We’ll need hydrogen infrastructure and production anyways for steel smelting as well as the chemical industry, those are things that just don’t run on electricity, no way.
I’m curious how you see hydrogen being used in smelting. Hydrogen fuel cells do just produce electricity. Are you talking about something else, like combusting the hydrogen?
barsoap@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Iron ore + hydrogen = Iron + water. It’s used to tear oxygen off the ore. Currently that’s done with carbon, generally of fossil origin. thyssenkrupp is already doing it at scale. Not all the hydrogen they use right now is green but unlike the old furnaces the new ones are ready to be carbon-neutral, they just have to switch over fuel sources no need to mess with the furnaces themselves.
It is possible to do the reduction directly with electricity but that’s less energy-efficient than going via hydrogen.