Is hydrogen green energy or efficient?

Allow me to let these two gentlemen speak for me,

https://youtu.be/RPvQZgafvzA?si=HsQqUY0hc-_Dlofn This begins with a humorous skit by John Cleese but becomes technical. This is by Welsh comedian Paul Burgess, a fellow you may also remember from the Monty Python series.

Then the articles at the following website by Dr. Lars Schernikau confirm the above information and my previous post on hydrogen.

Hydrogen… what more can we wish for?

Dr. Lars Schernikau is an energy economist, entrepreneur, commodity trader, and author.

Educated at New York University in the US, INSEAD in France, and TU Berlin in Germany, he has worked with commodities for 2 decades in Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America.

Previously, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group in the US and Germany. Lars is also a shareholder in the Berlin based, German publicly listed commodity trading firm,
HMS Bergbau AG
(www.hms-ag.com)

After watching and reading these links, you may wonder why the Saudis would invest in hydrogen. The answer is money of course. As you have seen in the above links, H2 gas sells for high prices. The Saudis have basically unlimited fuel and very low cost. Their result would be very high profits for them to sell to unwitting and misinformed virtue signally end-users foolish enough to buy. Hydrogen will sell for a while at least at very high prices, as seen the above links, much higher than the natural gas CH4 which Saudis have in abundance. The Saudis can convert their natural gas (CH4) to H2 gas instead of flaring/burning it off it, or they can use the natural gas to power a turbine electric generation to produce electricity and then use that electricity to produce H2 gas by electrolysis of seawater. In the first case, they could build a plant that would also produce ethylene (C2H4) as a byproduct of the H2 gas production…if they are very careful. Ethylene is a highly valuable feedstock for petrochemical plants to make thousands of products from plastics.

As you can surmise from the links above and my comments, in summary, from a public investment point of view and from an environmental point of view, hydrogen energy systems regardless of color is stupid and foolish. As an investment for the Saudis to build a plant to produce hydrogen, this could be highly profitable for them for a while…so long as people and their politicians believe in the carbon pollution fallacy or until the next Hindenburg-like disaster. Presumably the Saudis will build their plant so that it can be conveniently converted to a different output product (e.g. ethylene, or ethylene oxide) since eventually the end user will figure out that they are wasting large amounts of money and significantly reducing safety with no benefit to the end users of the hydrogen.

About budbromley

Bud is a retired life sciences executive. Bud's entrepreneurial leadership exceeded three decades. He was the senior business development, marketing and sales executive at four public corporations, each company a supplier of analytical and life sciences instrumentation, software, consumables and service. Prior to those positions, his 19 year career in Hewlett-Packard Company's Analytical Products Group included worldwide sales and marketing responsibility for Bioscience Products, Global Accounts and the International Olympic Committee, as well as international management assignments based in Japan and Latin America. Bud has visited and worked in more than 65 countries and lived and worked in 3 countries.

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