Beyond the missing expensive infrastructure, the big problem is energy efficiency. Moving forward, we have to switch every energy production to renewables. But for the same amount of electric energy produced, an electric car gets about 3x the mileage than producing "green" hydrogen and powering fuel cell cars with it. Hydrogen means at least 3x the electricity cost and for many years to come, we are going to struggle producing enough clean electricity in the first place.

Also the infrastructure for electricity basically is there, mostly needed are plain outlets at all long-term parking spots. And of course, one can charge an electric car from your own solar.

I enjoy how you are taking all of the arguments people used against BEVs in favor of gas and using them against HV. The irony is strong in these threads.

BEVs are much more energy efficient than ICE. When was the argument that they are not ever used?

Sorry, I don't get what you mean. Which arguments are you referring to and what is ironic?

The key to a hydrogen economy will rely on creation of hydrogen in locations with extremely abundant electricity like Iceland. The next step is shipping it like it's LNG.

Not a small order.

> The key to a hydrogen economy will rely on wasting energy on creation of hydrogen in locations with extremely abundant electricity.

Honestly, this sounds just as bad as setting up bitcoin mines in places with high rates of renewables, to avoid directly throwing tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even if you have loads of clean energy, that's no reason to waste it when there are more efficient ways of using it (lithium batteries, PoS).

Not to mention the fact that every watt of wasted green energy can't used to replace a watt of coal energy.

I don't think there's a scarcity issue with electricity in places like Iceland where volcanic activity provides massive areas of land where electricity can be freely and easily generated. The issue is the ability to transport said electricity without massive losses.

I don't think you can feasibly ship all your electric batteries to be charged up in Iceland.

> don't think you can feasibly ship all your electric batteries to be charged up in Iceland.

No need if the Icelink DC link gets built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelink

Yes, those locations will play a huge role in securing the global energy supply. However, the hydrogen will be desperately needed in the industry (e.g. steel production) and for supporting the electric grid in times of both low wind and solar. No good reason to waste it around the year driving cars.

My understanding is that hydrogen may be most useful for heavy good vehicles rather than cars. EVs could be great for short range urban delivery vans etc but long haul infrastructure may be built around hydrogen if the supply chain is viable.

Might, but if the Tesla Semi becomes a reality, the potential market for hydrogen in trucks becomes much smaller too.

The dynamics of moving heavy loads long distances has never favored electric power. Diesel currently powers tractor semis because it produces more energy than gasoline and creates much more low speed continuous load torque.

EVs are well suited to light loads and short distances, rapid acceleration and altitude change but are not well suited to long range hauling of heavy loads due to the enormous energy required.

EVs are great if you are pulling heavy loads across hills, as you get your energy back going downhill (at least large parts of it). The torque also rather is an advantage of EVs. Diesel engines are popular because they are more efficient than gasoline engines and if you have continuous high loads, that adds up. Guess what is much more efficient than Diesel engines? Electric engines! And they are way more efficient than going the route via hydrogen.

The only open question is: can you put enough batteries into a battery electric semi? If you can't, then of course the question about efficiency is moot. But if you can, everything speaks for battery electric vehicles. That is where the Tesla Semi comes into play. It promises ranges that are just enough for most applications, for those applications it has basically "won" right from the start. What remains to be seen is how large exactly the sector is which isn't served by the Semi. But in any case, with every improvement of the battery technology, that sector shrinks a bit further.

An electric semi's battery weight alone makes them not viable imo. I think it's a good idea to ignore the endless Tesla sales hype and brand reinforcement and focus on the basic logic and physics. Musk is as fake as his hair imo and spends most of his time being very misleading while aggressively selling theoretical future projects.

I grew up in the UK with electric milk floats, a practical use of EV's for short, quiet urban delivery. There's a reason electric heavy trucks, which were marketed in the 20's and 30's lost out to diesel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Electric_Truck

Why would you think a semi's battery weight would make it not viable? If you calculate what the batteries would weight and subtract the weight of the engine, transmission and of course fuel in a full tank, you get to about 2 tons more for the battery powered semi, if not less. That is a small reduction of the maximum load capacity.

https://tfltruck.com/2020/01/electric-truck-towing-battery-w... See this link

Also for an 18 wheeler just the amount of tires on the road requires tremendous torque to create a rolling load and sustain it. Freightliner are working hard to make E trucks viable but the acid test is fleet buyers and maintenance, it's a ruthlessly efficiency first market. https://freightliner.com/electric-trucks/

Do you mean similar to how we do the same with LNG or oil from Alaska?

The question is not whether you pay a massive efficiency penalty for storing electricity as hydrogen (obviously, yes) but whether there are applications where you are effectively buying a set of useful properties for the losses you are "spending".

For displacing existing grey hydrogen from the chemical industry, a possible reducing agent in steel making, and other high temperature industrial processes it's pretty clear that the answer will be yes.

I happen to think that it is really unlikely that the answer for cars and vans will ever be yes, even if hydrogen could be made cheaply.

Whether it will have a role in other applications depends on a few things:

First, the structure of the future electricity mix. In order to ensure that there is enough electricity at every moment, we have to do a mix of things: -"over" build variable output renewables so that the troughs in production are higher -Intra-day demand side response -Intra-day storage (almost certainly batteries) -Dispatchable renewables like hydro -Dispatchable sort-of renewables based on biomass -Dispatchable fossil fuels (with CCS) -Load-following nuclear

The reason why people think about hydrogen and other exotic technologies is that many of the technologies on that list either have limited available scope (hydro, biomass), are probably not really carbon-neutral (biomass, CCS), rely on unproven tech at scale (CCS, new nuclear designs), or have exceptionally high capital costs (any new nuclear but especially when at low load factors, CCS especially at low load factors).

So what most simulations show you're left with as a low-cost mix for most days is a combination of the first five. That still leaves you with two problems: -What do you do if the average output net of load is very different between seasons? -How do you provision for a 1:20 yr weather system without making your system vastly more expensive?

and one opportunity (which is also a challenge): -variable renewables are cheap and getting cheaper so cost-optimal generation mixes build a lot more than needed for the average day in order to keep use of expensive biomass and limited hydro capacity to a minimum. As a result, electricity has low/no marginal value a lot of the time.

Second, the future cost of electrolysers. At current capex levels, they need to be run at max load all the time and still produce expensive hydrogen. Genuinely low costs like what BNEF thinks might be possible ($100/kW) allow you to run for only 20% or less of the hours in the year and scoop all the excess electricity up.

Third, the cost of alternative solutions in the areas where hydrogen is currently being considered as this reduces the value of any hydrogen produced.

I do agree that for passenger cars it's just not going to happen.

The bottleneck is not kwh of electricity produced, but storage. Hydrogen cards do well on that bottleneck.

No, the do worse than electric cars in that respect. The hydrogen production facilities are very expensive, so they have to run 24/7 at the same load. This is exactly what mixed badly with the varying supply of renewables. With electric cars, you just plug them in at home/at work and they charge whenever there is an oversupply of electricity. Offering special remote controlled charging outlets is going to be a game changer for the grid.

If I were to store solar in my electric car as a form of temporary storage, I get probably between 80 and 90% of what was generated by my cells delivered back to my house. All I need to do this are some slight alterations to my electrical system.

If I wanted to do this with my hydrogen car, I would need to get some expensive electrolysis station next to my house and I would get maybe 50% of stored energy back after electrolysis. I would also need to get the compressor etc maintained regularly.

Also, if you mean storage for actual driving, as in possible range, there's hardly a need for more range than a Tesla can already deliver... For most people. The biggest change to make it more feasible for pretty much all people is charging speed and that keeps improving too.

Tesla doesn't allow this because of the wear on the batteries, but it seems like a killer application for EVs and rooftop solar to be able to combine them like that.

> anyone could trivially break the record

"Make it bigger" doesn't really work in cars, otherwise range anxiety wouldn't exist as a concept.

The record still makes sense because the Hyundai Nexo is commercially available and it's not a prototype with a comically-large just for the record tank.

“Make it bigger” does work, but it increasingly stops resembling a car. Check out the range this one can get on a single tank of hydrogen!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas-Centaur

I don’t know what you’d consider the max range here to be, but it’s definitely better than 887km.

Excellent range. And to the point of the comment, said linked vehicle is a production vehicle where the tank was not added for the sole purpose of breaking a record, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the space shuttle may win for most kilometers traveled on a single hydrogen tank.

Shuttle had solid-fuel boosters and hypergolic thrusters for on-orbit maneuvering. The Delta IV Heavy, on the other hand, is a fully hydrogen-powered rocket: three common cores, with an RL10-powered upper stage. It also launched the Parker Solar Probe, which has been doing rounds around the sun for a while now.

I would have citied that, but they use solid boosters which makes the number messier... I could get a lot of range on a Tesla if I was allowed to use solid fuel boosters!

While it's true that you could add probably double the H2 storage to most HFC vehicles, I think this is the correct take. The Mirai's fuel tank is 37.25 gallons/141 liters vs 12-15 gallons/45-55 liters of gasoline for most cars.

Tank capacity only helps so much. You may have to fill up half as often, but having to go out of your way for a special station is annoying. ICE vehicles could easily have 40 gallon tanks, and eventually FCVs won't have these incredibly high ranges.

> ICE vehicles could easily have 40 gallon tanks

My first vehicle had a 33 gallon tank. Not much room for anything bigger; of course mileage was awful. My most efficient car can do about 600 miles on a 14 gallon tank; if it had room for a 33 gallon tank, it could go halfway across the country on one tank.

> but having to go out of your way for a special station is annoying

I went back from a Tesla to a diesel car. I hate going out of my way to special stations to fill up my car with diesel. I much preferred unplugging in the morning and plugging back in in the evening.

> "Make it bigger" doesn't really work in cars, otherwise range anxiety wouldn't exist as a concept.

Sure it does. Just look at Tesla, at the time EVs had 24kwh or smaller batteries and they more than doubled that to give reasonable ranges.

My point is that there’s a limit to it. Teslas still don’t have the same range as a gas car in the same category/price. They could increase it but then I don’t think they can sell a lot of $150k Model Ss.

At some point you’ll have more drawbacks than it’s worth it (size, price, weight, efficiency, safety).

Sounds like you're talking about distribution infrastructure, which is true but in my mind the biggest issue is efficiency. Storing and using H2 isn't very efficient, and current production techniques for H2 emit as much or more carbon as Diesel.

This is true. The current production techniques are basically using water. This is producing a ton of CO2 - the very opposite of what we're hoping to attain by running Hydrogen-powered vehicles. The hope is that we're able to leverage methane from animal droppings in the near future. Toyota is leading the research on this I believe.

Current production methods use natural gas, specifically methane. Animal droppings will never supply enough methane to be a significant source of energy.

The goal is to eventually produce hydrogen from water, through electrolysis. We have tech for this, but it's very expensive compared to our methane methods. Current electrolyzers are used for industrial applications. Spain is currently planning a huge deployment of electrolyzers to make ammonia, mostly for fertilizer.

And honestly, electrolyzed hydrogen will mostly be used in industry, and maybe some long-haul transport, but almost certainly will never make sense for cars. We will probably see hydrogen converted to methanol or ammonia or something else that's easier to handle than hydrogen. Though I do hear that hydrogen could be used with current ocean freighters with only a 10% loss of capacity, so there's some potential there.

Animal droppings are not our primary source of methane. Not sure if that was meant to be sarcastic.

Electrolysis is expensive and energy inefficient. It is unlikely to be a primary source of hydrogen unless there is some breakthrough.

If the limiting factor is clean electricity production, it makes sense to use it more efficiently with a BEV than it does to use it inefficiently with a HFCV.

The comment I was replying to said two odd, incorrect things: 1) water is our primary source of hydrogen (it isn't), and 2) that people were researching animal droppings as a source of hydrogen. Though people are looking for biogas to be a replacement for fossil-natural gas, there won't be enoug my for that, and certainly using it for steam methane reformation to hydrogen would be a poor use for biogas.

Hydrogen is an essential industrial input and feedstock for many processes, including production of fertilizer in the form of ammonia. So we will be producing hydrogen for that, without a doubt.

It is estimated that by 2030 or so that electrolyzers will be as cheap as steam methane reformation (SMR), with or without carbon capture on the SMR. We will see if that prediction pans out! The IEA has put approximately 850GW of hydrogen production as a feasibly goal by 2030 as part of their plan for keeping climate warming at 1.5C, with half of that from electrolyzers. This may be fairly plausible, as Europe has mandated 40GW of electrolyzers by 2030, and there are currently 154GW of hydrogen electrolyzers in the pipeline:

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/growing-ambit...

This is really positive news! Thank you.

All true, though to be fair CO2 savings with electric cars also only range, depending on car and country (i.e. local infrastructure and means of electricity production), from 0% to 35% of lifetime CO2 emissions of an equivalent ICE car). https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

I wouldn't consider up to 35% to be worth of the disqualifier "only" - that's a pretty huge reduction, even if we'd like it to be much more.

Absolutely, I meant that the gains made by electric cars aren't that huge that the inefficiency of h2 production automatically disqualifies that approach.

(I do feel the need to point out that public transport saves much more though, 85% for Hamburg, Germany, so again this heavily depends on the local situation.)

10,000PSI hydraulics are rapidly becoming cookie cutter commodity parts. Once you have the supply chain for all the little crap that nickles and dimes you the rest is a lot cheaper. Having industry expertise at working at those pressures really has a huge multiplier effect on everything else.

Building a system to plumb stuff from A to B at a pressure nobody uses is expensive. Calling up a sales rep and asking for slightly modifications on an existing product line so it can be used with your product is pennies by comparison.

I can picture how the conversation would go. There's some pretty big differences between hydrogen and hydraulic fluid, probably to the point of whole component redesign. The little crap here (springs and o-rings) would be completely different.

You're not wrong but "can you make hose X with material Y" or "can I get valve body P with spring rate Q" is a hell of a lot better than "we need custom hoses" or "is this casting good to 10kpsi?".

The big problem with hydrogen is just how small it is. It likes to leach through stuff hold just about everything else. You very well might need custom hoses, custom seals, and custom materials for the castings just to safely store it at 10kpsi. It'll leak through solid steel containers that will otherwise hold helium fine.

Even worse than simply leaking, hydrogen can diffuse into the crystal structure of metals and cause havoc with the material properties. It's definitely not as friendly as hydraulic oil.

Exactly. This is a major problem with anything hydrogen related, especially if it has an expected lifespan of a decade+.

And once it gets the thing all brittle and it starts leaking, you won't see it burn as it produces a lot of IR but almost no visible light.

Compressed liquid systems don't explode so much, they tend to be way less catastrophic as they are a liquid. (The burst, or they spray out fluid)

Gas compressed things EXPLODE, or things that become gas on de-pressure. 10,000 psi is an insane pressure to have in a tank. Gas transmission pipelines operate at 1450 psi...

It's not an apples and oranges comparison. In the O&G industry we default to hydrotesting over pneumatic testing in basically all situations.

How many people would be ready to drive a hydrogen bomb?

“Hydrogen bomb” is a little exaggerated. But to your detractors:

“More than a gasoline bomb, hopefully. Gasoline is more dangerous.”

Citation needed. How is gasoline more dangerous? While gasoline is very dangerous, gasoline is a liquid and will not burn until vaporized; Gasoline is dangerous because it vaporizes quickly. H2 is already a gas and has a ridiculously low spark energy. Furthermore H2 is under pressure.

Gas does have a lower auto-ignition T than H2, that’s no fun, but overall H2 scores worse than gasoline.

“Do you ride on a CNG city bus?”

CNG stands for Compressed Natural Gas; i.e. methane. Methane is a lot easier and safer to use than H2 because it:

- Packs a lot more energy vs. P so the tanks don’t have to be as strong - Doesn’t embrittle the container - Much higher spark energy (in fact, CH4 is kinda hard to light) - Smaller flammability range (i.e. mixture with air that will ignite) - lower auto-ignition T

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammability_limit

I work with a guy who was involved in a near miss incident with these cannisters. They are not risk free, although you could argue that the accidents are rare and potentially worth the risk?

https://www.busnews.com.au/industry-news/1201/gas-bus-explos...

https://www.ctif.org/news/cause-stockholm-cng-bus-explosion-...

https://hal-ineris.archives-ouvertes.fr/ineris-00976180/docu...

And you can't see a hydrogen flame.

More than a gasoline bomb, hopefully. Gasoline is more dangerous.

No, it isn’t. Gasoline is dangerous, but it’s a liquid. H2 is a gas, under extreme pressure, and with a very low spark energy.

The spark (ignition) energy is very important safety wise. Nothing will light without an ignition source. In fact hydrogen is more dangerous wrt to gasoline than gasoline is wrt to flour (yes, flour can explode). That is:

Flour:gasoline < gasoline:hydrogen

Hydrogen is dangerous. And that’s fine.

[1] http://www.explosionsolutions.co.uk/110411020.pdf

I'm relatively sure that a tank of hydrogen at ridiculous pressure makes a nicer fireball than a tank of gas at no pressure.

No: it's a myth that a hydrogen tank simply explodes. It would need to be mixed with oxygen.

Instead, liquid flammables can leak around and then ignite.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2852323/heres-why-hydr...

https://hydrogen.wsu.edu/2017/03/17/so-just-how-dangerous-is...

Few kg of hydrogen are surely more dangerous than 50 kg of gasoline.

120 MJ/kg for H2 vs 46 MJ/kg for gasoline.

Both are explosive, so I think (I'm no authority on this) we can compare those values directly, without taking into account the storage pressure.

Source: https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MichelleFung.shtml https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ArthurGolnik.shtml

Gasoline will not explode in normal conditions. Even in an accident it is pretty safe, although the risk of fire must always be considered.

A 10k PSI H2 tank is a straight up bomb. A gasoline tank can start a nasty fire but nobody is going to be torn apart by shrapnel or killed by the overpressure wave in an accident. Gasoline cars don't explode like they do in the movies. It must also be noted that the large batteries in EVs are also a fire hazard and in some ways worse than gasoline. For gasoline to act like a bomb it has to be aerosolized first and then ignited. In an accident there's not much that could achieve that. With a high pressure H2 tank something that cracked it open and allowed all of the H2 to be released at once would instantly create the conditions for a massive explosion. All it would need is a single spark.

The total amount isn't as much a problem as is the activation energy. Hydrogen will explode when you look at it cross eyed. For gasoline you will have to do some work.

Hydrogen does not explode unless mixed with oxygen or other comburents.

Fortunately there isn't any free oxygen in the atmosphere. Oh, wait.

Fortunately the atmosphere is not inside the hydrogen tank.

That's why it can flame out when pierced but not explode.

Do you ride on a CNG city bus?

Much higher activation energy, not to be compared.

Gack... one of my pet peeves: 90% of my friends compare car millage in terms of "how much money I spend to refuel", completely ignoring:

1. Significantly different tank sizes - 53L to 70L on regular cars.

2. Different prices of gas (suburbs vs downtown, 87 vs 91 octane, etc)

3. Different habits - some refuel at 1/3 left, 1/4 left, 50km left, yellow light on, needle at the end of the gauge, etc

It drives me absolutely bonkers banana berserk, but... nothing I've been able to do so far :-/

It's not scientific at all, but for most people gas mileage comes down to "how often do I have to go to the gas station".

Which is why once electric cars passed a certain point they become effectively infinite mileage as far as people are concerned (as they never have to think about charging as it's always charged overnight).

Similar for how for most people there are only two speeds of computers - I have to wait for it vs I don't have to wait for it.

I hate to tell you this but 90% of your friends are silly, all mine talk about miles per gallon.

>>I hate to tell you this but 90% of your friends are silly,

Quoted out of context like that, that's probably the best compliment on living life right that I've had in a long time! :->

... It's fascinating reading the comments here and other places that go between "that's crazy never heard of it couldn't imagine you're making it up" and "yup seen it / do it too" :-D

But basically for many of my non-science-major friends, it's money per tank or at best kilometers per refueling. Re another (for some reason dead?) comment, there may indeed be a correlation between cash flow and tendency to use "money per tank", haven't thought about it that extensively. And then whether education is a confounding or causal variable to either of those axis, it gets complex.

Location wise: Toronto Canada, Winnipeg Canada, and Fairmont Minnesota is where I've observed it, FWIW.

he, this reminds me of a recent interview with Daniel Kahneman (of behavioral science nobel fame) where he closes with saying he works on the "how the inability to solve the famous “bat and ball problem” [bat and ball cost 1,10 together, the bat costs 1 dollar more than the ball, how much do they cost each?] correlates with belief in God and that 9/11 was a conspiracy." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/16/daniel-kahnema...

I have never heard of anyone judging fuel cost outside of miles/kilometers per gallon/liters.

Where the hell do you live

Hmm, slightly different measurement. They're not talking about "sticker price of fuel at the gas station", so not "fuel cost".

Rather, if you ask them casually in an informal setting "Does your car get good milleage", they'll say things like "Yeah, it only costs me $50 to fill it up!" or my personal favourite, "Yeah, I only have to fill it once per week" --> the amount of unspoken variables in that one just boggles the mind, but goes to another commenter's point of "practical perspective". "How often I need to fill it up" is probably a sane, pragmatical way to think of milleage. It may in fact cut to the point faster than saying "it does 11L / 100km", because while it answers some questions in abstract, it doesn't actually answer the practical considerations of how often I need to refuel / how far can I get on a tank.

As mentioned in my another reply, for me at least, it hasn't been a factor of where I live but variety of company I keep -- on average I'd say my Comsci/Sci-major friends don't do it.

But I'm currently in Canada, where we do indeed as per stereotype, measure distance in units of time ("How far is your work?" "About 20 minutes" ComSciMajor response: "GAAACK!")

I kind of agree. The only thing that matters for me is a cost of ownership in $$$ over some period of time.

amazing… I literally never heard of anyone using that metric. Everyone I’ve ever known uses liters/100km…

The amount actually traveled on a single tank is indeed meaningless - Teslas can go a thousand miles if you go up a mountain, end up at 10% battery, then charge to & past 100% on the way down the mountain via regen. Improving overall efficiency should be what is strived for.

Assuming you’re starting with a significant amount of altitude, otherwise the laws of thermodynamics would like a word

They could be grabbing a bunch of rocks at the top and putting them in the car for the ride down.

That worked for this one: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1124478_world-s-largest...

Feels like the infrastructure and on car issues are going to be similar to CNG, but worse. Need new fuel stations, high pressure storage, no existing delivery network (worse than CNG; although CNG pipelines are much lower pressure than vehicles need, so you needed a compressor at the fueling point); and the killer --- the vehicle tanks expire and replacement may not be economically feasible, in which case your car's value evaporates when the tank expires (generally 15 years after tank manufacture); this is what happened to most CNG cars.

Hydride tanks don't require those high pressures. Other than nuclear arms treaties, is there a technical reason they don't use those instead?

That's a hell of a "Other than" you have there.

Long fill times? This commercially available one says 48 hours to re-charge it.

https://www.fuelcellstore.com/hydrogen-equipment/hydrogen-st...

Yeah, but ideally they'd be swappable. Similar to propane tank exchanges. Or even how some EVs were thinking about battery swap stations.

Ehh, I feel like there's some challenges there.

In the Toyota Mirai, for example, the tank is located under the passenger's seats, in a nice little 'braced' area. Likely chosen because it's the least likely location for the tank to get damaged in a collision. Also the challenge of either having to 'choose' between a 'swap' tank and a 'fill' tank, or a more complex tank that does both.

The tank I linked to says it stores at 400psi, and the material data sheet indicates it doesn't vent the hydrogen in a way that creates a significant fire hazard. So I don't think these need the same kind of protection as a high-psi tank. Though I'm sure there are challenges, or we would have heard about them being proposed.

Aren't they really heavy? This is also why swappable batteries in EVs never got off of the ground. You need a crane to do it and that's too much effort for a top-up.

I thought the tanks were much lighter than the batteries. I think they use multiple smaller tanks due to the rate of release of the hydrogen.

I don't know. I haven't done a lot of research since it will be at least another decade until a decent vehicle suiting my criteria comes out (electric or hydrogen). No point in me even looking at it now.