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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how different things are in Japan, but here in the US I would have to drive thousands of miles to find a hydrogen station. I can charge an EV in my garage. Or at the supercharger station at my local target.

Is hydrogen catching on in other parts of the world? It seems DOA here.

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We had a hydrogen gas station nearby. It exploded. Now there’s an EV charging station there instead.

Hydrogen might be viable for trucks, ferries and ships with limited dedicated infrastructure. But it’s a lost cause for personal cars.

Doesn’t hydrogen need to be kept at extremely low temperatures? I can’t see how a cryogenic fuel is viable for anything.

In Australia you'd need to live within 100 miles of the only station:

    Victoria's first hydrogen refuelling station is now operational. A commercial-grade facility, Toyota’s Hydrogen Centre is located in Altona in Melbourne’s West.

to use the Toyota Mirai with it's 300 mile range.

Realistically you'd be wating to live within 10 miles .. and hope that other stations open in the near future.

This really is something for whole country adoption such as Japan is attempting.

https://www.toyota.com.au/electrified/hydrogen/stations

It's probably same here in Europe. My local Lexus lists the hydrogen version,which is nice and all that but where the hell would I suppose to get hydrogen for it?..

IIRC there's been some articles written on how Japan has strategically betting big on importing hydrogen from Australia: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japanese-govt-awards...

Producing hydrogen from brown coal completely misses the objective.

Not really, gasifying the coal means you capture all the products, so the carbon is captured by default instead of released into the atmosphere which is what would happen if it were burned in a coal power station instead.

The ideal would be to actually make green Hydrogen, but frankly until the grid is 100% electric anyway it doesn't actually matter what we make with the green energy as long as we build it.

The carbon won’t be captured as in buried, it’ll be burned for energy of some form and the CO2 released into the atmosphere. And at the same time, it will keep the mines open and busy pulling new carbon up out of the ground, when otherwise the economics would probably dictate reducing overall production. Meanwhile a battery electric vehicle can charge from zero-CO2 power without wasting a ton of it on electrolysis (which isn’t available at scale yet anyway.)

The Inflation Reduction Act contains some big subsidies to try to jumpstart hydrogen in the U.S.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/13/why-ira-hydrogen-tax-credit-...

They're also jumpstarting a nationwide charging network via the infrastructure plan.

But that's in the future, I mean today. I can't buy a hydrogen vehicle if I wanted to. I can't fill it up if I wanted to, not even at the dozen Toyota dealerships around me.

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