Hydro_Gem

There is no CO2 produced with LN2 (except from electricity production), since we are "just" distilling air. The cheapest way to capture or produce CO2 is to look for rich sources, like fumes of different industries, this is also the priority to reduce this emission, AL is committed to capturing CO2 from its own plants (SMR)

Direct CO2 capture from air is possible but far from being competitive compared to previous case (industry fumes) When all CO2 emissions will be captured from the plants themselves, then maybe direct CO2 capture will maybe make sense, but it's a long way to go.

Xavier's response: Sorry I do not know and cannot answer your question.

As the student running the AMA: Xavier didn't have the time to consult the right people, however there are a lot of questions and answers about helium here from which you can deduce an answer. Sorry for the unsatisfactory response

Thank you, these are excellent questions!

1. Most of the H2 Volumes are produced with SMR today (it’s the most mature and at scale technology, so least expensive indeed). So in order to make green hydrogen, we need to both implement CO2 capture and storage on SMR units and to launch large-scale electrolyzers with low carbon electricity. If we take into account CO2 taxes rising up, we expect low carbon hydrogen to be competitive with H2 produced from SMR by 2030 (source: Hydrogen Council, Decarbonization Pathways - Part 2, Jan 2021). We are moving towards electrolysis, even though in the short term the best way is to decarbonize SMR.
2. H2 and batteries will coexist. H2 will be preferred for intensive long distance travels (like heavy duty trucks with ranges of 500+km), when the charging time needs to be quick (~5min versus a few hours for battery), and when strong power is needed (forklifts for example). Very simply, every usage more intensive and larger than a car will be H2, everything below is and will remain batteries. The boundary between the two will evolve a little, but this is not important.
3. Storage: since 2017, Air Liquide has been operating the largest H2 cavern in Texas. H2 can be safely stored underground or in other types of storages and forms (liquid hydrogen for example allows higher density storage than compressed gas).

In Air Liquide, Management is essentially engineers :) It depends on which business you are running, for industry, Engineers make sense, but the talent of management is more important than its education...

What’s interesting about the business is that even though the hydrogen technology is mature and can be implemented today for many applications (including in famously hard-to-abate sectors), there is still plenty of research and development going on. The market keeps growing and opportunities are numerous!

Otherwise here's a few lesser known facts about the business:

We've been producing H2 for 50 years and we supply liquid H2 for the Ariane rockets ever since the beginning.

We just started a 20 MW electrolyser in Canada (green H2 incoming!) as well as a 30 TPD plant with LH2 in Nevada.