Everfuel is quite the ironic name…
Hydrogen won’t go anywhere as long as storage is a problem.
And transportation… and production…
And safety.
Gasoline also explodes. Lithium batteries also explode.
Li-ion batteries explode.
LiFePO4 batteries can’t explode without the aid of some C-4. Im so tired of my boi LiFePO4 being lumped in with their explodey cousins.
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I like lifepo4 batteries. You can safely forget about them and then they don’t burn your house down. They last long enough that when you finally do remember and need them for something years later, they’re probably still good.
You ever hear about “jokes”, boy?
Both make lovely sources of power for cars and lawnmowers though 😍 just don’t inhale the exhaust of the former, or the combustion of the latter 😳
This image, right or wrong, is why hydrogen cars were never going to win. The public gestalt on how they thought of them mimics this photo.
The reason why the Hindenburg exploded like that was because they coated the fucking thing in what is essentially thermite. They doped those things with aluminum powder mixed with nitrate.
Ironically hydrogen works well as a storage solution for the variability of wind and solar. When you have a large excess of them, you can run electrolyzers to generate green hydrogen. And then when the grid needs some more supply, we can use that hydrogen to make up the gap.
Which is basically the same problem with green transportation: A car is usually lightly used, but every once in a while you drive hundreds of miles. That requires a high capacity energy storage mechanism where “efficiency” is not that big of a concern. But that creates the need for hydrogen cars. At best, you can conceive of a plug-in hybrid car where short trips are battery powered. But then you have redundant infrastructure, and it is simpler to just to move everyone to hydrogen.
I will also say that transport and storage of hydrogen is way better than what people are envisioning here. Full disclosure, I work for a hydrogen energy company, so I am biased, but I also have seen things in this space work well
This is my main problem with hydrogen cars. I think it’s a very cool concept that might eventually overtake pure electric cars but there’s almost no places to get hydrogen yet.
It isn’t going to overtake electric cars, too inefficient.
But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.
But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.
Specifically density by weight. By volume, which is more important to cars, hydrogen also loses.
Yes also cargo ships and possibly American sized semi trucks. Although semis are right on border of battety vs hydrogen.
“American sized?”
There are semis all over the world…
Yean but aren’t the trucks in america large. I have seen memes making fun american semi compared to smaller loris.
The trucks in Japan and Europe honestly seemed just as large, albeit the can be were shorter. But then there is Canada and Mexico which trucks are identical.
The problem with long distance airliners though is that the turbofan powered engine has such a huge power output that is only possible using a turbine.
It also requires dedicated infrastructure. EVs can have charging stations at basically anywhere with a power hookup (or a genset. A grocery store here puts small VAWTs to charge off of in their parking lots. And every new-ish building has added charging stations to some of their spaces.
Hydrogen cars would need refueling stations with dedicated pressurized gas hookups, tanks, and fill machines. And the tanks and the tankers to keep the tanks full.
Finally the ultimate problem is it’s rather low energy density.
And all that infrastructure is a problem that doesn’t need solving with EVs. An entire industry we don’t need to build/rebuild
I thought hydrogen had the highest energy density, like it’s #1 in that metric.
By mass, sure, but not by volume; and that usually doesn’t take into account the mass of the tanks, and hydrogen is rather difficult to keep from leaking.
In cars we’re more concerned about volume than mass, in which it performs very low- aluminum as a fuel actually leads that (but is … impractical…)
For cars, amonia would be the better choice and can be synthesized at home fairly easily. It’s still fairly low energy, though. About the same as hydrogen
Something else no one has said yet (I think) is that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, so this is in no way a climate solution. It’s been sold as one and it’s bullshit.
While producing hydrogen from natural gas is cheaper, this company claims to produce it with electrolysis
But IMHO at the moment is a waste of energy
Yes but not for long.
As (generally climate denying) people love to point out, wind and solar is erratic power generation. For this reason you need triple capacity Vs requirements.
This means that for a huge amount of time you’ll have excess energy, once we start to be predominantly renewables, battery storage is expensive. One of the solutions is to create hydrogen, also pumped hydrogen, etc.
The ones in Denmark were green hydrogen, made from water electrolysis.
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Fossil fuels are the dominant source of industrial hydrogen.[2] As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification.
That is irrelevant to the topic.
The reason why hydrogen is produced by steam reforming is because natural gas is cheap and is needed to produce ammonia. In Norway where there is plenty of cheap electricity from hydroelectric, there is hydrogen production via electrolysis.
The advantage of hydrogen as fuel is that can be used to decarbonise things like ships, and possibly things like branch rail lines, and planes. Passenger vehicle is probably the least attractive application, but somewhat lower capital investment than a green hydrogen plant on a industrial scale.
However this can only make sense if electricity is cheap i.e. if they are running with waste electricity from renewables.
in theory yes, in practice no
Okay but you have to use electricity to do that and currently you’re generating carbon by producing the electricity.
It’s not a solution.
The same is true of electric vehicles right now
Why do you think it’ll overtake electric cars? The energy efficiency of hydrogen cars is significantly worse, as they introduce some extra steps in pipeline of energy-generation -> movement.
The only major advantage they have is “ICE-like” fuelling, which has a bunch of major caveats attached to it (as in: it’s nowhere near as simple a system as ICE refuelling. Everything from generation, to transport to getting-it-in-the-car is way more complex and thus expensive and error-prone).
Wait getting in the car is more complex?
I hadn’t thought of it before but it’s obvious, hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, it had to be stored under pressure in order to get any significant mass into the volume of a tank. So it’s under pressure in the refueling station and in the car’s tank. How does it get from one to the other without boiling away?
oh there are a few ways. One group is researching turning H2 into a paste. the paste mixes with water and breaks down into water and Ca+ ions. You now have a energy density around liquid hydrogen and it only add some calcium to the exhaust. There is also storing hydrogen in metal disks.
Hydrogen is a gas, under very high pressure but you will never find it in a liquid form unless you cool it down to -250 C or so. It’s not used in liquid form for such applications.
There is though the need to chill the hydrogen to about -20/-40C before delivery to the vehicles due to some anomalous properties of hydrogen respect to ever other gas known to humans.
I dunno, everything I’ve always seen on it made it seem like a hyper-specific solution that’s more suited to a few edge cases that could have their specific infrastructure.
For the average consumer, the recharging of EVs is actually Not A Big Deal™️. It seemed like one at first. Now all it does is ensure I take hourly short breaks which I should have been doing anyways, basically. The only big upside of Hydrogen is the ability to refill very quickly, but you pay with a whole bunch of downsides like inefficient generation, inefficient transportation, secondary infrastructure, energy inefficiency, etc.
You also can’t fill up at home!
Hydrogen also only manages fast refills with a break between vehicles. If you try and fill a lot of cars in a row like gas pumps do, you have to wait much longer while it compresses and cools the hydrogen.
So the number of hydrogen pumps you need to support fuel cell EVs winds up being similar to the number of fast chargers BEVs need, and hydrogen pumps are very expensive.
Those “edge cases” are major industrial processes that drive the modern industrial economy. Like steel making and ammonia production.
They’re still electric cars at their base. They just use a hydrogen reactor in lieu of a battery to power the motors.
I don’t see a future where hydrogen supplants electric cars, unless there’s some revolution in storage technology for it. In that case, progress in battery tech is more likely.
Is there even a possibility of better storage tech for hydrogen? It’s not like batteries where you can use different elements in the battery out of different things. It has to store hydrogen. The processes surrounding that can be made more efficient, but the storage is just a physical limitation, not chemical.
not really. It’s a gas. and a really low density one at that. physics is a removed
I don’t think there is, but I also gave up on predicting the future a while ago.
Same problem with gas waaaaay back in the day.
True, but “gas” is not a gas in the way that hydrogen is a gas. Hydrogen presents some unique storage and distribution issues.
The same will happen to EVs after them libs still all the electricity with their solar panels. /s
Did you mean “steal”?
Shhhh, that’s exactly how the accent sounds!
Weird that this hasn’t been on the local news. I see Drivr cars all the time.
Relevant bits:
“According to the Danish Car Importers association, there were 147 fuel-cell cars on Danish roads at the end of last year, with only one sold so far this year — all of which now have no means to refuel.”
“He added: “There is no doubt that hydrogen cars are not an option in the short term and that electric cars will win the vast majority of the passenger car market.”
As a former Betamax owner, even I could see that hydrogen wasn’t going to win this one.
Hydrogen is guaranteed to win this one. Batteries are just another unsustainable greenwashing idea. People are falling prey to BEV propaganda.
Hydrogen is guaranteed to win this one.
I wish I knew if you lived in Denmark or not.
