Does Green Hydrogen Cause Brain Damage?

German nuttiness reaches new heights

Does Green Hydrogen Cause Brain Damage?

German Nuttiness Reaches New Heights

Robert Zubrin

December 22, 1944

“To the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne.

The fortune of war is changing. This time the U.S.A. forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units…

There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town….

If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne….

All the serious civilian losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity.”

“To the German Commander. 

Nuts.”

As the above celebrated interchange illustrates, many people have believed for years that Germans are nuts. Those versed in history can cite many other examples where not only Germans, but Germany as a nation, behaved in very bizarre fashion. Some critics have ascribed this to congenital mass insanity. This is unfair. Rather, it would appear that German nuttiness is not due to lack of emotional control, but on the contrary stems from an elevated state of mind which allows Germans to ignore all contrary factual evidence that might serve to undermine a theory they have chosen to embrace. 

Yet, it is one thing to believe that the 101st Airborne Division might surrender to the tattered supply-starved remnants of the armed forces of the collapsing Third Reich, and quite another to believe that modern Germany can be fueled with “green hydrogen” shipped overseas from Canada. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-and-canada-sign-hydrogen-deal/a-62899992 After all, while it is true that no division of the US Army – let alone one of its best – ever surrendered to German forces in either world war, it is true that American army divisions did exist (they still do.) In contrast, green hydrogen does not.

Allow me to clarify the above statement. When I say that “green hydrogen does not exist,” I only mean to say that it does not exist in the world of reality (which includes Canada). It does, however, exist in the world of thought, the Gedankenwelt. There it is a very important commodity, so much so that Germany’s leaders are now proclaiming they will power their nation with it.

Of course, there are some things that make the transition from the fantasy world to the real world. Could transatlantic shipments of Canadian green hydrogen be among them?

In a word, no.

Transatlantic shipments of Canadian green hydrogen do not exist (in the real world), because green hydrogen does not exist, and cannot exist. This is so because hydrogen is not a source of energy. It is a carrier of energy. It takes energy to make it. It is an alternative type of battery. To imagine that Germany can be powered with green hydrogen from Canada is somewhat like thinking that Germany can be powered with batteries charged up in Canada and then shipped across the ocean for discharge. (Although there is a significant difference in that batteries don’t need to be refrigerated to -253 Centigrade before shipment, and don’t evaporate along the way. We’ll come back to that part shortly.)

Nevertheless, within the Gedankenwelt there is a vision of green hydrogen, and it looks like this: While Canada’s significant real world nuclear and hydroelectric capacity are already spoken for, Canada can nevertheless use its abundant Gedankenwelt wind power resources to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. This hydrogen will then be liquified and shipped across the ocean to power Germany.

It should be noted that Germany has plenty of Gedankenwelt wind power resources itself, but for some reason most of the power it generates does not make it into the real world. Canada’s Gedankenwelt wind power might prove to have the same problem as well. But we’ll let that part go, because there is a bigger problem.

In the real world, hydrogen is not produced on a commercial scale by water electrolysis. It is certainly possible to do this, but it is much cheaper make hydrogen by steam reforming methane, (natural gas) into carbon dioxide and hydrogen. (The chemical equation for this is CH4 + H2O + 1/2O2 => CO2 + 3H2.) You then need to separate the hydrogen from the CO2 to get pure hydrogen that you can ship. That takes energy, as does the production of the oxygen used in the steam reformation process itself. Still more energy is lost because while the net energy content of the three hydrogen molecules produced by steam reformation is about 90 percent that of the single methane molecule that was used to make them, they are much harder to ship. While using refrigeration equipment capable of achieve ideal (Carnot cycle) efficiency it would take about triple the power to liquefy the hydrogen as the original methane, using real world equipment it would take at least ten times the power, with the process consuming about half the energy the hydrogen contains. The refrigeration equipment would also be far more expensive than that used to liquify natural gas into LNG, as it must achieve temperatures of -253 Centigrade (20 K), instead of the -165 Centigrade (108 K) needed to liquefy natural gas.

The required hydrogen tankers would not only have to be higher tech than current LNG tankers, but much bigger as well. Liquid methane has six times the density of liquid hydrogen, while hydrogen only has 2.4 times the energy per unit mass. As a result, it takes a tanker 2.5 times as big to transport the same about as energy shipping liquid hydrogen as it does shipping LNG. These tankers will use a lot of oil. To make matters worse, about three times as much hydrogen (by energy content) as LNG would boil off along the way.

It is precisely the overheads of liquefaction and tanker shipping that typically drive LNG costs to be a factor of five times or more that of pipeline natural gas. (Current US pipeline price is $9/thousand cubic feet; price of LNG delivered to Europe is now $74/thousand cubic feet.). That’s bad enough. But these same overheads for hydrogen will be at least ten times greater.

Assuming anyone is willing to pay such enormous prices, once the hydrogen gets to Europe there will be further problems. To be used, the hydrogen will have to be regasifed and transmitted to the point of use by pipeline. But hydrogen gas contains less a third the energy content per unit volume as natural gas. So the cross sectional area of gas pipeline systems will need to be tripled. Also, any vehicles running on compressed natural gas will have to triple the size of their already oversized tanks to maintain the same range using the new, inferior, but vastly overpriced fuel.

The bottom line is that transatlantic hydrogen shipments will not only cost at least ten times as much as LNG, but result in triple the CO2 emissions per unit power as well.

That’s why, outside of the Gedankenwelt, there is no such thing, and never will be any such thing, as green hydrogen.

An alternative scheme, involving turning green hydrogen into (highly toxic) “green ammonia” (at great energy cost) prior to shipping across the Atlantic, is afflicted by comparable defects. For one, ammonia costs three times as much per kilogram as pipeline natural gas, but used as fuel, only provides one-third the energy.

There are real world technologies that Germany could use to provide itself with green energy. Germany has abundant shale resources, which if fracked, could provide Germany with natural gas at pipeline prices. But Germany’s Moscow-aligned political elites have banned development of this enormous resource.

Germany is a technically sophisticated nation, which could produce unlimited amounts of carbon-free nuclear energy. But in 2014, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a decision to implement a phased shut down of all of Germany’s nuclear industry, which at that time provided 23 GW of electricity to the nation. This must be done, Merkel said, in order to prevent a reply of the 2012 Fukushima disaster on German soil.

In 2012, an earthquake caused Tsunami killed 28,000 people in Fukushima, Japan, and wrecked 3 of the city’s 6 nuclear power plants. All of the 28,000 deaths were caused by drownings, falling buildings, exposure, and the like. None were caused by radiation. In fact, no one outside the plant gate received a radiation dose that might impact their health in any way whatsoever. Furthermore, it is rather unlikely that Germany will be swept by a Tsunami.

Nevertheless, the decision was made, and to paraphrase Hitler, where a German decision goes, there it remains. Proceeding therefore in an orderly fashion, and ignoring the Russian 2014 seizure of Crimea and the Donbas and other evidence that the policy of switching Germany from its own nuclear power plants to reliance on Russian gas might be unwise, Germany implemented a phased shutdown, so that by this year, only 3GW of the original 23 GW remained online.

Now Russia has launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine, with the clear intention of wiping Ukraine off the map. This would bring its forces to Poland’s border, thereby directly endangering NATO, an alliance to which Germany claims to be a member.

Russia’s gas sales to Germany bring the Kremlin around $60 billion per year, about the same as Russia’s entire military budget. By buying Russian gas Germany is funding not only Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has caused over 100,000 deaths, made 10 million people homeless, caused hundreds of billions in property damage in Ukraine, and trillions in economic losses worldwide, but also funding Russia’s thermonuclear and hypersonic weapons programs, which could be used to devastate the entire world – including Germany.

Germany gets 11 GW of power from natural gas. It has shut down nearly twice that capacity in nuclear power. So a rational move, assuming Germany is actually part of the Western alliance, adverse to genocide, or simply concerned about its own safety – or power supply –  would be to turn its nukes back on.

But no, where a German decision goes there it remains. The nukes that have been shut down must remain shut down, and certainly no new ones can be built. Accordingly Germany will now voluntarily set up itself and neighboring countries to energy extortion by Putin.

This is so crazy that it is difficult to explain, even for a country as historically prone to nuttiness as Germany.  I, however, have a theory that could provide a basis for understanding.

Green hydrogen may only exist in the Gedankenwelt, but that is where Germany’s rulers live as well.

Is it possible that green hydrogen causes brain damage?

Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book, The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.