2y ago

Making hydrogen from waste plastic could pay for itself

techxplore.com

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2y ago

Making hydrogen from waste plastic could pay for itself

techxplore.com /news/2023-09-hydrogen-plastic-pay.html

18 comments

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
- 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
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.
- 95% of hydrogen is made using natural gas in a process called natural gas reforming. They see a way to maintain their investments.
- 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.
  
  Leftist mentions nationalization
  Reactionaries: Bu-But, VENIZUALA!!
"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
- How much energy is used to do so and how much CO2 is released as part of the process?
  
  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?
- 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
  
  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...
- 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?
  
  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

18 comments