The more I learned about H2 the less excited I became.
The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.
The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.
There are some projects aiming to use it for steel production for example, and in a few areas where batteries aren't feasible, such as long distance flights.
But hydrogen never had a chance at competing with batteries where batteries are an option. In part due to energy inefficiencies in it's production(I'm assuming green hydrogen, since otherwise, What's the point)
The mismatch between supply and demand is a function of time whose Fourier transform has components at various frequencies. There will be a strong component around 1 per 24 hours, which batteries will be good for, but there will also be much longer period components (seasonal, or from rare extended solar and wind combined outages, so called "Dunkelflauten").
Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) are well suited to the latter. For those storage needs, round trip efficiency is far less important compared to minimizing the per energy storage capacity capital cost. That's because there will be many fewer cycles over which to amortize the latter (while the contribution of round trip efficiency to levelized cost of storage is not so affected.) The per energy storage capacity cost of hydrogen is two orders of magnitude less than that of batteries.
To see this effect in action, go to https://model.energy/ and get it to solve for the minimum cost combination of solar, wind, batteries and hydrogen to supply a steady power output in Germany. Then, disable hydrogen and solve again. The cost nearly doubles.
Liquid fuel is so energy dense that if you have to synthesize it and remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere it’s probably still easier and cheaper than hydrogen.
I guess the most important factor is how much energy is lost in synthesizing/burning it. Do you have those numbers available?
I know methane can be synthesised, but it requires you to first make hydrogen, and then you'll lose an additional 50-60% energy in turning hydrogen into methane.
For any large scale operation I can't imagine that kind of energy loss is acceptable, hydrogen storage is difficult, but not THAT difficult
For ships and planes, we may be able to use lower carbon synthetic fuels like ammonia or methanol, and not have to go as far for synthetic fuels.
Pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere is really inefficient. There may be cheaper ways to sequester carbon but they won't give you CO2 for making fuels. Hydrogen is definitely more efficient.
I'm not aware of any way to create synthetic propane using renewable energy sources, but that might be my ignorance speaking. A quick googling indicates it's not possible, but I'm happy to be proven wrong here if you want to provide a reference I didn't find.
Easier and cheaper doesn't really cut it for the climate. Petroleum is easy and cheap, and so is coal. Both are terrible ideas in the long run though
That at least seems a lot better than the 30 minute-several hours charge time for electric cars
Home charging is where it's at. You leave home practically every day with a full battery with about 20-30 seconds of effort every evening and morning.
Public charging also can enable EVs to operate as power sources for homes to handle extended power outages (days, even weeks).
Sheesh, if there's a power outage you might have power from your home solar panels. Good luck getting it from the charger down the road.
I guess technically it can take much longer if you're using an L1 charger, but if you just plug into the wall at home you have the advantage of being able to charge overnight while you sleep, whereas for gas or hydrogen it's much more complicated to fill up on your own
"During NASA's Space Shuttle program, which was carried out from 1977 to 2011, more than 24,500 tons of liquid hydrogen were purchased, of which 54.6% was used on-board; the rest was lost during storage, loading, or replenishment"
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110008561/downloads/20...