HVO - The big con?

[Evanivitch]

So, local council are now running their recycling fleet on hydrogenated vegetable oil (HVO), and claiming a significant reduction in emissions.

Now there's a lot of claims about "sustainable and renewable" by HVO providers, and yet from my understanding HVO is manufactured from hydrogen being reacted with the vegetable oil.

And nearly all the hydrogen in this country comes from gas. How does that support their claims?

What I don't know is how much hydrogen is required to manufacture the HVO.

[tamore]

file with 'blue hydrogen'. ie utter arse and not worth another penny of public money investing in it.

[Huff]

In UK Construction - that major user of red diesel now facing some rather large challenges - Balfour Beatty has just come out strongly against HVO:

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/b...

It's a well reasoned, and detailed 'position paper' they've published.

[Evanivitch]

Huff said:

In UK Construction - that major user of red diesel now facing some rather large challenges - Balfour Beatty has just come out strongly against HVO:

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/b...

It's a well reasoned, and detailed 'position paper' they've published.

I've seen this, but from what I've read their concerns are almost entirely focused on the availability of the 'bio' feedstock and questions about displacing animal feed.

There seems.very little published on how much and where the hydrogen comes from to produce HVO.

[Huff]

Good point, but to be fair - I don't think that is the main concern with HVO (much of which is alleviated by HVO D+ which is guaranteed to be based on aftermarket used veg oil and Palm-oil free - but rarer, so more expensive, rinse-repeat...)

There is very , very little green hydrogen out there as yet, for all that people are talking about it: /and/ - using it would only add to the cost of HVO - which is already more expensive than white diesel. So I suspect - obvious answer is obvious, for a while yet.

An aspect to watch, definitely - so thanks, hadn't considered that aspect seriously.

[Evanivitch]

Huff said:

Good point, but to be fair - I don't think that is the main concern with HVO (much of which is alleviated by HVO D+ which is guaranteed to be based on aftermarket used veg oil and Palm-oil free - but rarer, so more expensive, rinse-repeat...)

There is very , very little green hydrogen out there as yet, for all that people are talking about it: /and/ - using it would only add to the cost of HVO - which is already more expensive than white diesel. So I suspect - obvious answer is obvious, for a while yet.

An aspect to watch, definitely - so thanks, hadn't considered that aspect seriously.

Agree entirely that green hydrogen is a unicorn at this time. But if they're using grey hydrogen then it flies in the face of many HVO supplier claims that it is fossil fuel free.

[DonkeyApple]

It's pretty much guaranteed to be fossil fuel sourced hydrogen as that's all that's really available. The other colours of the rainbow are really just laboratory levels of supply currently.

If you delve deeper the most likely discovery will be that the hydrogen purchases are matched with purchases of carbon credits that would permit various 'zero emission' claims for PR, like you see with Octopus more openly.

If they're just running one bus then it is possible they could be spunking all your council tax on laboratory GH?

There are a couple of buses running on the Westway that claim to be powered by hydrogen and I've just not been arsed to even look to see what their PR spin is or who is fronting the cash etc.

All local authorities and provincial governments are currently being bombarded with hydrogen solutions where the aim is to get those easy targets to buy into the spin on green hydrogen and to then deliver fossil fuel hydrogen at the last minute while talking about some carbon capture scheme that doesn't exist.

[ecs]

Not to mention that they're also using a crop for fuel - this is maybe ok at a micro level (maybe it's recycled veg oil), but you still need to consider the water and fuel to produce the stuff. See also bio-ethanol.

[DonkeyApple]

ecs said:

Not to mention that they're also using a crop for fuel - this is maybe ok at a micro level (maybe it's recycled veg oil), but you still need to consider the water and fuel to produce the stuff. See also bio-ethanol.

Usually in these cases it is used vegetable oil. But even that is problematic as there is no true audit trail for the industry.

When one considers how much horse meat was imported as cow meat in an industry that did have pretty fair auditing it strikes me as somewhat obvious that the biofuel market is completely rife with naughty behaviour.