Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification | Hacker News Reader

Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

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382 pointsamadeuspagel375 comments

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.

Are you referring to hydrogen as a mobility fuel specifically? I generally agree.

However, it is a critical large-scale industrial input, a replacement industrial input for several additional large industries, and an excellent large-scale stationary energy store.

Is it an excellent large-scale stationary energy store though?

I mean, it seems like it should be but

* Hydrogen really likes to leak.

* Hydrogen breaks down the container holding it over time.

* Hydrogen is very low density. This means you need either a very large container or very high pressure. Combined with 1 and 2 this is going to be expensive.

I'm really asking the question. I would love to know the full cost difference with current tech vs other options.

> * Hydrogen really likes to leak.

Yes, but the rate of leakage is tiny enough that for any reasonable sized tank it's going to be years till it's all leaked away.

The real risk is the leakage causing explosions if you ever put a tank in a confined space.

It leaks a lot faster if it corrodes a hole in the container. Hydrogen is fairly reactive.

That's probably only the 'primary' real risk, there are some number of secondary real risks of hydrogen being a very reactive chemical. Not in the flammable boom boom, but the interacting with stuff it shouldn't and causing degradation and corrosion.

> My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them

I don't understand how any one looks at the electric car charging situation and thinks it makes sense to scale that out to 100% of vehicles.

A 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.

The future is public transport.

The decline in passenger trains seems to indicate that future is headed in the other direction.

Did you know that car ownership has kept increasing in the Netherlands, at least until a few years ago? The country renown for cycling and public transportation.

From 197 cars per 1000 people in 1970 we've grown to 662 in 2019. i.e. we now have more than three times the number of cars per person even compared with the "bad old days" of the car dominated 1970s ... The simple fact is that Dutch car use has grown continuously for 70 years much as it has in every other nation

I love train, but let's not pretend that public transportation will be dominant. Rather, it will be a mix of different modes of transport. Cars will continue to be important. Visit the Netherlands and see for yourself.

https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-m...

The envisioned car charging situation is that you charge your car at home or at work. Cars sit unused 99% of the time, they can use that time charging without issues.

What we are experiencing now is transitional, where people use infrastructure intended for road-trips for their daily needs. That phase will pass

Exactly.

I charge at my parking spot with around 2-2.5kW power use. With that I'll get about 100-150km of range overnight easily. I drive less than that daily, which means my car's battery is full practically all the time.

Almost all charging is done at home.

Have you seen the queues for H2 stations? 2 hours is peanuts.

Also: the longest wait I've had in the almost 3 years I've owned an EV has been about 15 minutes and in that case it was a couple who had clearly rented an EV and was charging it for the first time ever.

The infrastructure is perfectly solvable. The US is just at a disadvantage because gasoline is practically free over there compared to the rest of the world so there isn't that much of an incentive to improve the charging infrastructure.

As a reference, currently gasoline at the station near to me is $7.47/gallon, which actually pretty cheap. The most expensive price here is $9.24/gallon at the moment.

Compare that to electricity, which costs 0.02c/kWh right now. That's 0,0002€/kWh. Looking at the market price it'll dip down to -0.18c/kWh in the morning hours, they're literally paying people to use electricity =)

Even in the US it is mostly a solved problem for Tesla owners. There are a few places that are consistently problematic (eg, Las Vegas), but there are new stalls planned there to help.

Several companies are in the early stages of national DCFC rollouts. It will get better quickly in a lot of places.

I don't see why you'd look at a 2 hour wait somewhere and extrapolate that out as an impossible problem. Show an EV nerd a video of a 2 hour wait and they can probably tell you where it happened and maybe even when, because that is really unusual.

This is a solvable problem.

> 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.

That rules out widespread use of hydrogen, then. Hydrogen filling stations need to periodically recompress their hydrogen. Which is never a problem because current hydrogen stations are virtually always idle. However, if they were continuously busy, you'd have to wait.

If the case for the battery was objectively better, oil companies would pull a phillip morris and buy out their antithesis to profit on both ends. The fact that they are doubling down on hydrogen itself I think its really interesting. To me, this shows that perhaps there is a true advantage, and also a high enough barrier to entry where only these oil companies at the scale they already exist can reap the most benefit. Its hard to know where the truth actually lies due to our propaganda/media environment, but I think these actions at least do inform of it a little.

Like BP? https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bp-joins-forces-with-harmony...

or Exxon? https://www.aa.com.tr/en/p/duyurular/1002/exxonmobil-launche...

or Chevron? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ev-charging-startup-ele...

Hydrogen can be captured out of some of the oil wells they have. Its not about producing it from green energy they have a plan to keep extracting it from the ground.

Nissan has famously owned the patent on large format NiCad batteries without producing them or offering them for sale on the open market. So you're right.

"If the case for digital cameras was objectively better Kodak would have bought up chip companies and profited on both sides".....

"If the case for digital video consumption was objectively better, Blockbuster would have bought Netflix to profit on both ends"

Hydrogen was pushed by the Japanese government because BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources. It's not a coincidence the only two companies making hydrogen cars were both the largest Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda. And both of those models are economic failures atypical of their usual engineering prowess.

Toyota Mirai sales have been flatlined at low ~1-2k since they started, for 7 years: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa...

While Tesla immediately had ever-growing sales: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/

Toyota is said to lose in excess of $100k per hydrogen car.

> "BEV's aren't as ideally suited to the country's economy and resources."

BEVs are better suited to Japan's economy and resources than any other fuel, the vast majority of which is imported (including natural gas).

It's just that it's taken Japan's government a long time to realise this. But it seems like they're finally coming around!

The Japanese electric grid is even worse than the one in the US.

Their grid is a mix of 60Hz and 50Hz networks because of weird historical reasons. It's also single-phase, which isn't the best for mass EV charging.

Compare that to, say, Finland where every single apartment and house has three-phase power. 3x16A or 3x32A usually. It's completely trivial to install a 11kW home charger for example, it's just running some cables and maybe adding a load balancer - all 100yo tech.

Most Japanese houses do not have parking garages or private parking spaces, so the ability to charge from home is irrelevant.

But in any case, single phase is fine for home charging and it's the default in many parts of the world. Three phase charging is a nice luxury, but far from a necessity.

In many Japanese cities you won't get a permit to buy a car unless you can prove you have a place to park it. Curbside parking isn't a thing.

So in those cases it really is irrelevant whether you can charge or not =)

Indeed. And it's not so difficult to make a rule that wherever car parks and parking spaces are built, chargers must also be provided.

BEV is hit and miss for Japan. For vehicle usage, it's great that we don't need to import oil from mideast (that is a big reason for trade deficit) and of course it's great for commute and non-long commercial usage. But it's not suitable for a big personal car use case. Japanese family can't take holidays as what they want, so they tend to do long trip in the same specific long holidays (new year, Golden week, Obon, Silver week), that needs tremendous amount of fast charging equipment at highway or need to wait multiple hours after BEVs sold well. So theoretically PHEV should be good option but manufacturers hadn't sold it much (except Mitsubishi). It's hard to install slow charger for mechanical parking system that is common in dense cities.

For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. Toyota cares Japan economy (cared in a bad way, hydrogen for car). IMO they should had promoted PHEV more in 2012-2015.

The "holiday weekend" phenomena is not unique to Japan. It's a challenge already for many countries with growing EV share, where you often see big queues at charging stations along highways at peak holiday times.

It's not insurmountable, though. For one thing, big industries tend to shut down on holiday weekends, so there is lots of spare generation & transmission capacity on the grid. Here in the UK it's not unusual for wholesale electricity prices to go negative on windy holiday weekends - there's so much surplus energy available that the grid struggles to deal with it all! That makes holidays very profitable for charging operators and gives a strong incentive to deploy as much fast charging as possible.

Dynamic pricing can also help here. You raise prices at the most congested charging locations and busiest times, and lower them at under-utilised locations and off-peak times. Tesla already do this with their superchargers. Navigation software that is aware of how busy the chargers are can also route traffic onto less congested routes where there is unlikely to be queues.

Also remember that there is plenty of time to build out all the needed charging infrastructure. Even if all car sales switched to EV tomorrow, we've still got 10-20 years before we approach 100% of journeys being made by EV, depending on how fast the vehicle fleet gets turned over in your country.

> "For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. "

Japan must make BEVs in Japan in order to secure the future of the Japanese car industry. If they don't keep up with the times, there won't be a Japanese car industry in the long term - at least not for exports. Japan putting their heads in the sand will not make the global EV transition disappear!

What about using hydrogen in lorries/trucks? I see that argument thrown around often in hydrogen vs battery discussions.

For long-haul trucks it's a viable option. I think there's a large-ish test fleet in Switzerland.

But for personal vehicles it's 100% dead unless we get some huge advances in the technology.

It's an option.

But short-range trucks can operate with batteries just fine, and for long-range trucks it might end up being more viable to just construct overhead wires[0] above long-distance highways and avoid the problem altogether.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg

I don't blame you for being skeptical, but it isn't just the oil and gas industry. The Japanese government went all-in on hydrogen.

https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydr...

Sure, and it's by and large viewed as a complete failure[0]. Is your argument that we should repeat that failure?

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4266501...

No? I'm not sure why you jumped to attack me when I was simply providing a counter-point to your claim that it's all "oil and gas". I drive an EV, I'm quite happy with it.

As to the article: they fail to mention that Japan hasn't even begun to throw in the towel. The newest CEO of Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen powered vehicles.

https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-pla...

Also, it's not a complete failure according to the article he mentions "The 20-page report doesn’t argue for hydrogen’s complete removal from the energy mix. In fact, REI argues that hydrogen is vital for industries where decarbonization is particularly tricky (think: aviation, shipping, and steelmaking). However, to use hydrogen in place of electrification via other renewable sources is a mistake, REI says."

Japan has little traditional fossil fuels, but they were making a lot of noise about exploiting the methane hydrate in their seas:

> Methane hydrate is confirmed to exist abundantly in the sea near Japan and is expected to become one of the domestic energy resources of the future

https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/

So in this case, they're really just a subset of the "oil and gass industry" boosting hydrogen vehicles.

It has been just a dream for a long time.

Japan is clinging to hydrogen like a drowning man to driftwood.

About 80% of Japan's energy is imported coal and natural gas. Their electric grid is a bonkers mix of 50Hz and 60Hz single-phase.

Hydrogen is the only viable solution for them and even that's not going too well despite lofty goals. They can't build the tech and infrastructure alone and the rest of the world just isn't as enthusiastic on H2.

The 50Hz and 60Hz is an accident of history and neatly splits the country in half. It's not a problem.

Their domestic voltage is also 100v. I've never thought about it before but it does seem like that might pose some challenges in electrifying their road transportation. 240v is considerably more useful when you are trying to suck down 7kw or more.

Now that you mention it, the electric connection in my home in Tokyo was much worse than the one I have in Calgary. They might have connections of 60 amps [1] or less where I lived (whereas my home in Calgary has a 100 amp connection which can be upgraded to 200 if I paid for it)

[1] Found this here (https://www4.tepco.co.jp/en/customer/guide/moving-e.html), I don't recall what exactly it was where I lived.

It is a problem, because there's limited capacity to move electricity between the systems. You can just plug them together, they have essentially two separate grids.

I think it would be a problem if they had ten tiny grids, but is two decently sized grids that are in roughly the same time zone (so peak solar doesn’t need to go from A to B) a big deal?

It was a huge problem when earthquake stopped many power plants in east area.

It is when a 1500MW nuclear power plant built in area A is essentially useless for anyone in area B.

Yes, you can transform from 50Hz to 60Hz, but the capacity is limited and can't be grown infinitely.

I think that may be due to pressure from their automotive industry, who for whatever reason are very resistant to making battery electric cars.

It's because batteries are expensive to produce, maintain, and are not as environmentally friendly as going from solar directly to hydrogen via electrolysis. There's more parity for existing fossil fuel engine use cases with hydrogen as well.

My understanding is liquid hydrogen could be a contender for a green jet fuel alternative. Batteries are too heavy.

I think we'll see a synthetic version of jet fuel before we see a hydrogen powered plane in mass production.

Far less trouble to store and use and much higher energy density, also works with existing airframes (fuel tanks!) and engines.

Plus it works with the FAA and with the existing expertise in the Airline industry.

The big problem is that fueling with liquid hydrogen is not easy. Getting things down to that temperature is not easy. Getting hydrogen cleanly is not easy.

I mean if hydrogen was just as abundant in the atmosphere as oxygen and didn’t need to be at ridiculous temperatures to be liquid, it would be a great fuel.

But to keep things green you’re fighting a ton of trade-offs using electricity, it which point why don’t you just use the electricity directly?

My understanding of the airline industry is that it will be MUCH easier to further synthesise that green hydrogen into proper jet fuel than to build and certify a jet that runs on Hydrogen.

Batteries are heavy, expensive and we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale.

I don’t believe hydrogen is the answer but methane cells could be… liquid energy storage is just so much more practical compared to alternatives.

“We don’t have the infrastructure” is a temporary problem. The same could have been said about gas stations and the electrical grid capacity needed for widespread air conditioning.

Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end.

The weight efficiency can only improve from here and more charging infrastructure and faster recharge times will mean less demand for long range variants. This is ideal for electrics because shorter frequent stops are more time efficient for EVs while for gas vehicles it’s the opposite.

The great thing about electricity is that it’s even easier to transport and generate than liquid fuel storage. Generation can be centralized with a diverse set of energy sources.

> The weight efficiency can only improve from here

I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons.)

Is range really an issue if you can easily find charging spot and recharge in less than 15min?

It is in the mind of consumers, yes (I have not offered my personal opinion and don’t want to, as it’s irrelevant to the point.) There has been a lot of consumer studies on this and range anxiety is a very real thing.

> They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons

The difference in wear between a 3600 pound RAV4 and a 4400 pound Model Y is so minor that it'll disappear in the noise. Nobody will notice. The only time it'll even come close to mattering is on residential streets that never see any commercial trucks. And even then, nobody cares now about the 6500 pound HD pickups that are so popular, so I can't see why that would suddenly become an issue.

I mean, if we’re picking models to support our points, I’d counter with the Hummer EV which is 9,630 lbs. Road wear goes up with the 4th power of weight, so doubling the weight increases road wear 16x… it’s not something we should just ignore.

That car cannot be legally driven in Europe on a B license due to its weight. Phew.

If only we had that kind of sanity in the US… the electric hummer is an absolute monstrosity and should never have been made IMO. I am a supporter of EV’s but, I am increasingly skeptical that legacy US automakers will ever “get it” when it comes to efficiency, and it’s not surprising at all to end up with monster vehicles like the EV hummer. But I do admit the American consumer shares as much of the blame by demanding such large (in size, if not necessarily weight) vehicles in the first place. It’s like GM said “we need an SUV at least this big, and we need at least this much range. Engineers said it’ll weigh 10,000 lbs? Fuck it, nobody will notice, ship it.”

The Hummer is a toy. It sells in toy numbers, and has toy impact on society. It's a distraction. The most popular EVs are just like the most popular ICEVs -- crossovers.

That Hummer also does 0-60 in 3 seconds. Imagine the amount of damage it can do just going all out from traffic lights and crashing into someone...

It's like someone took America and distilled it into an EV :D

> if we’re picking models to support our points, I’d counter with the Hummer EV

I picked the Model Y, which has outsold every other non-pickup vehicle except the RAV4, and it's really close to the RAV4 numbers. It's a good comparison.

How many Hummers has GM sold this year? Couple hundred? That's three orders of magnitude fewer than the Model Y, the Hummer is irrelevant.

You’re absolutely right and I don’t disagree at all, but what worries me is the mindset that produced the Hummer. It feels a lot like GM started with a constraint of “Americans like larger vehicles”, then added “Americans want long range”, then told the engineers to make it happen, and the result is something that weighs 4.35 metric tons. The fact that weight itself didn’t seem to be a constraint guiding the design is worrisome to me, and is a sign that we can expect more superheavy vehicles like these in the future.

I would counter that by saying that the Hummer EV is an exotic car that is not going to be widely available and isn’t intended to be sold in high volume.

GM sold 272 of them last year and only 47 this year.

It’s basically a halo car and technological showcase.

I’m already on board with the urbanist camp that believes car-focused infrastructure is economically and environmentally unsustainable. EVs don’t help the American addiction to stroads and strip malls.

I just happen to also believe that EVs are no worse than the status quo and are almost certainly at least marginally better than any other alternative on the table.

Weight is an air pollution problem - tires and brake pads release fines during normal usage. Regenerative braking helps, but only so much.

https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384

Electricity is easy to transport but very hard to store and it's the storage that's the problem, see batteries.

_You_ don't. We do.

There are 6 over 100kW charging spots under 1km of my house. Although I don't need any of them, because I can charge where I park at 2kW all day and night.

6 is a number an order of magnitude too small unless you live in a desert. If you live in a city, it's probably closer to two orders.

To support 60 assuming ~50% utilization you'll need 1MW per 1 sqkm additional power. This isn't a small number. The grid anywhere is absolutely not ready for such a rapid increase of load. There isn't enough refined copper produced worldwide to upgrade the grid. I mean setting up a copper mine on 16 Psyche is not a batshit insane idea here.

Why does a city need ~100 L3 chargers per km2? People don't need to drive as far within a city, so even home L1 chargers should handle most city residents needs. The L3 chargers seem most useful on highways exiting the city.

Well, we have a power grid and not a hydrogen grid.

Hydrogen can be created from water and electricity

It can yes, but the efficiency is laughable. It's only viable when you've got essentially free renewables AND you've filled every battery you can.

Water is quite affordable and so is solar. The efficiency of both solar and electrolysis will likely increase as more research is done.

Obviously. But if you already have the electricity it's more efficient to use it directly.

We (in the US) have very little hydrogen infrastructure but there's high voltage power lines basically everywhere - so it seems like hydrogen has the infrastructure and scaling issues.

Batteries are indeed heavy - but so are portable hydrogen storage cell that don't easily explode or require liquid cooling.

I agree with you that hydrogen isn't the answer but methane doesn't really seem to be either. Batteries and electric cars are already here - they just need to continue scaling the infrastructure and work on lightening up the vehicles.

There isn't enough infrastructure to power all the eventual electric cars.

Yet.

You're right, we'll need about 20% more electricity if we replaced all our ICE cars with electric ones. If we stop selling gas cars in 2035 then by about 2045 we'll hit ~99% electric cars.

Are you implying we can't increase our infrastructure by 20% in 20 years?

What's involved in increasing electricity infrastructure by 20%? Have you looked at the timeline of some large scale, coordinated effort public infrastructure projects?

One that's close to home for me is the Seattle area's light rail system. Voters approved a plan that includes an extension of the line from downtown Seattle to the neighborhood I live in sometime around 2016. Service is now scheduled to start in 2039, but there have already been multiple delays.

Interconnect backlog queue is limiting factor, and it's five years.

There are currently enough projects in the queue to double our generating capacity.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...

2016 means you're talking about ST3, and 2039 means you're talking about Ballard [1]. It looks like the date in ST3 for Ballard was originally 2038 [2], so it doesn't seem delayed that much *yet*.

That said, I'm not sure large-scale transit projects are too comparable to electric infrastructure. The ST1 project had a lot of delays due to disagreements about where the rail line would go, and the cost of purchasing land [3]. It's a system designed to move people to places, so a lot of people have opinions on which places the system should go. By contrast, people mostly care that enough electricity is getting delivered to where they live, and don't really care how it gets there.

[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Link_light_rail

We can't even provide for the current needs on a cold or hot day… I'm not "implying" anything, I just notice the continuous blackouts in summer and in cold winter days.

There wasn't enough silicon wafer manufacturing infrastructure in 2005 to meet global silicon wafer demand in 2023 either, yet somehow humans magically got together, invested money, built plants, and wow, a decade and a half later there is silicon wafer manufacturing infrastructure to meet global demand.

Imagine not understanding the ability for humans to build things. Pretty sure the comment i'm responding to is a gas industry shill.

It is both a violation of HN guidelines and reason to assume that the person you are simply disagreeing with is an industry shill rather than simply someone you disagree with.

This is one reason I like to suggest putting PV onto cars directly, even though normal shaped cars will only get 8-12 miles of extra range per day from this, and even though the surface of a vehicle is one of the worst places for PV cells: 8-12 miles per vehicle per day makes a big difference to the overall infrastructure requirements.

Small scale plants are the key when the grid is either unreliable or insufficient.

It's not much of an issue to have, say, a 1000kWh battery with some small/medium scale solar or wind power feeding it. Or even the grid if there's extra.

Then everyone around that battery uses it primarily for their energy needs and only when it runs out they tap into the larger grid.

The only thing solar panels on cars are good for is keeping the AC running in the summer so the car (and battery) are cool at all times.

But there isn’t any infrastructure for fueling the hydrogen cars.

A move towards hydrogen means 3-5x more energy requirements (which also cost money) as well as a transmission and distribution network for the gas.

At home charging and on street parking charging will be an easier retrofit than the construction of new refueling stations.

Well the whole powergrid needs to be basically re-made to handle all the extra load… although I agree that it's probably cheaper than distributing hydrogen.

Anyway we should go towards trains IMHO, we should absolutely not even have long distance trucks.

About the infrastructure. I've got many ways to recharge my car available today. I've got zero places to fill hydrogen. I don't even have many CNG options.

>we don’t have infrastructure to charge them at the required scale.

Yeah we do, or to be more precise, we are having no trouble expanding the infrastructure at the same rate people are buying the cars.

Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view.

Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.

Or possibly our descendants ;)

Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires.

Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.

> quite literally insane from all practical points of view

Erm. I don't think that's true.

I’d expect that, but would have assumed it is due to there being more old gas vehicles on the road. Is that data normalized for age of the cars driven?

I assume that my neighbors 30 year old gas guzzler is more likely to catch fire than my 1 year old PHEV for example (or maybe I’m more likely since I have both a lithium battery and a gas tank).

That fun fact may be true, but ask any firefighter that has had to put out a lithium based car fire how fun that fact is. The lithium based fires require 12-15 times the amount of water to extinguish.

They can also be put out with a blanket apparently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv2L_QYg4oA

Although weirdly enough the video demonstration doesn't seem to be of a battery fire. :facepalm

Why is water being used for either? One's an electricity-rich fire, the other's an oil-rich fire, water's an unwise response to both for different reasons.

> Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view.

And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable. Really, it's a wonder these things were ever allowed. :)

duskwuff says: >"And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable"<

1. Off by an order of magnitude: ~4-6 quarts of oil in the motor, about the same for the transmission yielding for a large motor about 2 gallons total.

2. duskwuff says >"they're still quite flammable."< Nonsense. Engine oil is so hard to burn that it is not classified as flammable by OSHA:

https://firefighterinsider.com/is-motor-oil-flammable-you-ma...

Furthermore these oils are encased in heavy metal (the engine block, the transmission block and the differential casing).

Starting batteries (the 6- and 12-volt kind) cause more fires than do engine and/or transmission oils.

To paraphrase Charlton Heston: "I'll give you my gasoline car when you can pry it from my cold, greasy, dead hands."

> Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view.

And ICEs are powered by many thousands of mini explosions per minute with a side effect of producing an odorless gas that can kill us silently.

Everything can be scaremongered.

And personal transportation, as much as I wish wasn't the case, is a fact of life since 1910.

What happened in 1910? The first automobile dates from 1886, and I'm pretty sure the horse&buggy personal transportation method predates it by several centuries.

Mass manufacturing. Almost everything became widely available, at least in developing and developed countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T

Technically 1908, but we can round.

The first automobiles were practically toys for the rich. Cars didn't really become a "mass market" thing until ~1910.

A canister of hydrogen in your car isn't exactly safe, either!!

The insane bit when you look at it logically is the car shaped object part - we drive around in and store portable living rooms.

Yes, but also the moral crusade to replace "shitty way to live and move around" with "equally shitty way to live and move around, but with a different set of externalities" is equally insane.

We currently put toxic and highly flammable gasoline into car-shaped objects. The car needs to carry its energy with it somehow. Energetic things tend to be flammable and toxic, since those are just uncontrolled ways to release energy

> Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium

Maybe cut back on the hyperbole a bit. Two tons is the entire car. The lithium content of the battery is 15-20 pounds. And it's not straight lithium metal that becomes flammable in the presence of water. It's the electrolytes that are flammable. And most EVs in the world use LFP, which doesn't have that flammability problem.

LFPs are flammable too, they just don't tend to ignite as easily. I suspect they're probably easier to put out, but I don't know for sure.

(I'd be curious what the real-life vehicle fire statistics actually are so far for regular lithium ion versus LFP. LFP is promoted as being safer, but at this point there should be enough vehicle fire statistics to be able to quantify how much safer they are. The Tesla Model 3 might be a good model to compare because it's available in both versions, though maybe there just aren't enough model 3 fires to be statistically significant.)

The FAA has studied this. LFPs are an order of magnitude less prone to fire, and less intense when they do. There are some fun videos out there put together by fire departments testing various battery chemistries. It's fairly easy to make a regular modern lithium ion battery erupt in flame. It's hard to get LFP to do much more than release the magic smoke. And LTO batteries, which are another variety, don't even smoke.

EV fires are already significantly less common than ICEV fires. Factor in LFP, and maybe we should start kicking ICEVs out of garages because they're unsafe. And lest you think ICEVs don't spontaneously combust -- that's very much incorrect, there have been recent recalls of millions of ICEVs for exactly that.

I was aware that internal combustion cars catch fire more often. There's a bit of a compensatory difference in severity: EVs don't catch fire as often, but it's especially bad when they do. But hopefully we can quickly move past the era of super-flammable EV batteries even if actual EV fires are rare.

I look forward to kicking fossil fuel based cars out of everywhere for reasons unrelated to safety. Or you could say reasons that have to do with the collective safety of all life on Earth rather than individual safety.

The negative externalities of the large-scale strip-mining and fossil-fuel-burning effort to convert all cars to electric will not improve the collective safety of life on Earth.

Also, remember that lithium is also a fossil fuel. Electicity is not magic, you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.

> large-scale strip-mining and fossil-fuel-burning effort to convert all cars to electric

What about the large-scale strip-mining, fossil-fuel-burning, and other absolutely nasty environmental efforts of continuing to use oil? And how much of that oil pulled from the ground is actually recyclable and reusable?

> lithium is also a fossil fuel

Lithium is by definition not a fossil fuel, as it isn't from the remains of long dead living organisms. Fossil fuels are all organic chemistry! Lithium is inorganic!

> you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.

A significant percentage of the electricity from my wall socket does not come from fossil fuels. And even then, the EV is massively more efficient per mile than an equivalent gas car and the natural gas power plant supplying the non-renewable part is also massively more efficient and less emission producing per watt of power than a car's motor. The break even, even if 100% of the electricity was natural gas, is still like 30,000mi.

Any mechanism that can store enough energy to get a car from point A to point B is going to store a nontrivial amount of energy and be subject to some eyebrow-raising failure modes. This applies to gasoline, diesel fuel, batteries, and all flavors of hydrogen.

I still believe there is potential for hydrogen/ammonia/methane fuel to be a seasonal storage mechanism. Battery technology does not seem capable of offering grid scale storage for the entirety of Winter. While the solar->fuel->electricity conversion takes huge efficiency hits, for “free” renewable energy, it can still pencil out as economical. Plus, it is feasible today without unobtanium (but not currently cost competitive vs fossil fuels)

Hydrogen is _really_ hard to store. It leaks from every container, transport and storage losses are just an accepted fact.

It might be a good option when we have so much renewables that we can't find any more batteries to shove it in. Then we can use it to store compressed hydrogen, that can be released as electricity from large-scale fuel cells during calm cloudy days.

> seasonal storage mechanism

Is this even needed? With solar, wind, etc storing more than a few days worth of energy seems very wasteful.

Available solar energy is significantly lower in winter. Additionally, heating typically requires more energy than cooling, so it is a double whammy. Solar alone cannot generate sufficient power without ludicrous over provisioning which would be wasted the majority of the year.

Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.

Sure, but the same companies that lobby for hydrogen for cars & heating, claiming green benefits there one day, don’t raise a finger to decarbonate hydrogen for fertilizers, which does make it seem like they don’t actually care about reducing CO₂ emissions. The article points out the hypocrisy:

> Liebreich gives an example of Shell being happy to spend $12bn on a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform, the Prelude, which has seen a host of problems, “but they won't spend $12bn just producing blue, green, pink, or any other sort of clean hydrogen for those [existing] uses where we currently are driving 3-4% of global emissions”.

Absolutely. A sane hydrogen strategy can not be left to the lobbyists. Unfortunately, these companies have a lot of money to throw around, and they have no qualms about speaking to peoples "anti-ideological" impulses. In Germany, we have seen this strategy employed a number of times now politically: There is a clear technological winner (EV, battery, heat pumps, etc...), however with enormous transition costs (new infrastructure, people changing habits). So it's inconvenient. You then simply claim that you are pro-climate, but you want a "technologically neutral" solution, claiming that the slightly inconvenient winning technologies are driven by "green" moralizing and ideology. As no alternative technologies are ready to go, and their trade-offs and inconveniences (e.g. where do you build all the wind farms to produce the electricity to get your hydrogen) are not apparent in the immediate future, you get to not inconvenience your electorate, seem pragmatic/rational (vs the "green ideologues"), while still talking pro-climate.

It's not exactly been a winning strategy electorally for those who employ it the loudest, but it's been an effective strategy to prevent political wins of the parties and politicians that actually want to make the sustainability transition happen.

So far, it seems to have empowered the anti-establishment populist right instead...

A reason I think carbon pricing makes sense. Then you can calculate the most economical solution rather than going with the slickest politicians.

Carbon pricing is great theory, but also is a massive cop-out politically. It moves the pain point into the future. If todays governments can't implement measures that are somewhat uncomfortable, why do you believe that a government in five or ten years will actually be able to implement or sustain a carbon price that is effective?

I will not believe a policy based around future increases in carbon price unless it is implemented at a constitutional level (i.e. hard to reverse), comes with a detailed plan to redistribute the taxes raised in a manner that makes it socially just, and includes detailed information campaigns what the future price means for investments done now.

Having a huge carbon price in 10 years, for example, implies that internal combustion engine cars are worthless then. Just trying to implement a policy to stop selling them in ten years already causes a huge backlash, the idea that there will be the political capital to turn all existing ICE cars into expensive paper weights that only the richest few can afford to drive is wishful thinking.

Carbon prices do have an important role to play, but for those situations where we need to transform large systems in our societies (heat sector, mobility) that are incredibly ingrained in the status quo, relying on market mechanisms that depend on a politically backed price does not seem feasible.

Absolutely agree.

Yup. Even Toyota, a big H2 promoter is bailing and announcing high-range. solid-state, fast charging batteries [0, 1, 2]. Makes me wonder if the H2 promotion was just a ruse to misdirect the rest of the industry while it caught up, and possibly even leapfrogged (we'll see if their announcements play out), on battery tech?

[0] Toyota Teases Solid-State Batteries in 2027

https://spectrum.ieee.org/toyota-solid-state-battery

[1] Toyota reveals its plan to catch up on EV battery technology Three liquid chemistries, solid state cells, and flatter battery packs.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/toyota-reveals-its-plan...

[2] LGES to supply Toyota with batteries, invest $3 billion in US plant

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...

I think Toyota also had their hands tied a bit because the entire country of Japan has heavily invested in hydrogen. I can understand why it makes sense strategically for a country like Japan without their own oil (or lithium?) reserves. Toyota is a Japanese industrial powerhouse so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were receiving subsidies and maybe even direction on hydrogen research. Only now that they have invested enough to prove hydrogen is a fantasy can they move on to batteries.

I’m not sure it’s such a loss though. Nissan was early with the Leaf but nobody talks about them as cornering the EV market. Toyota can benefit from the battery advancements everyone else made over the last 15 years and catch up quickly.

At the time it made sense to invest in hydrogen. And in hindsight it wasn’t as much of a mistake as it might seem. It was a moonshot but they didn’t risk their existence on it and if it had worked they’d look like geniuses. If hydrogen was feasible Toyota and Japan would be world leaders in energy tech or at least have secure domestic energy independence.

Maybe it just needs to work in their borders Japan had a unique response to the 1973 oil crisis. Given recent instability in Russia/Ukraine, Afghanistan after the Withdrawal, and now Israel, having a hedge against petroleum primarily sourced in the Middle East and Russia it's a smart hedge to have. Besides, Americans have switched from wanting big extravagant American Made cars to small fuel efficient ones from Japan before

I think Toyota is making these pie-in-the-sky announcements to Osborne[1] other manufacturer's BEVs, and delay electrification too, because Toyota's actual battery tech that exist is far behind their competitors.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Yes, real possibility, but note that the direction is still away from H1 and towards batteries

>very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.

The basic mistake you're making here is thinking that "carbon free" is key. It is not, what matters is that a given energy source is carbon NEUTRAL. Anthropogenic global warming is driven primarily by net increase in atmospheric CO2 on our timescale. When CO2 in consumed from the atmosphere, and then shortly released again (textbook example being a plant fixing CO2/H2O into sugar and the getting eaten by an animal and the animal the metabolizing sugar back to CO2/H2O) the short term net change is zero. The problem has come from releasing stored carbon that was fixed in geologically long term ways, ie, fossil fuels.

We're used to thinking of "hydrocarbons" as equivalent to "fossil fuels" but that's not true. It's perfectly possible to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2, water, and zero carbon energy like solar. Burning those hydrocarbons later will result in net zero change to atmospheric CO2, and thus are perfectly acceptable from an AGW POV (at ground level in particular burning fuels have other pollution issues that may be worth getting away from, but not global warming). The issue is "just" cost, it's much more inefficient and thus costlier to go solar -> fuel synthesis -> combustion -> useful work vs solar -> transmission -> battery -> work. But for applications where battery energy density is insufficient or other properties are required (like high performance aircraft that use fuel as coolant as well as energy) that could be worth it.

So green hydrogen directly faces not just batteries, but green methane, gasoline and other hydrocarbons. Which are far, far easier to work with and have many better properties than hydrogen itself. And on top of course feed seamlessly into existing infrastructure and system.

Steel production really needs hydrogen though. Hopefully the first test-production facilities will come online soon in Sweden. But I agree on for instance air travel. Don't faff around with hydrogen in planes. Convert the hydrogen to something liquid, like the Porsche e-fuel, then use it in regular jet turbofans.

What is the hydrogen doing chemically such that it is needed?

It replaces the massive amounts of coal that is used. It changes from (simplifying)

    2 Fe2O3 + 3 C → 4 Fe + 3 CO2

    Fe2O3 + 6 H2 → 2 Fe + 3 H2O

At the moment emissions are: 1.4 kg CO2 per kg of steel produced. And westernized countries will use 321 kg of steel per capita per year.

So switching to hydrogen could save about 500kg of CO2 per capita. Carbon capture of the fumes could help alleviate some 30% of that. Direct air capture is just not feasible, or wayy to expensive compared to just using H2.

In any case, even with H2; 321 kg of steel per capita will have to be reduced (main uses: construction, transport, industry, pipes, machines, weapons)

The processes to make synthetic fuels are well known have proven to scale to a countries needs for energy. Germany did it in WWII, South Africa did it for a while too.

The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.

I've seen some presentations over the last half a decade that are trying to couple this to fission as a form of cogeneration, and the carbon capture story for the resulting hydrocarbon synthfuels is pretty compelling.

>The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.

The real problem there though of course is that oil from the a well has always been cheating by not pricing in its externalities. To get an apples-to-apples comparison with synthetic fuel, fossil fuel would also have to be made at a minimum [0] carbon net neutral too, such as by running an atmospheric scrubber and ensuring that for every ton of carbon coming out of the ground a ton was getting captured again in an equivalently long term stable way.

----

0: Fossil fuel extraction has always resulted in a ton of other externalities too, not just in terms of massive non-carbon pollution but geopolitical costs. That itself may well be a driver, if a country can switch fully to renewable/nuclear power and then run its entire economy solely off of that via grid/batteries/synthetic hydrocarbons the security implications alone are pretty massive. No more fossil fuel blackmail from hostile regimes, ever.

Wasn't Germany's WWII "synthetic fuel" just coal derived gasoline?

Synthetic fuels are also made from hydrogen. That's actually what i had in mind.

For long haul flight, hydrogen's main use is going to be producing fuels that can actually go that distance. Hydrogen has a volumetric problem and it just isn't a great fuel for that reason. Even over short distances this is problematic. It just takes up too much space. It's about 2.5 x that of lng in both liquid and gas form. In liquid form, you need to cool it to a few degrees above 0 degrees kelvin, which makes it very impractical in a plane. And of course lng even in liquid form does not compare that favorably to things like kerosene.

Green steel you can do without hydrogen. Basically you need lots of heat and some carbon to produce steel. Generating heat with electricity is not that hard. You can use induction, plasma heating, resistive heating, etc. And doing that is a lot more efficient than using that same electricity to first create hydrogen and then burn it.

Hydrogen has its place, mostly as a chemical half product that is used to create other stuff. It doesn't store very well; it doesn't travel very well. It's mostly used close to where it is generated. Which as of yet is done almost exclusively by expending large amounts of fossil methane or coal. Green hydrogen production is minuscule and relatively inefficient and costly. Most uses of hydrogen today are neither green nor sustainable. Or carbon free. And that's going to stay like this for a while. Even just shifting current hydrogen production to being green is going to take a massive investment and take decades.

> Hydrogen has a volumetric problem and it just isn't a great fuel for that reason. Even over short distances this is problematic. It just takes up too much space.

Blended wing body designs may solve the volume problem. It's only intractable if you try to fit the same energy content into a modern airliner that was designed for Jet A.

Weight is the usual suspect in aerospace, and fuel weight significantly favors hydrogen over Jet A (factor of ~2), so a blended wing body design with a much larger internal volume wouldn't even have to have equal aerodynamic efficiency in order to be a suitable replacement.

To be clear, this is not a simple shift and will probably take decades, but it is merely an engineering challenge rather than a fundamental constraint.

> Green hydrogen production is minuscule and relatively inefficient and costly. Most uses of hydrogen today are neither green nor sustainable. Or carbon free. And that's going to stay like this for a while.

Your other points hold, but I don't think this one is necessarily so (depending what you mean by "a while"): electrolysis is so incredibly trivial that I suspect it'll become green as fast as the grid in general, and if current exponential trend continues, that's going to be almost everything within a decade.

If the current exponential continues. It might, but such is never assured.

We'd need a lot of renewables for this to work though. Like a lot more than we currently have or that is currently planned/under construction. Orders of magnitude more. At the cost of a few trillion $. The math just isn't great for this.

Just doing the simple math of the twh needed to produce the fuel for a major airport on a daily basis is kind of eye watering. Just a little back of the envelope math makes it really obvious that that's not going to be a thing any time soon even if we do get some magic laws of physics defying electrolysis technology (those pesky laws of thermodynamics are hard to beat though).

And even just shifting current hydrogen production, which is good for a few percent of carbon emissions today, is a huge undertaking. I agree that electrolysis improvements will actually make that cost effective to do at some point. Possibly even as soon as next decade. But right now it just isn't and most of those electrolysis companies still have a few things to prove. Like having working products or the ability to produce those cost effectively at scale. Either way, within now and a decade, we won't have nearly enough renewables in place to power any of this new hydrogen economy. We'd struggle to power the current one with that. As long as renewables remain scarce, hydrogen is not a great use case for wasting them.

> Orders of magnitude more

Yes. 30% per year compound growth does that very quickly.

(Exponentials will turn into s-curves of course, no guarantees, but growth here doesn't have to be asymptotic to the current market).

absolutely.

but the interesting thought experiment to have is... once you have converters all over the place for those uses... would that make it more attractive to cars?

Quebec now tests a hydrogen train.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1...

Am not well versed on these considerations but it appears one advantage of hydrogen is energy density compared to batteries. This may be less an issue for passenger vehicles but could be more relevant for air travel - as an example. No comments or opinions otherwise re: funding etc.

Found the below article useful as a primer:

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and...

Haven't we tried hydrogen for air travel before? ;-)

It's been used successfully for space travel, in liquid (cryogenic) form. The Space Shuttle's main engines ran on hydrogen fuel, for example.

However the latest generation of rockets seems to have moved away from hydrogen back to things like RP-1 (kerosene) and liquid methane. The high cost and difficulties of working with hydrogen is a factor in this.

Hindenburg

Engineering Explained occasionally discusses hydrogen energy density: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8

They definitely fly better than a lead balloon (batteries).

What kind of energy density? There is energy density by volume (where it matches batteries, when you ignore all the stuff you need to keep hydrogen at 700bar safe), and energy density by weight (where it wins pretty handily against pretty much everything).

Am not historically familiar with this topic though the attached paper above shows a comparative figure of Specific Energy in terms of Wh/Kg at both 5k and 10k psi

Edit: interesting to do the conversion and realize 700bar is just over 10k psi - misunderstood the parent comment regarding "700bar safe"

Edit2: further interesting to note how the 5k compression of the hydrogen has _higher_ Specific Energy density than 10k due to _decreased_ pressure vessel requirements

Just be careful with Hydrogen energy density as there’s a huge range of non obvious issues. Compressed you lose a great deal of energy converting it to kinetic energy and weight due to the containers + engines. Fuel cells also need electric motors and ideally a hybrid battery.

Cryogenic fuel looks great until you need to have it sit around unused. Embrittlement, volume, cost, and a rage of safety hazards make it unappealing for aircraft or ships.

So, my guess is the ideal long term solution barring “super batteries” is some sort of synthetic hydrocarbons that uses atmospheric CO2 but we are a long way from viability there.

Anybody who needs to run 24/7 and/or can't count on an electric grid could use hydrogen power: A logistics network, an army, public transportation, utility companies, forestry or mining...

Or they could just use the well known https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process to convert it the rest of the way to a hydrocarbon, not have the pesky raw hydrogen issues, and be able to use all their existing infrastructure to burn it? With the advantage of pulling carbon from the air in the process?

This is a technical requirement often overlooked by the Consumer Market compared to the Commercial Market - the heavy and long usage of equipment in remote places (generators that run for days or shipping across oceans).

Hydrogen may be a solution along with other hybrid approaches (WA state ferry electrification being relevant [1])

[1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/major-projects/fe...

Not really, because if you don't have access to electricity then you very likely don't have access to hydrogen either. Hydrogen is much more difficult to transport and store compared to natural gas, gasoline, diesel, etc.

Getting electricity out of hydrogen works the same way as getting electricity out of all the sources you mentioned, except your generator now produces zero emissions.

JCB are heavily in to hydrogen. They’ve shown how they can convert existing diesel equipment, and setup fuel bowsers on work sites.

Once you're already committed to green hydrogen (electrolysis-made hydrogen) you may as well go whole hog and do green methane (methane made through the Sabatier process, which consumes Hydrogen and CO2).

Making a methane-powered jetliner is far more practical than a hydrogen-powered one.

That's right, but there's an even better option: making synthetic kerosene from green H2 and CO2 so it can be used in existing jetliners.

I thought it was hard to contain since the particle is so small (leaks).

Liquid I suppose, temperature concern though.

For boats, fuel cells can make sense. But air travel not only requires a high energy density but also a high power density, and here the fuel cells are relatively weak even by car standards. The alternative is to burn hydrogen, which introduces an inefficiency that eats up most of your advantage. For a car, you can have a small auxiliary battery, but a jet engine will run at max power for several minutes continuously during take-off, and for existing jet engines the power-to-weight ratio is considered a crucial figure of merit.

For hydrogen storage, the DoE targets are truly sobering [1]. That whittles down hydrogen from roughly 100 times as dense as batteries to about 5. Throw a 50% thermodynamic efficiency (jet engines are not efficient!) on top of that and hydrogen still has an advantage, but it lags quite badly behind jet fuel. There have been four decades of intensive government-sponsored research effort into hydrogen storage materials, but all existing systems in practical use rely on fiber-composite tanks at 700 bar.

You get better results with an ammonia-burning jet engine. Here the tank weight is negligible and the hydrogen storage density is effectively 15% (after correcting for the enthalpy of formation). But ammonia still has just half the energy density of jet fuel, and it's rather unpleasant to work with. Plus, the existing production process of ammonia faces its own serious inefficiencies, and extensive investigation of more efficient ammonia production has been painstaking with only one Japanese startup [3] that is behind its timeline (probably a little COVID-influenced) and other contenders at lab stage.

With the direct ammonia fuel cell, the power density issue is even worse, but the energy density is very good. This technology competes well with fossil fuels for weight-sensitive applications that do not require high power (DARPA has been interested in a DAFC drone). But ammonia fuel cells are mostly at lab stage, partially because ammonia production remains disappointing (despite a theoretical energy cost of zero) despite considerable research effort.

1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage

2: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=tsubam...

You know what does make it make sense?

If you can take natural gas out of the ground, split it into hydrogen and CO2 (releasing heat, which can be used to generate electricity), and inject the CO2 back underground to help release more oil and gas.

At this point, you have hydrogen gas.

Sure, you could burn that hydrogen to make more electricity, but it works out financially better if you can directly use it.

The benefit of this approach is it can make use of most of the existing oil and gas infrastructure, and countries sitting on big gas reserves have a use for them.

The downside is it makes minimal sense unless there is some financial disincentive from just burning the gas and releasing the CO2.

You hit the nail on the head, this is why oil companies are pro-hydrogen.

They can greenwash their natural gas into "green" hydrogen and get even more profits. H2 prices are at least 5-10x compared to natural gas.

This is similar to fracking, no? Doesn't it have the same seismic/water table problems?

Yep. And it won’t be 100% efficient. The energy to capture and store the co2 is likely greater then the energy you get in hydrogen

CO2 reduces the viscosity of oil, and helps get more oil out of the oil well.

Even ignoring climate benefits, it's still worth pumping CO2 down the well for financial reasons alone - especially towards the end of the lifespan of classical oil wells.

Unfortunately it is a bit tricky in practice, and still have a very significant global warming footprint[0]. You're never going to capture 100% of the CO4, and oil and gas wells tend to leak quite a lot of methane to the atmosphere.

So-called "blue" hydrogen only results in about 10% less GHG emissions than traditional "grey" hydrogen. It's something, but not big enough of a difference to actually be usable.

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956

Isn’t that effectively what they call “blue hydrogen”[0]? All oil companies seem very slow in deploying that; there is no question that it is much more expensive than just releasing the CO₂ in the air.

[0]: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/what-we-do/delivering-indus...

I think oil+gas companies are currently just waiting for the right moment to deploy it.

Blue hydrogen only makes sense with global carbon caps, taxes or quotas. And it only makes sense if CO2 injected underground doesn't count towards that cap/tax/quota.

So far, there is no political appetite for global taxes/caps/quotas, so blue hydrogen is only at pilot-plant scale.

The problem is that oil/gas companies see their impending demise. They are good at moving flammable things through pipes. Electricity is not that, and if it takes hold, they're in for a _major_ pivot. So they do what they've always done.

Batteries go bad over a rather short period of time and are incredibly expensive too. They’re basically currently infeasible as a mode of transport without _a lot_ of trade offs. Compare that to a tank for fuel, which is comparatively minuscule in cost and basically never goes bad. I don’t think electrical is as scalable as liquid fuel and I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by exotic materials.

Fuel definitely goes bad, at least once the storage is in vehicles. The petroleum industry keeps peddling all this FUD about how awful batteries are.

The difference is batteries can be improved (and there's a tooooon of $$$$ pouring into this problem) and they are improving. Petroleum is a dead end while batteries, solar, and electrical grids have a bright future and lost of room for growth.

How long is a "rather short period of time"? There are decade old EV batteries still in use and over 80% SOH.

And fuel definitely goes bad. It doesn't work like in the movies where you can just find a 30 year old car in the desert and grab more fuel for your awesome roadwarrior vehicle. You can use additives to make it last longer and store better, but still.

As for "exotic materials" we're figuring out new battery chemistries at a record pace. Some are better for vehicles, that need a good kWh/kg ratio. Others are better for grid storage where kWh/€ is a more relevant measurement.

I think the point the post you're replying to was making is that the gas tank itself doesn't usually go bad. It's true you can't just let gas sit in a tank forever, but with EVs it's also true that you can't usually just leave a battery to sit unused for years; eventually, it'll self-discharge below a threshold where it becomes permanently damaged.

I do agree that battery "problems" are exaggerated -- most will last a very long time, and batteries that don't use cobalt and nickel are available now. Sodium-ion might be relatively common in a few years for low-end applications.

> "Batteries go bad over a rather short period of time"

Not really. They do gradually lose capacity over a long time, but it's a slow process. The US Government requires EV batteries to have an 8 year / 100,000 mile warranty, and California requires 10 years and 150,000 miles. I expect most batteries will significantly exceed that.

LFP batteries generally have about 3x the longevity of other lithium ion types.

There are some examples of early battery failures, like the Nissan Leaf didn't use liquid cooling; now basically everyone else learned from their example and does it. Chevy Bolts had a battery recall due to bad manufacturing. Basically, if a battery fails early someone somewhere screwed up. Most EV batteries are fine and will continue to be fine for a very long time.

>> "I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by exotic materials."

Resource constraints are an issue, but there are workarounds. Nickel and cobalt can be avoided simply by using LFP cells. Permanent magnet motors are more efficient than induction, but the permanent magnets don't need to be based on rare-earth elements -- it's just that the non-rare-earth-magnet version would be less powerful and/or bulkier. Similarly you could wind the motors with aluminum instead of copper, and the motor would be less powerful and/or bulkier. But that's fine -- electric motors are already quite a bit smaller and more powerful than they need to be anyways.

Lithium is probably the hardest-to-get-around resource constraint with current technology, but lithium production is ramping up.

Also worth noting that the need for large batteries would be substantially reduced if were to invest heavily into charging infrastructure and even the electrification of roads so that cars don't even need to stop. (There are some projects in Sweden and Germany along those lines.)

According to Recurrent's recent report, most EVs lose only about 10% of SOH (or battery capacity/range) after 100,000 miles.

>> LFP batteries generally have about 3x the longevity of other lithium ion types <<

This is not true at all. All LFPs in EVs degrade much faster than other lithium ion batteries:

  Tesla LFP Battery 10% RANGE LOSS PROBLEM? | Model 3 RWD  (Cleanwatt citing Tessie's data) 
  The brand new LFP batteries will degrade substantially quicker.  There's not long-term retention data for LFP batteries on the market yet, but the trend tends to be substantially faster degradation.  Trends show them stabilizing around that 10% degradation mark in about half the time as non-LFP batteries - around 50,000 miles instead of 100,000 miles."

Even in ideal environment, such as ESS, LFPs would degrade substantially faster under high SOC/high c-rates (eg, EV).

LFPs lose some of their capacity early on, but then the degradation is much slower. It's just a weird quirk, it doesn't mean they're going to fail quickly.

>> LFPs lose some of their capacity early on, but then the degradation is much slower. ... <<

There is nothing weird about lithium ion batteries, including LFPs, degrading quickly under high SOC/high C-rates -- ie, EVs. We don't know anything about LFP's longevity in EV profil, and, while there is no long-term data on LFP's true lifespan in EVs, it's been demonstrated that LFP could lose as much as 1/3 of its lifespan under 100% SOC in ESS profile.

LFP's are already mostly limited to entry-level, low-range EVs due to its other technical short-coming in moving vehicles (ie, low energy density and weight). This quick degradation makes LFP even less appealing in vehicles.

Liquid fuel is inherently unscalable, it is a finite resource.

Gas, especially gas with ethanol in it, absolutely goes bad unless stored very well. It'll oxidize, absorb water, and evaporate within months. There's a lot of reasons why people "winterize" their lawn equipment; gas going bad is one big part.

The fdp, a small german party part of government, that holds the traffic ministry, managed to block an EU-wide phase-out of ICE vehicles to promote e-fuels. Whats e-fuels you ask? Its even more ridiculous than hydrogen cars - using renewable energy to synthesize fossil fuels. The beauty is that this makes ICE vehicles supposedly green, so then you can just keep selling them forever. And at some point down the line u just kill the e-fuel requirement.

Your comment contains no substance. You are just pushing a conspiracy theory.

Hydrogen based fuels make sense on multiple fronts: long term storage (batteries cannot do this), scale (adding more tanks is cheaper than whole battery packs) and energy/power densities are still above what the best batteries can provide.

> Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while [...]. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn

Sorry, you say you're familiar with hydrogen fuel cells and you don't know it's not burning?

Hydrogen fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction to turn hydrogen and oxygen from the air into electricity and water. The byproduct is water, not fire.

I'm not rich enough to own either a battery-electric or hydrogen-electric car, but it's weird how the only people who hate hydrogen are the battery people. I don't hear any hate from fossil-fuel guys.

It seems they're more interested in protecting their investment than saving the environment through a process (which is more inefficient, but) that doesn't require rare earth minerals.

> batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases

That's not true. There are two main storage cases: from day to night and from summer to winter. Because there are 365 days and nights in a year and only one summer and one winter, a battery for seasonal storage needs to be 365 times cheaper than one for daily storage to break even after the same number of years. Of course, there are no batteries that are 365 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Nothing comes close.

People are thinking that chemical energy storage could work for the case of seasonal storage. It doesn't quite work right now, but it's not off by 2 orders of magnitude, it's off by maybe a factor of 5. It is much more likely that we'll succeed in making green hydrogen production, transportation and storage economical than that we could make batteries cheaper by a factor of 100.

Separately, there is a fairly good chance that we'll be able to extract hydrogen from underground deposits (google "white hydrogen", e.g. [1]).

Third, hydrogen storage economics enjoys the square-cube law: larger pressurized tanks can hold a lot of hydrogen for not a much larger cost than smaller tanks. So hydrogen could make sense for applications where very large tanks are needed, and one such application is railways. A typical train oil car has a volume of about 130 m3. At 700 bar (typical storage tank pressure), one m3 of hydrogen weighs about 42 kg, so this is about 5.5 tons. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel, so that would be the equivalent of about 16 tons of diesel. Train have an efficiency of at least 400 ton-miles per gallon, which is more than 125 ton-miles per kg, or 2 million ton-miles for 16 tons. In other words, such a tanker car could be enough to propel a ten thousand ton freight train for 200 miles. It would be much easier to convert diesel locomotives to burn hydrogen than to electrify thousands of miles of railways, so there's a fairly good chance that rail could be hydrogen's killer app.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...

Summer to winter isn't a real storage case.

If you need more energy in the winter, you build more wind power, not PV to store it an entire year.

And episodes of little wind+sun have a duration of less than a month.

And there are more storage use cases, e.g. short term grid stabilization (<1 second).

You cannot reasonably dimension wind power to serve the winter heating needs of northern Europe. Once you get halfway there you're summer surpluses get so huge, inefficient seasonal storage becomes a much better solution.

Interestingly, others worry that the seasonal phenomenon of wind power is too large:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-pattern...

Perhaps southern Europe will counteract as well: less need in the winter and energy required for increased cooling with heat pumps in the summer

Can you explain why existing batteries don't store energy well? I don't have to use energy to crack natural gas or water. I don't have to worry about the hydrogen leaking out and catching into an invisible fire. I don't have to carry around a tank with enormous pressure, because the hydrogen isn't very dense as an energy source.

I could just say we'll solve all problems with green batteries. We can recycle batteries at > 95% of materials already. We have lifepo4 batteries that are stable, don't have cobalt and be charge up to 100% without destroying them. In reality I don't have to point to some unknown incredible improvements in the future, they work today.

I see hydrogen as the oil industrial complex and diesel & ice industrial complexes wanting to maintain all their infrastructure that burns fuel for engines. It makes sense from their standpoint.

For seasonal storage, because you cycle then so rarely, and demand between charging and discharging is so different, the economics favor low cost per kwh solutions, and care much less about efficiency.

"From 2020 through March 31, 2023, Toyota sold a total of 23,123 fuel cell vehicles."

This is less than the number of EVs Tesla builds every single week.

It's posited as a "dump" for excess electricity; while batteries may be good for storage and balancing out the grid, hydrogen is suitable to put everything else in, that is, what if the batteries are full, or there's still more electricity in the grid that has nowhere to go? Hydrogen generation - as far as I'm aware - can scale to schlurp up any excess to a huge amount in the same plant.

The other one - in my country - is that they want to wind down natural gas entirely, but then want to reuse the pipes for hydrogen; I suspect this may be to continue making use of the huge infrastructure investments made in the gas pipelines.

There is an Oil Sector Lobby and there is an electric sector Lobby too. All Lobbies hate competition.

The electric sector wants to destroy Hydrogen because it competes with them, of course, they want to destroy the seed so no tree comes out of it. Hydrogen disappearing is not going to happen, because it going to be necessary for some things, like heavy transportation.

Just because clean Hydrogen is in the early stages in development(like EV were 15 years ago) does not mean that we should not develop the technology.

I personally believe that NH3 is great for storing energy and energy transportation, and extremely useful for things like growing food.

It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil, but in lots of sectors(like heavy industries) it makes lots of sense. In other sectors, electricity and batteries make more sense. Different technologies will coexist together and compete.

>It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil

Except oil is a liquid, while ammonia is a gas. You can put oil in an open container and it won't hurt anyone. Now try doing the same with ammonia...

Oil burns and CH3 explodes easily, but we use it anyway because it makes economic sense.

The same will happen with ammonia. There are risks, but the energy that you could store is immense at a very low price.

Don't get me wrong, I was working in batteries and solar panels research in the early days. I heard the same arguments against it( why we should spend money when batteries and solar panels are so expensive and work so badly? They were expensive and worked badly)

Now we work on fuel cells. They are expensive and there is room for improvement.

Ammonia is more comparable to natural gas or propane than oil.

Also crude oil is really toxic. It off gasses all sorts of questionable things, and touching it isn't recommended. I get what you mean by your comment, but oil isn't some super stable, safe material.

Most of the hydrogen made today is made from fossil fuels, so they of course love that idea.

So is most of electricity. None of that matters for the future.

This is technically true, but only barely. In the US in 2022, renewables were 21.5% and Nuclear was 18.2% of total generated power (yes nuclear should be counted among renewables, oh well). That means nearly half of power generated is green compared to ~1% of hydrogen.

It actually matters more, because the fossil industry is just gaslighting

What are you talking about? Mazda had hydrogen concept car in 1991, Toyota started selling hydrogen cars in 1996 before EV, Honda in 1999.

The YouTube channel Engineering Explained has an excellent video regarding why hydrogen is not a practical replacement for gasoline/petrol/diesel in a traditional internal combustion engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8

Not saying the oil sector is powerless by any means, and I guess maybe they're going for regulatory capture, but this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it. The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. I believe every car maker (save 1 that I know about) is fully committed to 100% electrified vehicles in the not-too-distant future. I feel like eventually even Toyota will give up their weird H2 push.

All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations and what becomes more compelling to the consumer flips overnight. Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. It seems like there's a lot lot less inertia to get consumers over that hurdle than the EV hurdle, where charge times are long and convenient chargers not a guarantee in comparison to the fuel station network.

Have you ever read up on what storing hydrogen entails? Both at the station and in the cars? The tanks are totally different beasts than gasoline.

As is propane, but we use that currently with no issues.

Lol at all; Hydrogen can't easily be transported in current pipelines; Can't be transported in current trucks, and can't be stored in current gas station tanks.

And if the gas station doesn't maintain its hoses, nozzles, or seals; you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately.

> you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately.

If you're lucky. If you're unlucky the first you realize there is a leak is when it ignites. Fortunately it is harder to make it explode than gasoline vapors but it also escapes far more readily than gasoline does.

Though the maintenance issue can be solved with a nitrogen pressure test before - the equivalent of electrical connectors verifying the connection digitally before sending the amps.

> All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations

"All it takes" is doing very heavy lifting in that sentence. There's a good reason that hydrogen fueling stations are basically non-existent aside from a few in California. Distribution and fueling is quite complicated compared to conventional liquid fuels.

there are 86 now in Germany.

https://h2.live/en/

basically most of the main highways are covered

Not even close. It requires a whole new delivery network, trucks, pipelines need to be re-sleeved and tons of safety measures. Switching to hydrogen from diesel or gasoline is a non-trivial exercise. And large scale storage is yet another problem. That's hard enough with LNG, LPG, diesel and gasoline, with hydrogen it is much more complex and carries more risk.

Large scale generation of power to support a 100% EV fleet is also an issue. This is why current charging stations are having issues.

> Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken.

I don't know that people's cultural attraction to fueling at the gas station is high at all.

After we got an EV I realised how much I had actually disliked filling the car. Smelly, every time an in your face reminder of the fossil fuels you are burning. Having to go in an queue. Having to wait and jostle for a spot with the filler hoses on the correct side for my vehicle. Dodgy characters milling around. Unable to use cellphone and take calls. Possibility of being involved in holdups/antisocial behaviour.

> Unable to use cellphone and take calls.

Why are you unable to use your cellphone?

They're apparently "banned" or "dangerous" at fuel filling stations. Whether that's actually true is a different matter, but all the stations I've been to have had prominent "cellphones not allowed" signs displayed.

What country is this? I've never seen this in the US.

New Zealand. Seems to be a blanket rule here.

South Africa, but UK also had it if I'm not mistaken.

Isn't the long charging time an issue? After a quick search, Tesla needs 30 minutes to charge to 80% with superchargers and this is good for 300 kms. Assuming 120 kmh, this means that about every 2.5 hrs, I need to take a 30 min break.

With the old system, I fuel in 2 minutes and I can travel 600 kms on it or approx 6 hrs (assuming 50 litres fuel tank and 7.5 litres per 100 km, and 120 km/h).

(I don't have a car, and I'm open minded about EVs, just honestly wondering)

If your main usecase is using the car in the city, which it is for my family for example, then you go for months without seeing a fuel station of any sort.

They aren't as good at long distances, you have that part right. Your numbers could be debated but are close enough. Most people don't drive long distances on the regular though.

They are MUCH better for day to day if you can charge at your home. You always start the day with a full battery. I only use a supercharger on long trips. Note that I actually drive farther than most for various reasons but that route has a supercharger at a grocery store. I tend to come back at the end of the weekend and do my shopping at the same time, so in reality I don't spend any time refueling.

So total yearly time where you are actively "fueling" your vehicle in a supervised manner favors EVs for the vast majority of people.

It's an entirely different paradigm.

With an ICE, you can only fuel up at a gas station, but it is fast (not always though, queues, etc.).

With an EV you charge overnight at home, and only charge on the road as required, and it can be slow (not all that slow though, not a big problem for us). Depending on your usage and vehicle range, you may never need to charge on the road at all.

I wouldn't personally want to own an EV if we couldn't charge at home.

> With an ICE, you can only fuel up at a gas station, but it is fast (not always though, queues, etc.).

No. This is the reason many still aren’t switching to an EV. Gas cans exist, the same does not exist for an EV. You can fuel up a liquid fuel vehicle anywhere. An EV must be charged at a specific station, be it at home or some other location.

I spend multiple hours a year more time pumping gas than I do waiting on my EV to charge, despite the ICE getting far fewer miles.

I have a diesel car. Every 3 weeks I have to fill my tank. This wastes me around 5/10 minutes, depending if the gas station is full of person that want to fill their tank. And this only thanks to the fact that I've one of the gas station with the cheapest price of my city 50 meters from where I work. Otherwise I would need to spend time (and gas) to get to the station with the cheapest price, because paying 2 euros for a liter of gas is not something I like to do.

With an electric car I can get home at evening, park my car and connect a plug, exactly as I connect my phone to the charger before going to bed. Time wasted? Probably less than a minute every couple of days. Also, I pay it in my electricity bill, the price of electricity doesn't go as high as the price of gas. Also... it's impossible to distinguish between the electricity used to charge a car than the one used for domestic purpose. This means that the government cannot add taxes on electricity used in vehicles, as it does with gas. Finally there is the possibility to install solar and produce the electricity myself.

> All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations

Easy? We have natural gas cars since decades. Only recently (last 10 years) you find a sufficient number of stations that serve you natural gas. Still for nonsense rules in my country you can't fill your natural gas car by yourself but it has to be done by an operator, so good luck filling it in the weekend or at night. I imagine the same rules would apply for hydrogen.

Now, after decades of natural gas cars, they are mostly usable (my parents have one). Inconvenient, since you maybe have to drive 10km to get to a station, and you have the same range than an electric car (350km more or less). Will hydrogen be that better? I don't think so.

While all of this happens, electric car chargers are starting to appear everywhere. You go to a supermarket, there is a charger, you stop to eat on the highway, there is a charger, or more of them really, in the cities there are plenty of them (plus while the car is charging you don't pay for parking!).

It's nonsense to this day to not consider buying an electric car if buying a new car to me! I keep my diesel car since I already have it, it has more than 10 years, and works fairly well, and I don't like changing things that works, but when I will change it, I will buy an electric for sure.

>This means that the government cannot add taxes on electricity used in vehicles, as it does with gas.

You don't think you'll be paying a significant electricity tax once ICE cars are fully phased out?

Also, I don't know what you drive but my diesel has quite a bit more range than 350 km. Yours must be quite the guzzler.

Yeah, Texas already charges an additional $400 for EV registration and then $200 annually.

IMO it should just be a mileage check at inspection time. Miles travelled * weight classification coefficient * emissions/fuel type modifier + base registration fees = total yearly car taxes.

But then Texas also just got rid of inspections... :(

No such tax can be effectively charged as part of an electricity bill, at least not for areas with enough insolation to have encouraged people to have their own PV arrays for charging.

Some sort of tax will be necessary to replace the fuel tax, but I'd be very surprisedby some attempt at a general electricity tax, or for that matter, a charging-station tax (since that won't affect the majority of EVs).

> this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it

Still dangerous. It reminds me of Zubrin’s takedown of VASIMR [1]. An unrealistic counterproposal can torpedo a workable one by appealing to peoples’ tendency to choose the perfect over the good.

[1] https://youtu.be/myYs4DCCZts?si=Ksqw_MFLKHKIgMod

Would gasoline be anywhere near something people wanted to use if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities?

Petroleum is a huge industry and they could make a big problem by getting subsidies to make some other fuel look competitive even though it’s a disaster.

Look at biodiesel.

> if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities?

I think you kind of identified the issue there, though. Externalities are notoriously difficult to tax and account for. The issue with EVs is that they are intrinsically better than hydrogen in nearly every way. Even issues with long distance driving and recharging are quickly improving with EVs, and the improvements are happening much faster than anything going on with hydrogen.

It's not just Toyota - it does seem to be a Japanese thing. Honda is also actively producing H2 powered vehicles.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42796089/2024-honda-cr-v-...

Also Hyundai, which is Korean.

> The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles.

British government has just postponed it's EV vehicle transition by 5 years, British tabloids are printing articles about how EVs will never work for British uniquely harsh weather

EVs don’t work for a lot of situations. What they are good at is around town driving. Maybe this will change in the future but this is the current reality.

I wish them much good luck, but it's a bit like the dinosaurs complaining about those uppity mammals getting underfoot: their days are numbered. BEVs are here to stay, hydrogen is - as far as I can see - a non-starter except when it comes to heavy traffic and possibly rail or air but even there I have my doubts.

Meanwhile BEVs are rapidly building momentum and coupled with solar and wind make very good sense. Even the last holdout for a passenger hydrogen vehicle (Toyota) has finally seen the light and is making BEVs now, I don't remember ever seeing a Mirai but given how many have been produced that's not so strange.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

I'm not so sure that BEVs will reach anything close to 100% of all cars on the road. My primary reason is this: as long as you "only" have 10%, 20%, even 30% BEVs the electric charging infrastructure is mostly free, we already have it. But after that, BEVs will require expensive infrastructure to be built in the electricity transmission grid. Think "we need to dig up all of the roads". Because it's not just cars going electric, it's everything else as well at the same time.

At that point hydrogen cars could very well see a resurgence. Especially in places with cold weather, where the fuel cell waste heat can be used for the climate control, while the BEV needs to spend energy running a heat pump, so the efficiency advantage of BEVs is mostly gone.

Yes, that's a good point. But: the grid can be expanded and probably will be expanded. I don't have a BEV but I've run the numbers and it would work very well for me today, it's just that I have an old, non-connected and fairly recently rebuilt car that I'll drive into the ground. But if I were younger and still in the market for a new vehicle I would definitely consider an electric one, though I'd make sure it had LiFePO4 or maybe even LTO in it (not yet available). Battery tech is getting better rapidly now that sufficient funds is pumped into it and I would expect the next two generations to be major improvements over what's on the market today.

This 100%, we're not done with batteries yet as a society and it's probably one of the most heavily funded industries because the opportunity to strike "gold" with good battery tech is too large to ignore.

Lithium wont be used forever and and downsides to batteries will slowly be eroded until we wonder why we ever used petrol in the first place.

As far as the grid goes, in my eyes rooftop solar is going to provide a huge amount of the power generation required for EVs. We're not there yet but the price of solar keeps dropping rapidly and you'll see a shift in messaging from "discounts and charge overnight when demand is low" to "discounts and charge during the day because generation is high".

I could already supply an EV with all the power required for my trips inside the country. 7700 KWh surplus from solar this year and we're not done yet. That's a multiple of what an EV would use for my current mileage (which is a fraction of what it was pre-COVID, and to be fair I also use my (e-)bikes a lot more than before).

The counter to your "think of the grid" argument is that the fossil fuel network may start to atrophy once there are significantly less people fuelling their gas vehicles.

If filling your gas car involves an unplesant trip to a peeling, cracking and unreliable gas station, then that's one more incentive to go BEV.

No, this has been debunked over and over.

People imagine BEVs need to be charged every evening at some super high power. The reality is they need to be charged about once a week (median US commute is 1/10th of typical BEVs range at city speeds), and can charge overnight, or when parked at work, while using less electricity than your air conditioning unit.

The grid is designed to handle peak demand (see the "duck curve"), and there is a lot of spare capacity outside of the peak hours, especially at noon when there's more solar production than consumption.

BEVs are very flexible with their charging time, and scheduling charging in off-peak hours is a standard feature.

> People imagine BEVs need to be charged every evening at some super high power. The reality is they need to be charged about once a week

Wouldn’t you say this is based on usage? Or do EVs run for a week regardless of distance traveled?

EV energy use is mostly proportional to distance traveled, except they're more efficient at lower speeds (typical values are 4-5miles per kWh in city traffic, and 2.4-3.5mi/kWh at highway speeds).

I've noted it's based on median commute, which is around 35-40 miles a day (median means that half people travel less than this, half of people travel more). WLTP range of Telsa Model 3 is 370 miles.

There will obviously be some users who need to charge often, but my point is that it's closer to once a week for at least half of the US population. And I'm using US stats, because the country is particularly car-centric, so if the US can do it, rest of the world can manage too.

Ah so it is variable. Ok glad that’s clear. I also only fill my gas vehicle once a week. Sitting at a pump (charging station) for 30 mins a week is still too long. Not every person will be able to have a charger at home (think apartments, condos, hotels, homeless, etc)

You don't need to be near the car while it's charging, so usually EVs are charged while they're parked.

There could be a charger at your work, or in a shopping mall, at a hotel. You keep the car plugged while it's parked, and it doesn't take more of your time than 30 seconds it takes to plug and unplug. You can be elsewhere working/shopping/sleeping.

In some countries there are already laws that require new parking lots to have chargers. I know the infrastructure isn't there yet, but if we imagine 100% people having EVs, there will be enormous demand for it, and having plugs in parking lots will be the standard.

Eh, you don’t want to monitor something taking a household worth of power? In the RC car world we monitor substantially smaller batteries and even charge them in a specific bag because of the risk. How long until you think it catches fire? A house down the road from me just burned down from an EV that ignited from a short, and risked all the houses around it. Meanwhile it takes 3 minutes to fuel a gasoline vehicle and you can still do it anywhere.

My view on hydrogen is that we will look at it like pressurized air in the 1900’s. Some industrial applications exists but its not the silver bullet many articles are talking about. It is inefficient and we shouldn’t spend many ressources on it. However, I am happy some people experiment with it, we may discover an innovative application that may be a true breakthrough. But I won’t bet on it.

They've been doing it for twenty years, hydrogen allows maintaining a distribution network and *most of all* to keep using fossil fuels to generate it

Much longer than 20 years. But the reason it hasn't taken off is that both the economics and the physics don't work very well for consumer vehicles.

Because gasoline was more convenient. Now with clean emission mandates gasoline can’t be used anymore. But that doesn’t mean EVs suddenly got more efficient.

I think that it is just as important for the oil industry to make it look like alternatives are being tried, but they just don't work out, so that the status quo seems more acceptable.

This is true and is contrary to this headline/quote. The oil sector is lobby for hydrogen but the attribution of motive is off. They are lobbying _for_ hydrogen, not against EVs.

EVs happen to not need their oil, I have the feeling that they have and are still lobbying the sh*t against EVs; lobbying for hydrogen is one way to lobby against EVs, and if hydrogen were (or had been) successful it's potentially infinitely more profitable than EVs for oil companies.

Article is from [2021]. But it might as well be from 2015 for all the relevance it has to today's automotive industry. Electric already won.

Yup. It's painfully obvious here in Canada, where the loudest champion of hydrogen-powered vehicles is the Premiere of the oil-and-gas-generating province of Alberta, and she's an ideological-conservative pro-oil leader at that.

Seeing people like that rally to hydrogen over EVs is the loudest argument against the tech.

Hydrogen technology doesn't exist to save the Earth, it exists to save the natural gas industry.

The business model for hydrogen that's generated is

1. Hydrogen is extracted from natural gas.

2. A miracle happens, capturing the carbon dioxide from this process.

3. Hydrogen goes in cars.

The amount of truly "green" hydrogen out there is functionally zero.

So it's a tech that isn't green, has no refueling infrastructure, and practically no adoption in the car industry. At this point it only exists so that anti-environmentalists can claim there's an alternative they prefer, since it's politically unacceptable to be pro-apocalypse.

Green hydrogen is developing now, and is very real, and is based on polysilicon solar advancements and PEM electrolyzer advancements, both of which provide ~3 decadal cost-down paths. See these two companies of ours:

[1] https://ohmium.com [2] https://novohydrogen.com

At present, the amount of green hydrogen in the total hydrogen economy is less than 1%. (edit: possibly less than 0.1% [1])

Green hydrogen is vapourware.

[1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...

I don't think you know what the word "vaporware" means.

1 GW per day of new solar is being installed globally. Where do you think the excess mid-day production is going to go? It doesn't have to go anywhere, actually. But it will go somewhere.

99.9% of all hydrogen currently on the market is not "green". It is either captured by products from dirty industrial processes, or more commonly it is made from gas or coal and the CO2 is released into the atmosphere.

If you're championing a tech that based on the one form of it that's basically a rounding-error in the overall prevalence? Yes, that's vapourware.

No, that isn't what vaporware means. Vaporware means a technology promised, but not delivered. What it doesn't mean is a technology promised, and successfully delivered, and at the beginning of its growth curve as supply of the enabling products ramp.

By your definition, solar was vaporware in 2001 because less than 1 gigawatt per year was built. But it wasn't. It was simply early in its lifecycle. Today, 1 gigawatt of solar is installed in the world every day. Next year China will likely reach 1 TW of annual solar production capacity.

This is perhaps why software people shouldn't throw around the word "vaporware" –- a useful software-industry term –– in hardware-based industries with well developed and well understood generational patterns.

Suspiciously missing are efficiency numbers. How many "joules of hydrogen" do you get from one joule of electricity? We already know electric cars are on the order of 80% efficiency overall.

Without telling you anything groundbreaking, around 80% for PEM. It's more than acceptable when you look at how much excess solar production is being built.

> has no refueling infrastructure

That's not true, there are a whopping five (5) hydrogen fuelling stations in Canada :D

https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/transp...

I see some hydrogen cars from time to time on the road. They belong to some government agency. I wonder how many actual hydrogen cars there are in the entire country, it's probably less than a hundred ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

What can we do to make it so that motivations are more clear around messaging? It feels like so many things are ruined because industries are so good at messaging and people are so bad and disadvantaged at recognizing misleading messaging.

I took the afternoon off work to drive around town supplying school kids doing walkouts and walking across town to the administrative buildings to protest drastic changes that were announced <5 days ago, completely change 6 schools, and have apparently been planned in secret, for no good reason. We're starting to do some deep dive investigations because of the secrecy.

It just feels like so much of the system is impossible right now.

Hydrogen systems have zero advantage over GMO biodiesel (short-cycle carbon neutral) for energy capture, storage, and distribution.

The local Ballard H2 bus test platforms were reverted to diesel after 6 years.

Mostly, people see Hydrogen as a way to green-wash catalyzed natural gas (30000 years to reach carbon neutral).

The Battery people seem to think $7000/Kg for global lithium deployment is feasible. Look, a EV/pollution-relocation device is impressive, but is still unsustainable.

I retain the opinion goat-carts are the future. =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0

One thing I never see discussed about why hydrogen is so popular as a replacement for hydrocarbons: You can fairly easily generate hydrogen from natural gas via methane pyrolysis, and the carbon falls out as carbon black, a solid. The waste heat from a single gas turbine can generate enough hydrogen to power about 3 turbines of the same size, so when it's all said and done at a combined cycle plant with a steam turbine on the other 2 units, you're down about 12% on your net energy production, but it's not releasing any carbon into the atmosphere.

I'm not trying to put white hats on petroleum executives, but it must be pointed out that -- given the overall incentives and regulatory environment -- they cannot do other than to attempt this.

From the article:

> At the bottom “uncompetitive” end of the ladder are hydrogen cars and domestic heating — which he says make no sense when you have battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and heat pumps.

which begs a question: might we see hybrids with electric motor drive, small batteries for regenerative energy capture, and hydrogen fuel cell for quick refills? That is, hybrids that only involve battery and fuel cell to both drive a single electric powertrain?

Renewable power calls for massive over provisioning to minimize time where backup energy has to be used. Over provisioned energy could power hydrogen production, in which case the "inefficiency" doesn't really matter, as long as there is no other better purpose for which the energy can be spent.

There's obviously a sweet spot which may invalidate this argument. But to me it sounds like a win-win, even if only focusing on aviation.

Aviation could be interesting, but when it comes to cars the problem is not hydrogen production, it is delivery. The hydrogen could be produced for free and it would still be a bad solution.

Toyota was betting big on hydrogen.

Were they being engineer-minded or where they being lobbied? I would like to think they were betting on Beta -- the superior technology -- in the Beta v VHS battle of our time.

What am I missing here? Toyota's engineers have a great track record and the company isn't easily swayed by fads or Wall Street.

I would assume they were maintaining a visible (and subsidized) presence in a non-fossil technology, while ensuring their profitable ICE business faced no immediate threat.

Beta was the inferior technology, like hydrogen.

It is also possible that Toyota's engineers are not the level they used to be, much like Fujitsu's engineers (who caused one of the largest banking outages ever) or (other company of your choice that used to be a great engineering company but was hollowed out).

Considering the work load at Toyota (it is often referred to as a "black company" by people I know), the level of pressure that is put on their shita-uke companies, and changes in what people consider acceptable work environments, I imagine that they might not attract the same level of talent in 2023 that they did in 1983.

While I agree using clean electricity to make hydrogen to power things seems a bad solution compared to batteries there looks to be quite a lot of potential for "white hydrogen" which is basically drilling for naturally occuring hydrogen in the earths crust.

There seems to be a lot of it eg "huge reserves found in France". Potentially 46 million tonnes in Lorraine, 1 euro a kilo to produce https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/exc...

And elsewhere in the crust. It's just people haven't really focused on drilling for it until recently https://archive.ph/RbQwv

It might be a practical solution to use our existing equipment which is basically the same as drilling for natural gas, but with no or at least less CO2.

There are good use cases for both technologies.

For smaller, lighter vehicles in warmer climates, lithium batteries make a lot of sense.

For heavy, long haul trucks that require minimal refueling, hydrogen fuel cell makes a lot of sense.

You need to build out the infrastructure for both.

Finally, not an either/or perspective.

The difference here is that long haul infrastructure needs a H2 station every 200 maybe 300 kilometers.

For personal vehicles we need orders of magnitude more, because refuelling a H2 vehicle is even slower than liquid fuels.

Its mostly the infrasctructure thats the problem though. Its complex, expensive and overall just less efficient than full EV. Ageing wheels has an entertaining vid of the Toyota Mirai where he discusses the pros and cons of hydrogen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZQLUtckS4

Scratch an inch deep and this is always hydrogen stripped from methane. Still fossil fuel based.

They oil industry are filthy liars, aided by petrostates like KSA and Russia. They are like the tobacco industry, but many thousands of times worse.

Water is a greenhouse gas as is the methane infrastructure that will be used to create the hydrogen. I don't say this disparagingly, but an ignorant populace will fall for it, and that includes Congress.

I'm not too sure we need to worry too much about the additional water vapour becoming a problem. About a third of all sunlight that reaches earth is spent just evaporating water [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Energy_Budget_with_...

The argumentation is flawed.

1. Just imagine the required charging infrastructure if all vehicles were suddenly battery powered. Charging electric vehicles requires quite some power. Can the power grid installations sustain that (power lines, Transformer stations...) ? What resources (financial and physical (e.g. Cooper)) are required in order to adapt the infrastructure ? Just an example: A supercharger station which can charge a few cars at "full speed" simultaneously can draw > 1 Megawatt. Furthermore, superchargers are quite complex (and expensive) technology;

2. Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage. However, non-dispatchable, fluctuating energy sources such as solar and wind power require huge amounts of storage in order to sustain the power demand.

Source for either of these claims other than "just imagine?"

Of course infrastructure is a concern but I haven't seen any sources that claim we are unprepared to sustain significant EV deployment - and of course it will not ever happen overnight, so that's a strawman.

have you not paid attention to the rolling blackouts in CA? or what happened in TX recently?

> The argumentation is flawed.

Which argumentation are you referring to? You're re-iterating an anti-electric talking point that is explicitly debunked in the article.

> “That's nonsense,” says Liebreich. “[In] 1995, [people said] ‘we'll never use the internet because there are not enough modems’. [In] 2000, ‘we'll never do online video because there isn't enough bandwidth’, then, ‘you can't do multiple streams of video because you will never get fibre to the home’. We’ve got 30 years between now and 2050 [when countries plan to reach net-zero emissions] and we will simply have more and more investment. We’ve dug up the streets for cable, phone, gas, cable, fibre, electricity. It's a thing we do. We know how to just build slowly over time. This is not rocket science.

> “Plus, there's smart charging. And of course, we know we're going to be doing this because we're also going to be having to add capacity because of electric heating. And so the idea that you'll say, ‘no, no, we mustn't do that extension of existing infrastructure, we must build a completely new one [for hydrogen refuelling], it's nonsense, frankly.”

1. Yeah, we upgrade the grid over time as demand increases, exactly as we have been doing. Nobody gets bent out of shape when a grocery store or something goes in and it requires power. This is only a problem if vehicles are "suddenly" battery powered, which is not a thing.

2. Yes they are.

Re 1: The US built 1,000,000 new homes last year without anyone saying "how we the country cope with this increase in need for wood/etc". Most new homes will have multiple 50A circuits to power an electric range and/or HVAC system. Most level 2 electric car chargers max at 50-75A, and can be configured to only charge during times of low grid power demand. Every electric car in existence won't be DC fast charging all the time. In fact, I'd wager for most EV owners in the US today, DC fast charging is a very very low percent of their total charge allocation (between DC fast and AC level 2).

We have plenty of wood, go outside and see for yourself. We currently have very visible issues with the power grid, and as you’ve pointed out you’ve doubled every houses power demand.

Let’s look at what happened in TX, when the grid shut down. How will people charge their cars to leave the area? Maybe people used the gasoline engine in their car to provide heat.

TX has a mismanaged power grid with no interconnects to load share by choice, how does that apply to the rest of the US? CA’s problems aren’t demand driven.

I live in a state that gets almost its entire gasoline supply from a single pipeline (Colonial) that has burst or leaked and left us with mass shortages several times in the last decade.

Yet your problem is not nationwide, at least two states are having issues.

Re 1: Charging mostly happens overnight where there isn't a lot of demand. Smart meters can distribute the demand to spread it out optimally. BEVs are actually very valuable for the electrical grid when they can feed their power back into it - further balancing supply and demand.

Re 2: Batteries keep getting cheaper due to economies of scale. Batteries for grid stabilization don't need high energy density and will soon (or maybe already are) more cost effective than pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/research/blog-can-the-g... ("A question that frequently comes up when discussing electric vehicles (EVs) is: “Can the grid handle it?” The short answer is “yes.”") [Blog post demonstrates the math showing the grid can handle 100% EVs]

Superchargers are primarily for road trips and people who need to fast charge because they don’t have home charging (for now; infra is rolling out very fast). Most will charge at home, work, or other locations that perhaps have a level 2 charger (vs a fast DC charger). A 120V 15amp outlet is sufficient to fully charge your vehicle if left for 2-3 days or more at an airport or other longer dwell location.

> Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage.

They will get us most of the way to success. Some combination of seasonal storage, renewables overbuilding, transmission, and limited fossil generation (peakers, cogeneration, etc) will be needed to get close to 100% net zero.

https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf

https://www.energy-storage.news/nrel-rapid-growth-of-energy-...

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81779.pdf

Enough sunlight falls on the Earth every ~2 minutes to power humanity for a year. We're just arguing shuffling the electrons around.

> Most will charge at home, work, or other locations that perhaps have a level 2 charger

with the push for cheaper, multi tenant housing where you have many households sharing the same parking lot, how does charging at home work? How do you bill the person charging? What if every spot has its own charger?

Your argument is textbook anti-EV propaganda that has been debunked for over a decade now.

Ask anyone that owns an EV how many times a month they go to a super charger. The answer is probably zero because unless they went on a road trip, they are definitely charging at home. You don't even need to install a 240V charger. For most people's commute a 120V charger (which can charge at ~1.4 kw) can recharge about 40 miles over night which is equivalent to the average American's commute.

It's still not ideal for apartment dwellers yet, but they don't need a super charger in their complex. They just need a standard power outlet accessible from their parking space.

I know managing the grid is probably really hard. But if we can power every home in America in less than a century, I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to add standard power outlets to parking garages without crashing the economy.

EV's are in fact a solution to the sporadic nature of renewables since they can charge anytime the car is sitting still such as for the 8 hours of sunshine that people spend in office buildings every day.

You forgot that the power station is a centralized point of failure, where as the fuel distribution network is not. This make the power stations a much more valuable target as you can easily disable a country’s transportation infrastructure.

One irony is that hydrogen cars are actually a better option than ICE. They're just both blown away by BEVs because batteries and supporting tech has progressed so dramatically.

A better option in what circumstance?

In the circumstance that we wanted to deal with climate change, local air pollution and inefficiency of ICE, but didn't have modern battery tech available.

If we somehow magically knew that we'd hit a physics limit with battery tech over a decade ago, hydrogen for personal vehicles would be a good range extender option and worth rolling out the infrastructure to support.

And bear in mind, basically every FCEV containts a small battery BEV at its heart.

I thought hydrogen was still difficult to handle and store. Is that information out of date?

Gasoline is difficult to handle and store too. It can cost over a million to remediate a single gas station, totaling billions across the US.

See HN discussion on "The hidden cost of gasoline"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471601

Meanwhile Toyota announced an amonia engine. I guess we’ll have to live and see what comes out of it.

NOx, most likely.

The person in the thumbnail for the article is hitting my uncanny valley.

I didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge.

They oil companies own a lot of infrastructure for moving fuel around. They cannot use this infrastructure to move electricity but they can use the existing infrastructure to move hydrogen around.

The oil companies don't own many pipelines. Pipeline companies own those. And pipeline companies are eager to do business with hydrogen companies.

The fight here is over whether natural gas-made hydrogen (SMR) is an interesting fuel at all. I think the numbers say no, while solar-made hydrogen is in fact extremely interesting.

More to the point, currently only 1% (edit: some articles I've seen put it less than 0.1%[1]) of hydrogen is "green". The rest is mostly made out of natural gas, a process that releases just as much CO2 as if you'd burned it. H2 isn't a way to save the Earth, it's a way to save the Natural Gas industry.

[1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...

Ridiculous. You're conflating source and fuel.

H2 can be produced in large quantities from green power. Part of the problem is, some people see everything as non-green.

Dams? Oh, carbon and cement! Nuclear? Oh risk. Windmills? Oh birds. Solar? Short cell lift and manufacturing waste.

So let's start with the snae assumption that a dam is green. Now you want to get power to cars.

Guess what. You can make h2 on site, at night (low power demand), then send it anywhere using existing gaslines.

And yes, you can. No, h2 isn't hard to store, hard to move.

Frankly, it is the oil industry flooding green forums with false crap about h2, because they know h2 is the only complete threat to them

Batteries, with their wonderful waste, slow charge time, massive weight, and vast dangers in a accident, won't be enough to break oil's back.

We need h2 for that, and that's why all this bullwark is spewed at h2. A tech demonstrated as workijg quite well in buses, cars, and spaceships for 50+ years.

> Dedicated hydrogen production today is primarily based on fossil fuel technologies, with around a sixth of the global hydrogen supply coming from “by-product” hydrogen, mainly in the petrochemical industry. In 2022, 70% of the energy requirement for dedicated hydrogen production was met with natural gas and around 30% with coal (mostly used in China, which alone accounted for 90% of global coal consumption for hydrogen production).

https://www.iea.org/energy-system/low-emission-fuels/hydroge...

"Existing gaslines" won't work because hydrogen leaks. It's literally the smallest molecule in the universe. Very different from natural gas.

Also you need around 55kWh of electricity to get 11kWh of power out of a Toyota Mirai's wheels to the ground. It'd be more efficient just to send that 55kWh to a waiting plugged in EV using existing power lines.

As for "slow charge", you're behind on tech. The current Hyundai/Kia platform supports 800V charging, meaning it can take in power at 350kW. It'll take under 10 minutes to fill it from 0 to ~80%.

Existing gaslines" won't work because hydrogen leaks. It's literally the smallest molecule in the universe. Very different from natural gas.

It works just fine. The British did studies in the early 2000s, injecting h2 into Ng lines, and separating it back out at the other end with mebranes.

Love how you ignored the power loss in transit, the power loss in charging, especially with fast charging, and didn't mention how inefficient batteries are as a comparison.

As for "slow charge", you're behind on tech. The current Hyundai/Kia platform supports 800V charging, meaning it can take in power at 350kW. It'll take under 10 minutes to fill it from 0 to ~80%.

We'll only need about 100 trillion dollars in new power lines, transfer stations, and on demand power generation, to enable people to charge like that.

Far better to build power plants, and when off peak load, generate h2 and ship through our existing pipelines.

Direct electric is still more efficient than green hydrogen even if you take into account all the losses[0]. The amount of loses just during electrolysis and transportation make it clear. EV overall efficiency is 77% from production to engine. H2 is 33%. And this is based partially on 10 year old studies.

Batteries and charging have developed since then, but as far as I know there haven't been any huge leaps in electrolysis processes.

What about countries who don't have an extensive gas pipeline infrastructure? Should they spend "about 100 trillion dollars" building one so they can take part in the H2 revolution?

The US is pretty unique in how your pipeline structure is built vs how ancient even essential parts of your electric grid is. This combined with a legal structure that allows gas pipelines to be built pretty freely vs everyone who can see a new power line can complain about it makes stuff really hard to upgrade.

[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/02/01/chart-why-battery-elect...

I'm in Quebec, and here we have a very modern grid. Much of that is to how well Hydro Quebec is run, providing some of the cheapest power to its citizens in all of North America, whist making billions in profit for the state.

Much of this profit comes from selling massive amounts of power the US Eastern states, which is why its long haul transmission lines are modern, high frequency, low power loss.

Some of that power comes from as far north as Hudson's Bay!

The other reason so much of the grid is modern, is from the ice storm at the turn of rhe century, which destroyed an incredible amount of the distribution network. Hydro Quebec took the rebuild as an opportunity, and modernized everything.

Point is, even with all of that, there is the need for more, more, more, as well as last mile stuff. Nimbyism isn't as big of a thing here, but it still exists.

Hydro Quebec is very green, and is building a variety of trial h2 infra. Generating H2 at the power source, and using pipes to send it through that massive network of local gasline distribution, does allow for distribution without the same power loss as sending power 2500km.

Even with high efficiency power lines, that's a long haul.

But the thing is, there should not be one solution! Frankly, long haul batteries should be prohibited in cars, we should have different solutions for different situations!

How inefficient is it to carry around 2000lb or more of batteries from long distance, when most people only need short runs?

Conversely for taxis, buses, and people who need range, h2 provides that without all that weight and battery waste.

And even better, short range battery cars are charged at home, or at office more often, and at lower power draws. Thus, having h2 and batteries means dual generation, and end point distribution methods.

We can scale with existing infra more easily.

Current ICE cars have propane, diesel, and gas. Why must there be "the true path!"? With more research, we may find h2 to be more efficient than batteries, and without all the weight and e-waste of batteries.

And this is why locales should build what infra works best. Not be forced into some cookie cutter solution.

I mean it does kind of seem silly just to throw billions of dollars of infrastructure to the wayside that could be repurposed.

Except the hydrogen will destroy the pipes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

And whatever was the corn ethanol biofuel thing about?

In a free market-based economy all options are on the table. An entrepreneur (like Elon Musk) can invest in a technology and market it in such a way to capture some share of the market.

I would encourage these "oil executives" to find creative solutions. Diverse market options drive costs down and promote innovative products. To say one technology is always better than another because "some oil executive" does or doesn't promote it, is FUD. In tech we hear enough FUD we should be immune to it. We are not.

It is a proven fact enough electricity is not produced to handle the charging of enough BEVs to replace the current number of ICE vehicles. We need more options not fewer.

´Green’ hydrogen produced by nuclear is just fine

please feel free to vote me down into oblivion because, you know, "I'm wrong"... But I would prefer a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle over a battery-electric for a number of reasons. The first is theoretical recharge/refuel times, but the second is firefighter rescue personnel safety.

BEVs are here-and-now technology though, and I don't oppose them, it's just I plan to wait until hydrogen technology matures and reaches deployment, or BEV finally solves those two problems.

If you're worried about firefighters, I'm not sure why you think hydrogen would be the solution. Hydrogen fires are invisible to the human eye, and carry an extremely high risk of catastrophic explosion. While a lithium fire isn't great, it's more the issue of "this is going to ruin the roadway that it's burning on" than "the firefighter is going to die trying to put it out".

https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion#:~:t....

The firefighters will mainly sit and watch while H2 gets vented or burns off. A lithium battery fire is much more worse, not even mentioning the smoke.

https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0

The rescue personnel will be safe because there won’t be anything of you left to rescue.

But a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has a battery that is cycled much more than a BEV (because it’s small). So a fuel cell vehicle has less durability not more.

How can you have an opinion on firefighter rescue and personal safety when there is next to no comparable data on fuel cell vehicles?

Well..you are wrong. Firefighters are trained to understand battery fires. Here's one of the many online courses they take to do it. Perhaps if you take it you would gain peace of mind on the subject.

https://fsri.org/research-update/online-training-available-s...

There's also a huge amount of idiotic anti-EV FUD and misinformation being pushed.

i'd pay for a multiparty open investigation

It's incredible that the oil lobby can so persistently and flagrantly spread disinformation to the extent that they have for decades. I suppose this is what happens when you have enough money to out-lobby everyone.

It's not only electric cars either, recently they've been propping up opposition to wind farms off of the new england coast by posing as environmentalists concerned about whales.

Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work, we don't have the "green" energy resources to actually produce that electricity, and second, and just as important, we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power (both in the US and in Europe).

So that leaves us with the logical conclusion that we won't have millions and millions personal cars going forward, for better or for worse.

> Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work

26+ million BEV already running in the world... Like 2 million driving around the US.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in...

Less that 1% of the cars in the US are electric [1]. The majority of those are powered by natural gas, at night [2]. With 5% in CA, we already have "do not charge" notifications on hot days, here in California.

What does 100% look like in California (definitely unrealistic, but can be scaled)?

California uses 13 billion gallons of gasoline, per year [3]. Let's say electric is 50% more efficient than gas, so we'll need 6.5 billion gallons worth of energy. At 33.7 kWh of per gallon of gas, that's 219 TWh of energy per year. In 2020, California produced 277 TWh [4]. They'll need to nearly double energy production, which matches most developed countries in Europe.

[1] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-percent-of...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46236#:~:tex....

[3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transp...

[4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

> What does 100% look like in California

It looks like 30 years of infrastructure upgrades, as ICE cars are still sold by 2035 and will last like 20 years.

It looks like 1TW of solar going to be deployed annually[0]

CA has a lot of solar potential, and market incentives will cause people to charge many of their cars during the day, acting as excess batteries for the grid.

[0]https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/05/16/a-fate-realized-1-tw-...

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/09/13/a-terawatt-of-solar-m...

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1698496805162353029

> we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power

I think people overestimate the net change in consumption. Making a gallon of gasoline takes about as much electricity as moving a BEV the distance the ICEV would go on that gallon. What'll change a bit is the distribution of the energy. But given that much of it will happen at night when the grid has historically been very underutilized, the net impact isn't a huge problem to deal with.

People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute.

It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars.

But I believe once self-driving robotaxis arrive, they are going to reshape transportation - they're going to be used for short distance commute, and hauling people to train stations for long distance commute. At least in Europe.

Range anxiety won't be a thing, since these taxis won't ever cover large distances.

in their current format no. but I think there is sufficient demand for long range personal vehicles, and as the world gets more electric, battery tech will get better. I can easily see a future where 1000 mile range on a single charge will be a norm. and I can easily see an America that requires that. range anxiety will decrease as charging gets faster and easier to access. but I just can't see an America household going 2x electric vehicles until 1000mile range with a charge up time of an hour or two is the norm.

I'm actually a huge fan of full ev hybrids that have on board gasoline generators

I generally agree with you about 2 electric cars. That said, I don't see how a 1000 mile car is possible. You can't even get that with generally available gas cars (The Volkswagen XL1 only has a 650 km range for those curious.)

I own a used EV (a 2019 Model 3 that I picked up this year) with real-world 300km range. It's an amazing main car, except that it is too small for my family. Still, we use it for about 80% of our transportation now (the other 20% being handled by a minivan).

More saliently, the charge time at home from 5% to 80% was ~30 hours on my level 1 charger. The idea of getting 5 times as much range in 1/30th the time sounds dangerous, unless we are talking about much smaller vehicles.

I've heard Toyota talking about solid state batteries, and I hope someone eventually succeeds in bringing them to market. However, I assume it will be used to reduce the weight and cost of the vehicle, not drastically increase range (and cost and charge time)

Feels pretty green charging an EV at home with solar panels.

Batteries mostly outlast the EVs they are in and are being recycled when they don't. Most EVs produced since they entered the market a bit over a decade ago are actually still driving fine. Most of them even have their original battery. You can get some really nice second hand models at this point. Of course they hold their value pretty well too. That's why manufacturers give eight year warranties on their batteries and drive trains. Basically, very little risk for them.

Hybrid is for people that are confused about what they want or need. You basically get the worst of both worlds: lots of maintenance and fuel cost, pollution, and they aren't that much more efficient. Or green. Lots of fiddly bits that break down and need maintenance. And the fuel economy isn't that great either. And the battery range is tiny.

Range anxiety is going to be a thing for ICE and hybrid car owners pretty soon. As petrol demand collapses, the infrastructure for filling up cars is going to start disappearing. Starting with the least profitable, remote petrol stations in the middle of nowhere that are already struggling to get by. What happens when 20-30% of their customers start driving EVs that they mostly charge at home? Exactly, they won't survive that. Not a chance. And of course, that 20-30% is just a brief moment in time on the way to 50, 80, and eventually 100%. Between now and 2030, there's going to be increasingly more struggling gas station owners. And beyond that it's going to be a massacre. Year on year declines in business with no end in sight.

>Batteries mostly outlast the EVs they are in and are being recycled when they don't.

Are they reused in practice? Are they recycled? Can you give me a comprehensive plan on this? Is there an EU mandate on this?

According to this article from MIT they're hard to recycle:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-well-can-electric-vehicl....

I feel like this is an emotionally and ideologically driven issue with a really complex answers. Like most climate and green activism, action predates thinking, and the costs are only seen in hindsight. And more often than not, the proposed actions seem to be to throw away your already existing and working stuff, to buy more, newer stuff that's supposed to be greener.

And even buying the line that EV total CO2 emissions are less over the life of a vehicle

This makes the whole thing look like the affluent West trading global environmental concerns of CO2 emissions, to much more severe, local ones that strike less fortunate economies.

Issues such as lithium mining:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...

Or battery manufacture:

https://www.greenpeace.org/hungary/environmentally-speaking-...

So once more rich people get to feel good about themselves, while getting new shiny stuff.

And corporations can convince people to buy 10x as much batteries as they actually need, because people think in labels like 'petrol bad'.

I kind of agree that hybrids suck, but most of that is due to manufacturers not putting the R&D and investments in, because the public is against them.

I would encourage you to educate yourself more on this.

The crossover point is 1.5 years for EVs to be net better than ICE cars, for one thing.

Also electric motor drivetrains make much more efficient use of energy, so even when powered by coal-generated electricity, EVs still win. Meantime power sources are getting more clean over time.

The electric car industry is spinning alternatives. Hydrogen is a much better alternative all around. You'll be able to convert existing cars much easier.

unfortunately no one's going to be converting existing cars to anything other than scrap metal no matter which technology proves to be the most promising

Well I agree with your other comment, but about this one, retrofitting (ICE->EV) is a thing. Even if very niche for now.

It is niche but growing less so by the day as conversion kits mature and more options make it onto market.

Used Prius is always free and used Tesla is cheaper than a conversion. It never will make sense except for few classic cars.

With the way cars are built today it can be an endeavor to change a lightbulb, let alone the entire propulsion system.

Classic cars are much easier to convert to electric than hydrogen. I’m not even sure anyone would make a kit to do it. There’s just so much complexity with fuel cells.

How is it better? It seems worse than electric by just about every measure

Why would you want to? Existing cars suck to work on compared to an electric. Ice needs too many parts it's inefficient for moving vehicles. Legit ditch all that running gear and give me hub motors on suspension arms. That's it. Don't need anything else.

Ice vehicles gonna get squeezed out by economics. Why pay some Muppet a few k to pull a block out to do gaskets when for little more than removing a Tyre I could replace the entire hub motor. Maybe a few hundred in labor compared to a few thousand. Hell for some car models like my subi I basically have to remove the entire front end or pull the block out just to do the head gaskets.

What EVs on the road today have hub motors? That unsprung mass would ruin handling. Also the motor could easily be damaged by hard bumps from potholes or curbs.

>Ice vehicles gonna get squeezed out by economics

You mean ICE vehicles are going to get squeezed out by regulations.

It seems that the low efficiency when using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine, combined with it's low energy density, makes it unlikely to be viable for mainstream vehicles.

https://evcentral.com.au/why-burning-hydrogen-in-an-ice-is-a...

Thanks for sharing the clearly written article!

Not sure who's pocket you're in but you need to get your facts straight. I can convert anything from a Model T to a modern vehicle from ICE to EV with nothing more complex than a conversion kit, and those come in flavors. Want to keep your original transmission and drive train? They make EV kits in a form factor to replace just the motor portion of a power train. Not married to having a stick shift? Toss the entire drive train, drop in a solid rear axle with hub motors. Fact is you can convert a vehicle from ICE to EV in a weekend and most of the work involves removing unnecessary deadweight.

What would "convert existing cars" get you?

A BEV is so much simpler to build and maintain.

The U.S. unlike the U.K. never adopted LPG or natural gas vehicles in any types of scale; That's with natural gas going directly to many houses.

If LPG/Natural gas ice conversions had taken off in the 80s/90s THEN evidence would be more in Hydrogen's favor.

I doubt it would be economically feasible to convert existing cars to hydrogen. If you want to use a hydrogen fuel cell, you'd have to replace the gas engine with a hydrogen fuel cell and electric motor, then mate that to the existing transmission (though with an electric motor, things like a clutch and six gears wouldn't be very useful). Then you'd need another electric motor to run the accessory belt(s) for things like the power steering pump and the air conditioning compressor. If you want to warm the interior of the car, you'd have to replace the heater core with some sort of heat pump or resistive heating element.

If you want to modify the gasoline engine to run on hydrogen, you'd need to replace the entire top end and many components in the bottom such as the connecting rods. You'd also need different spark plugs, a higher voltage ignition coil, different fuel injectors, a stronger head gasket, and a modified ECU. Burning hydrogen at stoichiometric ratios causes lots of nitric oxide, so you'd probably have to run lean to get emissions down. This means the engine won't be as powerful.[1]

There are other modifications you'd have to do in either case. You'd have to replace the fuel tank with a hydrogen tank, replace the fuel lines, and replace the gas cap with a high pressure nozzle. Hydrogen is an odorless invisible gas, so you'd need to add some hydrogen sensors to the car to warn about leaks.

After solving all of these problems, your car would have less range and fewer ways to refuel.

1. See page 25 of https://web.archive.org/web/20110905043908/http://www1.eere....

The problem is simple - EVs are overpriced and battery density is too low. It needs to be at least twice of current ones. EVs are Definitely going to be over hydrogen, but the tech is just not there yet for many markets. 200 kilometers in harsh conditions is wayyto small range

Why? Commuting 100 miles to work each day is ridiculous. For anything less than that, your 300 mile range is going to be plenty. There's an argument to be made that the tech isn't quite there yet for long haul trucking and the like, but 95+% of commuter vehicles could and should be replaced with EVs tomorrow.

I think this implies that a family has multiple cars. It is good enough to be a second car (yet IMO to expensive still and while Tesla gets on the cheap side, its interior is not for everyone).

However, my point is - I don't want 2 cars and EVs don't yet tick all boxes.

How so? What I'm implying is that most families don't need a car that can drive more than 300 miles a day. And on the rare occasion that a family that doesn't drive more than 300 miles in a day has to do so, charging for 45 minutes every 270 miles or so isn't such a huge inconvenience that it justifies burning hydrocarbons the other 364 days of the year.

The problem is that in reality it is not every 270 miles :) Take it a a normal winter with -20 celsius and it is impossible to drive 270 miles on one charge in a motorway.

My parents live 240 miles away and yet it is almost impossible to get there on a single charge in winter (not talking about super expensive cars).

How often are you making that specific 240 mile drive that adding 45 minutes to it is a dealbreaker on the vehicle?

That is a dealbreaker - my parents live that far and I do this drive at least twice a month. And I can't afford stopping in between - that is just too small distance and I want to make it as fast as I safellly can.

On the bright side - I like how silent EVs are and definitely would like one. Considering a PHEV as it seems that better batteries are quite far away now

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