By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
From the Telegraph:
Engineers will rarely tell you something is impossible, even if your proposal is a very bad idea. Computer scientists at Stanford and MIT in the 1970s came up with a wonderful expression for this, a technically possible, but highly undesirable, task. They call it “kicking a dead whale on the beach”. Folklore compendium The Hacker’s Dictionary defines this as a “slow, difficult, and disgusting process”. Yes, you can do it like that. But you really don’t want to.
In their efforts to show the world how nimble they are on their CO2 emissions targets, The government has left a lot of dead whales on the beach for usand as consumers, we will be the movers.
For example, it is not impossible to heat a house with a heat pump, but it is a very noisy, inefficient and expensive way to do it. An electric car can be fun to drive, but it’s also expensive, and because of the lower energy density of a battery, an equivalent gasoline will always be lighter and go further. At the end of the day, an EV won’t be able to boast any CO2 emissions savings, we now know, thanks to Volvo. But perhaps the largest whale to land on our beaches is hydrogen.
Every day, manufacturers announce that they working on some kind of hydrogen initiative.
These include our best and brightest companies, such as Rolls-Royce and JCB. The Government has a Strategy on Hydrogen. The Climate Change Commission thinks hydrogen is amazing. You might think these are all signs that it’s a good idea. But things are not what they seem.
To replace gas boilers with hydrogen boilers requires thousands of miles of new, much thicker high-pressure piping. Last year, Lord Martin Callanan, the energy minister, candidly described our plans to replace our gas-fired boilers with hydrogen ones as “very unlikely”.
Hydrogen has two major problems that turn any project into a dead whale exercise.
The first is that pure hydrogen doesn’t exist – it’s everywhere and nowhere. Then we have to make all the usable hydrogen, and this requires a lot of energy. This is good when the output of the process is something very valuable to us, such as fertilizer. But less so when the output of the process has to compete with much cheaper goods, as it must be in the energy market.
Second, the intrinsic physical properties of hydrogen create a series of unique problems. It is an extremely small atom that easily escapes confinement. It’s expensive to keep in captivity, and it’s even safer to move it around, because in liquid form it must be very cold.
Hydrogen advocates tend to deny these problems – they think solving them will be someone else’s problem. Personally, none of these factors make hydrogen impossible as an energy carrier or store, but the whale-like properties are increasingly difficult to ignore.
To replace gas boilers with hydrogen boilers requires thousands of miles of new, much thicker high-pressure piping. Last year, Lord Martin Callanan, the energy minister, candidly described our plans to replace our gas-fired boilers with hydrogen ones as “very unlikely”.
Wrong, ma’am. It’s not impossible – it’s just an extremely bad idea. And when the hydrogen explodes, it’s pretty spectacular. Right on the signal, Australia’s first hydrogen carrier set sail for Japan this year, and burst into flames on its maiden voyage.
Again, hydrogen transport is not impossible, it is only hindered by reality. Liquid hydrogen can be as light as gasoline or kerosene, but keeping it at -257C requires much heavier equipment. I recently noted that converting a twin-engine turbofan engine from kerosene to hydrogen would increase the weight of the engine from two tons to 13 tons.
As for the archives, the story is a bit better. Wind usually generates electricity when it is not needed (and does not generate electricity when it is needed). So when the wind blows, the hydrogen hall argues, we can make “blue hydrogen” using electrolysis. These electrolytes are expensive and sensitive, and it is uneconomical to turn them on continuously to produce the legendary blue hydrogen.
So the blue hydrogen is actually not one, but two dead whales, engaged in a gruesome act of congress.
In his devastating assessment of the Government’s energy report, Professor Dieter Helm called it a “lobbyist’s utopia”. Professor Helm, an energy expert, describes how people looking to hire “[react] for each problem… by inventing another intervention. Each has undesirable consequences, and these undesirable consequences need more ‘correction’. In short, it’s green hydrogen.
Green hydrogen can be produced reliably and cheaply using high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactors (HTGRs), a technology the Japanese have been refining for two decades. Japan’s first HTGR opened in 1997, but amazingly, has been inactive for a decade.
The history of nuclear energy is filled with such stories, of untapped potential and of unexplored avenues. Our government deeply hopes for an “HTGR demonstration by the early 2030s at the latest”. But even with a team of HTGRs generating hydrogen, the nasty stuff still needs to be stored and moved, and those costs haven’t gone away. Using hydrogen is still the worst way to do most things.
However, special interest groups have discovered that the magic word “net zero” has the same power as “Open Sesame!”. During the Arabian Nights, this phrase opened a cave full of treasures. Here, they open up an unlimited range of grants and grants for research, and tap into a variety of undirected “green” capital. Dead whales are never taken off the beach – and maybe that’s the point.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/16/great-hydrogen-swindle-green-gas-not-seems/
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