I had to Google what is green hydrogen. It is hydrogen produced by electrolysis.
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
Once you go battery electric, you never go back. It's the most efficient way to move vehicles.
And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.
Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.
Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
> Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Nuclear trucks and boats are what I envision so maybe I'm the one who needs a reality check.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
Works a charm.
But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.
That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.
I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.
> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.
Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.
You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.
And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.
Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.
That's the experience I'm drawing from when I point out that "virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it" isn't based in reality. Everything is constantly wearing out. Anything rubbing on another thing, any fluid being pushed through a hole, anything that might be reacting with another thing, its all slowly getting more and more out of spec. And when it gets more and more out of spec, its performance gets worse. You might not immediately notice it, that performance might not be in the go go kind of performance, but it isn't working as well as it used to.
Are you really going to tell me a car with a couple hundred thousand miles on it running all original parts (assuming they didn't literally break apart yet) is likely to be anywhere near the same performance as when the car had 200 miles on it? Its not. Its almost like there's a reason why mileage is considered when people price cars. The suspension isn't going to keep the wheels as well planted, the cylinders likely don't have the same compression, those fuel injectors are likely tired and aren't spraying optimally, that coolant pump is worn down and barely able to pump coolant anymore, your timings are likely not optimal anymore due to slack in the timing chain or belt, your spark plugs aren't making as full or reliable of spark, etc.
If your response is "well you would have replaced those by now"...well, why would you have to do that? Because they...had their performance reduce over the life of the part?
And even then, a part of that break-in period of those parts is the part's performance actively changing over the life of the part with pieces of the part literally degrading, just pretty quickly and positively for performance as opposed to negatively. That positive slope of performance change is a pretty early hump though, otherwise as I mentioned you'd be taking me up for ensuring all your tires are near-bald (but not quite, they haven't actually failed yet!) all the time and you'd be dumpster diving for the good stuff out behind your auto parts store.
That theory didn't play out, mostly because the price of electrics kept dropping year after year, undercutting any appeal in early investment in hydrogen.
What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.
As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.
Yes, if you actually have the batteries.
Between around 2014-2024, the common talking point was "we're not making enough batteries", and the way the discussions went it felt like the internal models of people saying this had the same future projections of batteries as the IEA has infamously produced for what they think future PV will be: https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
I've not noticed people making this claim recently. Presumably the scale of battery production has become sufficient to change the mood music on this meme.
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!"...
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.
The Mirai goes from empty to full in 5 minutes or less - which compares very well with fossil-fuel burners. Now that every OEM has abandoned battery-swapping, how fast can EV batteries be safely charged with the said 3 phases? How long were the charging time when the Mirai was debuted? That was the trade-off Toyota was hoping to fall on the good side of, nevermind the Japanese government bet on hydrogen and whatever incentives are available for Toyota.
It was with regard that 800V was the driving factor, it'd be possible to have 'fast' charging earlier with existing infrastructure, even home.
>be safely charged with the said 3 phases?
The limiting factor for charging would be charging current in lots of cases. Getting 60% of 75kWh battery, it's 45kWh to charge in 20mins, the output should be ~150kW (90% efficiency) or 325A (on 400v), 4x 12-15mm wires.
Note about 'home' charging - three phase 32A is widely available domestically or around 6-8h to fully charge
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.
H2 will experience 20-30% over the same distance of natural gas line including compression and friction losses. DOA.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf
It's a common mistake to think efficiency dominates all other metrics. It's never just efficiency.
H2 makes sense for feedstocks but not energy distribution.
The same capex and opex can support 100x more Wh-km via HVDC, making HVDC at least an order of magnitude cheaper then the H2 pipeline.
What's interesting to me is that this is completely uncontroversial and incontrovertible, so I wonder where your insistence otherwise is?
"This paper compares the relative cost of long-distance, large-scale energy transmission by electricity, gaseous, and liquid carriers (e-fuels). The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines. These differences generally hold for shorter distances as well. The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels. The differences in the cost of transmission are important but often unrecognized and should be considered as a significant cost component in the analysis of various renewable energy production, distribution, and utilization scenarios."
I'm to read this as supporting your assertion that electrical transmission is several times cheaper??
The Mirai uses the hydrogen in a fuel cell so it is an EV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
It looks like a reasonable idea, but it needs infrastructure.