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Spiderbanana t1_isonlda wrote

Reply to comment by The_bruce42 in Nation’s First Nuclear-Powered Clean Hydrogen Production Announced. The Nine Mile Point Generating Station, the oldest operating U.S. nuclear power plant, will soon house the nation’s first nuclear-powered clean hydrogen production facility by chopchopped

Hydrogen can be produced from natural gas (blue hydrogen) or through hydrolysis (green hydrogen) if I recall correctly. Then can be either used in gaseous form (complex storage and transportation industry is not ready for that yet, although they are working on it) or in liquid form when mixed with amonnia.

Anyway, what I was starting is that, if you still need to run a gas powerplant alongside for baseload electricity production. All you're doing in your example is using electricity to produce hydrogen through a reaction (not 100% efficient) and using it mixed with gas for heating. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use the equivalent of gas needed to produce electricity in order to compensate the nuclear electricity required for hydrogen production directly for heating instead of adding an unnecessary step ? Surely, it's fantastic, but only once you don't need a carbon intensive (coal, gas,...) source for electricity production.

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Albert14Pounds t1_isos4dr wrote

Not sure if this hydrogen being added to natural gas is being used for producing electricity or sent with gas to homes or both, but if sent to homes for heating then it's more efficient for it to be burned in the home than to be used to generate electricity then incur generation and transmission losses.

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rabbitaim t1_itodzbz wrote

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment so I’ll try best to explain it. I’m not an expert.

Hydrogen is not being added to natural gas.

Natural gas is broken down using a thermal process and you get hydrogen fuel. The process is called Methane Pyrolysis.

Then you can use the stored energy in hydrogen fuel like a liquid battery. For example Hydrogen fuel cars have a platinum plate that pulls the electrons from the liquid and use that to generate an electric current to power the electric motor.

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Spiderbanana t1_ispe5yx wrote

Hydrogen consumes electricity, it makes no sense to mix it to produce electricity. But using gas (if on the same power grid theee is gas an nuclear, whatever you're using comes back to using the dirtier source to create electricity because you're creating the electricity demand this way for the to dirty source to start open) to generate hydrogen and then mix it with gas for heating makes no sense. You lose a lot of energy content along the way.

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The_bruce42 t1_isorzx8 wrote

But what if it was produced through a renewable source like wind, solar, or hydro?

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Spiderbanana t1_isph1jf wrote

Well, that's another question here. Note that nuclear isn't really polluting and so isn't the problem here, is the fact the energy demand you create on the grid is still supplied by dirty sources. While without this added demand then maybe you could have closed a carbon intensive powerplants instead.

Anyway, the problem here stays the same with hydroelectricity.

For wind and solar, it is a good idea, but still not if you use all their energy. See, a powergrid had two components; baseload, which is the current needed all day long, and variable load, which varies during the day/year. To overcome this, baseload centrales, with relatively stable electricity output, like nuclear and dams, are usually built to provide the need. Then you have multiple other electricity sources that are used partially for the baseload but also for the variable load. Like windturbines, solar, or gas powerstations.

The problem with solar and wind is that their production varies in time during the day and year. So you have to design your power supply chain for the worst case scenario. By doing so, and since you can't really modulate nuclear powerplants electricity output neither, most of the time you produce more then you consume. However this energy can't reasonably be stocked nowadays. (Well, you can always pump water up a dam, using it kind of like a battery).

Hydrogen powerplants, in this scenario, offer an opportunity to stock this excess energy by transforming it into hydrogen.

One point I didn't mention earlier, and which goes in favor of the nuclear hydrogen powerplants is that they increase massively the hydrogen production nationally. Reducing this it's price and creating availability. Boosting therefore up the interest into the technology for application that are hesitant due to availability and final costs being higher than for petroleum based applications. (They currently estimate that a subside of 3$/kg produced would be necessary to render hydrogen competitive (obviously, you could also tax carbon emissions to level the game instead)

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