Everfuel is quite the ironic name…
Hydrogen won’t go anywhere as long as storage is a problem.
And transportation… and production…
And safety.
The reason why the Hindenburg exploded like that was because they coated the fucking thing in what is essentially thermite. They doped those things with aluminum powder mixed with nitrate.
This image, right or wrong, is why hydrogen cars were never going to win. The public gestalt on how they thought of them mimics this photo.
Ironically hydrogen works well as a storage solution for the variability of wind and solar. When you have a large excess of them, you can run electrolyzers to generate green hydrogen. And then when the grid needs some more supply, we can use that hydrogen to make up the gap.
Which is basically the same problem with green transportation: A car is usually lightly used, but every once in a while you drive hundreds of miles. That requires a high capacity energy storage mechanism where “efficiency” is not that big of a concern. But that creates the need for hydrogen cars. At best, you can conceive of a plug-in hybrid car where short trips are battery powered. But then you have redundant infrastructure, and it is simpler to just to move everyone to hydrogen.
I will also say that transport and storage of hydrogen is way better than what people are envisioning here. Full disclosure, I work for a hydrogen energy company, so I am biased, but I also have seen things in this space work well
…but, but, but hydrogen is the future!1!!
Found the Toyota CEO.
Where does all of the anti hydrogen rhetoric come from? Hydrogen has its issues for sure but so does electric. Hydrogen has advantages to electric, namely range and refueling time, which may make it a better choice, at least for certain applications.
What’s so horrible about Toyota investing in it? At least someone is giving it a shot and they actually have a production automobile that uses it.
Here we are going all in on electric with a grid that can’t support it, charging times that are too slow, driving range that’s too low and housing that can’t accommodate it but hydrogen is somehow a crazy idea?
I get the feeling the same people who were anti nuclear are now pushing anti hydrogen without realizing they’re falling right into fossil fuel’s division.
Because there’s no real attempt to roll out hydrogen infrastructure and almost all the attempts we’re seeing to paint hydrogen as the future are actually just anti-EV FUD. Hydrogen is the future! … but it isn’t ready yet, so keep buying gas cars for now.
Same goes for nuclear, at least in my country - the political party that’s now talking up nuclear while in opposition didn’t say a word about nuclear while they were in government. They were trying to fund new coal plants. They’re talking about nuclear to slow down renewables, they don’t actually plan to build new nuclear plants. They want to protect their big donors in the coal industry.
Hydrogen fuel cells probably have a future somewhere, but it isn’t in cars. The filling stations are too expensive and the hydrogen itself is too expensive.
Battery EVs are about to pass the range of fuel cell EVs, you know? They can’t actually hold that much hydrogen. And they only fill faster if the filling station has a long break between vehicles - fill a couple of cars in a row and you’ll be there for 20 minutes.
It comes from brainwashed BEV owners and companies. In reality, it is a huge greenwashing industry designed to distract from the fact that fossil fuel consumption continues. It is only a matter of time before the BEV fad ends and we begin taking real ideas more seriously. Hydrogen will be one of them. So will nuclear in all likelihood.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out that’s for sure. Every time I drive by a rest stop on the highway I imagine what the gas lines would look like if those people were instead lining up to spend 20+ minutes minimum at a charging station.
Even if you put a charger in every parking space it would likely be a problem. Those lots fill up as it is and I can’t even fathom the electrical feeds required for that.
I think the people saying “oh it’s just electricity we already have that” are a bit dilusional. It’s going to require enormous investment into infrastructure and even then it may not be feasible.
I think it’s one of those things that seems great when only a handful of people are doing it but will become a nightmare as more EVs end up on the road.
Its great for those who have a dedicated place to park their car, can charge at home and only commute a short distance back and forth to work but it falls short for many.
It reminds me of those who think “food comes from the grocery store!” And not realize that there is an entire infrastructure behind that. Electricity is the same. It will take trillions of dollars to move all cars to electricity. Realistically, it won’t happen. There are too many pitfalls and challenges in the way. The most likely outcome is that we stop pushing BEVs so hard and move in another direction.
Because Toyota spent something like
1531 years developing a shitty performing, very expensive hydrogen car that they then sold hardly any units of and there are still no filling stations to fill them.If you think battery electric cars are expensive, how about spending $75,000 on basically a Toyota Corolla? Sure you can drive 600 mi on one tank but…
To say that Toyota fucked up is an understatement.
Toyota is one of the largest auto makers in the history of the world. They’re practically their own government, and have more than enough money bankroll a burgeoning technology tree. To say they fucked up by testing a brand new technology and developing it in-house, seemingly on their own until recently (BMW and Mercedes have both joined Toyota in their development process within the last 5 years) is bonkers.
Any new technology or idea generally has a long road to maturity. You wouldn’t say the quest for quantum computing or the unified field theory are complete wastes of time and money when we’re discovering things along the way. Hydrogen may not work out for your consumer vehicle, but it absolutely works better than electric for those trans-oceanic container ships and shooting rockets to the moon.
Unfortunately capitalism will keep killing things that are good for the environment while we spend 7 trillion subsidizing fossil fuels.
Hydrogen really isn’t good for the environment. You have to spend electricity to make it, then storing it is a massive issue just to turn it back into electricity. There’s some advantage to it with very large and heavy vehicles, but not for cars. Batteries make a lot more sense for cars, and you can charge them almost anywhere (theoretically). I can see shipping and maybe trucking moving towards hydrogen at some point, especially since shipping in particular is an extremely convenient location to produce hydrogen.
I wish more people understood this. We aren’t going to find a one size fits all replacement for oil. It’s going to be using all the different renewable sources in different applications where they excel.
It’s because people dont understand that hydrogen is a energy carrier and if we want to produce it in e green way it is more comparable to batteries than petroleum.
Agreed. We’re going to see hydrogen being used in industrial scaled uses in the future more than transportation.
However, I just watched the video a few days ago about the Canadian mining company that is switching all of their mining equipment to battery electric. I thought that was pretty interesting - The mine operator flatly said that hydrogen wasn’t financially viable.
So I’m thinking hydrogen being used for steel manufacturing, chemical manufacturing and other major large scale materials processing.
We’re going to use hydrogen for all things transportation. It’s pretty much the obvious next step since we still need chemical fuels. There is just too much BEV propaganda and peopled totally deluded about how transportation works.
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Haha someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.
So you think 9 trillion couldn’t be spent better than fossil fuel subsidies?
The same will happen to EVs after them libs still all the electricity with their solar panels. /s
This is my main problem with hydrogen cars. I think it’s a very cool concept that might eventually overtake pure electric cars but there’s almost no places to get hydrogen yet.
It isn’t going to overtake electric cars, too inefficient.
But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.
But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.
Specifically density by weight. By volume, which is more important to cars, hydrogen also loses.
Yes also cargo ships and possibly American sized semi trucks. Although semis are right on border of battety vs hydrogen.
“American sized?”
There are semis all over the world…
Yean but aren’t the trucks in america large. I have seen memes making fun american semi compared to smaller loris.
The trucks in Japan and Europe honestly seemed just as large, albeit the can be were shorter. But then there is Canada and Mexico which trucks are identical.
The problem with long distance airliners though is that the turbofan powered engine has such a huge power output that is only possible using a turbine.
It also requires dedicated infrastructure. EVs can have charging stations at basically anywhere with a power hookup (or a genset. A grocery store here puts small VAWTs to charge off of in their parking lots. And every new-ish building has added charging stations to some of their spaces.
Hydrogen cars would need refueling stations with dedicated pressurized gas hookups, tanks, and fill machines. And the tanks and the tankers to keep the tanks full.
Finally the ultimate problem is it’s rather low energy density.
And all that infrastructure is a problem that doesn’t need solving with EVs. An entire industry we don’t need to build/rebuild
I thought hydrogen had the highest energy density, like it’s #1 in that metric.
By mass, sure, but not by volume; and that usually doesn’t take into account the mass of the tanks, and hydrogen is rather difficult to keep from leaking.
In cars we’re more concerned about volume than mass, in which it performs very low- aluminum as a fuel actually leads that (but is … impractical…)
For cars, amonia would be the better choice and can be synthesized at home fairly easily. It’s still fairly low energy, though. About the same as hydrogen
Something else no one has said yet (I think) is that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, so this is in no way a climate solution. It’s been sold as one and it’s bullshit.
While producing hydrogen from natural gas is cheaper, this company claims to produce it with electrolysis
But IMHO at the moment is a waste of energy
Yes but not for long.
As (generally climate denying) people love to point out, wind and solar is erratic power generation. For this reason you need triple capacity Vs requirements.
This means that for a huge amount of time you’ll have excess energy, once we start to be predominantly renewables, battery storage is expensive. One of the solutions is to create hydrogen, also pumped hydrogen, etc.
The ones in Denmark were green hydrogen, made from water electrolysis.
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Fossil fuels are the dominant source of industrial hydrogen.[2] As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification.
That is irrelevant to the topic.
The reason why hydrogen is produced by steam reforming is because natural gas is cheap and is needed to produce ammonia. In Norway where there is plenty of cheap electricity from hydroelectric, there is hydrogen production via electrolysis.
The advantage of hydrogen as fuel is that can be used to decarbonise things like ships, and possibly things like branch rail lines, and planes. Passenger vehicle is probably the least attractive application, but somewhat lower capital investment than a green hydrogen plant on a industrial scale.
However this can only make sense if electricity is cheap i.e. if they are running with waste electricity from renewables.
in theory yes, in practice no
Okay but you have to use electricity to do that and currently you’re generating carbon by producing the electricity.
It’s not a solution.
The same is true of electric vehicles right now
Why do you think it’ll overtake electric cars? The energy efficiency of hydrogen cars is significantly worse, as they introduce some extra steps in pipeline of energy-generation -> movement.
The only major advantage they have is “ICE-like” fuelling, which has a bunch of major caveats attached to it (as in: it’s nowhere near as simple a system as ICE refuelling. Everything from generation, to transport to getting-it-in-the-car is way more complex and thus expensive and error-prone).
Wait getting in the car is more complex?
I dunno, everything I’ve always seen on it made it seem like a hyper-specific solution that’s more suited to a few edge cases that could have their specific infrastructure.
For the average consumer, the recharging of EVs is actually Not A Big Deal™️. It seemed like one at first. Now all it does is ensure I take hourly short breaks which I should have been doing anyways, basically. The only big upside of Hydrogen is the ability to refill very quickly, but you pay with a whole bunch of downsides like inefficient generation, inefficient transportation, secondary infrastructure, energy inefficiency, etc.
You also can’t fill up at home!
Hydrogen also only manages fast refills with a break between vehicles. If you try and fill a lot of cars in a row like gas pumps do, you have to wait much longer while it compresses and cools the hydrogen.
So the number of hydrogen pumps you need to support fuel cell EVs winds up being similar to the number of fast chargers BEVs need, and hydrogen pumps are very expensive.
Those “edge cases” are major industrial processes that drive the modern industrial economy. Like steel making and ammonia production.
They’re still electric cars at their base. They just use a hydrogen reactor in lieu of a battery to power the motors.
I don’t see a future where hydrogen supplants electric cars, unless there’s some revolution in storage technology for it. In that case, progress in battery tech is more likely.
Is there even a possibility of better storage tech for hydrogen? It’s not like batteries where you can use different elements in the battery out of different things. It has to store hydrogen. The processes surrounding that can be made more efficient, but the storage is just a physical limitation, not chemical.
not really. It’s a gas. and a really low density one at that. physics is a bitch
I don’t think there is, but I also gave up on predicting the future a while ago.
Same problem with gas waaaaay back in the day.
True, but “gas” is not a gas in the way that hydrogen is a gas. Hydrogen presents some unique storage and distribution issues.
Another problem to the already mentioned ones (expensive, expensive dedicated infrastructure needed) is the range. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. For example the Toyota Mirai has a range of 500 km (310 miles) and its a pretty big, fuel-efficient car and the fuel storage is as big as the vehicle allows it.
So while you can refuel faster than electric, you need to do it more frequently and its less convenient.
What’s wrong with that range? It’s bigger than my bladder.
Just spitballing here, please pretend I’m some rando on the Internet and not some kind of expert.
On its own, there’s not much wrong with it. It takes a little longer to fill than a normal gas dispenser, but not bad. But you’ll still need to put hydrogen fuel stations everywhere similar to gas stations now.
Hydrogen’s biggest competitor is pure electric. I love my EV in part because I can charge at home. There’s just something really nice about waking up to a full battery every day, and realizing you haven’t been to a gas station in months (I have an ICE as well, but it’s not my daily driver). Having to go to a fueling station every week or so again would feel like a big step backward, especially if we need to create a from-scratch infrastructure for it. We already have power lines pretty much everywhere, and can generate power relatively easily, so much of the hard part is done.
Going back to range: in theory this problem could be alleviated if the range were enough that one had to refuel less often, but going through all that trouble to be in a similar situation to what you’ve had, when a better alternative exists? Nah.
500km is pretty close to the typical range for gas vehicles(500-600 usually).
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Km you numpty, not miles.
Use the context of the km from my first number.
The XLE does 410 miles. Few electric vehicle can touch that and EV ranges decline over time so almost no EV that’s more than a couple years old could match it.
Weird that this hasn’t been on the local news. I see Drivr cars all the time.
Relevant bits:
“According to the Danish Car Importers association, there were 147 fuel-cell cars on Danish roads at the end of last year, with only one sold so far this year — all of which now have no means to refuel.”
“He added: “There is no doubt that hydrogen cars are not an option in the short term and that electric cars will win the vast majority of the passenger car market.”
As a former Betamax owner, even I could see that hydrogen wasn’t going to win this one.
Hydrogen is guaranteed to win this one. Batteries are just another unsustainable greenwashing idea. People are falling prey to BEV propaganda.
Hydrogen is guaranteed to win this one.
I wish I knew if you lived in Denmark or not.
