EU set to launch world's first hydrogen bank
EU set to launch world's first hydrogen bank
The European Commission will inaugurate this week its much anticipated Hydrogen Bank in order to support the increase of renewable hydrogen in the EU's energy mix. #EuropeNews
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It would be hard to come up with a crappier fuel than hydrogen.
E-fuels, coal, gas, oil, wood. There I did it.
Wood is renewable and literally grows without effort. Pretty darn good.
Gas and oil have much, much better energy density (by volume) which is a big deal for transportation uses. Pretty darn good.
Hydrogen is bested by other fuels in every category. It likes to leak directly through container walls, you can't transport it economically, it has low energy density (by volume) even when you put it in a pressure vessel which is basically required to have any energy storage wroth speaking about, and on top of all that it is expensive to produce. Hydrogen sucks as a fuel. It's why it isn't used hardly anywhere despite the technology to use it existing for decades.
Wood is only good if you produce it regionally. Cutting down forrests to produce wood pellets for heating in Western Europe is very bad. Wood is most of the time not as sustainable as one might think.
Oil and gas are used as much as they are for a reason, but it's also the reason why we face an ecological tragedy.
It's not that hydrogen is perfect, but it has more of a place in the future than the other ones.
That and wood isn't the best fuel overall. It's okay for very local burning, but as a source of more concentrated energy just about all other fuels are better. There's a reason you don't see wood-powered electricity plants anywhere.
Yeah, it is shit, but it can be CO2 neutral, which gives it an edge over all the other fuels. It will most likely be used for everything, that can not be easily done with electricity.
It is not meant as a fuel necessarily. The big consumers today are chemical companies, which use it as a base product for a lot of their production. The other big ones is the steel industry. Hydrogen can be used to create iron from iron ore. That is already done on industrial scale. The big problem is that for a lot of it hydrogen is produced using natural gas, which is extremely polluting.
There are some other maybe intressting things, but green hydrogen is very likely to be a key part of the green transition.