Do you hate fossil fuels or do you want to save the planet? I feel your words seem prejudiced against allowing fossil fuel companies to help us fight climate change
At this point, the idea that fossil fuel companies are actually interested in trying to help save the planet in any way more than is mandated by law and public opinion is not supported by evidence. They have shown, time and again, that they will lie about science, falsify documents, and try to get laws changed to allow them to pollute without limits. They have lost all benefit of the doubt.
Anyone trying to argue that they have any genuine interest in helping to save the planet is making an extraordinary claim, and needs to back it up with extraordinary evidence.
It's not about saving the planet, it's about saving humans. The planet will be completely fine and will adapt (painful though it may be). The ecosystem has survived much worse, it's just us humans that don't have a few million years to wait for everything to re-balance.
We need to stop using fossil fuels. Both their extraction and they use are ecologically disastrous. They power they provide is all op ex, rather than cap ex as with solar or wind (or nukes for that matter).
How does this have anything to do with the question posed by the parent? You want the whole world to stop using fossil fuels, but clearly the world isn't ready for that. In the meantime, what's wrong with fossil fuel companies using some of their profits to fuel (heh) renewable energy projects?
Those companies have a half century history of lying about the science. We have no reason to believe they aren’t lying now about this technology’s feasibility or the carbon emissions in their production process — or that any profits wouldn’t be used in part to fund their political lobbying to prevent action or dodge the consequences of their actions.
>We have no reason to believe they aren’t lying now about this technology’s feasibility
It'd be a pretty big lie for them to pull off. It's one thing to spend a few million funding some climate change denying think tanks. It's a whole other level of deception to spend hundreds of millions on a technology in the hopes that others will fall for it.
>the carbon emissions in their production process
This seems like the weakest possible argument. Either the chemical reaction they're proposing generates carbon or it doesn't. It's very easy to validate. Are you expecting them to build an entire "green" hydrogen plant that claims to use a process that doesn't produce co2, but is secretly burning oil? That seems extremely risky to pull off and very easy to discover.
>or that any profits wouldn’t be used in part to fund their political lobbying to prevent action or dodge the consequences of their actions.
So you would rather shoot ourselves in the feet (metaphorically) when it comes to the green energy transition, because you can't stand the thought of the bad guys making money in the process? Do you also think that we should drag out the pandemic a bit longer because a bad guy[1] might be making money in process?
> It's one thing to spend a few million funding some climate change denying think tanks. It's a whole other level of deception to spend hundreds of millions on a technology in the hopes that others will fall for it.
First, anti-science campaign they’ve run is on the order of billions - there were individual “no big deal” ad campaigns measured in millions. It’s truly hard to appreciate the scale of that half-century committed effort to influence the public and politicians around the world, so I would urge extreme skepticism before relying on any of their claims which hasn’t been validated by truly independent sources. Their later green campaigns have been well-publicized but the actual work has been a tiny fraction of their total R&D expenditures.
One of the big things to keep in mind is how often they’ve talked about carbon capture or sequestration far in advance of what the actual technology is capable of. They do that because it allows them to say they’re doing something but just can’t stop business as usual until it’s ready. A key part of this is that they often fund genuine research where the academics involved are really trying to make progress but it’s just a hard problem.
What I would worry about with hydrogen is continuing what we’ve seen since the 1970s: big promises but no meaningful impact at reducing use of fossil fuel. That comes in two forms: the most obvious is simply that there aren’t many hydrogen cars you can buy and the logistics are daunting so most people don’t buy it (or literally cannot because e.g. they don’t live near one of the few dozen stations in the entire state of California). Things like storage and transportation still have significant unsolved problems before they’re ready for mainstream adoption.
The second would be more subtle: currently, almost all hydrogen is produced from hydrocarbons. It is very easy to imagine a campaign selling the image of solar powered electrolysis but relying on fossil fuels “at first”, where the companies know there’s a huge gap before the process doesn’t depend on things which emit CO2. That’s the scenario I had in mind, where there’d be a likely legal defense that they were just too darn optimistic about being able to switch.
How will you make a battery-powered semi? Tesla claimed to have one then got super-quiet about it.
Do the calculation for joules of power to move a fully-loaded tractor-trailer. Do a joule/kg calculation for modern batteries and calculate the series you get due to the rocket fuel problem (it takes a lot of battery to haul your battery).
You find that the towing capacity of that semi is miniscule vs an ICE engine. Same problem applies to heavy equipment (even if you completely dodge the issue that heavy equipment works out where stable power usually isn't readily available).
Hydrogen offers a solution to this that batteries can't offer.
"Tesla has failed to produce a battery EV semi truck" is not strong evidence that it is impossible to produce one. Tesla has been having quite a bit of trouble in recent years, as its not-a-founder-but-wants-you-to-think-he-is makes promises reality can't deliver.
Now, it may be that you're right—that battery-powered semi trucks are unfeasible to build.
But a) this doesn't mean we should go all-in on hydrogen, either, and b) maybe what this really means is that we need to eliminate the semi truck as a common feature of our roads, and do most of our cross-country shipping by rail, which is massively more efficient no matter what means you use to power it. (Yes, that requires more investment in our rail infrastructure, but that would also be a very good thing on several levels.)
You really notice the difference when you go to a country like Germany, which uses a lot more trucks to haul freight. The rail percentage is about 19% currently. [0] The Autobahn is packed with trucks. The percentage of rail traffic is lower in other EU countries apparently.
> power they provide is all op ex, rather than cap ex
And hydrogen is the same: producing it, transporting it, getting it to end consumers... lots of op ex. Whereas with pure electric you just need wires and batteries, and there is none of the efficiency loss of converting energy into hydrogen and having to transport it as mass and worry about leakage.
But for rent-seeking old-money megacorps, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. They can take a percentage of all that waste and complexity as profit.
We’ve seen enough of the fossil fuel industry’s shenanigans and political lobbying efforts to know how that will go. The anecdote about the turtle allowing the scorpion on its back to cross the river comes to mind. It’s in their nature to sting. It’s their entire incentive structure to sting.
this is a very good question, I never thought about it this way. I think it explains a lot of the debate, some people just want to see Exxon, Shell and Chevron crash and burn, rather than switch to green energy production.
