Might as well power it on farts and the hopes and dreams of orphans, to go along with the rest of the new capital. The whole project is "what if Dubai, but even stupider?" It's a slow-motion...
Might as well power it on farts and the hopes and dreams of orphans, to go along with the rest of the new capital. The whole project is "what if Dubai, but even stupider?" It's a slow-motion economic, social, environmental and humanitarian disaster for Egypt, and I can't say I'm unsurprised that CNN "Style" would publish an uncritical article about one of its many shit-facets.
Is it a bad idea to design carbon-neutral or carbon-negative public works? Not at all. Is it a bad idea to make Africa's tallest building for no reason other than you think you can, using funds your country doesn't really have, built with labor under questionable safety standards, locating it in the heart of a massive unnecessary complex patterned after American-style suburbs (the worst development pattern ever conceived) designed to segregate your common people from their military overlords entirely? I'm going to say yes. Unquestionably.
Much luck, Egypt. With this kind of leadership, you're going to need it.
Also, why the fuck not just use electricity directly? Oh wait, that's not futuristic enough. Remember kids, being environmentally friendly is only good when it sounds cool!
Also, why the fuck not just use electricity directly? Oh wait, that's not futuristic enough. Remember kids, being environmentally friendly is only good when it sounds cool!
There's a whole industry built upon dreaming up idiotic ideas that sound plausible and cool if you don't think about it at all deeply or do even a minute's research, and then creating CGI or,...
Exemplary
There's a whole industry built upon dreaming up idiotic ideas that sound plausible and cool if you don't think about it at all deeply or do even a minute's research, and then creating CGI or, lately, AI-generated concept art to sell it to fabulously wealthy idiots with net worths two or three billion times higher than their IQs. I think this industry is casting around for their next marks, because some of the oil sheiks in the UAE have started to realize that the gravy train might conceivably pull into the station at some point, and their multi-billion-dollar vanity projects to build 1:10,000-scale replicas of the fucking moon in downtown Dubai might not be tenable.
I honestly wonder how analogous this con game is to whatever led Bronze-Age poobahs to command their megalithic monuments to be built. Was there some Old Kingdom equivalent of modern fly-by-night architectural firms fluffing Khufu's peen with grandiose papyrus mockups of pyramids? Is this just a continuation of a 5,000-year-old tradition of gulling rich idiots to build impractical projects by breaking the backs of the proletariat? Has a question ever been so rhetorical?
"and his net worth is only 100 million!" You're completely right though. The entire article reads like a grift perpetrated by the Egyptian government making bad choice after bad choice. It's not...
sell it to fabulously wealthy idiots with net worths two or three billion times higher than their IQs.
"and his net worth is only 100 million!"
You're completely right though. The entire article reads like a grift perpetrated by the Egyptian government making bad choice after bad choice. It's not like their economy is doing so well to allow these types of projects.
More than that, it's likely to actually tank their economy in more than one way. They're paying for the thing largely by a combination of foreign loans and turning on the money printers, so not...
It's not like their economy is doing so well to allow these types of projects.
More than that, it's likely to actually tank their economy in more than one way. They're paying for the thing largely by a combination of foreign loans and turning on the money printers, so not only are they going to drive down the value of the of the Egyptian Pound through inflation, they'll be in debt to various international interests for generations.
The whole project from soup to nuts has an estimated budget of about $58bn USD (an optimistic estimate, as these things inevitably are), of which about $11bn has already been spent on the completed Phase 1, which they already can't afford. The World Bank has cut about $6bn in loan checks to prop up the country, and the IMF is poised to increase their loan program to Egypt from $3bn to $8bn, but they've made that contingent on reining in infrastructure spending–a demand that's both unlikely to be met and kinda mind-blowing, considering the IMF's whole mandate is to stimulate economic development in poorer member nations. Even the IMF, an organization with a long history of enabling the siphoning of wealth from public coffers to private hands, intentionally or otherwise, recognizes this is just a terrible idea.
All this would be merely silly and reckless if it weren't for the implicit goal of the whole project, which is to absolutely separate the poor majority of Egyptian citizens from the military ruling class. The damn thing is being built 30 miles outside of Cairo in the middle of nowhere, and is designed to cater to the administrators who work there and their families, and exclude everyone else.
The planned housing is all mini mansions built on the model of American suburbs, far outside of affordability for service industry workers and lower-level government functionaries, who are expected to take the electric train into the administrative district to work and then fuck off back to the slums afterward. Needless to say, the government promises high security through CCTV and for-hire security services in the capital district. That's part of the sales pitch to the foreign business interests they're trying to attract to the financial center.
The best that can be said for the thing is that at least they're building it on vacant land and didn't have to bulldoze quite so many poverty-stricken neighborhoods to build it, unlike some vanity projects.
The whole endeavor is just so monumentally stupid and evil that I even have a hard time believing it's real.
Why do people keep forgetting that hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s a storage medium. There is little to none “free” hydrogen we can just pump to a tank and use - it always needs to be...
Why do people keep forgetting that hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s a storage medium.
There is little to none “free” hydrogen we can just pump to a tank and use - it always needs to be separated from other elements using tons and tons of energy.
For that matter, petroleum is just an extremely long-term storage medium for solar energy, if you want to be pedantic about it. That's just what fuel is. Hydrogen could still be an important part...
For that matter, petroleum is just an extremely long-term storage medium for solar energy, if you want to be pedantic about it. That's just what fuel is.
Hydrogen could still be an important part of a sustainable energy strategy, and should not be dismissed as an incomplete solution though. At this point, just about our biggest problem as regards green energy isn't actually production, it's storage and transport. Photovoltaics are cheaper than they've ever been, and Egypt in particular is well-situated to exploit that fact. Hypothetically, Egypt could use solar peak hours to generate hydrogen via electrolysis or biological generation and greatly reduce their carbon footprint, so it's not entirely deceptive greenwashing to use "hydrogen" as a shorthand for 'more sustainable.'
The devil is in the details though, and you're right that merely generating your electricity via hydrogen isn't a guarantee of sustainability in itself. Steam reforming is by far the most common method of hydrogen generation in the US at least, and that does require the use fossil fuels.
Considering how asinine and wasteful this particular project is, I'm not willing to give the masterminds behind it much benefit of doubt, but neither do I think that the mere mention hydrogen alone is grounds to be dismissive.
Transporting hydrogen is a massive pain in the ass, it leaks from every container, the containers need to be MASSIVE because it needs to be pressurised to insane levels to be economical to move....
Transporting hydrogen is a massive pain in the ass, it leaks from every container, the containers need to be MASSIVE because it needs to be pressurised to insane levels to be economical to move.
Hydrogen is good for grid-scale long term storage where pumped hydro and batteries are either cost-prohibitive or inconvenient. Use excess renewables to create hydrogen on-site and fill massive tanks in the middle of nowhere with it. When production dips, feed it back through grid-scale fuel cells.
In a limited way it might be possible to convert old natural gas pipes and infrastructure to hydrogen, but it still leaks like nobody's business and making the pipelines hydrogen proof is not exactly cheap.
But for Joe Regular's car? Never. Unless we figure out literal free electricity and have already filled every battery on the planet first.
For long-haul transport where EVs aren't valid for some reason? Maybe - but it'd millions an millions worth of infrastructure - and multiple trucks delivering the hydrogen for the other trucks :D
Might as well power it on farts and the hopes and dreams of orphans, to go along with the rest of the new capital. The whole project is "what if Dubai, but even stupider?" It's a slow-motion economic, social, environmental and humanitarian disaster for Egypt, and I can't say I'm unsurprised that CNN "Style" would publish an uncritical article about one of its many shit-facets.
Is it a bad idea to design carbon-neutral or carbon-negative public works? Not at all. Is it a bad idea to make Africa's tallest building for no reason other than you think you can, using funds your country doesn't really have, built with labor under questionable safety standards, locating it in the heart of a massive unnecessary complex patterned after American-style suburbs (the worst development pattern ever conceived) designed to segregate your common people from their military overlords entirely? I'm going to say yes. Unquestionably.
Much luck, Egypt. With this kind of leadership, you're going to need it.
Also, why the fuck not just use electricity directly? Oh wait, that's not futuristic enough. Remember kids, being environmentally friendly is only good when it sounds cool!
There's a whole industry built upon dreaming up idiotic ideas that sound plausible and cool if you don't think about it at all deeply or do even a minute's research, and then creating CGI or, lately, AI-generated concept art to sell it to fabulously wealthy idiots with net worths two or three billion times higher than their IQs. I think this industry is casting around for their next marks, because some of the oil sheiks in the UAE have started to realize that the gravy train might conceivably pull into the station at some point, and their multi-billion-dollar vanity projects to build 1:10,000-scale replicas of the fucking moon in downtown Dubai might not be tenable.
I honestly wonder how analogous this con game is to whatever led Bronze-Age poobahs to command their megalithic monuments to be built. Was there some Old Kingdom equivalent of modern fly-by-night architectural firms fluffing Khufu's peen with grandiose papyrus mockups of pyramids? Is this just a continuation of a 5,000-year-old tradition of gulling rich idiots to build impractical projects by breaking the backs of the proletariat? Has a question ever been so rhetorical?
"and his net worth is only 100 million!"
You're completely right though. The entire article reads like a grift perpetrated by the Egyptian government making bad choice after bad choice. It's not like their economy is doing so well to allow these types of projects.
More than that, it's likely to actually tank their economy in more than one way. They're paying for the thing largely by a combination of foreign loans and turning on the money printers, so not only are they going to drive down the value of the of the Egyptian Pound through inflation, they'll be in debt to various international interests for generations.
The whole project from soup to nuts has an estimated budget of about $58bn USD (an optimistic estimate, as these things inevitably are), of which about $11bn has already been spent on the completed Phase 1, which they already can't afford. The World Bank has cut about $6bn in loan checks to prop up the country, and the IMF is poised to increase their loan program to Egypt from $3bn to $8bn, but they've made that contingent on reining in infrastructure spending–a demand that's both unlikely to be met and kinda mind-blowing, considering the IMF's whole mandate is to stimulate economic development in poorer member nations. Even the IMF, an organization with a long history of enabling the siphoning of wealth from public coffers to private hands, intentionally or otherwise, recognizes this is just a terrible idea.
All this would be merely silly and reckless if it weren't for the implicit goal of the whole project, which is to absolutely separate the poor majority of Egyptian citizens from the military ruling class. The damn thing is being built 30 miles outside of Cairo in the middle of nowhere, and is designed to cater to the administrators who work there and their families, and exclude everyone else.
The planned housing is all mini mansions built on the model of American suburbs, far outside of affordability for service industry workers and lower-level government functionaries, who are expected to take the electric train into the administrative district to work and then fuck off back to the slums afterward. Needless to say, the government promises high security through CCTV and for-hire security services in the capital district. That's part of the sales pitch to the foreign business interests they're trying to attract to the financial center.
The best that can be said for the thing is that at least they're building it on vacant land and didn't have to bulldoze quite so many poverty-stricken neighborhoods to build it, unlike some vanity projects.
The whole endeavor is just so monumentally stupid and evil that I even have a hard time believing it's real.
Why do people keep forgetting that hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s a storage medium.
There is little to none “free” hydrogen we can just pump to a tank and use - it always needs to be separated from other elements using tons and tons of energy.
For that matter, petroleum is just an extremely long-term storage medium for solar energy, if you want to be pedantic about it. That's just what fuel is.
Hydrogen could still be an important part of a sustainable energy strategy, and should not be dismissed as an incomplete solution though. At this point, just about our biggest problem as regards green energy isn't actually production, it's storage and transport. Photovoltaics are cheaper than they've ever been, and Egypt in particular is well-situated to exploit that fact. Hypothetically, Egypt could use solar peak hours to generate hydrogen via electrolysis or biological generation and greatly reduce their carbon footprint, so it's not entirely deceptive greenwashing to use "hydrogen" as a shorthand for 'more sustainable.'
The devil is in the details though, and you're right that merely generating your electricity via hydrogen isn't a guarantee of sustainability in itself. Steam reforming is by far the most common method of hydrogen generation in the US at least, and that does require the use fossil fuels.
Considering how asinine and wasteful this particular project is, I'm not willing to give the masterminds behind it much benefit of doubt, but neither do I think that the mere mention hydrogen alone is grounds to be dismissive.
Transporting hydrogen is a massive pain in the ass, it leaks from every container, the containers need to be MASSIVE because it needs to be pressurised to insane levels to be economical to move.
Hydrogen is good for grid-scale long term storage where pumped hydro and batteries are either cost-prohibitive or inconvenient. Use excess renewables to create hydrogen on-site and fill massive tanks in the middle of nowhere with it. When production dips, feed it back through grid-scale fuel cells.
In a limited way it might be possible to convert old natural gas pipes and infrastructure to hydrogen, but it still leaks like nobody's business and making the pipelines hydrogen proof is not exactly cheap.
But for Joe Regular's car? Never. Unless we figure out literal free electricity and have already filled every battery on the planet first.
For long-haul transport where EVs aren't valid for some reason? Maybe - but it'd millions an millions worth of infrastructure - and multiple trucks delivering the hydrogen for the other trucks :D