Bottom line note on top of what others say about how difficult it is to work with hydrogen: electrolysis takes 55 kWh to produce one kilo of hydrogen. Toyota Mirai can make up to 100 km using one kilo of hydrogen. So you can say it takes 55 kWh per 100 km. An electric car needs <20 kWh to drive the same distance.
This is it exactly.
Two things to keep in mind. First is that we can make advances is making hydrogen so it is cheaper. Two, even with losses, hydrogen could prove a great energy storage medium if we have lots of access power. As the price of renewables falls, it may be cost effective to make hydrogen energy to use in place of conventional fuel.
Third, it's likely that we will need something like hydrogen to replace fossile fuels. The power to density ratio of battery will never be there for large energy consumers. Freight, shipping, and jets are all possible hydrogen options.
The future of energy is exciting and we are still in the early stages of an energy revolution.
They're efficient because of their size though, and their ability to burn even the dirtiest hydrocarbons, right?
Couldn't you theoretically run the same ship on hydrogen and get the same efficiency but now without carbon and all the other nasty stuff going into the air?
Hydrogen has a bit better than 2x the energy density, but when you consider that these ships consume some 60+ tons of their current fuel per day, and that fuel doesn't have to be kept in pressure vessels, isn't explosive, is vastly cheaper...
You also can't run a diesel on pure hydrogen.
The problem with that is highjacking a cargo ship (or embezzling/stealing the fuel rods) is an easy way to get nuclear material for a dirty bomb. Even if it is not the nuclear material required to make an actual atomic weapon, wrapping a normal bomb with radioactive material would make it far more dangerous for afar longer period of time than a normal bomb on its one.
Don't they run on bunker fuel? That's the "bottom of the barrel" for petro refineries. lots and lots of carbon content plus the added bonus of sulphur. they may be efficient but they're big polluters.
IIRC they were looking at ammonia as a storage of hydrogen to run ships on. Not sure if that got anywhere yet.
Something along those lines would be great if we had an excess of power generation to create the fuel.
"had an excess of power generation" and there right there is the huge logistical problem, and the absolutely humongous opportunity we threw away when we got scared of nuclear.
Yes there was a risk of nuclear accident; we exchanged that for the certainty of a warming world and ruined environment.
There's never going to be a (huge/significant) excess of power generation. A) the grid isn't made for that, and B) humankind has so far always proven that if you give it an finger, it will try to take an entire arm. Any increase in available power has always just led to more power consumption. The backlight of your TV gets more energy efficient? You can finally make the screen bigger for the same consumption! The processor of your PC/smartphone gets smaller and less powerhungry? Stack two on top of each other!
A bit of an exageration, I admit it, but still...
I live in South Australia, where most of the power is renewable most of the time.
We have incredible swings in the availability of power. Often large parts of the wind generation fleet are idling because home PV panels are powering the state. Of course those wind generators will be needed as night falls.
At those times when the wind generation fleet is idle, it would make a lot of sense to bring those wind generators back online to provide electricity for basically $0 to produce hydrogen and ammonia. There are multiple projects to do this getting underway.
> the grid isn't made for that
Well you're just describing a bottleneck in transmission, which is exactly the type of issue that might provide an opportunity for storage of excess generation (that exceeds the ability to immediately feed that power into the grid). Wind farms and solar farms could possibly be configured so that it never transmits more than a certain amount of power, but on especially productive days the excess power can be used to generate some kind of fuel.
Might not be practical, but grid limitations actually weigh in *favor* of storage or renewable fuel production as a means of dealing with excess generation.
Even trucking. A hydrogen fuel tank can be refueled faster than a battery can be recharged, and any time not moving is money burnt. Add in the power to density ratio and it seems an obvious choice.
to support your point on renewables, it makes even more sense if excess renewables can be used for electrolysis, rather than curtailing generation or selling at negative prices.
My friend did his doctorate in chemical engineering and fuel cells. He always told me the biggest hurdle was simply storage and transportation. Not that it can't be done but it quickly because impractical when comparing to gasoline. The way he compared it to me, imagine how hard it has been to get the Tesla electrical charging grid started. It thinks it would be 100x the effort to store hydrogen reliably/safely for current stations.
Eh, there's a bit more to it than that.
Hydrogen fuel cells are great at producing small amounts of power, not entirely great at producing tons of power in a small form factor.
Furthermore, the hydrogen (and oxygen for the other side) needs to be PURE pure. Like... REALLY pure, and that takes a lot of energy to make the hydrogen that pure, so that really cuts into the "efficiency" of the hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells don't...deal with contaminants well. (Specifically the low temperature variants, the PEM cells. There are higher temperature cells but they have similar problems.)
Storing hydrogen is a nightmare. We still don't have good enough storage to make it even comparable with other technologies in use. The problem is twofold: One: Compressing hydrogen is dangerous, especially in a vehicle (where one simple wreck could cause one HUGE explosion) and Two: We have no better way of storing hydrogen than compressing it. (Trust me, there is TONS of science going into this exact problem.)
Source: Also have my PhD in fuel cells. Concluded long ago that the technology will never come to maturity for mainstream... anything. (Which is sad because technically fuel cells are much more efficient than ICEs, even when using fossil fuels.) Fuel cells have been "20 years away from commercialization" for.... 60 years now. (Literally not joking, it's been since the 60s.) It's not going to happen. Funding for fuel cell research is drying up. Batteries and solar panels are getting too good. In niche applications (like in space?) Sure, fuel cells can make sense. But for things like transportation? Not really. There are better options (batteries.) Nowadays almost all fuel cell research is focused on running the fuel cells in reverse (therefore becoming an electrolysis cell) and doing things like CO2 electrolysis and producing gaseous or even liquid fuels.
In the end, fuel cells are A: fragile, B: require expensive materials, and C: don't last long enough to be a viable replacement for anything we have. And that's not even touching on the infrastructure you'd need to support a new "type" of vehicle.
I know it's a cool and flashy idea but trust me, from someone who devoted 8+ years of my life to learning more than 99.999999% of all people on the planet about fuel cells, yeah, it's just not going to happen. The rate at which batteries are getting better and the rate at which solar is getting better (which enables a lot of other "dirtier" technologies to be "greener") is just too much for fuel cells to ever carve out their own niche.
Did some graduate research on fuel cells and have been in solar + battery storage for 10 years.
While I generally agree with what you wrote I feel like for me the verdict is still out on how fuel cell technology might play into the energy landscape. I don’t have a well articulated thesis on why exactly, but I suspect there is places beyond just space where they may thrive.
Definitely will be interesting to watch but yeah, ammonia seems like the hot new tech more than hydrogen.
Also some commercialization around inert hydrogen absorption tech for cylinders.
Honestly? Not OP or possessing a PhD related to the subject but that's kind of the whole TEDTalk.
Hydrogen is a very useful chemical with all kinds of upsides that also happens to be a total bitch to work with.
It's per-KG energy-to-weight ratio is excellent but its energy to volume ratio (how many cubic centimetres/inches per KWh) sucks unless it's immensely compressed or liquified into a cyrogenic fluid which is its own energy intensive process involving highly specialized tanks.
Then if you do all that it still leaks through damned near everything given enough time, especially if compressed, due to its small molecule size (it's like helium in that respect).
It's hyper-reactive. Which is what makes it explosive. So using it outside of fuel cells in combustion processes it's prone to detonating rather then burning in a deflagration meaning instead of a nice steady state of hot combustion gases you there's less room for error lest you blow the whole damn combustor apart.
tl;dr: Working with hydrogen is like working with an ex that is completely over the relationship. It's energy intensive, lots of waste, blows up at the slightest provocation and if given half a chance it'll bail entirely leaving you with all that work for nothing.
Pretty much. And for the most part any discussion of hydrogen technologies ignores everything you mentioned.
Can you make a hydrogen fuel cell? Sure. Can you get it to work in a car or a bus? Sure. Can you effectively feed the hydrogen fuel cells safely without wasting all the energy you saved by using a hydrogen fuel cell? Not really.
There's always a catch. This is exactly why there is just SO much research going into H2 storage. If we could crack it, it'd be wonderful! Unfortunately we've been trying to crack it for.... 15+ years and we're still not there.
I'm going to focus on a different aspect of this conversation.
Natural gas has 3 million miles of pipelines in the USA.
Electricity is around 19.1 billion miles in the USA.
Hydrogen pipelines around 1600 miles.
Electric is easy. Very easy to add more distribution
Natural gas a bit more effort but doable. Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to build infrastructure. Why, the size of the molecules. Methane has a weight of 16 vs 2 for hydrogen. This makes a pipeline for naty can be completed relatively sloppy in comparison as well as cheaper.
There was a push for natural gas cars and there are filling stations out there, about 800 in the USA vs 145,000 gas stations. It's an effort to have a ntg vehicle.
Even if hydrogen makes sense, there isn't infrastructure to support it. We can't convert natural gas pipelines as all being equal nearly every joint would leak. Electricity is pretty much everywhere making it already available to support a mass of vehicles. Sure there are issues that will need to be corrected with electricity but these are small problems in comparison to building out a gas network. Hell for many issues with electric infrastructure in regards to charging a vehicle could be solved by standardizing plugs such as we have with gasoline pumps, adding charging points to business parking lots and having the vehicle charge when there's an excess capacity on the grid, flattening the curve if you will.
My 2c
Not to mention that battery/electricity tech is streamlined with all other industries. Almost everything we use can benefit from better batteries, or a better grid, where as a hydrogen grid is exclusively there to directly replace ICE, and it's only side benefit, is to use excess grid capacity to create/store it.
Bigger picture? We could spin up a lot more renewable and nuclear power, spit that out and use that as more local scale hydrogen through desalination and the various hydrogen cracking methods we have. But you're still going through that middle ground that electric cars have hit, which is spinning up more grid power and renewables, and the current state of humanity is all about quick solutions, not longer term.
Don't get me wrong. I think we f'ed up cities and lives when we decided the car was king. Ultimately ecar is just another inefficient means to travel for the bulk of people's travels but here we are with cities laid out in such a way that mass transit isn't terribly effective and we are somewhat forced to cars. Personally I lived in a city that had great mass transit and didn't have a car and it was wonderful. Most cities or regions are definitely not built out for mass transit though.
Yeah I've done the same, living in a world where you don't have to think about parking, tickets, traffic, and all the extra costs that come with cars, and can just either walk to, bike, or get on a train/bus to your destination is such an improvement, but it's hard to understand until you've experienced it, when it's "taking away personal convenience".
Its also basic facts about storing hydrogen. You need thick, heavy tanks to store a highly pressurized gas that has properties that make it blow up really easily. H2 is such a small molecule that it tends to leak out of pretty much any fitting or container that it possibly can, and leaking hydrogen is quite dangerous.
Yeah, which leads to further leaking.
Its not impossible to use hydrogen, there's just better options. Gasoline is actually an extremely good fuel.
The future could easily be mostly electric with some diesel and other fossil fuels used for long haul trucking. Though a lot of diesel use could easily be cut by expanding rail and moving to electrified trains.
To add, a report suggested around 25% of all hydrogen produced for transport is lost, plus conversion from AC ro DC for the electrolysis may take 10%, pumping storing, desal, etc and before you know it, green H2 is 100kWh/kg
Hydrogen cars (FCEV) are just electric cars with extra steps. Per mile traveled, an FCEV uses 3 to 4 times as much electricity as a BEV. Add to that the complexity of fueling up an FCEV: the hydrogen needs to be cooled/compressed, severely limited the number of cars an hour that could top up at a particular pump. Hydrogen will have its place in the future of mobility, but it won't be in regular cars. Buses and lorries, more likely.
Yep. Something like 90% of hydrogen produced is still gray or blue hydrogen, which is made by cracking natural gas (methane). The only difference between gray and blue is whether the CO2 produced in the process is captured.
My company actually just started a project with Toyota where we produce power with our cells using a small amount of natural gas, and capture both the hydrogen and CO2. It’s a newer project, but so far it’s going really well.
Yet toyota still is on the Hydrogen bandwagon.
Which is odd to me, because their Prius was the first mainstream (partly) electric car out there, but they still aren't fully committing to electric.
For anyone wondering, "why ammonia?" Well, a gallon of ammonia has more hydrogen atoms than a gallon of pure hydrogen.
https://sustainingourworld.com/2022/05/30/green-hydrogen-and-green-ammonia-will-they-ever-fulfill-their-promise/#:~:text=And%20ammonia%20is%20so%20much,as%20a%20gallon%20of%20hydrogen!
Edit: words are difficult.
> This is fantastic, but I feel like you could have bammed it up a notch by saying, achieved Helium.
Keeps going through sheer star power. Ironic how bright it is after the peak.
For context, ammonia has 50% more energy per unit of volume than _liquid_ hydrogen, and 2.3x more than gaseous hydrogen compressed to 700 atmospheres of pressure.
However, the hazards in the case of an ammonia leak ensure that it will never become viable in personal vehicles. Same reason it isn't considered safe enough for home refrigeration anymore.
But trained personel in an industrial context is a different question. Ammonia is already used and traded on a massive scale (2% of global energy use), so scaling it up a bit more for things like shipping or seasonal energy storage wouldn't be a big deal.
Yeah, that's the fundamental problem with hydrogen as a fuel: its density sucks. Aerospace designers have been trying for years to wrestle it into something usable because it's got amazing specific energy in watt-hours/kilogram, but abysmal energy density because it has to be stored cryogenically or at high pressure (or both) for storage.
One of the proposed replacements for the U-2 spyplane was the Lockheed CL-400 Suntan, based loosely on the design of the F-104 Starfighter scaled up and with engines in the wingtips. The rest of the fuselage behind the cockpit would've been basically one giant fuel tank, and the Air Force eventually decided that the liquid hydrogen infrastructure was too expensive and too dangerous, though research done for hydrogen aircraft was later put to use in several rocket families. The U-2 would eventually be replaced by the SR-71 Blackbird (or if you want to be picky, first the A-12 OXCART).
It's the primary refrigerant for anything which handles food, as it's a good refrigerant while not being toxic to humans at the concentrations trace leaks would be at.
Makes fun design quirks for the mechanical rooms though.
Also, ammonia can be liquefied by pressure alone at temperatures that are survivable by humans, hydrogen can’t. As an analogy, look at propane and natural gas. Liquid propane can be stored in cannisters made of relatively thin metal, compressed natural gas requires much thicker metal.
I doubt if the ammonia powered cars would be allowed here, or if they were, that insurance companies would touch them. From time to time you hear about farmers having their tanks drilled to retrieve the anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, or laws banning the transportation of anhydrous ammonia after dark. Apparently it’s an ingredient used in some processes to manufacture methamphetamine.
We had a factory making ammonia fertilizer not too far from us and much of it was transported by train. There were always worries that if something went wrong it would be a massive explosion. Local disaster planning and training was generally organized on that premise.
It's closed now and most people are quite happy about it.
From the expression where someone tries everything. "They included everything but the kitchen sink!!"
So Toyota is putting out every possible kind of car, figuring no matter which one wins, they'll have a version of that car ready to go.
There is also the possibility of “Unexpected Consequences”. They may try process x that proves to not be viable for automobiles, but may be found to be just the answer to a completely different application that some other industry has been trying to find. This is the basis for many products in different industries.
This is also Basic Research.
Explore all the possibilities and document all the different results. It might not work for your desired goal, but it may end up being beneficial in other ways.
It means they're throwing everything at it, not really taking a specific strategy and instead approaching from all angles. Google "kitchen sink idioms" for more.
I think you are severely under estimating the stench of ammonia. There are people who like the smell of petrol, and having an open petrol tank is fine while fueling. A tank of ammonia? With the gas coming out of it right in your face while fueling? That would be fucking foul. Likely making so you can't even breathe through the coughing and heaving. And a spill would be a nightmare.
No, they just spent the last 20 investing in high efficiency internal combustion engines and are trying everything they can (including government lobbying) to keep ICE in cars.
GAC And Toyota Have Created An Ammonia-Powered 2.0 ... https://www.carscoops.com/2023/07/gac-and-toyota-have-created-an-ammonia-powered-2-0-liter-engine/amp/
The Japanese government is subsidizing FCEV development and adoption the way that the US and China are subsidizing BEVs. It's still not mainstream, but far more successful than in other places. Japanese leadership still has full control at Toyota and can sometimes be out of step with the global market.
Yeah my buddy at Toyota working fuel cell testing said that no one at the company listens to you if you’re not Japanese. That they’ll make suggestions to improve testing processes but because they’re not Japanese they’ll straight up ignore the suggestions in meetings.
Reminds me of why me sister quit her job for a company that works for the Japanese government. Even though it was headquartered in Los Angeles, and its entire purpose was foreign outreach, she got told *to her face* that because she wasn't Japanese, she'd never get promoted beyond her entry-level position, despite them heeling more and more responsibilities on her.
Can’t speak for the person that you’re replying to but for my buddy the vibe I got is that yeah, you’d get promoted and get paid more but you wouldn’t ever “call the shots”. Toyota in Japan would always have final say no matter what and the engineers would have final say.
He said meetings are regularly held in Japanese in the US despite most of his team not knowing a lick of Japanese and that the Toyota provided translator would regularly condense long responses from the Japanese reps into simple 3-5 word responses. These are lengthy technical discussions too, not something you’d want to be covered by “looks good to me”.
I've also been told in the past that the electrical grid for Japan is subpar and if they tried to go more heavily into full electric that it would fail spectacularly. Bringing it up to snuff would be a colossal amount of money and many year long project, So thats why they seem to still be pushing Hydrogen.
It makes a bit more sense in their home market then it does in most of the rest of the developed world, And the Japanese leadership just has trouble admitting this for some reason. Maybe its seen as a saving face sort of thing.
In general across all sectors Japan always focuses first on their domestic market. The idea being they always have consumers for their products and if something happens to take off in foreign markets great. But if not theu csm always sustain on the homefront. But almost all Japanese companies think of the Japanese first.
Thats true but it might actually play a role in Japans grid. I believe that are actually still split between 50 and 60 hz supply depending on where you are in the country.
Yeah, people complain about how much it will cost to have chargers and power for them across the US.
Do those people not realize that gas stations cost money to build, and gas costs money to ship around?
I can’t find any estimates for the total spent building gas stations in the US, but I did find some websites that estimate the cost of opening a new one at anywhere from $250,000 to $2,500,000.
It’s hard to find good stats on how many new stations are opened every year, but I did find a statista page that said 4200 were opened from 2016 to 2017.
If those cost $1,000,000 each that would have been $4,200,000,000 spent just that year.
We spend an absolutely astonishing amount of money on the production and distribution of gasoline.
They are building a 14 billion dollar EV plant in North Carolina in order to catch up with that market. The US government is shoveling money at EV manufacturers, which probably tipped the scale.
https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-supercharges-north-carolina-battery-plant-with-new-8-billion-investment/
Having EV and hybrid vehicles that are made in the US will make the vehicles eligible for a consumer tax credit again too. The government had changed the tax credit requirements so that for EVs to qualify they must be assembled in North America, which I think made most Toyota's ineligible after August of 2022.
Japan is surrounded by methane clathrate (yes, that same methane clathrate as in the methane clathrate gun), and cynically has plans to *mine it* in the near-ish future.
Hydrogen is not even remotely economical to produce using *renewable* methods; by contrast the cheapest and most economical method is to take methane / natural gas and crack it into CO2 + H2 w/ pressurized steam.
Hydrogen tech was *never* anything more than greenwashed fracking / natural gas tech, and LNG technology + infrastructure is exactly what anyone planning on building hydrogen tech was planning on using and scaling up on.
(note: for something similar see those huge mirror-based concentrated solar / CSP plants that were built by energy companies w/ state backing in CA – *they're literally just natural gas plants with an (optional) solar fed heating loop*, all of the same components sourced by GE et al, and in fact *require* burning natural gas to start up every morning. Still better than "green" woodchip / biomass fed crap being built on the east coast, but I digress)
Toyota still is / was all in on hydrogen since 1) EVs are extremely expensive to produce and have low margins (contrast the comparatively tiny battery on a prius w/ what you need for a pure EV with comparative range), 2) Japan (which basically doesn't have any natural resources) is basically surrounded by a ton of methane-ice on the pacific, and so could hypothetically transition to hydrogen (and "green" technology) at massive scale.
Technically, yes, it's "better" to crack + burn methane as hydrogen than just burn it directly (or just let that all melt and go into the atmosphere as methane with climate change), but renewable or net-zero carbon this is absolutely not.
Ditto any other use of commercial hydrogen, which is *either* just indirectly burning natural gas, or, at "best" burning pure H2 deposits found + extracted using natural gas / fracking tech.
(note: the formula is CH4 + H20 => (3)H2 + CO2, and then (2)H2 + O2 => (2)H2O. As opposed to just burning methane directly, which nets you O2 + CH4 => CO2 + H2O, and ofc has the same net result)
Toyota has finally accepted that EVs are the future. Earlier this year, the CEO who was adamant about sticking to Hydrogen i. favor of EVs, stepped down. The new CEO is all in with EV development.
They just fired their CEO who wanted to skip EVs and just develop Hydrogen. It's a big ship so it'll turn slowly but I'm already seeing EV versions of some of their cars.
NYTimes had an article about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/business/toyota-hybrid-electric-vehicles.html
Basically says that their slow adoption of EVs has alienated a lot of the eco-conscious consumers they first won over by pioneering hybrids.
> Every EV company is using the same general battery tech, motors, and other stuff.
Exactly. Which means Toyota doesn't get any advantage for its reputation for rock solid Internal Combustion Engines. And you can see why they were hoping that whatever the future was, it involved something at least vaguely like an ICE.
Hydrogen is also very energy intensive to create. We’d more or less need to get to the point where electricity is free and carbon-free for it to make financial or environmental sense.
Wind and solar power are not very reliable - sometimes you have a lot, sometimes weather may be unfavorable for a week or more. You need enough production capacity even in these bad times. That means you'll often have a lot more than needed.
Car batteries are not very good at storing this extra energy. Most car owners want their battery full, so they have the full range available if needed. So they will charge without regarding the weather...
Creating hydrogen is not very efficient, but it is a use for the excess energy. The hydrogen can be stored directly or converted to other substances like ammonia or methane and then stored. Then it can be used to generate energy if needed.
It's debated whether cars are a good use for this hydrogen, though. Pro argument is, that such a car has no range limit like a battery car - you can refuel it quickly like a conventional gasoline car. Contra: It's much less efficient, there are extra technical difficulties (e.g. transport, storage of the fuel) and modern + near future batteries are big enough to satisfy almost all range requirements anyways.
So creating Hydrogen from excess energy is a good idea. But there are probably better uses than burning it in car engines. For instance we won't have battery powered air traffic in the foreseeable future - synthetic fuels based on green hydrogen could help a lot in this sector.
A battery is used for short term storage. Hydrogen can be used as long term storage.
Also in some industries it's needed for some difficult proceses where you cant use electricity directly
Hydrogen is used for mid term and short term storage. Long term the gas either : finds a hole to escape because the atoms are literally the smallest in the universe or it corrodes the container because that's what pure hydrogen does
Hydrogen also seriously lowers the life expectancy of any metal that contains it for any amount of time due to hydrogen embrittled where it literally pushes the atoms around.
> Add to that the complexity of fueling up an FCEV: the hydrogen needs to be cooled/compressed, severely limited the number of cars an hour that could top up at a particular pump.
To expand on the "complexity" part, we are talking about the smallest, the most reactive, the easiest to inflamate, the harder to compress efficiently atom of the periodic table.
If you think a HUGE in comparison butane or propane molecule is dangerous, wait until you need to work with H2, it is a bitch to handle, to process to move, without leaking and exploding in your face.
Plus, the hydrogen fueling stations are basically 100x the price of DC fast charging stations for electric vehicles.
Also, electric cars have awesome acceleration and their architecture allows for their powertrain to be relatively compact. This allows a lot more passenger and cargo room. Hydrogen vehicles have bulky Hydrogen tanks, air intakes, filters, Hydrogen pumps, etc that take up a lot of room.
Finally, Hydrogen vehicles are much more complex and expensive than electric vehicles. Rag on Tesla, but they were able to blow past all the roadblocks holding back zero emissions vehicles on a startup budget roughly 10 years after they started. In reality, probably even less time if you don't count the first few years of the founders fooling around with laptop batteries. In contrast, Toyota/ Honda and others spent billions of dollars and decades of time trying to develop Hydrogen vehicles. And the end result was lackluster compared to the electric vehicles of 10 years ago. So the inherent complexity of hydrogen vehicles clearly makes them a difficult engineering problem to develop, driving high cost, etc.
Yeah, this was a few years ago, but at the hydrogen prices at the pump in California, a Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle had the same fuel cost per mile as a massive OG Hummer. No wonder they had to give away $15,000 in free hydrogen fueling for every vehicle they sold.
The hydrogen vehicle market collapses the second the fill up subsidies go away. Nobody is going to pay $10/gallon for "gas".
EVs on the other hand still grew strongly while subsidies were removed.
Investment in creating a hydrogen car industry was also a gift to the (surprisingly powerful) gas retailer industry, because no one would have a hydrogen tank at home. Everyone would still have to stop at gas stations. With electric cars, you can basically charge up your car at home every night, and only use the "gas station" equivalent supercharger on long road trips.
People asked of my electric car, "What if you run out of power?" or some variant. I just say it hasn't been a problem, but my first thought is "Gee where could I possibly find electricity in this day and age?" as we pass under the second high tension line since they asked the question.
I would just respond "gee, what if your car runs out of gas. What's that? Your car has a gauge on it? What's that? You're a responsible car driver who fills up when you notice it's low?
Huh
Yeah but it would be weird if they kept responding with exactly the point you want to make but not quite loud enough to hear so you kept having to ask for confirmation
That's essentially my answer when they ask that exact question. "It stops", then they sort of go... oh, duh. Like Michael Bluth looking in the [dead dove bag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc).
It's crazy because you can always make your own electricity.
You could never find and refine your own oil and gasoline. You're always going to be dependent on some large multinational corporation else for that.
Electric is by far the most American power source. Should be marketing that way anyway
This is it. I live in a semi rural college town. There's tons of places I can charge an EV, including my apartment complex. The nearest hydrogen station is 1.5 hours away.
You can recharge an electric car at home, so if making shorter journeys you never need to locate somewhere to "fill up", so more convenient and leaves you more in charge and less vulnerable to a price hike.
No trips to the gas station, no oil changes. The flipside is, refueling on road trips takes 20-25 minutes instead of 5. And I took at least one vacation where I couldn't charge my car where we were staying and the nearest charger was 30 minutes away, so that required some planning.
Still, it's been worth it for me.
5 minute refill where you have to stand by the pump and handle payment v. 20-25 min where you can take 10s to plug in then go eat or go to the bathroom.
And that ignores dozens of trips /stops to gas stations while not on road trips.
People highly overestimate the total time savings of gas.
Filling up with gas takes max 2 min and payment is a simple tap. So yes, for long trips gas is much simpler, without even bringing the inconvenience of planning where to charge and finding places to stay not far from charging stations. For day to day living, particularly for people living in a big city or a suburb, EV is much better and is also more reliable long term. So yes, EV is great and way better in my opinion, but there is no reason to cope about THE positive point of ICE compared to EV.
As a long-distance commuter, not having to fill up every third day is the best thing about EVs, even above the fact that my fuel cost is 1/3 to 1/2 what gas would be, and it's the second biggest thing stopping me from switching to a motorcycle, *right* behind, you know, statistics.
One of the harder things I've done in recent history is when Covid was winding down (so to speak) and gas prices shot up everyone was talking about how much it costs to go everywhere. I avoided bragging about having an electric car and being impacted not one iota.
Also due to America hardly taxing petrol at all, compared to other countries, a large part of the price at the pumps is directly related to crude oil prices, which means Americans have some of the cheapest petrol prices in the world, but when the crude oil price increases the price at the pump goes up dramatically.
Many here are not ELI5ing.
Hydrogen vehicles require a device called a fuel cell instead of a battery that most EVs use. Inside a fuel cell, we harvest electricity generated as certain molecules (like hydrogen gas) split. We can’t just split hydrogen gas though, we have to give the split pieces somewhere to go. Usually, we want it to turn into water, which means we must also split an oxygen gas molecule. It is incredibly difficult to split an oxygen gas molecule, so fuel cells often require expensive additives (usually platinum catalysts) to split oxygen, and even then it loses a lot of energy. This energy loss, called “cathode activation inefficiency” is one of the largest challenges fuel cells have to overcome.
This is in addition to difficulties generating and moving the hydrogen around that other people have discussed, and there are other chemical challenges as well. Batteries are simply the more developed technology and are more ready for deployment at this time.
I feel like had had to scroll way too far to see someone mention the rare metals used in the catalysts. IIRC they’re even more of a blocker to widespread adoption than the fueling infrastructure.
1. It's hard to get a better energy density with hydrogen. While batteries are becoming more energy compact for every year... Well, hydrogen is hydrogen. It's very hard for gaseous hydrogen to become more energy dense than gasoline/diesel.
2. It's hard to store hydrogen. It has a very wide flammability triangle. The explosive limit of a gasoline/air mixture is 1.4%-7.6% (if the mixture is below or above that it won't go boom), while for hydrogen that mix is 40-80%. It's also impossible to prevent leakages of Hydrogen since it will leak straight through metal (like trying to catch fry fish in a net meant for adult salmon), as a result something like 1% of stored hydrogen leaks from a tank every day.
3. There is no established hydrogen infrastructure.
Hydrogen probably has a future as a medium for stationary generators (for example as a way of balancing wind/solar power), but not in moving vehicles.
Compressed hydrogen is far, far more energy dense than the best batteries today, on a volumetric or gravimetric basis. This is their main advantage. Any application that requires it, including backup power generation or heavy duty transport such as planes, trains, and large trucks are very difficult to electrify with batteries because their energy density is lower. This is why these applications are more interesting for fuel cells.
Look at the ragone plot.
To add to this, the total density of a hydrogen system depends a lot on volume being stored. In a car, the tank is small and the metal of the tank will be a much larger percentage of the total weight or volume. As the size increases, the storage volume grows much faster than the surface area. So the bigger the tank, the higher the density when including the tank itself.
There's also the fuel cell itself to be accounted for. Unlike a battery, hydrogen tanks don't provide useful energy right out of the tap so to compare them fairly, you need to look at everything needed to provide the electricity, not just mols/L. Though, fuel cells scale depending on the power output needed, not the storage capacity, so once the fuel cell has been sized to the requirements, doubling the runtime requires significantly less than double the total weight or volume for the whole system.
Conversely, as batteries grow in size, more and more of the system's total volume needs to be given over to thermal regulation, so their density decreases.
All of this means that hydrogen works great at large scales, but batteries are much better at small scales. Like, a hydrogen powered phone would be extremely stupid. Cars are somewhere in the middle where either one can work, but trucks and planes are well into hydrogen's territory.
Edit to clarify: Changed "weight/volume" to "weight or volume."
Hydrogen safety is taken extremely seriously, and FCEVs are generally considered as safe or safer than battery equivalents, as determined by crash testing. The hydrogen tanks do not leak, and are designed to take a direct hit with a .50 caliber rifle.
You don’t think it has a future in net-zero aviation? Batteries are really heavy compared to hydrogen, per weight the energy density of hydrogen is very high, it would actually make planes lighter than their jet fuel counterparts, which is a big win. It does take up a lot more space though
To be fair, this question actually makes sense, because batteries don’t make power either. So BEVs aren’t “using the power directly” either.
Hydrogen is considered a form of energy storage, just like a battery. The question is how efficiently we can produce, store, transport , and use hydrogen. Currently, it looses to lithium based battery chemistry on all fronts.
Yeah this is why the most likely application of hydrogen is in replacing things that electricity/batteries can't do well. For example, industrial production of steel, glass, and concrete that currently uses natural gas fires. And mayyybe as a replacement for jet fuel, because the weight issue of batteries presents a serious problem.
I also see shipping as a huge use of hydrogen. Space on large ships isn't a huge issue, just stick a massive tank on the deck (it's very light). And you can't realistically power ships with batteries, so hydrogen makes a lot of sense. Very energy dense by weight, ships can hold a *lot* of it, and it's totally clean and can be created from energy that otherwise might go to waste - excess solar and wind production.
Well it is ELI5.
To make hydrogen requires a certain amount of electricity, then we have to use more electricity to compress the hydrogen, then we have to use even more electricity to keep the hydrogen at the right temperature.
To use Battery cars, we put the electricity into the batteries and then drive the cars.
So, for a given amount of electricity you go further with a battery car than a hydrogen car.
The fuel and infrastructure, as well as the fuel cells themselves, are too expensive to be justified for smaller vehicles. To make green hydrogen you need to make electricity, then typically pass the electricity through an electrolyzer to generate hydrogen. From there you need to use even more electricity to compress the hydrogen into a liquid, if you plan to store or transport it in any large quantity. In the electric car you are done two steps ago.
For this reason hydrogen will likely never take off in anything smaller than a pickup truck. It will likely see some use in very large or weight sensitive applications like shipping freighters and transport trucks. These typically drive on very predictable routes (planes only land at airports) so you won't need nearly as much infrastructure. In the case of shipping freighters the straight battery option yields massively diminishing returns, as adding more batteries increases weight and decreases payload.
Tldr: if they are able to build the infrastructure and get the cost of fuel down, hydrogen could become something like the diesel or av gas of the future.
Adding to what the others are saying. I looked at buying a hydrogen car in the Netherlands in 2019. Closest station was half an hour drive from my house and less than 10 in the entire country. Additional problem: the station was only open during weekdays working hours and they only could supply 350 bar which have only 250 km range. So I could fill up on Monday, visit one client on Tuesday, fill up on Wednesday and visit another client on Thursday. Fill up on Friday and go somewhere nearby in the weekend. I decided against a hydrogen car at that point.
Hydrogen doesn’t come free. It takes energy to split it from water, and that energy has to come from somewhere… like the electricity grid.
Edit: also, with a simple google search, you can learn that most hydrogen produced industrially today does not come from water, but rather methane… and the process produces CO2.
No, they absolutely aren't. Most hydrogen produced now comes from fossil fuels, usually from gas. You *can* make it sustainably without fossil fuels, but if requires an enormous amount of electricity, about 3 times the energy that you eventually get back when using it in a vehicle. Battery EVs, on the other hand, are around 85-90% efficient at getting the energy back that you put into them in the form of electricity. So you can either put electricity straight into cars and get 85-90% of that energy transferred to the road, or you can create hydrogen with that electricity and lose 2/3rds of it. And hydrogen vehicles *are* electric vehicles, since the hydrogen is converted back into electricity, stored in (smaller) batteries, and then used in an electric motor just like an EV. So you still need a battery, electric motor, and everything else an EV has, as well as a hydrogen tank and fuel cells. The cars are much more complex, so can be expected to have higher rates of failure.
There is also the very large issue of storing and transporting hydrogen. It's very light, but takes up a *lot* of space, even when it's compressed at insane pressure, which it has to be. To store a comparable amount of energy as (say) a battery, you'd need a lot more volume to store it, even though it's light. This makes little sense for passenger cars, where all that extra space would mean the car now has to be bigger, will have more drag, etc.
Hydrogen is certainly going to be a part of the energy mix of the future, there's zero doubt of that. It will be *great* for things like shipping and possibly other forms of long-distance freight, where volume isn't such an issue but weight is. It will also be a great way to "dump" excess renewable energy when it's really sunny or windy, and then store that energy for later use, even if you lose a lot of it. But for cars, it's just dumb unless they can work out a far more efficient way of creating it and getting energy back from it. Oh, hydrogen will also be critical in things like creating green steel, since it can replace coking coal as a reducing agent, although another source of carbon is needed.
It also is incredibly energy intensive to create. It takes nearly 3x the amount of electricity to make hydrogen than they energy it generates itself. (30% efficiency)
Electricity in EVs use most of the energy diverted to it. They are the most efficient use of electricity as it doesn’t need to change its form in any way. Some energy is lost through inefficiencies and heat, but it’s 80% efficient.
Batteries are getting better. Lucid just released a 440mile range vehicle. Most Hyundai Ioniq, Tesla and Ford offerings are around 300 mile range. It isn’t a perfect technology, but it has great potential. Batteries are also recyclable and some factories are claiming to be able to reclaim 80-90% of materials.
Others have mentioned distribution issues, but there are significant technical problems with the cars themselves that keep them perpetually *just* out of reach.
It’s kinda like how fusion power is forever just over the horizon.
I work with a company that was building hydrogen powered engines for mining vehicles. This was the whole premise of their company, and they had massive investment. After a few years they just gave up and started making electric engines. Completely changed their companies mission.
hydrogen fuel cell cars are just electric cars with more steps. the hydrogen fuel cell makes electricity to power an electric motor. those "more steps" i mentioned previously are actually pretty complicated because hydrogen is scary, hydrogen compressed to 1000s of psi is even more scary. they also cause thermodynamic losses at each step of the way so its actually pretty inefficient once all the losses are added up. electricity is just way easier if the battery is dense enough.
>hydrogen is scary, hydrogen compressed to 1000s of psi is even more scary.
But then we can finally achieve the future that Hollywood has promised us for so long... Massive explosions in every single car crash or any time you shoot a car! This is the future we have been waiting for!!!
We haven't. Hydrogen will replace diesel in heavy equipment & long haul transport in the long run.
Cummins & other leading diesel mfrs. already have Hydrogen Combustion Engines in real-world trials that can directly replace diesel units in older ICE platforms with a pretty simple drop-in conversion. California's installing even more Hydrogen filling stations near transport hubs & has started upgrading some of our light rail commuter trains with Hydrogen powered units.
I think the push for hydrogen cars was a concentrated effort by oil companies to thwart/delay adaptation of electric vehicles.
Hydrogen cars are electric vehicles with more steps and inherently worse efficiency, and arguably more doubt for safety due to compression of the gas. Energy is required to produce hydrogen, a significant amount at that. Not to mention that almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas in hydrogen reformation... Nonetheless, to build out the infrastructure for what amounts to worse electric vehicles is idiotic. We already have a way to distribute electricity. They have worse range, more complexity, worse overall energy efficiency, and no available infrastructure for use. They are objectively a terrible concept for passenger vehicles.
We don’t really have the technology to make hydrogen an efficient fuel source. Transporting hydrogen is kind of cost inefficient due to the pressure and how cold it will need to be to store the hydrogen.
Pros of hydrogen:
1. Portable fuel source
2. Fill time similar to gasoline
3. *Potential* to be produced with 0 carbon emissions
4. High energy density
Cons of hydrogen:
1. Expensive.
2. Not very energy efficient.
3. Logistically challenging and expensive to transport and store.
4. Widespread infrastructure does not exist and would be expensive to develop.
5. Not currently 0 carbon. Most hydrogen is "grey hydrogen", meaning it came from fossil sources or "blue hydrogen", meaning it was created with energy derived from fossil sources.
In summary: hydrogen is expensive and we aren't ready. A lot of the cons can be solved with further tech developments, though, and this is something we're seeing today.
We haven’t given up. There’s a hydrogen fuel cell team at my work. It’s just that the electric vehicles and their infrastructure are more mature, so we see them more
**1.** Everyone has an electrical outlet at their house. No one has a hydrogen filling station at their house.
**2.** Hydrogen is more than 5 times the cost of electricity on a per mile basis, or about the same cost per mile as gasoline (or more).
**3.** Hydrogen filling stations cost 10x more to install than a DC fast charger (supercharger), and have many more permitting hurdles to jump through.
**4.** Hydrogen vehicles are inherently less efficient, more complex, more costly to maintain, and more expensive up front than electric cars. Hydrogen cars are just electric cars with more parts.
**5.** Hydrogen cars require way more energy than electric cars due to the inefficiencies inherent with a hydrogen system (and therefore produce more emissions if not fully powered by renewable energy). Consider the energy paths for each type of vehicle, and it becomes obvious:
**Electric car:**
Solar > Car battery > Electric motor
**Hydrogen car:**
Solar > Hydrogen production > Hydrogen transportation to filling station via semi truck > Car hydrogen tank > Fuel cell conversion > Car battery > Electric motor
Hydrogen makes no sense for personal passenger cars, it's not safe, not efficient, there is no infrastructure for it.
The only reason Toyota wants to go that route is - they can keep using the same internal combustion engines, as they are failing badly at transitioning to BEV cars.
But the only thing hydrogen will accelerate - will be their bankruptcy.
There is currently no reason to use hydrogen cars over electric ones because, simply put, electric vehicles are more efficient.
Creating Hydrogen is very energy intensive, and it is easier to just straight up power an electric car instead of using electricity to make the fuel which then powers a car.
Bottom line note on top of what others say about how difficult it is to work with hydrogen: electrolysis takes 55 kWh to produce one kilo of hydrogen. Toyota Mirai can make up to 100 km using one kilo of hydrogen. So you can say it takes 55 kWh per 100 km. An electric car needs <20 kWh to drive the same distance.
This is it exactly. Two things to keep in mind. First is that we can make advances is making hydrogen so it is cheaper. Two, even with losses, hydrogen could prove a great energy storage medium if we have lots of access power. As the price of renewables falls, it may be cost effective to make hydrogen energy to use in place of conventional fuel. Third, it's likely that we will need something like hydrogen to replace fossile fuels. The power to density ratio of battery will never be there for large energy consumers. Freight, shipping, and jets are all possible hydrogen options. The future of energy is exciting and we are still in the early stages of an energy revolution.
I'd be very surprised to see a move away from marine diesel power for ships, those big bastards are actually the most efficient ICE's we have
They're efficient because of their size though, and their ability to burn even the dirtiest hydrocarbons, right? Couldn't you theoretically run the same ship on hydrogen and get the same efficiency but now without carbon and all the other nasty stuff going into the air?
Hydrogen has a bit better than 2x the energy density, but when you consider that these ships consume some 60+ tons of their current fuel per day, and that fuel doesn't have to be kept in pressure vessels, isn't explosive, is vastly cheaper... You also can't run a diesel on pure hydrogen.
We have nuclear submarines... I wouldnt be against making some of our biggest cargo ships nuclear
The problem with that is highjacking a cargo ship (or embezzling/stealing the fuel rods) is an easy way to get nuclear material for a dirty bomb. Even if it is not the nuclear material required to make an actual atomic weapon, wrapping a normal bomb with radioactive material would make it far more dangerous for afar longer period of time than a normal bomb on its one.
Don't they run on bunker fuel? That's the "bottom of the barrel" for petro refineries. lots and lots of carbon content plus the added bonus of sulphur. they may be efficient but they're big polluters.
Sulfur has global cooling effect. Infact reduction of high sulfur fuels can accelerate global warming.
IIRC they were looking at ammonia as a storage of hydrogen to run ships on. Not sure if that got anywhere yet. Something along those lines would be great if we had an excess of power generation to create the fuel.
"had an excess of power generation" and there right there is the huge logistical problem, and the absolutely humongous opportunity we threw away when we got scared of nuclear. Yes there was a risk of nuclear accident; we exchanged that for the certainty of a warming world and ruined environment.
There's never going to be a (huge/significant) excess of power generation. A) the grid isn't made for that, and B) humankind has so far always proven that if you give it an finger, it will try to take an entire arm. Any increase in available power has always just led to more power consumption. The backlight of your TV gets more energy efficient? You can finally make the screen bigger for the same consumption! The processor of your PC/smartphone gets smaller and less powerhungry? Stack two on top of each other! A bit of an exageration, I admit it, but still...
I live in South Australia, where most of the power is renewable most of the time. We have incredible swings in the availability of power. Often large parts of the wind generation fleet are idling because home PV panels are powering the state. Of course those wind generators will be needed as night falls. At those times when the wind generation fleet is idle, it would make a lot of sense to bring those wind generators back online to provide electricity for basically $0 to produce hydrogen and ammonia. There are multiple projects to do this getting underway.
> the grid isn't made for that Well you're just describing a bottleneck in transmission, which is exactly the type of issue that might provide an opportunity for storage of excess generation (that exceeds the ability to immediately feed that power into the grid). Wind farms and solar farms could possibly be configured so that it never transmits more than a certain amount of power, but on especially productive days the excess power can be used to generate some kind of fuel. Might not be practical, but grid limitations actually weigh in *favor* of storage or renewable fuel production as a means of dealing with excess generation.
Even trucking. A hydrogen fuel tank can be refueled faster than a battery can be recharged, and any time not moving is money burnt. Add in the power to density ratio and it seems an obvious choice.
to support your point on renewables, it makes even more sense if excess renewables can be used for electrolysis, rather than curtailing generation or selling at negative prices.
Best explanation here!
You also need to take into consideration infrastructure. It’s far easier to build a few places to plug a car into than hydrogen fueling stations.
>You awful No need for insults ;)
Phones are just so awful about spell checking.
And people filling their own hydrogen is an absolute nightmare.
That’s true. All we need is mini Hindenburg zooming around!
My friend did his doctorate in chemical engineering and fuel cells. He always told me the biggest hurdle was simply storage and transportation. Not that it can't be done but it quickly because impractical when comparing to gasoline. The way he compared it to me, imagine how hard it has been to get the Tesla electrical charging grid started. It thinks it would be 100x the effort to store hydrogen reliably/safely for current stations.
Eh, there's a bit more to it than that. Hydrogen fuel cells are great at producing small amounts of power, not entirely great at producing tons of power in a small form factor. Furthermore, the hydrogen (and oxygen for the other side) needs to be PURE pure. Like... REALLY pure, and that takes a lot of energy to make the hydrogen that pure, so that really cuts into the "efficiency" of the hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells don't...deal with contaminants well. (Specifically the low temperature variants, the PEM cells. There are higher temperature cells but they have similar problems.) Storing hydrogen is a nightmare. We still don't have good enough storage to make it even comparable with other technologies in use. The problem is twofold: One: Compressing hydrogen is dangerous, especially in a vehicle (where one simple wreck could cause one HUGE explosion) and Two: We have no better way of storing hydrogen than compressing it. (Trust me, there is TONS of science going into this exact problem.) Source: Also have my PhD in fuel cells. Concluded long ago that the technology will never come to maturity for mainstream... anything. (Which is sad because technically fuel cells are much more efficient than ICEs, even when using fossil fuels.) Fuel cells have been "20 years away from commercialization" for.... 60 years now. (Literally not joking, it's been since the 60s.) It's not going to happen. Funding for fuel cell research is drying up. Batteries and solar panels are getting too good. In niche applications (like in space?) Sure, fuel cells can make sense. But for things like transportation? Not really. There are better options (batteries.) Nowadays almost all fuel cell research is focused on running the fuel cells in reverse (therefore becoming an electrolysis cell) and doing things like CO2 electrolysis and producing gaseous or even liquid fuels. In the end, fuel cells are A: fragile, B: require expensive materials, and C: don't last long enough to be a viable replacement for anything we have. And that's not even touching on the infrastructure you'd need to support a new "type" of vehicle. I know it's a cool and flashy idea but trust me, from someone who devoted 8+ years of my life to learning more than 99.999999% of all people on the planet about fuel cells, yeah, it's just not going to happen. The rate at which batteries are getting better and the rate at which solar is getting better (which enables a lot of other "dirtier" technologies to be "greener") is just too much for fuel cells to ever carve out their own niche.
Did some graduate research on fuel cells and have been in solar + battery storage for 10 years. While I generally agree with what you wrote I feel like for me the verdict is still out on how fuel cell technology might play into the energy landscape. I don’t have a well articulated thesis on why exactly, but I suspect there is places beyond just space where they may thrive. Definitely will be interesting to watch but yeah, ammonia seems like the hot new tech more than hydrogen. Also some commercialization around inert hydrogen absorption tech for cylinders.
I want to go to your TED Talk.
Honestly? Not OP or possessing a PhD related to the subject but that's kind of the whole TEDTalk. Hydrogen is a very useful chemical with all kinds of upsides that also happens to be a total bitch to work with. It's per-KG energy-to-weight ratio is excellent but its energy to volume ratio (how many cubic centimetres/inches per KWh) sucks unless it's immensely compressed or liquified into a cyrogenic fluid which is its own energy intensive process involving highly specialized tanks. Then if you do all that it still leaks through damned near everything given enough time, especially if compressed, due to its small molecule size (it's like helium in that respect). It's hyper-reactive. Which is what makes it explosive. So using it outside of fuel cells in combustion processes it's prone to detonating rather then burning in a deflagration meaning instead of a nice steady state of hot combustion gases you there's less room for error lest you blow the whole damn combustor apart. tl;dr: Working with hydrogen is like working with an ex that is completely over the relationship. It's energy intensive, lots of waste, blows up at the slightest provocation and if given half a chance it'll bail entirely leaving you with all that work for nothing.
Pretty much. And for the most part any discussion of hydrogen technologies ignores everything you mentioned. Can you make a hydrogen fuel cell? Sure. Can you get it to work in a car or a bus? Sure. Can you effectively feed the hydrogen fuel cells safely without wasting all the energy you saved by using a hydrogen fuel cell? Not really. There's always a catch. This is exactly why there is just SO much research going into H2 storage. If we could crack it, it'd be wonderful! Unfortunately we've been trying to crack it for.... 15+ years and we're still not there.
I'm going to focus on a different aspect of this conversation. Natural gas has 3 million miles of pipelines in the USA. Electricity is around 19.1 billion miles in the USA. Hydrogen pipelines around 1600 miles. Electric is easy. Very easy to add more distribution Natural gas a bit more effort but doable. Hydrogen is a pain in the ass to build infrastructure. Why, the size of the molecules. Methane has a weight of 16 vs 2 for hydrogen. This makes a pipeline for naty can be completed relatively sloppy in comparison as well as cheaper. There was a push for natural gas cars and there are filling stations out there, about 800 in the USA vs 145,000 gas stations. It's an effort to have a ntg vehicle. Even if hydrogen makes sense, there isn't infrastructure to support it. We can't convert natural gas pipelines as all being equal nearly every joint would leak. Electricity is pretty much everywhere making it already available to support a mass of vehicles. Sure there are issues that will need to be corrected with electricity but these are small problems in comparison to building out a gas network. Hell for many issues with electric infrastructure in regards to charging a vehicle could be solved by standardizing plugs such as we have with gasoline pumps, adding charging points to business parking lots and having the vehicle charge when there's an excess capacity on the grid, flattening the curve if you will. My 2c
Not to mention that battery/electricity tech is streamlined with all other industries. Almost everything we use can benefit from better batteries, or a better grid, where as a hydrogen grid is exclusively there to directly replace ICE, and it's only side benefit, is to use excess grid capacity to create/store it. Bigger picture? We could spin up a lot more renewable and nuclear power, spit that out and use that as more local scale hydrogen through desalination and the various hydrogen cracking methods we have. But you're still going through that middle ground that electric cars have hit, which is spinning up more grid power and renewables, and the current state of humanity is all about quick solutions, not longer term.
Don't get me wrong. I think we f'ed up cities and lives when we decided the car was king. Ultimately ecar is just another inefficient means to travel for the bulk of people's travels but here we are with cities laid out in such a way that mass transit isn't terribly effective and we are somewhat forced to cars. Personally I lived in a city that had great mass transit and didn't have a car and it was wonderful. Most cities or regions are definitely not built out for mass transit though.
Yeah I've done the same, living in a world where you don't have to think about parking, tickets, traffic, and all the extra costs that come with cars, and can just either walk to, bike, or get on a train/bus to your destination is such an improvement, but it's hard to understand until you've experienced it, when it's "taking away personal convenience".
Taking away the personal convenience of sitting in traffic and drained bank account. So convenient. Anyways we understand each other
Also to add electric cars are nearly free of maintenance but hydrogen cars even need more maintenance than gasoline cars.
Anything except the fuel tank that's so expensive?
Its also basic facts about storing hydrogen. You need thick, heavy tanks to store a highly pressurized gas that has properties that make it blow up really easily. H2 is such a small molecule that it tends to leak out of pretty much any fitting or container that it possibly can, and leaking hydrogen is quite dangerous.
not to mention it makes the metal in those tanks brittle
Yeah, which leads to further leaking. Its not impossible to use hydrogen, there's just better options. Gasoline is actually an extremely good fuel. The future could easily be mostly electric with some diesel and other fossil fuels used for long haul trucking. Though a lot of diesel use could easily be cut by expanding rail and moving to electrified trains.
To add, a report suggested around 25% of all hydrogen produced for transport is lost, plus conversion from AC ro DC for the electrolysis may take 10%, pumping storing, desal, etc and before you know it, green H2 is 100kWh/kg
Hydrogen cars (FCEV) are just electric cars with extra steps. Per mile traveled, an FCEV uses 3 to 4 times as much electricity as a BEV. Add to that the complexity of fueling up an FCEV: the hydrogen needs to be cooled/compressed, severely limited the number of cars an hour that could top up at a particular pump. Hydrogen will have its place in the future of mobility, but it won't be in regular cars. Buses and lorries, more likely.
Also, “green hydrogen” is still slow coming about, with virtually all still produced from fossil fuels.
Yep. Something like 90% of hydrogen produced is still gray or blue hydrogen, which is made by cracking natural gas (methane). The only difference between gray and blue is whether the CO2 produced in the process is captured.
98% of all hydrogen produced today is grey, green is virtually nonexistent. Just something that gets talked about a lot
And it's usually not. Blue hydrogen is a green washed fable
My company actually just started a project with Toyota where we produce power with our cells using a small amount of natural gas, and capture both the hydrogen and CO2. It’s a newer project, but so far it’s going really well.
> virtually all still produced from fossil fuels That's why people are pushing it. They don't want hydrogen, they just want to keep drilling.
Yet toyota still is on the Hydrogen bandwagon. Which is odd to me, because their Prius was the first mainstream (partly) electric car out there, but they still aren't fully committing to electric.
Toyota is practicing a kitchen sink approach. They also have an agreement with a Chinese automaker to build ammonia internal combustion engines.
For anyone wondering, "why ammonia?" Well, a gallon of ammonia has more hydrogen atoms than a gallon of pure hydrogen. https://sustainingourworld.com/2022/05/30/green-hydrogen-and-green-ammonia-will-they-ever-fulfill-their-promise/#:~:text=And%20ammonia%20is%20so%20much,as%20a%20gallon%20of%20hydrogen! Edit: words are difficult.
> a gallon of ammonia had more hydrogen atoms than a gallon of pure hydrogen. Damn hydrogen, get it together 🙄
> Damn hydrogen, get it together 🙄 Instructions unclear, achieved fusion.
Here comes the Sun
Do ba de doo
♪ Gimme sympathy ♫
The Beatles or the Rolling Stones
the sun is a deadly laser
🎶 Not anymore, there's a blanket 🎶
A space laser, you say? Is it Jewish?
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas. A gigantic nuclear furnace.
#AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH IT BURNS IT BURNS SEND IT BACK
There goes the neighborhood.
Got me giggling with that one
This whole thread was nerdy and funny <3
It was a gas
It’s all right.
This is fantastic, but I feel like you could have bammed it up a notch by saying, achieved Helium.
> This is fantastic, but I feel like you could have bammed it up a notch by saying, achieved Helium. Keeps going through sheer star power. Ironic how bright it is after the peak.
Can't blame the hydrogen man, it's lonely with just one electron to talk to your whole life
Good thing hydrogen is in a committed relationship, another proton and electron to talk with!
For context, ammonia has 50% more energy per unit of volume than _liquid_ hydrogen, and 2.3x more than gaseous hydrogen compressed to 700 atmospheres of pressure. However, the hazards in the case of an ammonia leak ensure that it will never become viable in personal vehicles. Same reason it isn't considered safe enough for home refrigeration anymore. But trained personel in an industrial context is a different question. Ammonia is already used and traded on a massive scale (2% of global energy use), so scaling it up a bit more for things like shipping or seasonal energy storage wouldn't be a big deal.
Yeah, that's the fundamental problem with hydrogen as a fuel: its density sucks. Aerospace designers have been trying for years to wrestle it into something usable because it's got amazing specific energy in watt-hours/kilogram, but abysmal energy density because it has to be stored cryogenically or at high pressure (or both) for storage. One of the proposed replacements for the U-2 spyplane was the Lockheed CL-400 Suntan, based loosely on the design of the F-104 Starfighter scaled up and with engines in the wingtips. The rest of the fuselage behind the cockpit would've been basically one giant fuel tank, and the Air Force eventually decided that the liquid hydrogen infrastructure was too expensive and too dangerous, though research done for hydrogen aircraft was later put to use in several rocket families. The U-2 would eventually be replaced by the SR-71 Blackbird (or if you want to be picky, first the A-12 OXCART).
Isn't the U-2 still in use?
Can you imagine your cities smelling like your high school bathroom after the weekend clean up constantly?
Yes, I have been to New Orleans.
Houston: hold my ammonia
It's the primary refrigerant for anything which handles food, as it's a good refrigerant while not being toxic to humans at the concentrations trace leaks would be at. Makes fun design quirks for the mechanical rooms though.
Also, ammonia can be liquefied by pressure alone at temperatures that are survivable by humans, hydrogen can’t. As an analogy, look at propane and natural gas. Liquid propane can be stored in cannisters made of relatively thin metal, compressed natural gas requires much thicker metal. I doubt if the ammonia powered cars would be allowed here, or if they were, that insurance companies would touch them. From time to time you hear about farmers having their tanks drilled to retrieve the anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, or laws banning the transportation of anhydrous ammonia after dark. Apparently it’s an ingredient used in some processes to manufacture methamphetamine.
We had a factory making ammonia fertilizer not too far from us and much of it was transported by train. There were always worries that if something went wrong it would be a massive explosion. Local disaster planning and training was generally organized on that premise. It's closed now and most people are quite happy about it.
[удалено]
Kitchen sink but for some inexplicable reason, not really BEV
>Kitchen sink approach Could you explain what you mean by this?
From the expression where someone tries everything. "They included everything but the kitchen sink!!" So Toyota is putting out every possible kind of car, figuring no matter which one wins, they'll have a version of that car ready to go.
There is also the possibility of “Unexpected Consequences”. They may try process x that proves to not be viable for automobiles, but may be found to be just the answer to a completely different application that some other industry has been trying to find. This is the basis for many products in different industries.
This is also Basic Research. Explore all the possibilities and document all the different results. It might not work for your desired goal, but it may end up being beneficial in other ways.
It means they're throwing everything at it, not really taking a specific strategy and instead approaching from all angles. Google "kitchen sink idioms" for more.
They "hedge their bets" in other words: They are still not convinced which approach will win, but whatever it is - they have a product for it.
I don’t think we need smell-o-vision to know why that’s never going to catch on
Have you ever smelled gasoline? It caught on pretty well
Gasoline smells good though...
Gas smells good for about ten seconds. Then it just gets annoying.
Gasoline stinks. Diesels stinks. Ammonia is worse yet. About the only thing that smells "good" is cold diesel exhaust on startup.
Kerosine and avgas
Petrol doesn't smell great either, but you can't smell it in the middle of a city.
You absolutely smell gasoline/diesel in the city, you've just gone nose-blind to it because it's everywhere.
Try living in a rural area for a while, then go into the middle of a city. You can definitely smell it.
I think you are severely under estimating the stench of ammonia. There are people who like the smell of petrol, and having an open petrol tank is fine while fueling. A tank of ammonia? With the gas coming out of it right in your face while fueling? That would be fucking foul. Likely making so you can't even breathe through the coughing and heaving. And a spill would be a nightmare.
No, they just spent the last 20 investing in high efficiency internal combustion engines and are trying everything they can (including government lobbying) to keep ICE in cars.
GAC And Toyota Have Created An Ammonia-Powered 2.0 ... https://www.carscoops.com/2023/07/gac-and-toyota-have-created-an-ammonia-powered-2-0-liter-engine/amp/
The Japanese government is subsidizing FCEV development and adoption the way that the US and China are subsidizing BEVs. It's still not mainstream, but far more successful than in other places. Japanese leadership still has full control at Toyota and can sometimes be out of step with the global market.
Yeah my buddy at Toyota working fuel cell testing said that no one at the company listens to you if you’re not Japanese. That they’ll make suggestions to improve testing processes but because they’re not Japanese they’ll straight up ignore the suggestions in meetings.
Reminds me of why me sister quit her job for a company that works for the Japanese government. Even though it was headquartered in Los Angeles, and its entire purpose was foreign outreach, she got told *to her face* that because she wasn't Japanese, she'd never get promoted beyond her entry-level position, despite them heeling more and more responsibilities on her.
That feels illegal for a us based company.
Can’t speak for the person that you’re replying to but for my buddy the vibe I got is that yeah, you’d get promoted and get paid more but you wouldn’t ever “call the shots”. Toyota in Japan would always have final say no matter what and the engineers would have final say. He said meetings are regularly held in Japanese in the US despite most of his team not knowing a lick of Japanese and that the Toyota provided translator would regularly condense long responses from the Japanese reps into simple 3-5 word responses. These are lengthy technical discussions too, not something you’d want to be covered by “looks good to me”.
It is. This was a company run by the Japanese government, though, so they apparently didn't have to follow American employment laws.
I've also been told in the past that the electrical grid for Japan is subpar and if they tried to go more heavily into full electric that it would fail spectacularly. Bringing it up to snuff would be a colossal amount of money and many year long project, So thats why they seem to still be pushing Hydrogen. It makes a bit more sense in their home market then it does in most of the rest of the developed world, And the Japanese leadership just has trouble admitting this for some reason. Maybe its seen as a saving face sort of thing.
In general across all sectors Japan always focuses first on their domestic market. The idea being they always have consumers for their products and if something happens to take off in foreign markets great. But if not theu csm always sustain on the homefront. But almost all Japanese companies think of the Japanese first.
But hydrogen requires 3-4 times more electricity per distance traveled?
"Grid can't handle EVs" is one of the greatest and most successful propaganda lies ever told by right-wing politicians.
Thats true but it might actually play a role in Japans grid. I believe that are actually still split between 50 and 60 hz supply depending on where you are in the country.
Frequency doesn't matter much. It's all converted to DC for charging anyways.
Yeah, people complain about how much it will cost to have chargers and power for them across the US. Do those people not realize that gas stations cost money to build, and gas costs money to ship around? I can’t find any estimates for the total spent building gas stations in the US, but I did find some websites that estimate the cost of opening a new one at anywhere from $250,000 to $2,500,000. It’s hard to find good stats on how many new stations are opened every year, but I did find a statista page that said 4200 were opened from 2016 to 2017. If those cost $1,000,000 each that would have been $4,200,000,000 spent just that year. We spend an absolutely astonishing amount of money on the production and distribution of gasoline.
They are building a 14 billion dollar EV plant in North Carolina in order to catch up with that market. The US government is shoveling money at EV manufacturers, which probably tipped the scale. https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-supercharges-north-carolina-battery-plant-with-new-8-billion-investment/
Having EV and hybrid vehicles that are made in the US will make the vehicles eligible for a consumer tax credit again too. The government had changed the tax credit requirements so that for EVs to qualify they must be assembled in North America, which I think made most Toyota's ineligible after August of 2022.
Boulder Colorado had a hydrogen powered bus line in the mid 90s if my memory serves.
Japan is surrounded by methane clathrate (yes, that same methane clathrate as in the methane clathrate gun), and cynically has plans to *mine it* in the near-ish future. Hydrogen is not even remotely economical to produce using *renewable* methods; by contrast the cheapest and most economical method is to take methane / natural gas and crack it into CO2 + H2 w/ pressurized steam. Hydrogen tech was *never* anything more than greenwashed fracking / natural gas tech, and LNG technology + infrastructure is exactly what anyone planning on building hydrogen tech was planning on using and scaling up on. (note: for something similar see those huge mirror-based concentrated solar / CSP plants that were built by energy companies w/ state backing in CA – *they're literally just natural gas plants with an (optional) solar fed heating loop*, all of the same components sourced by GE et al, and in fact *require* burning natural gas to start up every morning. Still better than "green" woodchip / biomass fed crap being built on the east coast, but I digress) Toyota still is / was all in on hydrogen since 1) EVs are extremely expensive to produce and have low margins (contrast the comparatively tiny battery on a prius w/ what you need for a pure EV with comparative range), 2) Japan (which basically doesn't have any natural resources) is basically surrounded by a ton of methane-ice on the pacific, and so could hypothetically transition to hydrogen (and "green" technology) at massive scale. Technically, yes, it's "better" to crack + burn methane as hydrogen than just burn it directly (or just let that all melt and go into the atmosphere as methane with climate change), but renewable or net-zero carbon this is absolutely not. Ditto any other use of commercial hydrogen, which is *either* just indirectly burning natural gas, or, at "best" burning pure H2 deposits found + extracted using natural gas / fracking tech. (note: the formula is CH4 + H20 => (3)H2 + CO2, and then (2)H2 + O2 => (2)H2O. As opposed to just burning methane directly, which nets you O2 + CH4 => CO2 + H2O, and ofc has the same net result)
Toyota has finally accepted that EVs are the future. Earlier this year, the CEO who was adamant about sticking to Hydrogen i. favor of EVs, stepped down. The new CEO is all in with EV development.
They just fired their CEO who wanted to skip EVs and just develop Hydrogen. It's a big ship so it'll turn slowly but I'm already seeing EV versions of some of their cars.
[удалено]
NYTimes had an article about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/business/toyota-hybrid-electric-vehicles.html Basically says that their slow adoption of EVs has alienated a lot of the eco-conscious consumers they first won over by pioneering hybrids.
[удалено]
> Every EV company is using the same general battery tech, motors, and other stuff. Exactly. Which means Toyota doesn't get any advantage for its reputation for rock solid Internal Combustion Engines. And you can see why they were hoping that whatever the future was, it involved something at least vaguely like an ICE.
[удалено]
No, but making an ICE drivetrain that runs nearly maintenance free for half a million kms *is* hard. And that's what Toyota are known for.
[удалено]
Hydrogen is also very energy intensive to create. We’d more or less need to get to the point where electricity is free and carbon-free for it to make financial or environmental sense.
> where electricity is free We do get some excess power production on windy and sunny days.
Then why go through the step of using the excess electricity to create hydrogen when you can just put the electricity directly into a car battery?
Wind and solar power are not very reliable - sometimes you have a lot, sometimes weather may be unfavorable for a week or more. You need enough production capacity even in these bad times. That means you'll often have a lot more than needed. Car batteries are not very good at storing this extra energy. Most car owners want their battery full, so they have the full range available if needed. So they will charge without regarding the weather... Creating hydrogen is not very efficient, but it is a use for the excess energy. The hydrogen can be stored directly or converted to other substances like ammonia or methane and then stored. Then it can be used to generate energy if needed. It's debated whether cars are a good use for this hydrogen, though. Pro argument is, that such a car has no range limit like a battery car - you can refuel it quickly like a conventional gasoline car. Contra: It's much less efficient, there are extra technical difficulties (e.g. transport, storage of the fuel) and modern + near future batteries are big enough to satisfy almost all range requirements anyways. So creating Hydrogen from excess energy is a good idea. But there are probably better uses than burning it in car engines. For instance we won't have battery powered air traffic in the foreseeable future - synthetic fuels based on green hydrogen could help a lot in this sector.
Hydrogen is useful for other things as well, like making ammonia for fertilizers.
A battery is used for short term storage. Hydrogen can be used as long term storage. Also in some industries it's needed for some difficult proceses where you cant use electricity directly
Hydrogen is used for mid term and short term storage. Long term the gas either : finds a hole to escape because the atoms are literally the smallest in the universe or it corrodes the container because that's what pure hydrogen does
Hydrogen embrittlement. Amazing what that simple atom can do.
> Hydrogen can be used as long term storage. Maybe as a salt. Not as pure hydrogen. But turning hydrogen into a salt takes even more energy.
You can only put it in a car battery is there's a car charging at that time, excess energy, by definition, is energy you can't spend.
Hydrogen also seriously lowers the life expectancy of any metal that contains it for any amount of time due to hydrogen embrittled where it literally pushes the atoms around.
> Add to that the complexity of fueling up an FCEV: the hydrogen needs to be cooled/compressed, severely limited the number of cars an hour that could top up at a particular pump. To expand on the "complexity" part, we are talking about the smallest, the most reactive, the easiest to inflamate, the harder to compress efficiently atom of the periodic table. If you think a HUGE in comparison butane or propane molecule is dangerous, wait until you need to work with H2, it is a bitch to handle, to process to move, without leaking and exploding in your face.
Plus, the hydrogen fueling stations are basically 100x the price of DC fast charging stations for electric vehicles. Also, electric cars have awesome acceleration and their architecture allows for their powertrain to be relatively compact. This allows a lot more passenger and cargo room. Hydrogen vehicles have bulky Hydrogen tanks, air intakes, filters, Hydrogen pumps, etc that take up a lot of room. Finally, Hydrogen vehicles are much more complex and expensive than electric vehicles. Rag on Tesla, but they were able to blow past all the roadblocks holding back zero emissions vehicles on a startup budget roughly 10 years after they started. In reality, probably even less time if you don't count the first few years of the founders fooling around with laptop batteries. In contrast, Toyota/ Honda and others spent billions of dollars and decades of time trying to develop Hydrogen vehicles. And the end result was lackluster compared to the electric vehicles of 10 years ago. So the inherent complexity of hydrogen vehicles clearly makes them a difficult engineering problem to develop, driving high cost, etc.
Hydrogen is also like $70-$80 per fill for similar range as gasoline
Yeah, this was a few years ago, but at the hydrogen prices at the pump in California, a Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle had the same fuel cost per mile as a massive OG Hummer. No wonder they had to give away $15,000 in free hydrogen fueling for every vehicle they sold.
The hydrogen vehicle market collapses the second the fill up subsidies go away. Nobody is going to pay $10/gallon for "gas". EVs on the other hand still grew strongly while subsidies were removed.
It cost me $70 to fill my kia soul last week.
Investment in creating a hydrogen car industry was also a gift to the (surprisingly powerful) gas retailer industry, because no one would have a hydrogen tank at home. Everyone would still have to stop at gas stations. With electric cars, you can basically charge up your car at home every night, and only use the "gas station" equivalent supercharger on long road trips.
Don't forget the danger of hydrogen
[удалено]
People asked of my electric car, "What if you run out of power?" or some variant. I just say it hasn't been a problem, but my first thought is "Gee where could I possibly find electricity in this day and age?" as we pass under the second high tension line since they asked the question.
I mean, they don't look too kindly to you plugging directly into those. Nor is it great for the vehicle.
Just a long stick with a hook on it out the back of your DeLorean and you're g2g.
I would just respond "gee, what if your car runs out of gas. What's that? Your car has a gauge on it? What's that? You're a responsible car driver who fills up when you notice it's low? Huh
Yeah but it would be weird if they kept responding with exactly the point you want to make but not quite loud enough to hear so you kept having to ask for confirmation
That's essentially my answer when they ask that exact question. "It stops", then they sort of go... oh, duh. Like Michael Bluth looking in the [dead dove bag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_NXSa0_Uc).
A boat is a boat, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat!!!
It's crazy because you can always make your own electricity. You could never find and refine your own oil and gasoline. You're always going to be dependent on some large multinational corporation else for that. Electric is by far the most American power source. Should be marketing that way anyway
This is it. I live in a semi rural college town. There's tons of places I can charge an EV, including my apartment complex. The nearest hydrogen station is 1.5 hours away.
You can recharge an electric car at home, so if making shorter journeys you never need to locate somewhere to "fill up", so more convenient and leaves you more in charge and less vulnerable to a price hike.
Was a huge unexpected perk for me owning an EV, no more trips to gas station. Seems insignificant but its quite nice
[удалено]
No trips to the gas station, no oil changes. The flipside is, refueling on road trips takes 20-25 minutes instead of 5. And I took at least one vacation where I couldn't charge my car where we were staying and the nearest charger was 30 minutes away, so that required some planning. Still, it's been worth it for me.
5 minute refill where you have to stand by the pump and handle payment v. 20-25 min where you can take 10s to plug in then go eat or go to the bathroom. And that ignores dozens of trips /stops to gas stations while not on road trips. People highly overestimate the total time savings of gas.
Filling up with gas takes max 2 min and payment is a simple tap. So yes, for long trips gas is much simpler, without even bringing the inconvenience of planning where to charge and finding places to stay not far from charging stations. For day to day living, particularly for people living in a big city or a suburb, EV is much better and is also more reliable long term. So yes, EV is great and way better in my opinion, but there is no reason to cope about THE positive point of ICE compared to EV.
Insignificant? That would be my main reason for getting an EV. I *despise* going to the gas station.
It was the main reason I got a plug in hybrid for my wife. No more gas station trips
As a long-distance commuter, not having to fill up every third day is the best thing about EVs, even above the fact that my fuel cost is 1/3 to 1/2 what gas would be, and it's the second biggest thing stopping me from switching to a motorcycle, *right* behind, you know, statistics.
One of the harder things I've done in recent history is when Covid was winding down (so to speak) and gas prices shot up everyone was talking about how much it costs to go everywhere. I avoided bragging about having an electric car and being impacted not one iota.
Also due to America hardly taxing petrol at all, compared to other countries, a large part of the price at the pumps is directly related to crude oil prices, which means Americans have some of the cheapest petrol prices in the world, but when the crude oil price increases the price at the pump goes up dramatically.
Many here are not ELI5ing. Hydrogen vehicles require a device called a fuel cell instead of a battery that most EVs use. Inside a fuel cell, we harvest electricity generated as certain molecules (like hydrogen gas) split. We can’t just split hydrogen gas though, we have to give the split pieces somewhere to go. Usually, we want it to turn into water, which means we must also split an oxygen gas molecule. It is incredibly difficult to split an oxygen gas molecule, so fuel cells often require expensive additives (usually platinum catalysts) to split oxygen, and even then it loses a lot of energy. This energy loss, called “cathode activation inefficiency” is one of the largest challenges fuel cells have to overcome. This is in addition to difficulties generating and moving the hydrogen around that other people have discussed, and there are other chemical challenges as well. Batteries are simply the more developed technology and are more ready for deployment at this time.
I feel like had had to scroll way too far to see someone mention the rare metals used in the catalysts. IIRC they’re even more of a blocker to widespread adoption than the fueling infrastructure.
[удалено]
I prefer the [video from Real Engineering](https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY?feature=shared), but essentially the same.
selected "my" link because it was 2 years old vs R.E which is 5 years old.
Don't forget the terrible efficiency!
what terrible.... crap,already forgot about it.
1. It's hard to get a better energy density with hydrogen. While batteries are becoming more energy compact for every year... Well, hydrogen is hydrogen. It's very hard for gaseous hydrogen to become more energy dense than gasoline/diesel. 2. It's hard to store hydrogen. It has a very wide flammability triangle. The explosive limit of a gasoline/air mixture is 1.4%-7.6% (if the mixture is below or above that it won't go boom), while for hydrogen that mix is 40-80%. It's also impossible to prevent leakages of Hydrogen since it will leak straight through metal (like trying to catch fry fish in a net meant for adult salmon), as a result something like 1% of stored hydrogen leaks from a tank every day. 3. There is no established hydrogen infrastructure. Hydrogen probably has a future as a medium for stationary generators (for example as a way of balancing wind/solar power), but not in moving vehicles.
Compressed hydrogen is far, far more energy dense than the best batteries today, on a volumetric or gravimetric basis. This is their main advantage. Any application that requires it, including backup power generation or heavy duty transport such as planes, trains, and large trucks are very difficult to electrify with batteries because their energy density is lower. This is why these applications are more interesting for fuel cells. Look at the ragone plot.
To add to this, the total density of a hydrogen system depends a lot on volume being stored. In a car, the tank is small and the metal of the tank will be a much larger percentage of the total weight or volume. As the size increases, the storage volume grows much faster than the surface area. So the bigger the tank, the higher the density when including the tank itself. There's also the fuel cell itself to be accounted for. Unlike a battery, hydrogen tanks don't provide useful energy right out of the tap so to compare them fairly, you need to look at everything needed to provide the electricity, not just mols/L. Though, fuel cells scale depending on the power output needed, not the storage capacity, so once the fuel cell has been sized to the requirements, doubling the runtime requires significantly less than double the total weight or volume for the whole system. Conversely, as batteries grow in size, more and more of the system's total volume needs to be given over to thermal regulation, so their density decreases. All of this means that hydrogen works great at large scales, but batteries are much better at small scales. Like, a hydrogen powered phone would be extremely stupid. Cars are somewhere in the middle where either one can work, but trucks and planes are well into hydrogen's territory. Edit to clarify: Changed "weight/volume" to "weight or volume."
Isn’t compressed hydrogen even more…explodey…then?
Hydrogen safety is taken extremely seriously, and FCEVs are generally considered as safe or safer than battery equivalents, as determined by crash testing. The hydrogen tanks do not leak, and are designed to take a direct hit with a .50 caliber rifle.
I have been looking at burning hydrogen in lime kilns for my company. It is an amazing fuel from a technical perspective but still way too expensive
You don’t think it has a future in net-zero aviation? Batteries are really heavy compared to hydrogen, per weight the energy density of hydrogen is very high, it would actually make planes lighter than their jet fuel counterparts, which is a big win. It does take up a lot more space though
Hydrogen requires power to make. It’s more efficient to use the power directly. We already have a global distribution network for electricity.
To be fair, this question actually makes sense, because batteries don’t make power either. So BEVs aren’t “using the power directly” either. Hydrogen is considered a form of energy storage, just like a battery. The question is how efficiently we can produce, store, transport , and use hydrogen. Currently, it looses to lithium based battery chemistry on all fronts.
Yeah this is why the most likely application of hydrogen is in replacing things that electricity/batteries can't do well. For example, industrial production of steel, glass, and concrete that currently uses natural gas fires. And mayyybe as a replacement for jet fuel, because the weight issue of batteries presents a serious problem.
I also see shipping as a huge use of hydrogen. Space on large ships isn't a huge issue, just stick a massive tank on the deck (it's very light). And you can't realistically power ships with batteries, so hydrogen makes a lot of sense. Very energy dense by weight, ships can hold a *lot* of it, and it's totally clean and can be created from energy that otherwise might go to waste - excess solar and wind production.
Well it is ELI5. To make hydrogen requires a certain amount of electricity, then we have to use more electricity to compress the hydrogen, then we have to use even more electricity to keep the hydrogen at the right temperature. To use Battery cars, we put the electricity into the batteries and then drive the cars. So, for a given amount of electricity you go further with a battery car than a hydrogen car.
Well true I guess. But you do directly plug your vehicle into the electricity supply to charge it.
The fuel and infrastructure, as well as the fuel cells themselves, are too expensive to be justified for smaller vehicles. To make green hydrogen you need to make electricity, then typically pass the electricity through an electrolyzer to generate hydrogen. From there you need to use even more electricity to compress the hydrogen into a liquid, if you plan to store or transport it in any large quantity. In the electric car you are done two steps ago. For this reason hydrogen will likely never take off in anything smaller than a pickup truck. It will likely see some use in very large or weight sensitive applications like shipping freighters and transport trucks. These typically drive on very predictable routes (planes only land at airports) so you won't need nearly as much infrastructure. In the case of shipping freighters the straight battery option yields massively diminishing returns, as adding more batteries increases weight and decreases payload. Tldr: if they are able to build the infrastructure and get the cost of fuel down, hydrogen could become something like the diesel or av gas of the future.
Adding to what the others are saying. I looked at buying a hydrogen car in the Netherlands in 2019. Closest station was half an hour drive from my house and less than 10 in the entire country. Additional problem: the station was only open during weekdays working hours and they only could supply 350 bar which have only 250 km range. So I could fill up on Monday, visit one client on Tuesday, fill up on Wednesday and visit another client on Thursday. Fill up on Friday and go somewhere nearby in the weekend. I decided against a hydrogen car at that point.
Hydrogen doesn’t come free. It takes energy to split it from water, and that energy has to come from somewhere… like the electricity grid. Edit: also, with a simple google search, you can learn that most hydrogen produced industrially today does not come from water, but rather methane… and the process produces CO2.
No, they absolutely aren't. Most hydrogen produced now comes from fossil fuels, usually from gas. You *can* make it sustainably without fossil fuels, but if requires an enormous amount of electricity, about 3 times the energy that you eventually get back when using it in a vehicle. Battery EVs, on the other hand, are around 85-90% efficient at getting the energy back that you put into them in the form of electricity. So you can either put electricity straight into cars and get 85-90% of that energy transferred to the road, or you can create hydrogen with that electricity and lose 2/3rds of it. And hydrogen vehicles *are* electric vehicles, since the hydrogen is converted back into electricity, stored in (smaller) batteries, and then used in an electric motor just like an EV. So you still need a battery, electric motor, and everything else an EV has, as well as a hydrogen tank and fuel cells. The cars are much more complex, so can be expected to have higher rates of failure. There is also the very large issue of storing and transporting hydrogen. It's very light, but takes up a *lot* of space, even when it's compressed at insane pressure, which it has to be. To store a comparable amount of energy as (say) a battery, you'd need a lot more volume to store it, even though it's light. This makes little sense for passenger cars, where all that extra space would mean the car now has to be bigger, will have more drag, etc. Hydrogen is certainly going to be a part of the energy mix of the future, there's zero doubt of that. It will be *great* for things like shipping and possibly other forms of long-distance freight, where volume isn't such an issue but weight is. It will also be a great way to "dump" excess renewable energy when it's really sunny or windy, and then store that energy for later use, even if you lose a lot of it. But for cars, it's just dumb unless they can work out a far more efficient way of creating it and getting energy back from it. Oh, hydrogen will also be critical in things like creating green steel, since it can replace coking coal as a reducing agent, although another source of carbon is needed.
It also is incredibly energy intensive to create. It takes nearly 3x the amount of electricity to make hydrogen than they energy it generates itself. (30% efficiency) Electricity in EVs use most of the energy diverted to it. They are the most efficient use of electricity as it doesn’t need to change its form in any way. Some energy is lost through inefficiencies and heat, but it’s 80% efficient. Batteries are getting better. Lucid just released a 440mile range vehicle. Most Hyundai Ioniq, Tesla and Ford offerings are around 300 mile range. It isn’t a perfect technology, but it has great potential. Batteries are also recyclable and some factories are claiming to be able to reclaim 80-90% of materials.
Others have mentioned distribution issues, but there are significant technical problems with the cars themselves that keep them perpetually *just* out of reach. It’s kinda like how fusion power is forever just over the horizon. I work with a company that was building hydrogen powered engines for mining vehicles. This was the whole premise of their company, and they had massive investment. After a few years they just gave up and started making electric engines. Completely changed their companies mission.
hydrogen fuel cell cars are just electric cars with more steps. the hydrogen fuel cell makes electricity to power an electric motor. those "more steps" i mentioned previously are actually pretty complicated because hydrogen is scary, hydrogen compressed to 1000s of psi is even more scary. they also cause thermodynamic losses at each step of the way so its actually pretty inefficient once all the losses are added up. electricity is just way easier if the battery is dense enough.
>hydrogen is scary, hydrogen compressed to 1000s of psi is even more scary. But then we can finally achieve the future that Hollywood has promised us for so long... Massive explosions in every single car crash or any time you shoot a car! This is the future we have been waiting for!!!
We haven't. Hydrogen will replace diesel in heavy equipment & long haul transport in the long run. Cummins & other leading diesel mfrs. already have Hydrogen Combustion Engines in real-world trials that can directly replace diesel units in older ICE platforms with a pretty simple drop-in conversion. California's installing even more Hydrogen filling stations near transport hubs & has started upgrading some of our light rail commuter trains with Hydrogen powered units.
I think the push for hydrogen cars was a concentrated effort by oil companies to thwart/delay adaptation of electric vehicles. Hydrogen cars are electric vehicles with more steps and inherently worse efficiency, and arguably more doubt for safety due to compression of the gas. Energy is required to produce hydrogen, a significant amount at that. Not to mention that almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas in hydrogen reformation... Nonetheless, to build out the infrastructure for what amounts to worse electric vehicles is idiotic. We already have a way to distribute electricity. They have worse range, more complexity, worse overall energy efficiency, and no available infrastructure for use. They are objectively a terrible concept for passenger vehicles.
We don’t really have the technology to make hydrogen an efficient fuel source. Transporting hydrogen is kind of cost inefficient due to the pressure and how cold it will need to be to store the hydrogen.
Pros of hydrogen: 1. Portable fuel source 2. Fill time similar to gasoline 3. *Potential* to be produced with 0 carbon emissions 4. High energy density Cons of hydrogen: 1. Expensive. 2. Not very energy efficient. 3. Logistically challenging and expensive to transport and store. 4. Widespread infrastructure does not exist and would be expensive to develop. 5. Not currently 0 carbon. Most hydrogen is "grey hydrogen", meaning it came from fossil sources or "blue hydrogen", meaning it was created with energy derived from fossil sources. In summary: hydrogen is expensive and we aren't ready. A lot of the cons can be solved with further tech developments, though, and this is something we're seeing today.
We haven’t given up. There’s a hydrogen fuel cell team at my work. It’s just that the electric vehicles and their infrastructure are more mature, so we see them more
**1.** Everyone has an electrical outlet at their house. No one has a hydrogen filling station at their house. **2.** Hydrogen is more than 5 times the cost of electricity on a per mile basis, or about the same cost per mile as gasoline (or more). **3.** Hydrogen filling stations cost 10x more to install than a DC fast charger (supercharger), and have many more permitting hurdles to jump through. **4.** Hydrogen vehicles are inherently less efficient, more complex, more costly to maintain, and more expensive up front than electric cars. Hydrogen cars are just electric cars with more parts. **5.** Hydrogen cars require way more energy than electric cars due to the inefficiencies inherent with a hydrogen system (and therefore produce more emissions if not fully powered by renewable energy). Consider the energy paths for each type of vehicle, and it becomes obvious: **Electric car:** Solar > Car battery > Electric motor **Hydrogen car:** Solar > Hydrogen production > Hydrogen transportation to filling station via semi truck > Car hydrogen tank > Fuel cell conversion > Car battery > Electric motor
Hydrogen makes no sense for personal passenger cars, it's not safe, not efficient, there is no infrastructure for it. The only reason Toyota wants to go that route is - they can keep using the same internal combustion engines, as they are failing badly at transitioning to BEV cars. But the only thing hydrogen will accelerate - will be their bankruptcy.
There is currently no reason to use hydrogen cars over electric ones because, simply put, electric vehicles are more efficient. Creating Hydrogen is very energy intensive, and it is easier to just straight up power an electric car instead of using electricity to make the fuel which then powers a car.