Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
Methane has good energy density, doesn't demand cryogenics or diffuse through steel, burns very cleanly, and can be used in modified gasoline ICEs - without even sacrificing the gasoline fuel capability.
CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits.
They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.
It's just the physical properties of methane.
That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car.
Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.
Actually higher working presure than regular welders' oxygen tanks.
Too bad the higher the pressure, the heavier the tank, especially steel.
I had a pretty good job offer from a company that was going to start building CNG tanks out of carbon fiber.
This was a few years before the failure of the Titan submersible.
CNG has made some progress since then, here's the kind of thing there is now:
https://steelheadcomposites.com/sites/default/files/2024-01/...
Not like it's a necessary thing. CNG conversions were already viable even with 00s steel tanks.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
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.
Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.
Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.
You'll find EVs that will go 700km+ with just one, 15min stop, as they charge at over 350kW in this day and age:
https://ev-database.org/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&rs-pr=10...
You'd want to make that 15min stop at least once on such a trip. Or fly instead.
> It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
Problem is that while batteries only needed scale and improvements in manufacturing processes to become cheaper, there's no such path with hydrogen.
The tank and the fuel cell are inherently expensive. The fueling station costs literally 10x that of a fast charger and in this day and age doesn't even charge faster as while the first customer will be done in less than 15min, the next needs to wait for the system to repressurize and that takes time. Also it goes kaboom if it fails, which is something we know, because it already happened. The fuel itself cannot be cheaper than electricity unless you want to make it from natural gas, in which case you better just use that instead.
> (batteries are terrible, environmentally)
The sheer energy that's wasted by a hydrogen car vs EV over its life cycle is enough to produce and safely dispose of a battery.
And this is what it really boils down to: hydrogen is not energetically efficient, therefore you can't make it cheaper unless you use fossil fuels. We already have fossil fuel cars.
As with any car, you don't wait until out of fuel to recharge. Instead, you seek to do so well before. These pages at least understand a little of that, and cite a real-world range under perfect conditions of 450km before recharging, with a range of 300km afterwards.
Yet these figures are with no heat or AC, with it not below -10C, and with an incredibly slow speed of 110km/hr, which is illegal on some freeways in the US and Canada (yes, too slow on a freeway is illegal). At least, according to this page.
And yes, this is a "long trip" after all. I often have circumstances where I drive 1600km a day.
For current situations, although the future can be different, if you click on the details, it's actually 22 minutes to get an 80% charge, and of course with 400kw thrown at it. You have to get to the charger, hope one is free, then start this business. Just the on/off plus charging would realistically be 30 minutes, and taking 1 1/2 hours off to charge is ridiculous.
The current real world problems are, you'll never find that level of charging anywhere along the route of your long trip. Not with assurances it actually works, and that you don't have to redirect 100s of kms out of the path you wish to take. I cite current, because the future is just that. However, you'll literally have to spend trillions on infra just to do anything more than that, because if you're having literal parking lots full of cars charging at turn-offs on interstates, that's going to require massive, new long-haul electricity infra.
Which is really the point. Very slow to charge, hard to get charged, and once the infra is in place, there's still issues. Like recycling. And weight of car. And peak demand vs storage (such as with h2). And more.
Each tech stands poorly against gas cars, in terms of usability, reliability, range, fueling issues, and so on. That's to be expected though, with over 100 years of relentless development of carbon beasts, in planes, ships, cars, engines of all sorts.
It will take decades at the very least to get as good with electric in any form.
Yet what do I hear and see?
What madness do I see relentlessly spouted?
That one tech is the only answer, that R&D will change nothing, that even though range is an issue, the person is the problem, not the range, and so on.
Like the crass "use an airplane" comment.
Ah well.
Do you not do stops? The ranges I've shown include a 15min stop to recharge.
Anyway, I used to do such trips regularly. Covered over 100k km like that. I still did stops every ~400km because a man's gotta eat and, more importantly, wee.
Also sleep, because after a few close calls caused by 18h+ of driving I figured it makes more sense to find a hotel after 1200km or so.
Overall, current-day EVs and infrastructure wouldn't add more than 30min (if anything at all) compared to a combustion car if I were to do the same trip today.
In hindsight I should have flown and take taxis at my destination - would have been cheaper.
My view is that you're arguing about a non-issue, because the small minority that actually runs down a full tank before stopping is endangering others and being unkind to their bodies.
The ranges you showed were inaccurate, for the reasons I cited, including 22 minutes to charge under only special circumstances, with super special very rare chargers.
When I stop to refuel a car, I put fuel in and drive through. I urinate often on the side of the road, or (what takes 2 minutes) while the car pump runs.
Driving 1600km is under 12 hours driving, including those stops. No I'm not tired or lacking in focus at the end of that time. It's only 12 hours.
You'd need to recharge three times time make that range, or 22 minutes * 3 plus the fact (which you are ignoring) that you can't drive where ever you want and get that speed of charging. No way.
If you think driving for a few hours is dangerous, you are completely out of it.
This is the problem with these discussions. People sugar coat all the issues, and pretend they don't exist.
And this isn't even a conversation about "use fossil fuels". Oh no. This is "you'd better use MY green tech, or you're nuts! and I don't want you to even try another tech, how dare you!"
The more options we have, the better.
The article is about a sign of failure of one of the multiple paths that was pursued by Japan and Ca State subsidies that was attempted over the last 20 years.
You can work on multiple paths, but to not measure and adjust defeats the purpose.
Apart from that a modern BEV can charge pretty fast. Just enough time to get a snack and eat it.
This conversation is about R&D too. Batteries used to take forever to charge. They're better than they were. But I guess h2 can never improve, ever? And all these made up "hassles", oh no, you have to plug the nozzle in right? How tiresome! And I guess they can't insulate the handle? And the speed, well it takes hours to pump? All made up problems.
Apart from that I find it a bit unfair to compare today's BEVs with tomorrow's H2 cars.
Irrelevant. It seems like everyone who argues against H2 is stuck on "now". Had that been the case with battery powered cars, they'd have never got off of the ground.
Batteries were terrible, wildly expensive, extremely unreliable. It's only been the immense research poured into them, that has brought their costs down.
Meanwhile, the cost of storage on an H2 car is nothing, compared to the immense and exorbitant cost of all those batteries. Batteries which make a car extremely heavy. Batteries which cannot be charged below -20C, and require heaters. Batteries which are incredibly dangerous in car accidents. Batteries which are costly, and damaging to the environment to create, difficult to recycle, and damaging to the environment to recycle.
Compared to battery tech of any type, H2 is a dream from the gods.
Yet because there hasn't been 17 trillion dollars of cash thrown into h2 generation tech, people prattle on about how expensive h2 generation is.
And it doesn't matter where h2 comes from now. It matters where it can and will come from. The goal isn't to make sources of power to generate h2 clean, the goal is to get end-polluters, cars, clean.
If the only goal was "clean", then most electric batteries charging right now, would fail that very goal. After all, there are still coal and gas power plants this very moment, and if we pulled all electric cars off the road, those would close.
No, the goal is to work towards more and more solar power, wind, etc. And in parallel, get cars ready for the day when power they're charged from isn't polluting.
The myopic view of what I deem hyper-environmentalists, is disturbing to me. It is paramount that we don't let short sighted views fog the reality around us.
Anyone arguing 1000lbs of batteries, all environmentally damaging in their construction, recycling cost, and disposal, is superior to h2, is arguing from a pedestal of sandy, earthquake prone, unstable support.
It's a solved problem. It's not an issue.
Because it must be a really killer feature to justify wasting about 50% of the electricity you put in and developing a distribution network and building cars that can handle H2 and even using the H2 for driving instead of steel mills or other places that might need green H2. Not to forget about the hassle of refueling with gasses that is totally different from a normal gas pump where you have to create a high pressure seal and the handle gets to cold to touch.
Also comparing a technology that will be only useful in many years with the battery technology from today is an odd choice, to say the least. Not only is the content of problematic materials constantly shrinking, the number of batteries that need recycling is currently so low that there is very little need for a big industry. But it is very likely that just like with the classic car battery recycling the more recent batteries will definitely be stripped for their precious materials.
You're asking questions that were answered in the very post you responded to. You're also simply inventing costs, such as 50% power loss.
What is the precise cost? You don't know. If you research the precise cost, my post discusses "what about the future after research", but this upsets you too.. for, researching things is a waste, you say.
(Even though you realise h2 is used elsewhere, and any improvements would help those industries?!)
For power, a real world example is that charging a car, tends to result in ~15% power loss. Some is converted to heat. There is also power loss in keeping the battery warm, when it's cold out (-20C). There is power loss when it is very hot outside, when draining the battery too. There are also transmission costs related to power infrastructure, upwards of 15%. When generating h2, the stored gas is simply transported as is, 30% plus loss of gas seems unlikely.
Batteries also age, and as they do, they are less and less efficient at discharge/charging. They lose range:
https://www.slashgear.com/2008627/tesla-owners-reported-batt...
Losing significant capacity is unhelpful for range. Further (same article), most car companies recommend not full charging on a regular basis, to extend battery life. So you lose range over time, and you're not really supposed to charge to full. Great. So much for that range!?
You ignored my comments on recycling, by simply saying there aren't many batteries to recycle?! This is an absurd response, absolutely absurd. The point is adoption, and every car requires recycling at end of life. We're comparing car tech side by side, and your response is "well there's only a few of these horribly polluting battery cars!". What? Recycling a horribly polluting tech is just that. It's amazing how the most environmentally conscious among us, simple ignore that electric cars are cesspools of 1000s of pounds of polluting materials.
Lastly h2 works perfectly right now. It is useful right now. It has range as long as electric cars.
These are the sort of arguments that are constantly leveled against h2. Ones without any real research, with made up figures, and not comparing battery tech in the same light. Ones ignoring the downsides.
If people had this attitude when modern battery based cars appeared on the market, no one would have tried a single one.
>(Even though you realise h2 is used elsewhere, and any improvements would help those industries?!)
It doesn't upset me but I am struggling to see the killer argument for H2 right now. The cost I am talking about is the cost of researching improvements at this exact moment and the cost of rolling out H2 infrastructure. I can not name them but they are probably not small.
> For power, a real world example is that charging a car, tends to result in ~15% power loss. Some is converted to heat. There is also power loss in keeping the battery warm, when it's cold out (-20C). There is power loss when it is very hot outside, when draining the battery too. There are also transmission costs related to power infrastructure, upwards of 15%. When generating h2, the stored gas is simply transported as is, 30% plus loss of gas seems unlikely.
The 50% I am talking about is a very positive estimate of the "well to wheel" efficiency of H2 in a car right now. From what I read about 30-50% of the power needed to produce the H2 is available to the car. As far as I read the efficiency of BEV is more around 70-85%.
> Batteries also age, and as they do, they are less and less efficient at discharge/charging. They lose range
H2 tanks and fuel cells also degrade over time and that doesn't just mean that they have less capacity that means they have to be replaced because they get very dangerous. Both should hold for the lifetime of the car though. There was study recently that car batteries last longer than we assumed: https://www.dekra.com/en/batteries-of-electric-cars-are-more...
I do cede that very cold or very hot weather will harm range and that a H2 car has more range than a BEV car. I don't think though it is significant enough though (from what I read about 100 miles more). There is though the thing that batteries are getting are getting better. Less harmful and rare materials, better density, less susceptibility to temperature. So there is the distinct possibility that the problems you mentioned might be solved before H2 even gets to the point that it's downsides are addressed. That is what I meant when I was talking about the viability of researching H2 (for cars). It might be too far behind in adoption at this point to catch up to even make sense spending time on it.
It is good to keep in mind that BEV has and had a lot lower barrier of entry. H2 fueling will never work without specialized fueling stations. That means a hassle for the owner of the car and for the potential owner of a fueling station. As a society we went through the hassle of building gas stations everywhere and figuring out how to store and transport the fuel once. It is very unlikely that we have to do that again when there is another solution that doesn't need that. Power infrastructure is already widely available even though some upgrades might be necessary. You can charge your BEV on a normal outlet at home if time is not important.
> You ignored my comments on recycling, by simply saying there aren't many batteries to recycle?! This is an absurd response, absolutely absurd. The point is adoption, and every car requires recycling at end of life. We're comparing car tech side by side, and your response is "well there's only a few of these horribly polluting battery cars!". What? Recycling a horribly polluting tech is just that. It's amazing how the most environmentally conscious among us, simple ignore that electric cars are cesspools of 1000s of pounds of polluting materials.
I didn't mean to ignore what you said but the problem is currently that to build recycling infrastructure you have to have batteries to recycle. Most BEV cars and their batteries are still on the road. Even crashed car batteries often get a second life as home storage. There is development though regarding the recycling.
https://insideevs.com/news/787778/ev-battery-recycling-growt...
> Lastly h2 works perfectly right now. It is useful right now. It has range as long as electric cars.
I'd say we have part of it. We have a way to produce H2, we have a way to create electricity from H2 but we don't have a huge overproduction of H2, we don't have a distribution network and we don't have any widespread interest. From my point of view it only makes sense to even think about H2 in cars when we have enough green energy capacity to satisfy the industries that need H2. The previously mentioned inefficiencies in converting electricity to H2 and back mean that we need to deploy much less renewable energy sources before reaching a net neutral goal.
What BEV has now is moderate momentum and it's why I am asking for the killer feature of H2. Because whatever it is it must be so good that it overcomes the downsides of H2 as well as the momentum of BEV. In the end I do not care about what kind of power storage we use as long as it gets us to not use fossil fuels anymore and that as fast as possible. I am skeptical though if it is a good idea to split investment and research now when time is of the essence.
I don't know if I need to say this but am looking at this from a strictly zero emission standpoint. That means I don't consider H2 from natural gas as relevant.
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".
If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.
And I didn't say it could never under any circumstances be feasible.
> If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.
I don't follow your logic here. Nobody went out and built tons of lithium ion batteries for cars until they were actually feasible. We're living in the world where companies wait, and it worked out for electric cars.
Now apply the same logic to h2.
But while research and scaling up made batteries 50x cheaper, batteries are mostly about material costs and technique. For hydrogen there's a huge per-unit energy cost and that limits how much research helps.
Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
>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.
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
H2 doesn't compete with ICE. It competes with BEV. That and in that comparison I do think it is much simpler. I'd be open to be enlightened why the killer feature of H2 is that makes it even worth considering with all these downsides.
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Bigger cable, upgraded delivery infrastructure to support that cable (think more or stronger poles), transformer upgrades, and finally the charging stations which unlike the home ones aren't just a complicated switch because DC fast charging.
H2 is a stupid fuel, but the idea that high power vehicle charging stations are a cheap or simple upgrade to a gas station is ridiculous.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.