France hits hydrogen jackpot: World's largest reserve valued $92 billion found

[NNadir]

12. One of the more stupid things bourgeois fools focus on is their fucking cars. The car CULTure is not sustainable...

...in any form, and in fact, there are billions of people who live on this planet who have never been in one. Unfortunately, the bourgeois types that populate this space couldn't care less about human poverty, anymore than they care about the destruction of the planetary atmosphere and they always want to talk about fucking cars.

The worship of the car CULTure accounts for vast destruction, and, notably, the rise of fascism via the mechanism of Eloon Musk, who at one time here at DU, ten or so years ago, was worshipped because of the stupid idea that electric cars are "green," only slightly less stupid than the idea that hydrogen is "green."

Cars are not "green," in any form. We need to find ways to minimize their use.

This said, it may be useful in a sustainable future - one increasingly unlikely but still barely feasible - there would be some use for self propelled vehicles, such as ambulances, fire trucks, farm tractors, and certain kinds of trucks. In this case, using technology known as thermochemical hydrogen cycles to produce captive hydrogen, one would close the carbon cycle by hydrogenating carbon dioxide to produce the wonder fuel DME, about which I have written here many times. Note that the critical temperature of DME is 401 Kelvin meaning that it can be liquified at temperatures higher than the boiling point of water (373 K). It can displace all fossil fuels, LPG, diesel fuel, dangerous natural gas, etc. There are many thousands of papers in the primary scientific literature on the subject, which is not to say that they have led to industrialization of DME beyond the limited uses it now enjoys, for instance as a propellant in hair spray cans, having displaced chlorofluorocarbons. The reason this has not happened is attributable to human stupidity. DME is, among other things, an excellent refrigerant, and in theory could replace all hydrofluorocarbons, albeit with the elevated risk connected with its flammability.

The critical temperature of hydrogen is 33 Kelvin, just 33 degrees above absolute zero. It can't be liquified at the temperature of dry ice. It's exceedingly stupid, almost criminally stupid, to hype hydrogen as a consumer product but there's no suppressing this moronic hype, which has popped up like an ugly hydra, every decade or so for half a century, with much public idiocy attached to it.

Hydrogen is, however an important captive intermediate, which is why it is synthesized industrially using dangerous fossil fuels with exergy destruction. The world food supply is dependent on hydrogen manufacture to make ammonia, which is the most important industrial use of this otherwise dangerous industrial product.

The great late Nobel Laureate George Olah, one of the Martians wrote a paper on this subject, closed carbon cycles, involving methanol and/or DME, in 2011. DME is superior since it is fairly chemically inert and non-toxic.

Olah's paper is here:

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898.

I have in my personal library many hundreds of scientific papers on this topic, only a small subset of which were written by Olah.

Doing this would not be easy, since it require a scientifically literate public, something we clearly don't have.

I'd suggest reading Olah's paper (or any of his other papers on the subject), but I'm not sure that hydrogen hype types can read all that well, unless it involves reading the checks provided by fossil fuel companies paying people to greenwash fossil fuels as "hydrogen" using slick marketing videos of the type we see here frequently. The practical literacy of non-professional fossil fuel marketing hydrogen people is extremely low, which is why they're so full of shit.