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Comment by zonkerdonker | Hacker News Reader

Seems about a decade late. Did anyone other than toyota execs really believe hydrogen everstood a chance? Maybe if the push had started in 1984 they would have been able to effectively insert themselves into the market and properly compete with EVs before battery tech has grown to be able to be viable.

I'm genuinely baffled at the money and time that was poured into this when it seemed dead on arrival to almost everyone (as far as I know). Am I missing something? Is this some quirk of Japanese techno-optimism and simply a failed moonshot?

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"Did anyone other than toyota execs really believe hydrogen everstood a chance?"

I think BMW did. They had a good prototype in the early 2000s and really went to town with it. They marketed it heavily as a finished and usable product and I guess the thinking was that no one would notice the difference because the infrastructure wasn't there.

Now, the story goes that a sheik tried to test them and actually ordered a whole fleet, which BMW could not deliver. This dealt a heavy blow to BMW's hydrogen ambitions and the program only continued at a much much smaller scale.

Of course this is all anecdotal, and I do not know how much is really true, but it is the story I heard on multiple accounts when working close to these projects.

For many years there was a hydrogen fuel station in Hamburg and I think many BMW images showcase it. Last time I heard it was decommissioned.

Hydrogen electrolyzers perhaps makes sense as a backup load: something that can be turned on when there's too much electricity production (as is increasingly the case in renewable-heavy grids). But then what to do with the hydrogen?

Fertilizer? sure. Heating? maybe.

Cars? the infrastructure still has a long way to go. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/ for the deets.

I agree that is a better use for excess power than just dumping it into a resistor, but why go through all the extra effort? Batteries are getting better and better and better, and choosing to use excess generated power to generate hydrogen seems like one step backward. Why waste so much power on a doubly inefficient process (losses from hydrogen production and then again during use) when you could just, you know....store the actual pure energy you need for everything else?

Even barring a great battery, there are dozens of other great ways to store energy. Pumped hydro is 80%+ efficient, and all you need is a pump and a hill, vs hydrogen electrolysis, which maxes at 80% efficency, and then hydrogen combustion, which is like 40%, on top of all the exotic equipment required for manufacturing.

By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it

> Batteries are getting better and better and better

They are still too heavy. Carrying a ton of battery every time doesn't really makes sense.

> By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it

I understand the policy around hydrogen (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $8 billion to hydrogen production) as a technological pivot for the United States which leads the world in oil and gas extraction and logistics tech. The US has a lot of gas handling experience.

Optimistically, green hydrogen will diversify the energy supply, bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase. Batteries and pumped hydro are undeniably superior in round trip efficiency, but hydrogen does have some desirable properties such as relative ease of overland transport, very long term storage, and being a chemical precursor for some industrial processes.

Pessimistically, green hydrogen is a way for oil and gas companies to siphon many taxpayer dollars while doing superficial work similar to the compliance EVs of the 90s and 00s.

I'm optimistic mainly because my PhD in electrical engineering is being funded partly with the green hydrogen taxpayer dollars. Shout-out to my fellow taxpayers and my advisor's grant writing skills! I'm working on power electronics which are fundamental in renewable energy and by extension green hydrogen electrolysis.

Very enlightening! I appreciate the reply. Hydrogen as a sort of stepping stone away from gas and oil makes sense, as does creating another pillar for energy resiliance.

> ... bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase.

The word "buzzphrase" implies that you think energy resilience is not as relevant as the proponents want to make it seem. Correct?

I've been thinking for years that resilience of the overall energy system is a factor that many green energy transition people appear to systematically overlook.

As I see it, chemicals based energy systems have a huge advantage over electricity based energy systems through their property of bringing large amounts of storage (and thus capacity to bridge outages) with them basically inherently.

The electrical grid is a delicate life support system and I'm convinced that it will - even in the far future - depend heavily upon chemical energy storage and transportation to give it resilience.

As far as I've heard the electrical grids in the US and Europe have come close to breaking points a lot more often over the last few years, compared to before. And even though huge sums of money are being invested in their build-out and maintenance, the supply situation with critical components such as transformers is apparently dire.

Alltogether makes me think that chemical energy storage (and thus, hydrogen, power-to-gas, ammonia, and such) will have a dead-sure place in energy systems.

hydrogen was never in the running in the first place. Toyota were just kidding themselves. Billion dollar projects still can't get handling hydrogen right. A hydrogen infrastructure is pure sci-fi

It’s not sci fi. There are small scale hydrogen generation and storage solutions that are real and cost effective.

but small scale isolated things are not a hydrogen infrastructure are they?

Why wouldn’t they be?

The idea endures because produce fuel from nothing but water and sun light and left with no emissions is incredibly promising.

I would ask why nearly everyone has contentedly continued using rare earth mineral, cobalt and fossil fuel to power out vehicles when a clean renewalabl source is right here.

Because "rare earth minerals" aren't that rare, are pretty easy to recycle (making them renewable), and batteries have end to end efficiency of ~80% compared to ~20% for hydrogen.

Also, Li-ion batteries don't really use rare earth metals (there's a little yttrium in some varieties of LFP cells). The idea that REs are needed for batteries dates back to nickel metal hydride batteries, which Li-ion batteries supplanted.

> easy to recycle

Maybe. But IIRC practical reality is that no one actually does this, and there is no infrastructure setup for this. Something like <1% of rare earths in product are recycled.

Please correct me if I'm outdated.

EVs (and their resulting large battery packs) haven't been available at scale long enough, but there are already established businesses for recycling standard car batteries and it's why you pay a separate "core" deposit in the US to ensure they go back into the system.

People are starting these businesses already, it's yet another logistics problem to solve. Right now there is more money in pulling apart the packs the using the cells as salvage than there is recycling, but as more and more EVs reach end of life you can bet it will be a sizable market.

Everyone compares Li-ion recycling to starter battery recycling, but starter battery recycling is extracting a single element that makes up almost all of the mass of the battery. There are many different cathode chemistries all in use for lithium ion cells, so the logistics problem is significantly more complicated.

Presumably a specific chemistry will end up winning out for chars, but, IMO, most of the cars on the road now will never have their cells recycled.

basically all batteries now are 1 of 2 types, and the differences within those types largely relate to manufacturing methods and trace elements that probably aren't worth recycling anyway.

Pretty sure this is what Redwood does: https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/

They’re currently so cheap and plentiful that it doesn’t really make economic sense to recycle them. They’re recyclable in the sense that it would become a realistic option if supplies became limited, which isn’t true of everything.

The difficulty with getting LPG fueled vehicles off the ground should have demonstrated the foolishness of pursuing a fuel even more difficult to handle and with no large scale delivery mechanism already in place.

Hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a carrier. You have to create hydrogen gas from water (or as is done today, from fossil gas). This takes energy. This energy can just as well be used to power the thing directly. Which is significantly more efficient.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0MuwO9V4AEGbUo.jpg

Hydrogen is brought up as a potential storage method which may work, but it makes metals it touches brittle. It is not like storing fossil gas. There are ways to limit it, but it has costs.

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

Hydrogen in cars also uses expensive metals, platinum in the fuel cell.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...

Hydrogen is actually a really good solution for shipping and long haul trucking. Conceptually, it really could have worked for cars but Tesla did a really good job of making BEVs sexy, when consumers looked at the market they decided to head towards BEVs.

Personally, I think they could have done some quick cocktail napkin math and figured out their strategy without too much effort, but large mega corps tend to frown upon that sort of thing. I remember the Honda clarity (a retro-fitted civic) was going for $350K and saying to myself: no one thought to use a spreadsheet before building?

I’d say that Tesla did a lot more than just make BEVs sexy, they made them practical. You don’t see Toyota out there making a nationwide network of Hydrogen fueling stations like Tesla did with Superchargers. Someone had to get the ball rolling, and Toyota didn’t do it.

Maybe not Toyota, but Japanese gvt has been doing it: https://hydrogen-navi.jp/en/station/index.html#:~:text=As%20....

Hydrocarbons are already good at that. Its the fact that the carbon comes out of the ground instead of the air that is a huge, pressing problem. Use the excess electricity to split water, and bond it with carbon in the air.

Why?

Hydrogen is dangerous and difficult to store, dangerous and difficult to transport, and has egregious specific energy density--all of them are deal-killers for any widespread fuel.

The only two benefits of hydrogen over other fuels are:

1. The cleanest and most efficient combustion 2. Ease of synthesis on a distributed scale

Ammonia beats hydrogen on every front aside from:

1. Less efficient/clean combustion (which we can handle with extant NoX scrubbing technologies) 2. Currently, it's only efficient to manufacture it in large-scale non-distributed industrial plants.

The great thing about ammonia is we've been manufacturing and storing it at-scale for about a century so we're really good at it. Ammonia is the best current candidate for replacing bunker oil and diesel in shipping.

Ammonia is also incredibly toxic. Hydrogen is explosive, but not toxic.

In fact, fun fact, it makes for an incredibly good dilutant for extremely deep scuba diving (you can't breathe pure oxygen underwater and most gases, including oxygen, become toxic under pressure). For some reason though, people are queasy about the idea of mixing pure hydrogen and oxygen hundreds of meters underwater.

Ammonia in a form suitable for combustion is extremely toxic and even produces chemical burns on direct skin contact.

There's been quite a few deaths from industrial ammonia tank (plant, truck, railcar), leaks but unlike hydrogen there's zero chance for a combustion explosion or incidental damage from fire.

Ammonia also almost immediately diffuses and dissipates in air at atmospheric conditions, so while it's VERY toxic it's only VERY toxic for a VERY brief period of time (a few minutes).

One of the odd "safety" benefits with ammonia is that it takes a rather special set of circumstances for it to combust in the first place. That makes it a sub-optimal fuel in many applications--notably aviation.

Thanks for that neat fact about using hydrogen in diving. I'm only familiar with trimixes or bimixes of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium.

Interesting re ammonia. But is it the same when there would be a huge spill? E.g. imagine a leak at a large storage facility, of comparable size to how we store hydrocarbons today. Wouldn't that turn into a massive toxic cloud?

Interesting read re breathing hydrogen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydreliox

It does leak and it has turned into a massive toxic clouds, but ammonia is much, much lighter than air and a (comparatively) unreactive gas so any large release dissipates extremely quickly and rises straight up out of buildings and infrastructure. It doesn't linger and there's no danger of invisible structural embrittlement or fires.

It's also extremely noxious at even very low (safe) concentrations so, unlike odorless methane, hydrogen, or carbon monoxide, people know immediately to stay away from the area.

The natural gas (mostly methane) that's piped into housing for heating or cooking is deliberately ordorized with hydrogen sulfide to make it noxious so gas leaks can be smelled.

Electricity in batteries isn't great for trucking, but it's going to win anyways.

Because it's far cheaper than diesel or hydrogen.

60% of the cost of trucking is fuel. A reduction in that provides a massive competitive advantage that will push out other trucks. Trucking is a highly competitive low margin business.

Green hydrogen uses about 3X the electricity per mile as a battery powered truck, it can never be competitive on cost. It may be better in every other way, but cost is primary.

We still have to solve aviation and maritime don’t we?

I can see why you’d want a single fuel source for all vehicles.

But I know nothing about fuel production.

> We still have to solve aviation and maritime don’t we?

Hydrogen for aviation is turbocharged stupidity. Particularly when we're making solid progress on synthetic (and biomass) aviation fuels [1]. (Which wouldn't require a global aircraft and airport infrastructure overhaul.)

[1] https://www.catf.us/resource/decarbonizing-aviation-challeng...

Sadly, aviation is looking like only hydrocarbon combustion will work for anything aside from very short-haul flights.

No battery breakthrough will get around the fact that medium and long-haul planes get the bulk of their range from the fact that they get substantially lighter as they burn fuel. Short-haul routes and trainers can be all electric ( https://byeaerospace.com/ ).

We'll probably end up with something like "green" hydrocarbon synthesis--at substantial cost increases. The vast bulk of aviation will never be de-carbonized in any foreseeable future short of something akin to "Mr. Fusion" from Back to the Future.

There's good hope for ammonia in maritime. Man in Germany has had working ammonia fueled gas turbines on a variety of vessels and routes for years with forthcoming retro-fits available this year. https://www.man-es.com/discover/two-stroke-ammonia-engine

Ammonia won't work well in aviation due, primarily, to its very short/slow combustion wave-fronts and low combustion temperatures, but also due to its lack of specific energy density with storage infrastructure that's light enough to be airworthy. It's "do-able", but a very distant "2nd fiddle" to even lite/green Jet-A (kerosene) synthesis.

It is possible to take some of the carbon out of the jet fuel equation, but there are worse forms of pollution than carbon.

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

Thanks for that link! I've been following aviation fuels for some time, but had no idea this had ever been tried.

if you want to fuel an airliner with hydrogen, it might be possible, but you'd have to kick most passengers off to make place for the hydrogen

Its not that it had a big chance, its that because everyone (other auto manufacturers) was doing it and you have to keep up to make the shareholders happy

All revolutionary technologies that end up successful surely look hopeless and too expensive at some point. Just look at the price of solar panels on 1970s.

SpaceX looked insane to me. For a very long time I was incredibly sceptical Starship will ever fly. Well...

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