How is the hydrogen made?

To my knowledge, with plenty of carbon emisssions

Is it less than using fossil fuels for power exclusively? If so then it's a step in the right direction. Yes I know it sounds like I'm shilling for BP now but we get lost in the doom spiral so fast we forget we are indeed making progress. We just have to keep their feet to the fire or...erm... solar panel?
- Unfortunately, no. It's not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.
  The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.
  In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution
- In the spirit of the comic - how is the solar panel made?
- That would be nice, if it actually happened 🥲
- They aren't using dirty energy to do electrolysis, they're steam reforming methane. It isn't possible to do renewably.
- Yeah, fuck the other 70% of energy from renewables you lose when converting to hydrogen
how could hydrogen power possibly produce carbon dioxide
- Using hydrogen doesn't emit carbon. But the principal way hydrogen is produced is called steam reformation. It's a process that turns methane (CH4) and water (2* H2O) into hydrogen (4* H2) and CO2 (i think, I'm not an expert). So all the carbon get emitted as co2. So it's not better, and there are a bunch of inefficiencies too. (The reformation process itself, and transportation challenges, and leakage). But theoretically, it does centralize the emissions which would make them easier to sequester so there's that.
- In the USA for example about 99% of commercial Hydrogen is a byproduct of Steam Cracking Petroleum refinement. We have the technology to create hydrogen via other methods, but so far we're not really utilizing them. Still, as a byproduct it's better to use it than to not.
- it's the production of the hydrogen that's done improperly. Similar to how electricity doesn't cause emissions, but coal power plants do

It was sad when the Physics Girl took Shell's money to shill hydrogen fuel cells.

I get you need to eat but still....a very shitty move.

I can't even come close to imagining her medical bills, can you?
- Is she "ok" now? The last I knew she was completely incapacitated and couldn't get out of bed. One hell of "long covid" case... :(
- The videos were made before she got long covid. I don't know how well she's doing now. My only updates about her are from the host of veritasium and only when I go looking for his videos.
- She can't even make videos in her current state. This was done well before then. The fact that she is able to have the medical care she has now is a sign she didn't need that money though. She was obviously making enough from other more ethical sources. Now if she made that, I could excuse it, but it wasn't done now.
  That said, her medical bills shouldn't be an issue for anyone. There are people out there in the same state but with much less support. They shouldn't have to suffer even more because they can't afford it.
I haven't heard about this. Can you elaborate on what happened?
- Kari Byron, formerly of MythBusters fame, recently put out an ad for Shell. I believe she's also committed to a 3 year "docuseries" for them. See here for a thread on Lemmy.world with a link to the video
- I can't find the specific video but here is the first video in her series: https://piped.video/watch?v=hghIckc7nrY
  She says that the hydrogen is sourced using water and renewables but it's highly sus that Shell (or BP; I can't remember) was sponsoring the series.
I remember coming away from her videos with the perception that hydrogen fuel cells are dumb. So she did a pretty bad job shilling it, if that is the case.
- They are far from dumb. Fuel cells are one of the few ways that hydrogen can be consumed in a green way.

Well, supposedly almost all hydrogen was made not long after the Big Bang went bang, with a tiny bit getting once in a while produced by the spontaneous formation of particle and anti-particle pairs, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, but then it combines with stuff and is no longer hydrogen. For example, a lot of it on earth is bound with oxygen in a from known as dihydrogen monoxide. You can input energy to separate the two hydrogen from the oxygen, but it's not freely available. This is a useful way to spend excess energy to store the energy for later or to move, but not if you don't have excess clean energy.
You can also get some from things like Methane (CH4, aka natural gas). This is how most of the gas companies are producing it, and it obviously isn't clean. They like to pretend it's clean by saying using the hydrogen just produces water, but obviously the hydrogen didn't just appear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
- Don't get me started on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide: that stuff can kill you!!! ;)
- My favorite way to get hydrogen is mixing caustic soda, water and aluminum foil. Only cause I think it's funny you can get very explosive things from the grocery store
- I see what you did there
Some is also produced by the decay of heavy elements (helium too)
- Helium was made from fusion of hydrogen so haha it always has been hydrogen
Hydrogen is the name of both an atom and a molecule, and humans are perfectly capable of creating hydrogen molecules.
You just described the same event twice. The particles formed shortly after the Big Bang came into being precisely through the formation of particle-antiparticle pairs in the energy-dense early universe.

Is there a community for green memes like this? Love it

With excess power from renewables. Which is highly inefficient. But better than not producing power when you could.

That's the ideal case, but in practice much of it is directly derived from natural gas instead of electrolysis
In 2022 less than 1% of hydrogen production was low-carbon.[1] Fossil fuels are the dominant source of hydrogen, for example by steam reforming of natural gas.[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
- That's what a transition is though, the new things need to be tested and built up but it's pointless making green hydrogen if there's nothing using it so we need both to be developed at the same time.
  We're moving towards having good uses for excess power at peek generation which will make wind and solar much better investments, personally I prefer sequestered SAF but hydrogen has a great chance of helping stabilize the grid which will make transition much easier
- What you're saying is true. I still want to point out that developing hydrogen infrastructure based on non-renewable hydrogen today, helps lay the groundwork for using primarily renewable hydrogen tomorrow, because we're developing storage, transportation, and fuel cell technology.
  Also: Methane can be produced from renewables, so developing steam reforming technology today, using non-renewable methane, helps lay the groundwork for renewable-based hydrogen production tomorrow.
  Finally: Steam reforming lends itself well to CCS, so hydrogen production from renewable methane + CCS is a potentially viable path to a carbon-negative future.
- This is the dream we follow while driving our gasoline cars.
If they were using excess renewables there'd be much more efficient ways to capture that energy. A simple one would be pumping some water up hill.
There's no particular reason to store up power with hydrogen like that. We have tons of grid scale storage solutions. Heating up sand will work, or spinning up flywheels. Flow batteries are looking promising. We're not stuck on the limitations of lithium batteries for this purpose. There are so many other possibilities, and hydrogen production is not likely to come out on top.

Obviously they mean purified and stored hydrogen, fit for use and delivery as an energy medium.

You just pour water on solar panels or something.

Soaking coal in diesel and burning it to capture the hydrogen.
It's literally pouring rain on top of my solar panels right now. I'll letcha know how much hydrogen it produces. What kind of container should I store it in? How would I even collect it and gather it and trap it into a can?
- Store it in a well crafted German zeppelin. Nothing can go wrong.

All hydrogen was made just after the Big Bang.

Technically correct, i.e., the best kind of correct.
- Is it? Isn't atom splitting a thing?
My thought first aswell..
Didnt see the bottom text only the goose meme first

Oil companies really made hydrogen sound evil. Maybe that's what they wanted all along.

Exactly. Hydrogen can be produced easily with all the green energy produced during off peak that is otherwise wasted.
- But it's usually produced by processing oil instead.
- You need water and transport, and someone to use it once it's made.
Technically, the majority of Hydrogen is produced as a petroleum steam cracking byproduct. More of a Coal/Coke Company stance to hate hydrogen.
- And that's how they successfully programmed everyone to think hydrogen is bad. Green hydrogen, if it becomes successful, can compete with oil/gas. Unlike batteries, you can transport/import/export the energy.

Either by pendulum air separation and filtration, by steam cracking petroleum as a biproduct, or by electrolysis of water with an oxygen biproduct.

- I don't get the joke.

Looking at you @Hypx@lemmy.world

So, why is making hydrogen from other energy source worse than filling up lithium batteries from other energy sources?

Hydrogen isn't a source of energy. It's a battery all the same.
There are efficient and inefficient ways to "charge" a battery. And as a result, there are efficient and inefficient batteries.
Lithium is easy and efficient to charge, but there's certainly environmental (and not to mention political and ethical) concerns around its mining and refinement.
Hydrogen is not. It does have a benefit of being a rather dense mechanism though. But storing and transporting it is a problem of itself due to how small hydrogen atoms are. There will always be leaks.
- Thanks for the info.
Hydrogen is less efficient, so you waste energy and you have to transport hydrogen from producer to consumer, usually with gas powered vehicles anyway.
No the hydrogen is not a battery, it is gray hydrogen sourced from fossil gas or coal. This makes the hydrogen still a fossil fuel. Green hydrogen doesn't have this problem.

Isn't it just blasting water with loads of electricity to split it up? That's how I learned it in school at least. So yeah, just use the electricity directly for now.

From water and electricity, directly adjacent to where maritime uses would need it: https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/docs/hydrogenprogramlibraries/pdfs/review22/ta045_pal_2022_o-pdf.pdf?Status=Master

BP is pro-environment 🤡