Green Hydrogen
Hydrogen is simple to produce using electrolysis. In fact, it is done in schools by using salt water, wires and battery. It is not hard to do.
The benefits of hydrogen are that:
- It is simple to produce
- It is flammable
- It produces water as a by-product of combustion
However, it has drawbacks:
- It is inefficient to produce. More energy is put in than you will get out of burning it
- It is hard to distribute and store without losing energy
- It is highly-flammable. We cannot forget the Hindernburg Airship that blew up
- It is more costly than fossil fuels
- Batteries are getting way cheaper than hydrogen due to economies of scale
It is worth a shot in my view. Batteries cannot be used for everything. Applications like planes, large ships and rockets cannot use batteries. Hydrogen is a better substitute for fossil fuels in these areas. It can also be useful in the industrial process of making steel, glass and even cement (Not sure about this one though).
In the Ted talk, a company called Enapter is looking to make the production of green hydrogen cheaper. They are doing this by making the electrolyzers cheap to produce in mass. This is the key to make products that scale across the globe. Just like computers, they only become popular and widespread when the PC was introduced. Unlike the mainframe which was for businesses, PC could be purchased and used by anyone. Eventually, businesses adopted PC technology for their computing needs are they were cheaper due to mass production and modular enough to be stacked for large computational needs.