Clean Hydrogen Is Facing a Big Reality Check

These may not be them.

>A major barrier for clean hydrogen today is that dirty methods based on fossil fuels are just so much cheaper than cleaner ones.

That's not the only thing.

Good amounts of hydrogen are produced by oil refineries utilizing surplus energy that was being largely wasted during much earlier decades. Plus the hydrogen atoms come from the hydrocarbons that they are already processing at huge economies of scale. Not only that but that dirty hydrogen in refinery gas itself is also largely surplus since it is the product of refineries producing fuels having lower molecular hydrogen content than the crude oil feedstock coming in. That's a lot of barrels.

As if that's not enough, there's chemical equations that fairly well represent reactions that have remained unchanged since the beginning of time.

Like to make clean hydrogen from plain water, which is an ideal way, it's electrolysis, which is really clean but it takes electricity. Nice to know that clean electricity is already widely available and becoming more so all the time.

According to some pure financial equations, there would be a point where clean, renewable, electricity may become cheap enough for clean hydrogen to undercut refinery hydrogen. Or one particular player may work an exceptional deal on their electricity in some way that might not be available to the general public. Completely free electricity would of course be the ultimate, and with water as raw material there are people who will buy this who would never think of investing in an old bridge into Brooklyn.

Seems promising since at any energy price there will be a margin that could be worked with, but when you do the math, price doesn't end up figuring in at all. It cancels, might as well be free.

Quite simply because the conversion from electricity to hydrogen is not 100% efficient, in addition to the cost of the further processing needed beyond the raw electrons coming in, the hydrogen produced can never compete with the cost of the the raw electricity itself that is used to produce the hydrogen. If what you really need is energy itself more than anything else, you're better off using the electricity straight rather than the lesser amount of energy you get from the amount of hydrogen that it would produce.

For situations where you really, really need hydrogen and nothing else will ever suffice, that's a good reason to continue pursuing this, focusing ideally on the scale needed for that exact market.

I just don't see how it could pay best to try and fool Mother Nature, we still see people trying it all the time anyway :\