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What is white hydrogen? Scientists say the clean-energy gas could save the world.
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Since burning hydrogen just creates water, no, not really.
... I mean it wouldn't imbalance C02 but you would be adding water. At scale that could be just as bad.
Carbon neutral, yes, but water positive.
How would it be just as bad? Water doesn't cause climate change.
If we converted all of the CO2 humans have ever released into water, you'd get around 2.5 times lake superior. I don't see how that would cause much issues.
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
Yes, but the amount of it in the air globally is not increased by burning hydrogen. The processes that remove extra water vapor from the atmosphere operate on a much faster time scale than the ones that remove CO2.
It wouldn't be on it's own though.
Without other greenhouse gases kickstarting the warming process, just adding water vapor to the atmosphere just saturates it faster, slowing natural evaporation of the water cycle, which would eventually just move all the additional water to the ocean.
The amount of water we're talking about is insignificant given the already large reservar of water we have on earth. Also in the absence of other greenhouse gases, the water cycle is self regulating, it doesn't act as a greenhouse gas in the absence of another sauce of warming (which then increases the moisture carrying capacity of the air, starting a feedback loop).
CO2 is much more rare so adding that same amount in CO2 is very significant.
It's a bit like making a sauce. Adding a bit more of your main ingredient (for example cream in a cream based sauce) won't make much difference to how it tastes. But add the same amount of a potent spice and your sauce is ruined.
"at scale" it could be just as bad. C02 isn't poisonous the big problem we're dealing with is we're putting C02 from the ground in oil and coal and putting it into the air. We've been adding C02 that was NOT in the environment into the environment.
Yeah some water isn't a bad thing, but if all of a sudden we're adding from sources outside of the water cycle a LOT more water into the atmosphere you've got increased clouds, increased weather patterns, All of a sudden the inland portions of continents can start dumping as much water into the air as a warm ocean, that can DEFINITELY be a problem.
Yeah, but we're really talking a LOT more water here. Like Noah's ark numbers.
I was talking about an amount equal to what we so far added in CO2, which is would be an insignifcant amount when turned into water.
Burning Hydrogen produces pure, fresh water, a very scarce resource relatively speaking.
Also, even at scale it's not even a drop in a bucket compared to the oceans.
Water is good for you
We don't have enough fresh water so that is of limited concern.
The big problem with hydrogen is leaks, which we can't measure well enough yet. But 5% leakage cancels out all the benefits from replacing fossil fuels. And I'd guess hydrogen leaks from natural sources would be even harder to control.
Massive potential from hydrogen but lots of problems to solve.
Well fuck... it doesn't seem to matter much what we do, we have simply overshot the carrying capacity of the earth, by a lot, and no matter what tech we try to use to solve the problem, the carrying capacity is the one thing we can't solve for, or at least, we can't seem to.
We have more than enough resources to go around, they're just badly distributed. And mostly in the hands of people who have a lot of money tied up in Big Carbon.
We can easily produce enough renewable electricity to replace all fossil fuels. Hydrogen has a role in storing renewables, along with batteries and hydro. We just need to get strict about leaks. And improve transport and housing so that we need less fuel to start with.
Are you suggesting we're going to flood the world if we use hydrogen fuel?
It wouldn't affect it any more than what we currently do to get natural gas. It can also be produced cleanly through eletrolyzing water or from biomass like peat. In the future, we could even extract it directly from stars.
Not quite. There is a CO2 cycle similar to the water cycle. Basically plants/algea absorb CO2 from the atmosphere then animals eat those, burn it and release it back in a somewhat balanced way.
Burning coal and other fossile fuel is adding large quantities of CO2 to the air that were previously stored. And it doesn't take a lot of CO2 to mess things up (we only messure it in parts per million). So just burning the stored coal almost doubled the CO2 in our atmosphere, which is a big deal.
On the other hand, adding a few lake superiors to the ocean is literally a drop in the bucket.