Serious Plan to Convert Australia's Largest Fertilizer Plant to Green Hydrogen to Save Money
By Ian Page – 2021.12.31
I’ve written before that the high price of gas means that it's now cheaper to make hydrogen by electrolysis than from natural gas in Europe.
This is the first actual plan I've seen and by a big industrial group.
I hope it goes forward.
Also:
Hyundai has given up on hydrogen powered cars citing technical issues, and lack of marketability after spending a fortune over many years.
With Toyotas ambivalence and deal with a Chinese EV car firm to make rebrand-able EVs, hydrogen powered cars are effectively dead.
This is good news because energetically it's a lousy idea, and batteries have gotten good enough to eat into the potential market.
However, there is still potential for long distance lorries, although we are already seeing in Germany container lorries doing repeated medium distance trips from port to warehouse, trying pantographs on parts of journeys with electric lorries to keep the battery charged.
This suggests that if hydrogen fuel cell lorries don’t come along soon, batteries with pantographs or wireless recharging at stops, may eat into the potential market.
Hydrogen for ships is still plausible, but ammonia has better energy per volume but worse end to end efficiency. I am seeing a lot of enthusiasm for ammonia powered ships since it can reuse diesel engines, is easy to retrofit, and doesn't require much change to the filling infrastructure, and can be converted to a fuel cell process eventually.
The Hydrogen economy is beginning to look more like the ammonia economy, at least for transport.
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