Hacker News Reader

It'd be great in a renewables-based grid for energy storage and transport. It could be carefully controlled and monitored because of the partial centralization. I'm not sure it'll ever make much sense for vehicles unless you could increase the density so it's stored as a slush without needing a high-pressure or an ultra low-temp holding tank.

View on HN

You can't just put hydrogen in a tank like you can with i.e. propane. It's a real pain to deal with, and I don't think grid scale hydrogen will ever work out.

It would make more sense to use the hydrogen to synthesize methane, and then use that for grid scale storage and generation. This would be carbon neutral.

These are the types of conversations we need. So many people crap on hydrogen, but you can use it in a variety of ways. We can run cars on methane or convert it to ethanol. This makes converting our current fleet of vehicles cheaper and more realistic than converting to an all EV future. Even if we really, really wanted to move to EV, we can convert the existing fleet to carbon neutral ethanol for the next 50 years while slowly introducing EVs.

Electrocatalytic oxidation of methane to ethanol via NiO/Ni interface - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09263...

Right now, for planes and ships, it’s either hydrogen or syngas, because batteries are too heavy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com