[AR] Re: ammonia borane

  • From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 19:24:43 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 2 Mar 2021, Troy Prideaux wrote:

GH2 from hydrolysis of water by solar cells.
Prohibitively expensive by comparison, for any practical purpose, except in what are basically tech demos that don't have to make economic sense. Commercial GH2 is from petroleum.

 How up-to-date is that claim?

As far as I know -- with the caveat that it's an area I don't actively monitor -- it's still current. There is lots of hype about solar-powered electrolysis, but no reality behind it yet. Electrolysis is hideously energy-intensive, and solar cells are not a particularly cheap energy source (even allowing for the fact that this application wouldn't need energy storage). Making GH2 from petroleum -- usually natural gas -- is *much* cheaper, and so long as the producers don't have to pay for the side effects of the CO2 release, it's likely to stay that way.

Henry

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