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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

IMO because hydrogen is less efficient (by a factor of two, I believe) than using the electricity directly. So given that we are going to have less energy in the future (because fossil fuels are not unlimited, e.g. we passed the production peak of conventional oil back in 2008), then we should use it wisely. And we need hydrogen for other applications (steel, methanol, fertilisers), so probably we should keep it for those.

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We'll be making hydrogen from saltwater with sunlight and wind energy in ~15 years or less. There's a race to own these industries right now.

The same sunlight and wind energy could be used directly as electricity in homes and EV batteries. There is a significant cost to storing the energy as hydrogen, and there's no benefit.

Installing battery banks to last longer and longer has an increasing cost, so you start to run out of batteries to fill during high production times. At a certain point hydrogen should get cheaper per watt to soak up production.

For countries that import LNG as source of power now, there's a future in shipping h2 as ammonia and converting it to hydrogen on the other end. Places with lots and sun, lots of ocean and existing LNG infrastructure are in a good place to assist in this transformation.

You're probably right about the currently known processes. But there are companies working on chemical engineering processes that are more efficient.

Here is one : https://hazer.wpmudev.host/about/#hazerprocess

The fact is that you need energy to produce hydrogen, and then car engines are less efficient with hydrogen than with electricity.

And the other points remain: we need hydrogen in other important fields (probably more important than cars, right?), so we should keep it there. If we get more efficient at producing hydrogen for those applications, that's good. No need to add cars on top.

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