Production of hydrogen (via a variety of methods) for use in vehicles is actually more efficient than gasoline (including hybrids) if you measure well to wheel.
It just in turn gets stomped by battery electric, so it has little future there, but that doesn't mean it is bad compared with the status quo. Like Windows phones were better than Blackberries and (pre windows) Nokia, but not as good as Android or iOS.
Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience.
As long as you produce it by cracking fossil fuels anyway, which is how >95% of hydrogen production currently works.
In theory hitting ~60% energy efficiency on solar power could be cheaper than fossil fuels. But hydrogen is a long way from that benchmark.
Could this be a useful form of carbon capture for fossil fuels? Hydrogen at least burns much more cleanly at the point of use.
https://spectra.mhi.com/achieving-net-zero-what-is-turquoise...
You might even be able to sell some of it, although i suspect there isn't a market for all the carbon you would produce.
I'm sure someone will come up with something more interesting to do with it than just dumping it though if it all works out.
I think that it's solar and wind energy, peaky and unstable as it is, should be used to produce hydrogen. Then it could be used as is, or combined with heavy hydrocarbons to produce much lighter hydrocarbons like methane. Maybe it can be economically used to produce something useful from CO₂, from fuel to plastics.
Burning hydrogen emits water.
Burning CH₄ produces much more water and less CO₂ than burning longer hydrocarbons. This works for ICE car engines, with tiny modifications, too. So it could still be a useful step in phasing out carbon-based fuels, until we have epic-scale batteries and likely more nuclear generation.
https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/eus-hydrogen-stra...
> “'Hydrogen Europe' promotes the growth of green hydrogen production in the EU... €145bn in support between grants and subsidies."
Something either needs to be dramatically failing, or an overnight success to make a good story.
Something being an obvious evolution and way forward in the future as part of a portfolio of other complementary technologies doesn't really come across well in this medium.
I think the story is trying to capture that the continued success of renewable energy means green hydrogen is inevitable now and that's becoming the consensus.
Personally, I assume that's part of the reason no-one believes it's at grid parity and beyond, and half the users of this site are waiting for fusion to save them.
Decades of stories about how expensive PV is, because that worked as clickbait/propaganda, while "this is the early stages of a sensible long term investment" didn't.
"Instead, hydrogen can help in niche markets, involving complex chemical processes and high temperatures that are hard to achieve with electricity"
The article title is a little misleading, although as misleading titles go, it's not that bad.
And niche in this case means about the same size as nuclear or hydro power at their peak and working in conjunction with other techs to completely decarbonize the world.
Again, the lack of nuance is a problem inherent in the medium, but they gave it a try.
- Hydron has very low energy density per unit volume unless you compress it to many times atmospheric pressure.
- Highly compressed hydrogen is a safety nightmare.
Do we currently have hydrogen storage technologies that compare acceptably with modern batteries in terms of weight, size and catastrophic failure risks?
Unless the energy input for production is from solar or wind.
Hydrogen is a great battery and can form a good storage solution for wind and solar.
With the proliferation of installed solar capacity, and availability of low cost renewable energy, the economics of H2 production allow for use of lower efficient systems, with focus on reducing exotic materials in the system.
Where is this solar capacity? Where is this available low cost renewable energy? We are decades away from making the renewables our main electricity source if there were massive investment into it, meanwhile we are building new coal and gas plants instead. And the electricity demand is still going up.
Even if things go way better than anyone can predict, we will never have enough energy to throw it away on inefficient hydrogen, not in a lifetime of anyone currently on Hacker News.
The whole H2 hype is just shilling for oil and gas, whether the people perpetuating it know it or not.
Of course we can have the capacity, after just a few more doublings.
...in 2018. It's 2021 already. In 2020 solar made up something like 3.2% (https://www.worldenergydata.org/world-electricity-generation...). That alone is an increase of 0.6% per year. Even if nothing changed about PV buildup, it would still be headed for 15% in 2040. This rate is likely to increase, though.
SOME materials have trouble with hydrogen. But this is a problem that can be, and is, worked around as needed. It's a nuisance, not a showstopper.
If you just want 'hydrogen from any source' and aren't trying to get off fossil fuels, then yes, the materials costs are that horrible. But I don't believe that's where anyone is going with this conversation.
And no, most of the infrastructure connecting these can't be reused either. Our existing hydrogen production facilities are set up to produce the hydrogen as it's needed for other industrial processes. Our existing hydrogen economy does not have a significant storage capacity. Rather, it's set up to minimize the need for hydrogen storage altogether. For your proposed renewable grid, we'd likely be transporting methane many miles away from its generation to under ground storage facilities. Sure, the existing pipes connecting to fertilizer plants can still be used. But we still need a lot more pipes connecting electrolysis plants, to storage sites, and to hydrogen to electricity production facilities. This isn't something our existing infrastructure is set up to support.
Your proposal has us effectively rebuilding our hydrogen economy from the ground up: First, changing production from steam reformation to electrolysis. And second, building out a vast hydrogen storage and transportation network to deliver this hydrogen to where energy is needed. There's a lot more to your proposed hydrogen grid storage than just valves and pipes.
There has been progress on all of these fronts, one of the most interesting developments that I'm aware of is this fleet of 1500 trucks that is being built:
https://www.electrive.com/2021/02/18/hiringa-energy-orders-1...
But there are a large number of questions (for me) around this project that make me wonder how much it is vaporware and how much of it is reality. If they pull this off, and that includes delivery of the vehicles, infrastructure and do it within budget and with a substantial fraction of the life-span of an ordinary truck without major issues it will be a game changer. If not some investors - and their customers - are going to be extremely pissed off.
Even the first 50 deliveries would already be a huge milestone, I'm aware of exactly one truck like this that is supposed to be driving for Campina ( https://www.nieuweoogst.nl/nieuws/2021/07/13/frieslandcampin... ) but I have not been able to get any data on the actual use of this truck by the customer (ie: service history, operational readiness history).
What is suspicious is that if I enter that truck's license number (19-BLD-5) into https://ovi.rdw.nl/ that it comes up as a more or less regular Volvo truck with a 12.7 liter LNG installation, not a hydrogen installation, which it would surely mention if that were the case.
It's very well possible that that was just a promotional picture from before the conversion to Hydrogen, but you'd expect the company to put out one press release after another to prove their tech is real if it was actually road worthy. But all of the pictures where they 'Hyzon' logo is present on the front of the trucks show no license plate.
(for instance: https://www.truckpartsandservice.com/alternative-power/hydro... and many other promotional articles like it).
I guess it is easier to modify an LNG truck to handle H2 rather than a diesel one.
There are 100's of promotional pictures of that vehicle but none that show it in actual operation or with its license plate post modification and you can't just take a truck like that on the road here without going through all of the required processes.
RDW is pretty strict and good at what they do, if you bypass them for something like this they'll smack you down hard.
They claim they will deliver 100 trucks this year. So far I've seen precious little evidence of that.
69-BPR-8 is a good example of a vehicle that is powered by Hydrogen, it is listed as 'electric / hydrogen' with RDW, and that's what I would expect for this Hyzon truck.
That's a garbage truck in the city of Groningen, which is also a hydrogen conversion of a regular (diesel) truck, no data about reliability, availability, range or service.
See:
https://www.alexmiedema.nl/2021/01/22/exclusieve-beelden-nie...
These are the tanks they use:
https://www.waterstof-centrum.nl/product/700-bar-waterstof-c...
Hyzon went public July of this year:
https://www.fleetowner.com/emissions-efficiency/article/2116...
Forklifts do not operate on highway distances, but instead they operate in very limited areas around where they can be immediately serviced.
Toyota is also still on the hydrogen-for-vehicular use bandwagon but it looks as though all electric has the future, and I really don't see how fuel cell tech has an edge over battery tech, especially not with the new battery chemistries that are becoming available for large scale use.
As for hydrogen usage in vehicles, it's hard to imagine that it won't be used in some capacity. Battery electric cars aren't a one-to-one replacement for an ICE car, and there are genuine drawbacks to the recharge time. Crucially, this isn't a problem that can be fixed through battery technology -- it has to be fixed at the grid level, because electricity has to be consumed when it's produced. Fuel cell tech is already cheaper than battery electric for use cases where the cost of overlay is taken into consideration, and it's hard to see new battery chemistries fixing this without somehow being dramatically cheaper than existing chemistries. Not to mention, fuel cells aren't exactly standing still either; future battery chemistries will have to compete with next generation fuel cells, not current ones.
The reality is that there's almost certainly a market for people who want vehicles that refuel using a traditional model, and that's okay. The idea that there has to be a winner in the automotive industry is asinine, because different vehicles fulfill different needs, and it's unlikely that someone who relies on on-street parking, or goes on frequent long roadtrips, is going to want the same solution as someone who owns a home with a garage, and mainly drives around the city.
IMV batteries are not sustainable. Currently there is a huge hype on batteries, but once the first set of batteries start dying out and the disposal process begins, we will have to deal with a lot of toxic waste. This is going to start happening in about 10 years or so.
Suppliers like Tesla and Panasonic might be making recyclable ones, but Chinese vendors scarcely give a thought to recyclability.
That's pretty much irrelevant. Hydrogen is used as an energy store. Thus the whole point is to generate it where it's cheap to generate, and afterwards transport it to customers willing to pay for it. Therefore conversion effixiency is irrelecant and the key factor is market price, whose lower bound is dictated by the combination of production cost and how much it costs to transport it.
To illustrate how irrelevant conversion efficiency is, keep in mind that right now both Morocco and Australia are investing in Hydrogen export.
If I recall
> if I remember correctly. Adding to that the storage tank cost and the far bigger explosion potential compared to batteries its supposed advantage is dwindling fast given the continuous improvement in batteries.
You're already describing how natural gas is used. Not only are there large natural gas storage tanks in residential neighborhoods but also there are plenty of major cities throughout the world where natural gas is piped straight into apartment buildings.
Indeed, but the round trip efficiency is hardly exceeding 30 to 40%.