The world's largest green hydrogen project, which generates hydrogen from solar and wind renewables without emitting carbon dioxide, produced its first batch of "green hydrogen" on Thursday in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China.
China is the largest producer and consumer of hydrogen globally, but less than 0.1 percent of the hydrogen it produces comes from renewable energy sources.
It can both currently produce only 0.1% of hydrogen using a green process, while also developing a new process that is 99.9% green (for the hydrogren that it produces using the new process). That means the overall production right now is probably still ~0.1% green, but the point of the article seems to be that they hope to transition to this new process, which sounds pretty cool.
And to also knock out a few other misunderstandings, I’ll also address your comment below: The stats you link are for the number of plants, not the volume of production or consumption (what is claimed). Both stats can be correct if China has large plants that produce more volume than in other countries. But better yet, we don’t even have to root around for the details - the article cites it’s source: the World Economic Forum’s latest whitepaper (June 27, 2023), which in turn cites statistica “Global Hydrogen Consumption By Country”. So there you have it - China out-consumes hydrogen at a rate of about 2-times that of the next largest consumer (the United States). That seems to track pretty well, since both countries are similarly developed, and China is about 4x the size of the US by population. If you wanted to split hairs, you could say that this doesn’t include volume of production. Given the incredible lead in consumption volume, I’m willing to grant them that omission.
And, not chalking this up to you, but I’ve seen other replies in here about how China is somehow cooking the books. That’s becoming more and more obviously wrong (and more than a bit racist). As one indicator, their universities occupy 8 of the top 20 institutions in the Nature index. For those unaware, this is a premier British-based peer-reviewed journal that releases a ranking of academic institutions based on their publishing to high-impact journals. China’s year-over-year change also means that they’re rising on that list rapidly.
That would be an awesome stat, but it’s not what the article claims. I explained that above.
But because the topic has caught my interest I did some more digging. The only report I found was linked on Wikipedia, which says that 0.1% of all hydrogen globally is produced using renewable energy. This is the same figure China claims they produce, so by volume I would expect the total volume to be proportional to the production/consumption, which would mean China still would produce approximately 2x the next biggest producer. There could still be other countries punching way above their weight, but given the incredibly low net green production globally, we’d be splitting hairs over what amounts to research plant production. You’re welcome to continue searching for more specific reporting.
Now, given that we’ve found ourselves on a tangent sparked by a misunderstanding of the article, trying to compare countries on a metric that amounts to 0.1% of production, I would say it would be a better use of both of our time to focus on how we get the other 99.9% of production over to green production. Given this article, China seems to be approaching that problem ambitiously and I’m glad to see it. To address climate change we absolutely need China to invest in green tech, so this article should only be received positively. I’m looking forward to tracking the progress, because it looks like there’s a lot of opportunity to improve globally.
I’d say “they” might try? But no western country’s government has an iron grip on what news is reported/propagated in their respective countries like China does. There are at least dissenting opinions in western media, as terrible as it may be.
Oh look. Assange. Again. It’s like when you click on a link hoping someone’s been more clever than to try rickrolling again, but they haven’t.
It’s worth noting that there has been plenty of criticism from leading US journalism outlets over the handling of Assange’s case. Answer honestly, would you ever see that in China?
Or there is a middle ground where you’ll actually get a nuanced take?
I’m mostly curious about what they’re going to do with the hydrogen. Fuel cells? No hydrogen tech I know off has really proven scalable, reliable and cost effective. And while hydrogen generation was part of the issue it wasn’t the biggest one. I’m also keen to understand if they use fresh water or salt water. The latter then there is potential for a energy neutral or positive even desalination process which would be massive for large swaths of Africa.
Well from reading the article like a big boy I’ve learned that it’s pure freshwater they use which is expected but lame.
As for what they’re going to use it for that remains mostly a mystery. The world total for hydrogen fuel cell cars is 67,000 which is virtually nil and China aims for 50,000 of their own by 2025 which is also virtually nil. For reference they had estimated around 300 million cars 2021 and that number is on a rapid growth. 50,000 is less than 0,02%…
Further a hydrogen pipeline is not something I’d like to live near, I get it must exist for hydrogen tech to work but china + hydrogen pipeline is just a headline waiting to be written.
Personally I think they’re betting on the wrong horse
Hydrogen cars don’t seem like a good idea from my limited understanding of them. Hydrogen must be compressed to have the necessary energy density. That means a more complicated supply chain and heavier equipment. It is going into use in some lower traffic train lines where electrification doesn’t really make sense. There it makes sense to have a big ol’ tank of hydrogen.
Another good use is in combination with wind and solar where you can produce hydrogen when there’s energy available, and then use it to provide a steady energy supply. This addresses one of the main issues with renewables.
It’s also just a good idea to try out a lot of things and see what sticks. We never know what might turn out to have an unexpected application in one niche. Global warming requires “all of the above” strategy. That will mean some efforts fail to produce results, but that’s okay. We don’t have the time to dawdle.
They don’t have many buses like that yet and buses are always near population centers where using food waste to make biogas is simply much better in almost every way.
As for storing excess energy sure if we’re talking solar generation but they use a lot of hydrogen too for this project and in that case pumping water up to the dam is a much easier and probably more efficient than generating hydrogen and either using it to run an engine or store in fuel cells. Fuel cells aren’t all that efficient. Overall a lot of money spent that will not at all pay for itself for that use case.
I really struggle with why they’ve gone so heavily into generating hydrogen when there is a big lack of viable use cases. Though they’re far from alone in overestimating hydrogen, BMW and Toyota both invested heavily in fuel cell research (and BMW experimented with direct hydrogen use) and neither came out the other end a winner.
China is pursuing lots of different energy alternatives to fossil fuels. That’s the correct approach in my opinion. We don’t know what particular approach or combination of thereof will be most efficient in the long term, the only way to find out is to try different things and see where you get. Thinking of it purely in terms of profits is a bit myopic.
You keep thinking about the long term but have you considered that these brand new technologies aren’t widely implemented yet? I bet you would think that it’s a good idea to get a job working with computers but in the 1970s there weren’t many about. If you need some help to work all this out, I can tell you a story about this guy called Robert Wayne or something.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it’s hard to predict when it’s going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they’re going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don’t like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn’t tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do ‘knowledge exchange’ work. It’s all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of ‘transparently’ and ‘rigourously’ giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it’s too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won’t even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you’re interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I’m not. My friend posted on Twitter and Reddit, among other sites. Go to the CD website and apply. You can also apply at CGTN. Why do Xi’s PR work for free?
Not everyone who works there is a true believer but a few are and they get to advance over time.
I love how you’re just doing a low key smear on me here, and you probably think you’re being really clever in the process. It’s kind of adorable really.
I am not trying to smear you… I assumed you were getting paid because you post quite often and your English reads native level. Who has that kind of time to defend a government trey don’t live under?
I’m also not joking. I really recommend you look at state media jobs. You get a visa to live in Beijing, free housing, top-line private health insurance (because even CPC knows Chinese public healthcare is terrible), and a regular paycheck. It’s a great deal. I lived in the CD employee housing and was quite satisfied with it. Beijing is a fun place to live, and the expat scene is among the best I’ve encountered.
I left for Shanghai and that’s a whole other crazy story.
If you earnestly support the CPC, why not consider moving there? There’s a lot to like
In China, low-to-middle income people actually have deeply subsidized or sometimes no rent payments. Their apartments aren’t the best, but they’re not slums either
Yeah, FICO points are a social scoring system created by the West, it’s a joke because Westerners thing le ebil communism gives social points to citizens for doing pro government stuff. They are so alienated from their bourgeois dictatorships they can’t fathom people actually liking their government.
This is just whataboutism. Talking about the Chnia doesn’t remove any critique of the UK. We were talking about UK here. And BBC (the news source which was linked) has a documented bias towards the UK.
Calling whataboutism is a logical fallacy used to justify having different standards for yourself and your adversaries. Anybody using whataboutism in place of an actual can be safely dismissed as a troll. Meanwhile, western media is certainly no less biased than CGTN and has been caught lying about China repeatedly.
Calling whataboutism is a logical fallacy used to justify having different standards for yourself and your adversaries. Anybody using whataboutism in place of an actual can be safely dismissed as a troll. Meanwhile, western media is certainly no less biased than CGTN and has been caught lying about China repeatedly.
What are you on? Whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. We are talking about the bias of CGTN, and you say “what about western media?” Yeah western media are also biased, but it doesn’t take away the fact that CGTN is a heavily biased media outlet, highly biased towards positive chinese news. I never mentioned any western media or said they were superior, but to avoid talking about this difficult topic, you change the narrative. Did I mention anything about western media? No! Because that’s not the topic.
Whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. Far from it. Whataboutism has been heavily documented as a propaganda technique by many sociologists and rhetoric scientists:
The actual propaganda technique is calling whataboutism when confronted with the fact that you’re being a hypocrite. It’s a well known technique used to deflect any criticism of the US regime.
The fallacy of screeching whataboutism is in the use of a double standard for oneself and ones adversaries. If you screech that CGTN has bias, while similar level of bias exists in western media then what exactly is the point you’re making.
In fact, simply screeching that CGTN has bias without addressing the content of the article is a form of ad hominem fallacy. You are dismissing the content of the article by attacking the source and claiming that it’s biased. You didn’t actually engage with the topic at all or show what this supposed bias is in relation to the topic. All your comment attempts to do is to shut down discussion because by attacking the source.
China reporting that China is doing great… Call me Mr. Skeptical.
So, what are the numbers reported by other parties?
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Yeah, better go read some US propaganda against their peer competitor for some real facts about China. 😂
From your own article 😂
It can both currently produce only 0.1% of hydrogen using a green process, while also developing a new process that is 99.9% green (for the hydrogren that it produces using the new process). That means the overall production right now is probably still ~0.1% green, but the point of the article seems to be that they hope to transition to this new process, which sounds pretty cool.
And to also knock out a few other misunderstandings, I’ll also address your comment below: The stats you link are for the number of plants, not the volume of production or consumption (what is claimed). Both stats can be correct if China has large plants that produce more volume than in other countries. But better yet, we don’t even have to root around for the details - the article cites it’s source: the World Economic Forum’s latest whitepaper (June 27, 2023), which in turn cites statistica “Global Hydrogen Consumption By Country”. So there you have it - China out-consumes hydrogen at a rate of about 2-times that of the next largest consumer (the United States). That seems to track pretty well, since both countries are similarly developed, and China is about 4x the size of the US by population. If you wanted to split hairs, you could say that this doesn’t include volume of production. Given the incredible lead in consumption volume, I’m willing to grant them that omission.
And, not chalking this up to you, but I’ve seen other replies in here about how China is somehow cooking the books. That’s becoming more and more obviously wrong (and more than a bit racist). As one indicator, their universities occupy 8 of the top 20 institutions in the Nature index. For those unaware, this is a premier British-based peer-reviewed journal that releases a ranking of academic institutions based on their publishing to high-impact journals. China’s year-over-year change also means that they’re rising on that list rapidly.
You’ve made the same mistake, we need to know who makes the most green hydrogen, not who consumes the most H2
That would be an awesome stat, but it’s not what the article claims. I explained that above.
But because the topic has caught my interest I did some more digging. The only report I found was linked on Wikipedia, which says that 0.1% of all hydrogen globally is produced using renewable energy. This is the same figure China claims they produce, so by volume I would expect the total volume to be proportional to the production/consumption, which would mean China still would produce approximately 2x the next biggest producer. There could still be other countries punching way above their weight, but given the incredibly low net green production globally, we’d be splitting hairs over what amounts to research plant production. You’re welcome to continue searching for more specific reporting.
Now, given that we’ve found ourselves on a tangent sparked by a misunderstanding of the article, trying to compare countries on a metric that amounts to 0.1% of production, I would say it would be a better use of both of our time to focus on how we get the other 99.9% of production over to green production. Given this article, China seems to be approaching that problem ambitiously and I’m glad to see it. To address climate change we absolutely need China to invest in green tech, so this article should only be received positively. I’m looking forward to tracking the progress, because it looks like there’s a lot of opportunity to improve globally.
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Agreed
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And that’s still higher than the rest of the world. 😂
Once again, facts elude you
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311948/number-of-green-hydrogen-plants-by-country/
what year is it?
That’s as of 2022, why? do you have newer data?
The article in the submission.
What’s your point? China now has one more? I don’t understand what you are trying to say
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Who said anything about America? Fuck America. You know, most countries don’t brainwash their citizens with China-level nationalism.
I can’t think of a single country in the West that doesn’t.
I’d say “they” might try? But no western country’s government has an iron grip on what news is reported/propagated in their respective countries like China does. There are at least dissenting opinions in western media, as terrible as it may be.
Yeah, sure, it’s not like capital accumulation in your bourgeois dictatorship has lead to consolidation and oligopolies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXfRDC2NKY0
I’m well aware, but, hey, we don’t get thrown in prison for questioning our leaders or the reported stories.
Are you sure?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60852832
Oh look. Assange. Again. It’s like when you click on a link hoping someone’s been more clever than to try rickrolling again, but they haven’t.
It’s worth noting that there has been plenty of criticism from leading US journalism outlets over the handling of Assange’s case. Answer honestly, would you ever see that in China?
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Are you trying to argue that China isn’t a terrible, totalitarian state? What is your point, even? Chinese whataboutism is so obnoxious.
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Why are you posting propaganda from Turning Point USA?
🤣🤣
Apologies, didn’t check before and thought you were the OP.
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Or there is a middle ground where you’ll actually get a nuanced take?
I’m mostly curious about what they’re going to do with the hydrogen. Fuel cells? No hydrogen tech I know off has really proven scalable, reliable and cost effective. And while hydrogen generation was part of the issue it wasn’t the biggest one. I’m also keen to understand if they use fresh water or salt water. The latter then there is potential for a energy neutral or positive even desalination process which would be massive for large swaths of Africa.
Well from reading the article like a big boy I’ve learned that it’s pure freshwater they use which is expected but lame.
As for what they’re going to use it for that remains mostly a mystery. The world total for hydrogen fuel cell cars is 67,000 which is virtually nil and China aims for 50,000 of their own by 2025 which is also virtually nil. For reference they had estimated around 300 million cars 2021 and that number is on a rapid growth. 50,000 is less than 0,02%…
Further a hydrogen pipeline is not something I’d like to live near, I get it must exist for hydrogen tech to work but china + hydrogen pipeline is just a headline waiting to be written.
Personally I think they’re betting on the wrong horse
Hydrogen cars don’t seem like a good idea from my limited understanding of them. Hydrogen must be compressed to have the necessary energy density. That means a more complicated supply chain and heavier equipment. It is going into use in some lower traffic train lines where electrification doesn’t really make sense. There it makes sense to have a big ol’ tank of hydrogen.
They’ve been using it for stuff like buses increasingly https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1132385/beijing-2022-hydrogen-buses
Another good use is in combination with wind and solar where you can produce hydrogen when there’s energy available, and then use it to provide a steady energy supply. This addresses one of the main issues with renewables.
It’s also just a good idea to try out a lot of things and see what sticks. We never know what might turn out to have an unexpected application in one niche. Global warming requires “all of the above” strategy. That will mean some efforts fail to produce results, but that’s okay. We don’t have the time to dawdle.
They don’t have many buses like that yet and buses are always near population centers where using food waste to make biogas is simply much better in almost every way.
As for storing excess energy sure if we’re talking solar generation but they use a lot of hydrogen too for this project and in that case pumping water up to the dam is a much easier and probably more efficient than generating hydrogen and either using it to run an engine or store in fuel cells. Fuel cells aren’t all that efficient. Overall a lot of money spent that will not at all pay for itself for that use case.
I really struggle with why they’ve gone so heavily into generating hydrogen when there is a big lack of viable use cases. Though they’re far from alone in overestimating hydrogen, BMW and Toyota both invested heavily in fuel cell research (and BMW experimented with direct hydrogen use) and neither came out the other end a winner.
China is pursuing lots of different energy alternatives to fossil fuels. That’s the correct approach in my opinion. We don’t know what particular approach or combination of thereof will be most efficient in the long term, the only way to find out is to try different things and see where you get. Thinking of it purely in terms of profits is a bit myopic.
The irony of your myopia, lol
Quite the counterpoint there.
You keep thinking about the long term but have you considered that these brand new technologies aren’t widely implemented yet? I bet you would think that it’s a good idea to get a job working with computers but in the 1970s there weren’t many about. If you need some help to work all this out, I can tell you a story about this guy called Robert Wayne or something.
This is a great example of how real progress happens outside capitalist relations. Developing something genuinely new takes a lot of false starts, and it’s hard to predict when it’s going to become profitable. No capitalist wants to invest money into an idea indefinitely without knowing whether they’re going to get a return on it. This can only be done at state level when technological advancement is pursued outside the profit motive.
Spot on.
Liberal democracies understand most of this, too, they just don’t like to admit it or the implications. The state will fund experimental research through e.g. universities. Then the successful stuff gets sold off to the highest bidder. The problem with doing it this way, though, is that it doesn’t tackle the key contradiction.
The public funding bodies come back full circle to what you describe and the state decision makers face the same problem: how to know which ideas will be profitable? Researchers have to indicate this in research bids and do ‘knowledge exchange’ work. It’s all guess work, still. Researchers and universities know it and write about the problem.The funders know it and write about the problem.
But very few can admit that there is no solution within the logic of capitalism. Meanwhile, this model provides a very good way of ‘transparently’ and ‘rigourously’ giving almost all the research money to a handful of top universities who return the favour by asking pharmaceutical and military corporations what tech they would like to see develop (because it’s too expensive for the corps to develop with their own money). (I won’t even go into how much benign research is repackaged for the MIC, to the chagrin of the researchers.)
If you’re interested in the publication of such research, I can give you a citation for a peer-reviewed historical materialist analysis of academic publishing.
Hey real question: Do you work at state media? I used to work at China Daily. Maybe we’ve crossed paths
No, I don’t work at state media, and it’s pretty weird to assume that anybody who sees China favorably must work at Chinese state media to be honest.
My friend had a job doing what you do
Wow, you should really hook me up with that job. Didn’t know people got paid to post on Lemmy, seems like I’m missing out.
I know you’re being sarcastic, but I’m not. My friend posted on Twitter and Reddit, among other sites. Go to the CD website and apply. You can also apply at CGTN. Why do Xi’s PR work for free?
Not everyone who works there is a true believer but a few are and they get to advance over time.
I love how you’re just doing a low key smear on me here, and you probably think you’re being really clever in the process. It’s kind of adorable really.
I am not trying to smear you… I assumed you were getting paid because you post quite often and your English reads native level. Who has that kind of time to defend a government trey don’t live under?
I’m also not joking. I really recommend you look at state media jobs. You get a visa to live in Beijing, free housing, top-line private health insurance (because even CPC knows Chinese public healthcare is terrible), and a regular paycheck. It’s a great deal. I lived in the CD employee housing and was quite satisfied with it. Beijing is a fun place to live, and the expat scene is among the best I’ve encountered.
I left for Shanghai and that’s a whole other crazy story.
If you earnestly support the CPC, why not consider moving there? There’s a lot to like
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9999999999999 FICO POINTS. Now you can pay the rent for 00000000.01 seconds.
In China, low-to-middle income people actually have deeply subsidized or sometimes no rent payments. Their apartments aren’t the best, but they’re not slums either
Yeah, FICO points are a social scoring system created by the West, it’s a joke because Westerners thing le ebil communism gives social points to citizens for doing pro government stuff. They are so alienated from their bourgeois dictatorships they can’t fathom people actually liking their government.
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This is just whataboutism. Talking about the US doesn’t remove any critique of china. We were talking about China here. And CGTN (the news source which was linked) has a documented bias towards china
This is just whataboutism. Talking about the Chnia doesn’t remove any critique of the UK. We were talking about UK here. And BBC (the news source which was linked) has a documented bias towards the UK.
Calling whataboutism is a logical fallacy used to justify having different standards for yourself and your adversaries. Anybody using whataboutism in place of an actual can be safely dismissed as a troll. Meanwhile, western media is certainly no less biased than CGTN and has been caught lying about China repeatedly.
What are you on? Whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. We are talking about the bias of CGTN, and you say “what about western media?” Yeah western media are also biased, but it doesn’t take away the fact that CGTN is a heavily biased media outlet, highly biased towards positive chinese news. I never mentioned any western media or said they were superior, but to avoid talking about this difficult topic, you change the narrative. Did I mention anything about western media? No! Because that’s not the topic.
Whataboutism is not a logical fallacy. Far from it. Whataboutism has been heavily documented as a propaganda technique by many sociologists and rhetoric scientists:
The actual propaganda technique is calling whataboutism when confronted with the fact that you’re being a hypocrite. It’s a well known technique used to deflect any criticism of the US regime.
The fallacy of screeching whataboutism is in the use of a double standard for oneself and ones adversaries. If you screech that CGTN has bias, while similar level of bias exists in western media then what exactly is the point you’re making.
In fact, simply screeching that CGTN has bias without addressing the content of the article is a form of ad hominem fallacy. You are dismissing the content of the article by attacking the source and claiming that it’s biased. You didn’t actually engage with the topic at all or show what this supposed bias is in relation to the topic. All your comment attempts to do is to shut down discussion because by attacking the source.