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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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We already can do something similar to this by producing hydrogen gas from water. Hydrogen has an energy density of about 33MJ/kg, which is comparable to hydrocarbons, and production is relatively trivial. The problem comes in converting it back to usable energy, which requires complicated fuel cells that are relatively expensive, which is, I believe, the biggest reason why the simpler but inferior EVs got the edge on hydrogen as the "green" vehicle solution.

Hydrogen isn't currently a panacea: it's difficult to store long term: it isn't very dense at room temperature and liquefies at a difficultly-low temperature. It also likes to leak really easily.

I don't know that it can be made practical for vehicular applications, but if you're thinking about fixed energy storage infrastructure it's probably worth considering.

Converting it to methane, if you could do so scalably and efficiently, would make the longer-term storage problem (months) much easier.