Now you get to explain in some detail through what modes a single nation's government controls multinational companies that preside over global markets. Be sure to account for regulatory capture in your explanation. We'll wait.
I am always eager to rise to the call of a rank bully. Well maybe less eager than you to have the opportunity to be completely rude to a total stranger you disagree with.
Meanwhile, they control companies with laws. Isn't this obvious?
Try charity next time. Or be this rude in real life to people you know and see how it goes. People like you ruin this site.
If refusing to let baseless handwaving pass for reasoned arguments ruins the site for you you're gonna have a bad time. In the mean time, "laws" hardly meets burden of proof here when the initial claim is a single nation's government controlling an entire global industry. An industry that is dominated by manufacturers that are not based in the country in question. Did you want to flesh that out a little?
What is baseless or handwaving about it? It's an incredibly simple statement.
"Well.. the government decided it wanted to control the car market, it has single handedly set it back several decades at this point."
The government /is/ attempting to control the car market. This is happening at both the federal and state level. These laws specify what the market can and cannot sell, the most direct form of control available. These laws inject government money into subsidies for both the consumer and the manufacturer, an indirect form of control.
The article "it" is indefinite but it obviously refers to the /market/, and not the /industry/. A word which never appeared in my original statement.
After looking into natural gas vehicles, I don't see how any high pressure gas vehicle could work in the states, except through fleets.
At least natural gas had distribution already (but usually not anywhere near the pressure needed for fueling; and that compression is energy intensive!). The pressure tanks in the vehicle expire, at which point the vehicle turns into a pumpkin. At least early Mirais had 15 year tanks.
In theory, you can replace the pressure tanks, but when I was looking at aging CNG Crown Victorias (circa 2017), it was very hard to find new tanks (and many of them had been sitting for some time, so you're not even getting the full tank lifetime), or someone to install them. When I saw cost estimates, it was in the couple of thousands; not really economical when that money would get you a similar age gas car that will probably never need its gas tank replaced.
That's interesting. In Victoria Australia (Melbourne to me more specific). LPG (liquid petroleum gas) cars were more very successful. Throughout the 80s and 90s almost every taxi was LPG, basically every petrol station also had (and many still do) have LPG. And it was super common if you bought a Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore, two of the most popular cars of the 90s and 00s here that you would convert them to LPG. Typically by installing an additional smaller tank in the boot (trunk as Americans call it) and have a switch in the cabin to switch between the fuels. Maybe the smaller tank might only get a couple hundred kilometres but it was quick, cheap and easy to fill up, simple to swap back to petrol if you needed the range etc. It was so common, I know Ford (and possibly Holden) were offering the factory ready for LPG without a petrol tank.
LPG = Liquified petroleum gas = propane (or butane?). CNG = compressed natural gas = methane.
LPG tanks are much more straightforward, 100-200psi (and standardized) than CNG (thousands of psi to usable amounts in the tank because it stays as a gas unless you chill it to like -100C).
NG is a lot cheaper, in theory. In theory, you could refuel at home.
Fuel cells are not a good solution for small vehicles now, but I think there's an argument to be made fr their use in trucking, where electric vehicles don't make economic sense due to battery weight, poor range, long recharge times, and currently poor towing capacity.
While hydrogen is expensive to produce, difficult to store, and less efficient in transfer than electrochemical batteries, I suspect they'd be a good technology for large fleets of trucks due to weight and range.
Fuel cells can also be made to run on natural gas, which might end up being a good stop-gap, as we already have a strong natural gas production infrastructure and despite its downsides, it's far easier to store than hydrogen.
The cheapest way to produce hydrogen today does indeed involve methane as the starting material, but the promise of hydrogen was that there is a clear path to producing hydrogen from renewables. We can easily do it today, it’s just currently more expensive. If you think of hydrogen like just the energy storage / transport mechanism this isn’t any different than electric infrastructure, where electricity can be produced by fossil fuels or greener alternatives. Lots of people get upset at hydrogen for this reason, but I really don’t think it is warranted.
The real reasons to be upset with hydrogen are the various impracticalities with the infrastructure and storage. Hydrogen leaks out of solid metal tanks because the atom is so small, and it has to be kept under enormous pressure because it doesn’t liquefy without cryogenic temperatures. There is no reason that I know of to assume these practicality concerns will ever be solved for car sized applications.
Most hydrogen today is produced by steam reforming from natural gas. Which means hydrogen cars are more expensive natural gas cars.
There is green hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water. But it more expensive than other sources. It only makes sense when fossil fuel sources aren't allowed.
Hydrogen cars are a bad idea. Now, they aren't green and don't have infrastructure. In clean electricity future, battery cars will be better. Hydrogen will be important in the future for industrial processes that need heat. And maybe for long-distance transportation like planes and ships where electricity won't work. But those only make sense with green hydrogen.
There is also microbe produced hydrogen extracted from ch4. This would allow using corn as the input similar to ethanol fuel, which already has a large scale production infrastructure.
There are already far more battery powered electrical trucks than there are hydrogen trucks. That race was over before it ever began. Like with hydrogen cars, the gap is growing very rapidly. All sorts of battery powered trucks exist right now in every weight class. Everything from tiny vans to mining monster trucks. The notion that this cannot work is utter nonsense and easily disproved by just pointing at the obvious reality of these things existing in the market right now.
There are only two limiting factors on electrical trucks: cost of batteries and production volume of battery manufacturers. This is a temporary problem. As the production volumes improve, cost will come down. You can cover any range by just using more batteries. Typical trucks in the market have less than half a mwh of battery. This provides them with a useful but not amazing range. Unlike car owners, truck companies typically settle for good enough and don't suffer from range anxiety. They buy the range they need. Mining trucks need batteries in the mwh range. Batteries are heavy of course but this isn't a problem in a vehicle designed for moving heavy things around.
Australia actually has battery powered road trains weighing hundreds of tonnes. Reason: superior torque over any diesel engine and electricity is very cheap (lots of solar power over there). Some of these vehicles are converted decades old diesel trucks. These aren't high tech vehicles. The process for producing them is brutally simple: rip out the diesel engine, replace that with an electrical motor and shove in pallets of batteries where the fuel tanks used to be. It takes minutes to swap batteries with a fork lift truck. Supremely pragmatic and awesome. If Australians can do this in the middle of nowhere, anyone can. Likewise there are logging trucks in Canada that are built locally for the same reason. Hard core power users of trucks are going for electric. They are just better.
The only thing better than electrical road trains is actual trains on rails. Those too can run on electricity. In fact that's very common and has been so for decades. There are far more electrical trains than diesel trains. High speed trains, freight trains, passenger trains. Long trains, short trains. Any kind of train.
Fuel cells can indeed run on gas. The reason nobody is talking about that or seriously considering this as an alternative is that it is far more lucrative for gas companies to use way more gas to produce hydrogen while grabbing subsidies and selling the hydrogen at premium. Never mind that hydrogen has nearly 3x the volume of gas, both in liquid and compressed form. And never mind the high pressures you need for moving it around in gas form. Because doing so in liquid for is stupidly expensive and technically challenging. In compressed gas form, diesel has about 18x the energy density of hydrogen stored at 200 bar. Meaning you need about 18 trucks of hydrogen for every truck of diesel to move a fleet of trucks around. Transporting hydrogen to fuel stations at scale is stupidly expensive and inefficient. Producing, storing, compressing, pumping, transporting, etc. You lose money and energy at every step. It's stupidly inefficient and costly.
That's why Shell just pulled the plug on this business. It was a scam and these things served their purpose. EVs won. Game over. Moving on to the next thing. Of course the exact same thing is going to happen for hydrogen truck fueling stations. But not until after they pocket the subsidies. Until then they'll be talking up how awesome hydrogen trucks are going to be all while battery electrical trucks are actually being awesome all over the place already.
The cheapest fuel cells are alkaline cells. If you try to run those on a gasified carbon-containing fuel, they will clog up with carbonates (from the CO2) almost immediately. Ammonia would make more sense, but even then the CO2 in air causes clogging.
Carbon monoxide in gasified fuels can poison fuel cell catalysts.
The fuel cells best suited to carbonaceous fuels are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) but these operate at 800 to 1000 C; they are not "instant on" devices. They're better as a topping cycle for something like a combustion turbine (which can also serve to pressurize them, increasing current density.) But these are also somewhat fragile (thin ceramic membranes) and any technology operating at 1000 C has lifetime concerns from creep and other degradation processes.
I don't know that hydrogen was a "scam" per se - I think of fuel cells as essentially an alternative battery technology. It wasn't clear 20-30 years ago that lithium batteries would progress as much as they did, and so fuel cells were perhaps a reasonable hedge.
Exactly. It's a very cynical play by oil and gas companies collaborating with car manufacturers. The play here is to get paid to "study" the obvious (it won't ever be profitable to produce these things) while delaying the inevitable (demise of the oil and gas industry and its dependent ICE car manufacturing business). The oil companies are also doing this because the goto method of producing hydrogen involves large amounts of gas. Much larger than would be used if you burned the gas directly in a combustion engine. So, they are getting subsidized to produce more gas while shedding crocodile tears over global warming and green washing their business.
Toyota has very reluctantly produced more EVs in the last year than the total amount of hydrogen cars it has ever produced. That number is in the lower tens of thousands spread over a decade. Their EV production numbers aren't very good either but it absolutely dwarfs their hydrogen car production numbers. And soon on a quarterly and eventually even monthly basis.
Toyota of course is by far the most enthusiastic hydrogen car proponent. They can't shut up talking about it and are flogging that dead horse at every opportunity they have to explain why they are so far behind producing EVs. But for all their talk about hydrogen, they are not lifting a finger to actually scale hydrogen car production. Because it doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. Never has. They know this very well. Because they've been "studying" this topic for decades. They know everything there is to know about the viability of hydrogen cars. That's the whole reason the number of vehicles is so pathetically low. The number is the absolute bare minimum needed to grab the subsidies. Per vehicle, the subsidies are orders of magnitude the sales price of the car. Which is typically far below cost price. Producing hydrogen car has never been profitable. The game here is to minimize the money lost producing these things while maximizing the subsidies grabbed.
Putting valid industry applications aside, consumer hydrogen was always just a FUD just slow down prevent EV adoption and PHEV use by the petroleum companies.
It sucks because it should be a valid path for lots of things, but the grey black blue was all a bullshit screen for methane sales in perpetuity.
I think you'd have to lift the entire cabin in order to fit a big enough battery underneath it. Still, not quite outside the realm of possibility. Sillier things have been done by individuals before.
If you look at cutaways of the hydrogen vehicles, there is an enormous amount of space used for tanks and the fuel cell etc. The battery layout could be closer to that of a Polestar 2 rather than the more common 'skateboard' battery pack. Not that it would be an easy project!
By way of comparison, there are just under 30,000 gas stations in Japan, which itself represents a 50% dropoff from previous peaks and leaves some people needing to drive long distances for gas (c.f. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01830/#:~:text=As%20th....). That's still pathetic.
Buy it. Store it in an arctic tundra desert protected from the elements. In some decades, some country will roll out mass nuclear and dirt cheap H2 and you'll export it there as a $$$ vintage H2 car and make bank.
Yeah, I purchased a brand new Mirai in late 2022. I was excited about hydrogen, but the past year has been very rough, with dramatic price hikes on fuel as well as station reliability issues. Thankfully in Silicon Valley (where I work) I’m mostly unaffected by the closure of Shell’s stations since there was only one (South San Jose), but this is bad news for people living and working in areas where Shell was the primary provider of hydrogen; there aren’t many hydrogen stations to begin with, and the loss of a hydrogen station could be a nightmare for a Mirai driver.
The Mirai itself is a wonderful vehicle, but I don’t recommend purchasing one; for me I believe it was a huge financial mistake. I still owe about $35K but I’d be lucky to get an offer for $15K if I were to sell it now. I’m active in a Mirai Facebook group and I’ve heard stories of dealerships refusing to accept Mirais as trade-in offers, and I’ve also heard of trade-ins falling through because the owner’s Mirai loan was so underwater that attempting to roll over the remaining Mirai loan’s balance on another vehicle exceeds the lender’s loan to value limits.
1. I wanted to drive a zero-emissions vehicle. In 2022 gasoline prices in California reached record-high prices, and I believed it was a good time to look at alternatives.
2. I live in an apartment complex that lacks EV chargers. My landlord has no plans to install them, so buying an EV meant being entirely dependent on public chargers.
3. The hydrogen situation looked more optimistic in 2022, with new stations being planned and with infrastructure improvements Coming Soon(TM).
Of course, gasoline prices fell, but hydrogen prices went through the roof in 2023. When I bought my Mirai in November 2022, hydrogen cost $19.70/kg at True Zero stations; most stations in Silicon Valley are operated by True Zero. A month after I purchased my Mirai, prices rose to $23.75, then again the following month to $26.75. These price hikes were blamed on the spike in natural gas prices that occurred in early 2023. But while natural gas prices did fall, hydrogen prices never fell; in fact, they kept increasing until it reached $36 in summer 2023, which remains the price at True Zero stations.
Thankfully True Zero’s stations in Silicon Valley have been relatively reliable. Every now and then there would be supply-related outages, but they have been resolved relatively quickly in Silicon Valley. However, the situation is different in Southern California, and I feel especially bad for Sacramento-area Mirai drivers, who are reliant on one Iwatani station that gets so much traffic that there is a waitlist app! People have waited hours in line for fuel there.
The silver lining is that my Mirai came with a $15,000 fuel card that I use for purchasing fuel, so I don’t have to deal with the direct costs now. However, at $36/kg my card will likely run out by the end of the year, and once it does I’m on the hook for paying nearly $200 for a full tank, with a range of about 300 miles. By comparison, the Prius c that I traded in upon purchasing my Mirai cost $56 to fill up when gas was $7/gal, and it had a range of roughly 360 miles.
I’m hoping that hydrogen production will increase this year as a result of the energy bill Biden signed last year, which has provisions for investing in hydrogen. The Mirai is a wonderful luxury car, but I admit that if Toyota announced a buyback option for the Mirai, then I’d hand over the keys immediately and revert to a hybrid like a Prius or a Crown.
> once it does I’m on the hook for paying nearly $200 for a full tank, with a range of about 300 miles.
That seems like terrible $/mile even if you were seeing your original price of roughly half. My cmax (phev, but i rarely charge it) does 500-700 miles on a 14 gallon gas tank depending on speed and style. Even at $7/gallon, that's way better $/mile.
Have you see the fuel price for those things? It’s obscene.
And it’s not like you can make your own fueling station at home. Doing so it an hilariously difficult engineering with plenty of potential to blow yourself up. I mean it’s easy to make hydrogen. It’s just difficult to make hydrogen at this scale and even when you do it still has to be compressed.
To build one in California costs 1.5-2m, and I actually found the company that owns the patent on the home hydrogen refueling system, but I imagine that’s not cheap enough to make up for the money saved on the car.
No, they proved they're good people by promising hydrogen, and the government is very pleased when good people receive public monies. if they actually deliver on their promise, that's just extra gravy.
industry has signalled very clearly that it doesn't like strings attached to its money, and legislators have listened
Part of R&D is taking what works and abandoning what doesn't. Requiring companies to commit to a path forever in order to get a subsidiary is counter productive. We want companies to make green solutions that actually work. That requires trying things that might not work out in the end. We don't want them to continue an experiment if it is obviously not working just because the initial stage was gov funded.
Did the government actually declare the plan over or did independent studies actually show it didn't work?
The problem is who decides whether a solution works or doesn't work? Because the goals of the general public, government and private companies may not necessarily be aligned here.
Taking the govt subsidiary is submitting to the government's goals in that regard - so if the company drops out again because that project isn't conductive to its own goals, that's all fine, but it should indeed pay back the subsidiaries.
Subsidies typically have rules, such as "will employ X people for Y years" or "will provide the service for X years". Subsidies are also very often paid out after the fact, but even if not, this is a very easy court case (probably not even that - just administer a fine).
So if they're closing down now, it's very likely because the date has passed and they met all requirements.
If incentives are that misaligned it will never work.
The way it should work is company puts some money in, gov puts some money in. Company money still on the line to incentivise actually doing a good job, gov money just lowers the threshold a bit. If no company money on the line, they will just pretend to do the thing.
That would land better if shell weren’t abandoning hydrogen stations and ev charging while being led by a CEO who has publicly stated they’re doubling down on oil.
If you want to pull out of something like this after getting subsidies you should absolutely be punished. They’re putting profits above the future of our planet. And don’t give me any nonsense about shareholders, government exists to keep companies like shell in check.
I feel like people would be defending standard oil in 2023 “because capitalism”.
Companies are always going to chase money, that is their nature. If we want to save the planet we need to make incentives aligned so companies want to do that.
Bemoaning capitalism does nothing to save the planet. The world exists as it is, not as we'd like it to be. Solutions need to work within the system, otherwise they are just a distraction.
I’m not bemoaning capitalism, I’m suggesting government should do their job. Which includes taking back subsidies if not punishing companies that take OUR money and then pursue actions directly contradicting what they took the money for.
Nah, we don't have to do shit that companies like or find aligned. We can make regulations they hate and yet they still must follow. This idea that we have to appease them into cooperation is some late stage capitalist bullshit and it's surprising to see so many on a hacker forum not just treading but defending the corporate line. Sad.
Regulation is aligning incentives - companies dont want to pay a fine so they do what you want them to.
What doesn't work is setting things up so the company benefits from the thing you don't want them to do, and then being surprised when the inevitable happens.
Shell was awarded a $40m contract, but never actually requested the funds from the State.
But don't worry, Air Liquide just spent $250 million on a hydrogen plant in Nevada. So the latest California budget earmarks 15% of our billion dollar green initiatives fund for hydrogen station production. For context, no other stations exist in the continental US outside California.
subsidies can be structured in a number of ways, many of which are not at all equivalent to "investments". why is it that so many people here make claims obviously well outside their actual understanding. aren't folks embarrassed by being so wrong so often so publicly? it's almost endemic to this place. sad.
The more I learned about H2 the less excited I became.
The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.
I think hydrogen has a place as a energy source, but cars are not it.
There are some projects aiming to use it for steel production for example, and in a few areas where batteries aren't feasible, such as long distance flights.
But hydrogen never had a chance at competing with batteries where batteries are an option. In part due to energy inefficiencies in it's production(I'm assuming green hydrogen, since otherwise, What's the point)
Hydrogen (or a related e-fuel made from hydrogen) is likely essential for a fully renewable grid, especially at high latitude. Not much of the total energy flow would go through hydrogen, but replacing that component with overprovisioning or batteries could be very very expensive. The hydrogen would be stored underground as a compressed gas, not as liquid. Done right, the energy of compression would be (mostly) recovered when the hydrogen was burned in a turbine.
The mismatch between supply and demand is a function of time whose Fourier transform has components at various frequencies. There will be a strong component around 1 per 24 hours, which batteries will be good for, but there will also be much longer period components (seasonal, or from rare extended solar and wind combined outages, so called "Dunkelflauten").
Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) are well suited to the latter. For those storage needs, round trip efficiency is far less important compared to minimizing the per energy storage capacity capital cost. That's because there will be many fewer cycles over which to amortize the latter (while the contribution of round trip efficiency to levelized cost of storage is not so affected.) The per energy storage capacity cost of hydrogen is two orders of magnitude less than that of batteries.
To see this effect in action, go to https://model.energy/ and get it to solve for the minimum cost combination of solar, wind, batteries and hydrogen to supply a steady power output in Germany. Then, disable hydrogen and solve again. The cost nearly doubles.
In any place hydrogen can be used, you’re probably honestly much better off with natural gas or propane unless you literally cannot have a carbon atom involved.
Liquid fuel is so energy dense that if you have to synthesize it and remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere it’s probably still easier and cheaper than hydrogen.
I guess the most important factor is how much energy is lost in synthesizing/burning it. Do you have those numbers available?
I know methane can be synthesised, but it requires you to first make hydrogen, and then you'll lose an additional 50-60% energy in turning hydrogen into methane.
For any large scale operation I can't imagine that kind of energy loss is acceptable, hydrogen storage is difficult, but not THAT difficult
There are places where the density of hydrogen doesn't matter. One is long-term storage, where can pump hydrogen underground and then burn it when solar and wind are low. Another is steel production where need high heat, and can store it in big tanks on site. Finally, is ships which have plenty of volume. Planes probably can't use hydrogen.
For ships and planes, we may be able to use lower carbon synthetic fuels like ammonia or methanol, and not have to go as far for synthetic fuels.
Pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere is really inefficient. There may be cheaper ways to sequester carbon but they won't give you CO2 for making fuels. Hydrogen is definitely more efficient.
The problem with hydrogen powered airplanes is that hydrogen tanks are heavy and use lots of space. It should be possible to make hydrogen powered planes but they would have to be completely redesigned to work, and may lose range and payload. While with liquid fuels, at least the non-cryogenic ones, can use existing designs and maybe even retrofit existing planes.
Except natural gas is a fossil fuel. The name is somewhat misleading.
I'm not aware of any way to create synthetic propane using renewable energy sources, but that might be my ignorance speaking. A quick googling indicates it's not possible, but I'm happy to be proven wrong here if you want to provide a reference I didn't find.
Easier and cheaper doesn't really cut it for the climate. Petroleum is easy and cheap, and so is coal. Both are terrible ideas in the long run though
If you have an older EV, sure. Newer ones pretty much all charge in 15-30 minutes.
I guess technically it can take much longer if you're using an L1 charger, but if you just plug into the wall at home you have the advantage of being able to charge overnight while you sleep, whereas for gas or hydrogen it's much more complicated to fill up on your own
The losses are a problem not even NASA had a solution to!
"During NASA's Space Shuttle program, which was carried out from 1977 to 2011, more than 24,500 tons of liquid hydrogen were purchased, of which 54.6% was used on-board; the rest was lost during storage, loading, or replenishment"
Shell took a busy station next to my old office at South Park, San Francisco, out of commission for 6 months to install hydrogen pumps. Six months of forgone revenues, installation costs for likely no actual new revenues as most of those 2K registered hydrogen vehicles are owned by the state of California.
In countries where there is a natural gas network, in theory you could co-transport hydrogen with mixed the methane, and pay around 1% energy cost to extract pure hydrogen (assuming a 20% hyrogen mix). That seems to me to be the simplest way to deploy hydrogen infrastructure - you don't need to build much, and people are already looking at mixing the hydrogen into the natural gas anyway to reduce CO2 output. Eventually you switch over to pure hydrogen and drop the natural gas, saving the extraction cost.
But that 1% energy cost is assuming thermodynamically optimal extraction. I don't know how close we get in practice.
(I doubt it would be safe to actually have a hydrogen gas pump at everyone's house, either, even if there is a gas line going there, although it would be kind of cool)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] threadMeanwhile, they control companies with laws. Isn't this obvious?
Try charity next time. Or be this rude in real life to people you know and see how it goes. People like you ruin this site.
"Well.. the government decided it wanted to control the car market, it has single handedly set it back several decades at this point."
The government /is/ attempting to control the car market. This is happening at both the federal and state level. These laws specify what the market can and cannot sell, the most direct form of control available. These laws inject government money into subsidies for both the consumer and the manufacturer, an indirect form of control.
The article "it" is indefinite but it obviously refers to the /market/, and not the /industry/. A word which never appeared in my original statement.
Did you want to constrain yourself a little?
At least natural gas had distribution already (but usually not anywhere near the pressure needed for fueling; and that compression is energy intensive!). The pressure tanks in the vehicle expire, at which point the vehicle turns into a pumpkin. At least early Mirais had 15 year tanks.
In theory, you can replace the pressure tanks, but when I was looking at aging CNG Crown Victorias (circa 2017), it was very hard to find new tanks (and many of them had been sitting for some time, so you're not even getting the full tank lifetime), or someone to install them. When I saw cost estimates, it was in the couple of thousands; not really economical when that money would get you a similar age gas car that will probably never need its gas tank replaced.
LPG tanks are much more straightforward, 100-200psi (and standardized) than CNG (thousands of psi to usable amounts in the tank because it stays as a gas unless you chill it to like -100C).
NG is a lot cheaper, in theory. In theory, you could refuel at home.
LPG is used for BBQs and some heating, so more widely available, but hard to find cars that use it.
While hydrogen is expensive to produce, difficult to store, and less efficient in transfer than electrochemical batteries, I suspect they'd be a good technology for large fleets of trucks due to weight and range.
Fuel cells can also be made to run on natural gas, which might end up being a good stop-gap, as we already have a strong natural gas production infrastructure and despite its downsides, it's far easier to store than hydrogen.
The real reasons to be upset with hydrogen are the various impracticalities with the infrastructure and storage. Hydrogen leaks out of solid metal tanks because the atom is so small, and it has to be kept under enormous pressure because it doesn’t liquefy without cryogenic temperatures. There is no reason that I know of to assume these practicality concerns will ever be solved for car sized applications.
There is green hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water. But it more expensive than other sources. It only makes sense when fossil fuel sources aren't allowed.
Hydrogen cars are a bad idea. Now, they aren't green and don't have infrastructure. In clean electricity future, battery cars will be better. Hydrogen will be important in the future for industrial processes that need heat. And maybe for long-distance transportation like planes and ships where electricity won't work. But those only make sense with green hydrogen.
You mention natural gas; that's one option (CH3 = methane).
Ammonia – NH3 – is another that's starting to look promising and really could use some of hydrogen's hype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia#Fuel
Not for personal transportation, though – it's toxic – but for big engines in ships and airplanes.
You're not the only one who thinks so: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/netherlands-unveil...
There are only two limiting factors on electrical trucks: cost of batteries and production volume of battery manufacturers. This is a temporary problem. As the production volumes improve, cost will come down. You can cover any range by just using more batteries. Typical trucks in the market have less than half a mwh of battery. This provides them with a useful but not amazing range. Unlike car owners, truck companies typically settle for good enough and don't suffer from range anxiety. They buy the range they need. Mining trucks need batteries in the mwh range. Batteries are heavy of course but this isn't a problem in a vehicle designed for moving heavy things around.
Australia actually has battery powered road trains weighing hundreds of tonnes. Reason: superior torque over any diesel engine and electricity is very cheap (lots of solar power over there). Some of these vehicles are converted decades old diesel trucks. These aren't high tech vehicles. The process for producing them is brutally simple: rip out the diesel engine, replace that with an electrical motor and shove in pallets of batteries where the fuel tanks used to be. It takes minutes to swap batteries with a fork lift truck. Supremely pragmatic and awesome. If Australians can do this in the middle of nowhere, anyone can. Likewise there are logging trucks in Canada that are built locally for the same reason. Hard core power users of trucks are going for electric. They are just better.
The only thing better than electrical road trains is actual trains on rails. Those too can run on electricity. In fact that's very common and has been so for decades. There are far more electrical trains than diesel trains. High speed trains, freight trains, passenger trains. Long trains, short trains. Any kind of train.
Fuel cells can indeed run on gas. The reason nobody is talking about that or seriously considering this as an alternative is that it is far more lucrative for gas companies to use way more gas to produce hydrogen while grabbing subsidies and selling the hydrogen at premium. Never mind that hydrogen has nearly 3x the volume of gas, both in liquid and compressed form. And never mind the high pressures you need for moving it around in gas form. Because doing so in liquid for is stupidly expensive and technically challenging. In compressed gas form, diesel has about 18x the energy density of hydrogen stored at 200 bar. Meaning you need about 18 trucks of hydrogen for every truck of diesel to move a fleet of trucks around. Transporting hydrogen to fuel stations at scale is stupidly expensive and inefficient. Producing, storing, compressing, pumping, transporting, etc. You lose money and energy at every step. It's stupidly inefficient and costly.
That's why Shell just pulled the plug on this business. It was a scam and these things served their purpose. EVs won. Game over. Moving on to the next thing. Of course the exact same thing is going to happen for hydrogen truck fueling stations. But not until after they pocket the subsidies. Until then they'll be talking up how awesome hydrogen trucks are going to be all while battery electrical trucks are actually being awesome all over the place already.
Carbon monoxide in gasified fuels can poison fuel cell catalysts.
The fuel cells best suited to carbonaceous fuels are solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) but these operate at 800 to 1000 C; they are not "instant on" devices. They're better as a topping cycle for something like a combustion turbine (which can also serve to pressurize them, increasing current density.) But these are also somewhat fragile (thin ceramic membranes) and any technology operating at 1000 C has lifetime concerns from creep and other degradation processes.
Green hydrogen was simply going to be a "in ten years" moving goalpost while everyone used methane if they actually got hydrogen off the ground.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-liquid-hydrogen-dumbass-p...
Toyota has very reluctantly produced more EVs in the last year than the total amount of hydrogen cars it has ever produced. That number is in the lower tens of thousands spread over a decade. Their EV production numbers aren't very good either but it absolutely dwarfs their hydrogen car production numbers. And soon on a quarterly and eventually even monthly basis.
Toyota of course is by far the most enthusiastic hydrogen car proponent. They can't shut up talking about it and are flogging that dead horse at every opportunity they have to explain why they are so far behind producing EVs. But for all their talk about hydrogen, they are not lifting a finger to actually scale hydrogen car production. Because it doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. Never has. They know this very well. Because they've been "studying" this topic for decades. They know everything there is to know about the viability of hydrogen cars. That's the whole reason the number of vehicles is so pathetically low. The number is the absolute bare minimum needed to grab the subsidies. Per vehicle, the subsidies are orders of magnitude the sales price of the car. Which is typically far below cost price. Producing hydrogen car has never been profitable. The game here is to minimize the money lost producing these things while maximizing the subsidies grabbed.
Now, let's not blame ourselves. It was the people we voted for who gave Toyota money to do nothing. Not us.
It sucks because it should be a valid path for lots of things, but the grey black blue was all a bullshit screen for methane sales in perpetuity.
Business idea: buy Mirais, pull out and sell the H2 systems, and drop in battery packs to make them BEVs.
If the fueling system is compatible, perhaps they would use these cars as company vehicles.
I can't think of anyone else that would have a private hydrogen fuel station.
The Mirai itself is a wonderful vehicle, but I don’t recommend purchasing one; for me I believe it was a huge financial mistake. I still owe about $35K but I’d be lucky to get an offer for $15K if I were to sell it now. I’m active in a Mirai Facebook group and I’ve heard stories of dealerships refusing to accept Mirais as trade-in offers, and I’ve also heard of trade-ins falling through because the owner’s Mirai loan was so underwater that attempting to roll over the remaining Mirai loan’s balance on another vehicle exceeds the lender’s loan to value limits.
It was a good offer in theory, but the H2 infrastructure never caught up.
2. I live in an apartment complex that lacks EV chargers. My landlord has no plans to install them, so buying an EV meant being entirely dependent on public chargers.
3. The hydrogen situation looked more optimistic in 2022, with new stations being planned and with infrastructure improvements Coming Soon(TM).
Of course, gasoline prices fell, but hydrogen prices went through the roof in 2023. When I bought my Mirai in November 2022, hydrogen cost $19.70/kg at True Zero stations; most stations in Silicon Valley are operated by True Zero. A month after I purchased my Mirai, prices rose to $23.75, then again the following month to $26.75. These price hikes were blamed on the spike in natural gas prices that occurred in early 2023. But while natural gas prices did fall, hydrogen prices never fell; in fact, they kept increasing until it reached $36 in summer 2023, which remains the price at True Zero stations.
Thankfully True Zero’s stations in Silicon Valley have been relatively reliable. Every now and then there would be supply-related outages, but they have been resolved relatively quickly in Silicon Valley. However, the situation is different in Southern California, and I feel especially bad for Sacramento-area Mirai drivers, who are reliant on one Iwatani station that gets so much traffic that there is a waitlist app! People have waited hours in line for fuel there.
The silver lining is that my Mirai came with a $15,000 fuel card that I use for purchasing fuel, so I don’t have to deal with the direct costs now. However, at $36/kg my card will likely run out by the end of the year, and once it does I’m on the hook for paying nearly $200 for a full tank, with a range of about 300 miles. By comparison, the Prius c that I traded in upon purchasing my Mirai cost $56 to fill up when gas was $7/gal, and it had a range of roughly 360 miles.
I’m hoping that hydrogen production will increase this year as a result of the energy bill Biden signed last year, which has provisions for investing in hydrogen. The Mirai is a wonderful luxury car, but I admit that if Toyota announced a buyback option for the Mirai, then I’d hand over the keys immediately and revert to a hybrid like a Prius or a Crown.
That seems like terrible $/mile even if you were seeing your original price of roughly half. My cmax (phev, but i rarely charge it) does 500-700 miles on a 14 gallon gas tank depending on speed and style. Even at $7/gallon, that's way better $/mile.
And it’s not like you can make your own fueling station at home. Doing so it an hilariously difficult engineering with plenty of potential to blow yourself up. I mean it’s easy to make hydrogen. It’s just difficult to make hydrogen at this scale and even when you do it still has to be compressed.
To build one in California costs 1.5-2m, and I actually found the company that owns the patent on the home hydrogen refueling system, but I imagine that’s not cheap enough to make up for the money saved on the car.
https://residentialhydrogenpower.com/product/sfha-model-300/
industry has signalled very clearly that it doesn't like strings attached to its money, and legislators have listened
The problem is who decides whether a solution works or doesn't work? Because the goals of the general public, government and private companies may not necessarily be aligned here. Taking the govt subsidiary is submitting to the government's goals in that regard - so if the company drops out again because that project isn't conductive to its own goals, that's all fine, but it should indeed pay back the subsidiaries.
So if they're closing down now, it's very likely because the date has passed and they met all requirements.
(I have experience with subsidies, though in EU)
The way it should work is company puts some money in, gov puts some money in. Company money still on the line to incentivise actually doing a good job, gov money just lowers the threshold a bit. If no company money on the line, they will just pretend to do the thing.
If you want to pull out of something like this after getting subsidies you should absolutely be punished. They’re putting profits above the future of our planet. And don’t give me any nonsense about shareholders, government exists to keep companies like shell in check.
I feel like people would be defending standard oil in 2023 “because capitalism”.
https://electrek.co/2023/06/30/shell-renewables-head-steps-d...
Bemoaning capitalism does nothing to save the planet. The world exists as it is, not as we'd like it to be. Solutions need to work within the system, otherwise they are just a distraction.
What doesn't work is setting things up so the company benefits from the thing you don't want them to do, and then being surprised when the inevitable happens.
But don't worry, Air Liquide just spent $250 million on a hydrogen plant in Nevada. So the latest California budget earmarks 15% of our billion dollar green initiatives fund for hydrogen station production. For context, no other stations exist in the continental US outside California.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/09/hydrogen-cars-cal...
The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.
There are some projects aiming to use it for steel production for example, and in a few areas where batteries aren't feasible, such as long distance flights.
But hydrogen never had a chance at competing with batteries where batteries are an option. In part due to energy inefficiencies in it's production(I'm assuming green hydrogen, since otherwise, What's the point)
The mismatch between supply and demand is a function of time whose Fourier transform has components at various frequencies. There will be a strong component around 1 per 24 hours, which batteries will be good for, but there will also be much longer period components (seasonal, or from rare extended solar and wind combined outages, so called "Dunkelflauten").
Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) are well suited to the latter. For those storage needs, round trip efficiency is far less important compared to minimizing the per energy storage capacity capital cost. That's because there will be many fewer cycles over which to amortize the latter (while the contribution of round trip efficiency to levelized cost of storage is not so affected.) The per energy storage capacity cost of hydrogen is two orders of magnitude less than that of batteries.
To see this effect in action, go to https://model.energy/ and get it to solve for the minimum cost combination of solar, wind, batteries and hydrogen to supply a steady power output in Germany. Then, disable hydrogen and solve again. The cost nearly doubles.
Liquid fuel is so energy dense that if you have to synthesize it and remove an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere it’s probably still easier and cheaper than hydrogen.
I guess the most important factor is how much energy is lost in synthesizing/burning it. Do you have those numbers available?
I know methane can be synthesised, but it requires you to first make hydrogen, and then you'll lose an additional 50-60% energy in turning hydrogen into methane.
For any large scale operation I can't imagine that kind of energy loss is acceptable, hydrogen storage is difficult, but not THAT difficult
For ships and planes, we may be able to use lower carbon synthetic fuels like ammonia or methanol, and not have to go as far for synthetic fuels.
Pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere is really inefficient. There may be cheaper ways to sequester carbon but they won't give you CO2 for making fuels. Hydrogen is definitely more efficient.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen-powered_aircraft
I'm not aware of any way to create synthetic propane using renewable energy sources, but that might be my ignorance speaking. A quick googling indicates it's not possible, but I'm happy to be proven wrong here if you want to provide a reference I didn't find.
Easier and cheaper doesn't really cut it for the climate. Petroleum is easy and cheap, and so is coal. Both are terrible ideas in the long run though
That at least seems a lot better than the 30 minute-several hours charge time for electric cars
Home charging is where it's at. You leave home practically every day with a full battery with about 20-30 seconds of effort every evening and morning.
Public charging also can enable EVs to operate as power sources for homes to handle extended power outages (days, even weeks).
Sheesh, if there's a power outage you might have power from your home solar panels. Good luck getting it from the charger down the road.
I guess technically it can take much longer if you're using an L1 charger, but if you just plug into the wall at home you have the advantage of being able to charge overnight while you sleep, whereas for gas or hydrogen it's much more complicated to fill up on your own
"During NASA's Space Shuttle program, which was carried out from 1977 to 2011, more than 24,500 tons of liquid hydrogen were purchased, of which 54.6% was used on-board; the rest was lost during storage, loading, or replenishment"
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110008561/downloads/20...
But that 1% energy cost is assuming thermodynamically optimal extraction. I don't know how close we get in practice.
(I doubt it would be safe to actually have a hydrogen gas pump at everyone's house, either, even if there is a gas line going there, although it would be kind of cool)