Hydrogen in cars never stood a chance. It was always used to grab government money to do expensive case studies.
While hydrogen is expensive to produce, difficult to store, and less efficient in transfer than electrochemical batteries, I suspect they'd be a good technology for large fleets of trucks due to weight and range.
Fuel cells can also be made to run on natural gas, which might end up being a good stop-gap, as we already have a strong natural gas production infrastructure and despite its downsides, it's far easier to store than hydrogen.
The real reasons to be upset with hydrogen are the various impracticalities with the infrastructure and storage. Hydrogen leaks out of solid metal tanks because the atom is so small, and it has to be kept under enormous pressure because it doesn’t liquefy without cryogenic temperatures. There is no reason that I know of to assume these practicality concerns will ever be solved for car sized applications.
There is green hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water. But it more expensive than other sources. It only makes sense when fossil fuel sources aren't allowed.
Hydrogen cars are a bad idea. Now, they aren't green and don't have infrastructure. In clean electricity future, battery cars will be better. Hydrogen will be important in the future for industrial processes that need heat. And maybe for long-distance transportation like planes and ships where electricity won't work. But those only make sense with green hydrogen.
You mention natural gas; that's one option (CH3 = methane).
Ammonia – NH3 – is another that's starting to look promising and really could use some of hydrogen's hype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Fuel
Not for personal transportation, though – it's toxic – but for big engines in ships and airplanes.
You're not the only one who thinks so: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/netherlands-unveil...
There are only two limiting factors on electrical trucks: cost of batteries and production volume of battery manufacturers. This is a temporary problem. As the production volumes improve, cost will come down. You can cover any range by just using more batteries. Typical trucks in the market have less than half a mwh of battery. This provides them with a useful but not amazing range. Unlike car owners, truck companies typically settle for good enough and don't suffer from range anxiety. They buy the range they need. Mining trucks need batteries in the mwh range. Batteries are heavy of course but this isn't a problem in a vehicle designed for moving heavy things around.
Australia actually has battery powered road trains weighing hundreds of tonnes. Reason: superior torque over any diesel engine and electricity is very cheap (lots of solar power over there). Some of these vehicles are converted decades old diesel trucks. These aren't high tech vehicles. The process for producing them is brutally simple: rip out the diesel engine, replace that with an electrical motor and shove in pallets of batteries where the fuel tanks used to be. It takes minutes to swap batteries with a fork lift truck. Supremely pragmatic and awesome. If Australians can do this in the middle of nowhere, anyone can. Likewise there are logging trucks in Canada that are built locally for the same reason. Hard core power users of trucks are going for electric. They are just better.
The only thing better than electrical road trains is actual trains on rails. Those too can run on electricity. In fact that's very common and has been so for decades. There are far more electrical trains than diesel trains. High speed trains, freight trains, passenger trains. Long trains, short trains. Any kind of train.
Fuel cells can indeed run on gas. The reason nobody is talking about that or seriously considering this as an alternative is that it is far more lucrative for gas companies to use way more gas to produce hydrogen while grabbing subsidies and selling the hydrogen at premium. Never mind that hydrogen has nearly 3x the volume of gas, both in liquid and compressed form. And never mind the high pressures you need for moving it around in gas form. Because doing so in liquid for is stupidly expensive and technically challenging. In compressed gas form, diesel has about 18x the energy density of hydrogen stored at 200 bar. Meaning you need about 18 trucks of hydrogen for every truck of diesel to move a fleet of trucks around. Transporting hydrogen to fuel stations at scale is stupidly expensive and inefficient. Producing, storing, compressing, pumping, transporting, etc. You lose money and energy at every step. It's stupidly inefficient and costly.
That's why Shell just pulled the plug on this business. It was a scam and these things served their purpose. EVs won. Game over. Moving on to the next thing. Of course the exact same thing is going to happen for hydrogen truck fueling stations. But not until after they pocket the subsidies. Until then they'll be talking up how awesome hydrogen trucks are going to be all while battery electrical trucks are actually being awesome all over the place already.
Carbon monoxide in gasified fuels can poison fuel cell catalysts.
The fuel cells best suited to carbonaceous fuels are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) but these operate at 800 to 1000 C; they are not "instant on" devices. They're better as a topping cycle for something like a combustion turbine (which can also serve to pressurize them, increasing current density.) But these are also somewhat fragile (thin ceramic membranes) and any technology operating at 1000 C has lifetime concerns from creep and other degradation processes.
Green hydrogen was simply going to be a "in ten years" moving goalpost while everyone used methane if they actually got hydrogen off the ground.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-liquid-hydrogen-dumbass-p...
At least natural gas had distribution already (but usually not anywhere near the pressure needed for fueling; and that compression is energy intensive!). The pressure tanks in the vehicle expire, at which point the vehicle turns into a pumpkin. At least early Mirais had 15 year tanks.
In theory, you can replace the pressure tanks, but when I was looking at aging CNG Crown Victorias (circa 2017), it was very hard to find new tanks (and many of them had been sitting for some time, so you're not even getting the full tank lifetime), or someone to install them. When I saw cost estimates, it was in the couple of thousands; not really economical when that money would get you a similar age gas car that will probably never need its gas tank replaced.
LPG tanks are much more straightforward, 100-200psi (and standardized) than CNG (thousands of psi to usable amounts in the tank because it stays as a gas unless you chill it to like -100C).
NG is a lot cheaper, in theory. In theory, you could refuel at home.
LPG is used for BBQs and some heating, so more widely available, but hard to find cars that use it.
Toyota has very reluctantly produced more EVs in the last year than the total amount of hydrogen cars it has ever produced. That number is in the lower tens of thousands spread over a decade. Their EV production numbers aren't very good either but it absolutely dwarfs their hydrogen car production numbers. And soon on a quarterly and eventually even monthly basis.
Toyota of course is by far the most enthusiastic hydrogen car proponent. They can't shut up talking about it and are flogging that dead horse at every opportunity they have to explain why they are so far behind producing EVs. But for all their talk about hydrogen, they are not lifting a finger to actually scale hydrogen car production. Because it doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. Never has. They know this very well. Because they've been "studying" this topic for decades. They know everything there is to know about the viability of hydrogen cars. That's the whole reason the number of vehicles is so pathetically low. The number is the absolute bare minimum needed to grab the subsidies. Per vehicle, the subsidies are orders of magnitude the sales price of the car. Which is typically far below cost price. Producing hydrogen car has never been profitable. The game here is to minimize the money lost producing these things while maximizing the subsidies grabbed.
Now, let's not blame ourselves. It was the people we voted for who gave Toyota money to do nothing. Not us.
It sucks because it should be a valid path for lots of things, but the grey black blue was all a bullshit screen for methane sales in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, they control companies with laws. Isn't this obvious?
Try charity next time. Or be this rude in real life to people you know and see how it goes. People like you ruin this site.
"Well.. the government decided it wanted to control the car market, it has single handedly set it back several decades at this point."
The government /is/ attempting to control the car market. This is happening at both the federal and state level. These laws specify what the market can and cannot sell, the most direct form of control available. These laws inject government money into subsidies for both the consumer and the manufacturer, an indirect form of control.
The article "it" is indefinite but it obviously refers to the /market/, and not the /industry/. A word which never appeared in my original statement.
Did you want to constrain yourself a little?