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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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)_/¯.

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.

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