I became disenchanted with hydrogen ever since I learned most of it comes from fossil fuels.
As it turns out, hydrocarbons are more than just carbon. They’re also hydogen.
Yeah that is true, but another useful application of Hydrogen is that it can store energy, like a battery. Think of it like a hydroelectric facility. You take water which is a low energy state, the bonds are super stable, you add a lot of energy to it, then it becomes Hydrogen, which is a high-energy state, very much less stable that can be used as an energy source whenever we want.
I think this is the really important application of hydrogen, as an alternative for batteries, as most technologies for conventional batteries require a lot of rare minerals and I doubt our planet will be able to sustain a transition in renewable energy, hence a huge increase in load for our electricity grids and demand for batteries, if we only have conventional ones. And on top of all that, you have to factor the fact that the economy will continue growing exponentially(it doubles every 20 years).
Yes, but also carbon, which is the problem. Hydrogen is in many compounds, being the most abundant element. Hydrogen as such can provide green energy, the problem is the other elements in its compounds and also the great energy necessary to separate the hydrogen from these compounds. This is why these investigations to manufacture hydrogen in a sustainable way.
It would be more useful to have cheap, stable and efficient electrocatalysts for hydrogen and oxygen formation reactions each for water electrolysis.
Well, it is perhaps not as efficient, but it is more direct, as it does not require large electrical installations to supply the necessary energy. There are also other approaches using bacteria and algae to produce hydrogen. Instead of using solar energy to produce electricity to make hydrogen, these methods use solar energy directly to do so.
A fun fact a lot of people don’t know about is that the light-dependent reaction in photosynthesis is generating hydrogen from water. They then take that hydrogen plus some carbon in the air and process it into sugars as food. The process leaves a little excess oxygen which it ejects. The sugar can then be burnt alongside some oxygen to generate energy and water, effectively undoing the process.
Photosynthetic centers have orders of magnitude less conversion efficiency than commercial photovoltaics. Fuel from algae requires photobioreactors to avoid being overgrown by wildtype so prohibitively expensive. Synthetic photochemical systems are all plagued with stability issues. If you separate photovoltaics from electrochemistry you can exchange a degraded part of the system instead of having to discard everything.
