A Hydrogen Perpetual Motion Machine. [View all]

Here's a fun paper: Enhanced CH4 Production from CO2 Hydrogenation on γ-AlOOH-Supported Cobalt Catalyst with Abundant Surface Coordination Unsaturated Oxygen Atoms Hongmin Ma, Yiyi Zhao, Sha Li, Jiajun Zheng, Peng Liu, Yu-Long Men, Xiaoliang Yan, and Yun-Xiang Pan Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (41), 17512-17520.

I'm not even going to bother with the text, but merely comment on the title.

The title refers to making methane from CO₂ and hydrogen.

Here's the problem: Most of the hydrogen on this planet is currently made from the steam reforming of dangerous natural gas, which is, of course, mostly methane.

This process is therefore a perpetual motion machine, methane makes hydrogen by steam reforming (dumping CO₂ into the planetary atmosphere, thereby killing it), and then according to the paper, CO₂ is hydrogenated to make methane.



The caption:

Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084]

Of course, this will not work in the production of energy, exergy is destroyed in the process, perpetual machines do not, and never will, exist.

Why then has a prominent journal published this work? The reason is that in China, as opposed to the rest of the world, makes hydrogen not from natural gas, of which it has only limited supplies. It makes it by the steam reforming of coal. The process is designed to make natural gas from coal because of the utility of gaseous methane as opposed to coal which must be transported as a solid.

Like all modern applications of hydrogen, this is an extremely dirty process, of course, if offering some convenience in shipment.

Exergy is destroyed in this process, and the atmosphere is dirtied. One should note that methane in terms of convenience of use, is vastly superior to hydrogen, since hydrogen is incompatible with many metals, including iron alloys, and methane has a much higher critical temperature than hydrogen and while it is thermodynamically problematic to liquify methane, the situation is far worse for hydrogen.

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

Have a nice Sunday.