This $10BN Desert Megaproject is a Game Changer
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- Опубликовано: 13 июн 2024
- This project is worth the same as the country's entire GDP.
Correction: The map at 3:41 shows the Walvis Bay. The Port of Luderitz is located further south
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im really quite interested to see how this pans out, especially their electricity generation
theyre aiming for 7gw, over 2 stages, which would make it both the second largest solar farm and third largest on shore wind farm in the world
I can see it being used for
Steel production
Aviation
Shipping
HGVs
Other hard to decarbonise industries
For regular passenger cars, hydrogen is basically electricity with extra steps. That's the same for the others ofc too but there's a more efficient way for regular passenger cars
Brave company to invest all that in Africa......
Might be more secure closer to the end user. Just a thought.
Take care M
@@markeh1971 its no good trying to mine for gold in a copper mine just because its 'closer to the end user'
@@waqasahmed939 CATL's new sodium battery and their new condensed battery have almost made hydrogen obsolete already. Sodium batteries for large scale storage and their condensed battery has a 500wh/kg energy density which is enough to power commercial aircraft, never mind long-haul trucks.
Really don't see a future where 3000 of these massive hydrogen facilities are built. I think it's more likely that just the wind and solar part of the facilities will be built, with sodium battery storage rather than hydrogen attached.
@@croakingembryothere's no way you're powering a long range aircraft with a sodium battery. But give me some of whatever you're smoking please
Industry does not use hydrogen for energy they use them as reducing agent. Currently we use carbon to remove oxygen from metal ores which is incredibly polluting but oxygen removal can be done with hydrogen if you have plenty and a cheap supply of it. This is much cleaner because the by product is water instead of carbon monoxide.
That's one theory. But hydrogen obviously causes rust, so it doesn't really hold water.
@@grantmccoy6739 It is simple chemistry ask your local neighborhood chemist.
@@grantmccoy6739look into some of the steel production with hydrogen, it’s used in a reduction step long before smelting. Rust isn’t a concern there
You will have a clean supply with all the solar being installed during the day when you can make H from super cheap solar.
Take care M.
That still falls under energy use.
Never mind producing it, storage gets interesting if you consider the de-embrittlement issue, big static tanks for industry perhaps. I hope they crack it.
I don't think they plan on storing it in H2 form. That would be crazy
If you go into a large enough scale then it becomes a wear and tear issue. Just replace your tanker ship with new ones before the issue becomes a safety hazard.
Hydrogen induced cracking can be avoided if you use non metal tanks like carbon fiber
@@aatsiiiit would not be crazy, but I still think, they will produce ammonia. That is what most hydrogen will be used for anyway and for other uses it can easily be converted back into Hydrogen.
I hope they don't crack it. big static tanks should not be cracked.
Green Hydrogen to replace gray is fine but do it at the sites where it is consumed so storage and transportation are reduced/eliminated. Transporting electricity is very simple and if the Hydrogen is generated at the fertilizer plant or the steel mill then ships and diesel trucks are not needed.
I think the issue is that green energy is not available everywhere. And then the whole ordeal defeats the purpose as the hydrogen is no longer green either.
@@lagritsalammasI think you misunderstood what he said. He meant to transfer the production of the green hydrogen close to wherever they will be used. The electricity needed can be transmitted there instead of shiploads of already made green hydrogen.
@@aronbalabs9389 You'd lose so much energy to transmission losses as to make that impractical at the distances involved. No one sane is going to build a transmission line from the south end of Africa to northern Europe through two dozen different countries when a tanker can do the same thing just better and faster.
Green hydrogen's most defensible uses are where it's needed as a chemical ingredient rather than a fuel. The most obvious examples are ammonia and methanol.
Also splitting water on site to fuel Industrial furnaces. None of this requires shipping large amount to fuel a moving object.
@@Neojhun Industrial furnaces can be powered by electricity directly much more efficiently. There are very very few uses for hydrogen - possibly only in shipping and airplanes.
and the amount needed for that is quite a lot.
most defensible uses?? You say that as if for most cases would be dumb.
Which just proves how ignorant you are.
The most benefit of hydrogen is that any power that you get from solar and wind does not need to be consume instantly which reduce a lot the value of that power.
Batteries can only store no more than 4 hours of a power input in a cost efficient way, with the same capital using hydrogen you can store days, weeks and months of power.
Then transporting energy as hydrogen is 10 times cheaper than using transmission lines.
Besides, 45% of all the energy that the world consume can not use wires or batteries in a cost efficient way.
I am talking of airplanes, ships, trucks and many of the industrial natural gas grid uses, the only way to clean all those sectors is using hydrogen.
You did not hear much about hydrogen until now, because this technology starts to become cost efficient once you have a 30% of solar and wind share in the grid power mix (this is when you need to store 3 or more hours of power output), and guess what? we need 180% of solar and wind (the most cheapest source of power today by a huge margin) to remove all co2 emissions in a cost efficient way.
So hydrogen would become more cost efficient each year.
@@MusikCassette Which means green hydrogen doesn't need to get into fuel cell cars to scale up.
Both of your channels are amazing
Thank you so much! 🙌
You're amazing
What is the other one?
@@jasmikkob1m
@@jasmikkoThe B1M.
Currently stuck in hospital so super excited when I saw this drop 👍👍
Enjoy the video and get well soon 🙏
@@TomorrowsBuild it was very enjoyable as always and thanks for the best wishes.
Thanks for covering green hydrogen (well, really ammonia - the carrier of choice)! I’ve been in the industry for three years but some have been at it for over a decade - and it’s nice to finally see folks talking about it in broader society.
Hot air considering the price per unit
The part of the plan to desalinate sea water should be updated to use sea towers to precipitate water from the vapour above the sea surface. This is more efficient anf less polluting than desalination.
do it then
Desalination is an extremely energy intensive process.
They would be generating electricity to not only power the Electrolyser for hydrogen generation, but also the desalination plants.
However depending on the amount of hydrogen generated from a given quantity of water may make the cost of desalination a minor one.
Also you have to do something with the salt or risk raising the salt level in the sea around the plant up
Yes the energy for desalination is very small compared to the electrolysis. The problem with the brine remains but there are a lot of much larger desalination plants which deal with it.
The video should have covered how they plan to store it. That seems to be the most difficult aspects that's usually raised in hydrogen related videos. Also, it's really hard to imagine how it is cheaper to pump water to the energy generation sites then to transfer electricity to the shore for electrolysis. I'd be interested to hear why they chose that approach
First, i was wondering why they needed to desalinate. Then why transport water from the shore then the product green hydrogen to the shore. Transmitting electricity is more efficient.
@@aronbalabs9389 Moving power using electric transmission lines is 10 times more expensive than using an hydrogen pipe line. So not sure what are you talking about.
If there are geologic salt layers, then creating saltcaverns to store the hydrogen could be incredible cheap, if they dont, then they have to liquify the hydrogen on the shore anyway to enter in the ships, storing liquid hydrogen is not expensive, you just need a huge sphere.
Keeping low temperatures at big scales is incredible easy.
An hydrogen tank that NASA used to fill the saturn5, only lost a 0.8% of its content by month without active cooling. (that tank is still being use)
In this case the tank would be bigger with better technology so the cost of storage is negligible. You just lost a 16% of the energy in the liquefy process, but it reduce a lot the cost of distribution and storage.
@@angellestat2730 I was going on the assumption that hydrogen isn't that outrightly stable to handle thus making it more expensive to transport than electricity in the long run. Your complete statement make it sound like that the idea that electric transmission lines are 10x more expensive than hydrogen pipeline is a common knowledge that i was so off the norm for thinking of the contrary. I am open to be educated. Perhaps you could enlighten me by explaining why it really is as you mentioned. Because at first glance of my dumb brain, it really thinks transmitting the power is easier and cheaper than separate pipelines for water and hydrogen.
@@aronbalabs9389 is not your brain the issue, I notice youtube is full of misconceptions about the energy business in general. Too many people doing videos of certain topic which they know nothing about with just 1 day of research that becomes a copy paste of tweets and slogans from other people who did the same thing.
So my advice in case you want to know more about the energy topic is to search info directly from real applications, serious studies or papers.
But is not just hydrogen, transporting energy in chemical form is always cheaper, for example a methane gas pipeline is 20 times cheaper than a transmission line (for the same power flow) and oil is even cheaper.
To mention some points, Transmission lines require very high voltage to reduce conductor cost, but this has other drawbacks, the electric field that this high voltage creates should be keep at high distance from the ground, this requires expensive towers, then to achieve that high voltage you need very expensive voltage transformer plants, minimun 2 or more if you want to extract power over the way.
With a gas pipeline for example, these can be installed over the ground or just buried.
These also require pumps to increase the pressure (which is similar to the role of voltage in transmission lines), but pumps are way way more cheap than transformers (the same for switch vs valves) or quite easy to connect T pipes to distribute the gas to different locations, not only that, a transformer plant are quite complex due these huge electric fields, a lot of conductor mesh are installed under the ground at different levels and a lot of different devices to keep people and hardware safe.
Of course, it will also depend if you need that energy in chemical form or as electricity for consumption.
But I read a paper, that even in the case your source is electricity and you want to consume that power as electricty on destination, for distances higher than 1700km (if I remember right), it could be more cost efficient, to convert that power into hydrogen (you lost a 15% of the power), then you use a pipeline until destination, and then you use a fuel cell to convert that power back to electricity (you lost a 40% of the power). Why it would be cheaper even when the cost of electrolyzer, fuel cell and power lost should be quite expensive?
Because you are adding storage value.
That pipeline has a lot of volume, this mean you can use that energy when you need it and not instantly.
This mean you are not wasting nothing from your solar or wind farm.
BTW, there is one extra parameter.
Transmission lines are not even more efficient, they have a energy lost of 5%, in the hydrogen case would be 0.5%, not because you lost that hydrogen over the pipeline, because pumps requires power.
Green hydrogen production is very inefficient in it's use of energy. It's not just the unavoidable inefficiencies of the electrolysis process, it's also the water pumping and treatment as well as the liquefying and transport of the liquified hydrogen to the point of use. It might work in Namibia where there is so much solar and wind energy available but I think that generally green hydrogen will struggle to compete with grey hydrogen on cost which will inhibit its large-scale adoption. It could, in fact, open the door to grey hydrogen by creating a demand that green hydrogen cannot meet.
The other feature of hydrogen which is not widely realised is that gaseous hydrogen is very difficult to contain due to the small size of the molecules. This means that losses to atmosphere are high. It's not generally understood outside scientific circles that atmospheric hydrogen is a potent greenhouse gas - it reduces the atmosphere's ability to break down methane. Therfore this new "superfuel" is probably not going to do anything significant to reduce global warming. The Namibianscould be better off exporting the electricity to parts of Southern Africa that are still using fossil fuels.
the thing about hydrogen is we need it for the chemical industry. And right now we produce it with a shitload of CO2 emissions. The only way I see to get rid of those emissions is to use renewable energy and electrolyses.
haha reading your ignorant comment makes me laugh..
Tell me what efficiencies YOU THINK electrolysis and liquifaction has?
Or what is the cost to transport power by transmission lines vs hydrogen?
You have absolutly no clue dont you? Start to search that on google and I bet even then you will mistake.
But well, I guess the people who will invest 10 billions doesn´t know what you know..
It's definitely a proposal! However I don't see it as the final solution.
Great video, but your map is of the wrong part of Namibia. What has been labelled as Luderitz is actually Walvis Bay which is several hundred kms further north.
Might seem pedantic but it's important as both ports are next to national parks, where large developments like this become controversial.
Before getting into the tech part of it i would like to say that from a global economic and humanitarian standpoint providing the access to the great green resources available in africa and letting them profit from their abundant green energy would do great things to help stabalise the region and improve quality of life for people in the region
Wonder how much energy losses occur with all these steps from making salt sea water to hydrogen.
Quite a bit of loss, but that doesn’t matter if the hydrogen does the job at the price you need. The current carbon-based processes are hideously inefficient anyway.
A lot
Pretty much all of it. This is very stupid. It would be MUCH more efficient to just burn coal and use some of the energy to sequester the carbon.
I wonder how they talk to investors. The economic doesn't work
as for commonly mentioned numbers, hydrogen electrolysis and then turning it back into elecricity with a hydrogen fuel cell you get about 30% back.
A commonly mentioned number for how much energy is lost as heat when turning water into hydrogen was 20-30%, and 10% is lost to convert it to storage. Another 30% is lost when turning it back into electricity, leaving you with the mentioned 30%.
The efficiency can be improved by using platinum and palladium as catalysts, but research is trying to find an artificial material that can do it better and cheaper.
Amazing production as always! You could do an analysis of the Chilean green hydrogen program as well
My favourite channel on RUclips
Greetings. All the way from Namibia
Fascinating video. Keep it up, i love this stuff.
Why would you build 2 pipelines (water + hydrogen) to hydrolyze in the desert, instead of 1 electrical wire to hydrolyze directly at the port?
I was thinking the same thing, maybe the power transmission over long distances creates sufficient power losses. Because you have to use high voltage power lines over that distance, you lose power from step-up and step-down transformers, the transmission line itself and then the distribution on the other end. Can add up to about 10-15%
It must just be the cost of pipes (smaller, easier to build and maintain) for water and hydrogen is cheaper than the pylons and the electricity infra.
Could use a superconductor power line to reduce losses
@@Matt-YT Pipes are easy and inexpensive (relatively speaking - I'm not buying a pipeline for myself any time soon) but I don't think you can say the same for lossless power grids.
Thanks of covering this important pioneering project in our country
Thanks for the content.
Thank you guys for your support of mental health in construction workers. That's really awesome, I didn't even know that was a thing. As a child of an unhealthily stoic construction worker who has severe anxiety problems and even more severe denial, and refuses to get any treatment for it, it's something that touches me personally and I know how deep the problem goes. Thank you.
The footage from the coast looks incredible … this could be a really awesome touristdestination it looks stunning
it is a tourist destination! Swakupmond is the access point. The traveling dunes are pretty amazing to visit and there is quite an adventure tourism base there.
It all depends whether the cost of making the panels and turbines in CO2 emissions is negated at some point.
With a 25% efficiency of solar then only 50% efficiency converting that into hydrogen, that is going to be a tall order I would say.
Seems like a quick get rich scheme that is subsidised by the government that will fail.
Look at all the ev bike and car graveyards in china.
They were such schemes to make a very few wealthy people at the cost of the environment.
Sad world we live in.
If in the end they're successful, then building future panels and turbines will be cleaner because they'll be using the hydrogen they produced
The video didn't get into the detailed cost. Instead it simply says that the project cost is $10 billion, and that it can produce 350,000 tons of Hydrogen every year. If that calculation is correct, then it doesn't matter what the panel efficiency is, because that has already been calculated in.
*This is why ”BLUE” hydrogen is much better.*
The whole point is to keep CO2 away from going into the atmosphere, and it solves this. “Green” hydrogen produces so much of CO2 via solar and wind power equipment, which is also, in effect, non-recyclable, that it is actually less green, than blue.
@@tatianaes3354 "produces so much of CO2 via solar and wind power equipment". I hear this claim often, but no one ever presents any data. Why would solar and wind power equipment produce more CO2 than any other industrial equipment? Why would it produce more than, say, a gas power plant? Bring forth the numbers, please? Certainly, any excess cost is not reflected in the price of wind and solar equipment.
"Non-recyclable". Some components are non-recyclable, others are recyclable. But most industrial products have components that are non-recyclable. Why is it a bigger problem when the discussion is about renewable energy?
@@tatianaes3354 You're way off about green hydrogen CO₂ emissions.
I'm not talking about hydrogen electrolysis efficiency - because that's a different topic - but solar panels will offset their CO₂ manufacturing emissions within months to a year or so depending on how they were manufactured. Then its _zero emissions_ during operation.
Then solar panels have expected long *25+ years* of useability. Even at that point in time, the panel retains some 80% to 85% of it original capacity. So they can be re-sold or donated for use in less demanding applications for decade or more further. Recycling solar panels is a must to avoid the ridiculous linear economy that is fossil fuels approach.
Same with wind turbines where carbon payback may be in months to years and zero emissions during operation.
Moreover, solar & wind turbines will help dismantle the global fossil fuel hegemony. That brings down the CO₂ emissions of _everything_ manufactured - including solar panels and wind turbines. At that point, they'll exit their manufacturing factories with low carbon emissions to begin with on top of their zero emissions operation.
Furthermore, Blue Hydrogen's dependency on carbon capture & storage (CCS) is dubious at best - that's what was hinted at 1:56 in the video. CCS is inefficient and will still not capture all of emitted CO₂. Even of the captured CO₂, they must be able to store it _permanently_ and guarantee no leak for hundreds+ of years. That's not a simple task to do (a) effectively and (b) at affordable cost.
CCS is essentially a scam used by fossil fuel industry to try to extend their unsustainable business model along with greedy/uneducated politicians and regulators that fall for CCS.
Blue Hydrogen's use of methane (CH₄) is a major red flag in itself. Because during processing and distribution, methane will want to leak out of any vessel its contained in. Methane has a large 80X more greenhouse potential than CO₂!
The US alone has 2-million miles of natural gas piping which allow plenty of opportunity for small leaks through valves and seals. This is collectively known as the methane "fugitive emissions" problem. Globally its produces some 7% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. It also costs the US billion dollars per year on waste on a danger waste stream. All use of methane needs to stop.
What surprises me is that nobody says you could use nuclear to generate green hydrogen, and you wouldn't have to do it way out in the middle of nowhere.
Nuclear is too obvious. If global nuclear spending had been a third of what has been sunk into solar and wind, their goals would have been met already.
Doing everything but nuclear would indicate that the stated goals aren't their actual goals.
It wouldn't be green hydrogen because nuclear energy isn't sustainable. Sorry to break your bubble.
Real costs of nuclear is too high compared to renewables. Solar and wind became very cheap. While current reactors are in build at the moment are a nightmare in rising costs for the companies. And the nuclear waste issue is still not solved.
@@lars-christianheinz6902 "Real costs of nuclear is too high compared to renewables."
It really isn't when one takes the footprint into consideration. Nuclear can produce 500X the output as wind and solar for the same footprint. Plus nuclear is 24/7/365, not intermittent.
"While current reactors are in build at the moment are a nightmare in rising costs "
That's mostly due to regulatory as volume. Consolidate the regulatory burden to a class of reactors instead of individual reactors, and the costs go down dramatically.
@@wisenberin the middle of the desert doesn’t matter too much the footprint. It’s pretty much dead land anyway. Cheapest option which is currently renewables wins.
This project covers 4000 square kilometers. We need 3000 such projects by 2050 to cover our hydrogen 'needs'. That's an unpleasant amount of space to call this approach green.
Finally something useful to do with deserts...
@@zapfanzapfan
Every inch of earth surface needs some 'use'? This is anthropocentrism disguised as ecology.
Thank you very much for this very interesting report.
Take care of yourself.
Thank you video brilliant
If that $10B funding has been confirmed, then this is a real possibility, but remember the wind and solar plan in Morocco that was to supply the UK via high voltage DC?
There was some big ass hype about this twenty years ago when I started college
Biggest catch is it makes no sense from a physics or economics perspective. But Governments will waste trillions of dollars on it regardless.
We need quite a lot of hydrogen for the chemical industry. So why does this not make sense?
@@MusikCassettewe always need hydrogen but it’s not a solution for transportation because when you put renewables into batteries it’s one step when you need to make hydrogen from any renewable source you the have to make hydrogen then convert it back into mechanical energy by burning or converting back to electricity why do an extra step???
@@nickkacures2304 I agree, that for those applications, there are better solutions.
however it will take a crap load of renewable energy to produce the hydrogen that we actually do need. That is why the initial statement from @michaelwebsternz is false.
Personally I think Sodium will be the main way to store energy in the Future (not just in Batteries). But it is quite a long way off until we actually need that.
@@nickkacures2304how do you use solar power at night? Batteries are not sustainable and degrade overtime. You can just build massive solar farms that generate more energy than you need in morning, use the to produce hydrogen and use those those whenever you want like like any other fossil fuel
@@AmrisaelThis is why you use nuclear fuel and have non of these issues and take up 76x less space. Solar is only useful in municipalities and households on roofs Even then it takes 10 years to pay itself off.
The problem is you need alot of flat land for solar land that can otherwise if regenerated be used for agriculture.
nice project,keep it up
Nuclear power can make green hydrogen too especially at night when electricity consumption is low
Power it with hydro electricity. A company called Minbos is doing this Angola using the cheapest green hydroelectricity globally to produce green ammonia for fertiliser for the local farmers and explosives for nearby mining. It will be economically competitive with ammonia produced from fossil fuels.
As a chemical engineering student I've been really interested on green hydrogen over the past few years. One thing that is annoying to hear about it (and renewables in general) is all the "miracle fuel" talk. If we expect to find the miracle fuel that is gonna solve all the problems and lead us to the promise land of zero emissions we never gonna make it. From my prespective its better to think about renewable and clean energy as a pool of many different options where each one is better suited for a different place, use and application. For exapmle we cant expect that all transportations and electricity production is going to be powered by green hydrogen. Instead a more viable solution would be to divide the demand between all the different clean resourses. Also I feel like, in the begining at least, green hydrogen is going to be the connecting factor of the construction of a green energy network, mainly playing a role in excess energy storage and on demand use of it. Finally one thing that I never see mentioned in these types of videos is about the innate hazards of hydrogen, namely it being extremely explosive below 600°C and flamable over 600°C. Maybe I'm not caught up on the topic and there have been developments regarding the safety, but to my knowledge its still a major issue that needs to be solved for hydrogen to enter our daily lives.
P.S For anyone that read through, I'd appreciate any corrections or tips on my english because I'm still trying to learn.
Cool, build more.
A cricism of hydrogen I've heard is that it is a strong greenhouse gas in itself (though it doesn't stick around for as long). And since the molecules are so small, it will leak out of a lot of tubes. Especially gas pipes and tanks, which is one of its selling points.
Couldn’t we just use a Thorium MSR to power the electrolysis process? It supposed to be much cheaper than regular nuclear power and produces far more energy than uranium
Both thorium and msr are experimental and are not currently viable. Plus, renewables are far cheaper than nuclear, especially when variability is no concern.
From what I understand this project is a collaboration between Namibia and South Africa
And Germany too :)
Is the power for the seawater desalination provided by the wind/solar farm as well?
Yah but that is a rounding error. 90% of power goes to the electrolyzers.
I think german export of electrolysers, will boom in the near future 😊 would of been nice if you could have mentioned all places in the world with co-located wind and solar resources. Or ones with such an abundance of just one, that it overcomes the issue with scale.
There used to be something called Phil, made H in your garage from cheap solar and you used it to cook on or for your car.
Take care M
what is the efficiency of solar to hydrogen and back hydrogen to electricity/energy?
The threat posed by new entrants to the industry depends on the existing barriers to entry, combined with the reaction of existing industry participants to what a firm entering the industry might assume is competition.
It appears people are gassing it up
Nuclear? So much better than "green" energy to power this
Could be done in Germany. Liquefaction, Shipping eliminated
Green hydrogen is a portable battery. Thats the simplest way to view this. HH is the product of a days wind and solar output and its in a tank and can sit, ship and be consumed as needed. It becomes a convenient tradable commodity which can be burned directly or transmuted into electricity. It can be shipped across the world from that central location.
How do the residents of beautiful Namibia feel about this plan to turn their stunning coastline into the world’s largest refinery?
Nobody in charge cares.
It's easy.
Did you even watch the video?
The liberals in the I-95 corridor and in Brussels don't give two craps about Africans other than how to continue to exploit them.
@@pawel8365 did you? the exploitation is glossed over
Lots of challenges with hydrogen, but at least we have mostly stopped about using it in cars and boilers now.
1:03 minor correction. Hydrogen has only been around since the Epoch of Recombination, around 370k years after the Big Bang, when the temperature of the universe dropped low enough that atomic nuclei could capture electrons. Hydrogen was indeed the first formed, though.
Electrolysis does NOT require desalination. In fact, the electrolysis process requires impurities in the water to conduct the electricity in the water splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen.
With gigawatts of excess electricity being generated desalination might seem like a money maker but not nearly as much as the hydrogen itself and possibly the remaining minerals and salts from the electrolysized ocean water.
Generally, most electricity networks only go beyond 90% capacity on 1% of days (3 days per year) to ensure reliable supply and avoid brownouts. Non-renewable fuels cost money but excess "free" renewable energy on the other 99% of days can be redirected to producing baseload hydrogen. Caveat: Producing liquid hydrogen is energy-intensive, and storing and transporting liquid hydrogen is challenging which results in lower energy recovery rates.
Where's the cogeneration combination of molten sodium solar array come into play?
So in order to get the energy in a form thats exportable, they first have to desalinate water, an intensely energy consuming activity? This is going to be so efficient ... granted compared to electrolysis itd be little, but couldnt they have just imported it instead?
Why would they pump desalinated water from the coast inland, only to pipe the hydrogen back to the coast? Why not transmit the electricity to the coast and electrolyze at an industrial site near the export facility?
In Australia we're removing farmland and native forests to make way for wind farms and transmission lines. For no additional energy..just more expensive energy.
However now is not the time to ask questions as that is seen as misinformation or simply 'getting in the way'
Or Australians just suck at renewables.
In Chile, there are plans afoot, to install wind turbines in the Magellan Straights, and use seawater to make green hydrogen. They will put the green hydrogen on tanker ships and sell to highest bidder, probably Europe.
I understand the model, and it seems very promising, but one part that makes no sense to me is co-locating the electrolysis plant with the solar/wind farm. This requires that they build two pipelines from the coast to the plant and use energy to pump water through the pipeline (water is a very heavy substance!) Not to mention the risks of pipeline leaks that could interrupt production. Wouldn’t it be easier to co-locate the electrolysis plant with the desalinization plant and simply transmit the electricity from the solar/wind farm? The energy lost through transition of electricity would probably be less than the energy required to pump water over the same distance.
Now if we could just work out what to do with defunct wint turbine propellors and solar panels and things that have a shelf life but not many good ways to recycle the problems will mount up in another area
I think it makes sense to look at hydrogen production as energy storage, like this. It's not the most efficient purely for that, but it's flexible and portable
Hydrogen production (or rather hydrogen carriers) go beyond storage. They can be transported all over the world from the places with the cheapest renewables to anywhere else. This will likely be much cheaper than local production. So instead of massive seasonal storage, we'll probably end up with a new energy trade with green fuels, replacing the current oil & gas. It also helps that many of the countries with the cheapest solar have summer when it's winter in the northern hemisphere.
Funny to see the satellite picture of Walvis Bay being dubbed as "Lüderitz Port" with a "Desalinated Plant".
Finally, you did what I asked. The hyphen in my Country. But it sounds too good to be true
A gamechanger....for shareholders.
2:08 any news on gen modified algea?
Oslo Is almost 100% battery powered. Buses , trucks, heavy construction equipment, light rail, even ferries. Far less tricky than any kind of hydrogen. Surely there are better ways to store energy than to expensively turn it into hydrogen.
Sure, but the advantage of hydrogen is that it doesn't need to link up to the grid. Some places are great for solar but are too far away from settlements that actually use the electricity to be viable.
Lemme go study green hydrogen courses from next year coz um a Namibian😊😂
Please tell the energy efficiency of the entire green hydrogen production process. Desalination itself is an energy intensive process and electrolysis, gas compression, pumping, etc wastes a significant portion of energy
It also produces brine
Just getting cargo ships to switch to hydrogen would lead to a huge reduction in global emissions
If we imagine the project has to pay itself off over 20 years, that will mean a price of $1.43 per kg of hydrogen. Currently, the price of hydrogen in the US is $16/kg, so there's a lot of money to be saved/made. The oxygen produced can probably also be sold, but oxygen is already very cheap.
it will probably cost an insane amount of money. There is a reason why desalinisation isn't used world wide
@@lntrt1390 The video title says "This $10BN Desert Megaproject", so we can assume it will cost $10BN. At least that is what I base my calculation on.
@@pjacobsen1000 the 10bn probably don't count the production costs
@@lntrt1390 Production costs? You mean the cost of energy used to produce the hydrogen? Presumably, that will come from all those solar panels and wind power generators. Then there's labor, of course.
I hope it works out. We need technology to help us get out of the climate crisis.
we would get out of the climate change just if the americans used less aircon and drove smaller cars.
And with the water desalination what do they plan on doing with the brine? Can't ignore that.
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I'm not some expert. I'm an engineer but I used the help of one. You might have heard about the popular Maria Victoria Caicedo. She's the CEO of Vayroko and an expert in the workings of the financial markets. I love delegating tasks and in this aspect of my life, I'm happy she's the one in charge
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gotta check thi s out right away!
Not mentioned: the left-overs from desalinated, electrolysed sea water i.e. higher salinity and marginally toxic brine. Pumped back into the ocean? This is already a worry around established desalination plants in the middle east. I'm not against such ventures but there's clearly some big problems to solve, which could be deal breakers.
You dilute the brine before releasing them. Your brine is 10X more concentrated than ocean water no problem just pump and mix 1 000 Liters of ocean water for every liter of your brine solution. This drops the concentration to (10+ 1000)/(1000+1). Just 0.8% more salty than ocean water.
Recycle the brine into battery and other useful elements….
Amazing how everything is 'about to change the world' and yet the world never changes.
Change on a global scale happens slowly, it took decades before wind and solar has the same impact as it does now.
Unfortunately we're almost out of decades. What a waste of a perfectly good planet.
@@andynonomous8558 Correct, but we still need to decrease CO2 emissions right?
We needed to do that 30 or 40 years ago. I suppose we should still try as a hail-mary, but this civilization ain't going to make it.@@Simon-dm8zv
One of the biggest arguments against green Hydrogen and renewable energies is the amount of materials that need to be used to build these massive solar and wind parks and factories.
While the concrete emits massiv eamount of CO2 and materials as non-recycleble plastic are also used, it's an investment for producing energy that's almost net-zero in its energy production - but not in the plants' and factories' production - that last up for 20-30 years. Plastic can be burned to produce the heat needed for creating cement/concrete, which reduces the emitted CO2.
Think of it like a car, where you invest more for a more efficient gas usage. You get your money's worth quite fast. It's the same with renewable energy.
You said Hyphen will cover 4000 square kilometers of Namibia's coastline. That's how much coastal _land area_ will be taken, but how many _linear kilometers_ of coast _line_ will be taken? If we assume it extends 1 km inland then the answer is easy, but that'd be a blind assumption.
I think they should also look to desalinate more water than they need for the electrolysis having a stand alone desalination plant is prohibitively expensive but allowing the government to purchase a contract to be supplied the excess will help hydrate the population boom that will come with the new economic growth
Namibia has quite a few desalination plants, mainly for the mines close to the coast. Desalinating ocean water to the point where it's drinkable is too expensive for the country to maintain. And even if they get it to that point profitably, they'll still need to pump it to the central regions where most of the population lives. Considering the geography of the country, not going to happen.
@silentSkipan I'm thinking that since it's not just a desalination plant it will have drastically lower costs and there will need to be a population nearby to do the work
@silentSkipan also they are already looking at connecting it to the main electrical grid so proposing connecting to the water system isn't that much of a leap they've already expressed an interest in providing to the greater community from their excess
@@ConstantChaos1 Fair point, would definitely for the immediate area, depending on the location. I do however think it'll be built in the south close to the orange river, might be cheaper to just pump water from there.
And I'm pretty sure Namibia won't really benefit from this for awhile to come, despite what they are saying.
I agree, but I would put local energy demand before that.
the power from those solar plants should first be used for the local Energie demands, than for water desalination to satisfy local water demand. And after that the surplus can be used for Hydrogen.
This is awesome. Love your content very much. :)
Odd thought: Strange how we say "yesterDAY" and "toDAY", but for the next day we don't say "tomorDAY". Lol. Weird, I know. Tomorday's Build.
🎶 By Jove I think he's [almost] got it! 🎶
day comes from a widespread root word meaning the hours of daylight, whilst morrow comes from the morning of the following sunlit hours and finally to refers to going towards/concerning.
Also, they were both written in hyphenated (Hyphen Ha! Topical) form until the early 20thC.
To~day is therefore referring to the current period of sunlit hours ahead.
To~morrow references looking forward to the hours of daylight right after the night to come.
Capisce?!
@@JP_TaVeryMuch k, that is *awesome*. Thank you!! 😊
You should make a videon about stockholms new metro or karlatornet in Gothenburg
Or just use pink hydrogen and manufacture where you need to consume it, then pipe it around said country.
Every time i see a project like this, I always wonder what are they going to do with the salt created by the process. It could be a local and possible environmental disaster if every project like this just dumps it in the sea. Especially in the Atlantic Ocean where I believe the gulf stream is affected by how much salt is in the water. Sure a little more probably doesnt hurt that much, but 50 of those projects dumping salt in the water. and eventually you will destroy the eco system in the oceans.
But if they have a plan on what to do with the salt. Then all i can say is Go, cant get this up and running fast enough.
Sodium batteries are a contender which comes to mind, lithium for current batteries is obtained from evaporated seawater already so the technology exists to get these metals out of their salt form.
The effects of hyper salinity are likely to cause problems locally near the coast but not for the ocean at large just due to the sheer amount of water in the ocean
1 400 000 000 000 000 000 tons. That's the mass of seawater on Earth. 35 parts in a thousand of that is salt, meaning that you'd need to process thousands of billions of tons of seawater for the change in salinity to register in the fourth decimal. Sure, very locally it could be an issue, but the de-salination facility would be the first to run into trouble, what with the saltier water being harder on their equipment...
The game changing technology is solar energy. Green hydrogen is just one of things that need cheap and abundant electricity to be economically viable.
High temperature nuclear reactor for producing hydrogen, not solar panels
People you want clean green energy then look down every time you flush there in the pipes down below is full of methan that gets vented into the atmosphere and not ever collected.
Like use the methan we produce every day when we flush and tada lots more potential energy right there.
Love your work, there's no doubt about this.
A logical question, what is the ecological footprint difference between battery and hydrogen?
I'm also not agreeing with the fact that batteries can't fuel heavy industries.
There's not much research going into that today (unless it's behind closed doors). Still, heavy trucks are presented with battery power.
Here is what I think. If we want a sustainable future we will need to go further than 1 person saying it doesn't work.
Not talking about you 😉
Thanks for the share and keep it going ✌️
3:50
That is the fucking wrong way around
first you feed the local grid, than you desalinate water from the surplus. And from what is left over once local energy and water needs are met you can produce Hydrogen from.
You labeled Walvis Bay as Luderitz Port.
2:40 sec in I’m like this idea is stupid. Great production as always
All the endangered desert species personally thank you for destroying more of their habitat.
I am worried about H2 leakage. Hydrogen GWP100 is 11.6 +/- 2.8 (Nature June 7,2023) which means 1 kg of hydrogen has the same effect as 11.6 ± 2.8 Kg of CO2 over 100 years. This is because hydrogen interacts with GHGs prolonging their lifetimes. it's GWP30is 37.3 ± 15.1 so any leakage anytime before it is used is a big problem.
Green H2 is thermodynamic pipedream. H2 is expensive in energy terms to produce, store and transport. By the time it gets to be used there is almost no energy left. By contrast batteries are over 90% efficient, pumped hydro about 76% efficient.
You got it right!
For the industry you need hydrogen as a reducing agent. Either use carbon to remove oxygen from ores and output carbon monoxide or use hydrogen and output water.
Considering that this energy is for the benefit of the EU, I don't think either of those two options are really feasibly simply due to transportation complications, not to mention cost.
In this case, they won't be storing or transporting it in H2, but in Ammonia. Safer and you don't lose any of it along the way.
@@kazedcat eventually green H2 will be needed to make ammonia for fertilizer but due to fossil fuel being depleted in decades and materials for low energy also near depletion not much industry.
@@silentSkipan Green H2 will be needed for ammonia production for fertilizers but conversion to ammonia for fuel uses so much of the little energy that is available that the cost would be prohibitive.
Finally a video that focuses on how the hydrogen would actually be used instead of talking about fuel cell cars, which will be a minor side project at best.
What of releasing the salt and mineral rich by product back into the ocean?
Ok, you break down the science into understandable chunks, are covering some cutting-edge stuff, and are supporting a mental health charity... this is, i believe, the first of your videos I've watched and I can already tell I'm going to enjoy subscribing, which I have just done.
gta expolsive car mechanics finally becoming realistic
Video topic starts at 2:35
How to get "green hydrogen."
Dig huge holes in the earth to get all the raw materials to construct the solar panels and wind generators. Use huge amounts of hydrocarbon based fuels to smelt the raw materials to get the materials you want and form them into the shapes you need. Create the often toxic chemicals needed to make the solar panels and wind generators work and to put in all of the transformers and power lines (more toxic chemicals and hydrocarbon fuels used) necessary to get the electricity to the "green hydrogen" generating plant.
Then when the solar panels and wind generators start to wear out, find a place to store all of the un-recyclable materials and toxic chemicals that have to be replaced to keep the solar farm and wind generators operational.
For all things it's all relative. Everything has a footprint. Everything involves resource extraction. Question is less or more?
Heres a lifecycle assessment study by NREL. This study looks at the emmisions from 'cradle to grave' including manufacturing.
Roughly:
Solar 50g co2e/kwh
Nat Gas 500g
Coal 1000g
As you can see, while fossil fuels are involved, the impact is magnitudes less than traditional fossil power.
Source: NREL, Life Cycle Assessment Harmonization
Renewables are absolutely meaningful in reducing emmisions. It's not about perfect solutions, but better ones. And renewables are starkly better.
We might ran out of water this way
Holy fuk!