this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Good, hydrogen cars shouldn't be a thing in the first place, hydrogen as fuel should only be used for heavy transport that fuels at the location where the hydrogen is produced.
Nearly all cars will switch to hydrogen (or e-fuels). Using giant batteries to power cars is insanity. If you want to power cars directly with electricity, use mass transit systems with overhead powerlines.
No they won't, because you will soon be able to get a 1000km charge BEV and charge it at home. Hydrogen is a joke and this is like my tenth response to you on this subject which makes me think you're here astroturfing for big oil. Every day hydrogen becomes a worse and worse alternative for the true winner.
You are imagining BEVs with ever larger and ever less cost effective batteries.
The problem is that the BEV was never intended to replace all cars. To even push this idea just means extremely expensive and non-environmental friendly batteries. You are just wasting your time on pushing greenwashing.
In reality, hydrogen is the only possible solution for most of transportation. Electricity should be reserved for directly electrified vehicles like trains or trolleybuses. Batteries powered vehicles only happened due to massive subsidies. It will revert back into a tiny niche or disappear entirely once those subsidies go away.
Apparently you missed the news of Samsung shipping their first solid state batteries that have 600 miles of range. The tech is still accelerating. You think we should instead build and maintain an entire hydrogen distribution network, similar to the gas stations of today, when I can have my BEV plug into my solar panels and give me free power at home? It's way easier to scale microdistribution and also less harmful than leaking unburned hydrogen.
This sounds like more magic batteries from the future rhetoric. An endless loop of fantasy ideas that never materializes into something usable. Right off the bat, you suspect it will be expensive to be viable for BEVs: https://www.goldenstatemint.com/blog/samsungs-silver-solid-state-battery-technology-1-kilogram-of-silver-per-car/
Note that you can build an entire energy storage system using hydrogen. People are simply refusing to accept that this is effectively a type of battery. People have a misplaced loyalty to existing technology, even though they would've laughed at its limitations just 15 years ago.
You need a hydrogen distribution system! Stations, pipelines, everything! Insane amounts of infrastructure!
hydrogen cars are electricity cars with extra steps, the gas isn't burned but converted to electricity in a fuel cell to recharge a tiny battery
the monetary and environmental cost of a 50kwh battery (people shouldn't want/need SUVs with 200 kwh batteries) is quickly offset when in order to make hydrogen you have to reform methane and deliver it all over the country via trucks
Wrong
Hydrogen production and transportation doesn't make sense unless it's done locally (ex: produce it at a port, transport it to fuel the ships stationed at the port). Hydrogen is pretty much impossible to transport long distance without wasting so much energy that it doesn't make sense to do it in the first place, then think about how hard it is for us to prevent leaks of petrol of all things, now think about the leaks if we're transporting hydrogen instead.
You have inverted reality here. It is much easier to transport hydrogen long distances versus electricity. Pipelines are cheaper than HVDC cables. You can actually ship hydrogen across oceans if necessary. It is electricity that has to be made locally, but hydrogen can made anywhere it is cost effective.
We transport electricity over thousands of kilometers without any hiccups, hydrogen leaks through every-fucking-thing.
We do not send much electricity over that amount of distance. More than several hundred km, and most conventional wires are cannot send much power through them. For thousands of km, we have to use HVDC, but that is very expensive. In reality, we tend to switch to pipelines instead of wires for long distance energy transfers.
Put it this way, if wires could really send power thousands of km without any hiccups, then why do natural gas pipelines exist in quantity? After all, most of them are just delivering natural gas to a gas turbine to make power. So why not put all the gas turbines in one area, and use wires instead? Because in reality, pipelines are much better at moving energy than wires over long distances.
Wow, you truly are misinformed...
Quebec's main line is over 1000km long, extending from northern Quebec all the way to Montreal, from the 54th parallel to the 45th it goes through the tundra and it just works! The longest one in the world is 2500km long.
You know what's expensive? Transporting a gas that leaks through solids. Current hydrogen production is done in ways that release more emissions than burning burning coal for heating for fuck's sake! Green hydrogen? You're taking electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to move cars... Sooooo skip the middle part and use electricity to move cars? Right?
Which is about the upper limit of a reasonable powerline. I'm pretty sure they had to resort to HVDC to get it that long. Note that I did not say it was impossible, only impractical. You lose a lot of energy when it gets very long.
I also know that Quebec is making hydrogen with their hydropower. Clearly, they know something you don't.
Pipelines go for thousands of km too, and send far more energy with smaller losses than wires. This is due to physics: A pipe is a hollow tube and scales up better the larger the diameter of the tube. Wires do not scale up as well.
A battery car does not "skip the middle part." It relies on a huge and resource intensive battery to store energy. This is electrochemical energy storage, and works the same way as how a hydrogen car stores energy. As a result, there is no fundamental advantage to using a battery. As costs comes down and as fuel cell technology advances, it is likely that there will be zero or next to zero efficiency advantage for the battery car.
You need to produce the hydrogen, if it's green one you're using electricity to do it, there's losses there (and you're using rate earth materials for the electrolysis). Then you need to liquify it to transport it, that's electricity you're using to bring it to -250°C, there's more losses here (not even considering the leaks, just energy losses). Then you put in cars where it's used to make electricity, there's losses again. Now add up all the costs and think about the cost at the pump compared to...
The alternative is to just take the electricity from the beginning, putting it in batteries to move cars.
With hydrogen you're using way more electricity to produce the same final output, you're just wasting a ton of it.
Quebec has the cheapest electricity in North America and it's still not financially reasonable to use our electricity to produce hydrogen. What ends up happening? Hydrogen for cars comes from the fossil fuel industry.
Where can we use it though? Where batteries aren't a reasonable solution, that's heavy transport.
You are not reading my post. The entire set of steps is exactly the same number of steps as charging a battery. Both are electrochemical processes and have similar losses. In theory, we can make a fuel cell that operates just as efficient as a li-ion battery.
The other point is that the process of moving hydrogen around is cheaper than moving energy via electricity. Losses of distribution are similar too. People are forgetting how big and complex the grid is.
How is it the same number of steps? You're taking from the grid and putting in the car OR you're taking from the grid, doing electrolysis, liquifying, transporting, storing and now you're finally putting it in the car.
To transport the hydrogen you're using tons of energy to liquify it, you still need to transport the electricity to do that, why not simply use the electricity in the cars directly then if you're going to transport it anyway?
It's funny because all experts that have a realistic outlook on the subject say the same thing, hydrogen for cars is stupid and inefficient and greewashing.
But hey, continue believing what you want, not as if you had any power over the market and you'll have to realize at some point that hydrogen cars were just something manufacturers tried to make a thing in order to not have to invest in making EVs.
Because a fuel cell is type of electrochemical device. It is literally a type of battery. So whether you are using a li-ion battery or a fuel cell, you are turning chemical energy into electrical energy. Also, the process of distributing hydrogen is comparable to the grid and has similar losses. The latter of which will see a dramatic reduction in efficiency as more renewable energy go onto the grid. Specifically due to the need for energy storage.
There are no experts saying hydrogen for cars is stupid. You are just hearing a lot of pro-BEV marketing and their fanboys. Of course, some of them pretend to be experts, but they are not.
In the long run, BEVs are going to die off because they are not economical vehicles. They cost far more than conventional cars and require huge amounts of new minerals for the raw materials used to make them. If the goal is just to have an EV, then the answer is a type of EV that does not so much raw material nor cost so much. That leads to ideas like PHEVs or FCEVs.
Hydrogen gas will leak though steel since the molecule is so small while making it brittle and incapable of handling pressure through hydrogen entitlement. It's not trivial to ship. Power lines are cheap and transport extremely high power density.
Only for certain types of steel. And there are many materials that are impermeable to hydrogen. This is mostly a marketing argument rather than one based on fact. Pipelines are far cheaper and send far more energy than high voltage wires.
That's just an indirect way of power a car via hydrogen. Sure, it can work. But it just implies that having cars directly powered by hydrogen are the better idea.