Letters: December 2021
Readers discuss the environment and greener fuels, and speculate on chemistry’s role in the first world war
Not converted
Discarding old issues of Chemistry World, the cover of one flagged an article on hydrogen power. This is extremely topical just now, so I read it. I felt that it could have been written yesterday, but it was in the August 2018 issue. Yes, there is more government money going into hydrogen project developments now, but is there real progress? Enough to meet our 2030 and 2050 decarbonisation targets?
The idea of a new technology to enable us to carry on without massively changing our lifestyles is attractive to politicians, but I suspect it’s a siren lure. We have to change and we will need storage for the large amounts of surplus renewable energy which it’s hoped to produce. But will conversion to H2 be a niche or the preferred option? I’m sure there will be a place for H2 to be used for some transport modes (perhaps as NH3), but for home heating it will surely be more efficient to use it directly, via heat pumps. Well done to Angeli Mehta for her article, and I hope to read her follow-up articles soon.
Tom Leatherland FRSC
Fife, UK