Comment by HPsquared
3 days ago
Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains, and aircraft where the energy density is a big plus. Those are where you'd expect to see hydrogen take off first, not passenger cars. Same as how diesel started in trucks - expensive engines but economical when amortized and worth it for heavy usage applications.
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
> Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains
Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).
Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.
And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.
Trucks and busses would be better off with battery swaps at depo like electric forklifts do. More mileage more towing weight for trucks, just stack more batteries. Overweight? Use a diesel.
Trains is an easy one, over head lines.
Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.
With the upcoming MCS charging standard you won't need battery swaps for trucks or busses. Even today you have trucks that can charge with up to 400 kW, which is good enough for charging during mandatory pauses or downtimes.
Reality already caught up with synthetic fuel for buses.
Shenzhen electrified its entire 16,000-vehicle bus fleet in 2017 - that's almost a decade ago. Since then virtually all of China has transitioned to electric, and other countries aren't far behind. Electric buses have completely taken over the market.
And it isn't just rich Western countries playing around either. We're seeing countries like Slovenia and Romania at >90% electric, and even countries like Ecuador and Colombia and targeting 100% electric in 2030 and 2035!
All the hard technical and financial problems have been solved. If your city isn't adopting electric buses yet, it will be solely due to political reasons.
> trucks, buses or trains
Trains no, electrify everywhere is clearly better. Maybe for really old legacy branch lines, batteries.
Trucks should as much as possible move to rail, much better solution.
For the rest, the waste majority of short-haul trucking, should be electric. In Europe, the amount of stopping trucks have to do already can be used to charge.
Only ultra long haul trucking has to stay on traditional fuels, and that a small %. And then you might as well just use conventional fuels.
Some aircraft is the only really good application. But I think not hydrogen, and instead syn-jet fuel.