POWER!!!! Fortescue Future Industries, page-5822

Like so many pro-hydrogen publications and articles, this one also overlooks the nub of the technical challenges of hydrogen, namely logistics (i.e., the storage and transportation of hydrogen), which limits hydrogen's use to only bespoke specialist applications,

Physically making hydrogen (or extracting it naturally from the earth) is a cake-walk; just about anyone can do that. All making hydrogen needs is a sufficient energy source to endothermically break the covalent bonds between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms and all extracting it requires is a hole drilled into the earth to where the hydrogen is to be found, a the holes is then cased and capped.

Those are the easy parts. But where hydrogen projects fall over in terms of economic feasibility is in the handling of the gas once it has been produced/extracted.

Being an inordinately small molecule, hydrogen is notoriously leaky, requiring sophisticated (read: expensive) valves, mechanical seals, pumps, piping and welds. And because it is a colourless, odourless gas, with one of the highest coefficients of diffusivity of all the industrial gases, detecting hydrogen leaks require extensive instrumentation at just about all points of hydrogen infrastructure, even points where there are no joints, intersections or welds. This is clearly impossible.

This is due to hydrogen's insane metallurgical interaction when it comes to metal components such as pipes, pumps, valves, seals, welds and storage vessels. Even at room temperature and under normal pressure operating conditions, hydride formation of the metal lattice itself occurs, and metal components and pipe also suffer from hydrogen embrittlement, including hydrogen enhanced decohesion (HEDE)] and hydrogen enhanced localised plasticity (HELP).

For a better understanding, refer here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S135063072100100X



(I'll wager London to a brick that the percentage of FMG shareholders who are conversant with these issues can be counted on my one hand.)

Here's a useful video that discusses the issues in lay terms, along with suggestions of dealing with hydrogen embrittlement (as can be seen in the video, none of the detection and mitigation measures are remotely cheap, requiring expensive componentry):




So, no; no matter what colour hydrogen we're talking about (green, blue, grey, pink, turquoise, yellow, or white) makes no difference in diminishing the structural limitations. The methodology by which the hydrogen comes into being is irrelevant; what happens after hydrogen has been produced is where the expensive challenges lie and which is where the economics of hydrogen projects fall over.

It's not some gnarly dudes on HotCopper who are being naysayers about hydrogen; its the immutable laws of Physics, Chemistry and Economics.

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