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this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it's clear the infrastructure isn't there right now, isn't hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev's? The biggest problem with EV's being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn't hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
Hydrogen is incredibly inefficient compared to using electricity directly. You have to first use the electricity to make the hydrogen, this is very inefficient in itself. then you have to "burn" it to drive the vehicle, which wastes most of the energy just like ICE vehicle. So you need several times the initial energy generation to drive a hydrogen vehicle the same distance compared to using electricity directly.
Of course the batteries is then the issue when it comes to EVs, so they're not a magic bullet. But I wouldn't say hydrogen is the obvious better choice either since it is so wasteful with the energy.
In a conference that in attended, they talked about usbhavimg to look at energy sources like a flow of energy and not as limited sources.
Currently, wind turbines are imtemtionally stopped, when there is so much wind that the generated electricity becomes too cheap to sell!
Instead, you could run them and use the electricity to convert the energy into hydrogen. Yes some energy is lost but it would be lost anyway as wind
With wind, sun, wave energy, we can look at energy in different ways that we usually do with fuel and coal. It's there and it just keeps coming.
Yes but the overhead we have is nothing compared to the energy needed to make everything hydrogen powered. we would need an absolute absurd amount of overhead to generate all the hydrogen from overhead alone.
It's kind of dumb to intentionally waste 75-80% of the total electric energy initially generated to power hydrogen vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea, it should absolutely be done ASAP...but it's not a solution to hydrogen powered vehicles.
A factory which only runs some of the time will be really expensive. From what I've seen it's way more cost effective to rely on batteries for surplus electricity.
So far grid scale battery storage only scales to stabilizing the grid. It’s better than anything else at that, but it’s not cost effective to for example power a town overnight until solar is back
Oh, that's a good reason, I didn't know that.
Agreed, but 2 important things in my eyes.
1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it's transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications.
2 - total life cycle cost. There is an incredible amount of emissions embodied in evs. Haven't seen a comprehensive analysis of a h2 vehicle but I would imagine a few hundred kilos of missing lithium is a good thing.
Creating hydrogen is incredibly inefficient if you look at all the steps involved. It will be significantly more inefficient if you don't create hydrogen 24/7. Meaning, it'll cost significantly more to rely on a surplus of electricity. Meaning, it is way more expensive per mile or km driven.
The tank in an hydrogen car is only good for 8 to 10 years. You're replacing one bit that might fail with loads of other bits that might fail.
I think people aren't understanding how inefficient hydrogen is. Especially with the suggestion that hydrogen somehow is better than EVs, despite hydrogen cars often still having all the EV tech in a car.
But the hydrogen also has to be transported, which produces CO2, you need containers for that that also produce CO2 when getting manufactured. I'm not saying it's more than with a battery but it could be. We'd need actual numbers to really know tho.
I've seen plans for hydrogen fuel stations to create the hydrogen there on site.
Grid storage is a genuine problem that needs solving, but there's no particular reason to believe hydrogen is going to be the technology to fill that niche. There are much simpler and more efficient competitors, not least of which being pumped hydroelectricity, but also including exotic technologies like molten salt thermal plants or compressed air mineshafts. And batteries, for that matter; once portability stops being a concern, other battery chemistries start to be an option which don't include lithium at all, like sodium-sulfur.
And even if hydrogen electrolysis does make sense as a grid storage medium, there's no particular reason to think it's a good idea to package up this hydrogen, transport it, and stick it in vehicles to convert into electricity through their own mini power plants. The alternative, where hydrogen is simply stored and converted back into grid electricity on site to meet demand leveling requirements seems far more likely.
You don't burn hydrogen . But your point still stands.
https://www.ineos.com/inch-magazine/articles/issue-16/how-hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles-work/#:~:text=But%2C%20unlike%20an%20engine%2C%20a,that%20can%20drive%20a%20vehicle.
Which is why i put it in quotation marks. I couldn't remember the name of the reaction, so that was my go-to replacement.
Hydrogen cannot be greener than an EV, because it's just an EV with more steps. It's energy intensive to turn electricity + water to hydrogen, transport it, pump it, then convert it back to electricity.
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you'd have to break laws of physics.
E: ok people. You live in your little fantasy world where thermodynamics aren't a thing.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
Yes.
I didn't. Those are very small. Compared to the losses of a HFCEV or even worse, a combustion hydrogen car.
There are laws of thermodynamics and there are laws of kinetics.
Fuels have much more power density than batteries. You can't deliver power as fast with a battery compared to a fuel. It doesn't matter if thermodynamically one is more efficient or greener than the other. You would be crazy to suggest moving an airbus with a battery, that's physically impossible.
I'm a researcher in both fields (batteries and hydrogen)
Sure, but I'm not talking about jets, which yeah, do need a far greater energy density than batteries can currently provide.
Honestly, the article answers its own question and acts oblivious to it, but I've been saying it for years.
It's for boats. The easiest and most convenient place to store hydrogen is near a port, which conveniently also generally has the infrastructure for natural gas, used to make hydrogen.
Honda and Toyota do make EVs, as does Hyundai, as well as patents for batteries, which would put them near the top of the market. Clearly, they're also betting on BEV cars. But they all also have a marine sector, and Toyota just partnered with a company to test out fuel cells for marine applications. The cars might as well have been a useful test bed which had its costs subsidized by consumers. Seems pretty clear what their angle is.
Or maybe they're out of their mind. Who knows?
In H2 car the H2 is just a really inefficient battery. Sure it can hold a lot, but it loses a lot. You lose it in energy conversions (to H2 and from H2) and you have to transport the stuff, and it leaks (smallest element) and it has to be cooled and compressed.
Battery tech is getting all the time, and really, you only need 300 mile range (many have that now) as humans have to stop for a rest/wee. With a charge network like or petrol network, you can charge then.
Edit: English
Hydrogen is good when it's green hydrogen- made via electrolysis. Blue hydrogen is produced by gas companies, so it isn't clean, unfortunately. There are some other snags, such as designing a really hard gas tank that cannot be punctured, and hydrogen storage is a bit challenging. It's less dense than gasoline, particularly at normal temps. So it has to be cooled down, which takes additional power and delivery complications, and it's still less dense even as a liquid, so you don't get as far of a range vs gasoline or jet fuel.
Hydrogen storage as a battery medium for overproducing wind, solar, even solar towers might make sense. I, for one am excited about the idea of hydrogen blimps coming back for lifting heavy loads to remote places, which Canada is toying with right now.
Hydrogen might make sense for something like container ships, but short term, I think other efuels will be used for things like planes, buses, trucks, maybe cars. Stuff that is more inert or just less expensive to design across a supply chain. It also has potential offworld uses in the further future. It definitely has its uses, it just seems a bit difficult in personal vehicles.
For personal vehicles, no, that is not at all clear and many of us would say clearly the opposite.
However there are more heavy duty applications where batteries are unlikely to ever scale. I don’t think we have a clear winner yet so hydrogen is likely still in the running for things like aviation, shipping, construction and farm equipment, industry, maybe even grid scale energy storage
There's no need for a "winner", why are people so fixated that it has to be one or the other?
All the technologies we have are not exclusive, having more options is always better when it comes to energy.
This "winning" debate has to stop. There's no gas vs diesel vs natural gas winner... There is no hydro, wind, PV winner.... They all can coexist just fine.
There is a place for hydrogen fuel, and there's a place for battery vehicles.
Stop debating this like they are football teams.
Firstly: winner, as in the more appropriate and mature technology
Secondly: while it may appear the technologies are not mutually exclusive, they each depend on a lot of infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense to build put multiple sets of infrastructure for multiple technology vehicles. The reason it may make sense for heavy equipment is you typically have a central hub everything comes back to, so the infrastructure can be much simpler
More appropriate in terms of what? Batteries and renewable fuels could serve two applications. And be more practical in certain locations.
The infrastructure can be location based. Doesn't make sense to have EV in certain locations with poor grid coverage, or renewable fuels in big cities.
We have plenty of technologies with double infrastructure, I mean EV and carbon based fuels are both around, no problem whatsoever, even better on because we don't rely on a single infrastructure. Renewable fuels can use a similar infrastructure to natural gas with a few tweaks. We have fiber optic, cable phone, 4/5G, all serve the "same" purpose but for different applications. There's no "winner" there.
Batteries don't deliver power as fast as fuels, so depending on what you need as a consumer you can decide to go for EV (single passenger small car for cities) or renewable fuels for long range, or high powered trucks for freight and heavy load.