> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
This is the Cannot be explained bit
If you look at the knifesteelnerds article on H1 (https://knifesteelnerds.com/2019/06/24/h1-steel-how-it-works...), you'll find that it's an austentitic alloy (which is highly unusual for any sort of tool steel), and that it seems like it's likely a somewhat less corrosion resistant than usual variant on steels like 301 or 304. And the rather common stainless alloy used for non-tool applications where high levels of corrosion resistance is 316, which is more corrosion resistant than 304.
In any case, this new alloy is weird -- it seems like it specifically has excellent resistance to electrochemical corrosion when it is used as an anode, which is not what people usually use stainless steel for :)
[edit]
I should also point out that the two alloys I mentioned are not particularly hard or tough for a knife steel.
That said, I have heard plenty of anecdotes confirming these properties from other folks. People losing a knife in a stream or field and then finding it the following year, etc.
> In any case, this new alloy is weird -- it seems like it specifically has excellent resistance to electrochemical corrosion when it is used as an anode, which is not what people usually use stainless steel for :)
100%. Probably almost no crossover into cutlery, but super cool regardless!
It's not that unexpected.
Additionally, the rope length extends quite a bit of an anchor fails (and it partially recovers it’s elasticity before the other anchors engage). Later anchors would not get forces exceeding a normal ‘healthy’ bolts limits.
So there is some systemic failure involved in this scenario.
The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen.
At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and resell later. That sets a floor price of electricity.
Between the floor price of the input and ceiling price of the output, there is no room for electrolysis, even at 100% efficiency, unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen.
Yes, but I think this the most likely outcome. Natural gas is only cheap in certain areas, and the past few years have made everyone very, very aware of the geopolitics involved in getting hold of it. While global warming is not going away, and I question the extent to which CCS actually happens with blue hydrogen.
Batteries are capital equipment in the same way as electrolysers are. They're great at short term storage, but medium-term is still a bit more of an issue. "Restrict batteries" is obviously not on the table except for stupid retail corner cases where utilities have captured the regulator.
There's a potential market for lots of green H2 in Haber nitrogen, metals refining, and synthetic jet fuel etc, but only if the cheap CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned, or H2 electrolysers get comparable capital prices to battery storage.
"Natural gas at Texas’s Waha hub is trading at negative $7.05 per million British Thermal Units, hitting a record low of negative $9.52 on April 15."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/natural-gas-texas-negative-...
There are different kinds of water electrolysis equipment, with different capital expenditure and operating expenses.
"Alkaline electrolyzers are cheaper in terms of investment (they generally use nickel catalysts), but least efficient. PEM electrolyzers are more expensive (they generally use expensive platinum-group metal catalysts) but are more efficient and can operate at higher current densities, and can, therefore, be possibly cheaper if the hydrogen production is large enough."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien...
Anything using platinum-group metals will be very expensive. Therefor catalytic converters in cars use very little platinum-group metals.
"The amount of palladium in a converter can vary, but it is typically around 2-7 grams." https://vehiclefreak.com/how-much-palladium-is-in-a-catalyti...
If this works out at scale (lots of problems can be found between a lab discovery and mass production), this is legitimately a very good thing for renewables.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
The problem with hydrogen electrolysis is its energy requirements to split water. The energy requirements for the desalination of water before that is a rounding error. It's not worth the hassle to develop electrolyzers that can deal with seawater.
https://www.nemaco.com/blogs/304-vs-316-stainless-steel-diff...
I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.
The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.
Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.
How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
You don't pour money into a fuel that is a logistical headache and a half, a fuel that nobody uses, and can only be converted back into electricity with the standard terrible internal combustion / turbine efficiencies.
I'm tired of Internet Experts(tm) announcing how dumb the specialists are for not seeing the Obvious Facts.
BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days.
> How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you.
> Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
Extremely low costs some of the time. Not low at all average costs. Metal refineries have significant capital costs and shutdown costs. You are not going to profitably operate one if you need to shut it down when the wind calms down, or if you are running it on batteries. The kind of existing industries that can make use of intermittently cheap power have already been scaled up, and we need more to keep building more renewables.
> HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
I don't have to, because there are significant pilot projects ongoing.
This is new, and requires higher initial capital outlay than batteries (which have the significant advantage that it's easier to do small projects and then scale them up), so of course it's going more slowly. But there are things that hydrogen (+ things derived from hydrogen. Storing it as gas is not usually the best option, but if you have the gas you can refine it further at very low cost.) can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.
But seriously, you need to consider different metrics for different situations. If your data is from California or Australia, maybe consider that it is not applicable to all of the rest of the world?
... hardened valves and valve seats, stronger connecting rods, non-platinum tipped spark plugs, a higher voltage ignition coil, fuel injectors designed for a gas instead of a liquid, larger crankshaft damper, stronger head gasket material, modified (for supercharger) intake manifold, positive pressure supercharger, and high temperature engine oil.
For CNG or LPG conversion I think some fuel system components need to change but the rods, valves, head gasket, etc. are all unchanged.
My guess as to the reason is that hydrogen will basically detonate in the cylinder, whereas methane or propane will burn more like gasoline.
You can probably make electricity directly from H2, and you can probably make special pressure vessels that'll store that H2 (though even then it'll have a 7 year "inspect thoroughly" and a 15 year "throw it out regardless" lifespan.)
H2 is a silly fuel unless you're making rockets. Or if you're trying to distract people.
I haven't checked to see how that went, but it sounded like the perfect test case for hydrogen's viability.
Imagine dividing farmland by 10x by feeding hydrogenotrophs with solar H2.
Not everything is about "muh EV".
There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.
H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.
Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.
And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.
You build an electric arc furnace.
Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.
WTF is "anti-COVID-19 stainless steel" I wonder.
Edit: Turns out it's a high-copper alloy that has antiviral properties.
Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.
Destruction of methane by chlorine has been observed naturally, for example after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption in 2022 (although the chlorine-mediated destruction there was less than methane injected by the volcano itself.)
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-massive-volcano-destroyed-met...
They're not exactly talking about destroying methane. The methane is turning into chlorinated organic compounds.
Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries.
For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but it can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which are suitable for long term energy storage or for aerospace transportation.
Even with abundant and cheap dihydrogen, using it for energy storage in vehicles is a bad idea.
Plus there's also futures where harvesting salt / lithium from seawater leaves clean ish water as a by product, or a future where when it's sunny, just boil water to evaporate it with nearly free solar, then electrolyse it. And you'd need near free electricity to make this economic.
Uh, dumb question, how is 1.7 volts "ultra high potential" ? Is that even enough to do electrolysis like they're talking about?
"Hong Kong researchers develop corrosion-resistant steel for seawater hydrogen electrolysis"
