Submitted by yourSAS t3_z7t0sf in technology
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As a gas turbine OEM, they're doing their part in ensuring that they can safely operate with hydrogen, ammonia or other vectors. It's on the major energy players to make sure that hydrogen is green, i.e. coming from electrolysis with renewable energy rather than NG.
I would add that jets in particular are difficult for a green transition.
High power and portability requirements really limit your options.
I recommend you give this a read then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/xdytr0/the_renewable_energy_scam/
Yeah but we aren't gonna give up modern day life. Yes renewables take finite non renewable resources, but they result in much less damage than the melting of the planet through climate change.
Except it takes 7x the amount of energy to produce the same result, how is that even remotely effective?
What does this even mean? Over how long? Building the structures? Running it continuously? How does that energy equate to the amount it puts out?
In “moving on from oil” we would be walking away from a complex and often-violent and always critical supply and transport system, only to replace it with at least ten more. A world in which we “electrify everything” requires an order of magnitude more copper and lithium and nickel and cobalt and graphite and chromium and zinc and rare earths and silicon and more.
The future is darker, and less green, than you think.
What point are you arguing? I asked about energy amounts and you bring up rare earth metals.
Yes. I agreed that finite resource materials are required.
I suppose what your definition of "green" is required. I'm thinking of carbon emissions resulting in climate change.
My point is it takes 7x as much energy/resources to produce renewable tech that has a shelf life of 10 years. How is that going to achieve cooling the planet if everything we use now takes 7x the resources and every middle class person wants it?
7x what we emit now is not better.
It would help if you had credible sources backing up the specific claims you want to work with, and not a link to a fifteen page self-post ramble.
So you didn't read it, got it.
Of course I didn't read it. My time has worth, and I have very little reason to believe that that post does.
Well that was a rant, but anything I have to say about it was already said in the comments on that post.
Really, you put a lot of effort towards being wrong.
So you're just going to ignore physics then.
First of all, materials such as iron and copper have to be mined. Mining is extremely destructive to the environment, and is carried out by machines such as giant excavators and huge trucks. All these machines are of course I diesel powered.
To create steel, iron ore and carbon, both non-renewable resources, have to be heated to about 1500 degrees. [The production of one tonne of steel emits about 1.8 tonnes of CO2] (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-mining/our-insights/decarbonization-challenge-for-steel). There are between 225 and 285 tonnes of steel in each turbine, so that's 400 tonnes of CO2 just to produce the steel for one turbine! It also takes plastic to build wind turbines. There are over 50 tonnes of plastic in the blades of a 5 MW wind turbine. Plastic is obviously a petroleum by-product. On top of that, each wind turbine needs between 200 and 1400 litres of a petroleum-based lubricant to work properly, which has to be replaced once every 4-7.
And that's not all. To prevent overloads and short circuits in the switchgear of wind turbines, sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) is used. SF6 is 22,800 times more powerful than CO2 and remains in the atmosphere for almost 3000 years! It is the most powerful greenhouse gas known. Each wind turbine contains about 5kg of SF6, which, if released into the atmosphere, would add the equivalent of about 117 tonnes of CO2. This is about the same as the annual emissions of 25 cars. That's not counting the fact that all the materials have to be mined/extracted, transported to a factory, and then the turbines transported over long distances to their final destination by special convoy, adding tonnes of CO2.
Your viewpoint is as damaging as the corporations releasing fossils fuels. People like you will lead the way to a downward spiral of society by telling everyone theres nothing we can do.
Not a single one of those problems is unsolvable. Not a single one of those statements makes green energy less efficient than coal.
We are already on the downward spiral. "people like you" you mean someone who sees what has to happen. Humans are a species in the overshoot of their ecological environment. This is commonplace. Species go into overshoot all the time and from the point of view of nature, it is a feature and not a bug because overshoot introduces creative disruptions. This may however be the first time that a species has gone into overshoot globally rather than locally.
The size and complexity of civilization is an emergent property of exploiting the stored sunlight in fossil energy. The party will soon end. All use of energy to perform work increases entropy which degrades the physical environment in which it is used. Our problem is that we discovered 500 million years of stored sunlight and used it all up in 200 years.
People searching for substitutes for fossil fuels with the expectation that we won’t have to live with less energy have not thought it through. Learning to live with the same energy people in 1721 used is the challenge we face this century.
Cynicism is not productive, it does not make you enlightened. Its just another form of gullibility.
As opposed to techno-optimism or hopium?
All of those also get us nowhere.
We can have a sustainable society. Its not impossible, but its going to take work. Hard work. And no small amount of sacrifice.
Yep, it's going to take an absolute monumental shift in the way we live, work and exist. I'm actually really excited for the change, it's going to be hard for many but if it pivots us out of our death spiral I'm all for it.
The only way to deal with a Gish gallop is to start picking out claims randomly. So:
> Each wind turbine contains about 5kg of SF6, which, if released into the atmosphere, would add the equivalent of about 117 tonnes of CO2. This is about the same as the annual emissions of 25 cars
Never mind the fact that the article you link mentions that wind farms are now being built that phase out SF6. Let’s just look at scale.
Conservatively, the average electric car needs 5000 kWh per year to run. An average wind turbine produces 843,000 kWh per month. So the turbine pays off those 25 car-years worth of emissions in under 5 days
It's literally the 2nd sentence in the article (presumably because they're tired of people not wanting or being able to read):
> The ground test, using a converted Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A regional aircraft engine, used green hydrogen created by wind and tidal power, the British company said on Monday.
Article is paywalled so no can read it
just make an account with reuters. they dont charge you anything.
Yea that’s not really the point though. It’s very easy to test with green hydrogen, but to commercialize the product the price of green hydrogen will have to drop below the price of gray hydrogen.
Yes it’s true that hydrogen is mostly from natural gas, but that is still better than aviation-gas. Because av-gas is the only fuel that still uses lead.
Long haul transport ships also still use leaded fuel.
I didn’t know that. Thank you u/spartanfred104. Is it only the “dirty fuel” they use on the open sea that have lead or do the “clean fuel” they use in ports also have lead?
u/spartanfred104, not @spartanfred104
Avgas is used for propeller engine planes, which are mainly flown by hobbyists in rich countries, meaning it's use is not very large scale.
Commercial aviation mainly uses turbine engines powered by Jet fuel, which is not leaded but we burn a lot more of it.
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Apparently they are using fully green hydrogen for these tests
Where do you think they get all that electricity for the electrolysis?
The test was carried out at the British military aircraft testing site at Boscombe Down, using green hydrogen fuel generated by harnessing the power of wind and waves at the European Marine Energy Center in the remote Orkney Islands, between Scotland and Norway.
Literally from the article I linked
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Europe is building out infrastructure to manufacture and transport 10 million tonnes of hydrogen by 2030 https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/energy-systems-integration/hydrogen_en
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Not to mention where will they even store the Hydrogen fuel. It aint gonna be cryogenic, and super high pressure storage tanks don't mix particular well with jetliners, especially because of the failure modes. They tend to really violently explode when they fail.
Another hurdle is where to store the hydrogen on a plane? Current tanks in the wings, rudder, body of the plane will not work.
The amount of space needed for the tanks is substantial and has to come at the expense of passengers and their luggage. It's the same issue for battery powered airliners. The technology isn't feasible with todays or near-future technologies.
And Hydrogen is a tiny molecule, it takes so much more tech to be able to store and use it as conventionally as gasoline.
If you were replacing jet fuel for every jet on the planet, you'd have to go with cryogenic.
Nat gas is currently the most common but there is significant and substantial work being done to use nuclear and renewable resources for hydrogen production. By the time RR and others get this to commercial production we’ll already have a robust clean hydrogen network.
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I mean, while it’s like that now it’s still POSSIBLE to get green hydrogen and battery powered planes won’t be a thing for long commercial flights, this is important tech as long as the storage is light enough
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