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Comment by lamnk | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what make Toyota changes their tone, because Toyota is known to be very reluctant against BEVs as they want to keep their inverstment in hybrids and continue to bet on hydrogen fuel cells.

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Perhaps it's the US states like CA that have basically shown that they can't support H2 fuel supply lines.

Take a look at the current status of stations in CA [1]. Mostly offline, and who knows for how long. A symptom of the entire fuel-cell economy.

[1] https://m.cafcp.org

That’s worse than the McFlurry machines. There was a big push for hydrogen when Schwarzenegger was governator, but the infrastructure for hydrogen hasn’t expanded beyond that. Fuel cell technology for cars, like its emissions, are vaporware.

I don't think adding new infrastructure is even necessary anymore. In fact, in many places, we're seeing natural gas lines intentionally not being built for new homes. Why? Electric is enough. Heat pumps for your home, modern electric appliances are arguably better than natural gas, no need to maintain electric lines AND gas lines. Adding hydrogen into the mix means a whole parallel set of infrastructure. Look into what happened in Lawrence Massachusetts (hardly the sticks) when the gas company made a mistake -- the town quite literally burst into flames.

I sympathize with going full electric in the home with modern appliances, but honestly the hydrogen thing was all supposed to be for automotives.

The cheapest hydrogen fuel is a byproduct of fracking so that's why it was pushed. It was never sustainable or made sense, obviously.

Unless they know something that the rest of the world doesn't, hydrogen fuels cells is a bad bet.

There is not enough time/space to explain all the reasons why; it is a very long list of factors working against hydrogen --- and it starts with the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

If there's a context where power density is way more important than efficiency, then hydrogen starts looking pretty good. As batteries get better, the number of those shrinks, however.

Hydrogen -- liquified hydrogen -- makes sense for large aircraft, rockets, and eventually bulk storage, and not much else.

The reason hydrogen makes sense for aircraft is the huge advantage of carrying enormously less weight of fuel up to the stratosphere. Add to that, that it will be produced and stored directly at airports from surplus peak electric power, thus obviating need for a great deal of other storage capacity, and of expense extracting, refining, and transporting petroleum.

Its downside is it needs much more space on board, thus new airframes with aerogel-insulated tankage somewhere other than in skinny wings.

We need a government-led initiative to get major airports outfitted with LH2 production and storage systems, to solve the inherent chicken-and-egg problem and get those new airframes into the pipeline. Any extra storage capacity an airport builds out substitutes for storage elsewhere. Airports could afford to get into the load-balancing business in a big way.

You can't simply ignore that liquid hydrogen is stored at 700 bar. That increases the system weight substantially. Direct ammonia fuel cells have competitive system weights even though NH3 is only 17% hydrogen:

https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/review19/arpae11_abbasi...

That document refers to compressed, not liquified hydrogen. I don't know of any reason to keep LH2 under extreme pressure, other than to increase its boiling point to a more comfortable temperature, or to stiffen tank walls.

The last would probably be a consideration mainly for rockets.

The critical point of hydrogen is 33.2 K, that is Kelvin, or -240 degrees celsius. Any higher temperature than that, hydrogen is not a liquid, and exerts pressure on the walls of its container. ... so, you have the choice of making a very strong container, or a very well-isolated one, preferably both. But probably not a lightweight container, which is what you'd prefer.

I thought that writing "liquified hydrogen" would adequately suggest that I was talking about hydrogen in liquid phase; maybe I needed to be clearer, and say that liquified hydrogen really is liquid, and not gas, but I still don't see why.

Aerogel is both very, very light in weight, and also extremely effective at isolating substances of very different temperatures such as LH2 and aircraft parts. Thus, practical LH2 tanks on aircraft would be insulated with aerogel.

Given a tank of LH2 insulated with aerogel, there would be no need for the tank to be "very strong", as it would not need to hold back any more pressure than the (very light) weight of the column of LH2 contained. Liquified-gas tanks are routinely equipped with fart valves to relieve any pressure that arises from heat leaking in and boiling the contained fluid.

I think terrorism fears will keep ammonia far away from use as a fuel. Isn't ammonia / ammonium nitrate used in some home-made IED designs?

Ammonium nitrate is a common, cheap explosive, but the key to explosives is nitrate, not ammonia. Almost every practical high explosive is a nitrate or an organic nitro compound.

Major obstacles to ammonia fuel include the smell and its corrosiveness. Only a small amount (~12%) of energy is lost converting hydrogen to ammonia, and you save energy by avoiding compression/refrigeration.

Ammonia is used industrially, today, by the millions of tons, mostly in pure liquid form. Management of large quantities of liquid ammonia is very mature, and has been for most of a century.

Tens of thousands of warehouse-scale refrigeration systems use ammonia as refrigerant. It is the preferred refrigerant in most places besides homes, small offices, and road vehicles.

Liquified ammonia is the odds-on favorite to replace bunker oil in intercontinental shipping, as engines already in place could easily be converted to burn ammonia just by replacing tankage and plumbing, which would not require any structural changes. You need a larger space for the ammonia than for bunker oil, but ships have plenty of room.

I'm not sure I would take this bet as them betting against hydrogen that everyone seems hellbent on making the narrative. I would take it as there is clearly a rise in EV that they can capitalize on. We will have both hydrogen and EV. Different use cases.

Nothing. They are doing the exact minimum needed not to complete fall behind.

Because Japan for some reason went all out on hydrogen, so Toyota being Japanese followed suit. What makes me wonder is why didn't they just look outside of Japan to realize this was not a good bet.

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