What people are missing is that there is no reason that all cars must be battery powered. It's a weird myopia that is antithetical to Silicon Valley thinking, despite being widespread in SV.
The basic problem here is that fuel cells EVs literally are EVs. They work in incredibly similar ways. Any sort of fundamental analysis would lead you to the conclusion that if BEVs are possible, then so are FCEVs. Any differences are going to be minor, not substantial. Also, a lot of the criticisms are just pure FUD, like claiming hydrogen is more dangerous than lithium (both are very flammable materials). And finally, battery car makers really want you to think that every single car in the future will be a BEV, with not a single exception. That’s a pretty crazy claim, and people should recognize how ridiculous it sounds.
Unless we figure out fusion, producing hydrogen is going to primarily come from hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas. For Europe, that means they need to get it mostly from Russia, and Japan has to boat all their supply of that in.
https://germany.embassy.gov.au/beln/hydrogen.html
https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/media-releases/growing-...
and other links from the Fortescue Metals sibsidiaries and other involved companies abound.
Nuclear power might be ideal for hydrogen production as well (using excess of peak power to make hydrogen to store in huge tanks rather than charging a battery or pumped reservoir?).
Those involved are making bank on some 800 million tonnes of iron ore sales per annum shipped to China and hold leases on significant (as a percentage of global supply) Lithium deposits and Australian land in the millions of acres (a lot of sunlight).
They understand industry at scale, the use of automation to deliver volume, the draw of large economies to sunlight abundant areas for processing and refining, etc.
Transport is planned via Ammonia (hydrogen + nitrogen) - with an excess of sunlight and rapid improvements in domain of electrolysis making seawater as a basis economical, energy losses due to conversion can still be covered to turn a profit delivering bulk ammonia for fertilizer, power generation, and other applications to Europe.
FFI (offshoot of FMI (Fortescue Metals)) has a handwaving set of web pages:
https://ffi.com.au/technology/green-hydrogen/
and have lodged more detailed tech reports for their shareholders via the Sydney, London, and Canadian Exchanges (IIRC).
Green hydrogen will be one of the cheapest energy sources available in the near future. It will be made from excess wind or solar and will cost nearly nothing to produce. This will be the next big fundamental error by anti-green energy skeptics.
BEV is attractive because electrify goes straight to the battery, energy is only lost once. But hydrogen can make sense for some applications given its weight (but it’s volume is a problem and compression only goes so far).
BEVs need huge batteries to function. It is easy to see how that totally undermines the value of BEVs.
BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable. Also, forget about having a frunk.
Wrong. Fuel cells and tanks will be vastly cheaper than batteries once produced at scale. They have very low resource requirements. They will likely match or beat internal combustion cars at cost. This is an unbeatable advantage compared to BEVs with any sort of range.
Some people can charge at home.
Do you know that conventional gas is delivered to homes around the country, currently, on a semi-annual basis to supply total heating needs, by truck?
The infrastructure is nill for fuel cell vehicles.
Battery vehicles will be wildly burdensome to the electrical infrastructure if widely adopted. Trucking via EV is currently completely unacheivable with the energy capacity available. No discussion of charging capacity. Also, it adds tons (actual tons) of weight to the non-cargo load