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The attraction of hydrogen is precisely that, as a fuel source, specifically because it's produced by fossil fuel companies cracking fossil fuels, and it lets t
by taneq 6y ago
The attraction of hydrogen is precisely that, as a fuel source, specifically because it's produced by fossil fuel companies cracking fossil fuels, and it lets them largely maintain their business models. It was also pushed heavily by car manufacturers as a stall to get around clean air mandates while avoiding developing electric vehicles (with their inherent threats to after-sales service revenues). Now individual, corporate and national egos are on the line and sunk costs are so huge that many players are politically incapable of backing out.
As an energy storage medium it's terrible. It's inefficient to produce, relatively inefficient to use, very difficult to store, and inconvenient to transport. There's no reason to prefer it over lithium batteries except that it perpetuates the refinery -> distributor -> truck -> fuel station-> consumer model.
- lambdatronics 6y agoOur climate is on the ropes -- if 'blue' hydrogen (ie, fossil hydrogen with carbon capture) is a convenient stopgap, I say we go for it. Sure, it's not renewable, but it also would be carbon-neutral (assuming the carbon is 100% captured). We shouldn't let ideological issues get in the way. So what if fossil fuel companies benefit from it instead of battery companies? If we were to implement a carbon tax instead of picking winners, 'blue' hydrogen would come out ahead of 'green' hydrogen for at least the next decade, but hydrogen fuel cell vehicles would probably still loose out to batteries for most automotive applications.
- taneq 6y agoIf there were nothing else on the horizon it'd be better than nothing, for sure. And a cap-and-trade carbon tax would work wonders especially if the proceeds were used for market stimulus or something. It's just that we now have practical battery tech so we can jump straight to a battery storage + distributed solar infrastructure for everything and skip wasting an incredible amount of resources rebuilding a giant chunk of our existing infrastructure for only marginal gain.