Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

You can run electrolysis from a cup.

Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.

Nothing is free.

That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.

Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.

Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.

Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.

If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.

(Atoms must have electrons - the definition in physics and chemistry is a structural one.)

The basic point is that a material that is highly flammable, needs to be compressed to high pressure in order to be useful, but also will seep through and damage steel containers because of the fundamental fact that the atoms and charged ions are just too small, is never going to be easy to work with. Compared to electrical battery tech now being widely and cheaply rolled out.

This goes some way to answering the "Why is it such a terrible idea?" question. Or at least it's an idea whose time has passed, due to the abovementioned battery tech maturing.

Some advantages are that a fuel cell that accepts hydrogen and air at one end and emits electricity and water at the other can be lighter-weight than a big battery, and it can [potentially] be refueled quickly for long trips.

Some disadvantages: We need a compressed hydrogen tank -- which isn't as scary to me as it may be for some people, but that's still a new kind of risk we need to carry with us wherever we drive. And we still need a big(ish) battery and the controls for it in order for regen braking to do its thing (which hybrids have shown to be very useful).

And, again, the grid: If it were cheaper/better/efficient to move energy from electrical generating stations to the point of use using buckets [or trucks or trains] of hydrogen, we'd already be doing that. But it isn't. So we just plug stuff in, instead, and use the grid we already have.

A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving. There's far faster methods, but that's something that lots of regular people with a normal commute and normal working hours can already accomplish very easily if they have private parking with an outlet nearby.

For most folks, with most driving, that's all they ever have to do. It shifts concerns about refueling speed from "Yeah, but hydrogen is fast! I waste hardly any time at all while it refills!" to "What refueling stops? I just unplug my car in the morning and go. I haven't needed to stop at gas station in years."

The main advantages of hydrogen are real, but they just aren't very useful compared to other things that we also have.

The 2026 bZ Woodland [1] looks pretty nice in my opinion.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...

https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...

Turbofans and supercritical airfoils are done to the point of engine manufacturers looking to propfans and alternative materials (carbon fibre) to eke out further efficiencies.

Although carbon fibre has significant down sides.

I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.

As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.

There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.

And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.

I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.

So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.

Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.

Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).

The math leaves out a lot of important factors.

Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.

Kaizen and JIT are not good for revolutionary change. So I expect by bootstrapping different options early enough they can act on real market pressure once the condition to accurately assess the evidence is available.

For hydrogen getting to that point was a multi decade lead time.

I suspect most western commentary on this topic comes from people not understanding both how numerical/empirical based Toyota are, how self aware of their potential weaknesses they are, plus the ability of a Japanese business to hold to a multi decade hedging initiative.

As if LNG is effectively more dense in flight than ordinary LPG, which doesn't need to be cryogenic to handle.

Armchair fuel experts do still provide food for thought though ;)

While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."

This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions

"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.

Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."

Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-re...

The bind moggles.

The Sabatier process looks like it might have much less of that! Very cool stuff. I would love to see a future in which we use uninhabitable, non-arable, desert land to generate cheap synfuel that we can ship wherever needed.

It is not such a fool proof technology that everybody should have one, but to me building and operating a hydrogen balloon isn't dissimilar to running a steam locomotive. It can be dangerous if done badly or incorrectly, but it can also be done safely with pretty well known and understood technologies and methods and practices. And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport I find it hard to dismiss its potential even so long after their heyday and previous problems.

Yes, but that's not the only option you have. With the absolutely awful efficiency of burning hydrogen you'd need to be building a massive amount of additional wind and solar - which in turn means you'll also have additional capacity available during cloudy wind-calm days, which means you'll need to burn substantially less hydrogen to generate power.

This leads to the irony that building the power-generation infrastructure for generating enough hydrogen means you won't even need to bother with the hydrogen part: you're basically just building enough solar that their overcast supply is enough to meet the average demand. As a bonus, you've now got a massive oversupply during sunny winter days and even more during summer days, so most of the year electricity will essentially be free.

Turns out having to fill vehicles at 350 to 700 bar (5,000 to 10,000 psi) is a massive pain - especially when you can't keep it cryogenically cooled as a liquid in your storage tanks.

Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.

So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).

Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.

The fossil industry was always suspiciously keen on green hydrogen - partly because the path to green hydrogen would likely have involved a long detour through grey and blue hydrogen, and partly because it gave them an excuse to lobby against phasing out natural gas for domestic heating/cooking ("we need to retain that infrastructure to enable the hydrogen economy!").

You can see the same thing happening in their support for Carbon Capture and Storage - "we're going to need the oil producers to enable carbon sequestration, so we might as well keep drilling new wells to keep their skills fresh!"...

Well, it can be made to work, you know. Late (in the XX century) industrialization stories are like that: competitive (dis)advantages make any such attempts simply unprofittable for any businessman (or even a group of them), but if the government keeps skewing the market for decades... The Japanese car manufacturing has been heavily subsidized for most of the XX century, even after their several disastrous attempts to enter the US market. But it all worked out in the end.

Battery degradation is extremely overrepresented in the minds of the public for example and based mostly on the performance of early entrants like the original Nissan Leaf. Since then, chemistries and management systems have progressed dramatically and rendered it a moot point — most EVs made in the past several years will have their batteries outlast the useful life of the vehicle. In the case the Ariya, Nissan appears to have overcorrected for the Leaf's reputation to such an extreme that they can be fast charged to 100% for many dozens of cycles and still show no capacity loss.

This is a gap in knowledge that smart buyers who are willing to do a little bit of research can exploit and get much more car for their money than would otherwise be possible.

Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.

Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).

I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.

Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.

All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.

Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.

Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.

you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")

if transport switches to electric, what's your role?

answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant

but what if hydrogen took off instead?

if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel

but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business

at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas

... and that's exactly what they're trying to do

No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.

EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.

Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.

Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.

Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.

And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".

>One of the reasons we use cryogenic liquidfied gases is so the density can be in the same ball-park of more-easily liquified gases which do not need low temperature to keep from expanding until the tank ruptures.

Propane, butane, LPG are all gases but the pressure which needs to be contained as the gas is turned into a liquid using pressure, is not too high for the typical welded BBQ tank. Designed to hold about 350 psi.

The two lighter hydrocarbons, methane & ethane can be compressed way beyond what a high-pressure spun cylinder (like the typical 3000 psi rated heavy oxygen tank welders use) can handle, and still not liquefy.

So similar to oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen and other "fixed" gases, methane needs to be liquefied cryogenically or any reasonable size tank will still not hold enough to last but a very small fraction of the time compared to the same capacity cryogenic storage.

But "storage" is doing a lot of work here.

Interestingly, with cryogenics you're going to need to handle even less pressure than the BBQ tanks, and the same size container ends up holding way more than the high-pressure cylinder at 3000 psi.

A typical liquid nitrogen cylinder runs at about 50 psi, the tank will be rated quite a bit higher than that but not considered "high-pressure" by anybody. Thinner and non-curved shapes can be fine which can be lighter in weight than higher-pressure ratings would require, but you really have to have plenty of good thermal insulation to boot.

The thing is, once you refill your cryogenic tank with cold liquid gas, you can never actually shut the tank completely. There is no additional cooling. The only thing keeping it cold is the low temperature of the liquid itself, no matter how good the insulation is, heat will gradually soak in and given enough time the whole thing would eventually end up at ambient temperature. Not cold enough to remain as a liquid any more.

That would be eventually explosive whether it was a flammable gas or not.

Instead, the tank is continuously venting a constant stream of gas from top.

IOW the rate of heat absorbtion is compensated for under equilibrium as it boils the liquid a little bit constantly and there has to be a way for that gas to escape. The remaining liquid maintains the low temperature because the boiling point of the gas (at that low pressure) is still in the cryogenic range.

The liquid self-refrigerates by evaporation to the (negative) boiling point of the substance. Which is why liquid helium is so much colder than liquid nitrogen in an identical cryo tank.

That means if you fill a tank with one of these cryo gases, depending on your usage rate the losses to evaporation may be more than the amount you are utilizing.

Or if you fill the cryo tank and don't use any at all for a while, it will empty itself by evaporation anyway and it could be before you got to use any of it.

The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.

This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.

Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.