Hear me out, so we make a ton of hydrogen for cars, heating, etc. But it takes lots of methane to make hydrogen. So we give oil companies subsidies so they can do more fracking which is how we get the methane in the first place. This will be great for climat cha—wait a minute...

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

It’s ok because after we have already fully transitioned the grid to renewables, batteries, and pumped hydro in twenty or thirty years, we’ll then be so good at making renewable electricity that we won’t mind using a process that throws half of it away, all so that we can keep going to gas stations instead of just getting electricity delivered to our homes.

Being able to fill up your car in 5 minutes instead of 18 during your occasional road trip is definitely going to win out over being able to fill up at home for a tenth the cost, and people will want to burn hydrogen for heating even though it would be a lot cheaper and more energy efficient to use it in even a basic diesel generator to power a heat pump, because people just love throwing their money away so that the poor oil companies can still have a growing business and it’s not like their is an easy and 98% percent efficient way to deliver power to people’s homes, that would just be ridiculous.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Screw that, we already have plenty of methane from cows. Just shove tubes up their asses and harvest that.

[–] MindTraveller@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Actually, cows burp most of their methane emissions

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Tubes in both ends!

[–] frezik@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago

Now you're thinking with capitalism!

[–] nicknonya@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

in my ignorance i assumed that we got hydrogen from electrolysis or something

[–] Nurgus@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

We don't at the moment. Hydrogen is primarily part of the fossil fuel process.

But there's nothing stopping us getting it from water, other than cost.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's really expensive compared to fracking. It's reasonable to assume that any hydrogen project is going to use fossil hydrogen