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

Last edited Mon Jul 17, 2023, 07:34 PM - Edit history (1)

The original working title for this long post was this:

"2022 Primary Energy Sources for Making Hydrogen, Exergy Destruction, and Climate Denial."

I will discuss a number of papers from the primary scientific literature in this post, beginning with this one: Muhammad Arfan, Ola Eriksson, Zhao Wang, Shveta Soam, Life cycle assessment and life cycle costing of hydrogen production from biowaste and biomass in Sweden, Energy Conversion and Management, Volume 291, 1 September 2023, 117262

This paper contains statements of reality – it gives the current sources of primary energy to make hydrogen for the industries that rely on it, the ammonia industry, the dangerous fossil fuel refining industry, and (the only application with potential energy implications) the methanol industry. The paper then goes into some soothsaying about making hydrogen by the steam reforming of biomass. (I think that the steam reforming of biomass may be a good idea as a minor component of air capture of atmospheric carbon dioxide, if, and only if, the steam's primary energy source is nuclear.)

It is, in my opinion, a fine paper.

Before going much further, let me define a word in the abandoned working title of this post that may not be familiar, even though it’s probably one of the most important words in the English language given the importance of climate change. The technical term for wasted energy in a process, energy lost to entropy, is "exergy destruction." Exergy is the amount of any form of primary or secondary energy - stored energy is never primary energy - that can be made useful, generally described as "work," i.e. energy consumed to accomplish a task, propelling a car, lighting a room.

I will use this term, exergy, below to show how much energy is wasted to make hydrogen from all sources of primary energy. Hydrogen and, for that matter, charging batteries are not primary energy, although regrettably people act as if they are. Storing energy in batteries or as hydrogen always results in exergy destruction. In any process, including but not limited to processes that consume energy to make hydrogen, energy recovery is never 100%. This is a consequence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, a law not subject to repeal by wishful thinking. In undergraduate courses in thermodynamics, the ideal case wherein 100% energy recovery in a process is discussed in theoretical terms, the purpose of the discussion is to show that the result of 100% energy recovery is impossible. It follows, continuing with "percent talk" that any discussion of energy, including those about environmental impact, that ignores the laws of thermodynamics is nonsense and useless. In the case of the much hyped "hydrogen economy" this ignorance of the laws of thermodynamics lapses easily into climate denial.

I previously discussed, in the simplest terms accessible to me, entropy here: The Difference Between Thermodynamically Rich Heat and Heat as a Thermodynamic Degradant.

Recently I stepped into a firestorm of hydrogen worship over in GD where advocates for the fraudulent claim that hydrogen is "green" energy got into paroxysms of profound anger, some of it of the "kill the messenger" type, because their dogmatic denial of reality was being confronted with facts. I hate to say it, but in this, they sort of reminded me of people screaming at doctors and nurses in the hospital room of a dying Covid victim because the patient wasn't given the horse dewormer Ivermectin (or having bleach injections).

From my perspective, as will be clearly shown below, any ridiculous claim that hydrogen is "green energy" constitutes climate change denial. I personally am fed up with climate denial, with climate denial on my own end of the political spectrum, the left, as I am with climate change denial on the right. In many ways, climate denial on the left is worse for me, since it reflects on all of us, and shows us to be fools, easily led by cheap marketing.

It's no small matter.

Hydrogen is not primary energy, and all the screaming in the face of this fact will not change it, nor will screaming in the face of any person reporting as much will change it.

To make these points, that hydrogen is made using dangerous fossil fuels involving exergy destruction of the energy content in dangerous fossil fuels, in some of my own threads and in many others threads posted here by fossil fuel salespeople selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as hydrogen, lowering their energy output and greenwashing them - I've been regularly posting this graphic with numbers and a reference:

I keep this text handy because there are so many horrible "hydrogen is green" fantasies running around, this while the planet burns, that an assertion of reality seems required. Many of the people who nonetheless insist that the destructive and highly dangerous fantasy they have, or sell, hydrogen cars, hydrogen trucks, hydrogen ferries, hydrogen lawn mowers, hedge trimmers blah, blah, blah, respond to this reality by saying hydrogen could be made without fossil fuels.

One of the many reasons - an important reason, I think - that the planet is in flames is confusion between the conditional word "could" with the statement of reality connected with the verb form of being represented by the word "is".

Confusion rhymes with delusion. We're living in a delusional world, this at peril to the future of the planet.

In fact, trivial tiny amounts of it are made without fossil fuels, and the point of this post is to put numbers on how much hydrogen may be so made by appeals to numbers, using data obtained from references from reputable sources, these being the primary scientific literature (which is not oracular, but is nonetheless reputable) and sources like the International Energy Agency, staffed by competent scientists and engineers from almost all the world's nations.

I know I can expect further outrage, dogmatic unreferenced unsupported assertions, soothsaying, spin, and chanting. No amount of information can address dogma, be it religious or otherwise.

It goes with the territory, but silence is complicity. Embracing reality is the most important psychological issue of our times, and I consider it a duty to report reality.

Anyway, text from the paper cited at the outset of this post, published online last month but dated for the "September 2023" issue of Energy Conversion and Management,:



The added bold is mine.

The first bold statement probably includes only people who abhor, as I do, fossil fuels. The second bolded statement is simply a statement of the fact that one requires energy to make hydrogen, to repeat and repeat and repeat - not that repeating facts matters in our culture anymore, not here, not anywhere - hydrogen is not primary energy.

Note that the authors, who are engaging in analytical soothsaying, as opposed to blind dogmatic soothsaying, honestly report that less than 1% - probably much less than 1% - of hydrogen is made by the reformation of biomass, and their fine paper is a discussion of what a large scale biomass based hydrogen source would look like in terms of environmental impact. "Would" like "could" is a conditional word and is not synonymous with "is."

There are small differences in the reported amounts sources of energy to produce hydrogen between the Energy and Fuels paper whose graphics I must have posted in this space well over 50 times, which works out to one time each for each of the ppm rises in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the 20 years I've written uselessly here and the paper cited at the outset of this post. The largest difference is in the amount of hydrogen produced by using coal as a primary energy source, which in "percent talk" is 9% higher. This may reflect an effect of time and the rising price of dangerous natural gas owing to the Ukraine War, a war funded by German antinukes who have been misrepresenting themselves as "going green." It may also represent the addition of hydrogen production in China. Both cases are somewhat speculative, but reasonable. In this post I will use the numbers from the Energy Conversion and Management paper for two reasons, one it is the most recent, and secondly because it goes beyond sometimes meaningless and/or misleading "percent talk" to give an absolute number for the amount of hydrogen being produced on this planet 94 million (metric) tons. With number we can calculate, in absolute terms, how much exergy is destroyed by making hydrogen on this planet.

The source for reference 11 in the paper is this one, from the IEA: IEA 2022 Global Hydrogen Review

The report there contains the following text:



Source: IEA: IEA 2022 Global Hydrogen Review, pg. 71.

Excepting the section title, I added the bold.

World carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 were roughly 36 billion tons, meaning that in "percent talk" that hydrogen related emissions of carbon dioxide amounted to about 2.7%, consistent with many figures I've seen over the years.

Oh, and all those hydrogen filling station in China ads posted here? They're advertisements for coal.

A figure:




IEA 2022 Global Hydrogen Review, pg. 71.

The LHV for hydrogen is said to be around 120 MJ/kg, suggesting that the energy content of this hydrogen - it's actually not used very much for energy purposes - is about 11.3 Exajoules (EJ). (Source: Engineering Tool Box) This is just 0.7 Exajoules less than the energy the solar and wind scam produced, after an expenditure of trillions of dollars on this junk. Obviously not all of the solar and wind energy on the planet, as useless as it is, went to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen must come from somewhere else, which is what I'm exploring here. The last data from the IEA World Energy Outlook, 2022, published this past November (as is a typical month for the release of the annual report) reported that world energy demand was 624 EJ. Thus the energy content of hydrogen production represents in "percent talk" about 1.8% of world energy demand. Again, however, hydrogen is mostly used for synthetic purposes, despite all the stupid ads one sees all the time here and else where for hydrogen cars, hydrogen trucks, hydrogen lawn mowers, etc.


Of course, this energy content involves exergy destruction of the energy content of dangerous fossil fuels, and so the task is to demonstrate how much exergy was destroyed to make hydrogen and account for the 900 MT of CO2 released in 2021, how much dangerous fossil fuel energy and how much electrical energy consumed at a thermodynamic loss to make hydrogen.

Let's start with the main fossil fuel from which hydrogen is made with exergy destruction:

There are a number of papers on this subject, some suggesting process improvements, but I chose this one Adam P. Simpson, Andrew E. Lutz, Exergy analysis of hydrogen production via steam methane reforming, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 32, Issue 18, 2007, Pages 4811-4820 because it's 16 years old and thus may well describe the design of new plants that function today, assuming that hydrogen reforming plants last longer than wind turbine junk does.

All we really need from this paper is to look a graphics from the paper:

The process system diagram, which looks totally reasonable to me:



The caption:





The caption:

Fig. 3. Distribution of exergy flows into and out of the modeled SMR system.

We have, between exhaust and exergy destruction (lost heat) about 62.70% efficiency for the production of hydrogen from dangerous natural gas, 44 million tons from the percentage of hydrogen made this way, again at 120 MJ/kg having an energy value of 5.3 Exajoules, suggesting that the energy consumed to produce it involved 5.3/.627 = 8.5 EJ, with 3.2 EJ of the energy content of the dangerous natural gas destroyed.

Next let's turn to the dangerous fossil fuel coal and the exergy destruction associated with it.

For an account of exergy destruction by the steam reformation of coal, I'm turning to a more recent paper, this one by Chinese authors, this paper: Song He, Lin Gao, Rui Dong, Sheng Li, A novel hydrogen production system based on the three-step coal gasification technology thermally coupled with the chemical looping combustion process, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 47, Issue 11, 2022, Pages 7100-7112.

Hydrogen salespeople who come here to run ads about Chinese hydrogen stations, always take the time to show large tracts of Chinese land wasted to make solar cell industrial parks. This as a marketing tool, frankly a fraudulent marketing tool, to imply, without proof, that hydrogen and the useless solar industry are hand in hand, which of course, as noted by reference to the IEA, they are not. Nevertheless, here, in this paper, we have highly trained chemical engineers devoting effort to improving the process for making hydrogen from coal. I hate to push for critical thinking, which can be very unpopular, but if the solar and wind fantasy is so great and so cheap - neither are either - how is it that Chinese scientists are actively researching ways to make the production of hydrogen from coal more efficient?

Once again, at hydrogen stations in China, what is being sold is thermodynamically degraded coal made by wasting coal, and as the reference immediately above suggests, the Chinese intend to keep selling coal as hydrogen, by making it slightly less horrible than it already is.

How horrible is it?

I'll get to that in a minute. The introduction to the paper would be amusing, as contains deliberate dishonest marketing of the type that hydrogen salespeople here display, except there is no longer anything funny about climate change denial marketed with wishful thinking and delusion. Here is the text in question:



...at the point of use?...

You don't say? Given that the manufacture of hydrogen is rather dirty, isn't this qualifier more than a tad dishonest. It's what's the paper's about after all, exergy destruction, the wasting of energy.

It should be obvious, although hydrogen salespeople will deny this because -let’s face it, as we’re seeing, the whole hydrogen game is “bait and switch” – moving pollution somewhere else is not stopping pollution. It’s simply hiding it for marketing purposes. It’s climate denial; it’s lying.

As for CSS - the idea that we'll just build huge carbon dumps someday, somewhere, somehow, and all of our carbon dioxide problems will go away - this has proved as useless a fantasy as solar, wind, and oh yeah, the "hydrogen economy." All of these marketed but never useful schemes have been actively discussed and discussed and discussed, and then discussed again, and again and then again, in this century, with the result that since the week of July 2, 2000 and the week of July 2, 2023, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide has risen 52.37 ppm. There are still no carbon dioxide dumps on any scale that matters; there is no so called "renewable energy" nirvana on any scale that matters, and there certainly isn't any "green hydrogen," despite 50 years of bullshit about it.

The whole idea behind the concept of “chemical looping” – oxygen is carried by a metal, often iron – and then used to oxidize an organic fuel essentially in the solid phase is to produce pure carbon dioxide from the fuel, rather than a dilute solution of carbon dioxide, typically on the order of 5 to 10% in flue gas, in a smokestack. The driving notion behind this idea is to greenwash fossil fuels by claiming that huge carbon dioxide dumps (aka sequestration) will someday be practical, but all efforts to build them have lapsed into some space between ridiculous and absurd. Like hydrogen, solar and wind energy, evocations of CSS are wishful thinking substituting for reality, an effort to greenwash dangerous fossil fuels and the status quo.

This said, oxyfuel combustion, the combustion of organic matter is an atmosphere of pure oxygen, can do the same thing with the advantage of being amenable to flow systems, which are inherently superior in continuous flow systems. It is possible, albeit to a limited extent, to make oxyfuel combustion of biomass and other organic wastes, to produce pure carbon dioxide not for dumps, but for use.

Before turning to the exergy destruction associated with what remains as of now a trivial but overhyped means of hydrogen production, electrolysis, let’s complete a discussion of the true source of hydrogen from dangerous fossil fuels by turning our attention to exergy destruction where the hydrogen source is petroleum.

For this discussion, the paper I’ll choose refers to the gasification of oil residuals (almost certainly representing the bulk of oil gasified to hydrogen) to make hydrogen. The paper in question is this one:

Aldemar Martínez González, Electo Eduardo Silva Lora, José Carlos Escobar Palacio, Syngas production from oil sludge gasification and its potential use in power generation systems: An energy and exergy analysis, Energy, Volume 169, 2019, Pages 1175-1190

Exergy destruction – this is a cogeneration system producing electricity as a side product by the direct burning of syn gas, syngas being a mixture of hydrogen and carbon oxides, monoxide and dioxide that is actually useful, as opposed to pure hydrogen:



The caption:



In this system the syn gas, without the separation of carbon oxides and hydrogen - said separation is another exergy destroying system - the syn gas is burned directly. This adds a layer to the previous two examples from coal and gas, which is that the hydrogen destroys exergy when it is burned, just like a battery destroys exergy when it is discharging. Energy storage is wasteful, particularly when the energy is stored by chemical means, as in a battery or in hydrogen. (The exergy destruction associated with the use of hydrogen, seen in this way, will actually be worse than what I've shown in the gas and coal reforming situations.)

The total exergy destroyed is 64.4%.

The nature of the wastes of this dirty process is shown in the Grassman diagram (a form of Sankey diagram that focuses on exergy destruction):



The caption:



An ugly mess is involved in producing hydrogen in this case, tar, ash, and of course, exhaust of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.

Now let’s turn to electrolysis, the smallest source of hydrogen; much of it, I suspect, is tied to the chlorine industry, where hydrogen is an inevitable side product, although there are some tiny Potemkin plants hyped by hydrogen salespeople to divert attention from how dirty hydrogen is.

For electrolyzer efficiency, I will rely on the figures from the following paper, which evaluates the solar hydrogen fantasy that’s been kicking around for decade after decade of hype – I remember this from my youth and am now an old man – but has not produced significant hydrogen, is not producing significant hydrogen and will not produce significant hydrogen, all mindless soothsaying to the contrary:

Valeria Juárez-Casildo, Ilse Cervantes, Carlos A. Cervantes-Ortiz, R. de G. González-Huerta, Key aspects in quantifying massive solar hydrogen production: Energy intermittence, water availability and electrolyzer technology, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 371, 2022.



For calculation purposes, I will use the intermediate figure, 70%.

For the primary energy sources for electricity, I will rely on the data published in the IEA's 2022 World Energy Outlook, which includes both reality, and soothsaying, about a putative "energy transition" that is supposed to be underway, although there are no numbers to support that claim. That table, Table A.a3 found on page 438 of that report is here:



Note that this document includes two sections, one based on reality and the other based on soothsaying about "stated policies." What are "stated policies?" They are the policies announced by public officials are very similar to the "stated policies" that have been going on for a very long time predicting an outbreak of a so called "renewable energy" nirvana "by 1990," then "by 2000," then "by 2010," then "by 2020" and now "by 2030," and "by 2050." I've been following these "by 'such and such a year'" stated policies since I was a young man; and now I'm an old man, listening to statements about how an "energy transition" is well underway, even though the accumulation of just one of the dangerous fossil fuel wastes, carbon dioxide, is occurring at the fastest rate ever observed.

And then, to distract from all this prayer, posturing, pronouncements, predictions, and other pissant pontifications, there's something called "reality." "Reality" can be shown by comparing 2020 with 2021 in the table, collated "data." The fastest growing source of electricity generation on this planet, measured, was coal, even though people chant day after day after day after day that so called "renewable energy" is reducing reliance on coal.

On what planet?

Not this one.

Coal based power generation grew by 762 TWh, in "percent talk" 426% faster than solar energy, which grew by 179 TWh, faster than wind, which grew, again in "percent talk," 279% faster than wind energy. Overall, led by coal, dangerous fossil fuel generated electricity grew by 1001 TWh.

Electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy; it's production always wastes energy, consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. For thermal Rankine plants, those run on petroleum, coal and nuclear, in my calculation for the exergy destruction connected with the trivial 3.7% of the world's hydrogen produced by electrolysis, I will use 33% Rankin efficiency, thus implying a exergy destruction of 67% for generation. Then 30% of the energy is subject to exergy destruction for electrolysis. Thus the fraction of energy represented by exergy destruction for these plants will be (1-(.33*0.7) = .77. For dangerous natural gas, allowing for the fact that some dangerous natural gas plants are combined cycle plants, I will assume, somewhat arbitrarily without digging too deep into data, that the overall thermal efficiency is higher, averaging 45%. Thus the fraction of exergy destroyed by electrolysis using dangerous natural gas derived electricity will be (1-.45*.07) = 0.69. For solar and wind, I have ignored the thermodynamic values for electricity production, since these generally show up in terms of the land destroyed for this useless and expensive affectation, and treated them as if they were 100% efficient, which of course, they are nowhere near being. Thus the fraction of exergy destroyed in my calculation is simply that of electrolysis itself, 1-0.7 = 0.3

From the above numbers and references, it is now possible to determine the exergy destruction connected with the wasteful synthesis of hydrogen by the reformation of dangerous fossil fuels, both in the reforming case, and the electrolysis case. The result is shown from the following table from an Excel spreadsheet I prepared:



The overwhelming majority of the world's hydrogen, 90.2 million tons out of 94.0 million tons is made from the reformation of dangerous fossil fuels. Although the bulk of this hydrogen is decidedly not used for powering cars, trucks, buses as in the cheap ads posted here by hydrogen/fossil fuel salespeople/salesbots, the energy content if it were burned rather than used for ammonia synthesis, petroleum refining and methanol synthesis, the energy content of this hydrogen would be 10.8 Exajoules, produced at a cost of 20.6 Exajoules, with the exergy destruction, heat rejected to the environment and wasted, amounting to 9.7 Exajoules. The overall cost of producing 10.8 Exajoules of hydrogen by reformation of dangerous fossil fuels is 20.6 Exajoules.

The exergy destruction of this process is 47.4%

About 3.3% of the world's energy supply, the last data point being 624 Exajoules produced in 2021, goes into making hydrogen; this figure is entirely consistent with what I've seen in the general literature over the last 20 to 30 years while assholes prattled on, nonsensically, about hydrogen being "green."

But of course, the hydrogen made from dangerous fossil fuels is not limited to reformation, but includes electrolysis. As shown above in the WEO 2022 Table A.3a, the bulk of the world's electricity is made by combusting dangerous fossil fuels. Using the WEO fractions from Table A.3a for sources of electricity, we can now calculate the exergy destruction associated with the trivial 3.7% of the world's hydrogen produced by electrolysis. (Note: The Hydrogen Salespeople/Salesbots that advertise here want you to believe that all of the world's hydrogen is made by electrolysis, a bald faced marketing lie. It's not even close.)

A table of exergy destruction I've prepared from Excel for the worse case wherein hydrogen is manufactured via electrolysis:



The exergy destruction is 66.94%. Electrolysis is even dirtier than reformation.

It is now possible to add to the amount of hydrogen produced by the direct (and cleaner) reformation of dangerous fossil fuels, the amount of hydrogen produced by electrolysis using electricity generated by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels. Again, from an Excel spreadsheet I've prepared:



And finally the reality connected with the bullshit handed out about "green hydrogen" going back over half a century, both in private belief systems, and worse, by prominent morons like Amory Lovins of the bourgeois antinuke cult called the "Rocky Mountain Institute" whose nonsense is sometimes posted by hydrogen salespeople/salesbots in a festival of destructive marketing, the amount of hydrogen that is produced by so called "renewable energy."



Combined, the materially and financially expensive land use nightmares of solar and wind energy, produced 0.37% of the world's hydrogen, at an exergy destruction penalty of 30%, 0.35 million metric tons out of 94 million tons of hydrogen now produced.

Anyone who is familiar with my writings, whether they are hostile people like the fossil fuel/hydrogen salespeople and salesbots who advertise here, "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes hyping the useless wind and solar industries, or straight up ignorant radiation paranoid antinukes or whether they are people who value what I say, will know that I consider that the only sustainable tool we have to address climate change is nuclear energy.

Via electrolysis, nuclear energy is responsible for the production of 0.34 million metric tons of hydrogen. Often people say that I should approve of hydrogen produced by nuclear energy via electrolysis, but I don't so approve. Making hydrogen from nuclear energy wastes the energy of this valuable infrastructure which should be applied in all cases involving electricity, on the reduction of the use of fossil fuels on electrical grids.

I do not favor, and never will favor, the use of hydrogen as a consumer product. It is too dangerous and far too expensive in terms of environmental and financial terms to even be considered, even though - to my horror - it is being considered, and vast sums of money is being squandered on it. What I have not covered in this post is the appalling energy cost of hydrogen compression and liquefaction, which would make this popular nonsense even worse, far worse.

A valued correspondent and I in the thread associated with one of my recent posts here nominally not about hydrogen at all, but about the mobilization of natural radium by the fossil fuel industry and chemical industries, had an exchange about the energy and environmental costs. That thread is here: Elevated Radium Activity in a Hydrocarbon-Contaminated Aquifer

In the comments of that thread, by appeal to references, I showed that the compression and liquefaction of hydrogen would require raising all of the figures described above for exergy destruction by about 30%.

An excerpt of a comment:



Now let me turn to a wiser approach to the use of nuclear energy to make hydrogen for captive industrial use, since hydrogen is a valuable industrial product with many uses, including it's current and potentially much larger use in the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide.

A caveat: I am now entering the realm of discussing could which is not and never should be confused with the word is.

The interior of nuclear fuels, depending on their structure and the heat exchange properties associated with their chemical nature, when in operation, are at temperatures of well over 1000°C, often approaching 2000°C. At Chernobyl, after the destruction of the heat removal system, and to a lesser extent, Fukushima, the melting of the fuels which are designed to be refractory, after the destruction of the heat sinks, shows this much.

If we were to exploit these temperatures we could - there's that word "could" again - greatly reduce the exergy destruction associated with the mere production of electricity, in a much discussed technique in the literature called "process intensification." I carry on about "process intensification" quite a bit here.

To give the general idea, I will reproduce two graphics from this paper: Reuben Joseph Soja, Muhammad Bello Gusau, Usman Ismaila, Nuraddeen Nasiru Garba, Comparative analysis of associated cost of nuclear hydrogen production using IAEA hydrogen cost estimation program, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 48, Issue 61, 2023, Pages 23373-23386:





To be clear, in these graphics, I oppose any pathway to includes reference to electricity and electrolysis, with the possible exception of more efficient high temperature electrolysis, and this only in the case where electricity is a side product produced to prevent exergy destruction of primary nuclear heat.

As I've noted in many posts here, my favorite thermochemical cycle is the "SI" cycle - the sulfur iodine cycle - because it involves fluid matrices and is thus subject to continuous operation once the materials science applications are all addressed, a process well underway.

One step of the SI cycle involves the thermal decomposition of sulfuric acid resulting in a hot stream of SO2 and O2 gas with a little steam, which must be rapidly cooled to prevent recombination in the reverse chemical reaction. The heat exchangers to do this can obviously use the heat for other purposes, one of which, but only one of which, would be the generation of electricity, which in a modified Allam cycle can actually be used for the dry reforming of waste materials, notably plastic waste, but also biomass waste.

A relatively recent review of thermochemical hydrogen cycles can be found here: Farid Safari, Ibrahim Dincer, A review and comparative evaluation of thermochemical water splitting cycles for hydrogen production, Energy Conversion and Management, Volume 205, 2020, 112182.

There are many such reviews, and many thermochemical cycles which feature low exergy destruction, higher efficiency, and thus cleaner energy. There are also equivalent - via the water gas shift reaction - carbon dioxide splitting reactions, one of which is a modified Allam cycle, but others involving high temperatures, such as the cerium oxide based cycles.

I have discussed these in other posts in this space.

Via mechanisms of this type, it is possible to utilize nuclear primary energy for all energy purposes at low environmental impact, thus eliminating all energy related mining - if uranium is recovered from seawater as side product of nuclear desalination - all of the destruction of wilderness and other valuable land for so called "renewable energy," and all drivers of climate change.

That's a could, not an is. What is happening is an unfortunate and highly destructive embrace of stupidity and wishful thinking, here and elsewhere driven by sophisticated but toxic marketing - tobacco quality marketing - driven by dishonest salespeople/salesbots of whom the hydrogen/fossil fuel salespeople/salesbots are only a subset.

I trust you have had a pleasant weekend. Here in New Jersey we are experiencing extreme weather, heavy flooding rain. As long as we continue to embrace ignorance driven by marketeers, the extreme weather will only get worse.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.