Are there any large investments being made to desalinate ocean water and turn the purified water into hydrogen fuel like NASA’s plan to do with lunar ice water? eli5
In: 69
Sort of. If you read up on the clean energy plans of several countries like Japan or the UK you’ll find a lot of them want to produce so called “green” hydrogen by breaking down water using renewable electricity through a process called electrolysis.
The reason why it hasn’t gotten off as far is because it takes a massive amount of electricity to do that. Right now it’s 10 times cheaper to produce hydrogen by breaking down methane (1 carbon and 4 hydrogens) through a different process called steam reforming, and dumping the carbon as CO2 in the atmosphere. 99% of hydrogen today is produced this way and mostly goes into chemical production.
The big problem with using hydrogen as a fuel as it is today is that when you run it through a fuel cell you get a little less electricity out of it than what you used up to produce the hydrogen in the first place. Hydrogen is also difficult to handle because it damages metal and it needs to be compressed and cooled to some ridiculous low temperature to be transported. That process takes up electricity. With the whole process in mind, you only get back about 30% of the energy you put into producing the hydrogen originally.
This shouldn’t be a problem if we have unlimited clean electricity, but unfortunately we don’t at the moment. This also wouldn’t be a problem if we manage to find free natural hydrogen sitting in the ground, and that is actually being looked at right now and seems promising.
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