Comment on Know thy enemy

• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  That implies that we can make electricity everywhere, which is technically true but not really the case because there’s countries with more and with less free space, with more suitable places and less suitable places to put renewables.

  Those ammonia tankers will happen. At that point btw we’re not just talking about electricity, but also chemical feedstock.

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• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  you really think this is going to stop the globalism aspect from happening? If you can ship something, and get better market rates on it, you’re going to do it. Economics follows the cheapest route, not the most efficient.

  It also just makes sense if you think about it. Places like alaska are going to struggle to generate green energy compared to another place like, texas for example. If you can ship in green hydrogen much cheaper than you can locally produce energy, why wouldn’t you? It’s a reasonable solution to the problem of supply and demand scaling.

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  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah, but Alaska uses dramatically less energy than… like, everywhere. Given that there are no people and the only industries are either oil or resources.

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    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      oil and resource industries are pretty well known for being energy intensive no?

      last i checked industry is the primary energy consumer. Sure there’s less people in alaska, but it was just an example i picked, and the market economics would still be applicable there. If it’s cheaper to buy hydrogen, than it is to produce locally sourced power, that’s going to be what happens.

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      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Not in comparison to… normal things like people and manufacturing.

        And oil is oil, it’s self-powering. Many/most are powered off of the propane out-gassing to dedicated turbines.

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• grandkaiser@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  We absolutely can ‘make oil’. Been doing it since world war II. Synthetic oil is extremely common.

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  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I mean, yeah, but also, that’s not really efficient or effective for burning.

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    • grandkaiser@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Neither is hydrogen.

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      • InverseParallax@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’m not disagreeing, but if the energy is surplus, might as well make hydrogen, at least we don’t end up with pollution.

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• jonne@infosec.pub ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yeah, there’s no reason to be transporting hydrogen long distances. You can make it anywhere that has water and electricity. And if you’ve transitioned to a hydrogen based economy, ships wouldn’t run on oil any more anyway, so there’s no problem there.

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  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    there absolutely is? What if i can buy hydrogen at 1$ per ton, from the hydrogen production empire, meanwhile in the manufacturing empire hydrogen is produced at 2$ per ton. Economically, it would make sense to buy that hydrogen from the hydrogen production empire.

    It’s not going to be as significant as a trade as something like coal and LNG obviously, but the market IS going to do this in some capacity. And it’s a beneficial thing for everybody.

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    • jonne@infosec.pub ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sure, there’d be some arbitrage, but pretty much every country that has a functional government will invest in domestic capacity for strategic reasons. You won’t have countries that have none at all and have to import everything.

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  • MarcomachtKuchen@feddit.org ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah but your electricity also needs to be produced by reusable manners, which commonly results in solar power. And since the intensity of solar rays and the amount of sunny hours per day vary on the global scale there are some countries which are capable of producing more hydrogen and cheaper than producing locally. I know that the German government is looking at Marocco to establish a hydrogen production and import.

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• skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  no we can’t make hydrogen everywhere, there will be regions with large excess of renewable energy compared to population. these places could export hydrogen. you also don’t need a lot of transport if crude is extracted near place where it’s used, like for example heavy crude from alberta

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  • Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The problem with the comparison is hydrocarbons are the energy source, hydrogen is no it’s just the energy carrier. It is very inefficient to convert energy to hydrogen then convert it back again. Something like 60% round trip efficiency. Not to mention the cost and loss in loading into containers and shipping it around the world. It’s also not a very dense fuel per volume especially compared to oil. It’s just way easier and cheaper to have cables that run from one place to another. They are already building one from Australia to Singapore and if it’s successful that will probably open the floodgates. There aren’t many places that are more than 2000 miles away from large sources of renewable energy even if your thinking places like Alaska which could do hydro if there ever was dense enough populations anywhere that would consume it.

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    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      this is less of a problem when you don’t use it for energy, but instead as a feedstock like in synthesis of ammonia or steelmaking. you can make ammonia in many places, but it’s not the case for steel

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