> Liebreich gives an example of Shell being happy to spend $12bn on a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) platform, the Prelude, which has seen a host of problems, “but they won't spend $12bn just producing blue, green, pink, or any other sort of clean hydrogen for those [existing] uses where we currently are driving 3-4% of global emissions”.
It's not exactly been a winning strategy electorally for those who employ it the loudest, but it's been an effective strategy to prevent political wins of the parties and politicians that actually want to make the sustainability transition happen.
So far, it seems to have empowered the anti-establishment populist right instead...
I will not believe a policy based around future increases in carbon price unless it is implemented at a constitutional level (i.e. hard to reverse), comes with a detailed plan to redistribute the taxes raised in a manner that makes it socially just, and includes detailed information campaigns what the future price means for investments done now.
Having a huge carbon price in 10 years, for example, implies that internal combustion engine cars are worthless then. Just trying to implement a policy to stop selling them in ten years already causes a huge backlash, the idea that there will be the political capital to turn all existing ICE cars into expensive paper weights that only the richest few can afford to drive is wishful thinking.
Carbon prices do have an important role to play, but for those situations where we need to transform large systems in our societies (heat sector, mobility) that are incredibly ingrained in the status quo, relying on market mechanisms that depend on a politically backed price does not seem feasible.
[0] Toyota Teases Solid-State Batteries in 2027
https://spectrum.ieee.org/toyota-solid-state-battery
[1] Toyota reveals its plan to catch up on EV battery technology Three liquid chemistries, solid state cells, and flatter battery packs.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/toyota-reveals-its-plan...
[2] LGES to supply Toyota with batteries, invest $3 billion in US plant
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
I’m not sure it’s such a loss though. Nissan was early with the Leaf but nobody talks about them as cornering the EV market. Toyota can benefit from the battery advancements everyone else made over the last 15 years and catch up quickly.
At the time it made sense to invest in hydrogen. And in hindsight it wasn’t as much of a mistake as it might seem. It was a moonshot but they didn’t risk their existence on it and if it had worked they’d look like geniuses. If hydrogen was feasible Toyota and Japan would be world leaders in energy tech or at least have secure domestic energy independence.
The basic mistake you're making here is thinking that "carbon free" is key. It is not, what matters is that a given energy source is carbon NEUTRAL. Anthropogenic global warming is driven primarily by net increase in atmospheric CO2 on our timescale. When CO2 in consumed from the atmosphere, and then shortly released again (textbook example being a plant fixing CO2/H2O into sugar and the getting eaten by an animal and the animal the metabolizing sugar back to CO2/H2O) the short term net change is zero. The problem has come from releasing stored carbon that was fixed in geologically long term ways, ie, fossil fuels.
We're used to thinking of "hydrocarbons" as equivalent to "fossil fuels" but that's not true. It's perfectly possible to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2, water, and zero carbon energy like solar. Burning those hydrocarbons later will result in net zero change to atmospheric CO2, and thus are perfectly acceptable from an AGW POV (at ground level in particular burning fuels have other pollution issues that may be worth getting away from, but not global warming). The issue is "just" cost, it's much more inefficient and thus costlier to go solar -> fuel synthesis -> combustion -> useful work vs solar -> transmission -> battery -> work. But for applications where battery energy density is insufficient or other properties are required (like high performance aircraft that use fuel as coolant as well as energy) that could be worth it.
So green hydrogen directly faces not just batteries, but green methane, gasoline and other hydrocarbons. Which are far, far easier to work with and have many better properties than hydrogen itself. And on top of course feed seamlessly into existing infrastructure and system.
2 Fe2O3 + 3 C → 4 Fe + 3 CO2
Fe2O3 + 6 H2 → 2 Fe + 3 H2O
So switching to hydrogen could save about 500kg of CO2 per capita. Carbon capture of the fumes could help alleviate some 30% of that. Direct air capture is just not feasible, or wayy to expensive compared to just using H2.
In any case, even with H2; 321 kg of steel per capita will have to be reduced (main uses: construction, transport, industry, pipes, machines, weapons)
The problem is it costs a lot of energy, and so it ends up 4-5 times more expensive than oil from a well.
The real problem there though of course is that oil from the a well has always been cheating by not pricing in its externalities. To get an apples-to-apples comparison with synthetic fuel, fossil fuel would also have to be made at a minimum [0] carbon net neutral too, such as by running an atmospheric scrubber and ensuring that for every ton of carbon coming out of the ground a ton was getting captured again in an equivalently long term stable way.
----
0: Fossil fuel extraction has always resulted in a ton of other externalities too, not just in terms of massive non-carbon pollution but geopolitical costs. That itself may well be a driver, if a country can switch fully to renewable/nuclear power and then run its entire economy solely off of that via grid/batteries/synthetic hydrocarbons the security implications alone are pretty massive. No more fossil fuel blackmail from hostile regimes, ever.
Green steel you can do without hydrogen. Basically you need lots of heat and some carbon to produce steel. Generating heat with electricity is not that hard. You can use induction, plasma heating, resistive heating, etc. And doing that is a lot more efficient than using that same electricity to first create hydrogen and then burn it.
Hydrogen has its place, mostly as a chemical half product that is used to create other stuff. It doesn't store very well; it doesn't travel very well. It's mostly used close to where it is generated. Which as of yet is done almost exclusively by expending large amounts of fossil methane or coal. Green hydrogen production is minuscule and relatively inefficient and costly. Most uses of hydrogen today are neither green nor sustainable. Or carbon free. And that's going to stay like this for a while. Even just shifting current hydrogen production to being green is going to take a massive investment and take decades.
Your other points hold, but I don't think this one is necessarily so (depending what you mean by "a while"): electrolysis is so incredibly trivial that I suspect it'll become green as fast as the grid in general, and if current exponential trend continues, that's going to be almost everything within a decade.
If the current exponential continues. It might, but such is never assured.
Just doing the simple math of the twh needed to produce the fuel for a major airport on a daily basis is kind of eye watering. Just a little back of the envelope math makes it really obvious that that's not going to be a thing any time soon even if we do get some magic laws of physics defying electrolysis technology (those pesky laws of thermodynamics are hard to beat though).
And even just shifting current hydrogen production, which is good for a few percent of carbon emissions today, is a huge undertaking. I agree that electrolysis improvements will actually make that cost effective to do at some point. Possibly even as soon as next decade. But right now it just isn't and most of those electrolysis companies still have a few things to prove. Like having working products or the ability to produce those cost effectively at scale. Either way, within now and a decade, we won't have nearly enough renewables in place to power any of this new hydrogen economy. We'd struggle to power the current one with that. As long as renewables remain scarce, hydrogen is not a great use case for wasting them.
Yes. 30% per year compound growth does that very quickly.
(Exponentials will turn into s-curves of course, no guarantees, but growth here doesn't have to be asymptotic to the current market).
Blended wing body designs may solve the volume problem. It's only intractable if you try to fit the same energy content into a modern airliner that was designed for Jet A.
Weight is the usual suspect in aerospace, and fuel weight significantly favors hydrogen over Jet A (factor of ~2), so a blended wing body design with a much larger internal volume wouldn't even have to have equal aerodynamic efficiency in order to be a suitable replacement.
To be clear, this is not a simple shift and will probably take decades, but it is merely an engineering challenge rather than a fundamental constraint.
but the interesting thought experiment to have is... once you have converters all over the place for those uses... would that make it more attractive to cars?
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/hydrogen-train-quebec-city-1...
Found the below article useful as a primer:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and...
Edit: interesting to do the conversion and realize 700bar is just over 10k psi
Edit2: further interesting to note how the 5k compression of the hydrogen has _higher_ Specific Energy density than 10k due to _decreased_ pressure vessel requirements
Cryogenic fuel looks great until you need to have it sit around unused. Embrittlement, volume, cost, and a rage of safety hazards make it unappealing for aircraft or ships.
So, my guess is the ideal long term solution barring “super batteries” is some sort of synthetic hydrocarbons that uses atmospheric CO2 but we are a long way from viability there.
However the latest generation of rockets seems to have moved away from hydrogen back to things like RP-1 (kerosene) and liquid methane. The high cost and difficulties of working with hydrogen is a factor in this.
Hydrogen may be a solution along with other hybrid approaches (WA state ferry electrification being relevant [1])
[1] https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/major-projects/fe...
Making a methane-powered jetliner is far more practical than a hydrogen-powered one.
Liquid I suppose, temperature concern though.
For hydrogen storage, the DoE targets are truly sobering [1]. That whittles down hydrogen from roughly 100 times as dense as batteries to about 5. Throw a 50% thermodynamic efficiency (jet engines are not efficient!) on top of that and hydrogen still has an advantage, but it lags quite badly behind jet fuel. There have been four decades of intensive government-sponsored research effort into hydrogen storage materials, but all existing systems in practical use rely on fiber-composite tanks at 700 bar.
You get better results with an ammonia-burning jet engine. Here the tank weight is negligible and the hydrogen storage density is effectively 15% (after correcting for the enthalpy of formation). But ammonia still has just half the energy density of jet fuel, and it's rather unpleasant to work with. Plus, the existing production process of ammonia faces its own serious inefficiencies, and extensive investigation of more efficient ammonia production has been painstaking with only one Japanese startup [3] that is behind its timeline (probably a little COVID-influenced) and other contenders at lab stage.
With the direct ammonia fuel cell, the power density issue is even worse, but the energy density is very good. This technology competes well with fossil fuels for weight-sensitive applications that do not require high power (DARPA has been interested in a DAFC drone). But ammonia fuel cells are mostly at lab stage, partially because ammonia production remains disappointing (despite a theoretical energy cost of zero) despite considerable research effort.
1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage
2: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=tsubam...
https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/a-look-at-japans-latest-hydr...
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a4266501...
As to the article: they fail to mention that Japan hasn't even begun to throw in the towel. The newest CEO of Toyota is doubling down on hydrogen powered vehicles.
https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/toyotas-bold-us-pla...
> Methane hydrate is confirmed to exist abundantly in the sea near Japan and is expected to become one of the domestic energy resources of the future
https://www.japex.co.jp/en/technology/research/mh/
So in this case, they're really just a subset of the "oil and gass industry" boosting hydrogen vehicles.
About 80% of Japan's energy is imported coal and natural gas. Their electric grid is a bonkers mix of 50Hz and 60Hz single-phase.
Hydrogen is the only viable solution for them and even that's not going too well despite lofty goals. They can't build the tech and infrastructure alone and the rest of the world just isn't as enthusiastic on H2.
[1] Found this here (https://www4.tepco.co.jp/en/customer/guide/moving-e.html), I don't recall what exactly it was where I lived.
Yes, you can transform from 50Hz to 60Hz, but the capacity is limited and can't be grown infinitely.
I don’t believe hydrogen is the answer but methane cells could be… liquid energy storage is just so much more practical compared to alternatives.
Batteries are indeed heavy - but so are portable hydrogen storage cell that don't easily explode or require liquid cooling.
I agree with you that hydrogen isn't the answer but methane doesn't really seem to be either. Batteries and electric cars are already here - they just need to continue scaling the infrastructure and work on lightening up the vehicles.
Are you implying we can't increase our infrastructure by 20% in 20 years?
One that's close to home for me is the Seattle area's light rail system. Voters approved a plan that includes an extension of the line from downtown Seattle to the neighborhood I live in sometime around 2016. Service is now scheduled to start in 2039, but there have already been multiple delays.
There are currently enough projects in the queue to double our generating capacity.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/grid-interconnection-queue-...
That said, I'm not sure large-scale transit projects are too comparable to electric infrastructure. The ST1 project had a lot of delays due to disagreements about where the rail line would go, and the cost of purchasing land [3]. It's a system designed to move people to places, so a lot of people have opinions on which places the system should go. By contrast, people mostly care that enough electricity is getting delivered to where they live, and don't really care how it gets there.
[1] https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion/west-seattle-b...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sou...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Link_light_rail
It's not much of an issue to have, say, a 1000kWh battery with some small/medium scale solar or wind power feeding it. Or even the grid if there's extra.
Then everyone around that battery uses it primarily for their energy needs and only when it runs out they tap into the larger grid.
The only thing solar panels on cars are good for is keeping the AC running in the summer so the car (and battery) are cool at all times.
Imagine not understanding the ability for humans to build things. Pretty sure the comment i'm responding to is a gas industry shill.
A move towards hydrogen means 3-5x more energy requirements (which also cost money) as well as a transmission and distribution network for the gas.
At home charging and on street parking charging will be an easier retrofit than the construction of new refueling stations.
Anyway we should go towards trains IMHO, we should absolutely not even have long distance trucks.
There are 6 over 100kW charging spots under 1km of my house. Although I don't need any of them, because I can charge where I park at 2kW all day and night.
To support 60 assuming ~50% utilization you'll need 1MW per 1 sqkm additional power. This isn't a small number. The grid anywhere is absolutely not ready for such a rapid increase of load. There isn't enough refined copper produced worldwide to upgrade the grid. I mean setting up a copper mine on 16 Psyche is not a batshit insane idea here.
Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end.
The weight efficiency can only improve from here and more charging infrastructure and faster recharge times will mean less demand for long range variants. This is ideal for electrics because shorter frequent stops are more time efficient for EVs while for gas vehicles it’s the opposite.
The great thing about electricity is that it’s even easier to transport and generate than liquid fuel storage. Generation can be centralized with a diverse set of energy sources.
I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons.)
The difference in wear between a 3600 pound RAV4 and a 4400 pound Model Y is so minor that it'll disappear in the noise. Nobody will notice. The only time it'll even come close to mattering is on residential streets that never see any commercial trucks. And even then, nobody cares now about the 6500 pound HD pickups that are so popular, so I can't see why that would suddenly become an issue.
It's like someone took America and distilled it into an EV :D
I picked the Model Y, which has outsold every other non-pickup vehicle except the RAV4, and it's really close to the RAV4 numbers. It's a good comparison.
How many Hummers has GM sold this year? Couple hundred? That's three orders of magnitude fewer than the Model Y, the Hummer is irrelevant.
GM sold 272 of them last year and only 47 this year
It’s basically a halo car and technological showcase.
I just happen to also believe that EVs are no worse than the status quo and are almost certainly at least marginally better than any other alternative on the table.
https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/145/1/98/1627384
Electricity is easy to transport but very hard to store and it's the storage that's the problem, see batteries.
Yeah we do, or to be more precise, we are having no trouble expanding the infrastructure at the same rate people are buying the cars.
However, it is a critical large-scale industrial input, a replacement industrial input for several additional large industries, and an excellent large-scale stationary energy store.
I mean, it seems like it should be but
* Hydrogen really likes to leak.
* Hydrogen breaks down the container holding it over time.
* Hydrogen is very low density. This means you need either a very large container or very high pressure. Combined with 1 and 2 this is going to be expensive.
I'm really asking the question. I would love to know the full cost difference with current tech vs other options.
Yes, but the rate of leakage is tiny enough that for any reasonable sized tank it's going to be years till it's all leaked away.
The real risk is the leakage causing explosions if you ever put a tank in a confined space.
If you can take natural gas out of the ground, split it into hydrogen and CO2 (releasing heat, which can be used to generate electricity), and inject the CO2 back underground to help release more oil and gas.
At this point, you have hydrogen gas.
Sure, you could burn that hydrogen to make more electricity, but it works out financially better if you can directly use it.
The benefit of this approach is it can make use of most of the existing oil and gas infrastructure, and countries sitting on big gas reserves have a use for them.
The downside is it makes minimal sense unless there is some financial disincentive from just burning the gas and releasing the CO2.
They can greenwash their natural gas into "green" hydrogen and get even more profits. H2 prices are at least 5-10x compared to natural gas.
Even ignoring climate benefits, it's still worth pumping CO2 down the well for financial reasons alone - especially towards the end of the lifespan of classical oil wells.
So-called "blue" hydrogen only results in about 10% less GHG emissions than traditional "grey" hydrogen. It's something, but not big enough of a difference to actually be usable.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956
[0]: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/what-we-do/delivering-indus...
Blue hydrogen only makes sense with global carbon caps, taxes or quotas. And it only makes sense if CO2 injected underground doesn't count towards that cap/tax/quota.
So far, there is no political appetite for global taxes/caps/quotas, so blue hydrogen is only at pilot-plant scale.
Is this even needed? With solar, wind, etc storing more than a few days worth of energy seems very wasteful.
But for personal vehicles it's 100% dead unless we get some huge advances in the technology.
But short-range trucks can operate with batteries just fine, and for long-range trucks it might end up being more viable to just construct overhead wires[0] above long-distance highways and avoid the problem altogether.
Toyota Mirai sales have been flatlined at low ~1-2k since they started, for 7 years: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/toyota-mirai-sales-figures-usa...
While Tesla immediately had ever-growing sales: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-us-sales-figures/
BEVs are better suited to Japan's economy and resources than any other fuel, the vast majority of which is imported (including natural gas).
It's just that it's taken Japan's government a long time to realise this. But it seems like they're finally coming around!
Their grid is a mix of 60Hz and 50Hz networks because of weird historical reasons. It's also single-phase, which isn't the best for mass EV charging.
Compare that to, say, Finland where every single apartment and house has three-phase power. 3x16A or 3x32A usually. It's completely trivial to install a 11kW home charger for example, it's just running some cables and maybe adding a load balancer - all 100yo tech.
But in any case, single phase is fine for home charging and it's the default in many parts of the world. Three phase charging is a nice luxury, but far from a necessity.
So in those cases it really is irrelevant whether you can charge or not =)
For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. Toyota cares Japan economy (cared in a bad way, hydrogen for car). IMO they should had promoted PHEV more in 2012-2015.
It's not insurmountable, though. For one thing, big industries tend to shut down on holiday weekends, so there is lots of spare generation & transmission capacity on the grid. Here in the UK it's not unusual for wholesale electricity prices to go negative on windy holiday weekends - there's so much surplus energy available that the grid struggles to deal with it all! That's very profitable for charging operators and a strong incentive to deploy as much fast charging as possible.
Dynamic pricing can also help here. You raise prices at the most congested charging times and locations, and lower them at under-utilised locations and off-peak times. Tesla already do this with their superchargers. Navigation software that is aware of how busy the chargers are can also route traffic onto less congested routes where there is unlikely to be queues.
Also remember that there is plenty of time to build out all the needed charging infrastructure. Even if all car sales switched to EV tomorrow, we've still got 10-20 years before we approach 100% of journeys being made by EV, depending on how fast the vehicle fleet gets turned over in your country.
> "For vehicle manufacturing, there's very less advantage to make BEVs in Japan, meanwhile China is too strong. Car manufacturing is a big industry so shrinking it causes Japan economy to be dead. "
Japan must make BEVs in Japan in order to secure the future of the Japanese car industry. If they don't keep up with the times, there won't be a Japanese car industry in the long term - at least not for exports. Japan putting their heads in the sand will not make the global EV transition disappear!
I do agree that battery "problems" are exaggerated -- most will last a very long time, and batteries that don't use cobalt and nickel are available now. Sodium-ion might be relatively common in a few years for low-end applications.
The difference is batteries can be improved (and there's a tooooon of $$$$ pouring into this problem) and they are improving. Petroleum is a dead end while batteries, solar, and electrical grids have a bright future and lost of room for growth.
Not really. They do gradually lose capacity over a long time, but it's a slow process. The US Government requires EV batteries to have an 8 year / 100,000 mile warranty, and California requires 10 years and 150,000 miles. I expect most batteries will significantly exceed that.
LFP batteries generally have about 3x the longevity of other lithium ion types.
There are some examples of early battery failures, like the Nissan Leaf didn't use liquid cooling; now basically everyone else learned from their example and does it. Chevy Bolts had a battery recall due to bad manufacturing. Basically, if a battery fails early someone somewhere screwed up. Most EV batteries are fine and will continue to be fine for a very long time.
>> "I’m not convinced it ever will be, especially if it’s continued to be made by exotic materials."
Resource constraints are an issue, but there are workarounds. Nickel and cobalt can be avoided simply by using LFP cells. Permanent magnet motors are more efficient than induction, but the permanent magnets don't need to be based on rare-earth elements -- it's just that the non-rare-earth-magnet version would be less powerful and/or bulkier. Similarly you could wind the motors with aluminum instead of copper, and the motor would be less powerful and/or bulkier. But that's fine -- electric motors are already quite a bit smaller and more powerful than they need to be anyways.
Lithium is probably the hardest-to-get-around resource constraint with current technology, but lithium production is ramping up.
Also worth noting that the need for large batteries would be substantially reduced if were to invest heavily into charging infrastructure and even the electrification of roads so that cars don't even need to stop. (There are some projects in Sweden and Germany along those lines.)
>> LFP batteries generally have about 3x the longevity of other lithium ion types <<
This is not true at all. All LFPs in EVs degrade much faster than other lithium ion batteries:
Tesla LFP Battery 10% RANGE LOSS PROBLEM? | Model 3 RWD (Cleanwatt citing Tessie's data)
The brand new LFP batteries will degrade substantially quicker. There's not long-term retention data for LFP batteries on the market yet, but the trend tends to be substantially faster degradation. Trends show them stabilizing around that 10% degradation mark in about half the time as non-LFP batteries - around 50,000 miles instead of 100,000 miles."
There is nothing weird about lithium ion batteries, including LFPs, degrading quickly under high SOC/high C-rates -- ie, EVs. We don't know anything about LFP's longevity in EV profile -- ie, high SOC/high C-rates -- and while there is no long-term data to verify LFP's true lifespan in EVs, it's been demonstrated that LFP could lose as much as 1/3 of its lifespan under 100% SOC in ESS profile.
LFP's are already mostly limited to entry-level, low-range EVs due to its other technical short-coming in moving vehicles (ie, low energy density and weight). This quick degradation makes even less appealing in vehicles.
Far less trouble to store and use and much higher energy density, also works with existing airframes (fuel tanks!) and engines.
I mean if hydrogen was just as abundant in the atmosphere as oxygen and didn’t need to be at ridiculous temperatures to be liquid, it would be a great fuel.
But to keep things green you’re fighting a ton of trade-offs using electricity, it which point why don’t you just use the electricity directly?
I don't understand how any one looks at the electric car charging situation and thinks it makes sense to scale that out to 100% of vehicles.
A 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.
From 197 cars per 1000 people in 1970 we've grown to 662 in 2019. i.e. we now have more than three times the number of cars per person even compared with the "bad old days" of the car dominated 1970s ... The simple fact is that Dutch car use has grown continuously for 70 years much as it has in every other nation
I love train, but let's not pretend that public transportation will be dominant. Rather, it will be a mix of different modes of transport. Cars will continue to be important. Visit the Netherlands and see for yourself.
https://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2019/08/the-car-free-m...
What we are experiencing now is transitional, where people use infrastructure intended for road-trips for their daily needs. That phase will pass
I charge at my parking spot with around 2-2.5kW power use. With that I'll get about 100-150km of range overnight easily. I drive less than that daily, which means my car's battery is full practically all the time.
Also: the longest wait I've had in the almost 3 years I've owned an EV has been about 15 minutes and in that case it was a couple who had clearly rented an EV and was charging it for the first time ever.
The infrastructure is perfectly solvable. The US is just at a disadvantage because gasoline is practically free over there compared to the rest of the world so there isn't that much of an incentive to improve the charging infrastructure.
As a reference, currently gasoline at the station near to me is $7.47/gallon, which actually pretty cheap. The most expensive price here is $9.24/gallon at the moment.
Compare that to electricity, which costs 0.02c/kWh right now. That's 0,0002€/kWh. Looking at the market price it'll dip down to -0.18c/kWh in the morning hours, they're literally paying people to use electricity =)
Several companies are in the early stages of national DCFC rollouts. It will get better quickly in a lot of places.
This is a solvable problem.
That rules out widespread use of hydrogen, then. Hydrogen filling stations need to periodically recompress their hydrogen. Which is never a problem because current hydrogen stations are virtually always idle. However, if they were continuously busy, you'd have to wait.
Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.
And ICEs are powered by many thousands of mini explosions per minute with a side effect of producing an odorless gas that can kill us silently.
Everything can be scaremongered.
And personal transportation, as much as I wish wasn't the case, is a fact of life since 1910.
Technically 1908, but we can round.
The first automobiles were practically toys for the rich. Cars didn't really become a "mass market" thing until ~1910.
Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.
And there's another 10-20 gallons of various oils in the engine and transmission. While they aren't nearly as volatile as the gasoline, they're still quite flammable. Really, it's a wonder these things were ever allowed. :)
1. Off by an order of magnitude: ~4-6 quarts of oil in the motor, about the same for the transmission yielding for a large motor about 2 gallons total.
2. duskwuff says >"they're still quite flammable."< Nonsense. Engine oil is so hard to burn that it is not classified as flammable by OSHA:
https://firefighterinsider.com/is-motor-oil-flammable-you-ma...
Furthermore these oils are encased in heavy metal (the engine block, the transmission block and the differential casing).
Starting batteries (the 6- and 12-volt kind) cause more fires than do engine and/or transmission oils.
To paraphrase Charlton Heston: "I'll give you my gasoline car when you can pry it from my cold, greasy, dead hands."
I assume that my neighbors 30 year old gas guzzler is more likely to catch fire than my 1 year old PHEV for example (or maybe I’m more likely since I have both a lithium battery and a gas tank).
Although weirdly enough the video demonstration doesn't seem to be of a battery fire. :facepalm
Erm. I don't think that's true.
Maybe cut back on the hyperbole a bit. Two tons is the entire car. The lithium content of the battery is 15-20 pounds. And it's not straight lithium metal that becomes flammable in the presence of water. It's the electrolytes that are flammable. And most EVs in the world use LFP, which doesn't have that flammability problem.
(I'd be curious what the real-life vehicle fire statistics actually are so far for regular lithium ion versus LFP. LFP is promoted as being safer, but at this point there should be enough vehicle fire statistics to be able to quantify how much safer they are. The Tesla Model 3 might be a good model to compare because it's available in both versions, though maybe there just aren't enough model 3 fires to be statistically significant.)
EV fires are already significantly less common than ICEV fires. Factor in LFP, and maybe we should start kicking ICEVs out of garages because they're unsafe. And lest you think ICEVs don't spontaneously combust -- that's very much incorrect, there have been recent recalls of millions of ICEVs for exactly that.
I look forward to kicking fossil fuel based cars out of everywhere for reasons unrelated to safety. Or you could say reasons that have to do with the collective safety of all life on Earth rather than individual safety.
Also, remember that lithium is also a fossil fuel. Electicity is not magic, you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
What about the large-scale strip-mining, fossil-fuel-burning, and other absolutely nasty environmental efforts of continuing to use oil? And how much of that oil pulled from the ground is actually recyclable and reusable?
> lithium is also a fossil fuel
Lithium is by definition not a fossil fuel, as it isn't from the remains of long dead living organisms. Fossil fuels are all organic chemistry! Lithium is inorganic!
> you're just replacing one fossil fuel with another.
A significant percentage of the electricity from my wall socket does not come from fossil fuels. And even then, the EV is massively more efficient per mile than an equivalent gas car and the natural gas power plant supplying the non-renewable part is also massively more efficient and less emission producing per watt of power than a car's motor. The break even, even if 100% of the electricity was natural gas, is still like 30,000mi.
Hydrogen based fuels make sense on multiple fronts: long term storage (batteries cannot do this), scale (adding more tanks is cheaper than whole battery packs) and energy/power densities are still above what the best batteries can provide.
Sorry, you say you're familiar with hydrogen fuel cells and you don't know it's not burning?
Hydrogen fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction to turn hydrogen and oxygen from the air into electricity and water. The byproduct is water, not fire.
I'm not rich enough to own either a battery-electric or hydrogen-electric car, but it's weird how the only people who hate hydrogen are the battery people. I don't hear any hate from fossil-fuel guys.
It seems they're more interested in protecting their investment than saving the environment through a process (which is more inefficient, but) that doesn't require rare earth minerals.
That's not true. There are two main storage cases: from day to night and from summer to winter. Because there are 365 days and nights in a year and only one summer and one winter, a battery for seasonal storage needs to be 365 times cheaper than one for daily storage to break even after the same number of years. Of course, there are no batteries that are 365 times cheaper than lithium-ion batteries. Nothing comes close.
People are thinking that chemical energy storage could work for the case of seasonal storage. It doesn't quite work right now, but it's not off by 2 orders of magnitude, it's off by maybe a factor of 5. It is much more likely that we'll succeed in making green hydrogen production, transportation and storage economical than that we could make batteries cheaper by a factor of 100.
Separately, there is a fairly good chance that we'll be able to extract hydrogen from underground deposits (google "white hydrogen", e.g. [1]).
Third, hydrogen storage economics enjoys the square-cube law: larger pressurized tanks can hold a lot of hydrogen for not a much larger cost than smaller tanks. So hydrogen could make sense for applications where very large tanks are needed, and one such application is railways. A typical train oil car has a volume of about 130 m3. At 700 bar (typical storage tank pressure), one m3 of hydrogen weighs about 42 kg, so this is about 5.5 tons. Hydrogen has about 3 times the energy density of diesel, so that would be the equivalent of about 16 tons of diesel. Train have an efficiency of at least 400 ton-miles per gallon, which is more than 125 ton-miles per kg, or 2 million ton-miles for 16 tons. In other words, such a tanker car could be enough to propel a ten thousand ton freight train for 200 miles. It would be much easier to convert diesel locomotives to burn hydrogen than to electrify thousands of miles of railways, so there's a fairly good chance that rail could be hydrogen's killer app.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...
If you need more energy in the winter, you build more wind power, not PV to store it an entire year.
And episodes of little wind+sun have a duration of less than a month.
And there are more storage use cases, e.g. short term grid stabilization (<1 second).
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/wind-pattern...
Perhaps southern Europe will counteract as well: less need in the winter and energy required for increased cooling with heat pumps in the summer
I could just say we'll solve all problems with green batteries. We can recycle batteries at > 95% of materials already. We have lifepo4 batteries that are stable, don't have cobalt and be charge up to 100% without destroying them. In reality I don't have to point to some unknown incredible improvements in the future, they work today.
I see hydrogen as the oil industrial complex and diesel & ice industrial complexes wanting to maintain all their infrastructure that burns fuel for engines. It makes sense from their standpoint.
This is less than the number of EVs Tesla builds every single week.
The other one - in my country - is that they want to wind down natural gas entirely, but then want to reuse the pipes for hydrogen; I suspect this may be to continue making use of the huge infrastructure investments made in the gas pipelines.