Environment & Energy

...not change the laws of thermodynamics.

Hydrogen compatible metals are certainly features of the petroleum industry, as petroleum refining is second only to the fertilizer industry - where hydrogen is made in the largest bulk from dangerous natural gas, and, in China, coal.

Specialized reactors are made to handle all kinds of gases and corrosive reagents.

When I was a kid, I was searching the planet to find a GMP pharmaceutical plant with Hastelloy reactors to contain phosphorous hexafluoride. That didn't mean that phosphorous hexafluoride was a consumer product, although the development of the lithium battery did.

Energy storage, whether it involves batteries, or far, far, far worse, hydrogen, is a dangerous enterprise, involving dangerous materials, but the most dangerous of all is the fact that energy storage destroys exergy and thus drives the extreme global heating we are now experiencing.

Every time fossil fuel sales people write here and elsewhere to greenwash their product as hydrogen, it's a worthy exercise to show, from the scientific literature, how hydrogen is made, and what it is used for - it ain't cars and trucks and lawnmowers.



The caption:

Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]
I referred to this graphic, and reproduced it, discussing a paper in the journal I discussed above here:

The current sources and uses of hydrogen.

Half a century of "hydrogen economy" bullshit hasn't changed the uses and sources of hydrogen one bit.

No amount, again, of slick fossil fuel industry funded videos, charts, graphs, etc. will change the laws of thermodynamics.

Hydrogen as a fuel is, dirty (as it is as a commodity) because its manufacture is wholly dependent on the use of, and the destruction of exergy in, fossil fuels.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

All the greenwashing of fossil fuels by marketing companies producing slick videos will not change that fact. This slick video doesn't do it, although it's a little more bald than some of the highly misleading crap handed out here:

Exxon rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen: