Explosion damages newly opened hydrogen fuelling station in Germany [View all]

[NNadir]

Explosion damages newly opened hydrogen fueling station in Germany.

Excerpts:

A fire broke out following an explosion at a hydrogen fuelling station near Augsburg, Germany on 26 June, forcing the facility to be closed down just one week after it was opened. The station’s operator, Tyczka Hydrogen, has said the station would remain closed until further notice due to the damage caused. Fortunately, no injuries were reported as a result of the blast.

Emergency services were first called to the green hydrogen fuelling station shortly after 10:10 local time following reports of an explosion. A total of 20 firefighters from the Gersthofen Fire Brigade arrived at the scene and managed to bring the fire under control before extinguishing it after a couple of hours...

There's that "green" hydrogen lie again; it's almost certainly bullshit, since the overwhelming majority of hydrogen on this planet, better than 95%, is made by steam reformation of fossil fuels, resulting in exergy destruction, the waste of energy.

I have a lot of these accounts of hydrogen "accidents" in the queue, since while I object to all schemes to declare stored energy as clean, this on a thermodynamic basis, as both batteries and hydrogen are generally storing dangerous fossil fuel energy, not clean energy, and thus make things worse not better, hydrogen is even worse on a safety level.

For now, I'll just limit myself to this one.

Hydrogen is, especially in the rare cases where it's made via electrolysis, in my view, worse than batteries and I note that while batteries can and do fail, a large fraction of the world's population owns batteries, very few people own hydrogen powered devices. Thus, ignoring even the thermodynamic penalties, hydrogen is worse, since these accidents and fires (there are quite a few if one looks) are occurring regularly at rare, not common, facilities, whereas battery failures occur among widely distributed devices.

Hydrogen is, however, an important chemical intermediate in industrial settings, essential to make as the world's food supply depends on the Haber-Bosch process to hydrogenate nitrogen to make ammonia, but as an essential commodity, it should only to be handled by trained chemical engineers, not fuel station clerks.