view the rest of the comments
politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
The raw material waste/cost/emissions to produce those batteries isn't great though. There's not really much that hydrogen can't do better if the infrastructure was in place and the storage/safety stuff is worked out.
Hydrogen for cars is not.. let’s just say it’s not great.
Granted: the cars drive very well (try it if you have the chance) and the fuel cells give them a serious range. However, distribution of fuel similar to regular gas is hard. Storage is dangerous, and pipelines continuously leak (H2 molecules are very small). Hydrogen gas cannot be mixed with stinky stuff that will warn you if the gas is leaking. It is much harder to keep under pressure than oil or regular natural gas. And last but not least: it is very inefficient to generate, the electricity used to generate it from (sea)water is significant and could have been used to charge batteries directly (note that it’s currently mostly distilled from natural gas, about 90% iirc). Mind you: I know it’s useful, just not for cars.
It is fundamentally less efficient to run electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen, and then reverse the process again in a fuel cell to produce electricity to turn a motor, vs taking the electricity used for that electrolysis and storing it in a battery that is then taken back out to turn a motor. Granted, modern lithium battery chemistry isn't the cleanest thing to extract and use, but it's also not the only possible battery chemistry, just the one currently most used for vehicle batteries. It also doesn't allow for certain benefits to BEV like home charging (I mean technically one could run a hydrogen line to one's house, but that doesn't seem likely). The only scenario I can think of for hydrogen cars taking off is if the needed infrastructure was built out for something else and so was readily available. I could maybe see that if hydrogen ends up getting used as the solution for decarbonized aviation fuel, but my understanding was that it (along with basically every other proposed tech for that admittedly) had some pretty serious cost drawbacks and so there's no garuntee of it getting built out for even that application.