Search query: The geopolitics of renewable energy
Video title:  a lot of CO2 as a byproduct so you're basically producing hydrogen you're just burning a fossil fuel before you get to the actual energy source and once you take into account things like transport and building out a parallel system to use the hydrogen it's actually more carbon intensive than what we're doing now so the only people who are doing hydrogen in this way are folks who are doing it as a test bed to see what they can do with hydrogen and that requires some volumes which leads us to the bridge technology potentially the middle step and that is to take hydrogen from a ammonia molecule now an ammonia molecule is a single atom of nitrogen surrounded by hydrogen molecules unlike hydrogen which is a gas that is wildly explosive and difficult to contain because the molecules are so strong so you couldn't use the pipelines we use currently to move hydrogen at scale you'd have to build new ones and they'd be much more expensive and much more dangerous ammonia has none of those problems it can be compressed without making it explosive if it does get out in the environment it's not going to burn in the same way if at all and we already have a parallel system in the world to produce it at scale because nitrogen is one of the three main nutrients that we use in our fertilizers now there are some challenges here because you know if you're going to use nitrogen at scale that means it's competing with other industrial uses and one of those uses is what keeps us all alive so you're talking about a massive industrial build out and in many ways that's the problem with hydrogen overall if we're going to switch to hydrogen you need to have a massive build out for the consumption side of the equation because what we do today with oil and natural gas and the rest you can't just slap a patch on it you need fundamentally new infrastructure so you're talking tens of trillions of dollars second this the intermediate step to massively build out and basically double and triple the size of the nitrogen production that we have globally