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One hypothesis: While Battery Electric Cars seem to have won out in California, it is still unclear what the longer term trend for Trucks will be. Some postulat

One hypothesis: While Battery Electric Cars seem to have won out in California, it is still unclear what the longer term trend for Trucks will be. Some postulate that Hydrogen might be useful for quick refueling of trucks, and to lower the mass needed to carry (as the trip goes on, increasing mileage), etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNgZ6xL_An4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNgZ6xL_An4

jeffbee 5y ago
That's a decent attempt at a back-justification, but to my knowledge the hydrogen program is running purely on momentum from many years ago when the economic superiority of battery-electric cars was not yet perfectly clear.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Hydrogen is not something that could work, it already does work. Battery EVs make a lot of tradeoffs making them unsuitable for a lot of workloads. Hydrogen solves them and does not need much development to make it useful for consumer vehicles. You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well. Nuclear to hydrogen is workable and the way I'm imagining it going. There's also options to create hydrocarbons from air using the heat of a reactor.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    BEV solve 99% of the problem and hydrogen is not worh investing in for the rest. The battle is already over, and just like with cars 10 ago its totally clear but it will be another 5 years until the hydrogen defenders admit it. And claiming that hydrogen doesnt need much development is an insane claim given the money put in and the total lack of success.
    - dsl 5y ago
      We will always need a portable liquid fuel to meet needs like emergency vehicles, construction equipment, and emergency generators. Not everything is a consumer car and truck. Being a battery maximalist prolongs the time everything else runs on dead dinosaurs.
      - jeffbee 5y ago
        Why can't that stuff just remain diesel? We can synthesize it, no problem.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        As I said, 1%. And in those cases using hydrogen makes little sense. Emergency vehicles of most types don't need that however. And in many of the cases you mention swappable battery packs are an option as well. But we have to realize that compared to all consumer and fleet cars, 99% of all trucking is the vast majority of fuel use in transportation. Extreme long range trucking is the exception. In most cases you would make the hydrogen into methanol and you can keep mostly the same engines.
        fmajid 5y ago
        Most hydrogen is produced from methane and is actually worse than gasoline for global warming because methane leaks and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It makes indeed more sense to just use renewable gasoline, e.g. using the Fischer-Tropsch process like VW's eFuel.
        panick21_ 5y ago
        I know, but its easier to go from renewable hydrogen to methanol then eFuel.
    - dragonsky67 5y ago
      Tell that to the person with the Tesla who is trying to drive from one side of Australia to the other and is completely dependent upon the generator powered charging station in the middle of the Nullarbor Plane to complete the trip. Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.
      - panick21_ 5y ago
        Yeah like the huge % of the population who crosses Australia or the Sahara. Please be series in these discussions. Long distances are no problem unless you you are traversing unpopulated area free of infrastructure, and that is likely 0.000001% of all driving.
  - outworlder 5y ago
    > You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well. That's exactly it, but maybe not in the way you meant. Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
    - stubish 5y ago
      > Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual. This is not the case, at least over here in Australia. Whenever hydrogen is mentioned as a fuel, it is implicitly Green Hydrogen. It only became necessary to explicitly start saying Green Hydrogen after the fossil fuel spokespeople were using existing production to belittle green initiatives and pilots. The actual reason hydrogen is being pushed here is because of what happens when you shut down large, centralized coal power plants and shut down coal mining capacity. You end up with rural towns with no jobs, or in the eyes of a politician an electoral district who isn't going to vote for them. Hydrogen means big solar and wind farms connected to hydrogen plants and jobs and votes linked to those jobs, and you can guess where they are going to be built. The elephant in the room is who is going to buy all this hydrogen when in most cases it seems batteries are the better choice for consumers.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Or we can just use hybrid technology where needed and pure EV elsewhere? Not much development except for developing generation capacity that doesn't exist (and electrolysis is wildly inefficient, by the way), a distribution chain that doesn't exist, familiarizing everyone from consumers to service staff with a fuel system unlike anything they've used before (CNG only ever took off in mass transit, and only to a limited degree), and oh by the way, it's centered around a gas that is so prone to leaking it leaks through metals and embrittles them in the process. I can plug in an EV into the wall in my garage and charge it every night without a single change to my house. An L2 charger installation is an hour or two's work for an electrician.
    - hnov 5y ago
      I suspect with enough R&D focused on ease of use the CNG fuel system won't require more consumer intervention than the 1500lb battery pack under the car.
russdill 5y ago
The pumps being installed are sized for passenger vehicles
- dsl 5y ago
  Hydrogen is like gasoline. Trucks and cars use the same gas pumps.
  - russdill 5y ago
    You sure can, but it takes a very long time to fill a class 8 truck from a consumer gasoline pump. Doubly so for hydrogen given the slower speed.
    - dsl 5y ago
      Department of Energy regulations require hydrogen fuel stations to be able to fuel vehicles at 8-12 gallons per minute equivalent. Gas and diesel pumps (even the hi-flow truck stop ones) are capped at 10 gpm for safety.
      - russdill 5y ago
        Truck stop pumps have much larger nozzles and pump 6-10 times faster than the limit for light vehicles "and that refueling facilities are exempt from the 10gpm requirement if used exclusively to refuel heavy-duty vehicles, boats or airplanes" https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-1996-06-26/96-16205 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-1996-06-26/96-16205 Right now the lack of standardization of high pressure, high flow rate pumps for large trucks is a problem that Nikola is working very hard to solve. The pumps that are standardized and in use right now are a major bottleneck.
      - russdill 5y ago
        It looks like current pumps fill hydrogen at a rate of about 1kg/minute. A class 8 truck would take more than an hour to fill. At they point just go BEV. https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/nrel-research-fueling-big-rigs-help-hydrogen-vehicles-hit-road.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/nrel-research-fuelin...
devman0 5y ago
I think what they are trying in Europe with overhead wires for charging on the move allowing trucks to carry lighter batteries will be more successful.
- dmitrygr 5y ago
  Those have existed for a while, complete with a small local battery and all: https://www.google.com/search?q=trolleybus https://www.google.com/search?q=trolleybus
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  So... worse electric trains?
  - lightbritefight 5y ago
    If by worse electric trains you mean electric trains that can solve the last mile problem all in one mode of transit, then yes. Visual a bus that picks you up at its regular stops, but when it enters the highway of uses a long stretch of overhead wire to use nil battery. You get the benefits of scale and flexibility of a bus, but at a reduced cost than train infrastructure while still moving many, many more people than a car.
    - nomel 5y ago
      I think you drastically underestimate how vast the American last mile is.
      - llampx 5y ago
        Maybe the age of American sprawl powered by cheap gas and high incomes is over.
      - manicdee 5y ago
        It’s time to stick a pin in the suburbia ponzi scheme and call this failed experiment done. Separating people from their place of work by a forced commute was a great subsidy for the automotive and petroleum industries, but that is over now.
dsl 5y ago
Electric is a complete non-starter for emergency vehicles. They need to be able to refuel in a grid-down situation, and fill up in minutes instead of hours. Hydrogen isn't as portable as gasoline, but it can be trucked to disaster areas easier than electricity. If EVs really take off and we start to see gas stations shutting down, it would be nice to have the infrastructure already in place to keep fire trucks and ambulances rolling.
- juliushuijnk 5y ago
  Solar + big batteries can provide electricity when the grid is down. If you need a backup plan, then a regular gas station and perhaps hybrid emergency fire trucks seems to make more sense. Since all the infrastructure is available for that right now.
  - dsl 5y ago
    That is the gotcha. Do you let peoples houses burn down while your fire truck charges? What happens when 50 fire trucks need to be charged at once? Or the giant battery is the thing on fire? Liquid fuel (hydrogen, gasoline, etc) is essential. So as EVs take over and gas stations shut down, we either need to provide government subsidies to keep some gas stations operational, or invest in a clean alternative.
    - manicdee 5y ago
      Or just provide the infrastructure to charge 50 trucks at once, like we already do with massive fuel stations that have a dozen pumps and the driveways to handle the traffic.
  - hnov 5y ago
    Realistically, we're not gonna have enough batteries. Passenger vehicle electrification so far has been paid for by optimism and subsidies. Renewables are great but they require batteries, that we won't have enough nuclear to provide a baseline of energy once we decommission all fossil burning plants is a foregone conclusion at this point. In short we're approaching things from the wrong end IMO, burning more fossil fuels for energy generation and moving things that need power density and quick refueling to slow, heavy batteries.
lowercase1 5y ago
Trucks have a higher duty cycle than cars so a battery pays for itself quicker. Truckers have legally mandated breaks that largely mitigates charging time. Charging infrastructure is cheaper than hydrogen infrastructure.
- cottager2 5y ago
  The energy density of a battery is so low though. That means a lot of capacity must be dedicated to batteries instead of cargo. Meaning you need more trucks.
trainsarebetter 5y ago
Or we could Just go back to trains.
- nradov 5y ago
  Go back? We never left trains. The US rail network moves a tremendous volume of cargo. But it can never be competitive with trucks for really time sensitive goods.
  - trainsarebetter 5y ago
    Your not wrong, but we sort of did. Road infrastructure gets the funding. We need to nationalize our train infrastructure. And change our zoning laws to prioritize rail freight instead of trucks. The amount of land saved from this alone would be huge. Trains are also just way more energy efficient
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jeffbee 5y ago

That's a decent attempt at a back-justification, but to my knowledge the hydrogen program is running purely on momentum from many years ago when the economic superiority of battery-electric cars was not yet perfectly clear.

R0b0t1 5y ago
Hydrogen is not something that could work, it already does work. Battery EVs make a lot of tradeoffs making them unsuitable for a lot of workloads. Hydrogen solves them and does not need much development to make it useful for consumer vehicles. You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well. Nuclear to hydrogen is workable and the way I'm imagining it going. There's also options to create hydrocarbons from air using the heat of a reactor.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  BEV solve 99% of the problem and hydrogen is not worh investing in for the rest. The battle is already over, and just like with cars 10 ago its totally clear but it will be another 5 years until the hydrogen defenders admit it. And claiming that hydrogen doesnt need much development is an insane claim given the money put in and the total lack of success.
  - dsl 5y ago
    We will always need a portable liquid fuel to meet needs like emergency vehicles, construction equipment, and emergency generators. Not everything is a consumer car and truck. Being a battery maximalist prolongs the time everything else runs on dead dinosaurs.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      Why can't that stuff just remain diesel? We can synthesize it, no problem.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      As I said, 1%. And in those cases using hydrogen makes little sense. Emergency vehicles of most types don't need that however. And in many of the cases you mention swappable battery packs are an option as well. But we have to realize that compared to all consumer and fleet cars, 99% of all trucking is the vast majority of fuel use in transportation. Extreme long range trucking is the exception. In most cases you would make the hydrogen into methanol and you can keep mostly the same engines.
      - fmajid 5y ago
        Most hydrogen is produced from methane and is actually worse than gasoline for global warming because methane leaks and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It makes indeed more sense to just use renewable gasoline, e.g. using the Fischer-Tropsch process like VW's eFuel.
        panick21_ 5y ago
        I know, but its easier to go from renewable hydrogen to methanol then eFuel.
  - dragonsky67 5y ago
    Tell that to the person with the Tesla who is trying to drive from one side of Australia to the other and is completely dependent upon the generator powered charging station in the middle of the Nullarbor Plane to complete the trip. Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Yeah like the huge % of the population who crosses Australia or the Sahara. Please be series in these discussions. Long distances are no problem unless you you are traversing unpopulated area free of infrastructure, and that is likely 0.000001% of all driving.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well. That's exactly it, but maybe not in the way you meant. Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
  - stubish 5y ago
    > Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual. This is not the case, at least over here in Australia. Whenever hydrogen is mentioned as a fuel, it is implicitly Green Hydrogen. It only became necessary to explicitly start saying Green Hydrogen after the fossil fuel spokespeople were using existing production to belittle green initiatives and pilots. The actual reason hydrogen is being pushed here is because of what happens when you shut down large, centralized coal power plants and shut down coal mining capacity. You end up with rural towns with no jobs, or in the eyes of a politician an electoral district who isn't going to vote for them. Hydrogen means big solar and wind farms connected to hydrogen plants and jobs and votes linked to those jobs, and you can guess where they are going to be built. The elephant in the room is who is going to buy all this hydrogen when in most cases it seems batteries are the better choice for consumers.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Or we can just use hybrid technology where needed and pure EV elsewhere? Not much development except for developing generation capacity that doesn't exist (and electrolysis is wildly inefficient, by the way), a distribution chain that doesn't exist, familiarizing everyone from consumers to service staff with a fuel system unlike anything they've used before (CNG only ever took off in mass transit, and only to a limited degree), and oh by the way, it's centered around a gas that is so prone to leaking it leaks through metals and embrittles them in the process. I can plug in an EV into the wall in my garage and charge it every night without a single change to my house. An L2 charger installation is an hour or two's work for an electrician.
  - hnov 5y ago
    I suspect with enough R&D focused on ease of use the CNG fuel system won't require more consumer intervention than the 1500lb battery pack under the car.

russdill 5y ago

The pumps being installed are sized for passenger vehicles

dsl 5y ago
Hydrogen is like gasoline. Trucks and cars use the same gas pumps.
- russdill 5y ago
  You sure can, but it takes a very long time to fill a class 8 truck from a consumer gasoline pump. Doubly so for hydrogen given the slower speed.
  - dsl 5y ago
    Department of Energy regulations require hydrogen fuel stations to be able to fuel vehicles at 8-12 gallons per minute equivalent. Gas and diesel pumps (even the hi-flow truck stop ones) are capped at 10 gpm for safety.
    - russdill 5y ago
      Truck stop pumps have much larger nozzles and pump 6-10 times faster than the limit for light vehicles "and that refueling facilities are exempt from the 10gpm requirement if used exclusively to refuel heavy-duty vehicles, boats or airplanes" https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-1996-06-26/96-16205 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-1996-06-26/96-16205 Right now the lack of standardization of high pressure, high flow rate pumps for large trucks is a problem that Nikola is working very hard to solve. The pumps that are standardized and in use right now are a major bottleneck.
    - russdill 5y ago
      It looks like current pumps fill hydrogen at a rate of about 1kg/minute. A class 8 truck would take more than an hour to fill. At they point just go BEV. https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/nrel-research-fueling-big-rigs-help-hydrogen-vehicles-hit-road.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/nrel-research-fuelin...

devman0 5y ago

I think what they are trying in Europe with overhead wires for charging on the move allowing trucks to carry lighter batteries will be more successful.

dmitrygr 5y ago
Those have existed for a while, complete with a small local battery and all: https://www.google.com/search?q=trolleybus https://www.google.com/search?q=trolleybus
R0b0t1 5y ago
So... worse electric trains?
- lightbritefight 5y ago
  If by worse electric trains you mean electric trains that can solve the last mile problem all in one mode of transit, then yes. Visual a bus that picks you up at its regular stops, but when it enters the highway of uses a long stretch of overhead wire to use nil battery. You get the benefits of scale and flexibility of a bus, but at a reduced cost than train infrastructure while still moving many, many more people than a car.
  - nomel 5y ago
    I think you drastically underestimate how vast the American last mile is.
    - llampx 5y ago
      Maybe the age of American sprawl powered by cheap gas and high incomes is over.
    - manicdee 5y ago
      It’s time to stick a pin in the suburbia ponzi scheme and call this failed experiment done. Separating people from their place of work by a forced commute was a great subsidy for the automotive and petroleum industries, but that is over now.

dsl 5y ago

Electric is a complete non-starter for emergency vehicles. They need to be able to refuel in a grid-down situation, and fill up in minutes instead of hours. Hydrogen isn't as portable as gasoline, but it can be trucked to disaster areas easier than electricity. If EVs really take off and we start to see gas stations shutting down, it would be nice to have the infrastructure already in place to keep fire trucks and ambulances rolling.

juliushuijnk 5y ago
Solar + big batteries can provide electricity when the grid is down. If you need a backup plan, then a regular gas station and perhaps hybrid emergency fire trucks seems to make more sense. Since all the infrastructure is available for that right now.
- dsl 5y ago
  That is the gotcha. Do you let peoples houses burn down while your fire truck charges? What happens when 50 fire trucks need to be charged at once? Or the giant battery is the thing on fire? Liquid fuel (hydrogen, gasoline, etc) is essential. So as EVs take over and gas stations shut down, we either need to provide government subsidies to keep some gas stations operational, or invest in a clean alternative.
  - manicdee 5y ago
    Or just provide the infrastructure to charge 50 trucks at once, like we already do with massive fuel stations that have a dozen pumps and the driveways to handle the traffic.
- hnov 5y ago
  Realistically, we're not gonna have enough batteries. Passenger vehicle electrification so far has been paid for by optimism and subsidies. Renewables are great but they require batteries, that we won't have enough nuclear to provide a baseline of energy once we decommission all fossil burning plants is a foregone conclusion at this point. In short we're approaching things from the wrong end IMO, burning more fossil fuels for energy generation and moving things that need power density and quick refueling to slow, heavy batteries.

lowercase1 5y ago

Trucks have a higher duty cycle than cars so a battery pays for itself quicker. Truckers have legally mandated breaks that largely mitigates charging time. Charging infrastructure is cheaper than hydrogen infrastructure.

cottager2 5y ago
The energy density of a battery is so low though. That means a lot of capacity must be dedicated to batteries instead of cargo. Meaning you need more trucks.

trainsarebetter 5y ago

Or we could Just go back to trains.

nradov 5y ago
Go back? We never left trains. The US rail network moves a tremendous volume of cargo. But it can never be competitive with trucks for really time sensitive goods.
- trainsarebetter 5y ago
  Your not wrong, but we sort of did. Road infrastructure gets the funding. We need to nationalize our train infrastructure. And change our zoning laws to prioritize rail freight instead of trucks. The amount of land saved from this alone would be huge. Trains are also just way more energy efficient

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]