this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Water powered car goes brrrrrrr
Actually you would never want hydrogen powered cars from an engineering perspective.
Ideally this would only be producing hydrogen for chemical processes which require a hydrogen feed stock.
Green hydrogen has a lot of advantages for cars compared to batteries: quick refuelling, much less weight, better range. Compared to CO2 emitting fuels (including non-green hydrogen), no contest.
It's especially good for heavy vehicles. It's the only way we can currently use non-carbon fuels for air travel. It's much more feasible for trucking than batteries.
Green hydrogen is more like a kind of battery than a fuel. It's a good way to store renewable energy that cannot be used immediately, or that needs to be used off-grid. How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands
quick refueling only matters if your travel distance exceeds your battery's range (which for 95% of driving is less than 100 miles) I would agree on the weight issue only if you don't engineer the hydrogen storage to properly survive car crashes. Range is of no practical use if it vastly exceeds your needs.
I find trains better for heavy transport and fixed route power lines would cover that problem in a more efficient manner.
Hydrogen would take double conversion loses if used like a battery and a flywheel would be more efficient at storing renewable energy at a grid level.
Off-grid energy storage can be done in heavy weight battery chemistries which can last forever without the maintenance cost that must occur with combustion. (heck even Nickel–iron batteries from 1901 would work)
I will grant you that hydrogen has many useful and wonderful applications.
Home energy storage and transportation are not one of them.
This is such a non-argument. I cannot have one car for short distances and another one for road trips.
There are no electric cars that can get me to my Dad's and back without recharging. He does at least have off-road parking but he doesn't have a safe charging point. I don't have off-road parking so charging at home is not possible. Yes, I can pay over the odds to charge while I do my supermarket shop, but I wouldn't usually use my car for the supermarket shop and I don't want to use my car for the supermarket shop. The only option for long journeys is to take an annoyingly long break.
Hydrogen is very inefficient, for sure. But there's no other way to get an electric plane that can replace existing passenger aircraft. Batteries are a non-starter for heavy transport because they're too big and too heavy to be practical. That's why we've been rolling out hydrogen buses for a couple of years now.
You're trying to argue that 10-15 minutes of reliable delay on a road trip over 500km trumps hours over the rest of the year filling (and also a probably 20 minutes of delay because hydrogen filling stations slow way down and only give half a tank during heavy use).
completely fair perspective, if you are required to travel large distances outside of cities then liquid fuels would be the superior option.
But if cities are linked by high speed rail and effective bus coverage; there would be no need for a car to visit someone. #fuckcars
I do agree that batteries are not a good solution for planes but I believe plane use should be only for special cases that are extremely time sensitive (like organ transplant transportation) and are of high social benefit (which could justify carbon fuel usage)
One doesn't need batteries or combustion in heavy transport as fixed lines can just use electric wires which saves on moving weight and would make such transport more efficient that any carried fuel source.
I go to my Dad's by train as often as possible but prices have doubled since the pandemic and there are usually two of us. It's become impossibly expensive, which is why we bought a car last year after ten years without one. It does not get used for short journeys because the bus and the tram still work well enough, as do our feet and our bikes.
We cannot electrify our bus routes, unless we make them entirely useless for most people. Come on. I live where I do because it's close to the tram station. But most people need a bus to get them to a tram station. And I usually need one when I get off the tram.
And I agree that a lot of plane travel is entirely unnecessary. But I'm not about to tell people that they can't move to another country without waving goodbye forever to everyone they left back home. It's an obscene proposition.
We have got to have solutions that actually work. Green hydrogen ticks a lot of vital boxes. We just need to be very clear that the only acceptable hydrogen is Green. I know a lot of the hatred for it comes from Big Carbon trying to hijack it. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater,
Where is the supposed 12 hour non-stop bus route that can't be served by a current-gen battery bus?
Also how is $3-5million per 100km for filling stations supposed to be trivial, but overhead wire on 5km per 100km route is impossible?
You are right in regards to very rural bus routes not being viable for electric buses but inside suburbs, cities and rural regions where the electric grid is already connected and in place, it is very cost effective to convert to pure electric.
But for rural bus routes away from a connected electrical grid, hydrogen is not a solution either as it is only 30% efficient (assuming only ideal conditions) and would be better served by liquid hydrocarbons. (I see no reason to deprive developing communities from the most efficient options)
I am in no way suggesting one would need to leave their family but one needs to understand up until the invention of the airplane, such relocation had to mean saying good bye and corresponding via mail or very rare train rides to visit with the whole family.
Green hydrogen outside of chemical processes (where it is actually useful) is a myth designed to keep the automotive industry alive past its expiration date.
The function of green hydrogen as an energy storage medium is better serviced by more custom chemistries as we are taking external energy to produce it (literally it would be the same as us taking CO2 + H2O + energy to produce gasoline [which we could do at the cost of $3.75/gal (if one ignores the CO2 collection costs)] using the Fischer-Tropsch process)
So skip the dream and accept the reality that if we are needing stored energy for transportation, it is more efficient to store it as liquid hydrocarbons. But if we need to store for transient demands, batteries and flywheels are better solutions.
Green hydrogen is used to store renewable electricity that cannot feasibly be stored any other way. There are some small Scottish islands producing so much wind power that the UK national grid cannot take it all. There are no battery packs or hydroelectric facilities that can store it. [So they've been producing hydrogen instead.]((https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190327-the-tiny-islands-leading-the-way-in-hydrogen-power)
It might not be the best solution anyone could ever wish for. But it is the only currently available solution for some storage problems and for a lot of heavy transport. And a better solution for cars than batteries. If you could wave a wand and abolish private vehicles, you should do so. But you can't. You can make electric vehicles a lot lighter and a lot less polluting while you work on getting rid of them in this real world that we live in.
Sounds like they didn't consider appealing to UK government to get subsidized liquid CO2 and use the produced hydrogen to synthetically create hydrocarbons (which are much easier/cheaper to store) and win political points doing so.