Hydrogen vs. Battery Buses: A European Transit Reality Check
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
As a certified old person, I'm having trouble getting used to them. It is unnatural for a double-decker bus to pull up near-silently, and then move off smoothly when you get on. They are _supposed_ to vibrate violently and sound like they might explode at any moment; it's traditional.
(One of the bus route closest to me has a mix of fancy BEV buses and ancient diesel things from 2007, so I get an interesting selection. The other is mostly plugin hybrids, which are extra-disconcerting, as they're either silent or very noisy depending on mode.)
I mean, right from the second section of the article.
If they ever go electric I’m not sure how we’ll know it’s time to take the kids out. Won’t be able to hear them coming.
I'm sure they'll just have an app.
It self disables above something like 10kmh when, as you say, tyre roar is the predominant sound a car makes (unless someone is revving the engine I suppose).
Maybe I'm missing something but I would think at the scale of a bus, a hybrid is even more appealing than at the scale of a sedan.
Even locomotives and one or two earthmoving off-highway trucks have electric transmissions, making them series hybrids (With very small batteries not used for traction)
I think the electric is for infinite torque to get lots and lots of cars moving. But to slow down, "electric" brakes are to bleed off power into resistor banks, not re-capture the electricity.
Meanwhile an electric bus actually has to be efficient, which means batteries and regenerative braking.
With diesel-electrics, there was nowhere to the braking power, so resistor grids were the order of the day. I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile to outfit them with battery tenders to recapture the current with modern batteries and power-management circuitry.
> From Riksgränsen on the national border to the Port of Narvik, the trains use only a fifth of the power they regenerate. The regenerated energy is sufficient to power the empty trains back up to the national border.
The twist: these trains aren't connected to the grid. They use regenerative braking to charge batteries when carting ore to the coast, and the batteries power the trip back to the mine.
At least it can dump it as heat without also producing fine dust, like mechanical brakes do.
So far you're only seeing hybrid locomotives for trains that stop/start a lot (shunting trains and passenger rail). The cutover for freight will likely take decades because A) locomotive lifetimes are measured in decades and B) longer range freight usually has less stop/start, making it's economical delta less.
As I mentioned above, the freight lines are very conservative with new tech and amortize equipment over decades (often to the point where many rail cars are unsafe, especially outdated tank cars), so even if it exists we won’t see it in practice for awhile yet.
Buses have a completely different use case. They drive a well-known distance, and every day is practically identical. It is fairly easy to scale its battery pack to closely match the actual range needed. Running a true long-distance route like a Greyhound or Flixbus, which physically can't be battery-based yet? Just stick to diesel for now.
Buses stop frequently so regenerative breaking is meaningful and crucially they avoid the horrible cloud of diesel particulates as they pull off. It was really noticeable as a cyclist. About 40% co2 savings over diesel in London.
From the OP:
Cologne is one of the few relatively good news stories for hydrogen bus fleets. Regionalverkehr Köln (RVK) has become the largest operator of hydrogen fuel cell buses in Europe, with a fleet that reached 101 vehicles by late 2024 and is expected to grow to 160 by the end of 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_emission_buses_in_London
Fossil fuels are on the way out because we do expect problems. Do you have something similar for EVs?
If people quit as easily as you say hydrogen car manufacturers should, we wouldn't have much of anything.
The biggest one is efficiency. 40% efficient is one figure I saw, versus 80% for EV's.
Yes, you can refill quicker, but time to "refuel" EV's is dropping precipitously as well, and it's just all around safer than tanking around highly combustible liquid gas.
It can be done safely, but adds a lot of complexity on top of all the complexity needed for ICE engines.
Your points are also great.
There are new ways to store hydrogen, but these also need external (=from a separate battery) electricity to release it again and the process is slow and doesn’t provide enough amperage, so it can only be used to slowly charge another big battery that is required for these cars to be able to drive.
I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.
And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.
So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]
[1] 0.5*0.7 = 0.35.
And that’s before we get to the fuel costs - £90 to go 400 miles in a Mirai, versus £5.50 to go 300 in an EV6.
Proton exchange membranes are very unreliable and expensive. They are also not power-dense, one that powers a bus will be very large.
Unless the hydrogen fueling nozzle freezes to the car, which is apparently quite common in high humidity weather and/or when multiple cars are fueled consecutively. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031992...
It’s not impossible, but I think you’re underestimating the complexity of doing that safely.
With more engineering work an intrinsically safe PTC heater could be certified and used just fine.
What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine.
Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe.
Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV.
Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing).
Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people.
And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway.
Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing.
The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough.
You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk.
BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier.
And if we work at it that number might go the same way as Coal has within our lifetimes.
Not yet. That is the nature of technological R&D - if we had the answers, we wouldn't be doing R&D.
AI before the last decade or so didn't beat other computer technologies in key metrics; should they have stopped developing it? Fusion power doesn't beat fission and other options in key metrics; solar didn't beat other sources in key metrics, including costs, ... - should humanity have stopped developing those things?
Unless you can find a way to double their efficiency, and also get hydrogen down to close to 1:1 energy input to output it's just not an efficienct use of electricity.
I always think of I, Robot where the protagonist gets on a motorcycle and immediately their passenger complains about how dangerous gasoline is.
While not for everybody, EVs have a really great property of being rechargable without much effort on your part. Just spend ~10 seconds plugging it in at home/work and then ~10 seconds unplugging it before your next time. Compared to waiting 20 minutes in line at Costco Gas to save 1 dollar.
On a pretty efficienct ICE that I had I was averaging about 20p per mile driven. On my EV I'm averaging 2.5p per mile driven.
Hydrogen cars will become available only when hydrogen is used as a temporary storage for renewable energy. But probably even there converting it to electricity in industrial scale fuel cell will make more sense.
I wouldn't say solved here. Significantly improved into usability yes, but there are still big issues with batteries:
- their low energy density means it's essentially impossible to have a long range in a small car, every long range EV is necessarily quite large, yet still has a shorter range than a city car
- specific energy remains meh, contributing to weight inflation (though by no means the only factor here)
- low temperature performance remains dreary and something you have to manage (and possibly hack / work around e.g. if your car only does automatic battery conditioning)
- while I think fast charge times are a bit overblown as a single driver on long trips (because stretching / resting every 2-3 hours is a good idea anyway), if you have relief drivers and can relay they're a significant impediment
Not that I think hydrogen has any future mind. But EVs do have a lot of drawbacks. And the amount of power you need available to charge a bus fleet in reasonable time is significant if you do pure battery.
And the fact that hydrogen is most popular in Germany and Japan should provide a clue.
These are countries with well established ICE car industries and therefore shifting to hydrogen provides the least disruption when it comes to their car manufacturing as well as infrastructure.
The disproportionately high interest in hydrogen is likely not being driven because of a belief in its future success, but likely more as a hope to continuing the status quo.
1. Germany's existing industrial capacity in terms of machining is a much closer match to hydrogen than to EVs. So in short it is wishful thinking mixed with a kind of self-preservation.
2. There seems to be a (somewhat unfounded) worry about energy storage when it comes to EVs, that many German technologists think is easier to handle and solve with hydrogen.
3. Germans culturally have a slight tendency to be fascinated by intricate and complex systems (which can also be a bad thing, see bureaucracy). Electric vehicles are conceptionally very simple, so the opposite. Hydrogen is a little bit more involved.
A more complete theory would encompass the Japanese drives as well.
Hydrogen would enable a lot of very rich and powerful businesses to just pivot their business model a bit: the fossil fuel industry would have a destination for "grey hydrogen", pipeline owners could repurpose natural gas pipelines and bunkers for hydrogen, you'd still need refineries, tanker trucks to refill gas stations, you'd still need a nationwide network of gas stations in the first place...
In contrast, electric cars cut out a lot of the middlemen - once you got the car and a solar panel on your roof, you don't need _any_ of these industries any more. And you can't have that.
With battery buses - you might need to slightly beef up the local transformer and installs some new wires and that's it.
Or even better, do what the city mass transit company does here in Brno, Czech Republic - get trolley busses with batteries, that charge from the overhead wires while on the way, so they can then continue to serve additional destinations past the terminus of road electrification.
It is also super handy for any road work, they just automatically stow their collectors and then once again under wires, deploy them. There is usually a small trough around the wires at this spot, guiding the 2 collectors to the 2 wires. As a result, the driver does not have to leave the vehicles when connecting or disconnecting from wired power.
And it looks super cool! :)
I do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).
Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.
It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
Ie. in the evening whilst everyone has their ovens on, charging might only be 3 kW per bus, but then at 1am when everyone has gone to bed, it can be 30 kW per bus.
Using that approach, you can get far more capacity out of old infrastructure.
Unfortunately, some utility companies aren't amenable to that approach, and instead insist you pay to upgrade the infra, since to them it's a free upgrade.
Also, if it is a cold night and everyone leaves electric heating/heat pumps on, what happens then? Noone can get to work the next day?
Regardless most urban transformers are not going to have 15MW of overnight capacity spare even on a good day. The largest LV substations might be 30MVA in the UK at least - they won't just have half capacity suddenly free.
As an aside, we have so far really dropped the ball on level 1 electric vehicle chargers at offices. As solar power and EV numbers increase, it's pretty obvious that we want more cars charging during the day and fewer charging at night.
Our govt. really did a disservice to transition to EVs by slapping on a big tax to anyone even brushing against a charger at work: 120€/year
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
The absolutely largest peak is in the morning and then a smaller one in the afternoon.
So you might have a baseline like every 10 or 15 mins and then in rush hour it is every 3 or 5 mins.
humans have places to be. They shouldn't wait for transit. and they mostly won't.
City busses don’t need that much energy because as they don’t move quickly, the cargo is light, and regenerative breaking offsets stop and go.
Sure, for regular battery buses without trolley collectors, indeed some new transformers might be needed. But even here, I wonder if you could make it somewhat distributed, with some charging happening at the line terminus where the drivers also often have to take a break anyway.
Battery buses have a battery capacity of around 400kWh. Assuming they are stabled for 6 hours overnight, that's only a charging power of 66kW. Suddenly your depot needs a connection with a peak capacity of 3.3MW instead of the proposed 15MW.
This can get significantly better in practice. There's a peak transit demand during commute hours, but that means there are quite a few unused buses in the middle of the day. Those can charge at the depot to take advantage of cheap daytime solar. A lot of bus routes are timed, with a waiting time of 5 to 10 minutes at the turnaround point. Place an overhead charger here, and the charging demand can be distributed across the day. As a bonus, this also reduced the battery capacity needed - and the associated lower weight reduces total energy demand as well.
Sure, bus depots are going to need beefy connections, but that's hardly an insurmountable obstacle. The ongoing rapid rollout shows that it simply isn't a such a big issue in practice.
Firstly you have charging losses - and you're assuming that you can charge at the same rate consistently over the cycle of the charge.
Secondly, doing it like that massively reduces operational flexibility. If buses are all late back (bad traffic for example) you would want to charge more aggressively than the 60kW. You can't so you're going to have buses that are low on charge the next day.
Finally, it's all a bit moot. In most areas you do not have 3MW of spare capacity on the LV network to suddenly plug into. You're going to need a new HV connection or dramatic LV grid reinforcement, so you might as well put a decent connection in at that point. The cost is basically the same, most of the cost is in permits and civils.
Your idea to place charging points at turnaround points is also not as feasible as you make out. It's incredibly hard to do that (TfL massively struggles to get planning for a simple toilet block for drivers at turnaround points) and they are not designed in a way to have buses in a certain exact position to charge often. And even if you could if buses are late they cannot skip the turnaround like now as they need to charge. This will cause massive cascading delays down the route for the rest of the day.
Grid connections are the reason rollout is so slow, at least in the UK. There is relatively plentiful funding for it but most depots are now completely maxed out in power availability - any spare capacity has already been used and the LV DNO queue is 10+ years for local reinforcement.
Unless you burn the hydrogen, you aren't producing any emissions... unless you count water as an emission. Fuel cells don't produce any emissions.
Burning hydrogen though, does produce some emissions, however it's pretty minimal. I believe it's only NOx, and even then at far lower rates compared to gas vehicles. No CO2, CO, or any other stuff from gas or not-fully-burnt gas.
That said, I agree hydrogen has seemingly no place in something like buses. Frankly, the only places that I see hydrogen has any future is either going to be for planes and boats, or potentially for intermediate storage akin to batteries (i.e., create hydrogen with excess solar/wind power).
So you still need filters, this not for the exhaust, but for the intake.
ICE air filter would destroy them in no time.
in one way it is a downside since its more parts and complication than maybe a pure EV architecture, but the similarities to ICE arch means that its an attractive option to transition to for both the OEMs and a tiered supply base used to working on ICE vehicles. If you can get economies of scale going and bring cost down for fuel cell its a great replacement for many (not all) ICE archs.
They are preferred solutions for larger vehicles because of the weight of lithium ion batteries. also because theyre optimized for power density while electric architectures excel with energy capacity/storage. But if you can implement infrastructure at the locations where these larger Class A vehicles are (or busses), then you dont care about capacity for the known universe's lightest (resting mass) fuel as much since H2 refuel times are fast.
You are correct about boats though, it is also a good solution set there. Planes will only work if we can achieve air cooled hydrogen fuel cells and eliminate the expensive and heavy balance of plant (Hysata).
Googling a bit I found this article about the first series produced parcial trolley busses (eq. battery equiped) being delivered in 2018: https://www.bmhd.cz/aktuality/aktualita.php?1481
Since then it certainly expanded a lot & there are now regular lines that have the trolleybus go part of the line under its own power, like the recently introduced line to Soběšice: https://brnensky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/brno-mhd-prvni-linka...
Thanks to this you can go watch them stow/deploy their collectors at the Královo Pole nádraží stop at about any time during the day. :)
It was usually in some tricky spots - trolley wires crossing streetcar wire on Konečného náměstí (yeah, we have both :) ) or on the top of the rather steep slope of the Kotlářská street next to the Natural sciences faculty of the Masaryk university.
I guess the new trolley busses with batteries and poles thatr can be stowed automatically might be even better for this - no need to fix the poles immediately, but wait for a regular stop or even the line terminus & just use the battery.
Also once when touring one of the trolleybus depos (the small one in Husovice) the local maintenance chief mentioned that the one roundabout wired for trolley buses (yes, that exists) is a pain to maintain & maybe they could scrap it in the future, with the busses crossing it on batteries instead. :)
We also have both streetcars and trolleybuses, and some strange junctions like the one at 5th and Jackson: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4TuLXmRLY5yK6HGJ6
There are some nice blog posts from a Seattle bus driver that go over some of the nerdy details of our system: https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i... https://www.nathanvass.com/blog/i-dont-know-what-a-trolley-i...
Australia kind-of already had 'hydrogen' infrastructure and supply chains already, in LPG or 'autogas'. LPG (or dual petrol/LPG) used to be a popular option for small vehicle fuel in Australia in the 2000s though has slowly declined due to petrol/electric hybrids coming along.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-19/lpg-cars-disappearing...
That said, it's possible to convert diesel engines to burn a 90% hydrogen/10% diesel mix, which could dramatically alter those numbers: https://www.unsw.edu.au/news/2024/08/converting-diesel-engin...
It shouldn't be too difficult to bring back 'autogas' infrastructure in Australia. And if we can, I don't see why others couldn't deploy it made sense to do so. Liquid/gas fuels make much more sense in very-low to moderate density areas with long distances between populated centres. Batteries make much more sense in high population density areas with relatively short trips.
Whilst I agree it's not as ideal as a true zero-emissions thing, it's certainly a stepping stone to greatly accelerate the decarbonisation of our fuels, by allowing many to convert internal combustion engines to use much cleaner fuels, without having to buy brand new vehicles.
Given that petrol and diesel these days are usually almost double the cost per litre of LPG in Australia, and that a lot of decently sized long range EVs are still very expensive in Australia, especially considering cost-of-living pressures and the distances many Aussies have to drive in rural and remote areas where EVs just aren't practical, I'm a little surprised LPG hasn't made a comeback.
Australia has since kicked off a project to construct a large green hydrogen generation plant in Western Australia, due to be producing by 2029 and fully operational by the end of 2031, so hydrogen could become a pretty big deal in by 2030.
https://research.csiro.au/hyresource/murchison-hydrogen-rene...
I’m currently in rural NW NSW, and it seems to me that BEVs would be ideal out here once they get a bit cheaper. Plenty of sunlight. Plenty of rooftop solar — every second house and farm shed has solar panels already. Powering farm vehicles from local solar instead of imported diesel seems logical and inevitable really.
Buses are classified as a “Most Uncompetitive” category. Electricity, whether wired or battery powered, is cheaper and easier to scale for the predicable everyday energy use of a city bus.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/07/green-hydrogen-for-ener...
edit: no, even internet archive from a year ago shows no picture
That intuitively makes sense - obviously a big vehicle needs more energy than a small one like a car.
However, typical city bus routes spend most of their time under 30 mph, cutting aerodynamic drag by a whopping 90% compared to 70 mph highway cruising that a car does.
With more work on rolling resistance (buying super-good bearings and fancy tyre designs), regen round trip efficiency, and energy use of the passenger cabin (heat pump heating, double glazing), I could see busses needing similar size batteries to electric cars and still being able to do a full days city work.
In turn, that makes the energy source fairly irrelevant from both an economic and a social perspective.
A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.
Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.
Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
Also, current hybrid busses with not-so-heavy batteries weigh about 15 tons without cargo. You are way off.
The mass of the bus does not matter, only the energy lost due to mechanical friction or electrical resistance, both of which increase much more slowly than the mass for bigger buses.
Climate control energy varies widely depending on geography - and appropriate door energy saving approaches will probably depend on where the bus operates, and possibly even the season (ie. winter doors swapped for summer doors), or extra batteries added in summer/winter to account for the extra energy use.
I took some photos of the main garage for these new buses: https://sschueller.github.io/posts/74-eletric-bus-charging-s...
While it gets you better fuel density for added vehicle complexity its pricey to run even when the infrastructure exists, which it currently doesn't. Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store because its the smallest element in the periodic table it just wafts through whatever container we try to put it in too causing a constant loss of fuel.
There might be circumstances where its the right thing to do and the extra cost is worth it, public transport is unlikely to be that scenario. Its got value mostly for remote locations where the nearest electricity is quite far away, although the issue then becomes can you get the hydrogen there. If it never reaches proper economies of scale and infrastructure deployment it might always be a dead end and there really aren't that many people using vehicles so remote to have no access to electricity but are carrying fuel cells to get the range they need.
Nowhere in the world is electrolysis done at scale. Industrial hydrogen almost exclusively comes from steam methane reforming (SMR).
Why not electrolyse water? It's not efficient, but if you use solar energy who cares? Set up a plant near the ocean and just let it run. All the inputs are essentially free.
Green hydrogen only makes sense when everything is electrified and electricity is cheap. It might be needed for things like industrial heat or shipping where need fuel.
Not yet. I know Siemens has some pilot plants running:https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-servi...
I think the last sentence speaks alot to hydrogens place in the sustainable energy field. It sounds like a good idea but the applications always seem to struggle with reality.
What sounds like a good idea is using fuel cells instead of ICEs, but using hydrocarbons as fuel, not dihydrogen (also solid carbon is a possible fuel).
The use of hydrocarbons can be carbon-neutral and sustainable, by making them from carbon dioxide and water.
There have been various experiments with fuel cells using other fuels than dihydrogen, but the main roadblocks have been a lower power at a given size than with pure hydrogen and the need for more frequent maintenance, besides the main disadvantage common to all kinds of fuel cells for now, high cost, due to expensive catalysts or to components such as separators that must be replaced frequently.
Nevertheless, we know that it is possible to make cheap and performant fuel cells, as demonstrated by any living being that breathes air.
Of course this was all for the past 30 years. Since everyone can see with their eyes that BEVs work, Hydrogen's job is over.
With battery prices trending to 50$ per kwh, a decent size bus battery of 250kwh would cost about 12.5K. That's manufacturing cost, not purchase cost. But it drives the point home: long term batteries are going to dip even further. Far below 50$/kwh. It will drive down the cost of battery electric drive trains for everything with wheels to far below that of the traditional setup with ICE engines. And they don't need expensive fuel to run. Or a lot of engine maintenance and servicing.
Currently tens of thousands of electrical buses are produced per year. Most of them in China. Which is of course where they have lots of battery factories. It's a rapidly growing industry.
Granted, these trolleybuses also have batteries and only spend about 1/2 of their journey under wires.
The poles also make for convenient overhead charging docks, which you can add on a somewhat piecemeal manner. With some automated guidance, that means you can charge the buses at long-wait stops or when they wait to run the route back even though they're not a a depot, without the need for an "accessible" charging infrastructure (or the driver needing to move out, go open an electric cabinet, plug in a charge cable, then remember to unplug before going back out).
The pantographs of trolleybuses are often pretty long, so they can switch to the other lane to avoid obstacles.
But the reality is our society is well on its way to fracturing the fossil fuel dominated infrastructure supporting us, and it wont just be electric to take a piece of the pie. Buses and other large vehicles like mining vehicles, semis, and many Class A vehicles will transition from their diesel engines to instead fuel cell, and not batteries. Battery technology is far too heavy to support vehicle and payload combinations at this level, and these applications prefer the high power density of fuel cells over the accessibility and storage capability of an EV only architecture. Hydrogen is a quicker refuel, and one can imagine a future where industrial sites and logistics warehouses that already have forklifts running on H2 will see the rest of their large work/fleet vehicles transition over to hydrogen as well.
Unfortunately, this premonition is probably at risk of being a few years off thanks to the current government situation.
Why would a factory invest in hydrogen fueled forklifts and their associated refueling infrastructure if they can get electric ones that just plug into a wall socket?
Unless research on hydrogen manages to upturn our foundational understanding of thermodynamics, hydrogen will be a waste of useful energy in most applications.
For further reference, check the "clean hydrogen ladder"
With hydrogen there simply isn't any obvious path forward. Hydrolyzers are inching closer to their theoretical maximum efficiency. Same for fuel cells. A few percent improvements here a few percent there. End to end battery electric wastes far less electricity. So it's inherently cheaper to charge a battery than it is to fuel a hydrogen vehicle. This is a gap that cannot be bridged.
With batteries we're looking at steep increases in energy density by multiple factors, new chemistries based on commonly available materials, cost reductions, etc. They are already competitive now. But it's going to get far worse for hydrogen very quickly.
Simply put, hydrogen is dead as a door nail for anything with wheels. There's a lot of subsidized inertia in the market. But without subsidized hydrogen, there is no business case to use hydrogen. None whatsoever.
> Hydrogen is a quicker refuel
Only slightly. It's not that fast actually. The naive notion that you just slosh some hydrogen in a tank like you would with diesel is not based in reality. Pumping compressed gas through narrow hoses takes time and hydrogen has a lot of volume. 10-15 minutes to refuel a truck is pretty normal. Charging can take a bit longer; depending on the size of the charger. And there is a path to making that quite a bit faster.
https://www.europeanbiogas.eu/biogas-buses-better-value-elec...
The infrastructure to support it is far more complex than our current petroleum network, and hydrogen is less safe than petroleum, while at the same time, electric is safer and requires just 10% of the infrastructure as petroleum.
It reaaalllly just feels like scientists and fossil fuel grifters still propping up hydrogens dead xorpse
The scientists are just there because if you give them the opportunity to work on hard technical challenges, they'll take it. The morality is much greyer than the ones being paid to contrive models with the initial goal of "higher CO2 is actually good for everybody."
Hydrogen has some huge advantages over other green options. But, also some huge disadvantages. If you want to diminish the disadvantages, you need to exploit the square-cube law, and that means you need huge scale.
In other words, hydrogen is a non-starter for cars. It has a very low chance of success for buses, but not zero. It could work very well for trains. And it could work extremely well for electricity generation at city scale.
Only if you completely ignore overhead wires. Electrifying main rail corridors is a no-brainer, and batteries are more than sufficient for short last-mile spurs.
The idea is for "heavy transport" and "aviation" sectors to use these. Are there any hydrogen planes?
Perhaps they mean turning it into ammonia through haber-bosch but that requires even further energy.
Losses via Gibbs free energy (237 kJ/mol to split H2O) and compression (20% of H2’s 120 MJ/kg.)
Barely cash in on the H2-O2 reaction (ΔH = -285.8 kJ/mol).
Battery buses, powered by lithium-ion cells, hit EROI of 2 to 4.
Redox heavy lithium mining (150 MJ/kg) drags it all down.
Charge-discharge losses (90% Coulombic efficiency)+ 5-10% capacity fade after 1000 cycles.
All trails diesel’s 5-10 EROI and 46 MJ/kg density.
Source/explainer: https://youtu.be/6c94vRmbM6Y?si=WmCvyB6uKJT7TWZ7&t=444
(jooze tränntzläyshun zörvizzäss!)
TL;DR: Hamburgs mobility provider is trying it again, after failure in 2019 with 5 Busses, with 5 Busses (Fuel-Cell) again, this time allegedly 'mass production ready'.
With the intent of max. 10% of the fleet based on this ¹, or similar, in 2030, which is their target for carbon neutrality.
Got a little bit more range, refuels faster (in 15 minutes), than the few hours E-Busses (currently) need.
Regarding infrastructure this has to be seen in the context of Hamburg wanting to be a hydrogen hub, because of its harbour, shipping, processing and such.
Shrug? We'll see...
¹ actually the Hamburger Hochbahn isn't the only provider, about the other half comes from VHH ( https://vhh-mobility.de ) which don't use or intend to use hydrogen, instead going for battery electric exclusively. Which in the context of 'Hydrogen Hub Hamburg' mentioned above, seems logical, because they operate lines far out of that also.
https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/hamburg-bei-gruenem-wasserstoff-...
shrug Who am I to judge? ;->
Reasons answering this question is difficult are, for example:
- given the demands for highly valuable electricity and alternative use cases, why do we insist on using it in locomotion?
- given marginal electricity pricing, everyone is subsidising cleaner air in cities for the benefit of air quality of only those living in cities
- might electric buses be prevalent because of smaller up front costs to infrastructure, and not because it's the right thing longer term?
- if electrification of transport in general was a bad idea (first bullet) then how does this change the economics of hydrogen given the longer run access to SMR sourced hydrogen from longer term fossil fuel extraction?
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
This all in the context of "greening" our economies when all the dirty industry and carbon emissions are exported to China, out of sight but not out of the true equation. And then there's the destruction of industrial capacity in Europe carried out by green agendas, all in favour of the Chinese Communist Party longer term.
And then there are the variety of other disadvantages that come with hydrogen: - significant leakage and high greenhouse factor - heavy support equipment need (both for storage and for usage)
About the only advantage of hydrogen (vs. lithium-ion batteries) is gravimetric energy density (where it's about a factor of 300). But even volumetric energy density differs only be a factor of 5-10. (Both numbers ignore that the storage thing will add significant weight). And those are _already_ not limiting for locomotion needs.
- how sure are we that we are solving a co2 climate crisis with the actions we are taking?
The thing here is yes: Even if we would generate the energy for the locomotion completely with fossil fuel! Large plants are significantly more efficient (10-35% vs up to 60%) and it would be _much_ simpler to, e.g. think about carbon capture if we had tens of thousand CO2 emitters rather than a billion. But we are not doing that!