We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.
Let alone the compressors or the flow measurement equipment. Also significant portions of the pipesline (especially in neighborhoods / last mile) aren't metal anymore.
There is a plausible scenario where a user cuts their wrist open cooking dinner. You don't have to file the edge off cooking knives, but won't you think of the children?
I still have nightmares from my first dev gig. We used SVN, which even in 2015 was prehistoric technology. The server was some awful rustbucket that couldn't sustain 100Mbit. Yes, it couldn't saturate basic 100megabit Ethernet. Everyone had to have big drives in their workstations to maintain multiple local trees. You just couldn't work otherwise.
But probably the worst part was that when I started it was a loose organization where anyone could sneakily merge something into trunk. That changed quickly.
All work was done against a develop branch, and every two weeks, the admin would DELETE THE TRUNK and recreate it from a COPY of develop.
Every two weeks, we lost all history and context for changes in any given release. This was an effort to stop bugs coming back in merge regressions.
I kinda love SVN, it was a leap up from many popular solutions at the time.
And some people hate it… but, up to and including this story of random-assed deletions, scratch the surface of why and all you hear are self-inflicted harm through bad process.
“Git sucks butt because at OUR shop we start a new repo every few weeks with copy n paste and don’t understand partial checkouts and under-resource the primary host server and also people sneak code into production for funsies.”… … yeah, sounds like “Git” has problems…
Deleting the trunk every two weeks physically hurts to read.
I'm always surprised by how popular SVN still is though. I ported my old Sublime SVN plugin to VS Code years ago for fun, and I still get issues raised today (usually in Chinese, so it seems popular there). If you look at the VS Code marketplace, the top SVN extension has ~1.3m installs.
Bit of a tangent, but it probably wasn't a good idea to release an extension for something I had stopped using long before, particularly when you have to maintain it!
When I quit my last job, I was the only employee left that understood our tech stack. The other was a mechanical engineer and industrial designer. Because I felt that CEO could barely comprehend what git is or why it's important to pay AWS on time, I made a full backup of everything on a USB hard drive.
If you ever need to do this, it can be as simple as "git mirror", with extra steps for LFS and other addons.
That guy definitely did not deserve me to give him $100 of my own personal hard drive stash but out of some sick sense of professionalism I felt I had to give him a failsafe archive. Because, you guessed it, not one byte of the entire company was backed up anywhere.
I understand the rationale, but don’t you see how this idea contradicts autonomy of decisions for able-minded people? Such good intentions tend to be a pavement on roads to bad places.
I’d rather suggest to inform about all the potential benefits and drawbacks, but leave decisions with the individual.
Especially given that it’s not something irreversibly permanent.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
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