Worse and worse; not a closed cycle economy but rather circular reasoning; a perpetual motion...

...machine.

I have heard, so as to believe it, that the patent office now requires a working model to patent perpetual motion machines.

Apparently though - although I suspect the authors might be able to wiggle out of what is implied by their description of this topic by claiming a bad translation - one can more or less publish one in the scientific literature.

To wit:

Research Status, Optimization Strategies, and Future Prospects of Ammonia Decomposition Catalysts for COx-Free Hydrogen Chunzheng Zheng, Bin Guan, Jiangfeng Guo, Tianxu Su, Jiefei Zhou, Junyan Chen, Yaoyao Zhang, Yuheng Yuan, Wenkai Xie, Nanxin Zhou, and Zhen Huang Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (29), 11305-11336.

Ammonia is manufactured from hydrogen and nitrogen in the famous, and extremely important Haber-Bosch process, using dangerous natural gas as a hydrogen source. The hydrogen is produced from the steam reforming of dangerous natural gas in most places, coal in China.

For example, in Germany, a major ammonia plant shut because of the price of dangerous natural gas, which antinuke Germany used to buy from Russia, thus providing funding for the Ukraine War. Fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots are very fond of Germany's energy policies apparently.

In this paper we seem to hear that ammonia, which is made from hydrogen at a thermodynamic loss, NH3, ?G°(635 K) = 20.084 kj/mol is now a source of hydrogen.

The paper starts off well enough stating some things that are partially true, although they seem to imply, as fossil fuel sales people and sales bots here and elsewhere do, that hydrogen is a source of primary energy before lapsing into nonsensical appeals to useless, hyped and extremely land and material expensive solar wind and biomass primary sources, although as of September 2023, um, now very little, so little as to be meaningless hydrogen is so made. Not only is so called "renewable energy useless in producing reliable primary energy on a scale worthy of addressing climate change, it is trivial to the point of absurdity in making hydrogen, the rhetoric from fossil fuel sales people and sales bots rebranding fossil fuels with "bait and switch" tactics here and elsewhere not withstanding.

The paper starts off with a true statement:

Before the sentence is complete however immediately flies off into wishful thinking...



...followed by a direct falsehood...



Finally it launches into complete nonsense...



...before stumbling back to a weak correction of the nonsense statement that is an outright falsehood since better than 98% of the world's hydrogen is not an "alternative" to fossil fuels, but represents a dependency on fossil fuels that is worse than the use of fossil fuels directly (were it actually a fuel, rather than a synthetic intermediate largely used to make, um, ammonia for fertilizer and industrial chemicals.

The weak stumble back to reality from Neverland...



...starts off with a dose of reality, including a statement indicating that this hydrogen bullshit is hardly new bullshit; it's old tiresome bullshit...

...

...and then the statement implying we're about to hear about a perpetual motion machine...



...before finishing with other hydrogen containing compounds...



...and after all this rhetorical agony gets stumbles back to reality, although in China, where the authors are located, the catalytic steam reforming of coal is industrially prominent, as acknowledged offhandedly above...



...before adding a disingenuous clause...



From my perspective, here and elsewhere, the intent of "hydrogen economy" bullshit is essentially to market fossil fuels as if they were "green." Making hydrogen depends on fossil fuels, at a huge economic, environmental and thermodynamic cost of exergy destruction.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

The authors then launch into wishful thinking that is taken up by fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots to greenwash the dependence of hydrogen production almost exclusively on fossil fuels by pretending that significant "green hydrogen" is really "a thing" as opposed to a marketing gimmick:



...but then points to why this marketing gimmick is just a mildly expensive advertising cost to obscure the reality that hydrogen is a filthy fuel

But electrolysis of water still requires very high costs because of the high energy losses. (6) Technical routes such as direct biomass to hydrogen and solar photocatalytic decomposition of water to hydrogen are still at the experimental and development stages, with yield rates to be further improved, and have not yet reached the requirements for industrial scale hydrogen production.

I added the bold.

The paper then happily goes along talking all about how to decompose ammonia; the science of ammonia decomposition into its elements is OK, I guess, although it is simply a statement of the reverse (and energy intensive) Haber-Bosch process, in other words, to the extent that ammonia is advertised as if it were a source of hydrogen, rather than a means of storing a material, at a cost in exergy destruction, that is already a material manufactured at a cost in exergy destruction from dangerous fossil fuels.

In fairness to the authors of the paper I have just criticized in no uncertain terms, I think that the statement of the "perpetual motion" machine may amount to an editorial mistake.

Nevertheless each transformation, primary energy (irrespective of its nature) to hydrogen, hydrogen to ammonia, ammonia back to hydrogen, and hydrogen to work, destroys exergy.

(A caveat is that from a process perspective, if hydrogen is produced from energy that is currently rejected to the environment in current technology, by this I mean heat energy, it can be used to increase exergy from a primary heat energy source, but only at very high temperatures, temperatures available cleanly only from nuclear energy.)

But the idea of using ammonia as a consumer fuel is even more appalling that the idea of using hydrogen itself as a consumer fuel, a point I made recently: Another very bad idea that never goes away.

The authors glib statement about the toxicity of ammonia is incredibly disingenuous:



The idea that a leak of an ammonia pipeline carrying potentially millions of tons of ammonia - were it to be on a scale of the dangerous natural gas, which accounts for almost all of the world's hydrogen production - would be "detected" and acted upon quickly enough to prevent the blinding and death of huge numbers of people - Bhopal on steroids - is completely dishonest.

In any case, ammonia is not a source of hydrogen, hydrogen is a source of ammonia, the main source of ammonia, on which our food supply depends, but thankfully, not our energy technology.

I have noted, by the way, that fossil fuel sales people and salesbots here and elsewhere rebranding fossil fuels as "green" hydrogen like to attack nuclear energy.

Of course they do. They're selling fossil fuels, and nuclear energy (which can generate captive hydrogen for synthetic purposes) is the only way to do away with what they're selling, fossil fuels.

Once again:

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

Have a happy Labor day if you're not laboring.