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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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