this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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I don't think you need to hedge with "generally", I'm going to say it always has combustion products, and CO2 is the most benign gas product you can really hope for. In this case you're burning carbon and hydrogen with oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water, and there really is a limit to how much energy you can extract from each molecule reacted. There's no way around that, it's a physical limitation.
I don't know what kind of reaction doesn't have by-products, maybe antimatter annihilation.
Fusion reactors have helium by-product which can be harvested I guess.
Point is you need to get pretty exotic and leave the realms of chemistry to get something with "near zero emmissions".
The closest thing I can thing of is hydrogen, burning it just makes water, which while still a by-product, is the cleanest and least harmful product of I'm pretty sure any combustion reaction
Oh that's true actually, you could probably call that emissions free in the sense that it really is harmless. I don't know how I overlooked that tbh.
A lot of people are afraid because hydrogen fuel cells have a tendency to go boom, in terms of catastrophic failure.
There's the going boom factor and the fact there is no good pressure vessel that can stop the hydrogen from slowly leaking out through the walls.
Also looking that up I just discovered this:
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/scientists-warn-against-global-warming-effect-of-hydrogen-leaks/
"Hydrogen is such a potent indirect greenhouse gas that it “could undermine the climate benefits of decarbonisation efforts,” warned Ilisa Ocko, a senior climate scientist at the EDF"
So... that creates a new problem before it gets out the tailpipe.
I don’t know what it is precisely, but I imagine that the lifetime of free hydrogen in the atmosphere is extremely short - like on the order of hours. Probably not much to worry about.
If you don't know, then pertinent information by leading climate scientists who do know, and are worried about it, is available at the link in my comment.
But since you seem inclined to make broad sweeping dismissals based on little more than your own admitted ignorance when you could've just spent like 60 seconds reading, I doubt this quote from the article will help you:
Maybe it will help other people to know why what you said is wrong.
I’m not saying it’s not a problem at all, but in general, we should focus our efforts on reducing emissions with high permanence. We’re already committed to an approximate sea level rise of about one meter over the next century, due in large part by CO2’s long half-life in atmosphere, up to 1000 years. By comparison, Methane’s half-life is about 12 years, and H2’s (which I did look up) is only 2 years. This makes it much less of a problem to deal with - not technically but socially.
The problem is that if we are still belching CO2 into the atmosphere in 2050 and find ourselves facing devastating cat6 hurricanes and global famine, the collective “oh shit” moment might spur action, but it’s unlikely to have any positive effect within a century, which would not bode well for civilization. By comparison, if we replaced our CO2 emissions with H2, that same “oh shit” moment could spur action that would mostly resolve things within a decade.
I view these alarmist articles about short-lived emissions the same way I see anti-nuclear rhetoric - a problem to be solved eventually, but not one that should stop us from taking advantage of its massive benefits.