Nonsense Seeps Into a Scientific Journal's Editorial Rebranding Dangerous and Filthy Fossil Fuels as Hydrogen.

[NNadir]

I am a regular reader of the scientific journal Industrial Engineering and Chemistry Research and have posted commentaries on many papers in this journal.

I am very disappointed and appalled to see a comment with which I could not disagree more in an article on a new conference, the 2022 World Multiphase Transportation, Conversion & Utilizationof Energy (MTCUE-2022) I would have very much liked to have attended, were the issues therein related to my professional life, which they are not, although the conference is very much attached to my personal private interests.

The paper is this one: Multiphase Transportation, Conversion, & Utilization of Energy in Chemical Engineering: A Special Issue for MTCUE-2022 Hui Jin, Hanbin Zhong, Yi Ouyang, Qiang Guo, and Qingang Xiong, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (42), 16945-16948.

The article is open to the public to read, but I will cite the section of the paper that totally disgusts me, this:

Supercritical water (SCW) gasification is a clean and efficient utilization method of coal or biomass for hydrogen generation. Ding et al. (3) studied free radical diffusion in the SCW environment. The results illustrated that higher temperature in the SCW environment can enhance the diffusion of free radicals, especially for the ·H radical, therefore facilitating and promoting reactions for hydrogen production.

I am very interested, by the way, in the chemistry and physics of supercritical water and have, in fact, referred to it in this space:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

I can also believe that SCW may have limited utility in gasification of municipal waste and biomass. If the energy to generate the supercritical water is nuclear, this might even be a carbon negative process.

But the reality of gasification is, as the authors of this commentary is about coal. Under no circumstances is the use of coal "clean."

The issue of free radical diffusion is, in and of itself, of interest, but not what is implied by the spin is, well, obscene.

We do have here at DU, fossil fuel salespeople and sales bots selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," but it is a L-I-E that hydrogen is "clean" or "green," as I pointed out in a post in the Ennui and Excuses forum:

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

Most of the world's hydrogen is made from dangerous natural gas with exergy destruction, but in China - which is often mentioned by our DU fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots as a hydrogen nirvana - it is made from coal.

The authors of this commentary are, in fact, Chinese, and this may be a party line, but it is very different from truth.

China is largely dependent on coal, but nothing, absolutely nothing about coal is "clean. When hydrogen is made from coal, exergy is destroyed, and the acceleration of climate change is enhanced.

In fact, hydrogen is a dirty fuel, and all the advertising and hype cannot change that fact.

Facts matter.

It's really depressing to see an obvious lie presented in a scientific journal, appalling really.

This is deadly marketing.

Have a nice weekend.