Green hydrogen is being invested in incredibly heavily around the world at the moment. Something like 26 billion USD of new investment was announced in 2022 alone. Hydrogen is a great energy carrier, and we can use it in a lot of industrial processes too. When you have a green energy grid with a lot of solar and wind, whenever there is oversupply you shunt this power into making green hydrogen. This actually has positive market effects for producers and consumers alike. Then when the wind stops blowing you use your fuel cell to make electricity. This part is pretty damn efficient.

The major part of the cost to make green hydrogen is the cost of electricity, and if you can engineer or take advantage of situations where electricity is cheap then it’s a great way to store energy that can last for years vs. batteries that slowly loose charge in weeks. Once you can make it for less than US$1 per kg, it becomes more attractive than diesel. The US DOE is investing $$ in their 1:1:1 challenge to get the average cost of green hydrogen down to less than $1 for 1 kilo in 1 decade. They may well succeed too.

If this happens there’s a tonne of cool stuff that might happen, not just cars and planes, bit alternative methods of making both concrete and steel which both happen to be 8% each of global CO2 output. Greening these processes would be a massive deal for our collective carbon footprint let alone the fun we could have with really long range lightweight cars and planes.

I’m not discounting nuclear at all, I particularly think these small modular reactors look amazing, and while we’re still talking fission rather than future fusion (let’s go!) then these molten salt reactor designs look great. They’re basically impossible to meltdown. Essentially the reaction situation is hard to maintain and any failure results in the reaction stopping rather than going critical. Good stuff. However it still comes with the problem of long (loooonnnnnggg) lasting radioactive waste. I can’t wait for fusion to get going.

It doesn’t ‘need’ to be stored at high pressure at all. It just often is for convenience. Actually when under consideration for seasonal storage, using old salt mines or other mines with less permeable rock has been proposed and tested as a really cheap way to store a lot of H2.

Why are Americans so afraid of China? It’s super-cringy.