Before you dig in, please scroll way down to the bottom of the page, read the last paragraphs, and please take action. See you back here in a minute!
Despite the slightly disparaging initial tone of this article's headline, what this is, is a state-of-the-art hydrogen electrolyser, a manufacturing plant already producing them and was scheduled to be in full automated production by now.
UPDATE: Scope for the project extended.
The magazine RenewEconomy usually reports slightly more favourably on these things, but maybe it's because Australian technology is always seen as a bit quaint or som. . . - No. I think it's time to start a change in the way we view and report our technology. I reported a while back on a huge - I mean, quite literally, HUGE - list of Australian innovations and technologies that we've invented, developed - and then had to go offshore with or sell to overseas interests in order for them to become successful products. If I can find that again, I'll whack a link in right about here.
I reported on the total bastardness of our (at each of those stages a RW goverment I note) government for shutting down automotive plant and factories that could by now have been producing our own EVs and EV subsystems, and how fossil fuel operations (coal mines, gas and oil wells) were being propped up by those RW governments over the far more deserving sustainable alternatives, and I'm actually in favour of taking our government, putting the whole lot on a cruise liner to Nauru Detention Centre, and replacing them with a series of SurveyMonkey surveys, which would probably see the country finally run as what it is, which is a successful and innovative member of the world stage. I digressed again, didn't I? But damn these are what we're stuck with here in Oz.
Back To Fortescue
I'm sure everyone here's familiar with hydrogen electrolysers, hands up those of you who know how one works? Come on, anyone? Anyone?
There's the thing. Or at least, one of the things. It's still not well-known technology.
How many know of the different ways that hydrogen can be generated? Why it can be as good an energy source as (in fact better than) lithium-ion batteries?
And there's another of the things. Some ways of making H2 are clean, others are just a really shitty way to keep using fossil fuels until the planet effing well explodes.
I Hated Hydrogen
Being an electronics-geek-type, batteries were the way to go, I was sure the next advance in batteries was going to be The One That Saves EVs.
Toyota's saying they'll have a 900 mile range battery that doesn't explode, by 2027. But that's still three years too late, we need some alternatives to fossil fuels right now. Fortescue Group are going to be too late, this should have been done five years - a decade - two decades - ago. But at least it's one more way to ditch fossil fuels.
Then Hydrogen came along. "Hindenberg In Pinto Form?" was of course the first thought that crossed my mind.
How do you carry one of the most explosive flammable gases in a wheeled shell that's prone to static sparks, has high current electrical systems, and is driven by primates that are prone to crashing them into each other and each other's vehicles and everything else around them?
But hydrogen fuel cells are now able to convert H2 to electricity at the kinds of currents needed, and they emit just water vapour from their "exhaust." Also, hydrogen tanks are safer than petrol and diesel tanks thanks to specific materials nano-engineered to soak up the hydrogen like a sponge. No liquid H2 sloshing around, and in fact I believe that these nano-materials can hold more H2 in a given volume than a liquid/vapour tank would.
By then I was ready to talk hydrogen except for one other thing - the sheer death-grip desperation of the companies I refer to as the FFC - the Fossil Fuel Cartel. Don't forget that this cartel is losing almost their entire raison'd'etre when we stop using fossil fuels. (And will lose the other half when we succeed in making plastic illegal unless it is entirely recycled.) They're a complex organism and we're killing it. Of course it'll fight back.
One of the ways was to extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons (= "fossil fuels," natch) using more energy (from more fossil fuels, natch) to do so. Not sure what they called it. Red Hydrogen, Blue Hydrogen, Joseph's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat effing hydrogen - who really cares, it was just a nice bit of obfuscation to divert attention away from the - ahem - fossil fuels part of the process- anyway.
That's Not The Way. Obviously.
Electrolysis on the other hand, can be. To be clear, half a century ago electrolysis wasn't a way forward, either. Almost all our electricity was derived from fossil fuels.
Obviously there are large losses at every step from an energy source to the mechanical output. Losing 75% of the energy in fuel between getting it out of the ground to driving your wheels is already a huge kick in the guts. (That by the way is a favourable estimate - many are much worse... )
If we add the losses inherent in converting fossil fuel to hydrogen first, or using fossil fuel electricity to electrolyse hydrogen, there can be far higher losses.
So to be able to start from solar electricity is already a WIN in letters too large for me to fit on this page. If we can use sunlight and a catalyst to do this directly, that'd be Boss level.
Hydrogen, Energy, Climate, And You
No matter which way you try to spin it, taking fossil fuels out of the equation is the only way we'll deal with climate change.
Wind and waves harvest their energy from the weather systems, and that energy was put into the weather system by sunlight and solar heat, with some coming from inherent geothermal heat.
Fortunately for us (or rather - unfortunately for us) global warming is increasing the energy in everything, wind, land, air, and seas included. On knowing this,it can be seen that absorbing some of that energy out of the weather systems can only be a good thing. As long as we retire wind plant once the climate crisis is in hand in a century or so.
So at this time, extracting some of the energy out of the weather system by way of large numbers of wind farms is exactly what we need. By the same token, taking some of the energy out of the oceans by wave and tidal generators is also good.
What isn't so good is that most of that energy will just leak back out along the way or at the end of the process of consuming it.
For the moment though - hydrogen can be one of the ways forward. I bet that right now someone's working out a way to inject hydrogen into a petrol engine along with its normal fuel and reducing consumption and pollution. That would at least be a solution everyone can come at.
And of course eventually getting over our seemingly insatiable need to own a large personal vehicle directly would also be a help.
Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? My wife is facing a life/death medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with her, caring, being there.
That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.
You can also help immensely by making a donation, either one-off or periodically, as that will allow me to pay online / running costs rather than taking away what little income we have.
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