In a country that worships the wind and sun Gods and treats our natural energy gifts, coal and uranium as the Great Satan, there is not much point even discussing energy or Australia's fast approaching descent into the Third World.

Australians don't deserve people like Keith Suter; they prefer to listen to dirty, smelly anarchists like Extinction Rebellion.

The car analogy is apt because when you drive a new car out of the showroom you'll never get back a huge percentage of what you paid for it. Same with hydrogen; it takes 54 kwh of electricity to make a kilogram of hydrogen by electrolysis but that hydrogen has a maximum heating value of 39 kwh and much less if you want to convert it back to electricity. It is much more efficient to use the original electricity directly such as in batteries. Battery cars are under under $50k and can fuelled at home unlike hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Hydrogen is also leaky, corrosive and explosive over a wide range of fuel-air ratios. To save the aviation industry we might have to make synfuel with hydrogen but they are struggling to get the cost down to $3 a litre. It's interesting how Finkel and CSIRO have put their reputations on the line by spruiking hydrogen. My guess is that when the ARENA grants run out the nascent hydrogen industry will stop in its tracks, just like geothermal and wave power. The reason is that successful future energy has to have a high net return like nuclear.

All true, but what is adroitly ignored is the energy component required to make or extract hydrogen and the massive cost of that energy component! And in previous examples has seen the cost of liquified hydrogen retail at around $6.00 a litre.

Now the proposal seems to be to use off-peak coal-fired power to make hydrogen?

This is just as nonsensical as continuing to use petrol to power our transport options! Given in he first instance we actually ad more greenhouse gas to the enviroment and ignoring that as we usee a vastly more expensive fuel to power vastly more expensive vehicles

Just so w can keep coalfired power and the dividend streams that low to shareholders from that resource!

There are four methods of making hydrogen, the first, extracting it from fossil fuel. By chemically separating the hydrogen and carbon constituents.

The second, via fractional separation directly from the atmosphere.

The third via electrolysis as advocated by the author.

The forth is via the catalytic cracking of the water molecule, the oldest method and not without some risk, given the volatile nature of the separated hydrogen. But not quite as volatile as some of the vapours produced in the extraction in refineries of petrol.

And burnt off in the flares we see at every refinery of gas compression station.

Thee same flares can instead be passed through a catalyst to also liquify them an as such be able to b used as fuel. Thus limiting the amount of greenhouse gas to the environment? At least for a time! TBC
Alan B.

The cracking of the water molecule to make hydrogen can be done using solar thermal power and seawater. The outlay to make it economic has to be massive and must include an astronomical cash outlay in the initial construction costs.

That said all the costs except routine maintenance are upfront!

This method includes flameless heat! With a certain amount of CO2 added to the super-heated steam just prior to it passing over the catalyst.

Which separates the H2O into its constituent parts, lighter than air hydrogen and the heavier oxygen and CO2.

The gas flow can be immediately cooled to below zero via the application of triangulated laser beams. which would massively assist liquefication. I'd pick a mostly unpopulated site along our west coast where we have almost desert conditions and nearby coastline. To limit pipelines and other outlays. Then build a connecting rail and use our east-west rail line to transport it across the Nullarbor and on to the southern and east coast.

Yes, we could do it here, and given the hours of sunshine etc. not much more expensive than doing it in the west. But the west coast option opens up a host of export market opportunities not as well served from here! TBC
Alan B.

Prize-winning, investigative journalist and science writer Richar Martin has written a book, called, Thorium, Super Fuel and subtitled, green energy.

He gives a short summation on U tube in google tech talks. As does author Professor Robert Hargraves, the Author of, Thorium, cheaper than coal.

Thorium is the most energy-dense material on the planet and so everywhere abundant, we can never ever run out of it in the predicted life of the universe!

Thorium is less radioactive than a banana and can be used in an unpressurised, molten salt reactor (MSR) It is as the element thorium fertile not fissile and therefore the element thorium cannot be compressed to create a thermonuclear reaction,i.e., a nuclear bomb!

The difficulty of weaponising it is what led to its eventual rejection and mothballing in the late seventies!

However, its prohibition later by congress would seem to protect the fossil fuel industry, big nuclear, which make the overwhelming profit stream from its fuel fabrication business, which would be completely destroyed by a change to universal and much, much cheaper, molten salt reactor technology.

Finally, that other big player, big pharma would see its cancer industry returns decimated by the introduction of the alpha particle, bismuth 213. A known, tried and tested, conventional medicine, miracle cancer cure. And via conventional radiological medicine. Repeat, CONVENTIONAL RADIOLOGICAL MEDICINE!

Whereas, many of big pharma's clinical servants here would have the gullible and uninformed public believe?

And just not the complementary or alternative medicines They to a virtual generic clinician claim for bismuth 213!? It has been used by reported conventional medicine in conventional medical clinics to have cured a whole host of virtual death sentence cancers, not the least of which is ovarian cancer, cured it would seem, given clinical reports, in European clinics in 2006.TBC
Alan B

Finally, we and the whole world needs to understand, we just cannot keep mindless burning fossil fuel! If you doubt the wisdom of that just go out to Bourke and take an unblinkered unconstrained by personal financial considerations, look at what climate change has wrought out there!

We need a universally affordable substitute for coal as our baseload dispatchable energy and that universally affordable substitute remains exclusively the nuclear power option! But particularly, for currently drought-ravaged and desperately clinging to faint hope!

Almost everything else including Kieth's current contribution, is horrendously expensive, pie in the sky stuff for most cash strapped Aussies!

We cannot build any nuclear reactors today, even using know tried and tested modular versions in factory mas production.

As for MSR thorium, we'd still need around seven years to produce a tried and tested prototype, given how much of the work has already been done!

Tha dovetails with the expected and or extended lives of the bulk of our coal-fired power stations and enough time for any adversely affected to make other timely rearrangements to their investment portfolios, which cannot keep, on including coal, given in the foreseeable future, you won't be able to given thermal coal away.

Finally, MSR technology can be fueled for literal centuries with the world' stockpile of nuclear waste! As we earn annual billions for providing the storage repository. But not before we've burnt the stuff and reduced the half-life to just 300 years!

And in the process, very safely, create virtually free, CARBON-FREE ENERGY! Which would also lend itself to turning inexhaustible seawater into endlessly sustainable, conventional fuel!
Alan B.