Electrolyser development: 200 times less iridium needed
Green hydrogen in theory is valid and a very worthy target of research.<p>In practice it remains a FUD&#x2F;policy distraction by petroleum interests to develop an energy ecosystem that is reliant on fossil fuels for the foreseeable (and profitable) future.<p>This is research that falls into the former category, but it&#x27;s presence and other &quot;green hydrogen&quot; headlines in the news feed is due to the influence of the latter.<p>The economics of solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;battery are and will be the driver of primary carbon reduction for the next decade, likely two decades.<p>Practical hydrogen has the same issue new nuclear has: what price target? LCOE and many other measures of solar&#x2F;wind&#x2F;battery have fallen at 10 percent or more per year for the last decade, and while &quot;who knows&quot; when that exponential curve tails off, looking at the scale of what&#x27;s needed, forthcoming techs like perovskites and forthcoming production of sodium ion &#x2F; LFP &#x2F; LMFP and the prototypes of Lithium Sulfur &#x2F; Solid State in batteries, there is likely another decade of improvement at those rates.<p>So like &quot;new nuclear&quot;, sure, keep up the research, and if price competitive applications can compete with sodium ion batteries (which I think will be a killer app in grid storage based on the materials and gravimetric densities), sure, but I think these techs will be kind of like magnetic RAM vs DRAM: it simply missed the boat of the economies of scale rampup, and now has to wait for that curve to stabilize before anything competitive can crop up.<p>For hydrogen to be practical in any green form in large scale requires a huge development in generation (which this is), storage, transport, and infrastructure. Fundamentally that hydrogen creation&#x2F;transport&#x2F;storage&#x2F;delivery infrastructure, which is 99.99999% unbuilt, competes with the existing power grid, which likely has TRILLIONS of dollars in accumulated investment and will receive likely another trillion or two globally over the next two years to adapt to dirt cheap solar and wind, to say nothing of what will be invested in home &#x2F; commercial distributed solar generation and battery storage which hydrogen is not applicable.<p>Big Oil had a chance when the Bush Administration was talking about hydrogen circa 2003. But the fat cats sat on their hats, and Tesla and solar&#x2F;wind left them in their dust. The only ones really pushing hydrogen are those and Toyota, who perplexingly missed the EV boat despite releasing hybrids in 1997 and should have been providing an entire product line of PHEVs by 2005 that pushed the entire industry towards PHEVs for all consumer transport by 2015. We&#x27;d be immune to OPEC and russia if that had happened, and 70-80% of daily miles would be electric with no range anxiety.