[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by zamler

I tried to find data on hydrogen burning turbine efficiency came up empty. A fuel cell needs a fair bit of nickel and also platinum I can see the cost and availability being an issue for large scale fuel cell production.

https://www.ge.com/content/dam/gepow...Generation.pdf

The difference between the process in the above paper and the process being discussed is the sequestration of the carbon after the fact. That should be noted as a significant difference, but the efficiencies of the turbines should be similar.

I will say this, there is a cost for everything, including the drilling and extraction of oil or the mining of bitumen. That's one of the things that really grinds my gears is that people don't take into consideration the amount of money it takes to drill for these resources, build the facilities to process oil and gas, transport them, and so on. It is costly as well, but those costs are ignored in comparisons.

Making batteries, solar cells, fuel cells, generators, motors, high voltage cable, electronics*, transformers etc. etc. all take energy to produce, very likely carbon based energy. Burning the oil directly does skip a whole bunch of energy hungry steps. That's one thing that grinds my gears hardly anyone is doing well to wheel calculations it's superficial nonsense hey look hydrogen has zero emissions.

So none of that stuff is needed to build a processing plant for oil? You can just pull oil out of the ground and burn it? Don't have to worry about refining the real icky stuff out of it? Don't have to worry about the effluent from that process and the pollution it creates? Don't have to worry about anything. Just have to take a cork screw, make a couple of twists, and there you go - free energy with no costs. I think we can agree there are substantial costs on that side of the ledger as well?

And we're back to how much energy does it take to extract hydrogen via oxygen injection, or whatever the exact process is which we don't know at all because all the articles gloss over it.

You're right, we don't know. It would be nice to know what the exact costs are, but based on the potential gain in protection to our environment and drag on the effects of climate change, the cost would have to be astronomical not to go down this route. A POC is needed to understand.

* this is a big one, these high tech systems rely heavily on micro controllers and support circuity producing such is energy intensive, uses larges amounts of water and is very polluting both in production and disposal. I rarely see anyone talk about this.

Come on. You don't think that there are massive amounts of micro-controllers and support circuitry in every step of the transmission or refinement process? I think you're ignoring the complex technology used to extract oil and refine the products, especially bitumen. I think we can assume that technology investment may be similar. If we get more information, then we can re-visit. As it is, we can agree its an unknown cost, but a similar process.