Comment by BadBadJellyBean
16 hours ago
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
And more to the point, if you want to use synthetic fuels, why on earth would you pick hydrogen?
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
I'd assume because it is complicated. Capturing enough carbon, splitting it, generating enough H2, combining it with the carbon to make long enough chains. That all sounds complicated and expensive and probably needs even more surplus green power that we don't have. It also doesn't solve the problem of local pollution when burning carbon based fuels.
Why go for long synthetic chains?
Methane has good energy density, doesn't demand cryogenics or diffuse through steel, burns very cleanly, and can be used in modified gasoline ICEs - without even sacrificing the gasoline fuel capability.
My understanding is most hydrogen fueling stations produce the hydrogen onsite via electrolysis of water.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
Completely wrong.
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Maybe that's what it was - produced onsite via steam extraction from piped in natural gas (which means you could just as easily burn the natural gas in the vehicle).
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
The electrolysis needs power and could be fueled by fossil fuels.
That’s not a thing. Anyone who’s seen hydrogen being split from electrolysis knows it takes a lot lot lot of electricity and is very slow. If two people needed to fill up in the same day it would run the well dry.
If you can do that at a meaningful rate you might as well install ev charging and just not electrolyse when cars are charging
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage.
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
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this is the case while they're in the hype building phase, when people are paying attention
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
Natural gas vehicles make way more sense than hydrogen. But they didn't survive in the (US) market outside specific fleet applications.
Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
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That makes no sense. If the oil companies were pushing H2, every car would be H2 by now.
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
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Your understanding is entirely wrong.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
Okay not driving it around then. But somehow it's worse. You still have to build the special tank and the special pump and also get an electrolysis device that is big enough to create enough hydrogen and also you have to get heaps of power somewhere that could instead be just straight put into a battery in a car. Make it make sense. What's the point? Who is willing to do that?
Don’t forget keeping everything cold enough.
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
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> battery
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
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Isn’t this bad? This means H2O molecules are being destroyed and the water is not returning to the water cycle to be reused. We will literally run out of water if everyone did this.
Water gets split into oxygen and hydrogen using energy. The hydrogen then gets burned to release usable energy, which creates water. At least as far as I remember from chemistry class ages ago.
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I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.
Storage is the bigger problem, specifically very long duration or rarely used storage (to cover Dunkelflauten, for example) for which batteries are poorly suited. Hydrogen (or more generally e-fuels) is one way to do that, but another very attractive one is very low capex thermal storage. Personally, I feel the latter would beat hydrogen: the round trip efficiency is similar or better, the complexity is very low, power-related capex should be lower, and there's no need for possibly locally unavailable geology (salt formations) for hydrogen storage.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
Moving renewable power is easy, we have a grid for that. Infrastructure for movement of electricity is ubiquitous in places that have never seen a hydrogen pump.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.
> It is just so much simpler with electricity.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Maybe if we had smartphones that emitted greenhouse and toxic gases by using a mini ICE engine that were so cheap nobody would buy anything else, we would subsidize the electric ones. We may even ban the gas phones.
We also wouldn't need to if environmental externalities were costed into petroleum prices.
ICE love is cultural, and there's a bunch of FUD from entrenched interests.
> we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.
At that point you're just building a weird battery storage system again though.
> Pretty much every gas station already has [electricity].
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Still seems like a smaller investment to get a bigger cable than H2 infrastructure (Tanks, Pumps, maybe even electrolysis system).
Bigger cable is a laugh.
Bigger cable, upgraded delivery infrastructure to support that cable (think more or stronger poles), transformer upgrades, and finally the charging stations which unlike the home ones aren't just a complicated switch because DC fast charging.
H2 is a stupid fuel, but the idea that high power vehicle charging stations are a cheap or simple upgrade to a gas station is ridiculous.
True, but they already exist.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
H2 can be transported by trucks. Must lay expensive hydro infrastructure to do the same for electricity.
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