Unfortunately at this time hydrogen is extremely expensive. A kilogram of hydrogen, roughly equivalent to a gallon of gas in energy, costs $26.75 at True Zero hydrogen stations, which is extremely expensive and is a massive price hike from $19.70/kg back when I purchased my Mirai two months ago. I'm still thinking whether purchasing a Mirai was a good financial decision for me, but I hope things will turn around in 2024.
> With help from Stiesdal, a European clean-technology firm, Reliance is building a large factory in Jamnagar to manufacture electrolysers. These devices, powered by clean electricity from Reliance’s planned solar farms, will then be used to manufacture green hydrogen. Mr Ambani asserts that these investments will make India the first country to produce green hydrogen for $1 a kilogram, within a decade. (The current cost is more than $4/kg.) He dismisses doubters, pointing to his recent success in delivering data to mobile telephones at the world’s lowest cost.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/10/20/will-india-bec...
I don't have a stake in any race and haven't had a need to drive a car in years, but a combination of three energy sources sound ideal to me. Batteries for two-wheelers that keep the weight low and commercial vans & buses, grid solutions for static highly efficient routes (AKA trains), and something like hydrogen for long range non-static infrastructure (transport trucks). The road network where I live is of a high quality, and currently road maintenance for fully electric vehicles is fully subsidised to promote adoption, but eventually we'll have to choose between our roads and the funds. (I am not someone with any expertise in this matter)
That's my impression too. It seems to be hard for some people to accept this as one solution for a narrow aspect of a complex problem. This is a problem I see a lot with "green energy" sceptics. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. If there isn't a one size fits all solution, it's not a solution at all.
Almost as good as the old adage of electricity not being clean today, therefore electrifying cars doesn't make sense. Nevermind that switching to renewable energy can be achieved asynchronously and is not something we need to wait for.
But we can transfer most of them to EVs, including nearly the entire light duty vehicle fleet and short haul trucking, which is probably good enough. There will always be niche cases for ICE vehicles, like driving across Siberia, or military vehicles. But the vast majority can be electrified.
Flight is a different story, perhaps hydrogen will be a viable path there.
No we can’t. We don’t have the industrial manufacturing capability. Not even by a long shot. And even if we did, we don’t have enough minded minerals to supply the manufactures, and even if we did, we don’t have enough electrical infrastructure to charge all the electric cars.
Note this also applies to hydrogen, and even if we had both, each technology relieving the stress on the manufacturing capability of the other, then we’d still need the infrastructure capable of supplying to both.
The best path forward for immediate success is public transit, using whichever technology is available (hydrogen, battery, overhead wires, diesel, whatever).
We don't have it today, but none that it is out of reach within a decade or two. Also, EV manufacturing is strictly less complicated than ICE manufacturing (as many engine parts suppliers are discovering). That's part of the reason you see so many EV startups (Aptera, Canoo, Lightyear, Rivian, Fisker) able to bootstrap vehicle manufacturing. That hasn't happened since the days of Preston Tucker.
The claim about never having the electrical infrastructure is similarly unfounded. We don't have the infrastructure for all 100M passenger cars in the US to switch to electric today, but with enough time we can certainly evolve the grid to not only charge them, but also utilize them for the purpose of grid stabilization.
> The best path forward for immediate success is public transit, using whichever technology is available (hydrogen, battery, overhead wires, diesel, whatever).
I agree that public transit is the ideal - and follow through by being a daily public transit rider myself. We absolutely should be providing better alternatives to individual car ownership, but that won't happen overnight, and it frankly requires a cultural change in much of the US that is a generational project. We can't make the perfect the enemy of the good, so in the meantime, we need to evolve the current paradigm - passenger cars - away from ICEs.
There are already commercial processes in place to capture it from landfills, and there are industrial processes that can produce it from hydrogen with an 8% energy loss. So if the green hydrogen problem is solved that could be used here.
A lot of Asian countries already have cars that run directly on CNG - from the factory -, as it produces less smog than petrol or diesel. I visited India recently, and I'd say 80% of vehicles I saw ran on CNG (they have a hazard label).
Maybe the most important thing is the infrastructure to distribute it is already there in most countries.
Compressed natural gas is mostly methane but we are trying to move away from fossil fuels so it's not a long term solution.
Here's a link that gives some info on it:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-gas-climatebox-explai...