I am always surprised that so many intelligent people support prescriptions like building a hydrogen economy, pumping water up hills, trying to replace thermo power with electrical energy, daming up thousands of acres of land, and consuming so much of the Earth’s mineral resources in efforts that run into the physical limitations you point out in this post. And why? Because so many people are singularly focused on CO2 emissions, which do not correlate to surface temperature of the planet because there are many other considerations like the sun and humidity. Maybe the silver lining, after wasting precious treasure and time, will be that we find common ground in the next densest source of fuel that, as a bonus, do not emit CO2, uranium and thorium. We will probably end up building gigawatt size nuclear plants all over the world, and small nuclear plants to service off grid applications like military bases, data centers, and industries that need to convert heat directly into work onsite. This energy “transition” we’re in, which isn’t really happening, will be looked back on like a couple of alchemists / astrology like 21st century decades that ended when nuclear fuel was adopted as society’s primary fuel, after 80 years experience with fission. Meanwhile this is interesting and relevant information on the challenges hydrogen production, storage and use introduce.
These arguments are all convincing. However you are not clear how you would produce synthetic fuels without increasing? My understanding was that the most feasible use of hydrogen was as a feedstock for synthetic fuels combined with carbon capture. I understand that producing hydrogen from high temperature nuclear reactors is likely to be very efficient. One could rapidly switch from generating electricity to generating hydrogen, allowing nuclear power station to be run at full power.
We are on the same page here.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-different-way-to-look-at-solar
I am always surprised that so many intelligent people support prescriptions like building a hydrogen economy, pumping water up hills, trying to replace thermo power with electrical energy, daming up thousands of acres of land, and consuming so much of the Earth’s mineral resources in efforts that run into the physical limitations you point out in this post. And why? Because so many people are singularly focused on CO2 emissions, which do not correlate to surface temperature of the planet because there are many other considerations like the sun and humidity. Maybe the silver lining, after wasting precious treasure and time, will be that we find common ground in the next densest source of fuel that, as a bonus, do not emit CO2, uranium and thorium. We will probably end up building gigawatt size nuclear plants all over the world, and small nuclear plants to service off grid applications like military bases, data centers, and industries that need to convert heat directly into work onsite. This energy “transition” we’re in, which isn’t really happening, will be looked back on like a couple of alchemists / astrology like 21st century decades that ended when nuclear fuel was adopted as society’s primary fuel, after 80 years experience with fission. Meanwhile this is interesting and relevant information on the challenges hydrogen production, storage and use introduce.
Fischer Tropsch
Great primer on hydrogen.
Synthetic fuels face their own physical limitations. Proposals to develop them need to be proven on an EROI (no monetary economics) basis.
These arguments are all convincing. However you are not clear how you would produce synthetic fuels without increasing? My understanding was that the most feasible use of hydrogen was as a feedstock for synthetic fuels combined with carbon capture. I understand that producing hydrogen from high temperature nuclear reactors is likely to be very efficient. One could rapidly switch from generating electricity to generating hydrogen, allowing nuclear power station to be run at full power.