Rendered at 18:54:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
smusamashah 10 hours ago [-]
> That is what makes the finding so striking. Manganese is usually not viewed as a friend of stainless steel corrosion resistance. In fact, the prevailing view has been that manganese weakens it.
> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
This is the Cannot be explained bit
MSFT_Edging 7 hours ago [-]
> which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science
The three stooges effect I see. Too many corrosive elements, they stop each other from getting through the door.
wnevets 3 hours ago [-]
I was thinking of the Mr Burns sickness bit which references the stooges [1]
I think people are taking this seriously but in reality I'm just referencing this bit.
janderson215 5 hours ago [-]
This is great. Any other dynamics in which The Stooges Effect is present?
PowerElectronix 4 hours ago [-]
High entropy alloys come to mind. There are so many possible metallic combinations when you mix 5 o 6 metals in equal proportions that they all end up being in a single, homogeneous combinantion with about one atom of each per crystal molecule.
chamomeal 4 hours ago [-]
Oh wow I thought this was a simpsons reference to when Mr. Burns has too many diseases, that none of them can take him down. Cool that it's a real thing
adrian_b 8 hours ago [-]
A bonus is that manganese is one of the cheapest metals, so this method for increasing the corrosion resistance of stainless steel in salted water and oxidizing conditions is very inexpensive.
hcknwscommenter 4 hours ago [-]
Will be interesting to see if, in hindsight, there are clues to this in the preexisting literature that we just hadn't quite recognized.
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
This is one of the areas where AI will accelerate scientific research, by scanning through the journal archives to make connections that no one had noticed before.
alwa 2 hours ago [-]
See, my thought would have been the opposite: in a situation like this—where nobody tries the thing because “everybody knows” it’s counterproductive—I’d expect AI literature surveys to confidently assert received wisdom.
It sounds from the quote like even the researchers thought it was a mistake at first… and that on the basis of the literature PLUS their collective professional wisdom. Now, obviously, they did in fact try the thing, so maybe the idea was not quite so wacky as they paint it for the article.
But the point feels similar here as with LLMs and writing: they can do what’s come before pretty well, and they can exhaust a well-specified problem space through sheer muscle; but they seem to be less good at evolving the frontiers of the domain, and I see no mechanism by which to expect that to change.
So I tend to take the opposite lesson: surprises like this renew my hope that there will remain a place in science long into the AI era for meatbags and serendipity and the spirit of curiosity.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
LLMs don't rely completely on received wisdom. The training process works in a higher dimensional space so some data points that might seem unrelated to humans end up being clustered close together if there is a hidden or unrecognized relationship.
abduhl 6 hours ago [-]
>> Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science.
This statement sounds like the type of language one uses when trying to get a patent.
adrian_b 4 hours ago [-]
The part with "cannot be explained by current knowledge" is an exaggeration, because the abstract of the research article explains it very well, based on the current knowledge.
However, "a counter-intuitive discovery" is true. Manganese is frequently used in stainless steels, but only as a cheap substitute for nickel, when this is considered as giving up the superior resistance to corrosion provided by nickel in exchange for the low cost provided by manganese.
The counter-intuitive result of the research is that there are circumstances when manganese provides improved corrosion protection, not only a lower cost.
The reason why this has not been discovered earlier is that manganese alone does not protect against corrosion, but only in an appropriate combination with chromium, when chromium protects both the steel and the manganese at lower electric potential differences, while manganese protects both the steel and the chromium at higher electric potential differences.
colechristensen 2 hours ago [-]
A paper is hardly worth publishing if "cannot be explained by current knowledge" isn't true.
It is, however, incredibly tacky to talk about your research like this.
wolfi1 2 hours ago [-]
you should know how to spin it. Take Müller/Bednorz for example, their paper just said "_Possible_ high Tc superconductivity in the Ba−La−Cu−O system" and they got the Nobel Prize in Physics one year later
dr_dshiv 4 minutes ago [-]
Imagining the giant solar lily pads that can create enormous hydrogen platforms in the sky.
asa400 5 hours ago [-]
Very interesting. Highly corrosion resistant "unconventional" steels have become somewhat popular in cutlery, with steels like LC200N, H1/H2, and MagnaCut. LC200N and H1/H2 in particular can be left in body of water uncoated/unpainted and come back in a year and they'll be fine. Obviously that's a different setting than electrified seawater for hydrogen production, though. So much cool materials science happening!
lukeinator42 3 hours ago [-]
This would be great for other use cases too like climbing bolts and anchors in coastal areas. Lots of areas are switching to titanium glue-ins which are expensive, but I wonder if this could enable more affordable option. A climber recently died in Greece after multiple bolts failed: https://gripped.com/news/rock-climber-dies-in-kalymnos-after...
cgh 2 hours ago [-]
Good point, not only is titanium expensive but the glue-in part is tricky to get right as the glue has to completely surround the bolt. Not only that, but early efforts at titanium rebolting sometimes didn’t use glue at all. In Thailand, I pulled out some titanium bolts with my fingers because they weren’t glued in.
kansface 2 hours ago [-]
3 10mm bolts failing simultaneously after two decades (on direct it seems) is unexpected! If it were an installation problem, I can’t imagine it would take that long and that they’d all go at the same time. Ditto for corrosion… people take victory whips all the time.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago [-]
All three bolts at critical level. A massive strain happens along. They pop: one, two, three!
It's not that unexpected.
inasio 1 hours ago [-]
Stayed a few times in a place exposed to constant breeze from a tropical Pacific coast beach, and learned that stainless steel doesn't really last very long there. Everything stainless steel-based (fixtures, fridges, handles) rusts in a few years. I'd bet there's a market for upscale alloys
1970-01-01 36 minutes ago [-]
If this is just a second layer, then it cannot be welded during on-site manufacturing nor for repair. If that is true, this isn't a major breakthrough for maritime. Things-of-scale need to be welded to be manufactured at said scale.
pjc50 10 hours ago [-]
So apart from the clickbait, the reason why this is interesting is because it's a limiter for the often cited idea of clean green hydrogen from electrolyis. The current use of titanium and precious metals is, obviously, really expensive, so it's uneconomical to build something that only runs on "spare" electricity.
londons_explore 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think the efficiency or longevity of electrolysis equipment is the limiting factor...
The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen.
At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and resell later. That sets a floor price of electricity.
Between the floor price of the input and ceiling price of the output, there is no room for electrolysis, even at 100% efficiency, unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen.
pjc50 8 hours ago [-]
> unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen
Yes, but I think this the most likely outcome. Natural gas is only cheap in certain areas, and the past few years have made everyone very, very aware of the geopolitics involved in getting hold of it. While global warming is not going away, and I question the extent to which CCS actually happens with blue hydrogen.
Batteries are capital equipment in the same way as electrolysers are. They're great at short term storage, but medium-term is still a bit more of an issue. "Restrict batteries" is obviously not on the table except for stupid retail corner cases where utilities have captured the regulator.
There's a potential market for lots of green H2 in Haber nitrogen, metals refining, and synthetic jet fuel etc, but only if the cheap CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned, or H2 electrolysers get comparable capital prices to battery storage.
leonidasrup 8 hours ago [-]
With CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned, direct hydrogen production using high temperature sulfur–iodine cycle without H2 electrolysers could be economic option. The heat could be supplied from high temperature nuclear reactor.
pjc50 6 hours ago [-]
Back to the corrosion discussion from the original article: when handling sulphuric acid at 800C, what kind of piping material do you need?
ac29 3 hours ago [-]
> With CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned
GP was talking about injecting the CO2 back into the well, not releasing it to the environment. There are even standards for specific injection wells used for long term storage (EPA Class VI).
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Processes that involve heating sulfuric acid vapor to decomposition don't sound terribly practical. If you thought seawater corrosion was challenging...
Jolter 7 hours ago [-]
How to make hydrogen production cheaper and easier: include an atomic reactor component.
Huh?
I’d be interested in hearing about some scenario where this actually costs less, given the cost of building anything nuclear in 2026.
leonidasrup 7 hours ago [-]
I agree, the experience building nuclear reactors is mixed bag. Some builds failed, like Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle 3. Some builds succeeded: Barakah nuclear power plant, Fuqing 5,6. It really depends on maturity of supply line and political support.
matthewdgreen 6 hours ago [-]
The real question is: how do we produce hydrogen from the coming massive overbuilding of cheap-but-variable solar. Nuclear reactors are a whole different animal: even if we build them "cheaply" they're not going to approach the costs of overbuilt solar, so those nuclear watts will be better used for other purposes.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Even without natural gas, hydrogen as a general energy storage medium competes against thermal storage. The round trip for this (electrical energy back to electrical energy) can be as good as hydrogen, and the storage medium can be literally dirt cheap, cheap enough that seasonal storage looks like it makes sense, if the design is brutally focused on cost optimization.
Here, corrosion of steel is also part of the problem, as you are burying steel pipes in piles of hot dirt.
Tuna-Fish 9 hours ago [-]
Reducing the capital cost of electrolysis is extremely good, because it makes plants that only produce when electricity is cheap (midday in sunny climes, when wind is blowing in the Nordics) more feasible.
If this works out at scale (lots of problems can be found between a lab discovery and mass production), this is legitimately a very good thing for renewables.
leonidasrup 9 hours ago [-]
Sometimes the price of natural gas is even negative, there is too much of it.
"Natural gas at Texas’s Waha hub is trading at negative $7.05 per million British Thermal Units, hitting a record low of negative $9.52 on April 15."
There are different kinds of water electrolysis equipment, with different capital expenditure and operating expenses.
"Alkaline electrolyzers are cheaper in terms of investment (they generally use nickel catalysts), but least efficient. PEM electrolyzers are more expensive (they generally use expensive platinum-group metal catalysts) but are more efficient and can operate at higher current densities, and can, therefore, be possibly cheaper if the hydrogen production is large enough."
> Sometimes the price of natural gas is even negative, there is too much of it.
Googling that tells me there was/is too much of it locally.
The gas is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there was/is insufficient pipeline capacity to move it to consumers.
whizzter 9 hours ago [-]
There's one case, rural areas often have abundant energy sources (hydro, wind,etc) but few consumers, in Northern Sweden f.ex. a lot is produced but there's a lot of losses in transporting the energy south.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
If solar continues to plummet in cost we may see distributed industry in rural areas, to take advantage of energy that is essentially stranded by transmission cost. Storage becomes even more important in this scenario.
pjc50 6 hours ago [-]
Well, unless all the planned datacentres get built, using more electricity than some small countries.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
The blockage of connecting those to the grid will encourage self-generation, which will mean putting them off in the boondocks where land is cheap. Taking that to the logical limit is where space data centers come from.
I think we're going to see a repurposing of remote coal-fired plants with renewable stored heat. The Four Corners plant, perhaps? It's supposed to stop operating in 2031, I believe.
voakbasda 5 hours ago [-]
In the US, this will never happen due to NIMBY zoning laws.
toast0 4 hours ago [-]
Most rural areas have pretty permissive zoning.
But also, other than Texas, I don't hear about a lot of regional over production. There's pretty good interconnection within and between the two major grids.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
One reason you don't see overproduction is it's hard to get connected to grids. Local self-generation eliminates that roadblock. I think we're going to see increasing energy autarky in rural regions as solar gets cheaper.
Assuming ultra low cost thermal storage becomes a thing, there's going to be a market for small externally heated engines to recover that heat as power. That (+ batteries) will enable complete off-grid operation with PV at small (maybe 100 kW) commercial scale and larger.
BiteCode_dev 6 hours ago [-]
With solar sometimes producing a lot of energy when you don't need it or can't store it, having a cheap hardware to produce hydrogen from it is quite nice.
Natural gaz may be cheap, but you can't beat free.
For this setup, the price of the hardware was a limiting factor.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago [-]
As always, the question is not "do this for solar, or not?". The question is, "Is this a valuable & efficient way to store energy?".
It has to compete with pumped weight (usually water), pumped heat (salt, water, or underground), electric batteries, and so on.
So, as always, it's complicated.
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
> The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to ...
Another, or perhaps related, limiting factor is just how difficult hydrogen is to handle safely - compared to natural gas, batteries, or other alternatives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety. And it does not take many surprise explosions & fires to give a technology a bad rep. Especially when people feel there are obviously-safer alternatives.
SwtCyber 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, although I'd still want to see how much of total delivered hydrogen cost this actually moves
SwtCyber 9 hours ago [-]
The "cannot be explained" headline is a bit much, but the underlying result is genuinely interesting
briandw 4 hours ago [-]
I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries.
I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.
Tuna-Fish 3 hours ago [-]
In a lot of places in the world, the marginal cost of electricity is zero, if your capital costs are low enough to only purchase when there is excess wind.
The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.
Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.
KennyBlanken 3 hours ago [-]
How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure.
How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
You don't pour money into a fuel that is a logistical headache and a half, a fuel that nobody uses, and can only be converted back into electricity with the standard terrible internal combustion / turbine efficiencies.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago [-]
So, do you have a materials science degree, or are you claiming you know more than the trained experts already tackling these issues IRL?
I'm tired of Internet Experts(tm) announcing how dumb the specialists are for not seeing the Obvious Facts.
Tuna-Fish 3 hours ago [-]
> How strange utility grids are spending on BSS and not hydrogen infrastructure.
BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days.
> How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you.
> Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
Extremely low costs some of the time. Not low at all average costs. Metal refineries have significant capital costs and shutdown costs. You are not going to profitably operate one if you need to shut it down when the wind calms down, or if you are running it on batteries. The kind of existing industries that can make use of intermittently cheap power have already been scaled up, and we need more to keep building more renewables.
> HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
I don't have to, because there are significant pilot projects ongoing.
This is new, and requires higher initial capital outlay than batteries (which have the significant advantage that it's easier to do small projects and then scale them up), so of course it's going more slowly. But there are things that hydrogen (+ things derived from hydrogen. Storing it as gas is not usually the best option, but if you have the gas you can refine it further at very low cost.) can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.
But seriously, you need to consider different metrics for different situations. If your data is from California or Australia, maybe consider that it is not applicable to all of the rest of the world?
fisherjeff 3 hours ago [-]
Well green hydrogen is also a necessity if you want to make carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.
dec0dedab0de 3 hours ago [-]
I think the best argument for hydrogen is for automobiles. Existing cars can be converted to use it, doesn't spray pollution all over the city, and can be refilled quickly unlike a battery.
Brian_K_White 4 hours ago [-]
I truly do not understand the fixation with trying to use batteries in applications that really need a fuel.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
> I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel
Not everything is about "muh EV".
There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.
H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.
Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.
And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.
KennyBlanken 3 hours ago [-]
You don't need hydrogen to smelt, refine, recycle, whatever, metal.
You build an electric arc furnace.
marcosdumay 25 minutes ago [-]
Furnaces don't refine metals just by themselves.
Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.
alephnerd 3 hours ago [-]
You still need iron to be processed in steelmaking. THIS is where the carbon bottleneck in steelmaking exists because pig iron has a high carbon ratio. H2 helps with processing sponge iron which dramatically reduces the carbon ratio within iron ingots used for steelmaking.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
A problem I'd have with seawater electrolysis is production of undesirable chlorine compounds: hypochlorite or elemental chlorine.
Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.
m4rtink 5 hours ago [-]
Don't they also react also with about anything else ? I would be a bit worried what else "gets eaten" if something as reactive as chlorine is released into the atmosphere on a wider scale.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
They'd also react with other hydrocarbons, also extracting hydrogen atoms. But that's ok too -- those hydrocarbons act as sinks for hydroxyl radicals, reducing the rate of methane destruction.
NortySpock 4 hours ago [-]
If we're talking seawater already, why not dilute it with seawater down near the ocean floor and have it react with some rocks or something? Why put chlorine gas directly into the atmosphere?
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
To destroy methane, which is a strong greenhouse gas.
IAmBroom 2 hours ago [-]
And because pumping gas to the ocean floor bites into efficiency.
nyeah 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, some products of methane-chlorine reaction are much less desirable than methane.
pfdietz 4 hours ago [-]
If you react large amounts of methane and chlorine, the methyl radicals will react with molecular chlorine to make methyl chloride. But if the methane and chlorine are dilute, as they would be here, the methyl radicals with react with something else (like oxygen) first.
Destruction of methane by chlorine has been observed naturally, for example after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption in 2022 (although the chlorine-mediated destruction there was less than methane injected by the volcano itself.)
The link points out that formaldehyde is one product of the methane-Cl reactions. Not sure we're better off with the formaldehyde (and its own further reaction products) than with the methane.
We're not just eliminating methane, we're turning it into chlorinated compounds.
You just know that engineers and management in Toyota's delusional hydrogen division are salivating.
adrian_b 8 hours ago [-]
Nope.
Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries.
For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but it can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which are suitable for long term energy storage or for aerospace transportation.
Even with abundant and cheap dihydrogen, using it for energy storage in vehicles is a bad idea.
foobarbecue 7 hours ago [-]
How does this refute the comment you replied to? That comment was implying that Toyota Mirai et al are ill-advised, so seems like your "nope" should be a "yep."
adrian_b 4 hours ago [-]
I agree that it was not the best introduction when that would be seen from the perspective of "ill-advised" companies.
What I meant is that for rational companies there would be no reason to be happy about this development, because it does not solve any of the problems that prevent free hydrogen for being suitable for energy storage, especially in vehicles.
It is not the cost of generating hydrogen that makes uncompetitive the cars with hydrogen, but difficulties in its storage and transportation.
Most of the energy used by living beings also passes through splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, but the hydrogen is never stored as such, but it is immediately used for synthesizing reduced carbon compounds, which are suitable for long storage and easy to carry by mobile beings. This has been proven in practice for billions of years as a suitable solution for long term energy storage.
ssl-3 6 hours ago [-]
Nope.
It's important to always appear to be argumentative, even when in agreement.
BoxedEmpathy 2 hours ago [-]
Nope.
I've noticed this too, even when agreeing lots of comments start with a negative.
ssl-3 2 hours ago [-]
Not really.
Perhaps it's reflexive.
kshahkshah 7 hours ago [-]
They said “delusional”
hobofan 7 hours ago [-]
They are not delusional.
Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs, and in order to prevent a gap in the market where EV-first competitors can steal market share from them, they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars. There they have a head start via some latent research and more reuse of ICE car platforms. I'm sure the hydrogen division is well aware that they are doing research on a dead-end technology (at least for the automotive sector).
The exact same thing happened in Germany. In 2020 there was a huge push from politicians to push more hydrogen technology to distract from the fact that German car manufacturers were lagging behind, as well as general missed initiatives for renewable energy. Now, 6 years later those initatives are deader than ever.
chupasaurus 4 hours ago [-]
> Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs ... they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars
Production of Toyota Prius started 28 years ago.
1970-01-01 49 minutes ago [-]
The Prius is a hybrid. Did you mean the Nissan Leaf in 2009?
UltraSane 6 hours ago [-]
Hydrogen is simply a really bad fuel for cars. It is hard to transport and store liquid hydrogen
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
They'd use compressed gaseous hydrogen, but that has its own problems.
toast0 4 hours ago [-]
Yep... Anyone who looked at how CNG cars went in the US and was like yep, let's do that but with a gas that's harder to transport and store and has no existing network, had to know it wouldn't work out very well.
CNG fleet vehicles work out for many fleets; especially those that have vehicle depots where fueling happens.
I haven't looked into detail for the hydrogen cars, but I wonder if they made the same kinds of designs with regard to the fuel tanks. On pressurized fuel vehicles, the tanks expire after 15-20 years; on most CNG cars, the tanks take a lot of labor to replace, so most vehicles will expire when their tank does; I suspect the same for the hydrogen cars. Fleet vehicles tend to do a lot of miles, so a time based tank expiration is less of a problem.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
You're explaining the practical consequences of their delusion, but delusion it remains. Hydrogen for cars isn't going to work to save them, even with the lobbying. Granted, they were probably screwed anyway, so they had no good options.
boppo1 5 hours ago [-]
Can anyone give me a semi-technical reason on why the hydrogen division are delusional? I'm actually convinced of it "osmotically", but I just don't know enough about it. I've got chem 101 behind me but otherwise I'm a finance & tech guy. It would be nice to actually understand why it can't be done though.
If we manage to get enough solar such that energy essentially becomes infinite then the inefficiency would no longer matter. Otherwise, it would only make sense in vehicles that require high energy density like airplanes.
0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago [-]
There is already free energy. In 2024, California curtailed 3400 GWh of solar. Hydrogen is one of the easier ways to load shift that to winter or processes which need something denser than batteries. I actually prefer synthetic methane (worse efficiency) because it is more immediately usable.
Looking at the charts[0], load shifting all the way to winter seems unnecessary. You only need to load shift until ~6pm, in which case there are plenty of better options out there like grid-scale batteries, flywheels, pumped storage hydro, etc.
It depends on your energy mix. The more solar you go, more load shifting is required. Winter solar production is relatively crummy and you need to offset that loss somehow for the entire season.
That chart is showing some curtailment in winter because the grid knows to expect less production. It is already tuned to spin up more gas because solar will underperform relative to Summer.
benj111 4 hours ago [-]
While interesting is this ever going to be actually needed? Unless hydrogen is going to be used in a decentralised fashion, which seems unlikely, water can simply be saved from recombining hydrogen and oxygen. So you only ever need a finite amount of water.
Plus there's also futures where harvesting salt / lithium from seawater leaves clean ish water as a by product, or a future where when it's sunny, just boil water to evaporate it with nearly free solar, then electrolyse it. And you'd need near free electricity to make this economic.
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
this kind of headline is bad for our collective souls; I know raging against the clickbait is old hat but seriously, this is ridiculous. Materials science is surely interesting enough to a reader of science direct without being SHOCKED and APPALLED all the time
RugnirViking 7 hours ago [-]
for reference, the title on the article itself is “Cannot be explained” – New ultra stainless steel stuns researchers
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Hacker News readers hate this one weird trick!
kadoban 10 hours ago [-]
> This second shield helps protect the steel in chloride containing environments up to an ultra high potential of 1700 mV.
Uh, dumb question, how is 1.7 volts "ultra high potential" ? Is that even enough to do electrolysis like they're talking about?
manarth 9 hours ago [-]
Galvanic corrosion typically happens at 0.5V (and as low as 0.15V in salt-water); 1.7V is "ultra high potential" in comparison with normal corrosion thresholds.
Tuna-Fish 9 hours ago [-]
The potential needed for electrolysis of water is 1.23V in theory, in practice a bit more to overcome inefficiencies. 1.7V is enough.
ajb 9 hours ago [-]
I think that may not be the potential used for electrolysis, but the chemical potential of the saltwater-metal boundary. But hopefully someone more knowledgeable will comment.
9 hours ago [-]
dvh 9 hours ago [-]
So does carbon, no?
SwtCyber 9 hours ago [-]
Sometimes, but carbon has its own failure mode: at high anodic potentials it can oxidize
Michael666 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ritzaco 9 hours ago [-]
@dang maybe we could have the title changed to something like
"Hong Kong researchers develop corrosion-resistant steel for seawater hydrogen electrolysis"
tomhow 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks! That's too long (limit is 80 chars) but I came up with something that fits. Feel free to suggest something better.
sveme 9 hours ago [-]
I think the seawater bit is really relevant here. Only understood the importance of this when I saw the seawater part.
> "Initially, we did not believe it because the prevailing view is that Mn impairs the corrosion resistance of stainless steel. Mn-based passivation is a counter-intuitive discovery, which cannot be explained by current knowledge in corrosion science. However, when numerous atomic-level results were presented, we were convinced. Beyond being surprised, we cannot wait to exploit the mechanism," said Dr. Kaiping Yu, the first author of the article, whose PhD is supervised by Professor Huang.
This is the Cannot be explained bit
The three stooges effect I see. Too many corrosive elements, they stop each other from getting through the door.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8
It sounds from the quote like even the researchers thought it was a mistake at first… and that on the basis of the literature PLUS their collective professional wisdom. Now, obviously, they did in fact try the thing, so maybe the idea was not quite so wacky as they paint it for the article.
But the point feels similar here as with LLMs and writing: they can do what’s come before pretty well, and they can exhaust a well-specified problem space through sheer muscle; but they seem to be less good at evolving the frontiers of the domain, and I see no mechanism by which to expect that to change.
So I tend to take the opposite lesson: surprises like this renew my hope that there will remain a place in science long into the AI era for meatbags and serendipity and the spirit of curiosity.
This statement sounds like the type of language one uses when trying to get a patent.
However, "a counter-intuitive discovery" is true. Manganese is frequently used in stainless steels, but only as a cheap substitute for nickel, when this is considered as giving up the superior resistance to corrosion provided by nickel in exchange for the low cost provided by manganese.
The counter-intuitive result of the research is that there are circumstances when manganese provides improved corrosion protection, not only a lower cost.
The reason why this has not been discovered earlier is that manganese alone does not protect against corrosion, but only in an appropriate combination with chromium, when chromium protects both the steel and the manganese at lower electric potential differences, while manganese protects both the steel and the chromium at higher electric potential differences.
It is, however, incredibly tacky to talk about your research like this.
It's not that unexpected.
The limiting factor is that natural gas is very cheap and cracking it to make blue hydrogen is really easy at scale, and gives off CO2 which is useful for injection into wells to increase production. That sets a price ceiling of hydrogen.
At the other end of the scale, there are batteries to store 'free' electricity and resell later. That sets a floor price of electricity.
Between the floor price of the input and ceiling price of the output, there is no room for electrolysis, even at 100% efficiency, unless government policies mandate it or restrict batteries or blue hydrogen.
Yes, but I think this the most likely outcome. Natural gas is only cheap in certain areas, and the past few years have made everyone very, very aware of the geopolitics involved in getting hold of it. While global warming is not going away, and I question the extent to which CCS actually happens with blue hydrogen.
Batteries are capital equipment in the same way as electrolysers are. They're great at short term storage, but medium-term is still a bit more of an issue. "Restrict batteries" is obviously not on the table except for stupid retail corner cases where utilities have captured the regulator.
There's a potential market for lots of green H2 in Haber nitrogen, metals refining, and synthetic jet fuel etc, but only if the cheap CO2 emitting option is priced out or banned, or H2 electrolysers get comparable capital prices to battery storage.
GP was talking about injecting the CO2 back into the well, not releasing it to the environment. There are even standards for specific injection wells used for long term storage (EPA Class VI).
Huh?
I’d be interested in hearing about some scenario where this actually costs less, given the cost of building anything nuclear in 2026.
Here, corrosion of steel is also part of the problem, as you are burying steel pipes in piles of hot dirt.
If this works out at scale (lots of problems can be found between a lab discovery and mass production), this is legitimately a very good thing for renewables.
"Natural gas at Texas’s Waha hub is trading at negative $7.05 per million British Thermal Units, hitting a record low of negative $9.52 on April 15."
https://www.barrons.com/articles/natural-gas-texas-negative-...
There are different kinds of water electrolysis equipment, with different capital expenditure and operating expenses.
"Alkaline electrolyzers are cheaper in terms of investment (they generally use nickel catalysts), but least efficient. PEM electrolyzers are more expensive (they generally use expensive platinum-group metal catalysts) but are more efficient and can operate at higher current densities, and can, therefore, be possibly cheaper if the hydrogen production is large enough."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis_of_water#Efficien...
Anything using platinum-group metals will be very expensive. Therefor catalytic converters in cars use very little platinum-group metals.
"The amount of palladium in a converter can vary, but it is typically around 2-7 grams." https://vehiclefreak.com/how-much-palladium-is-in-a-catalyti...
Googling that tells me there was/is too much of it locally.
The gas is a byproduct of drilling for oil, and there was/is insufficient pipeline capacity to move it to consumers.
Now, yes, as long as natural gas is cheap(inbetween US or Soviet wars) it'll probably be the core for hydrogen, however batteries won't help much in the north since the transmission rather than usage is the cap even with batteries so excess production could be redirected towards hydrogen production.
I think we're going to see a repurposing of remote coal-fired plants with renewable stored heat. The Four Corners plant, perhaps? It's supposed to stop operating in 2031, I believe.
But also, other than Texas, I don't hear about a lot of regional over production. There's pretty good interconnection within and between the two major grids.
Assuming ultra low cost thermal storage becomes a thing, there's going to be a market for small externally heated engines to recover that heat as power. That (+ batteries) will enable complete off-grid operation with PV at small (maybe 100 kW) commercial scale and larger.
Natural gaz may be cheap, but you can't beat free.
For this setup, the price of the hardware was a limiting factor.
It has to compete with pumped weight (usually water), pumped heat (salt, water, or underground), electric batteries, and so on.
So, as always, it's complicated.
Another, or perhaps related, limiting factor is just how difficult hydrogen is to handle safely - compared to natural gas, batteries, or other alternatives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety. And it does not take many surprise explosions & fires to give a technology a bad rep. Especially when people feel there are obviously-safer alternatives.
I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.
The cost of batteries for long-term storage is still prohibitively high. In contrast, large hydrogen (or methanol, etc further products) are relatively cheap to store.
Those two things put together is pretty much it. There is massive room for additional wind capacity in northern europe (and solar in north africa, etc). In order for constructing that additional capacity to make any sense, there needs to be more demand that can idle for ~2/3rds of the time, and make economic sense to run a third of the time. In these conditions, the roundtrip efficiency is an entirely uninteresting statistic, and the capital cost of capacity is what matters.
How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
You don't pour money into a fuel that is a logistical headache and a half, a fuel that nobody uses, and can only be converted back into electricity with the standard terrible internal combustion / turbine efficiencies.
I'm tired of Internet Experts(tm) announcing how dumb the specialists are for not seeing the Obvious Facts.
BSS is usable when you need hours of storage, not when you need days.
> How strange utility grids are spending on HVDC transmission and not hydrogen infrastructure.
HVDC makes sense in certain conditions, but not others. You need to have alternate consumers/producers available that are not correlated with you.
> Also, if you have extremely low cost of electricity: you build manufacturing nearby that needs massive amounts of energy, like metal refineries. Or you subsidize electric transport.
Extremely low costs some of the time. Not low at all average costs. Metal refineries have significant capital costs and shutdown costs. You are not going to profitably operate one if you need to shut it down when the wind calms down, or if you are running it on batteries. The kind of existing industries that can make use of intermittently cheap power have already been scaled up, and we need more to keep building more renewables.
> HN commenters should ring up their local electrical grid operators and set them straight /s
I don't have to, because there are significant pilot projects ongoing.
This is new, and requires higher initial capital outlay than batteries (which have the significant advantage that it's easier to do small projects and then scale them up), so of course it's going more slowly. But there are things that hydrogen (+ things derived from hydrogen. Storing it as gas is not usually the best option, but if you have the gas you can refine it further at very low cost.) can in principle do that batteries simply cannot, like time-shift production by 3 months.
But seriously, you need to consider different metrics for different situations. If your data is from California or Australia, maybe consider that it is not applicable to all of the rest of the world?
Not everything is about "muh EV".
There is a reason that countries that have built significant Solar PV and Wind Turbine manufacturing capacity like China, Germany, SK, Japan, and India have also been investing in H2.
H2 as an energy market helps subsidize additional H2 usecases such as Ammonia/NH3 production for fertilizers (this has become critical due to the ongoing Iran War), steelmaking via H2 direct reduced/sponge iron, and (for China and India) coal gasification.
Additionally, REEs and critical minerals have increasingly become a bottleneck so additional options is good to have depending on the country, which is a major reason Japan heavily invested in hydrogen along with sodium solid state battery R&D.
And finally, the brutal truth is no major country actually cares about climate change - they care about energy security. Most larger countries have the ability to afford the externalities that arise from climate change, the three largest CO2 emitters in the world (China, US, India) are seeing CO2 emissions rise (mind you at a reduced rate, but still unsustainable from a climate change perspective), and in China and India's case continue to leverage coal as an energy security tool especially after the Iran War supply chain crisis highlighted the criticality of coal gasification for the fertilizers and agriculture.
You build an electric arc furnace.
Factorio may be an excellent game, but life is more complicated than it.
Or maybe there are uses for these? Releasing chlorine (diluted!) into the atmosphere might be a way to accelerate the scrubbing out of methane. Chlorine is photolysed by sunlight into chlorine atoms, which immediately react with methane.
Destruction of methane by chlorine has been observed naturally, for example after the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption in 2022 (although the chlorine-mediated destruction there was less than methane injected by the volcano itself.)
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-massive-volcano-destroyed-met...
We're not just eliminating methane, we're turning it into chlorinated compounds.
Splitting water into free hydrogen and oxygen is important because it is an essential step for using electrical energy in the chemical and metallurgic industries.
For long term energy storage, free hydrogen is not a good solution, but it can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which are suitable for long term energy storage or for aerospace transportation.
Even with abundant and cheap dihydrogen, using it for energy storage in vehicles is a bad idea.
What I meant is that for rational companies there would be no reason to be happy about this development, because it does not solve any of the problems that prevent free hydrogen for being suitable for energy storage, especially in vehicles.
It is not the cost of generating hydrogen that makes uncompetitive the cars with hydrogen, but difficulties in its storage and transportation.
Most of the energy used by living beings also passes through splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen, but the hydrogen is never stored as such, but it is immediately used for synthesizing reduced carbon compounds, which are suitable for long storage and easy to carry by mobile beings. This has been proven in practice for billions of years as a suitable solution for long term energy storage.
It's important to always appear to be argumentative, even when in agreement.
I've noticed this too, even when agreeing lots of comments start with a negative.
Perhaps it's reflexive.
Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs, and in order to prevent a gap in the market where EV-first competitors can steal market share from them, they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars. There they have a head start via some latent research and more reuse of ICE car platforms. I'm sure the hydrogen division is well aware that they are doing research on a dead-end technology (at least for the automotive sector).
The exact same thing happened in Germany. In 2020 there was a huge push from politicians to push more hydrogen technology to distract from the fact that German car manufacturers were lagging behind, as well as general missed initiatives for renewable energy. Now, 6 years later those initatives are deader than ever.
Production of Toyota Prius started 28 years ago.
CNG fleet vehicles work out for many fleets; especially those that have vehicle depots where fueling happens.
I haven't looked into detail for the hydrogen cars, but I wonder if they made the same kinds of designs with regard to the fuel tanks. On pressurized fuel vehicles, the tanks expire after 15-20 years; on most CNG cars, the tanks take a lot of labor to replace, so most vehicles will expire when their tank does; I suspect the same for the hydrogen cars. Fleet vehicles tend to do a lot of miles, so a time based tank expiration is less of a problem.
If we manage to get enough solar such that energy essentially becomes infinite then the inefficiency would no longer matter. Otherwise, it would only make sense in vehicles that require high energy density like airplanes.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65364
[0] The 2nd chart on https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.05.28/chart2.s...
That chart is showing some curtailment in winter because the grid knows to expect less production. It is already tuned to spin up more gas because solar will underperform relative to Summer.
Plus there's also futures where harvesting salt / lithium from seawater leaves clean ish water as a by product, or a future where when it's sunny, just boil water to evaporate it with nearly free solar, then electrolyse it. And you'd need near free electricity to make this economic.
Uh, dumb question, how is 1.7 volts "ultra high potential" ? Is that even enough to do electrolysis like they're talking about?
"Hong Kong researchers develop corrosion-resistant steel for seawater hydrogen electrolysis"