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Comment by NoblePublius | Hacker News Reader

There is no naturally occurring source of Hydrogen. It can only be produced at industrial scale by cracking it from carbon fuel (usually CNG). If a viable pathway was created to produce it via electrolysis with sustainable energy, you’d be 10x better off (in terms of overall efficiency and carbon footprint) by putting that energy in a battery. STOP TRYING TO MAKE HFCS HAPPEN. They’re a carbon scam!

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We're not going to have battery-powered long-haul jetliners for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile:

> The Plasma Kinetics founder said that his company’s solution weighs only one-third of batteries for the same amount of energy.

I agree that we need scalable electrolysis, but there are people working on that too.

People are making synthetic field from atmospheric carbon. Compatible with all existing infrastructure yet carbon-neutral.

A big advantage of that method is that the same tech works for sequestering lots of carbon. At the current state of the art though, I don't think it's a given that it'll be cheaper than green hydrogen.

Doesn't matter if people are working on it: Efficieny of the H2 cycle is limited by physics, not engineering.

Efficiency of a production electrolysis plant today is about 80%, which really doesn't seem that bad.

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/7/5/hydrogen-made...

Ok cool now compress and store and transport it after you spend $10 trillion on the infrastructure to do that at planet scale. Or, send electricity into batteries over wires which already exist. Like, come on. You have to choose which energy innovator to back and you go with Tesla or the people pushing hydrogen (Shell, Exxon)?

I totally support electric cars but going back to my comment above, what's your solution for long-haul jets?

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