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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen almost certainly won't go anywhere, in my opinion.

* The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous.

* Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car.

* Let's not forget that the cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels. Electrolysis is very inefficient.

* Any concern there might exist for the effect on the electrical grid coming battery powered cars multiplies for hydrogen due to the inefficiency.

* You need a large infrastructure to produce and distribute it.

* It's a huge chicken and egg problem -- a hydrogen car needs hydrogen, and there's nowhere convenient right now to get it from.

* In the end, a hydrogen car is ultimately electric. What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station?

IMO the only excitement from hydrogen is for fossil fuel companies, because that's what the vast majority of it is made from, and because it'd be a fairly natural fit into their existing infrastructure.

There may be some niches where hydrogen could be the better solution -- hydrogen trucks might be viable because there you can have well defined routes, and trucks have a weight limit which may not play well with batteries. But for normal cars I don't really see it.

View on HN

While inefficiency is indeed a problem, I feel like a lot of people overlook the one huge pro hydrogen has over batteries, namely charging time. Of course this might not be important for the daily commute, or 99% of the vehicles' use. But for that remaining 1% it _is_ a huge deal. And most people buy cars to fulfill a 100% of their needs, not 99%.

Now I should say, I know basically nothing about battery tech. But unless full charging time can be greatly reduced, by which I mean under 5 or at most 10 minutes, I still feel hydrogen could have the upper hand even if it is more expensive and less efficient.

I don't think the difference between 10 and 15 minutes is enough to cause a huge problem in those 1% of situations. There are a lot of happy EV customers that go on multi-day road trips, just as they would in a gas car, without issue. I'm one of them, and will never go back to a fuel based car.

That extra five minutes on road trips is far far far less than the amount of extra time that has cars take day to day, needing to stop at gas stations rather than get plugged in at the garage. The tradeoff is hugely in EVs favor, IMHO.

> I don't think the difference between 10 and 15 minutes is enough to cause a huge problem

"Charging" with gasoline is like 2 minutes. With electricity AFAIR it is more like 30 minutes (in case of fast charger or longer in case of ordinary one).

The time difference is huge (e.g. if you travel with kids, every minute counts).

E.g. vacation travel in Poland from south to north (very popular during vacation) takes ~8h (depending where you start), during that time I need to tank gas twice, EV would need at least 2-4 times, this would increase travel time by 1-2h.

I recently made a trip through Poland, and, starting with a full tank of gas, I only needed to refuel the car once. But we still made 3 stops on the way, each being longer than 30 minutes. That's plenty of time to recharge an electric car. I think the issue would be that we'd never make it if all of the cars on the road were electric - a petrol pump can service far more cars hour than a tesla super charger.

OK, it depends on how/why you travel.

E.g. I do cross-Poland travel only to get from the mountains to the sea. And I have two small children -> they best travel when they are asleep -> travel during night.

My car has small tank, so I have to tank twice on the ~700km trip, and in the night it takes literally up to 3 minutes to tank and pay for it.

If I would use an EV (which I would like, very much, but they are prohibitively expensive here, I mean they cost 2-3x normal car) I would probably need to tank every 200-300km, so it would make 2-3 stops that last 30 mins (and that is assuming given gas station has EV charging, if not then I would need to borrow power from someone else and do charging for ~8h from a normal wall socket).

And this is considering that I use teslas superchargers, all other last longer than 30 mins. Not to mention if there is a queue to the chargers (fortunately at night it is not likely), if you have bad luck you would need to wait 30mins for the person before you and 30mins for your own charging - that makes it completely unsable for anyone.

I've taken multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Tesla. Charging typically adds ~2 hours to such a trip (14hrs -> 16+ hrs). I'm an "eat in the car and stop only for fuel" road tripper, so a ~30-40 minute stop every ~2-3 hours is far worse than an 3-5min stop every 4-5 hours.

What's especially frustrating is what happens when I arrive at my destination, where I don't have access to charging and the nearest Tesla supercharger is an "urban" charger with 72Kw max. I'll typically pull into that charger between 1 and 2am and spend nearly an hour there to get the car up to 80% so that I have a charge for trips during the week. The last thing I want to be doing then is sitting in an empty parking garage, waiting for my car to charge when I just want to get some sleep in my bed. I'd love to have a quick refueling option.

I know what you mean there. Destination charging is currently the biggest weakness in the EV world, IMO. I'd love for every hotel and tourist destination to have L2 charging.

The most frustrating thing is that my destination is a friend's urban condo. They share a parking garage and valet with a hotel. There are destination chargers, and the valet will charge your car for you. But only if you're a hotel guest; the chargers are not available to condo residents.

IMO, this is why it is important to make billing more common. It doesn't make sense to keep them from the condo users if they could generate revenue from them.

I feel like the risk of freeloaders keeps hotels from installing more of them too.

For passenger vehicle road trips charging time is already into "doesn't matter" territory for a number of models. I have taken a 1000 km+ trip in a BEV that I used to take in gas vehicles. We didn't have to stop more often or stay any longer than we would have with gasoline.

Really think about the time you spend stationary when stopping for fuel on a road trip. It's not just pumping fuel, you also go to the bathroom, get some food, and stretch your legs.

Extremely fast charging a Tesla trick, Hyundai Ionic 5 (starting around 45K before incentives) can charge 10-80% in 18 minutes, which is enough to travel around 330 km. That's roughly 3 hours of driving in most counties.

I could see hydrogen making sense for fleets with local operation that need to be operated nearly 24x7, like the support vehicles at an airport, city busses, and taxis in cities with strong night life. It also makes sense for heavy industry. Doesn't make sense for passenger vehicles; the cost of batteries has crashed too far and the power grid is way too ubiquitous.

It definitely takes longer west of the Mississippi river in the US. Mountains with 80MPH (130 km/h) speed limits mean the range is far shorter than typical freeway diving, which makes the fact that you need to stop more often, and for longer (gas cars have a typical 330 mile range, 1 l.6 longer than that Ionic), really add up.

[edit]

I will soon be diving 1600km. Google suggests the route will take 14h. I expect to make it in 15. Friends with Teslas suggest it would take nearly 20.

Driving at the fastest allowed speed for long duration isn't a good bet with BEV. Usually you'll get shorter trip time by driving at 110km/h and skipping a charge.

It depends on the charge curve for the car. For the fastest charging cars it's better to keep the battery in the bottom half (where it charges faster) and charge more often in very short stints.

> I will soon be diving 1600km. Google suggests the route will take 14h. I expect to make it in 15. Friends with Teslas suggest it would take nearly 20.

Google doesn't account for stops required for toilet breaks, eating and drinking. Of course, you can just not drink, so you don't have to pee. You can eat while driving even though that's isn't a good idea from a safety standpoint. You can skip taking any breaks and get tired, which is also a bad idea from a safety standpoint.

It also depends on the available charging infrastructure, of which I have no clue at your destination.

In my own experience with driving about 1200 km with regular breaks, it took about an hour longer than it did with my diesel. It just took more planning. Most times, a charging stop meant peeing, drinking a coffee and then the car would be finished charging. The biggest issue was that some chargers aren't near a rest stop.

1600 km in 15 hr is borderline irresponsible driving. Depending on speed limits as there simply isn't enough rest time to ensure you are focused on driving.

The EV cannonball record was set this winter in a Porsche Taycan at 44 hrs 26 minutes and that included some charger trouble and much less than ideal temperatures. Google's estimate for that route is 42 hours without any stops of any kind.

Here is a route plan for Lincoln, NB to Las Vegas NV. 1989 km with 17:43 driving and 2:29 charging for just over 20 hours total. That's an extra 400 km covered from your rough estimate and includes going up and over some pretty serious mountains.

https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=71dfd1e1-a134-46c...

> 1600 km in 15 hr is borderline irresponsible driving. Depending on speed limits as there simply isn't enough rest time to ensure you are focused on driving.

2 drivers.

>Extremely fast charging [...] can charge 10-80% in 18 minutes, which is enough to travel around 330 km. That's roughly 3 hours of driving in most counties.

This is not very impressive, and exactly where I see hydrogen have the upper hand. I suppose it's a matter of opinion, but _having_ to stop for 20 minutes every 3 hours isn't ideal at all for me.

Bloody hell, how much non-stop driving are you doing? If you're driving a solid 12 hours a day, that is only three 18-minute breaks, one of which is your lunch break.

>that is only three 18-minute breaks

Those are three _mandatory_ breaks, that add up to almost an hour, in ideal circumstances. To answer your question, not a whole lot, but in that 1% 6 hour drives aren't uncommon at all.

You are the outlier of the outlier. And if you plan it well, EV charge actually faster in the lower 50%.

So if you really want to optimize you can actually do it with shorter 10 min stops. Check out Kyle from inside EV.

And until you can seriously deploy Hydrogen vehicles, it would be a few years down the road. Until then the next generation of battery an charging will be significantly faster already.

Practically speaking most people simply don't drive like that, people need to eat, pie and so on. With an EV you simply stop at a charger do all the things and go back. That usually takes 10ish minutes.

And to be honest, every road trip with at least on other person usually means a break every 3h anyway.

And even more in a day to day application, most people charge over night, so never having to go to a station and having a short break every few hours is vastly preferable to having to constantly go to the hydrogen station.

Of course hydrogen would also be significantly more expensive.

All in all, it simply doesn't make practical sense to optimize everything for this one specific thing.

>You are the outlier of the outlier.

I don't think I am. Camping vacations in Europe are very common. 1500 km in two days really isn't as uncommon as you might think. For clarity, I'm not saying it can't be done with an EV, I'm just saying the relatively many, long, mandatory breaks aren't nearly as convenient as the relatively few short ones that regular cars, and perhaps in the future, hydrogen cars, offer.

And again, taking a quick break to stretch your legs a bit, is not the same as needing to take a 20 minute break in order to be able to continue your journey. This might seem like a small detail but I really don't think it is.

If you're taking a family camping vacation every time you stop the car it's going to be a 15-20 minute minimum stop by the time everyone climbs out, goes to the bathroom, and gets loaded back in. I don't believe you can transport 3 or more people without needing to stop at least once every 3-4 hours.

Here in Canada things are way, way further apart than Europe and car travel to vacation is often many hours or days apart. I have taken a number of EV road trips and I have not had to stop more often or stay longer than I would have in a gas car. Charging speeds and range are only getting better, but they are already well into low/no impact territory.

> I don't believe you can transport 3 or more people without needing to stop at least once every 3-4 hours.

Okay. I can, and do so a few times a year. Also, the 3/4 hours people keep referring to, is that in a fully loaded car pulling a caravan while occasionally driving through mountain ranges with an average speed of 100 km/h?

And for the last time, wanting to take a 20 minute break is different from having to. We often postpone/skip planned breaks in order to stay ahead of rush hour, or to reach the campsite before closing time, just to name two common reasons. Mandatory 20 minute breaks greatly reduce your freedom while traveling. No matter how little of a problem this is for you personally.

Again you just keep adding more and more stuff to defend your concept and it applies to fewer and fewer people.

The waste majority, 99.9something people will never drive with a caravan and most don't go threw the mountains.

You simply need to accept that you are representing an expedition, this has been studded. Most cars only very, very rarely do long travel at all. And when they do they don't do it very often. And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.

You can simply accept that an EV is not for you for the moment because you are apparently a special case. Most people don't stop wanting to pie so they can beat rush hour to a campsite. That is simply not the case for 99.9999% of miles driven.

>Most cars only very, very rarely do long travel at all. And when they do they don't do it very often.

I agree, and this is what I said in my first post. My entire point is that, for most people, a car needs to meet _all_ needs, not 99% of them. Don't get me wrong, EV's are a great step forward, but perhaps hydrogen can solve some problems EV's can not. They might very well introduce more problems than they solve, fair enough. But it seems silly to just brush off possible solutions in favour of an incomplete one. Yet this is what happens every time hydrogen gets mentioned.

>And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.

You are ignoring the optional vs mandatory difference. Whether it's a problem for you or me personally is irrelevant, the fact is it limits your freedom considerably.

If you have children you need to stop more often period. Even most woman that I have traveled with actually want to stop far more often. Sure, with a bunch of guys driving to Italy we might go 3-4 hours non stop but that is as I pointed the exception.

I have traveled threw Europe all my life and the idea that 15-20min stops every few hours are a major deal-breaker is just nonsense. You want to pie, you want to eat, you want to go to the shop and get some drinks.

Simply stopping, plugging in, going to pie, get a drink in the shop and stretching your legs for 5min already adds enough to drive another couple hours.

And even if you are a case, where you really are driving like that, 1-2 times a year where you do journey like that the extra 30min you spend on the journey are really not the end of the world. I honestly can not describe it any other way then a small detail that wouldn't matter to the waste majority of people.

And even if that is still a problem, a few years from now batteries will be better, charging will be even faster and density will be higher. Hydrogen would not be the right answer.

> We didn't have to stop more often or stay any longer than we would have with gasoline.

A serious question from someone who knows little about electric cars, and who still thought it would take anywhere between 30-240 minutes to charge, depending on charger type - can electric cars really now charge faster than the < 180 seconds I'd spend refilling with petrol/diesel?

If so, I think the industry needs to make more noise about this, to make it more know.

I own the 400km range model 3. I can tell you that you’re comparing apples and oranges.

Over the course of the 50 weeks of a year that I don’t take it on long trips I spend 0 seconds waiting for a charge. I plug it in at night and it’s always full in the morning. A typical errand running day for me is 200+ km and I have more than enough range for that.

The one or two times I take it on a road trip I usually time it with pee breaks and filling my self with coffee.

Net/net I spend less time over all waiting to refuel my car.

Yes, of course this depends on me having a place to plug it in at night.

I'm talking about total stop time. Pumping gas is an active task you have to be present for whereas charging isn't.

I roll into a charger and plug in, then immediately head to the bathroom. Grab food if it's a lunch or snack break. Walk around to stretch my legs. By the time I'm ready to go so is the car.

When pumping gas I can't leave the pump unattended, so bathroom time gets added on top of refuel time. With charging the car is adding range no matter what task I happen to be doing while the car is stationary.

The other charge need is daily use. Charging at home is a game changer that absolutely beats gas pumps. It takes me 10 seconds to plug in as I leave the garage. I wake up to a full "tank" every single morning. Daily errands cannot possibly use up my 400 km range, so I never have to think about charge unless I'm on a road trip.

> The other charge need is daily use. Charging at home...

Within reason, this seems like it would be a good tradeoff for many people.

Say you're on a rare long journey and need to stop and charge - minutes-wise how long are we talking about?

Not long. My most common road trip is about 720 km one way and doesn't have a lot of destination charging. I stop 3 times on the way up:

* 5 minutes to get synced up with the distance between chargers (it's a very rural route; on more major routes you have plenty of choice about where to stop)

* 20 minutes

* 15 minutes to make sure I can make it back to the charging network since my destination is super rural.

I have made that same journey to visit family many times in a gas car and we stop in the exact same places for pretty much exactly the same amount of time. The first one is in the town my grandmother lives in, so we'd have stopped to say hello anyway. The 2nd is where we have always stop for a meal. The 3rd stop is where we always take a bathroom break.

https://abetterrouteplanner.com

Select a car and enter a route. It will be a pretty accurate picture of the necessary charging. You can play with things like temperature, arrival and departure charge state, and load.

Because hydrogen has to be pumped at 700 bar there's a delay when the pump buffer has to be recompressed. This will happen after 1 or 2 cars have filled up, the third will have to wait for 20-30 minutes. Not that different from charging an EV...

You aren't wrong, but it still leaves Hydrogen in a weird place in the market.

With gasoline, you have to go weekly for your regularly commute. It can be annoying, but the upside is that you only have to stop for 5 minutes on a long trip!

With EVs, you just charge at home or the office which is really convenient. But the downside, is that those 5 minute stops become 25+ minute stops and you typically have at least 1 more of them. On top of that, the locations aren't as prevalent which increases planning needs.

With Hydrogen, you get the negative of weekly stopping, the negative of fewer locations, and the only benefit is that it can be refilled... almost as well as a gasoline for about the same $$.

So why would I choose hydrogen over either other choice?

The Toyota Mirai consumes about 1kg of hydrogen per 100km. In Germany, the government subsidised price for hydrogen is 9.50€/kg.

That’s expensive as all hell.

With hydrogen you get: fast refuels (if the station has pressurized itself after the last customer), good range, but the cost is redonculous and the distribution is nonexistent in most countries.

There are more Teslas in space than there are publicly available hydrogen refueling stations in Finland :D

By law you have to take 30minute break after 8 hours. And you cannot drive more than 14 hours per day. Iirc Tesla semi can get 400mi from 30 minute. If they can up that figure to 600, then fuel cells range and competitive advantages diminish greatly.

But when you have near autonomous truck that runs closer to 24 hours per day or have a co driver in cab splitting duty then fuel cell will have an edge

Tesla did have quick (90s) battery swap capabilities, but it has been abandoned. I would imagine the logistics of managing the batteries would be a headache considering they degrade with use and represent ~1/3rd of the value of car. My best guess is that it was a precaution in case battery longevity was worse than expected. That, or it was solely a way to get several hundred million in tax credits from California.

If production ever hits a point where it is not battery supply constrained, I could see tesla offering a battery insurance pool system with swapping capabilities, were they pull any pack under ~85% capacity and turn it into a power wall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0-sHtlCZ7M

https://insideevs.com/news/329836/tesla-battery-swap-locatio...

https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-b...

Have you seen a hydrogen pump in real life? While yes, it can be faster than a 20 minute fast charge, it is a significantly more complex process than gasoline - it doesn’t just pour out the end of a hose as a stable liquid.

I actually think a lot of people will prefer a 10-20 min fast charge on a BEV (I certainly do). Due to the volatile nature of hydrogen I can’t imagine many places will let you run to the toilet or get a coffee while pumping either; these are all just fine to do with fast charging.

For me the choice between BEV and the alternates is more about availability of home charging - if you can wake up each day with reliably ~250 miles of range already in the car, you virtually never need to fill up/charge on the road anyway!

> Of course this might not be important for the daily commute, or 99% of the vehicles' use. But for that remaining 1% it _is_ a huge deal.

That 1% use case should be priced for the externalities.

I'd like to see electric vehicle purchases heavily subsidized by taxes on fossil fuel vehicles and taxes on gasoline. If you really need to pollute 100% of the time you're operating your vehicle just in case you need that extra 1%, it should be priced in a way that really makes you think hard about that 1% scenario and whether there are really no alternatives.

You forgot safety.

Hydrogen poses some serious dangers as it is odorless and colorless if it leaks. It is very easy to ignite and it is explosive at a wide range of mixtures with oxygen. [0]

An hydrogen leak in an underground parking garage will be a very dangerous situation.

Obviously any dense concentration of energy will be dangerous. The gasoline in a traditional car is also highly flammable (though less likely to be explosive), and lithium reactions also also very hard to extinguish. But with both gasoline and lithium fire, you have some time to get yourself to a safe distance, with hydrogen... not so much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_safety

Odorless / colorless -- same as natural gas. Just drop in a tracer chemical.

Unfortunately, these tracer chemicals tend to poison the fuel cells in cars. So that is not an option

Surely there is a tracer chemical that could work.

The usual ones are sulfur based.

I don't really see hydrogen going anywhere for cars (except maybe as range extender there might be case). However, for certain applications batteries become to heavy to be practical, i.e. aviation, shipping, large trucks etc.

Hydrogen could be great for the power grid.

Yeah, I think seasonal storage with hydrogen makes more sense than hydrogen trucks. People often underestimate just how heavy hydrogen fuel tanks are and the required cells and especially the huge radiator you need to get rid of all the heat. I once heard that the prototype for a Nikola hydrogen truck had a heat rejection system that required just as much power as a Nissan Leaf.

Seasonal storage is a total fantasy that has no practical application in the real world if you do the math on it.

Building gigantic storage with 1 year cycle is a gigantic waste of resources and even if you assume electricity to be totally free to make it pay for itself the invest most per storage would have to be like 100x cheaper then current grid storage.

Hydrogen in no shape or form will every be used as seasonal storage.

Hydrogen is just another form of battery that would practically have to have a 6h to a few day cycle. And in that case there are better options.

Nah, that’s not true if you use a container with cheap enough cost per storage-kWh, for instance salt caverns. In fact we ALREADY use them for seasonal natural gas storage. The references to this toy model show how to get extremely low cost per storage-kWh, as cheap as 0.7 € per kWh. (So amortized over 20 years, that’s a pretty small addition to the energy cost). https://model.energy Details on the salt cavern hydrogen storage: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.05.059

Or think in context of this liquid air (or compressed air) battery.

If you can get liquid air or compressed air batteries to cost $300/kWh or so, hydrogen in the same container compressed to the same degree can store about 100 times the energy (especially if sub-cooled). So the storage cost (if dominated by the container structure) drops by a factor of ~100. That’s $3/kWh for storage, if you don’t use salt caverns. Not great if only amortized over 20 years (plus the bad round-trip efficiency), but also not terrible if it’s only used for like 5% of the electricity needs.

And that’s the real issue with seasonal storage: no one needs it really until you get to 95-100% decarbonization of the grid. Otherwise, best to use like a few gas turbines or something as backup/seasonal power. So investing a bunch of storage when you haven’t even built out a bunch of solar or wind, yet, is kind of suboptimal. Good to do demo plants, though, so you can get ready with the tech for when you DO need to decarbonize that last 5% or so.

Red Herring in that --> Green hydrogen + Solar + Wind + Energy Storage are all important components of the future energy portfolio as we deleverage traditional O&G.

They serve different functions and should all be targeted aggressively.

I agree a Hydrogen car is a long way away though. Many more viable options in the near term.

And electrolysis and plasma based hydrogen from renewable natural gas coupled with renewable energy are going to be cost-competitive with SMR based hydrogen very soon. Faster than anyone thinks.

"green" hydrogen is a greenwashing term being pushed heavily by oil and gas to make people think that hydrogen is currently low pollution, sustainable material/energy storage device.

Effectively all hydrogen currently produced, and this will be true for decades, is from splitting methane.

No that is factually untrue.

Green hydrogen is electrolysis based hydrogen that uses renewable electricity OR plasma based hydrogen that uses Renewable Natural Gas with or without renewable electricity.

Anything that is made from Natural Gas is by its very nature grey or blue (per ridiculous color definitions).

The better approach is to use Carbon Intensity values but that is too difficult for the general public (and most professionals) to understand the nuances.

What you are referring to is if it is possible to roll out electrolysis quickly enough using renewable electricity to ensure that our hydrogen portfolio is net zero or at least significantly better than oil and gas as current stands.

Diesel engines were built into trucks and taxis before they were used in passenger cars. Same thing will happen with hydrogen.

Efficiency is not really a concern if hydrogen is "produced" during peaks of some "sources" (mainly solar, wind): the surplus of energy, which today is a burden, will be used to obtain hydrogen. Producing hydrogen may solve the "intermittence" challenge.

Charging batteries with solar and wind is much more efficient than producing hydrogen. Why would you not charge batteries during peaks?

Because batteries are laughably costly for long term energy storage. It’s not even close; batteries will never be used for anything but short term storage.

Untrue - long-term energy storage options are being targeted by deep pocketed capital. E.g. Form Energy and Vanadium technologies.

LiON batteries can't do seasonal though - short term only.

Hydrogen is a good choice for storing peak power from renewables.

Distributing all that highly flammable high pressure blow-up juice around the world for consumer use is another matter.

Its a fantasy to believe that anybody would install such and absurd amount of access wind and solar that it could both cover the low production times and enough to export for use in vehicles.

That simply not economical.

In fact several technologies are more likely to be used then hydrogen for grid storage.

> Its a fantasy to believe that anybody would install such and absurd amount of access wind and solar

Fantasy becomes reality:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190327-the-tiny-islands...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-56279...

This would indeed be ambitious, however when considering that it is possible (the primary sources potential is adequate), that it will solve problems related to fuel reserves, and also a fair part of challenges related to NIMBY, overcentralization, capital intensity, pollution, waste disposal, decommission... it may (overall) be our best approach.

I was writing about a less ambitious plan, which simply aims at storing the energy produced by solar/wind powerplants during peak production periods.

I know this article is from bmw but afaik people are interested in hydrogen for other types of vehicles than cars. Ships, for instance. Forklifts. Trains.

Planes will never work well due to hydrogens low energy-to-volume ratio, unfortunately.

Tell that to Airbus. It will work well on 500 miles trips with 50 passengers, which is most air transportation.

500 mile trips are easily doable with battery-electric aircraft.

No way, not even close. Maybe for single seat or double seaters, but not for commercial airliners with 50 or so seats.

We already have the first 8 seater that can go around 400 miles in testing. And that is using pretty conservative battery tech.

And there is a significant amount of potential optimization left.

Using the batteries as load structures is just one of them, that significantly changes the simplified calculation people do on density. There are many other ideas. The problem is a lot of investment and engineering is needed and to get a passenger plane threw the regulatory process, specially something as new as E-Plane is a gigantic project.

In the future battery tech will get significantly better in the next 10 years and rethinking the plane from the ground up with that technology in mind will do the trick and beat hydrogen.

Yeah, it is possible to do long haul (5000km or more) electric aircraft. Difficult, but possible. 500 miles wouldn’t even be a big challenge. And “number of passengers” doesn’t even appear on the Breguet Range Equation (modified for electric flight).

One thing that matters that people don't consider is that with EV, the operating cost will be lower, so it might actually make sense to switch to somewhat smaller planes flying more different routes.

I think a 30 person plane that can cover the most common routes in populated regions would beat any jet fueled airline in terms of cost.

Switching airplanes to hydrogen has a much higher cost than replacing fossil fuel with carbon-neutral biofuels in the existing planes and engines. This is by far the easiest way forward. Still tremendously difficult - it does need electrification of bio-fuel production, something which we haven't made outside of a lab setting.

But the same tech is necessary for carbon neutral food production anyway. Today's agriculture is fully dependant on fossil fuel energy, both for running the machines and for creating the many inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.

Hydrogen is guaranteed to be the future of energy storage. What we're seeing now is the normal "reaction" from established business that fear being disrupted. It's so predictable that it's embarrassing to even see people try to argue it away on a website like this.

Remember, people said the same thing about electric cars and they were wrong. This is just history repeating itself. In a decade, no one will seriously try to argue against hydrogen.

So hydrogen busses might be viable... As long as there are enough passengers in a day, that could be a good use-case, provided maintenance is good enough.

I rarely see this mentioned, but you don't have to compress hydrogen that much for transportation/storage. Ongoing research on metal hydrides is promising [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...

You’re adding yet more weight and inefficiency.

> Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology

a lot like batteries and gas tanks

Hydrogen, like electricity and batteries, is an energy vector: you spend more energy producing that form than what you get from it.

Fossil fuels in general (maybe not shale oil) are sources, since you get more energy than what you spend. So, their energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is positive.

In this regard, we're facing diminishing returns, the low hanging fruit is long gone. This, plus resource scarcity, is going to be a huge limiting factor to growth…

We need a photosynthesis-like process that creates pure hydrogen...

I completely agree that hydrogen is fundamentally flawed, but from a commercial point of view it makes sense in the EU where the "Green deal" has allocated upwards of 500 billion euros for establishing a hydrogen economy over the next decade.

See e.g. https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...

Love this two part series. Hydrogen has an important role in a decarbonized economy, but it certainly isn't for cars. And it won't be ready ver soon. And hydrogen will likely be dwarfed by batteries as a storage mechanism.

How do we transmute those disadvantages into wins?

What will it take? What are the alternatives?

Electric cars weigh more and accelerate faster. Consequently tires and road sealing is worn more. Hydrogen cars do not weigh more.

I don't see that being generally true. For example, the Toyota Mirai weighs 4300 lbs to the Tesla Model 3 weighing 4000 pounds:

https://www.caranddriver.com/toyota/mirai/specs

https://www.caranddriver.com/tesla/model-3/specs

As far as acceleration, that's just a design parameter, as both are driven by electric motors. I'm surprised the Mirai can't perform better given it's extra weight.

Mirai can't perform better because the fuel cell can't put out enough burst power, it needs a buffer battery as is for acceleration and regenerative braking and the buffer battery isn't big enough either for Tesla like acceleration due to size and weight constraints.

The Mirai offers more range; it’s not apples to apples. FCEVs do have some constant overheads around the fuel stack weight.

> cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels

Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels.

> You need a large infrastructure to produce and distribute it

But you can reuse gas stations as the delivery mechanism. Versus EVs which require all new infrastructure since the charging time is so much longer.

> It's a huge chicken and egg problem

No different from EVs right now.

> What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station

Hydrogen charges a full tank in < 5 minutes which makes it the more convenient solution for most of the world who don't have access to outlets at home.

> Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel electricity is more expensive than wind and solar. Even the most expensive solar, residential, is cheaper than buying from a dirty grid for the vast majority of customers. And the intermittent nature of solar and wind is a perfect match for charging a fleet of EVs.

In contrast, green hydrogen is nowhere near as cheap as fossil fuel hydrogen from steam methane reformation. The dirty secret that no hydrogen fan talks about is that "blue hydrogen" the bridge to green hydrogen, requires carbon capture technology that does not currently exist at scale. And it requires transporting CO2 back to some sequestration site, doubling the amount of transportation of gasses.

Battery technology isn't very "green" either. Lithium and its alternatives require extensive, polluting mining operations while Hydrogen can be generated from water, water vapor, methane etc.

And how does that hydrogen get transformed from water? Alkaline or PEM electrolyzers, but at what environmental cost? And all the fuel cell materials? Why selectively evaluate only one side of the equation? That seems rather biased.

> Battery technology isn't very "green" … while Hydrogen can be generated from … methane.

Methane steam reformation is now green?

You're right, it's not. And the only way to make it halfway palatable, the so-called "blue" hydrogen, is to do carbon capture and sequestration during steam methane reformation.

However, for more than a decade, fossil fuel companies have said carbon capture and sequestration will be easy, and then failed to execute on any of their industrial size projects. Plus, what is that captured carbon used for? Extracting more fossil fuels. Plus the sequestration requires transporting carbon long distances, and somehow making sure that the sequestration lasts on geological time scales.

So any mention of methane for hydrogen should raise huge red flags and discredit that path. There's only one path for hydrogen in the future, and that's electrolyzers, and making them go through exponential price drops over the next two decades.

Hydrogen fuel cells use platinum catalysts. Platinum also must be mined and unlike lithium is very rare.

There are existing ways of generating Hydrogen using coated Nickel electrodes

No energy is green. Not a single energy source does not require some mining / oil extracting at some point. We have to choose the solution which impact as little as possible the environment on global scale.

Beware of the Nirvana Fallacy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

All valid points. A lot of the misconceptions about Hydrogen comes from the following ideas:

1. That it requires something energy consuming like cold-temperature electrolysis.

This is no longer true. We have ways of generating Hydrogen much cheaper from water vapor - which is a very common by product in many industrial processes and which is often simply vented. The new methods also use Nickel instead of the very expensive Platinum electrodes which reduces the cost drastically.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/features/norwegian-team-d...

UNSW Team has demonstrated ways of generating Hydrogen using very cheap metals (Nickel, again) using a catalytic coating which are orders of magniture cheaper than using Platinum electrodes.

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-scientists-cheaper-hydrogen-en...

2. Storage of hydrogen is very complicated and dangerous.

This is also being addressed by various teams - including the storage of Hydrogen in activated carbon etc instead of storing it in very high pressure in tanks.

https://phys.org/news/2011-09-method-inexpensive-carbon-mate...

Hydrogen's energy density gives it a big advantage over EV technologies - and if it is also stored using the newer technologies, it allows for much lighter vehicles.

You are talking about basically research stuff, EV are literally produce in the millions right now. Billions of private funds flow into battery tech and EV technology, while Hydrogen is basically massively government funded. Next generation EV and battery tech is getting closer and closer to beating hydrogen even in the few things it has an advantage.

And most of the costly infrastructure already exists. Its called the grid. Adding charge spots is incredibly cheap compared to adding hydrogen stations everywhere, even if gas stations already exist.

We have yet to see these lighter vehicles. Batteries can be made as a structural part of the car and the weight compared the normal structure we have now is actually pretty damn low. I don't see how hydrogen can beat that.

BEV are currently and the distance between the two technologies will grow, not shrink if you look at all the improvements rolling into BEV over the next years.

> Cheapest way of charging EVs is from fossil fuels.

Solar is now cheaper to install than it costs to operate existing coal and oil power stations. That's a startling fact that really inverts some traditional intuition on carbon emissions.

> But you can reuse gas stations as the delivery mechanism. Versus EVs which require all new infrastructure since the charging time is so much longer.

The site perhaps, but the hardware is completely different.

>The efficiency compared to battery tech is horrendous.

nope

>Hydrogen is effectively a storage technology -- we have to generate it and compress it. Which combined with the above means that charging a hydrogen car will always be more expensive than putting the same amount of usable energy into a battery powered car.

Nope, 350kw charger -> loss

>Let's not forget that the cheapest way of generating hydrogen is from fossil fuels. Electrolysis is very inefficient.

no, newest one >95%

>Any concern there might exist for the effect on the electrical grid coming battery powered cars multiplies for hydrogen due to the inefficiency.

Nope you get more energy with less area used via pipeline than grid lines

> In the end, a hydrogen car is ultimately electric. What is more convenient, having a car that can be plugged into an outlet, or a car that needs an extremely specialized hydrogen station?

home hydrogen station exist

> IMO the only excitement from hydrogen is for fossil fuel companies, because that's what the vast majority of it is made from, and because it'd be a fairly natural fit into their existing infrastructure.

wrong fossil fuel companies still want to sell fossil fuels. we have to deal with emission inside cities. hydrogen cars cleaning the air while driving. battery cars still emit emissions.

Astroturfing account

what? no!

There are some hydrogen boosters who are "good" in that it's honest boosting of good technology. They tend to share good information about PEM tech, for example. But in the last six months they have been drowned out by misinformation spreading accounts that carefully omit any mention of natural gas' role in the next few decades of the future of hydrogen...

That said, I'm not sure that calling out astroturf is appropriate on HN.

Nope: https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...

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