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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right. ICE will remain, however niche most consumers think it is. Offroad, towing, agriculture, specialist/collector vehicles.

And thats after a 20+ year transition, based on the average vs maximum realistic lifetime of vehicles either on the road, or soon to be.

But for liquid energy transport, I think LNG with H2 injection, and Ammonia will fit the energy density niche. I don't see deep well petrochemicals as a sustaining model of energy shipment, if we move the economy away from them for transport.

All this is very much "after my lifetime" -Much as my parents lived through the transition of horse power to gas engines, and I was on the cusp of steam trains to diesel and electric, some things happen in timescales beyond my lifetime

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Niche ICE run into a refueling logistical issues. It’s possible to get gas cheaply in large part because there is a vast amount of infrastructure devoted to extracting, refining, and distributing it. Gas prices in 1913 where the equivalent of $9.29/gallon without any special taxes and it gets worse the further back you go.

EV’s got to skip that growing pain because they could piggyback on electrical infrastructure.

The existing infrastructure of electricity, excluding building charging stations and the possibility of transmission upgrades, is why I believe in EVs instead of Hydrogen.

Wouldn't the cost of building a new Hydrogen setup equivalent to gasoline be insane? You can't retrofit gas stations that easily since the tanks weren't meant to hold a gas. I suppose they could add Hydrogen storage to existing gas stations but you still need central distributions and another set of trucks to bring it out.

Pure H2 is a nightmare. Hydrogen up converted to Ammonia is much easier to handle, comparable to LNG for the cost of management.

For volume shipment between economies, Ammonia is the way to go.

Can cars burn ammonia in the same way as hydrogen? Or are you saying that you convert to ammonia for shipping, then reconvert back to hydrogen just before it gets into the car?

You can run combustion engines on ammonia but I believe the most likely scenario is catalytic conversion back to H2 at high efficiency and use as hydrogen, supplementary to LNG or directly. It doesn't target cars very well at present.

Ammonia produces NOx when burned. You think CO2 is bad that stuff is absolutely nasty. I don't know why that would be an improvement.

You get NOx from burning most things including hydrogen. It’s can form from atmospheric Nitrogen and Oxygen combining at high temperatures such as found in flames. You do produce more or less with various types of fuel but production isn’t the issue it’s failing to get rid of them afterwards that’s the problem.

They are unstable breaking down either in the fire making complete combustion important, but a catalytic converter or at worse just the atmosphere works. They last just long enough to be a problem locally. But that also means people have local incentives to fix the issue unlike CO2 which has a much larger tragedy of the commons issue.

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