Comment by alephnerd

Edited. Too many moving pieces and not one-to-one comparable. Simplified by just using Chinese govt statistics alone.

> are you suggesting that these hydrogen programs are not going to use renewables sourced green hydrogen and that's a good thing

In the short term (next 10-15 years) they will not.

It's called Grey Hydrogen or Blue Hydrogen is Carbon Capture is used (basically greenwashing tbh). This is why I said Hydrogen and not Green Hydrogen (EDIT: I said green in my original post - explains the confusion), because most plans for expanded Solar and Wind capacity do not pan out until the early 2030s at the earliest.

I do not think this is a good thing, but there is no other intermediate gap if we want to maintain an industrial economy.

Industrial capacity is increasing at a faster rate than the capacity to build renewable energy alone.

> Hydrogen has some uses, but for many of the things it is touted for it doesn't even come close to making sense

It comes down to cost.

For heavy industry use cases you are competing against coal because (for example) steel costs 500 kWh/ton to produce.

This means 250-350 solar panels just for a single ton of steel. This means to scale out to meet the need of an average steel mill (around 400,000 tons of steel a year) you'd need an array of around 275,000-350,000 96-cell solar panels or around 55 Hectares of land dedicated to solar just for a single steel mill.

That is a lot of land to acquire, and most countries are not like China where zoning can be done by the central government with a drop of a hat, and anyhow global steel production is at almost 2 Billion Tons a year.

And this is just steel alone. Every other part of heavy industry (casting, fertilizers, plastics, shipbuilding, cement, mining, refining, etc) has similarly large energy needs and is growing rapidly. Yet renewables will not be able to grow fast enough.

And given that Coal is US$1-1.50/kg, heavy industry will continue to use that because it is cheap and available.

We need to de-greenhouse gas heavy industry, but renewables just are not scaling at the speed needed globally to meet that goal.

This is why hydrogen at least minimizes the carbon footprint as we transition heavy industry away from coal, because instead of both burning carbon for extraction and then energy production, we can at least minimize carbon usage at the extraction and then production step as renewable mega-projects start coming online over the next 10-20 years, and advances in PV and battery technology happen.

And this is why every industrial economy has a Hydrogen strategy and is pouring tens of billions of dollars a year in Hydrogen storage, electrolyzers, and distribution.

We as consumers probably won't be using hydrogen fuel cell cars, but our BEV cars will end up being manufactured by hydrogen-powered steel built in factories built by hydrogen-powered cement that will be shipped via hydrogen-powered trains and ships.

This transition has already started in much of Asia, but it's industrial so it's unsexy (like solar 20-25 years ago), but I absolutely stake my reputation that this change is actively happening and will be visible in 10 years at most.

And the fact that every major industrial country has a 10 year roadmap to bring Hydrogen costs to US$1/kg and is actually spending money to do this means I'm in good company.