at roughly 80% thermodynamic efficiency, as well as high Faradaic efficiency we should get around 60 to 65 "MW" of hydrogen. Let's be generous and say 65 MW. There are 31,557,600 seconds in a sideral year.

65 X 10⁶ watts X 31,557600 seconds = 3.5 X 10¹⁵J (approximately). This is 3.5 PJ, one thousandths of an Exajoule. In the year 2022, the last year for which the EIA, in the 2023 World Energy Outlook reported (the WEO comes out in November each year), world energy demand was 632 Exajoules, dominated in production by oil, coal and gas, some of which went to make hydrogen via steam reforming.

Thus the fraction of energy produced by the world's largest "green" hydrogen plant, a dangerous plant subject to blowing up apparently, is 3.5 millionths of the world energy supply, or in the dishonest "percent talk" hyped by apologists for the failed wind and solar business that has soaked up trillions of dollars for no real environmental result, 0.00032% of world energy demand.

Um, we're saved?

If one wishes to know why the planet is burning, why glaciers on which the world water supply depends are disappearing, why extreme weather is energized, it would do to understand the inherent dishonesty of advertising about, among many other things, "green hydrogen." It's a trivial scam, designed to greenwash fossil fuels.

Have a nice evening.