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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The only real reneweable energy storage problem is that we've not built enough generation to really need any storage yet. And so we're shovelling money to authoritarian regimes around the globe which they use to buy politicians and media.

Luckily the EV market alone is enough to drive battery tech for short term storage forward, and green hydrogen for fertilizer is enough to take care of the rest. But, there's no need to wait, we should be a decade ahead on this at least if not for well funded lies holding us back.

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Yeah, we do not need any breakthroughs in battery technology for grid stabilization in fixed service. We can do it today with lead-acid batteries if we needed to. Nobody cares about energy density, power density, or mass generally.

What fertilizer is made out of Hydrogen??

H2 + N2 (atm) -> NH3 (ammonia) (Haber Process) -> ammonium nitrate, nitric acid etc.

Ammonia is currently produced from methane.

To be precise, it's made from hydrogen and the current standard hydrogen is in turn made from methane (and the rest of the methane is dumped into the atmosphere as fossil CO2).

While accurate in a technical chemical feasibility sense, it is misleading to suggest that ammonia is industrially produced from hydrogen. Existing facilities take in methane and output ammonia and CO2. It is true that the chemical reaction used to make ammonia takes hydrogen and not methane, but that fact in isolation ignores a lot of existing infrastructure. Existing ammonia producing plants do the conversion from methane to hydrogen in the same facility that produces the ammonia, making the hydrogen essentially an implementation detail. There are other ways of producing hydrogen industrially, but it is incorrect to think about the hydrogen generating system in isolation when considering existing infrastructure. Hopefully in the future new plants will be built with green hydrogen in mind.

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