Hydrogen Embrittlement Barriers: A Picture of What the "Hydrogen Economy" Nonsense Would Entail.

[NNadir]

The paper to which I'll refer is open to the public, a gift from the American Chemical Society to the General Public:

Mechanism and Evaluation of Hydrogen Permeation Barriers: A Critical Review Yufan Li, Francesco Barzagli, Peng Liu, Xiaoan Zhang, Zhao Yang, Min Xiao, Yangqiang Huang, Xiao Luo, Chao’en Li, He’an Luo, and Rui Zhang Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (39), 15752-15773

Unfortunately the paper begins with a paragraph that is, if not an outright lie, is nonetheless exceedingly misleading because of the inclusion of a single word, which I will bold, underline, and italicize:

The exploration of green technology is a fundamental mission for humanity, and the development of renewable and nonpolluting energy resources has now become a critical challenge, indispensable for guaranteeing a more sustainable future. To address this issue, much attention has recently been focused on hydrogen, one of the most abundant elements in nature, whose oxidation releases three times the energy (per unit mass) of hydrocarbon combustion, (1) and the only product that is generated is water. Today hydrogen is considered an excellent energy vector as it can be generated by electrolysis from renewable sources, and as a clean fuel it could have the potential to replace gas and oil and become the main consumable energy type in the future.

Can is a very different word than is.

So called "renewable energy" remains, as of late 2023, completely useless at addressing climate change, a trivial form of energy which is dependent on access to gas, and oiland all production of hydrogen using it - if it is actually taking place at all - is trivial, although the marketing by the fossil fuel salespeople writing here and elsewhere like to represent otherwise. Hydrogen is made from dangerous fossil fuels, at a huge cost in exergy destruction which translates into environmental destruction. (The production of hydrogen is nonetheless necessary to maintain the world food supply, since it is a key intermediate in the production of ammonia based fertilizers.)

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

One can see their barely disguised fossil fuel advertising videos, rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen here, at Ennui and Excuses, and many places elsewhere.

In China, the fossil fuel from which hydrogen is made is dangerous coal. In most other places it is dangerous natural gas, with some dangerous petroleum thrown in.

Anyway, to get to the point, the problems - only some of which are listed - with hydrogen are listed here in this, with a focus on the one that makes hydrogen a very difficult and potentially extremely dangerous material to handle, embrittlement. The paper is open but I'll excerpt the relevant sections anyway:

However, some serious limitations of the use of hydrogen comes from its very low energy density (per unit volume) and the consequent need for high-technology solutions for its storage and transport. Different approaches have been developed for the storage of hydrogen in tanks, including extreme gas compression, (2) liquefaction under cryogenic conditions (?253 °C), (3) powder metal adsorption, (4) carbon absorption, (5) etc. Liquefaction consumes an enormous amount of energy to reach the very low temperatures required. (6) Storage with solid-state adsorbents normally needs energy to recover the hydrogen and could not use the pipeline networks for transportation. Thus, high pressure storage is normally the most convenient storage method for domestic use.

Generally, the hydrogen storage tank is mainly composed of stainless steel or its alloy due to its cost effectivity, maturity of manufacturing, suitability for compressed storage, etc. There normally have four types of hydrogen storage tanks as listed in Table 1. (7?10) The latest hydrogen storage tank are types III and IV: the main body of type III hydrogen storage tank is made of stainless steel or alloy, while type IV (Figure 1) is the polymer liner, coated with different materials, such as a high density polymer liner or carbon fiber composite. (6)

The reason why proper coating is applied in type IV is due to the so-called hydrogen embrittlement, which can make stainless steel fragile and foamy. Hydrogen embrittlement, also known as hydrogen-assisted cracking or hydrogen-induced cracking, is a reduction in the ductility of a metal due to absorbed hydrogen. (11) The embrittlement of a metal is caused by the diffusion of gaseous hydrogen within the material’s structure. During the hydrogen diffusion, extreme stress and distortion of the metallic crystal lattice are created, which leads to a reduction of the toughness on the surface of metal materials up to cracking and ultimately results in the leakages of hydrogen and its isotopes, deuterium and tritium. (12,13)

Hydrogen embrittlement is an irreversible phenomenon that must be prevented, as once the damage to the structure occurs, it will be permanent, and it is impossible to do any treatment (Figure 2).

I added the bold, italics, and underlining.

The rest of the paper is all about how we could rip up all of our infrastructure on the planet to store hydrogen for a putative "hydrogen economy" that's been an item of delusional bullshit for half a century, including hype from overly bourgeois intellectual Lilliputians of the likes of Amory Lovins and worse, to waste energy and destroy exergy to make hydrogen from coal, gas and oil, which is how it has always been made, and will continue to be made.

It's a three card Monte game.

It's 2023. In this century, as of this writing, from the week of January 2, 2000 when the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 368.70 ppm to now, for the week beginning October 1, 2023 when it's 49.10 ppm higher, this near the annual minimum for these concentrations:

Week beginning on October 01, 2023: 418.34 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 415.30 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 393.52 ppm
Last updated: October 07, 2023

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

Advertising hydrogen for climate purposes is exactly the equivalent of the practice in the 1940s and 1950s of tobacco companies advertising cigarette smoking among doctors:

It is time to think anew.

Have a nice weekend.

[Turbineguy]

1. H2 has a heat content of 61,000 btu/lb

By comparison Diesel 2 has about 17,500 Btu/lb. I think hydrogen could be useful in a stationary environment where system inspections are better and more frequent. I don't see it used in transport, especially consumer cars. Hydrogen embrittlement is a well-known problem in welding where hydrogen inclusion is a problem.

[NNadir]

2. The energy content of hydrogen is actually irrelevant, since it is made from fossil fuels...

...with the destruction of exergy.

Under the actual conditions it's a case of a perpetual motion machine.

Were it made by increasing exergy of high temperature nuclear thermochemical cycles, there might be circumstances where it could be burned, if in excess over the production of fluid fuels such as DME or methanol - or less desirable, Fischer Tropsch fuels - it might prove useful for load leveling, but in an intelligently run world this would be a rare circumstance.

It's a valuable captive intermediate, but its physical properties make it useless, and in fact, dangerous, as a consumer product.

My son's masters degree was in welding special alloys, and we discussed hydrogen embrittlement in this context a number of times. His Ph.D. program is in nuclear engineering, specifically nuclear materials.

I'm trying, with some light success, to push him in the general direction of high temperature refractories, but I'm not his advisor.