Father; husband; mechanical engineer. Posting from my self-hosted Lemmy instance here in beautiful New Jersey. I also post from my Pixelfed instance.
Those are fair considerations. However, I think in the context of a massive cargo ship, a penalty on energy density might be worth it to avoid the risks associated with ammonia releases. Of course, a nuclear reactor powered ship would run on the highest energy density fuel and is arguably safer to operate than a ship that runs on ammonia.
Hydrogen is definetly harder to store than ammonia and it takes a lot of energy to compress or liquify it.
It takes a lot of energy to convert hydrogen to ammonia and whatever challenges there are to handling and storing hydrogen, ammonia has its own. At least a hydrogen release isn’t a toxic, polluting event.
And I certainly don’t want commercial nuclear ships, because companies will just create “independent” companies that will “mysteriously” go bankrupt once a ship reaches end of life and needs to be decontaminated.
So the taxpayer would have to pay for the decomissioning costs.
Yes. Let’s just get ahead of the game and nationalize shipping.
Hydrogen will leak through a latex balloon, but it is not going to leak through the steel wall of a pressure vessel. The leak risk occurs at the various fitting connections in a hydrogen system, which is overcome by using the proper fittings.
That is an interesting article, but the authors are clear that they don’t know what to expect for hydrogen leakage in a developed hydrogen economy. Sure, hydrogen might be a greenhouse gas, but you can’t really compare it to carbon dioxide because that’s a waste product that we actively dispose of to the atmosphere. You can’t really compare it to methane either because it’s naturally abundant and the LEL is much higher. Relatively leaky valves and fittings are unfortunately acceptable in natural gas service. In other words, hydrogen leakage is barely tolerable, so we have no choice but to employ technology and techniques to prevent it.
It does not leak like crazy. I know because I have experience engineering and operating high pressure electrolysis, storage, and fueling systems for hydrogen. Even when it does leak, what’s nice about hydrogen is that it’s not toxic to humans or pollutive to the environment, unlike ammonia or fossil fuels. Hydrogen leaks are easily mitigated with proven detection and ventilation techniques.
The serious issues in the articles you linked are essentially red tape and public perception, which have to be surmountable if we’re taking global warming seriously.
Why run ammonia when you can just run liquid hydrogen? Why run liquid hydrogen when you can just run a nuclear reactor?
My response from the last time I saw this question: