Hydrogen is viewed as a promising alternative to fossil fuel, but the methods used to make it either generate too much carbon dioxide or are too expensive. Rice University researchers have found a way to harvest hydrogen from plastic waste using a low-emissions method that could more than pay for itself.
  • @[email protected]English
    39•1 year ago

    Sounds promising but remember that when there’s news of hydrogen, there’s a fossil fuel company behind it

    This is from SLB, the company that Kevin Wyss works for. Took about 30 seconds of googling to find out that it’s essentially a greenwashing fossil fuel company

    hold up it’s actually the biggest offshore drilling company in the world. lol, lmao even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlumberger

    • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      Lol, energy company interested in energy research.

      Such a gotcha…

      You’re shitting on this guy? Check yourself

      Who do you think is going to engineer the transition to a circular economy…my money is on actual engineers, not code monkeys

      You could also, you know, read the article…

      By comparison, “green” hydrogen—produced using renewable energy sources to split water into its two component elements—costs roughly $5 for just over two pounds. Though cheaper, most of the nearly 100 million tons of hydrogen used globally in 2022 was derived from fossil fuels, its production generating roughly 12 tons of carbon dioxide per ton of hydrogen.

      “The main form of hydrogen used today is ‘gray’ hydrogen, which is produced through steam-methane reforming, a method that generates a lot of carbon dioxide,” said James Tour, Rice’s T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering. "Demand for hydrogen will likely skyrocket over the next few decades, so we can’t keep making it the same way we have up until now if we’re serious about reaching net zero emissions by 2050

  • @jantinEnglish
    14•1 year ago

    So this is either a big oil corp spending pennies on theorycrafting some exciting buzzword technosolutions

    Or

    A big oil corp which figured out that if they want to stay relevant for more than 10 yrs they need to diversify into other energy sources. With all the deserved hate they attract such companies are probably most likely to invent and implement aomething like this at scale.

    It doesn’t change the fact that they should be nationalized asap and their decisionmakers jailed.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•1 year ago

      95% of hydrogen is made using natural gas in a process called natural gas reforming. They see a way to maintain their investments.

    • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
      -6•1 year ago

      It doesn’t change the fact that they should be nationalized asap

      How did that go in Venezuela?

      Sounds like a really effective way of deterring innovation to me.

        • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
          0•1 year ago

          That’s the only recent nationalisation I can think of, do you have any other successful ones?

          Or are you saying Venezuela’s energy infrastructure wasn’t fucked by nationalisation?

  • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    “We know that polyethylene, for example, is made of 86% carbon and 14% hydrogen, and we demonstrated that we are able to recover up to 68% of that atomic hydrogen as gas with a 94% purity,” Wyss said. "Developing the methods and expertise to characterize and quantify all the gases, including hydrogen, produced by this method was a difficult but rewarding process for me

    The hero we need

    • @TropicalDingdongEnglish
      7•1 year ago

      How much energy is used to do so and how much CO2 is released as part of the process?

      • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Doesn’t say, but if the electricity used is from renewables then it’s irrelevant, as it can potentially produce graphene at 5% of the current price

        Found this re co2

        Compared to commercial methods for carbon nanotube production that are being used right now, ours uses about 90% less energy and generates 90%-94% less carbon dioxide," Wyss said.

        https://phys.org/news/2023-02-joule-technique-efficiently-would-be-pollution.html

        If they’re making graphene and hydrogen then there can’t be much left over can there?

    • @[email protected]English
      6•1 year ago

      Not quite. This is greenwashing. the company funding the research is the world’s largest offshore drilling company. You got suckered or are trying to sucker in other people

      • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
        -2•1 year ago

        Rice University are greenwashing?

        And so what if an energy company is paying for research into hydrogen and plastic waste upcycling?

        Edit. the United States Army Corps of Engineers gave them funding…

        • @[email protected]English
          4•1 year ago

          The army is one of the biggest ghg emitters in the world. Now I’m certain you’re just sharing propaganda. Why would a fossil fuel company push hydrogen technology? Because hydrogen production requires fossil fuels.

    • The_PeteEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      So, the get 8% of the bottle into a usable form . . . by turning plastic bottles into gases. So where does the rest of the bottle go? How much energy is used for that?

      • Bernie EcclestonedOPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Second paragraph…

        In this work, we converted waste plastics—including mixed waste plastics that don’t have to be sorted by type or washed—into high-yield hydrogen gas and high-value graphene