It seems to me Japan is going all in on their new high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (which supposedly cant melt down)it transports the heat with helium in stead of water which allows for temperatures that allow for hydrogen production.
Just repeating what I read and hear online. This isn't an endorsement and I have no idea if it lives up to the hype. If it does it would be quite the game changer.
For example, the main ingredient in gasoline is C8H18. It has good energy density at atmospheric pressure, and the fire risks are manageable. We already use carbon/hydrogen systems today!
I think one of the candidates for metal hydride fuel cells is MgH2? It apparently also has decent energy density. Of course, magnesium poses some risks of its own. And I personally have no idea what a complete supply chain and refueling system would look like, or what it would cost.
Still, I fully expect that any portable energy storage is going to come with tradeoffs: cost, pollution, rare materials, and always the risk of catastrophic discharge (via fire, explosion, or messy kinetic failures). We should pursue multiple alternatives and invest in basic science, because portable energy is incredibly useful.
That screams regulation waiting to happen. like, have a lever or something on there. there is no more obvious or easily accessible place to flee a vehicle than the door.
also, which "some". is this just another tesla quirk?
The backups unlock the doors "no questions asked", so to speak, which includes possibly damaging the windows (because they don't get lowered out of their seals). For the front doors they are so intuitively placed that pretty much all of my first-time passengers have already used them before I can tell them to press the button instead.
Models other than 3 also have mechanical releases for the rear doors, apparently, but using those involves removing floor mats (according to the owner's manuals, no personal experience).
[1]: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-7A32EC0...
The problem with H2, ammonia, biofuels and other synthetic fuels is not that they have some limitations, it's that they are not accepted by the green energy dogma. Some green energy activists would like to see the gas stations go away, for example, and that is not going to happen if you keep needing to go somewhere to re-fuel, with any fuel.
If you're using hydrogen to smelt steel or make ammonia fertilizer, then there's no energy loss. The article aptly refers to these as "no regrets" uses.
Gas stations (ie ground vehicles) are a losing battle. BEVs will eat the sector. They're simply so much less expensive: for the vehicles themselves, for the infrastructure, and then of course for the wasteful energy use in operation.
The current process needs 55kWh of electricity to produce 15kWh of electricity on the other end. Not very efficient at all.
Talking about efficiency is a losing battle, people don't care about that, they care about total cost, safety and convenience.
Without subsidies it is ICE that would go away overnight on two of those three factors and then the third shortly after the market catches up to the overnight shift. EVs already have lower total cost and higher safety (than carrying around a tank of explosives and actively igniting those explosives during travel). ICE looks more convenient with current refueling infrastructure, but if ICE subsidies disappeared and demand plummeted we'd see how fast ICE range anxiety returns when companies quickly en masse decide to not sell such a low margin loss leader. (I do mean "returns", we know from history that ICE vehicles were the original range anxiety and EVs were the reliably ranged household cars until enough gas stations existed. AAA was in part founded because of ICE range anxiety.)
(H2 cannot compete with EVs on any of these three. Total cost is higher. H2 tanks can dangerously explode, even if fuel cells are not themselves at least using a burning process like ICE. H2 refuelling seems convenient if you discount the fact that there's no general, ubiquitous H2 refuelling infrastructure and likely never will be, especially with how badly H2 leaks in all attempts at long distance shipping and long term storage.)
Looking at efficiency alone is not enough.
> They're simply so much less expensive
Not yet they aren't. The upfront cost of an EV still makes it more expensive than an ICE vehicle. Also, they batteries are guaranteed to degrade, so the used market has very bad prices for EVs. At some point, they will probably be less expensive for most automobiles, but hydrogen can still play a part in trucking, trains, planes, boats and specialty operations.
Only about 64% of oil is used for transportation [1] and out of that, only about 50% for automobiles and light trucks [2] (even though for light trucks, motorcycles and other applications, EVs are not going to win probably). So BEVs could replace about 30% of all oil usage. The rest of 70% is up for grabs, so why not pursue hydrogen investment as a possible alternative?
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transporta...
The (relevant) comparison was H2 versus BEVs — ie comparing decarbonized solutions apples-to-apples. I have edited to make that more clear.
> why not pursue hydrogen investment as a possible alternative?
Because hydrogen, for all its marketing, doesn't actually solve the problems people have with BEVs. Better BEVs do.
I guess it depends on the definition of "people". If you mean private automobile owners, then I agree that batteries will eat hydrogen's lunch. For everything else(70% of oil use), it's an open question. In the future, you might even see a migration of H2 technology from large applications to small automobiles, like we've seen with diesel engines.
I'm just following your lead. You were the one who brought up "gas stations."
>For everything else(70% of oil use), it's an open question
Not really. Road use is ~50% .[1] It's all going BEV, like it or not.
Agriculture is another 10%. Ditto.
The technology improvement curves speak for themselves. ICE and H2 have both plateaued near their theoretical limits.
I intentionally said "ground vehicles," not private cars.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...
If battery densities end up meeting the needs of airplanes they meet the needs of ships easily enough. Plus, there's interesting new research on wind power for ships, which I find is a lovely irony to see ships return to wind power after all these years (though it may look quite different than the classic age of sail with primary propulsion still being electric turboprops).
Still, either a vehicle is more or less drives continuously or batteries will be the better alternative. But that is only for that sector.
Recycling of batteries is very efficient at >95%[1], and will only get better with time.
As for addressing only one sector, welcome to the world of high-complexity problems. Climate change is a "1000 cuts" type, not a "magic bullet" type.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/14/jb-straubels-redwood-mater...
Exactly, and I wish I understood why people thought this was a smart point.
EVs are a link in the chain that in and of themselves have no fundamental energy dependence on fossil fuels. They have an incidental reliance on fossil fuels to the extent that electricity is generated from fossil fuels. But they're a piece of the infrastructure puzzle that in and of themselves is fully solved and compatible with decarbonized infrastructure. I would like to think that one goal in advancing public understanding of EVS should be educating people to the point that this particular talking point never gets used ever again.
In general I would say I actually agree with this. It can be perfectly feasible to use an energy source that's terribly inefficient in some intuitive sense, but as long as it's economical to do so, poses no environmental harm, and you're getting significantly more energy out than you're putting in, you can be as inefficient as you want.
Now that said, I don't think that this kind of general truism is terribly responsive in this particular case, because it's nevertheless going to be true that inefficiency, and whatever sense you construe it, can indeed be a deal breaker and I think that's what GP is intending to communicate with respect to h2, biofuels, etc.
Fossil fuel comes out of the ground with the energy already in it, hydrogen doesn't exist in a free form and the energy must be put into it coming from somewhere else.
Most hydrogen now comes from natural gas at maybe 75-80% efficiency through reforming, then it must be compressed, then it must be burned at similar efficiencies to fossil fuel or used in a fuel cell with slightly better efficiency than ICE.
It's way worse in efficiency than fossil fuels, you could just use the natural gas directly in a combustion engine and be way ahead. Solar/wind/nuclear to electrolysis is even worse, just charge a battery.
Hydrogen is a energy storage mechanism like a battery not a source of energy like fossil fuel.
Look at well to wheel efficiency BEV are far ahead of hydrogen.
PS: Please don't post some Bloomberg article about this. They are wrong and did not correctly reference the state of battery technology back in 2010.
Why would long-term storage matter if wind and solar can produce so much energy that we cannot feasibly consume it all? What other long-term energy storage plans are there right now?
I would not write off fuel stations just yet. There may well be a future where some renewable fuel powers vehicles.
No.
You're thinking of "too cheap to meter," which never came to pass, and (as it turns out) was just a marketing line.
>What other long-term energy storage plans are there right now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429623
There was a great article a few days ago about "factories as batteries" (pointing out that aluminum smelting is uneconomic but hydrogen works) but sadly I can't find it.
Energy to plants to biofuels throws away nearly all the energy. More than all of it, by some accountings.
What are the alternatives for those use cases in which batteries are infeasible?
There's also battery systems outside of Lithium Ion formulations which have other use cases. Thermal batteries are an interesting alternative in some use cases, particularly where fast access to heat in addition to electricy is handy (such as in collaboration with building HVAC and water heaters).
But also in general as we keep finding new density scales in the Lithium Ion formulations (and as we have hope to potentially discover even more formulations beside that) the number of use cases where batteries are infeasible keeps shrinking.
The alternatives are mostly
* better batteries
* heat pumps to replace oil burners
* methane or ammonia for the remaining uses (eg trans-oceanic); globally shipping and aviation together account for only 8% of petroleum use
With a universal carbon tax everything would automatically self-organize into the most efficient solution, but of course we can't do that.
Seems like lack of imagination, nothing more.
He told us there were extremely high efficiency hydrogen systems at the time. But they all suffered from similar problems:
- Hydrogen is highly flammable (or explosive) in an oxygen atmosphere.
- Hydrogen has truly awful power storage density—unless you compress it to a couple of hundred atmospheres pressure.
Nobody wants to store potentially explosive fuel at 200+ atmospheres. I'm not aware of current hydrogen technology at all, but that's a fundamental physics challenge that needs to be addressed somehow. And it needs to be addressed in a cost-effective way at each step of the distribution chain.
The problem with high density energy storage is that you're putting a huge amount of energy in a tiny space. Gasoline is flamable, lithium-ion batteries are notorious for ugly fires, and even flywheels can fail catastrophically. A good power storage system needs to manage this risk somehow.
(There was some really interesting work being done with carbon-fiber flywheels and maglev bearings in a vacuum about 20 years ago. Apparently that had decent power density, and it could charge off electric charging infrastructure. But car insurance companies weren't convinced it was safe. Which would also be a problem for hydrogen.)