Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog...
> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources. And that sounds like a reasonable motive; the sort of thing that people who don't see themselves as evil villains – i.e. the supermajority of people – could embrace.
The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".
This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.
You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.
I thought it was methane. Wouldn't that be 80% hydrogen on a molar basis? (Or... 67%, if we're counting moles of molecular hydrogen?) Is the discrepancy coming from impurities, or different types of fuel, or what?
It is hard to see whose promise of a bright future seems most realistic.
It is promoting electric cars fairly forcefully.
If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.
Hydrogen is no threat to oil and gas companies, quite the contrary, as discussed by comments all around.
For example, they can produce hydrogen from fossil fuels and justify expanding gas infrastructure while talking about some "future transition".
I remember natural gas vehicles (busses and cars, like the honda civic). You could actually fill up at home if you had natural gas, but the electricity just to compress the natural gas for the car cost as much or more than the compressed fuel in the car.
For hydrogen, it is even harder. take a look at cars running compressed hydrogen. I remember $17 for the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. I think it is even more expensive now.
Easier to burn CH4 than use energy to split out the H2, then compres it, then store it.
I actually think solar is better.
Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.
Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.
How many MW of wind turbines? How big electrolyzer? How big energy storage? Investment cost? Running costs? Reliability?
A uni-polar electrolyzer uses alkaline liquids, rather than solid polymer, as its electrolyte. The electrolyzer can produce about 6kg of hydrogen per hour. The hydrogen is then stored as compressed gas in storage tanks that have a total capacity of about 500kg. The hydrogen is then used in the bi-fuel hydrogen/diesel genset to power the village when there is no wind.”
Source: https://martinottaway.com/rhemmen/hydrogen-as-the-ultimate-f...
I guess it’s no fun covering things that just work. News need drama…
Hydrogen leaks everywhere.
There's no "green revolution". Just different compromises and tradeoffs, and practical considerations for roll-out times (including for solar, wind, and batteries - no free lunch.
I don't have enough of an opinion to comment on anyone of them individually, but I notice a really striking pattern where every time the idea of alternative energy sources are brought up that are not wind or solar, whoever brings it up is accused of sabotaging the energy transition in some way or another.
Benefit of doubt has it's place but this is just naivety or outright trolling.
Because no matter how many wind and solar plants you build, they will never be able to provide baseload and hence you need fossil backup power plants.
Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.
The only technology that is actually able to get rid of fossil technology is nuclear power.
I enjoy HN a lot when the subject is software or software adjacent. I find myself avoiding the comments section in actual engineering topics, though. You'd never catch an electrical engineer claiming to be an expert on whatever the flavor of the month is in development but every developer is an expert when it comes to all things that are even tangentially related to electric fields.
Batteries are pretty messy for the environment. And carrying a ton (1000 kg) with your car, just to be able to move, is a bit too much.
Also, bonus points to the "liberals" (including many of the techies in here) helping bring forward guys like Musk, they did that by purchasing and aggressively marketing for his vehicles, they've actually empowered him and brought him into his actual position of power.
It’s implausible to blame them. But they absolutely bear responsibility for giving him wealth and power.
(And politicians in Sacramento, who didn’t do a good enough job of forcing their subsidies to cause competition.)
well NO, contrary to popular belief. there is no such things because
1. Oil is scarce resource that not every country have
2. since not every country has, they must import it with expensive trade deficit meaning that Oil alternative or replacement is very much needed
since country like china,south korea and japan that has massive economy dependant on oil for their survival, hydrogen tech would come out of necessity but they are not because its not feasible
if hydrogen is feasible in mass scale, trust me someone in Asia would already make it
Even today China is still building more hydrogen and nuclear plants than most of the world combined but those technologies have not scaled or gotten cheaper at the same rate as solar, wind and batteries so are not growing where as solar and wind are. China is close to reaching the point where it could start replacing its coal electricity with solar, wind and battery as it is cheaper.
That is a ridiculous proposition. Electric vehicles themselves were being pushed hard around the world before China saw the way the wind was blowing and overtook it.
The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta
Economics of hydrogen in CA are also complicated given our on-off approach to hydrogen infrastructure[2] for both personal and commercial vehicles but there is some progress on commercial side at least last year [1].
Hydrogen is not everyone but there are use cases for it.
The uptime (i.e. the refueling time) is an key factor [4]. Battery operated vehicles need a lot of downtime for charging thus you will need more vehicles for the same coverage. Fast charging can help but impacts battery life and thus TCO.
All green public transit are expensive. It is not a easy choice for administrators, should they improve coverage/ service frequency etc for their residents who need transit the the most or better air quality and less noise pollution for all of them.
Remember Fuel Cells are far cleaner for the air much more than BEV also, because it needs oxygen from the air FCs purify the air to do so. Kind of like having a big vacuum on the road in addition to not emitting direct pollutants[3]
[1] https://www.portofoakland.com/port-of-oakland-celebrates-hyd...
[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/zero-e...
[3] Ignoring tire dust, it is problem for all vehicles of course, that is independent of propulsion systems
[4] Even for personal vehicles it can be a decision factor when considering going green, as an owner of a Mirai with no easy access to EV charging stations I have benefited from being to refuel like a gar car.
It also means charge is a matter of having overhead lines which can be added as hoc (as overhead docking stations) to end-of-line stops, letting the bus juice up for some time before it runs the route back.
Charging a fleet of 100 buses overnight looks like a huge infrastructure issue to me. 100 charging ports, huge grid connection, substation etc. That is if the local grid even has capacity. Anyone who has tried to open a factory will know that is not always the case.
My view is that if you want a clean alternative today you'd go with electric and also the tech seems worth continuing to develop for other applications. I also think that public transit doesn't seem like it plays to the strengths (such as they are) of hydrogen.
On the other hand battery seems to be cracking along: "over 1,600 zero-emission buses currently in service, and TfL aims to have a fully zero-emission bus fleet by 2030, accelerating plans with increased government funding."
> The BEB fleet operated at 66% availability with more than half of the total days related to retrofit of the charger cabling and programming by the OEM.
I guess you could say this is due to immature technology but honestly I don't see 75% of HPC chargers being offline for maintenance at any given time. This is probably just bad luck with a vendor.
If you look at the road calls the BEB is by far the most reliable one, causing one road call out of 45. It was also the cheapest per mile by a long stretch.
Certainly wind power was viable as soon as fiberglass was invented.
The mass engineering should have also been directed at that which would have saved us a billion tons of carbon.
Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.
Not to disparage the talented scientists and engineers working on hydrogen power, but now that 20 years have passed I believe it was designed to fail.
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
Musk was very effective in pushing the narrative that there was nothing before Tesla.
https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07...
1997 (Gen I): 660 units 1999 (Gen II): 457 units
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
Battery technology still sucked in the early 00s and it wasn't obvious yet that lithium ion batteries would lead to the first truly viable mass market all-electric cars. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were still many possible futures and the path that had the most research behind it at that point was hydrogen.
Nothing has really changed either, 20 years later and laypeople still don't have better information about this technology...
I’m only semi-joking.
1. Transit agencies have no way to reasonably validate what the future holds. From the standpoint of today, a hydrogen bus can be expected to replace a diesel bus 1 to 1, while battery electric is a 2 to 1 replacement. This might not be a huge issue except:
2. FTA regulations have strict requirements on how many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water.
3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
BYD makes electric buses in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_K_series
Do the conventional bus manufacturers in the US not make electric buses? All of the electric buses here are made by the transport authority’s traditional manufacturers.
But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.
And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.
If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
This argument is weak. To get any kind of reasonable energy density you have to compress hydrogen to 10,000psi. The tanks to contain a gas at that pressure are heavy enough that the weight of gas inside is almost negligible. Especially in ground vehicles which aren't hugely sensitive to weight.
Although yes, agreed, a few kilos makes little difference to a bus.
You can't drill for oil & refine it at a bus depot but for the case of hydrogen maybe the assumption that fuel has to come from a supplier can be challenged
I don't see any benefits from economies of scale for electrolysis
Do you think it could be useful for farm or construction vehicles?
Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/
I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
Is it nice if the bus can do a driver's entire shift without a recharge? Sure! But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus. That means the technology problem is now a money problem.
Busses are also already quite heavy, so battery weight doesn't affect them as much as it might in a small car.
The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.
Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases.
That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient.
The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.
Seattle has kind of been a bust with them because the hills really reduce the amount of charge, and on top of that the existing bus depots are already full, so switching to electric only would mean having to find and locate space for more bus depots, which is quite difficult.
Alternatively, you could add charging infrastructure in more places. Eg, partially have trolley-like lines on the route to "top up". This could make sense on dedicated buslanes, especially when multiple lines use that stretch (eg near central stop).
In short there are plenty of places to switch buses if you need to.
This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.
And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change.
So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse.
There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.
Good article on this topic.
It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up.
As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in.
It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.
In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen.
I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.
A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.
https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/tcat-pulls-all-electric-b...
Established bus manufacturers make good electric buses now but we don't have the money to buy replacements.
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I hope you're using "should" as in "that's what I'm accustomed to" rather than "that's how it ought to be"... right? :-D
Personally I feel like quieting buses would be a huge step toward making day-to-day city life more pleasant.
>Disadvantages
>Weight: a bus which can carry 20 persons and has a range of 2 km (1.2 mi) requires a flywheel weighing about 3 tons.
>The flywheel, which turns at 3000 revolutions per minute, requires special attachment and security—because the external speed of the disk is 900 km/h (560 mph).
It's truly a mystery why they never caught on
>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.
So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged
Flows > stocks, overhead wire for the win!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Chargin...
4GJ of stored energy, dischargeable in eight seconds.
Hydrogen is produced by the big oil and gas companies. By pushing hydrogen vehicle instead of battery electric vehicles they stay in business.
They market hydrogen as a green alternative to oil, although most hydrogen is currently produced from fossil sources, and this won't change soon (next 10 years).
"Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one"
The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
I drive a Toyota hybrid and while it's a step up from a purely combustion propelled car, I still have to do oil changes and its fumes still smell bad when it's running rich for whatever reason.
The problem is hybrid drivetrains are complex. You don't save anything on the complexity of a combustion engine and exhaust train (over 1000 individual parts that have to be machined at extremely low tolerances), but add a more complex transmission (it needs to be able to work with two distinct inputs) and an electric drivetrain on top of that.
It is worth it in terms of energy efficiency and acceleration stats since even a small electric motor can supply a lot of torque at low speeds until the high-horsepower combustion engine catches up (virtually all modern cars have a turbocharger that needs time to spin up), but it's technically challenging to actually build into a modern car design - unlike 90s cars with ample space available to stuff components in, in a modern car every cubic centimeter is accounted for due to crash resistance.
The power split device isn't an ordinary transmission, it's a set of planetary gears with a fixed gear ratio between three shafts. One goes to the wheels, the other two to the engine and the electric motor respectively. The ratio of the engine speed to the wheel speed is then set by the speed of the electric motor connected to the third shaft, which gives you a CVT with no belts, clutches, torque converters or even synchros.
The transmission is "more complicated" only in the sense that it contains electric motors. In every other respect it's simpler, more efficient and more reliable than an ordinary transmission. Meanwhile those electric motors mean you don't need a starter motor or an alternator because the engine can be started by the electric motor through the transmission and an electric motor is a generator when operated in reverse.
A series hybrid still requires you to have a gas engine with all that entails, but now the gas engine needs its own dedicated electric generator/motor and you can't deliver power from the gas engine directly to the wheels, so the traction motors have to be bigger in order to supply 100% of the torque used in acceleration instead of the gas engine and electric motors both contributing. That makes series hybrids heavier, slower and more expensive, so they're basically useless. Probably the main advantage would be that you could offer the generator as an option on what would otherwise be a full electric vehicle and then only people who need the extra range would pay for it.
And of course, there are plug-in hybrids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid
It's a lot easier to add enough batteries to match the range of an ICE car. Range anxiety is largely manufactured at this point. The cars know how far they can go and where the chargers are. A gasoline powered generator would be a huge extra cost with no real upside other than averting a non-problem.
Any references?
This is not really true in the US, but maybe moreso in Europe, where engine displacement is penalized?
> that needs time to spin up
Porsche's latest 911 does something very cute here ("T-Hybrid"): they have a small electric motor in the turbo. They use the high-voltage hybrid battery to rapidly spin up the turbo on demand to significantly reduce turbo lag (one of the major drawbacks of a turbo engine). Then, at lower load, they can also regen the battery using the exhaust gases and that same motor.
They're also made by more than Toyota and Honda. The American automakers have been offering vehicles with a similar hybrid powertrain for around two decades and the German automakers for only a little less than that. But they're generally not a separate model like the Prius is, so the only exterior difference is a hybrid badge on what is otherwise visually identical to the non-hybrid car/truck of the same model.
I bought and drove a 2005 Prius for about 10 years. Loved it. But I would never buy another hybrid. My family now owns 3 EVs. Hybrids are better than pure ICE vehicles. But EVs are much much better than both of them. I could tell you about all the benefits of EVs, but until you own one, it may not sink in.
Hybrids are good for some people. Apartment dwellers without a place to charge an EV.
It includes fuel & upkeep costs.
("ditching already paid for" - probably not the case. Vs. leasing, or selling the hybrids on, or something.)
It's actually pretty simple to figure out. Making hydrogen takes energy. You lose some of the energy making the hydrogen. This is not a fixable problem. At least not unless you break the laws of thermodynamics.
When you have created hydrogen, you lose more energy compressing the energy. Then you have to transport it to wherever it's going to be pumped into the vehicle ... both of which take more energy. Then it goes into a fuel cell, which loses more energy. All these losses multiply. And if you know your maths, you know that multiplying numbers smaller than 1 means the result gets smaller and smaller. These losses are significant.
And we're comparing it with putting the energy into a battery directly. It has inherently better round trip energy. Even if hydrolyzers, and the infrastructure to store, compress, and transport hydrogen were free (which they are not), using hydrogen would still be more expensive than that. Because it wastes more of the energy that goes in. So, in addition to the energy losses, you also need to deal with infrastructure cost. On top of regular energy infrastructure.
Anyway, that's all theory. For practice, just look at market price of hydrogen. Most of that stuff is of the dirty grey hydrogen variety creating that wastes a lot of methane. So much, that it would be cleaner to just use the hydrogen in a combustion engine in the bus and you'd have less CO2 emissions. Expending more methane to make hydrogen to have less emissions makes no logical sense.
If you are using grey hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than methane. Nothing can change that. If you are using green hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than battery electric. Nothing can change that either. That's just physics and simple economics. Yes there are some innovations in this space happening that reduce the gap a little. But it's never going to be enough.
Right now it's not even close. Unless somebody is subsidizing the hydrogen fuel, you'd be paying way more per mile than with diesel. And not just a little bit. And a common reason to switch from diesel to BEV is that it actually costs way less per mile than diesel. So, instead of saving money, you are spending more money.
Subsidies are hiding the true cost of hydrogen. That's the only reason there are some vehicles on the road. As soon as the subsidies dry up, hydrogen transport use cases evaporate. There are of course plenty of other use cases where hydrogen is needed that make much more economical sense. Using scarce and expensive hydrogen for transport is a poor use of resources. The utopian world where we have vast amounts of hydrogen surpluses does not exist.
It's possible to imagine a future where both fuel sources have found their place, depending on context. Doesn't have to be an either/or.
In liquid form, methane has about 2.7x more energy by volume than hydrogen. Diesel has 4.2x more energy. Keeping and transporting hydrogen in liquid form takes a lot of energy and requires constantly boiling it off to keep it liquid. In practice, most hydrogen is transported in compressed gas form (700 bars). In that form, you need about 11 hydrogen truckloads to a single diesel truckload.
So, it takes up a lot of space. This makes it very impractical for transport use cases. Unless you convert it to something that maybe contains hydrogen but also other atoms. Like carbon (carbohydrates) or nitrogen (e.g. ammonia). Converting it to those forms takes more energy. And those multiply. And doing the chemical conversion back to energy in a combustion engine has the same problem as all combustion engines: it loses most of the energy as heat. Fuel cells might improve on that; but they'd still be losing energy.
This is why battery electric trucks easily match the ranges of most hydrogen trucks on the road. There are currently no production hydrogen trucks or buses that offer a longer range than their battery-electric equivalents. You'd need significantly larger tanks and adding the same volume in battery would match the range easily. Even with current production batteries (160-200 wh/kg), which are about a third of the energy density of already announced new state of the art batteries (500wh/kg). Batteries are on a path of steady volumetric an mass density improvements. Hydrogen will never get better than it already is.
It's also why hydrogen planes are no longer being considered a viable plan by the likes of Airbus; most of the plane would have to be reserved for hydrogen containment.
For ships, using hydrogen as a fuel is not a serious option either. Simply too much volume. Transporting hydrogen by ship in liquid form loses 1-2% of the load per day to boil off. This is the only way to keep it liquid; boiling it off cools the liquid. The longer the journey, the more hydrogen is lost to unavoidable boil-off, making long-distance transport highly inefficient.
"stuck with 19 buses that they have to drive a long way to refuel at great overall expense, something I wrote about this week."
This seems like a problem that can be solved, but it is a hen and egg problem. Not enough refusing options, system less attractive. Electric cars had this too.
I wonder why city buses have this problem. I am not aware that city buses use regular gas station, I always assumed that they get refilled in their "home base". This would make the refueling infrastructure not very challenging.
Is hydrogen the future for cars? Manufacturers haven’t given up on it yet https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/is-hydrogen-the-future-f...
> Metro gets about one or two buses every week or so, and that it typically takes around four months of testing before they are put into service. The lengthy testing process is necessary because the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust, one of the funders of the Metro’s initiative, requires the agency to destroy one of its existing buses before putting a new one on the road
I'm just gonna assume the rest of the article is from the same source and close this tab.
The article only makes this claim via a link to another article:
> the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), is riddled with conflicts of interest and bias toward hydrogen.
In which they reveal gas pipeline companies and fuel cell manufacturers are members of that org and on its board.
This lets the producers "green wash" their production pipeline by stating in a lies-through-omission manner that their hydrogen is "clean burning". See no carbon out of the tailpipe! It's clean! It's the same lie as EVs claiming to be "green" in places where fossil fuel sources dominate electricity production. It's just moving the tailpipe somewhere else rather than eliminating it entirely.
There's also "blue" hydrogen that's manufactured with fossil fuels but claims/intends to capture the carbon produced in the process. It can still feed into a hydrogen infrastructure so fossil fuel companies love it due to the same greenwashing.
The only carbon neutral hydrogen is "green" hydrogen which uses a renewable source and electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen. But even that is wildly less efficient on net than just using renewables to charge battery EVs. Electrons are far easier to move long distances than hydrogen or hydrogen feedstocks (including water).
This is just anti-ev propaganda.
First, its kind of a chicken-egg situation:
'its not worth going green for the power grid, all the cars are still ICE' 'oh its not worth building EV cars, the power grid is dirty anyway'.
Second, there are lifecycle analyses that show that even if your powergrid is entirely fossil fuels, EVs are still a win. This is because powerplants are really efficient in ways that a car engine can't be because of scale/weight. iirc the only exception was if your power-grid was still like 50%+ coal?
Then you not only charge the EVs from entirely renewable generation, most of them can curtail their load for about a week because typical EVs have around seven times the average commute in total range, and then when renewable generation is at 25% of normal, the capacity added to charge EVs can be directed to less flexible loads because the demand from EVs can be easily delayed for the right price.
Their existence is what makes a grid with a higher percentage of renewables even work.
It's not. I'm not in any was opposed to EVs. Assuming so is a bit ridiculous on your part.
There's a marketing push to cast EVs as green no matter the prevailing sources of utility power. EVs can be green (like hydrogen) if they're charged from renewables. They also get greener over time since they're as green as their charging source.
In the short term EVs are just moving their emissions from tail pipes to smoke stacks. Contrary to the marketing around them.
You can charge an EV with electricity made from several different energy sources. You could even charge it with gas or diesel generator, if such a need would arise. You can't really fill an ICE car with home-brewed gas.
The real issue a) range and b) if your car use maps well to an EV's need to have it plugged in for several hours at a time.
If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.
Isn't waste heat pretty much free by definition?
Also the article appears to be arguing for electric instead of hydrogen buses, but for some reason seems to try to frame "winter range" as being an issue for hydrogen buses specifically, and then says "electric buses face a different challenge" -- winter range.
I feel like there are two separate points that can be made:
- Hydrogen fuel is more costly than diesel or electric (not even sure how true this is, but it's what the article seems to indirectly imply).
- Hydrogen fuel doesn't have winter range issues the way electric buses do, but regardless electric is still better for other reasons.
Additionally, agencies are experiencing vapor losses of fuel, which results in an overall increase in fuel costs. These losses can occur in different circumstances, but often occur after fueling when the gaseous fuel left in the hose (that cannot be returned to the liquid tank) evaporates. One agency reported double the cost of fuel due to these losses.
Anyway, yeah I think the argument in the article was that this waste heat isn't "free" because you're paying such a premium for it via the fuel costs.
I wish there were a common framework for this lose and hand-wavy accounting. For some people this is painfully wrong, while the rest are not even convincible about it.
Anyway winter or cold temperature is an advantage for hydrogen in hydrogen vs electric, precisely because heating is free. They get the reasoning wrong. I think "exceptionally expensive heat" is just made up to illustrate their point. Trash "article" either way.
IMHO hydrogen is the most foolproof way to store cheap solar energy.
But to be fair busses and trains and other public transit that does fixed routes every day is the perfect bench for any clean energy drive train that needs real world testing.
Also public money should never be overly shy of coordinating with companies who are trying to in good faith to solve our climate crisis.
Some discussion on this thread about hydrogen being a poison pill promoted by oil interests which I don’t really know about.
Electric bus programs have been broadly successful and no doubt have contributed in a real way to our understanding of that technology.
I think it’s the opposite. Public money should be conservative spends on things we know work. Let the startups try the risky bets.
As this has been reversed a lot of cities have gotten taken for a ride. For example “self driving car lanes”.
>34-bus expansion, jointly funded by Brighton & Hove Buses and Surrey County Council, bringing their total hydrogen fleet to 54 vehicles – the largest hydrogen bus operation in the UK. https://drivinghydrogen.com/2025/02/04/hydrogen-buses-34-new...
I'm not sure how cost effective it is compared to battery though.
The investors are getting bilked.
Small aircraft are already there. I'm looking into starting my pilots license this year, the local flight school recently acquired an Elektra Trainer [1], that apparently has 2.5 hours worth of flight time [2].
Big transoceanic widebodies obviously will be fossil fuel based for a long time to come, but I think a lot of the GA market and bush pilot/island hoppers can and will be done by electric planes sooner than later - alone because the noise and lead emissions are all but gone, and I think that in a few years, when experiences on failure modes are a bit richer, electric planes will also be cheaper to maintain - similar to cars, there are less parts involved in the first place that can break down.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektra_Trainer
[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/elektrisch-fliegen-in-l...
Demonstrated range of over 300 nautical miles. Significantly higher reliability than helicopters previously used for the same task, and much cheaper.
It sounds ridiculous but I’ve been in aircraft that take off while attached to a cable thousands of feet in length — a winch launched glider!
Edit: although maybe there's a good idea: catapult or winch launch for electric aircraft would massively reduce the power and energy storage requirements to be carried onboard.
There are other issues - like you cannot abort a catapult in progress.
By comparison glider launch wires are quite thin and light.
Strong disagree. Short range eVTOL craft will blow open the market for all kinds of use cases.
Size the battery for takeoff/climbing/go-around/diversion use-cases. Size the fossil-fuel engine for cruising power, which should improve efficiency. During takeoff and climbing power, the two motors work together. During cruise and descent, the electric motor regenerates the battery. I imagine that for general aviation, you would maintain one propshaft and not even bother with a clutch pack, since the gas engine is needed in all phases of flight, and freewheeling an electric motor is simple. Perhaps have the fossil-fuel engine keyed to the shaft with a shearing pin, so that if the engine seizes, the electric motor still turns the prop.
This has the advantage that you now have two independent motors, which could eventually help with ETOPS rating, but would initially improve safety/reliability for general aviation.
Yes, you are still fossil-fuel dependent, but you burn much less of it, first by offsetting some takeoff energy to the electrical grid, and secondly by reducing reserve power in the fossil fuel engine to improve efficiency.
> There is no known battery technology, or one on the horizon,
The planes and batteries are getting there.
VC will invest in snake oil if they think they'll get out at a profit.
/j
..practical to replace commercial airliners, sure. There have been plenty of slow electric planes.
In the future, net-zero air travel can only be done by producing jet fuel in a carbon neutral way.
That approach turns this technology maturation and cost risk into a market, and those with most expertise can then put their own money on the line to help everyone make the right decision.
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-type-water-split...
In production in probably 5 years from now...
Buses suck. People don't like riding them as much as trains and streetcars. Bus lines do not attract the same kind of investment that streetcars can. Attracting denser development along routes improves ridership AND tax base, which helps balance out the cost.
I think we will massively regret BEV as the solution to ICE vehicles. They don't handle temperature extremes well and I believe people are overly optimistic about recycling them.
If we had zero cars in a city, but 10k diesel buses, the city would still be better than if it had 100k cars and 500 electric buses. I'm making up these numbers, of course.
Point being: sure, electrify everything eventually, but let technology improve and let prices go down to the point that it makea sense for public transport.
Right now, an extra diesel bus would do more good than replacing a diesel bus with an electric one in many cities.
I heard 100kw. If I have 100 buses charging overnight at 100kw I guess I need 10Mw grid connection? Is that an easy thing to get to a city bus depot in the US. In the UK I believe that would require moving to a location with a HV line and building a sub-station.
Anecdotally, the town I live in invested in probably around 100 buses. They did build a new depot with charging stations.
Batteries are coming down in price, so if getting a good grid connection is a problem, you can put in a buffering battery.
The comfort of the BEV buses is much better than the old diesel buses, by the way, and they are much less noisy in the city.
On average and excluding the minority of routes with dedicated lanes (which may be best run on diesel), the Boston metro buses are in use for 6.6 hours per day, covering on average 53 miles.
A full size electric bus uses electricity at a rate of approx 2 kWhr/mile.
So, on average the bus would have around 17 hours to charge up with 106 kWhrs of juice, and this averages out to about 6.2 kW. On average.
However, the smart thing to do would be to charge the buses when the power costs the least, say between 10 pm and 8 am, so you'd need ~10 kW/bus, maybe ~1MW for the 100 bus fleet. Not difficult.
But in the UK you would need HV powerlines overhead and 5 years of planning to get a 1MW connection
They are very common here in Sweden.
The engine is more or less the same as a gasoline/diesel engine.
The biogas can be (and is) locally produced by food/farming waste or similar but can also run on fossile gas.
And for the buses it is no problem to carry the somewhat bulky cylinders on the roof.
If the goal is anything-but-diesel-or-gasoline/petrol, the use of propane (a fossil fuel that is a byproduct of oil and gas refining) is a well-understood, well-implemented practice. I am not advocating for propane as a primary solution, but rather as part of the journey towards truly clean vehicle emissions and the ramp-down of heavily polluting fossil fuel refining. Propane and the equipment to operate engines with it are available today, and we have the knowledge going back over a century to implement it successfully.
BTW, I wish I could find the article from the 1970s discussing how Ford Motor Company engineers had converted a brand-new 1960s Lincoln to propane and ran it with 100% synthetic motor oil, never changing the oil or filter. After 500,000 miles of daily use, they stripped the engine down to its parts and found it to be shiny and not exhibiting the expected amount of wear seen in usual engines of those years with much lower mileage. I'd have to pour through old magazines for that story, but life gets in the way, so let's treat my recollection as apocryphal.
Also in 2011, the government introduced fuel-tax on to LPG, which it had been exempt/discounted on previously. So the price went up, and all of a sudden it wasn't as economical. So that put it in to a death-spiral, especially when many servo's started getting rid of it due to low demand. Now people with LPG cars have "range anxiety" [4]. Where I live (Perth, Western Australia), you are basically stuck in the metro area if you are LPG only. It also means there's a ton of ~2008-2012 LPG Falcons for sale second-hand at good price, but no one wants to buy them.
Out of curiosity, I just went and looked up some data for where I live - the Perth metro (source [5]);
Year Month Fuel c/L avg Servos $cost / 100km for Ford Falcon sedan (UNO)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
2010 Dec LPG 69.4 216 @ 15L = $10.4 (gas model)
ULP 128.0 298 @ 10L = $12.8 (petrol model)
2019 Dec LPG 89.0 147 @ 15L = $13.4 (gas model)
LPG 89.0 147 @ 12L = $10.7 (LPi model)
ULP 144.9 387 @ 10L = $14.5 (petrol model)
2024 Dec LPG 133.9 46 @ 12L = $16.1 (LPi model)
ULP 172.7 436 @ 10L = $17.3 (petrol model)
ULP 172.7 436 @ 6L = $10.4 (Falcon Ecoboost 4cyl 2L turbo)
Dsl 178.5 437 @ 9L = $16.1 (Ford Territory SUV 2.7L TD)
Like all ICE engines, it still emits NOx pollution that cities want to get rid of.
It is even less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells. It combines energy-inefficiency of ICE with the energy-inefficiency of hydrogen generation and distribution.
Hydrogen is a worse fuel than gasoline, so these engines are more complex and deliver less power.
Such engines in busses would be more expensive to run, more expensive to maintain, and still have tail-pipe emissions.
Just like public companies don't sell stuff they sell shares.
Just like private equity doesn't buy companies they buy loans they can disappear by defaulting a company.
1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale
2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?
3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all
4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however
5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.
I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.
I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.
2) There is a huge existing logistics network which conveys diesel to all corners of the world. The same, in a sense for electricity. For Hydrogen this doesn't exist.
5) The chairman of JCB wrote to all his employees before the Brexit referendum to say how he was absolutely convinced it would be a brilliant success and would lead to great prosperity for Britain. So probably not the best people to take strategy advice from.
In Europe at least, battery powered trains and commercial vehicles have been in use for decades simply because they were the best solution for certain use cases, before anyone thought about the climate or subsidies related to it. Hydrogen only came along once subsidies did.
In every single case I am aware in my country Hydrogen vehicles were only purchased because politicians insisted that Hydrogen MUST be used, and these projects have pretty much all been disastrous.
Recent in my city a number of diesel trains were replaced with battery and hydrogen. The Hydrogen trains lasted two weeks before they gave up and went back to Diesel. The battery ones are running perfectly.
Thank you, a template ad hominem. I'll cut that out and put it in my scrap book
Ah yes, his opinion on a completely unrelated highly partisan thing being wrong in hindsight implies his opinion about the company he is the very chairman of isn't trustworthy.
Maybe you should be the last person we all learn basic logic from :-)
Fuel cells are presumably more expensive than battery packs. The former are barely produced, while the latter are made in gigafactories. You can't just fill up the gas tank with hydrogen, it will leak out and/or cause a violent reaction with oxygen.
> somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot
You can't just store hydrogen in a tank and call it a day. Again, it leaks through everything and is rather reactive. Maybe it could be stored on site, but even then it'll still need to get there.
> it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle
Not intrinsically. Buses could be built with swappable battery packs.
> allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
How many solar panels and how much water you need to power those 100 buses you mention? Hydrolysis isn't very efficient.
> hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy
In theory, maybe. In practice, it is difficult to store at scale.
Maybe, but a tank of hydrogen burnt through an ICE is much cheaper than either
For your storage and production concerns, here it is working in practice
It's really not. Most of the hydrogen bus projects were killed by the surprising cost of fueling - approximately 4x the cost of electricity.
And no wonder: just the energy wasted producing hydrogen and then using it in a fuel cell is enough to build a battery pack that will last the equivalent.
Toyota FC stack costs ~$11k, about the same if not cheaper than a 100kWh worth of Li-ion cells.
I'm not like a hydrogen believer, I just loathe incorrect technical understandings on the Internet, like any techy person would.
Considering current CCS and future MCS charging ports and their speed I think the hydrogen lost another advantage if it ever had a refuelling time advantage.
People keep falling for the myth that we are making progress (we’re not).
Hydrogen powered busses are just a specific case of a much much larger communication/coordination issue…
To be clear no necessary corruption of the people in agencies themself,
- but of the people consulting them
- and/or influential investors in a sunk cost fallacy where they think they still can save their investments
- again often a place they ended up in due to corruption, not necessary them themself being corrupt but other which gave them wrong consultancy
Even when I looked into the topic around 14~ years ago it was very clear that hydrogen will likely not be a competitive technology for cars "in general", through maybe somewhat competitive in some niche (i.e. trucks). But the thing is if you considered marked dynamics back then it never looked long side promising. As whatever wins outside of the niche (batteries) will get so much more traction weather it's infrastructure or science investments.
Now the question is what kind of corruption?
Russian Money (and any other natural gas exporter, but in Germany mainly Russian Money)
Again not necessary Russia directly going to people and bribing them. But mainly by using co-investments, potentially with obfuscated source, to convince people that a lot of other reliable investors are investing into it and therefor you should, too. Which, with a bit of more direct corruption, is quite an efficient strategy to push investments into a specific direction. Because the more you convince ("in general" independent) investors to invest into hydrogen the more they will lobby for hydrogen themself.
Now the key question here is why would Russia want to convince countries to use hydrogen as a "green future technology"?
Because why it technically looks like it can work, _it practically does not_!
This isn't even about hydrogen cars by themself.
But about hydrogen production, the simplest cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from natural gas in a non green way. While you can produce it green it has a pretty bad efficiency and exiting (and long term planed!!!) infrastructure is barely enough to move the hydrogen usage from other industries which do not it anyway to green methane.
And while lobbyist go on and on about how it's just a question to spin up the infrastructure it not only doesn't seem to happen even ~14 years ago it didn't seem that likely and today it's very clear it won't happen because it makes no sense. I mean sure e.g. Australia will likely produce a ton of green Hydrogen in the future, but again in comparison of what is needed to move all trucks & busses etc. to it it's not that relevant.
This doesn't mean there is no use ever for green hydrogen (like mentioned various existing industries need hydrogen). But today you can very clearly say it doesn't make sense for PKWs (full stop) and due to constant battery improvements in all areas and high investments into future improvements and not having reached a wall in science in that are it has moved from "it might make sense for some decades for trucks" to, nah, seems dump for trucks, too.
So to sum up:
- It seems doable enough so that (potentially corrupt) lobbyist can be convincing.
- Russia spend a ton of money in co-investing into research to push research in the EU and especially Germany in that direction. Implicitly making it look like a good investment deal.
- Then a lot of people which can influence political decisions got stuck with it as they are worried about losing their investment and worse, having missed the window to get a foothold into the actual future technologies.
- Then this people using their vast influence, including e.g. the "Springer Verlag" (most influential new publisher in Germany).
- Leading to a loop where more people get mislead into tinging it's good and invest themself, and then lobby for it and then worry to lose their investment so now lobby against any of it's competition.
- And even companies and politicians not stuck in that loop in any way might thing it's not "viable" and as such don't push against that nonsense.