It is really a shame someone clever hasn't used this hype as a cover story to get natural gas infrastructure pemritted and built. The Maritimes has plenty of natural gas to export to Germany. Maybe they can brand it as saving Germany from Trump Gas?
I think the Carney govt. sees the play as west, to BC for export to Asian markets. Maybe he shares Trudeau's concern that with EU pushing crazy aggressive "net zero by __" dates, long-term future supply partners are better directed south (U.S.) and to Asia.
"Putin intentionally reduced natural gas supplies" presumably by bombing Russia's own Nordstream pipeline and forcing the EU to stop buying gas they would willingly supply on long-term contracts at fixed pricing below spot market pricing. So evil!
Your next sentence is "The EU fruitlessly sanctioned Russia and planned to phase out Russian oil and natural gas". You contradict yourself in consecutive sentences FFS.
Putin made up reasons to start reducing flow months before he invaded Ukraine. That is all well documented. That occurred about a year before NATO members or allies, with or without U.S. intelligence/involvement blew up Nordstream.
And, yes, EU sanctions were fruitless. But worse. Much of the nat gas they were getting by Nordstream and other pipelines that the EU isn't getting now they are getting instead from (...wait for it...) RUSSIAN LNG cargoes. And paying 3X the price on a BTU basis for those cargoes vs. piped gas.
The sanctions were, in fact, fruitless. We did not contradict ourselves, once you understand the facts involved.
Thanks for the article, Mental. Balancing the chemical reactions is the first step in the absurdity of using ammonia to get hydrogen. The sheer mass difference of ammonia (16) and diatomic hydrogen (2) should be the end of the conversation before even considering energy inputs to make and break ammonia. Only government subsidies can make the sum of many negative numbers equal a positive value.
Saskatchewan actually has commercially viable hydrogen but pints blue hydrogen in the ground and tested over 4000 Sq km at between 96 percent and 86 percent. Very little input if it’s coming right out of the ground. As well our helium in Saskatchewan is also much easier and cheaper to produce as it is mixed with nitrogen not LNG. Right now it’s only 3 percent of world’s production but expanding as we speak to 10 percent of Global production!
Not a problem! Sask has huge potential in green energy if you want to call it that. As far as European Markets well it depends to be seen. Let them freeze in the dark if they do not wish to support Canadian producers. Or they can go beg the Russians to keep them alive with their energy pipelines/ exports now probably cut in by Ukrainian/ E.U./NATO Supplied Weapons or funds? The E.U. Itself actually imports between 86 and 95 percent of its energy requirements every day! 10.7 or so Million BPD of oil. They produce less than 4 million, LNG. They only produce 12 percent of their yearly requirements. If they lose both Russian and M.E. Imports where is it coming from! No one believes pipelines are as vulnerable as tankers in Hormuz? 😂😂😂
Thank you, Very well done. I am not fan of hydrogen. The New York magical solution proponents think that hydrogen production can be developed using wind power that would otherwise be curtailed. I cannot imagine any industrial process working well with such intermittancy.
But what do you expect from pie-in-the-sky dreamers? They can't even get around their heads that you can't just switch on and off an electrolysis machine in order to produce hydrogen. But that's the mindset of clueless idiots who have never worked in industrial operations before...
This article mirrors the absolute collapse of the "green hydrogen market" here in Australia, despite the millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars that the federal Labor government has sunk into the venture, and continues to do so...
Agreed. The fact that the concept of "the Hydrogen Economy" has been floating around for well over 50 years and has not even come close to fruition speaks volumes as the the lack of validity of "green hydrogen" as a commodity. It's the same BS with the advocates pushing for the introduction of "green steel" production, yet unable to realise that if "green steel" was actually feasible the Japanese would've implemented it over 75 years ago during the 1950s...
The diagram shows that the “green hydrogen” will be produced from water by electrolysis and then synthesized into ammonia using Haber-Bosch. After shipping the ammonia, some of it will be cracked to produce hydrogen and nitrogen - essentially reversing the process. And then the hydrogen will be run through fuel cells, producing water and essentially reversing the electrolysis process. TWO processes that are, for all intents and purposes, reversed.
“Thermodynamic perversity” at its finest…
Not to mention the necessity for excess wind capacity to charge batteries to ensure that there is enough to power the electrolysis to keep it running most of the time. It wouldn’t want to be limited by wind’s capacity factor.
Oh don't worry about the batteries. They'd be mostly for show. When your government is going to subsidize them, stick them out there. Maybe they can provide some safety in the event of voltage irregularities for a few moments. But all of these projects are connected to the grid. And WEGH2, as we noted, was going to install three 50 MW gas turbines for the very capacity factor reason you stated.
We're friendly with Robert Bryce. He's told us that someone he knows in the business calls this hydrogen hopefest a "thermodynamic obscenity."
But to be fair, the G7 today is filled with the effective equivalent of drama teachers and labor lawyers when it comes to decisions based on those principles.
Rube Goldberg couldn’t possibly design a better system for failure (BSF^2 in acronym land) than did these fools. In addition to the ignorance surrounding safely operating nuclear power plants and every idiotic effort to close them, no one acknowledges the dangers of ammonia. Ammonia is highly toxic and corrosive. When it touches moisture in the body, it forms a caustic solution that burns skin, eyes, and the respiratory tract. Low levels cause severe irritation, while high concentrations can cause fatal lung fluid buildup or suffocation.
But, it’s “carbon free”! These morons assume they can produce, transport, deconstruct and reliably deliver magic, while publicly owning chemical companies have experimented nothing but money losing efforts in their “green hydrogen” projects.
It’s past time to call bullfeathers on all of these pie in the sky (PITS) projects that sound so simple on paper that experienced chemical engineers laugh out loud (LOL for all of the acronym lovers out there ALOT)
+10 for capitalizing on the acronym angle. (golf clap for BSF^2)
Toxic? Corrosive? Caustic? Burns skin, eyes and the respiratory tract? Fatal lung buildup and suffocation? (We're assuming you included aquatic organisms in the toxic group. Don't leave out our trout...).
But it's an RFNBO that doesn't give off CO2 when combusted or recracked back to hydrogen, so you mammals and fish and such will just have to deal with all those minor inconveniences.
You Mentalists have done it again. You lay out the broad construct of progressive government programs that rely entirely on taxpayer money, temporarily enrich connected corporations and individuals, then fail as they always do. And giving the least stupid alternatives to achieve the same questionable goals, eM provides the best rational view of irrational engineered realities.
Reading this piece was simplicity itself. As ever, I can't imagine less competent systems than the ones western nations are involved in (energy, land use, social constructs, DEI initiatives, deconstructionist clownery, cat culture over human reproductive flourishing). Guilt and pretend truths outweigh everything else when your brain is corrupted by fear and a desire for control.
Did we just do that? Huh, we weren't even thinking that when we wrote it, but thanks! ;)
Now, if you turn your head sideways and squint just right, you might find that cat culture you mentioned is what fixes all environmental ills in the long run, when you come right down to it.
Stay with me, indulge me for a minute here, Chris.
Cat culture, "furries" and that whole schmear are not exactly boosting the birth rate. Extrapolating from the present trend, global population drops to 2 billion in maybe 400 years or so, at which point it is plummeting even faster than what took it there.
So in far less time than the present Holocene, our impact is going to be quite "attenuated" by a population crash, 90%+fewer people = Ehrlich's dream/Malthus' fear (population/resources), and earth's natural processes will do their thing, making evidence of our brief existence trashing the place eventually something you have to dig in the ground to find.
Given that looks to be the odds on favorite outcome, maybe you should go thank a cat culturist or furry today?
Yeah I like the odds more than the outcome. Flourishing, even if it involves painful changes to help instead of hurt our environment works better in our household. The furries + Malthusianism = population implosion seems accurate but really dumb.
This was never about the hydrogen. It was always about Germany wanting to have a “check box” that they could fill in to “validate” their harebrained plan to shut off their reactors that didn’t involve Nordstream gas.
Suppose the German chancellor doesn't pull off his scheme to nullify an AfD victory and they seized the levers; any chance they return to an energy policy routed in reality?
If they get past the first hurdle (the scheme to nullify), then certainly.
But even if that were to happen, you do not build 20 nuclear power plants overnight.
You just stop building solar in a place where it has a 12% capacity factor, and wind which was quaint and useful on the Dutch landscape centuries ago.
And if you're going to make "green hydrogen" for anything, you do it domestically from your rebuilt nuclear power generation. Because it gives you 90%+ capacity factor for 60 or more years, and it does so safely.
Grovel, beg and plead with an unsympathetic Russian bear for some hydrocarbons to bridge the gap? The gulf caused by supply constraints even to referb the deactivated reactors may be make my hypothetical scenario moot anyway
a) just keep paying 3X or more than the cost of that piped gas price for landed LNG on an energy equivalent basis.
b) burn more lignite (we love to look at the RWE real time dashboard for Germany in the evenings in the dead of winter and the few months of warmth in summer. For example, as we are typing this, lignite, the dirtiest form of coal to burn for electricity on earth, is making up 73% of RWEs electricity generation in Germany, 4,706/6,454 Mw, with wind 0.27% (17.69 MW TOTAL) and the sun down. Dashboard > https://www.rwe-production-data.com/en/map
Their "Energiewende" will take years to fix. You don't undo a decade+ of that energy/environmental/economic wreckage and waste in 3-4 years, unfortunately.
Worst is that generation(s) of kids(now adults) raised convinced that nuclear is the worst thing ever- cancer and death and solar and wind are capable solutions. Quazi-religious upbringing that is going to be difficult to erase. That mental cancer spread to neighbor nation quite a bit. I remember watching France 24 around say 2013 (decent international channel otherwise) and environmental program praising "green Germany" with wind turbines and solar PV "revolution".
I totally forgot that the US did something similar. The goal was to use nuclear generated electricity to produce hydrogen. In 2022/2023 it was all the rage. Apparently Nine Mile Point is still producing hydrogen.
"OSWEGO, NY (Mar. 7, 2023) — Hydrogen production has commenced at the nation’s first 1 MW demonstration scale, nuclear-powered clean hydrogen production facility at Constellation’s Nine Mile Point Nuclear Plant in Oswego, New York, an advancement that will help demonstrate the potential for hydrogen to power a clean economy."
I get that ammonia is a "practical hydrogen carrier" but so is natural gas a "practical hydrogen carrier." So instead of carbon dioxide, that is plant food, we get nitrogen oxide (and ammonia already was plant food) but is a much more dangerous pollutant in the form of NOx (smog, health effects, acidification, and ozone damage). There does not seem to be a clear answer on NOx emissions from ammonia vs. natural gas plants emissions of NOx, but it seems to be larger. I always worried much more about my nitric acid in the lab than the carbonic acid in my soft drink. If they were really so focused on playing with a big chemistry set, maybe they should make "green methane" using the Sabatier process and sell that instead. Same BS, different market.
Emphatically agree with the premise about creating "green methane". Or they can create "green methanol" via the reaction between H2 and CO2 and use the methanol as feedstock to manufacture synthetic petrol, as what Porsche is doing. In my opinion, that's the most effective use of hydrogen.
We're with you. Natural gas is the most practical hydrogen carrier. No electricity/electrolysis/heat/pressure/catalysts, no water splitting, no fixing nitrogen from air, etc. needed. It's "organic" in that regard. ;)
First two drafts had a line about the NOx issue but pulled it; word count + thinking that the volume if this crap would never be enough to be a major issue.
Not a chemist but interesting comment on nitric acid in the lab. Best I can recall, for tests challenging a sorbent (for a patent we have) with a lead solution (lead sulfate? can't remember), the damn carbonic acid from atmospheric CO2 was an issue (where nitrogen wasn't).
It is really a shame someone clever hasn't used this hype as a cover story to get natural gas infrastructure pemritted and built. The Maritimes has plenty of natural gas to export to Germany. Maybe they can brand it as saving Germany from Trump Gas?
I think the Carney govt. sees the play as west, to BC for export to Asian markets. Maybe he shares Trudeau's concern that with EU pushing crazy aggressive "net zero by __" dates, long-term future supply partners are better directed south (U.S.) and to Asia.
NATO's war in Ukraine.
"Putin intentionally reduced natural gas supplies" presumably by bombing Russia's own Nordstream pipeline and forcing the EU to stop buying gas they would willingly supply on long-term contracts at fixed pricing below spot market pricing. So evil!
Your next sentence is "The EU fruitlessly sanctioned Russia and planned to phase out Russian oil and natural gas". You contradict yourself in consecutive sentences FFS.
Putin made up reasons to start reducing flow months before he invaded Ukraine. That is all well documented. That occurred about a year before NATO members or allies, with or without U.S. intelligence/involvement blew up Nordstream.
And, yes, EU sanctions were fruitless. But worse. Much of the nat gas they were getting by Nordstream and other pipelines that the EU isn't getting now they are getting instead from (...wait for it...) RUSSIAN LNG cargoes. And paying 3X the price on a BTU basis for those cargoes vs. piped gas.
The sanctions were, in fact, fruitless. We did not contradict ourselves, once you understand the facts involved.
As if all of this wasn’t obvious from the beginning 🙄
I know, right??!?!?!?
Thanks for the article, Mental. Balancing the chemical reactions is the first step in the absurdity of using ammonia to get hydrogen. The sheer mass difference of ammonia (16) and diatomic hydrogen (2) should be the end of the conversation before even considering energy inputs to make and break ammonia. Only government subsidies can make the sum of many negative numbers equal a positive value.
Keep up the good work, fellas!
Well, they are multiplying negative numbers, not adding them up!
🤣
Thanks!
Touche!
Saskatchewan actually has commercially viable hydrogen but pints blue hydrogen in the ground and tested over 4000 Sq km at between 96 percent and 86 percent. Very little input if it’s coming right out of the ground. As well our helium in Saskatchewan is also much easier and cheaper to produce as it is mixed with nitrogen not LNG. Right now it’s only 3 percent of world’s production but expanding as we speak to 10 percent of Global production!
https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/globenewswire_press_releases/max-power-nearly-triples-size-of-rider-natural-hydrogen-project-stakes-2-112-additional-sq/article_8e8f3c6a-6727-59a4-83a0-62264997a0d6.html
Wow. Doomberg has written about the prospects elsewhere but this is the first we’ve seen about its possibility in SK.
Thx for sending!!
Not a problem! Sask has huge potential in green energy if you want to call it that. As far as European Markets well it depends to be seen. Let them freeze in the dark if they do not wish to support Canadian producers. Or they can go beg the Russians to keep them alive with their energy pipelines/ exports now probably cut in by Ukrainian/ E.U./NATO Supplied Weapons or funds? The E.U. Itself actually imports between 86 and 95 percent of its energy requirements every day! 10.7 or so Million BPD of oil. They produce less than 4 million, LNG. They only produce 12 percent of their yearly requirements. If they lose both Russian and M.E. Imports where is it coming from! No one believes pipelines are as vulnerable as tankers in Hormuz? 😂😂😂
The foolishness of this ammonia fantasy is beyond belief. Total economic failure awaits these people.
We can think of better uses of Canadian’s tax $ in the energy arena than wind/solar electrolysis derived hydrogen or ammonia.
As Chris Keefer noted.
Thank you, Very well done. I am not fan of hydrogen. The New York magical solution proponents think that hydrogen production can be developed using wind power that would otherwise be curtailed. I cannot imagine any industrial process working well with such intermittancy.
But what do you expect from pie-in-the-sky dreamers? They can't even get around their heads that you can't just switch on and off an electrolysis machine in order to produce hydrogen. But that's the mindset of clueless idiots who have never worked in industrial operations before...
New York is rivaling California for magical solutions.
Who’ll win the trophy of consequences?
🤦♂️
This article mirrors the absolute collapse of the "green hydrogen market" here in Australia, despite the millions (if not billions) of taxpayer dollars that the federal Labor government has sunk into the venture, and continues to do so...
Trying to hack physics and trick economics has been widespread in the advanced world the last 20 years, mate. It’ll end eventually.
Think the Merriam Webster definition of sustainable. Not the sustainabilchemy version of “green” hydrogen and such.
Agreed. The fact that the concept of "the Hydrogen Economy" has been floating around for well over 50 years and has not even come close to fruition speaks volumes as the the lack of validity of "green hydrogen" as a commodity. It's the same BS with the advocates pushing for the introduction of "green steel" production, yet unable to realise that if "green steel" was actually feasible the Japanese would've implemented it over 75 years ago during the 1950s...
Ok, so let’s get it right…
The diagram shows that the “green hydrogen” will be produced from water by electrolysis and then synthesized into ammonia using Haber-Bosch. After shipping the ammonia, some of it will be cracked to produce hydrogen and nitrogen - essentially reversing the process. And then the hydrogen will be run through fuel cells, producing water and essentially reversing the electrolysis process. TWO processes that are, for all intents and purposes, reversed.
“Thermodynamic perversity” at its finest…
Not to mention the necessity for excess wind capacity to charge batteries to ensure that there is enough to power the electrolysis to keep it running most of the time. It wouldn’t want to be limited by wind’s capacity factor.
Oh don't worry about the batteries. They'd be mostly for show. When your government is going to subsidize them, stick them out there. Maybe they can provide some safety in the event of voltage irregularities for a few moments. But all of these projects are connected to the grid. And WEGH2, as we noted, was going to install three 50 MW gas turbines for the very capacity factor reason you stated.
We're friendly with Robert Bryce. He's told us that someone he knows in the business calls this hydrogen hopefest a "thermodynamic obscenity."
So you're both on the same thread there.
Yeah, those batteries and other "virtual inertia devices" will be as useful as those present during the Spanish blackout last year...
This is what you get when you have a Prime Minister who was a drama teacher making decisions that should be based on physical principles.
Correct.
But to be fair, the G7 today is filled with the effective equivalent of drama teachers and labor lawyers when it comes to decisions based on those principles.
It's part of how we got where we are today.
I'm Canadian. Trudeau is, was, and always will be an idiot of unprecedented proportions.
Let's hope he was the bottom.
Would be too painful to watch your great country set a new precedent.
(Maternal grandmother was from Winnipeg. Visited several times in the late 1960s. So I guess that makes me 1/4 Canadian?)
Green Chicken, et.alia.,
Rube Goldberg couldn’t possibly design a better system for failure (BSF^2 in acronym land) than did these fools. In addition to the ignorance surrounding safely operating nuclear power plants and every idiotic effort to close them, no one acknowledges the dangers of ammonia. Ammonia is highly toxic and corrosive. When it touches moisture in the body, it forms a caustic solution that burns skin, eyes, and the respiratory tract. Low levels cause severe irritation, while high concentrations can cause fatal lung fluid buildup or suffocation.
But, it’s “carbon free”! These morons assume they can produce, transport, deconstruct and reliably deliver magic, while publicly owning chemical companies have experimented nothing but money losing efforts in their “green hydrogen” projects.
It’s past time to call bullfeathers on all of these pie in the sky (PITS) projects that sound so simple on paper that experienced chemical engineers laugh out loud (LOL for all of the acronym lovers out there ALOT)
+10 for capitalizing on the acronym angle. (golf clap for BSF^2)
Toxic? Corrosive? Caustic? Burns skin, eyes and the respiratory tract? Fatal lung buildup and suffocation? (We're assuming you included aquatic organisms in the toxic group. Don't leave out our trout...).
But it's an RFNBO that doesn't give off CO2 when combusted or recracked back to hydrogen, so you mammals and fish and such will just have to deal with all those minor inconveniences.
p.s. it's OK to call bullshit here.
;)
You Mentalists have done it again. You lay out the broad construct of progressive government programs that rely entirely on taxpayer money, temporarily enrich connected corporations and individuals, then fail as they always do. And giving the least stupid alternatives to achieve the same questionable goals, eM provides the best rational view of irrational engineered realities.
Reading this piece was simplicity itself. As ever, I can't imagine less competent systems than the ones western nations are involved in (energy, land use, social constructs, DEI initiatives, deconstructionist clownery, cat culture over human reproductive flourishing). Guilt and pretend truths outweigh everything else when your brain is corrupted by fear and a desire for control.
Did we just do that? Huh, we weren't even thinking that when we wrote it, but thanks! ;)
Now, if you turn your head sideways and squint just right, you might find that cat culture you mentioned is what fixes all environmental ills in the long run, when you come right down to it.
Stay with me, indulge me for a minute here, Chris.
Cat culture, "furries" and that whole schmear are not exactly boosting the birth rate. Extrapolating from the present trend, global population drops to 2 billion in maybe 400 years or so, at which point it is plummeting even faster than what took it there.
So in far less time than the present Holocene, our impact is going to be quite "attenuated" by a population crash, 90%+fewer people = Ehrlich's dream/Malthus' fear (population/resources), and earth's natural processes will do their thing, making evidence of our brief existence trashing the place eventually something you have to dig in the ground to find.
Given that looks to be the odds on favorite outcome, maybe you should go thank a cat culturist or furry today?
Just sayin'
;)
Yeah I like the odds more than the outcome. Flourishing, even if it involves painful changes to help instead of hurt our environment works better in our household. The furries + Malthusianism = population implosion seems accurate but really dumb.
Agreed on the household level non-application.
But it’s not a question of smart or dumb at this point, we believe. The cake is already baked in the numbers.
This was never about the hydrogen. It was always about Germany wanting to have a “check box” that they could fill in to “validate” their harebrained plan to shut off their reactors that didn’t involve Nordstream gas.
Hahn, Haber, von Helmholtz, Hertz .... so many brilliant German scientists have to be rolling over in their graves right about now.
Suppose the German chancellor doesn't pull off his scheme to nullify an AfD victory and they seized the levers; any chance they return to an energy policy routed in reality?
If they get past the first hurdle (the scheme to nullify), then certainly.
But even if that were to happen, you do not build 20 nuclear power plants overnight.
You just stop building solar in a place where it has a 12% capacity factor, and wind which was quaint and useful on the Dutch landscape centuries ago.
And if you're going to make "green hydrogen" for anything, you do it domestically from your rebuilt nuclear power generation. Because it gives you 90%+ capacity factor for 60 or more years, and it does so safely.
Grovel, beg and plead with an unsympathetic Russian bear for some hydrocarbons to bridge the gap? The gulf caused by supply constraints even to referb the deactivated reactors may be make my hypothetical scenario moot anyway
That, plus:
a) just keep paying 3X or more than the cost of that piped gas price for landed LNG on an energy equivalent basis.
b) burn more lignite (we love to look at the RWE real time dashboard for Germany in the evenings in the dead of winter and the few months of warmth in summer. For example, as we are typing this, lignite, the dirtiest form of coal to burn for electricity on earth, is making up 73% of RWEs electricity generation in Germany, 4,706/6,454 Mw, with wind 0.27% (17.69 MW TOTAL) and the sun down. Dashboard > https://www.rwe-production-data.com/en/map
Their "Energiewende" will take years to fix. You don't undo a decade+ of that energy/environmental/economic wreckage and waste in 3-4 years, unfortunately.
Worst is that generation(s) of kids(now adults) raised convinced that nuclear is the worst thing ever- cancer and death and solar and wind are capable solutions. Quazi-religious upbringing that is going to be difficult to erase. That mental cancer spread to neighbor nation quite a bit. I remember watching France 24 around say 2013 (decent international channel otherwise) and environmental program praising "green Germany" with wind turbines and solar PV "revolution".
I totally forgot that the US did something similar. The goal was to use nuclear generated electricity to produce hydrogen. In 2022/2023 it was all the rage. Apparently Nine Mile Point is still producing hydrogen.
"OSWEGO, NY (Mar. 7, 2023) — Hydrogen production has commenced at the nation’s first 1 MW demonstration scale, nuclear-powered clean hydrogen production facility at Constellation’s Nine Mile Point Nuclear Plant in Oswego, New York, an advancement that will help demonstrate the potential for hydrogen to power a clean economy."
Well that demonstration (of what won't work) project is capable of producing about 560 kilograms of hydrogen per day—roughly 204 metric tons per year.
IF it runs continuously.
The world uses ~100 million metric tons annually.
"Stupid is as stupid does, Mrs. Blue." - Forrest Gump
I get that ammonia is a "practical hydrogen carrier" but so is natural gas a "practical hydrogen carrier." So instead of carbon dioxide, that is plant food, we get nitrogen oxide (and ammonia already was plant food) but is a much more dangerous pollutant in the form of NOx (smog, health effects, acidification, and ozone damage). There does not seem to be a clear answer on NOx emissions from ammonia vs. natural gas plants emissions of NOx, but it seems to be larger. I always worried much more about my nitric acid in the lab than the carbonic acid in my soft drink. If they were really so focused on playing with a big chemistry set, maybe they should make "green methane" using the Sabatier process and sell that instead. Same BS, different market.
Emphatically agree with the premise about creating "green methane". Or they can create "green methanol" via the reaction between H2 and CO2 and use the methanol as feedstock to manufacture synthetic petrol, as what Porsche is doing. In my opinion, that's the most effective use of hydrogen.
Great color.
We're with you. Natural gas is the most practical hydrogen carrier. No electricity/electrolysis/heat/pressure/catalysts, no water splitting, no fixing nitrogen from air, etc. needed. It's "organic" in that regard. ;)
First two drafts had a line about the NOx issue but pulled it; word count + thinking that the volume if this crap would never be enough to be a major issue.
Not a chemist but interesting comment on nitric acid in the lab. Best I can recall, for tests challenging a sorbent (for a patent we have) with a lead solution (lead sulfate? can't remember), the damn carbonic acid from atmospheric CO2 was an issue (where nitrogen wasn't).