Now as to the reason why Japan has been investing, it's because the actual way Hydrogen is produced is from fossil fuels. It's done by taking methane and other hydrocarbons and pulling the hydrogen off and expelling the CO2 (ideally capturing it). This process is called steam reforming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming This is the sweet lie people aren't told when hydrogen is brought up. Japan happens to have extensive offshore methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor and if they can make a hydrogen economy happen then those clathrates may become economical to mine.

The big problem with hydrogen is that it currently is a smokescreen for a certain industry that has a ton of hydrogen attached to carbon atoms desperate to maintain relevance in the "green" energy revolution.

It is staring down a massive economic challenge as well, shared with any new five-year nuclear reactor project or similar cutting edge power generation scheme, is that solar/wind/storage is in the prime curve of double-digit improvements to various aspects of cost, scale, storage, performance every year.

BEVs are poised to undercut ICEs fundamentally in cost and simplicity. Solar/wind is about to drop under even natural gas in LCOE for even installed turbines. All of those have three year projections of continued double-digit percentage drops in cost and massive increases in scale.

Even worse for hydrogen, most of that is using existing infrastructure for transmission, so while charging stations need to be built out for EVs, it is far easier to do that than put in hydrogen storage / transport infrastructure.

So even if some hydrogen article targets a certain cost on the batteries / EVs / power transmission lines, in five years things will look completely different.

Maybe aviation?

A five year nuclear reactor project would be amazing! Most of them, outside of China at least, are more like 15 year projects these days.

I see this attitude often and I think it's detrimental. If 'blue' hydrogen (ie, extracting hydrogen from natural gas & storing the carbon) provides an economical stepping-stone toward a fully fossil-free energy system, why not take it? If the only comeback is reflexive disdain for incumbent technologies, give me a break.

Your points on battery vehicles vs hydrogen vehicles are in agreement with in the second Bloomberg article linked by the GP.

That's a PR phrase from the oil industry. The people who brought you "mild hybrids" and such.

Full electrics are getting cheaper each year. And bigger. The battery-powered Ford F150, Jeep Wrangler, Tesla's Cybertruck, and, of all things, the GMC Hummer, are all going to be out for 2022. That's going to totally change the way people look at electric vehicles.

Doesn't mean it's not true. I take your point that batteries are a better option for personal automotive applications. However, there are other applications where hydrogen does have advantages. In those cases, using 'blue' hydrogen (A) kick-starts the technology, because it is currently cheaper than 'green' hydrogen (B) is carbon-neutral if done correctly.

For instance, consider how a renewable-heavy grid relies on gas turbines to step in when there is a 'drought' in renewable production. Using 'blue' hydrogen to replace the natural gas for those turbines would immediately get a fully reliable, zero-carbon-emission grid. Then as renewable prices continue to fall, 'green' hydrogen can close the loop & eliminate fossil fuels altogether.

To be fair, in that instance the blue hydrogen would crowd out other battery investment, delaying cost reductions in actually renewable batteries.

If you're starting from electricity, a water to hydrogen to power system gets maybe a third or a half of that.[1]

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/406676/battery-electric-hydrogen-...

This is what's promised. In practice it turns into "extracting the hydrogen and dumping the CO2 into the atmosphere". There are very few operating CCS schemes.

To ensure that the fossil hydrogen is 'blue' and not 'grey,' we'd need carbon tax or some other legislative action.

Massive investments are by far are not an indication of a future success, nor can they influence it.

In this case, no amount of money can do anything about the thermodynamics of the process.

https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/low-cost-clean-hydro...

Would that massively change your interest?

Lithium-ion achieves a 80%+ efficiency from energy input to usage via an AC motor, or more if DC is usable. Hydrogen fuel cells only achieve 40-60% efficiency, and that’s just one step (converting it back from storage to electric energy, not even the motor itself). No matter how much is being invested, this can’t just be wished away and effects how expensive something is per kWh.

On top of that, there’s a massive Li-ion R&D and production train already under way that will be hard if not impossible to catch up with.

In short, right now it looks like this will only be useful for a few edge cases that battery electric can’t feasibly support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production

Japan is interested in it as fuel, despite the well known drawbacks, because Japan has such limited domestic energy resources.

"Western Australia’s multi-gigawatt green hydrogen giant edges forward"

https://www.pv-tech.org/news/western-australian-renewables-h...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90477609/this-startup-uses-mirro...

Right, so for short-term grid storage and automotive applications.

How about long-term storage, chemical feedstocks, air & sea transport? Those are huge, and batteries aren't a good match. There's still a place for hydrogen, just maybe not where people initially thought it would be.

There are several projects to make smaller hydrogen planes, but I suppose larger planes will always need liquid hydrocarbons. Considering that the very smallest planes will probably be battery-electric, hydrogen may end being squeezed from both ends of the market in the long term.

For long distance sea transport, ammonia is a big competitor.

Fundamentally speaking, hydrogen is not a good fuel. It's hard to handle and not very energy dense (volumetrically). What's good about it, is that we have relatively efficient ways to make it from electricity, and to convert it back to electricity. But it's possible that methods to produce/use other fuels could be almost as efficient over time.

Hydrogen will be very important in the next 3+ decades, but I can see it being made irrelevant again over time, by better batteries at one end, and better ways of making/using hydrocarbon fuels on the other.

Also California has funded a number of hydrogen fueling stations and the US has the most fuel cell vehicles on the road (almost all in California).

The US has seen hydrogen hype cycles before when George Bush called for a hydrogen highway in a State of the Union.

My point is that the US is not going to be left behind given significant investment over the last couple decades.

I have seen California's H2 station map and have caught glimpse of a few Mirai in the Bay Area.

However only a tiny fraction of the hydrogen stations were for electrolysis derived hydrogen.

Any money going to steam reformation or other fossil fuel based hydrogen is absolutely wasted investment. We need commitment to electrolyzers, and can't let the money go to dead technologies. I look forward to reading more about how this program operates.

On the other hand, there are a ton of sources of methane that society pretty much will always generate through agriculture or landfills. For example, BMW ran a pilot a few years ago running a large factory's forklifts on hydrogen sourced from biomethane from a local landfill[1]. Cost and technology improvements in areas like steam methane reformers and anaerobic digestion could drive costs down to the point where those facilities can actually gain meaningful adoption, and meaningfully, co-locate hydrogen sources near points of consumption, so you can worry less about the headache of transporting H2 molecules around.

Hydrogen is unlikely to wholesale compete with battery electric at this point, but it absolutely shines in certain niche performance applications. To me, aligning the supply chain to leverage those particular instances seems like the best way to work it into a green(er) energy portfolio.

For what it's worth, while in school, I did a 7-month co-op a few years ago working on next-gen R&D of PEM fuel cell stacks, so I generally consider myself fairly well versed on potentially out-of-date information.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/articles/garbage-power-out-south-caro...

I've seen this stated a few times in this thread, but read elsewhere that electrolysis of water currently has nearly identical efficiency to steam reforming of natural gas, in the 70-80% range, with a theoretical max that is significantly higher than for the steam reforming process. Factor in the huge CO2 expense of extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels and the ever-increasing abundance of cheap green electricity, and electrolysis looks like the right place to focus to me.

Does electrolysis research make sense in a region that is already short of freshwater and experiencing drought?

Would you say that the science of electrolysis of seawater is worth researching and investing further?

Hydrogen might be very useful for some applications that require high energy density (electrified aircraft, perhaps?), though maybe those use cases will be served by conventional liquid fuels that might be increasingly made using renewable energy inputs rather than made from fossil fuels.

I don't see much use for shipping hydrogen around, unless it's as a minor component of a synthetic mixture that replaces natural gas, but that's super speculative.

However for ammonia (fertilizer), steel, maybe shipping, there's few other options.

(And I'm super hopeful that we figure out how to build more wires in the US, probably by repurposing existing right of way. But I'm also skeptical that we will be able to fight NIMBYs for that...)