Comment by b112
1 day ago
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.
H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable. Both are alternatives to BEVs, which are the better approach to electrifying transport. If Toyota had gone all in on BEVs when it began its H2 strategy, it would be selling more EVs than Tesla. Instead it entirely ceded the field to others, first Tesla and BYD.
H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable.
Irrelevant. It seems like everyone who argues against H2 is stuck on "now". Had that been the case with battery powered cars, they'd have never got off of the ground.
Batteries were terrible, wildly expensive, extremely unreliable. It's only been the immense research poured into them, that has brought their costs down.
Meanwhile, the cost of storage on an H2 car is nothing, compared to the immense and exorbitant cost of all those batteries. Batteries which make a car extremely heavy. Batteries which cannot be charged below -20C, and require heaters. Batteries which are incredibly dangerous in car accidents. Batteries which are costly, and damaging to the environment to create, difficult to recycle, and damaging to the environment to recycle.
Compared to battery tech of any type, H2 is a dream from the gods.
Yet because there hasn't been 17 trillion dollars of cash thrown into h2 generation tech, people prattle on about how expensive h2 generation is.
And it doesn't matter where h2 comes from now. It matters where it can and will come from. The goal isn't to make sources of power to generate h2 clean, the goal is to get end-polluters, cars, clean.
If the only goal was "clean", then most electric batteries charging right now, would fail that very goal. After all, there are still coal and gas power plants this very moment, and if we pulled all electric cars off the road, those would close.
No, the goal is to work towards more and more solar power, wind, etc. And in parallel, get cars ready for the day when power they're charged from isn't polluting.
The myopic view of what I deem hyper-environmentalists, is disturbing to me. It is paramount that we don't let short sighted views fog the reality around us.
Anyone arguing 1000lbs of batteries, all environmentally damaging in their construction, recycling cost, and disposal, is superior to h2, is arguing from a pedestal of sandy, earthquake prone, unstable support.
What I don't understand is why we would use H2. It's not like batteries are not getting better all the time. Not just the getting H2 for a good price but the whole system seems so much more complicated than just using a battery. What is it that H2 can do so much better that we would even spend the time and money to develop better solutions? Tell me what is the killer feature?
Because it must be a really killer feature to justify wasting about 50% of the electricity you put in and developing a distribution network and building cars that can handle H2 and even using the H2 for driving instead of steel mills or other places that might need green H2. Not to forget about the hassle of refueling with gasses that is totally different from a normal gas pump where you have to create a high pressure seal and the handle gets to cold to touch.
Also comparing a technology that will be only useful in many years with the battery technology from today is an odd choice, to say the least. Not only is the content of problematic materials constantly shrinking, the number of batteries that need recycling is currently so low that there is very little need for a big industry. But it is very likely that just like with the classic car battery recycling the more recent batteries will definitely be stripped for their precious materials.
You raise dying some good points, but hydrogen is really hard to store. It leaks out of everything. You have to very carefully design three containment vessel in order for it not to go wrong.
But isn't that a counter point? Just putting the electricity directly into a car seems sensible instead of converting it to H2 and then back to electricity. Especially now that wo don't usually have a huge oversupply of green energy. We can think of ways to use the oversupply when it really becomes a problem. But I'd assume then BEV will be so dominant the no one will go through the hassle of supporting H2.
> We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.
And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".
It is entirely feasible. And it is made up to claim that "Well, this second it looks like there's no infra for green h2, so it can never happen! So there!"
If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.
I haven't seen any cost models where green hydrogen is feasible without a lot of super cheap excess electricity. And those situations also boost batteries. Do you have one you can show me? It's not just lack of infrastructure, even if you solved the problem of building everything out green hydrogen is still not worth it under conditions close to the present day.
And I didn't say it could never under any circumstances be feasible.
> If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.
I don't follow your logic here. Nobody went out and built tons of lithium ion batteries for cars until they were actually feasible. We're living in the world where companies wait, and it worked out for electric cars.
2 replies →
say you're Shell
you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")
if transport switches to electric, what's your role?
answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant
but what if hydrogen took off instead?
if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel
but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business
at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas
... and that's exactly what they're trying to do
There's no point. EVs go 50% further on the same amount of energy, are easier to charge and are, of course, cheaper.
EVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic. They are not cheaper long term, for they rely upon thousands of pounds of heavy batteries.
If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.
Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.
Pumping gases is not really fast. That goes for H2 or natural gas. It pumps slowly as to not overwhelm the tank and it needs time to equalize after the pump. Also connecting the nozzle is much more of a hassle because it needs to be a tight seal. Not remotely comparable to pumping gasoline.
Apart from that a modern BEV can charge pretty fast. Just enough time to get a snack and eat it.
> But sure, let's not work on multiple paths.
The article is about a sign of failure of one of the multiple paths that was pursued by Japan and Ca State subsidies that was attempted over the last 20 years.
You can work on multiple paths, but to not measure and adjust defeats the purpose.
> EVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic.
You'll find EVs that will go 700km+ with just one, 15min stop, as they charge at over 350kW in this day and age:
https://ev-database.org/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&rs-pr=10...
You'd want to make that 15min stop at least once on such a trip. Or fly instead.
> It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
Problem is that while batteries only needed scale and improvements in manufacturing processes to become cheaper, there's no such path with hydrogen.
The tank and the fuel cell are inherently expensive. The fueling station costs literally 10x that of a fast charger and in this day and age doesn't even charge faster as while the first customer will be done in less than 15min, the next needs to wait for the system to repressurize and that takes time. Also it goes kaboom if it fails, which is something we know, because it already happened. The fuel itself cannot be cheaper than electricity unless you want to make it from natural gas, in which case you better just use that instead.
> (batteries are terrible, environmentally)
The sheer energy that's wasted by a hydrogen car vs EV over its life cycle is enough to produce and safely dispose of a battery.
And this is what it really boils down to: hydrogen is not energetically efficient, therefore you can't make it cheaper unless you use fossil fuels. We already have fossil fuel cars.
2 replies →
>We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.
EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.
Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.
Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.