{"id":12418,"date":"2020-05-28T21:22:34","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T04:22:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/?p=12418"},"modified":"2020-06-10T20:41:40","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T03:41:40","slug":"hydrogen-from-dirty-and-clean-sources","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/hydrogen-from-dirty-and-clean-sources\/","title":{"rendered":"Hydrogen from Dirty and Clean Sources"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hydrogen, the first element created from the Big Bang, is the lightest in the periodic table, has the atomic number 1, and is \u201cthe most abundant chemical substance in the universe.\u201d (Wikipedia).\u00a0 Until starting this blog entry, though, your editor was unaware that this colorless gas came in brown, blue, and green variants – referring to the methods used to extract h2.\u00a0 Hydrogen can be extracted from some fairly dirty sources, but the dirtiest may lead to an amazingly clean outcome, if we\u2019re to believe what\u2019s happening in Lancaster, California.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em> reports,<\/a> \u201c<\/span>Broadly, there are currently three ways to make hydrogen. Brown hydrogen is produced when the element is stripped out of fossil fuels such as coal, while blue hydrogen is produced from gas. Green hydrogen is produced from running an electric current through water using an electrolyser powered by renewable energy such as solar.\u201d\u00a0 (A simplified list)<\/span><\/p>\n

Brown H2 from Brown and Black Coal<\/b><\/h4>\n

Brown coal has more oxygen than black coal as part of its makeup, making it more easily broken down in a gasification process.\u00a0 <\/span>The Explainer <\/span><\/i>lives up to its name. \u201c<\/span>But to get a lot of hydrogen, the coal needs to be \u2018gasified\u2019 rather than burned, creating compounds that can then be reacted with water to make hydrogen. This is where the majority of hydrogen comes from in this case \u2013 not from the coal itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n