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Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

382 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

tim333 3y ago
While I agree using clean electricity to make hydrogen to power things seems a bad solution compared to batteries there looks to be quite a lot of potential for "white hydrogen" which is basically drilling for naturally occuring hydrogen in the earths crust. There seems to be a lot of it eg "huge reserves found in France". Potentially 46 million tonnes in Lorraine, 1 euro a kilo to produce https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/excitement-grows-about-natural-hydrogen-as-huge-reserves-found-in-france/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/exc... And elsewhere in the crust. It's just people haven't really focused on drilling for it until recently https://archive.ph/RbQwv https://archive.ph/RbQwv It might be a practical solution to use our existing equipment which is basically the same as drilling for natural gas, but with no or at least less CO2.
agumonkey 3y ago
i'd pay for a multiparty open investigation
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Not saying the oil sector is powerless by any means, and I guess maybe they're going for regulatory capture, but this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it. The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. I believe every car maker (save 1 that I know about) is fully committed to 100% electrified vehicles in the not-too-distant future. I feel like eventually even Toyota will give up their weird H2 push.
- asdff 3y ago
  All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations and what becomes more compelling to the consumer flips overnight. Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. It seems like there's a lot lot less inertia to get consumers over that hurdle than the EV hurdle, where charge times are long and convenient chargers not a guarantee in comparison to the fuel station network.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Have you ever read up on what storing hydrogen entails? Both at the station and in the cars? The tanks are totally different beasts than gasoline.
    - tekknik 3y ago
      As is propane, but we use that currently with no issues.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Lol at all; Hydrogen can't easily be transported in current pipelines; Can't be transported in current trucks, and can't be stored in current gas station tanks. And if the gas station doesn't maintain its hoses, nozzles, or seals; you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      > you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately. If you're lucky. If you're unlucky the first you realize there is a leak is when it ignites. Fortunately it is harder to make it explode than gasoline vapors but it also escapes far more readily than gasoline does.
    - smileysteve 3y ago
      Though the maintenance issue can be solved with a nitrogen pressure test before - the equivalent of electrical connectors verifying the connection digitally before sending the amps.
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    > All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations "All it takes" is doing very heavy lifting in that sentence. There's a good reason that hydrogen fueling stations are basically non-existent aside from a few in California. Distribution and fueling is quite complicated compared to conventional liquid fuels.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it Still dangerous. It reminds me of Zubrin’s takedown of VASIMR [1]. An unrealistic counterproposal can torpedo a workable one by appealing to peoples’ tendency to choose the perfect over the good. [1] https://youtu.be/myYs4DCCZts?si=Ksqw_MFLKHKIgMod https://youtu.be/myYs4DCCZts?si=Ksqw_MFLKHKIgMod
- MBCook 3y ago
  Would gasoline be anywhere near something people wanted to use if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities? Petroleum is a huge industry and they could make a big problem by getting subsidies to make some other fuel look competitive even though it’s a disaster. Look at biodiesel.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities? I think you kind of identified the issue there, though. Externalities are notoriously difficult to tax and account for. The issue with EVs is that they are intrinsically better than hydrogen in nearly every way. Even issues with long distance driving and recharging are quickly improving with EVs, and the improvements are happening much faster than anything going on with hydrogen.
- tw04 3y ago
  It's not just Toyota - it does seem to be a Japanese thing. Honda is also actively producing H2 powered vehicles. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42796089/2024-honda-cr-v-powered-by-hydrogen-details/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42796089/2024-honda-cr-v-...
  - tekknik 3y ago
    Also Hyundai, which is Korean.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. British government has just postponed it's EV vehicle transition by 5 years, British tabloids are printing articles about how EVs will never work for British uniquely harsh weather
  - tekknik 3y ago
    EVs don’t work for a lot of situations. What they are good at is around town driving. Maybe this will change in the future but this is the current reality.
deviantbit 3y ago
The electric car industry is spinning alternatives. Hydrogen is a much better alternative all around. You'll be able to convert existing cars much easier.
- micromacrofoot 3y ago
  unfortunately no one's going to be converting existing cars to anything other than scrap metal no matter which technology proves to be the most promising
  - henearkr 3y ago
    Well I agree with your other comment, but about this one, retrofitting (ICE->EV) is a thing. Even if very niche for now.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      It is niche but growing less so by the day as conversion kits mature and more options make it onto market.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      Used Prius is always free and used Tesla is cheaper than a conversion. It never will make sense except for few classic cars.
    - micromacrofoot 3y ago
      With the way cars are built today it can be an endeavor to change a lightbulb, let alone the entire propulsion system.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Classic cars are much easier to convert to electric than hydrogen. I’m not even sure anyone would make a kit to do it. There’s just so much complexity with fuel cells.
- thehappypm 3y ago
api 3y ago
There's also a huge amount of idiotic anti-EV FUD and misinformation being pushed.
gmane 3y ago
Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.
- xdennis 3y ago
  > Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while [...]. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn 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.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  > batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases 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/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...
micromacrofoot 3y ago
It's incredible that the oil lobby can so persistently and flagrantly spread disinformation to the extent that they have for decades. I suppose this is what happens when you have enough money to out-lobby everyone. It's not only electric cars either, recently they've been propping up opposition to wind farms off of the new england coast by posing as environmentalists concerned about whales.
g-b-r 3y ago
They've been doing it for twenty years, hydrogen allows maintaining a distribution network and *most of all* to keep using fossil fuels to generate it
- ska 3y ago
  Much longer than 20 years. But the reason it hasn't taken off is that both the economics and the physics don't work very well for consumer vehicles.
  - tekknik 3y ago
    Because gasoline was more convenient. Now with clean emission mandates gasoline can’t be used anymore. But that doesn’t mean EVs suddenly got more efficient.
- Smoosh 3y ago
  I think that it is just as important for the oil industry to make it look like alternatives are being tried, but they just don't work out, so that the status quo seems more acceptable.
- parineum 3y ago
  This is true and is contrary to this headline/quote. The oil sector is lobby for hydrogen but the attribution of motive is off. They are lobbying _for_ hydrogen, not against EVs.
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    EVs happen to not need their oil, I have the feeling that they have and are still lobbying the sh*t against EVs; lobbying for hydrogen is one way to lobby against EVs, and if hydrogen were (or had been) successful it's potentially infinitely more profitable than EVs for oil companies.
Clent 3y ago
I didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge. They oil companies own a lot of infrastructure for moving fuel around. They cannot use this infrastructure to move electricity but they can use the existing infrastructure to move hydrogen around.
- malchow 3y ago
  The oil companies don't own many pipelines. Pipeline companies own those. And pipeline companies are eager to do business with hydrogen companies. The fight here is over whether natural gas-made hydrogen (SMR) is an interesting fuel at all. I think the numbers say no, while solar-made hydrogen is in fact extremely interesting.
- Pxtl 3y ago
  More to the point, currently only 1% (edit: some articles I've seen put it less than 0.1%[1]) of hydrogen is "green". The rest is mostly made out of natural gas, a process that releases just as much CO2 as if you'd burned it. H2 isn't a way to save the Earth, it's a way to save the Natural Gas industry. [1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-green-hydrogen/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...
  - b112 3y ago
    Ridiculous. You're conflating source and fuel. H2 can be produced in large quantities from green power. Part of the problem is, some people see everything as non-green. Dams? Oh, carbon and cement! Nuclear? Oh risk. Windmills? Oh birds. Solar? Short cell lift and manufacturing waste. So let's start with the snae assumption that a dam is green. Now you want to get power to cars. Guess what. You can make h2 on site, at night (low power demand), then send it anywhere using existing gaslines. And yes, you can. No, h2 isn't hard to store, hard to move. Frankly, it is the oil industry flooding green forums with false crap about h2, because they know h2 is the only complete threat to them Batteries, with their wonderful waste, slow charge time, massive weight, and vast dangers in a accident, won't be enough to break oil's back. We need h2 for that, and that's why all this bullwark is spewed at h2. A tech demonstrated as workijg quite well in buses, cars, and spaceships for 50+ years.
exabrial 3y ago
please feel free to vote me down into oblivion because, you know, "I'm wrong"... But I would prefer a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle over a battery-electric for a number of reasons. The first is theoretical recharge/refuel times, but the second is firefighter rescue personnel safety. BEVs are here-and-now technology though, and I don't oppose them, it's just I plan to wait until hydrogen technology matures and reaches deployment, or BEV finally solves those two problems.
- tw04 3y ago
  If you're worried about firefighters, I'm not sure why you think hydrogen would be the solution. Hydrogen fires are invisible to the human eye, and carry an extremely high risk of catastrophic explosion. While a lithium fire isn't great, it's more the issue of "this is going to ruin the roadway that it's burning on" than "the firefighter is going to die trying to put it out". https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion#:~:text=lower%20flammability%20limit.-,Hydrogen%20used%20in%20the%20fuel%20cells%20is%20a%20very%20flammable,that%20a%20flame%20is%20present https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion#:~:t....
  - petre 3y ago
    The firefighters will mainly sit and watch while H2 gets vented or burns off. A lithium battery fire is much more worse, not even mentioning the smoke. https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0 https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0
- cycrutchfield 3y ago
  The rescue personnel will be safe because there won’t be anything of you left to rescue.
- onethought 3y ago
  But a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has a battery that is cycled much more than a BEV (because it’s small). So a fuel cell vehicle has less durability not more. How can you have an opinion on firefighter rescue and personal safety when there is next to no comparable data on fuel cell vehicles?
Pxtl 3y ago
Yup. It's painfully obvious here in Canada, where the loudest champion of hydrogen-powered vehicles is the Premiere of the oil-and-gas-generating province of Alberta, and she's an ideological-conservative pro-oil leader at that. Seeing people like that rally to hydrogen over EVs is the loudest argument against the tech. Hydrogen technology doesn't exist to save the Earth, it exists to save the natural gas industry. The business model for hydrogen that's generated is 1. Hydrogen is extracted from natural gas. 2. A miracle happens, capturing the carbon dioxide from this process. 3. Hydrogen goes in cars. The amount of truly "green" hydrogen out there is functionally zero. So it's a tech that isn't green, has no refueling infrastructure, and practically no adoption in the car industry. At this point it only exists so that anti-environmentalists can claim there's an alternative they prefer, since it's politically unacceptable to be pro-apocalypse.
- malchow 3y ago
  Green hydrogen is developing now, and is very real, and is based on polysilicon solar advancements and PEM electrolyzer advancements, both of which provide ~3 decadal cost-down paths. See these two companies of ours: [1] https://ohmium.com https://ohmium.com [2] https://novohydrogen.com https://novohydrogen.com
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    At present, the amount of green hydrogen in the total hydrogen economy is less than 1%. (edit: possibly less than 0.1% [1]) Green hydrogen is vapourware. [1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-green-hydrogen/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...
    - malchow 3y ago
      I don't think you know what the word "vaporware" means. 1 GW per day of new solar is being installed globally. Where do you think the excess mid-day production is going to go? It doesn't have to go anywhere, actually. But it will go somewhere.
jacquesm 3y ago
I wish them much good luck, but it's a bit like the dinosaurs complaining about those uppity mammals getting underfoot: their days are numbered. BEVs are here to stay, hydrogen is - as far as I can see - a non-starter except when it comes to heavy traffic and possibly rail or air but even there I have my doubts. Meanwhile BEVs are rapidly building momentum and coupled with solar and wind make very good sense. Even the last holdout for a passenger hydrogen vehicle (Toyota) has finally seen the light and is making BEVs now, I don't remember ever seeing a Mirai but given how many have been produced that's not so strange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  I'm not so sure that BEVs will reach anything close to 100% of all cars on the road. My primary reason is this: as long as you "only" have 10%, 20%, even 30% BEVs the electric charging infrastructure is mostly free, we already have it. But after that, BEVs will require expensive infrastructure to be built in the electricity transmission grid. Think "we need to dig up all of the roads". Because it's not just cars going electric, it's everything else as well at the same time. At that point hydrogen cars could very well see a resurgence. Especially in places with cold weather, where the fuel cell waste heat can be used for the climate control, while the BEV needs to spend energy running a heat pump, so the efficiency advantage of BEVs is mostly gone.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Yes, that's a good point. But: the grid can be expanded and probably will be expanded. I don't have a BEV but I've run the numbers and it would work very well for me today, it's just that I have an old, non-connected and fairly recently rebuilt car that I'll drive into the ground. But if I were younger and still in the market for a new vehicle I would definitely consider an electric one, though I'd make sure it had LiFePO4 or maybe even LTO in it (not yet available). Battery tech is getting better rapidly now that sufficient funds is pumped into it and I would expect the next two generations to be major improvements over what's on the market today.
paganel 3y ago
Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work, we don't have the "green" energy resources to actually produce that electricity, and second, and just as important, we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power (both in the US and in Europe). So that leaves us with the logical conclusion that we won't have millions and millions personal cars going forward, for better or for worse.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  > Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work 26+ million BEV already running in the world... Like 2 million driving around the US. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-electric-light-duty-vehicles https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in...
  - nomel 3y ago
    Less that 1% of the cars in the US are electric [1]. The majority of those are powered by natural gas, at night [2]. With 5% in CA, we already have "do not charge" notifications on hot days, here in California. What does 100% look like in California (definitely unrealistic, but can be scaled)? California uses 13 billion gallons of gasoline, per year [3]. Let's say electric is 50% more efficient than gas, so we'll need 6.5 billion gallons worth of energy. At 33.7 kWh of per gallon of gas, that's 219 TWh of energy per year. In 2020, California produced 277 TWh [4]. They'll need to nearly double energy production, which matches most developed countries in Europe. [1] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-percent-of-us-car-sales-are-electric https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-percent-of... [2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46236#:~:text=Both%20demand%20for%20electricity%20and,evening%20as%20the%20sun%20sets https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46236#:~:tex.... [3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transportation-energy/california-gasoline-data-facts-and-statistics https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transp... [4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
ahs1 3y ago
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- otabdeveloper4 3y ago
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boringalterego 3y ago
The person in the thumbnail for the article is hitting my uncanny valley.
dainiusse 3y ago
The problem is simple - EVs are overpriced and battery density is too low. It needs to be at least twice of current ones. EVs are Definitely going to be over hydrogen, but the tech is just not there yet for many markets. 200 kilometers in harsh conditions is wayyto small range
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Why? Commuting 100 miles to work each day is ridiculous. For anything less than that, your 300 mile range is going to be plenty. There's an argument to be made that the tech isn't quite there yet for long haul trucking and the like, but 95+% of commuter vehicles could and should be replaced with EVs tomorrow.
  - dainiusse 3y ago
    I think this implies that a family has multiple cars. It is good enough to be a second car (yet IMO to expensive still and while Tesla gets on the cheap side, its interior is not for everyone). However, my point is - I don't want 2 cars and EVs don't yet tick all boxes.
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      How so? What I'm implying is that most families don't need a car that can drive more than 300 miles a day. And on the rare occasion that a family that doesn't drive more than 300 miles in a day has to do so, charging for 45 minutes every 270 miles or so isn't such a huge inconvenience that it justifies burning hydrocarbons the other 364 days of the year.
      - dainiusse 3y ago
        The problem is that in reality it is not every 270 miles :) Take it a a normal winter with -20 celsius and it is impossible to drive 270 miles on one charge in a motorway. My parents live 240 miles away and yet it is almost impossible to get there on a single charge in winter (not talking about super expensive cars).
bparsons 3y ago
There are good use cases for both technologies. For smaller, lighter vehicles in warmer climates, lithium batteries make a lot of sense. For heavy, long haul trucks that require minimal refueling, hydrogen fuel cell makes a lot of sense. You need to build out the infrastructure for both.
- flkenosad 3y ago
  Finally, not an either/or perspective.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  The difference here is that long haul infrastructure needs a H2 station every 200 maybe 300 kilometers. For personal vehicles we need orders of magnitude more, because refuelling a H2 vehicle is even slower than liquid fuels.
- beefandcheese 3y ago
  Its mostly the infrasctructure thats the problem though. Its complex, expensive and overall just less efficient than full EV. Ageing wheels has an entertaining vid of the Toyota Mirai where he discusses the pros and cons of hydrogen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZQLUtckS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZQLUtckS4
firebaze 3y ago
Renewable power calls for massive over provisioning to minimize time where backup energy has to be used. Over provisioned energy could power hydrogen production, in which case the "inefficiency" doesn't really matter, as long as there is no other better purpose for which the energy can be spent. There's obviously a sweet spot which may invalidate this argument. But to me it sounds like a win-win, even if only focusing on aviation.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Aviation could be interesting, but when it comes to cars the problem is not hydrogen production, it is delivery. The hydrogen could be produced for free and it would still be a bad solution.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
From the article: > At the bottom “uncompetitive” end of the ladder are hydrogen cars and domestic heating — which he says make no sense when you have battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and heat pumps. which begs a question: might we see hybrids with electric motor drive, small batteries for regenerative energy capture, and hydrogen fuel cell for quick refills? That is, hybrids that only involve battery and fuel cell to both drive a single electric powertrain?
cpymchn 3y ago
Toyota was betting big on hydrogen. Were they being engineer-minded or where they being lobbied? I would like to think they were betting on Beta -- the superior technology -- in the Beta v VHS battle of our time. What am I missing here? Toyota's engineers have a great track record and the company isn't easily swayed by fads or Wall Street.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I would assume they were maintaining a visible (and subsidized) presence in a non-fossil technology, while ensuring their profitable ICE business faced no immediate threat.
- wilg 3y ago
  Beta was the inferior technology, like hydrogen.
- jbm 3y ago
  It is also possible that Toyota's engineers are not the level they used to be, much like Fujitsu's engineers (who caused one of the largest banking outages ever) or (other company of your choice that used to be a great engineering company but was hollowed out). Considering the work load at Toyota (it is often referred to as a "black company" by people I know), the level of pressure that is put on their shita-uke companies, and changes in what people consider acceptable work environments, I imagine that they might not attract the same level of talent in 2023 that they did in 1983.
drewg123 3y ago
The YouTube channel Engineering Explained has an excellent video regarding why hydrogen is not a practical replacement for gasoline/petrol/diesel in a traditional internal combustion engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8
cracrecry 3y ago
There is an Oil Sector Lobby and there is an electric sector Lobby too. All Lobbies hate competition. The electric sector wants to destroy Hydrogen because it competes with them, of course, they want to destroy the seed so no tree comes out of it. Hydrogen disappearing is not going to happen, because it going to be necessary for some things, like heavy transportation. Just because clean Hydrogen is in the early stages in development(like EV were 15 years ago) does not mean that we should not develop the technology. I personally believe that NH3 is great for storing energy and energy transportation, and extremely useful for things like growing food. It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil, but in lots of sectors(like heavy industries) it makes lots of sense. In other sectors, electricity and batteries make more sense. Different technologies will coexist together and compete.
- rasz 3y ago
  What are you talking about? Mazda had hydrogen concept car in 1991, Toyota started selling hydrogen cars in 1996 before EV, Honda in 1999.
- meindnoch 3y ago
  >It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil Except oil is a liquid, while ammonia is a gas. You can put oil in an open container and it won't hurt anyone. Now try doing the same with ammonia...
  - cracrecry 3y ago
    Oil burns and CH3 explodes easily, but we use it anyway because it makes economic sense. The same will happen with ammonia. There are risks, but the energy that you could store is immense at a very low price. Don't get me wrong, I was working in batteries and solar panels research in the early days. I heard the same arguments against it( why we should spend money when batteries and solar panels are so expensive and work so badly? They were expensive and worked badly) Now we work on fuel cells. They are expensive and there is room for improvement.
  - dexwiz 3y ago
    Ammonia is more comparable to natural gas or propane than oil. Also crude oil is really toxic. It off gasses all sorts of questionable things, and touching it isn't recommended. I get what you mean by your comment, but oil isn't some super stable, safe material.
mem0r1 3y ago
The argumentation is flawed. 1. Just imagine the required charging infrastructure if all vehicles were suddenly battery powered. Charging electric vehicles requires quite some power. Can the power grid installations sustain that (power lines, Transformer stations...) ? What resources (financial and physical (e.g. Cooper)) are required in order to adapt the infrastructure ? Just an example: A supercharger station which can charge a few cars at "full speed" simultaneously can draw > 1 Megawatt. Furthermore, superchargers are quite complex (and expensive) technology; 2. Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage. However, non-dispatchable, fluctuating energy sources such as solar and wind power require huge amounts of storage in order to sustain the power demand.
- tekknik 3y ago
  You forgot that the power station is a centralized point of failure, where as the fuel distribution network is not. This make the power stations a much more valuable target as you can easily disable a country’s transportation infrastructure.
- jrajav 3y ago
  Source for either of these claims other than "just imagine?" Of course infrastructure is a concern but I haven't seen any sources that claim we are unprepared to sustain significant EV deployment - and of course it will not ever happen overnight, so that's a strawman.
  - tekknik 3y ago
    have you not paid attention to the rolling blackouts in CA? or what happened in TX recently?
- re 3y ago
  > The argumentation is flawed. Which argumentation are you referring to? You're re-iterating an anti-electric talking point that is explicitly debunked in the article. > “That's nonsense,” says Liebreich. “[In] 1995, [people said] ‘we'll never use the internet because there are not enough modems’. [In] 2000, ‘we'll never do online video because there isn't enough bandwidth’, then, ‘you can't do multiple streams of video because you will never get fibre to the home’. We’ve got 30 years between now and 2050 [when countries plan to reach net-zero emissions] and we will simply have more and more investment. We’ve dug up the streets for cable, phone, gas, cable, fibre, electricity. It's a thing we do. We know how to just build slowly over time. This is not rocket science. > “Plus, there's smart charging. And of course, we know we're going to be doing this because we're also going to be having to add capacity because of electric heating. And so the idea that you'll say, ‘no, no, we mustn't do that extension of existing infrastructure, we must build a completely new one [for hydrogen refuelling], it's nonsense, frankly.”
z_rex 3y ago
One thing I never see discussed about why hydrogen is so popular as a replacement for hydrocarbons: You can fairly easily generate hydrogen from natural gas via methane pyrolysis, and the carbon falls out as carbon black, a solid. The waste heat from a single gas turbine can generate enough hydrogen to power about 3 turbines of the same size, so when it's all said and done at a combined cycle plant with a steam turbine on the other 2 units, you're down about 12% on your net energy production, but it's not releasing any carbon into the atmosphere.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
One irony is that hydrogen cars are actually a better option than ICE. They're just both blown away by BEVs because batteries and supporting tech has progressed so dramatically.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  A better option in what circumstance?
  - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    In the circumstance that we wanted to deal with climate change, local air pollution and inefficiency of ICE, but didn't have modern battery tech available. If we somehow magically knew that we'd hit a physics limit with battery tech over a decade ago, hydrogen for personal vehicles would be a good range extender option and worth rolling out the infrastructure to support. And bear in mind, basically every FCEV containts a small battery BEV at its heart.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I thought hydrogen was still difficult to handle and store. Is that information out of date?
      - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        Gasoline is difficult to handle and store too. It can cost over a million to remediate a single gas station, totaling billions across the US. See HN discussion on "The hidden cost of gasoline" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471601
linsomniac 3y ago
What can we do to make it so that motivations are more clear around messaging? It feels like so many things are ruined because industries are so good at messaging and people are so bad and disadvantaged at recognizing misleading messaging. I took the afternoon off work to drive around town supplying school kids doing walkouts and walking across town to the administrative buildings to protest drastic changes that were announced <5 days ago, completely change 6 schools, and have apparently been planned in secret, for no good reason. We're starting to do some deep dive investigations because of the secrecy. It just feels like so much of the system is impossible right now.
Reason077 3y ago
Article is from [2021]. But it might as well be from 2015 for all the relevance it has to today's automotive industry. Electric already won.
throwaway5752 3y ago
Scratch an inch deep and this is always hydrogen stripped from methane. Still fossil fuel based. They oil industry are filthy liars, aided by petrostates like KSA and Russia. They are like the tobacco industry, but many thousands of times worse.
torginus 3y ago
People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute. It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars. But I believe once self-driving robotaxis arrive, they are going to reshape transportation - they're going to be used for short distance commute, and hauling people to train stations for long distance commute. At least in Europe. Range anxiety won't be a thing, since these taxis won't ever cover large distances.
- Beached 3y ago
  in their current format no. but I think there is sufficient demand for long range personal vehicles, and as the world gets more electric, battery tech will get better. I can easily see a future where 1000 mile range on a single charge will be a norm. and I can easily see an America that requires that. range anxiety will decrease as charging gets faster and easier to access. but I just can't see an America household going 2x electric vehicles until 1000mile range with a charge up time of an hour or two is the norm. I'm actually a huge fan of full ev hybrids that have on board gasoline generators
  - jbm 3y ago
    I generally agree with you about 2 electric cars. That said, I don't see how a 1000 mile car is possible. You can't even get that with generally available gas cars (The Volkswagen XL1 only has a 650 km range for those curious.) I own a used EV (a 2019 Model 3 that I picked up this year) with real-world 300km range. It's an amazing main car, except that it is too small for my family. Still, we use it for about 80% of our transportation now (the other 20% being handled by a minivan). More saliently, the charge time at home from 5% to 80% was ~30 hours on my level 1 charger. The idea of getting 5 times as much range in 1/30th the time sounds dangerous, unless we are talking about much smaller vehicles. I've heard Toyota talking about solid state batteries, and I hope someone eventually succeeds in bringing them to market. However, I assume it will be used to reduce the weight and cost of the vehicle, not drastically increase range (and cost and charge time)
ezekiel68 3y ago
I'm not trying to put white hats on petroleum executives, but it must be pointed out that -- given the overall incentives and regulatory environment -- they cannot do other than to attempt this.
Joel_Mckay 3y ago
Hydrogen systems have zero advantage over GMO biodiesel (short-cycle carbon neutral) for energy capture, storage, and distribution. The local Ballard H2 bus test platforms were reverted to diesel after 6 years. Mostly, people see Hydrogen as a way to green-wash catalyzed natural gas (30000 years to reach carbon neutral). The Battery people seem to think $7000/Kg for global lithium deployment is feasible. Look, a EV/pollution-relocation device is impressive, but is still unsustainable. I retain the opinion goat-carts are the future. =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0
SCAQTony 3y ago
Water is a greenhouse gas as is the methane infrastructure that will be used to create the hydrogen. I don't say this disparagingly, but an ignorant populace will fall for it, and that includes Congress.
- contravariant 3y ago
  I'm not too sure we need to worry too much about the additional water vapour becoming a problem. About a third of all sunlight that reaches earth is spent just evaporating water [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Energy_Budget_with_GHE.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Energy_Budget_with_...
0wis 3y ago
My view on hydrogen is that we will look at it like pressurized air in the 1900’s. Some industrial applications exists but its not the silver bullet many articles are talking about. It is inefficient and we shouldn’t spend many ressources on it. However, I am happy some people experiment with it, we may discover an innovative application that may be a true breakthrough. But I won’t bet on it.
cromka 3y ago
Meanwhile Toyota announced an amonia engine. I guess we’ll have to live and see what comes out of it.
- pornel 3y ago
  NOx, most likely.
julienreszka 3y ago
´Green’ hydrogen produced by nuclear is just fine
Apocryphon 3y ago
And whatever was the corn ethanol biofuel thing about?
freedude 3y ago
In a free market-based economy all options are on the table. An entrepreneur (like Elon Musk) can invest in a technology and market it in such a way to capture some share of the market. I would encourage these "oil executives" to find creative solutions. Diverse market options drive costs down and promote innovative products. To say one technology is always better than another because "some oil executive" does or doesn't promote it, is FUD. In tech we hear enough FUD we should be immune to it. We are not. It is a proven fact enough electricity is not produced to handle the charging of enough BEVs to replace the current number of ICE vehicles. We need more options not fewer.

382 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

While I agree using clean electricity to make hydrogen to power things seems a bad solution compared to batteries there looks to be quite a lot of potential for "white hydrogen" which is basically drilling for naturally occuring hydrogen in the earths crust. There seems to be a lot of it eg "huge reserves found in France". Potentially 46 million tonnes in Lorraine, 1 euro a kilo to produce https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/excitement-grows-about-natural-hydrogen-as-huge-reserves-found-in-france/ https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/exc... And elsewhere in the crust. It's just people haven't really focused on drilling for it until recently https://archive.ph/RbQwv https://archive.ph/RbQwv It might be a practical solution to use our existing equipment which is basically the same as drilling for natural gas, but with no or at least less CO2.

agumonkey 3y ago

i'd pay for a multiparty open investigation

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Not saying the oil sector is powerless by any means, and I guess maybe they're going for regulatory capture, but this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it. The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. I believe every car maker (save 1 that I know about) is fully committed to 100% electrified vehicles in the not-too-distant future. I feel like eventually even Toyota will give up their weird H2 push.

asdff 3y ago
All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations and what becomes more compelling to the consumer flips overnight. Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. It seems like there's a lot lot less inertia to get consumers over that hurdle than the EV hurdle, where charge times are long and convenient chargers not a guarantee in comparison to the fuel station network.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Have you ever read up on what storing hydrogen entails? Both at the station and in the cars? The tanks are totally different beasts than gasoline.
  - tekknik 3y ago
    As is propane, but we use that currently with no issues.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Lol at all; Hydrogen can't easily be transported in current pipelines; Can't be transported in current trucks, and can't be stored in current gas station tanks. And if the gas station doesn't maintain its hoses, nozzles, or seals; you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > you don't wind up with a slight smell, a carcinogenic irritation -- you experience frostbite to you hand immediately. If you're lucky. If you're unlucky the first you realize there is a leak is when it ignites. Fortunately it is harder to make it explode than gasoline vapors but it also escapes far more readily than gasoline does.
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Though the maintenance issue can be solved with a nitrogen pressure test before - the equivalent of electrical connectors verifying the connection digitally before sending the amps.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations "All it takes" is doing very heavy lifting in that sentence. There's a good reason that hydrogen fueling stations are basically non-existent aside from a few in California. Distribution and fueling is quite complicated compared to conventional liquid fuels.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> this is a non-starter from an economic reality perspective so I'm not too worried about it Still dangerous. It reminds me of Zubrin’s takedown of VASIMR [1]. An unrealistic counterproposal can torpedo a workable one by appealing to peoples’ tendency to choose the perfect over the good. [1] https://youtu.be/myYs4DCCZts?si=Ksqw_MFLKHKIgMod https://youtu.be/myYs4DCCZts?si=Ksqw_MFLKHKIgMod
MBCook 3y ago
Would gasoline be anywhere near something people wanted to use if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities? Petroleum is a huge industry and they could make a big problem by getting subsidies to make some other fuel look competitive even though it’s a disaster. Look at biodiesel.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > if it was taxed to correctly account for its externalities? I think you kind of identified the issue there, though. Externalities are notoriously difficult to tax and account for. The issue with EVs is that they are intrinsically better than hydrogen in nearly every way. Even issues with long distance driving and recharging are quickly improving with EVs, and the improvements are happening much faster than anything going on with hydrogen.
tw04 3y ago
It's not just Toyota - it does seem to be a Japanese thing. Honda is also actively producing H2 powered vehicles. https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42796089/2024-honda-cr-v-powered-by-hydrogen-details/ https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42796089/2024-honda-cr-v-...
- tekknik 3y ago
  Also Hyundai, which is Korean.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> The train is well out of the station for electric vehicles. British government has just postponed it's EV vehicle transition by 5 years, British tabloids are printing articles about how EVs will never work for British uniquely harsh weather
- tekknik 3y ago
  EVs don’t work for a lot of situations. What they are good at is around town driving. Maybe this will change in the future but this is the current reality.

deviantbit 3y ago

The electric car industry is spinning alternatives. Hydrogen is a much better alternative all around. You'll be able to convert existing cars much easier.

micromacrofoot 3y ago
unfortunately no one's going to be converting existing cars to anything other than scrap metal no matter which technology proves to be the most promising
- henearkr 3y ago
  Well I agree with your other comment, but about this one, retrofitting (ICE->EV) is a thing. Even if very niche for now.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    It is niche but growing less so by the day as conversion kits mature and more options make it onto market.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Used Prius is always free and used Tesla is cheaper than a conversion. It never will make sense except for few classic cars.
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    With the way cars are built today it can be an endeavor to change a lightbulb, let alone the entire propulsion system.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Classic cars are much easier to convert to electric than hydrogen. I’m not even sure anyone would make a kit to do it. There’s just so much complexity with fuel cells.
thehappypm 3y ago

api 3y ago

There's also a huge amount of idiotic anti-EV FUD and misinformation being pushed.

gmane 3y ago

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably better than hydrogen for those use cases). My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them.

xdennis 3y ago
> Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while [...]. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn 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.
credit_guy 3y ago
> batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases 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/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospect...

micromacrofoot 3y ago

It's incredible that the oil lobby can so persistently and flagrantly spread disinformation to the extent that they have for decades. I suppose this is what happens when you have enough money to out-lobby everyone. It's not only electric cars either, recently they've been propping up opposition to wind farms off of the new england coast by posing as environmentalists concerned about whales.

g-b-r 3y ago

They've been doing it for twenty years, hydrogen allows maintaining a distribution network and *most of all* to keep using fossil fuels to generate it

ska 3y ago
Much longer than 20 years. But the reason it hasn't taken off is that both the economics and the physics don't work very well for consumer vehicles.
- tekknik 3y ago
  Because gasoline was more convenient. Now with clean emission mandates gasoline can’t be used anymore. But that doesn’t mean EVs suddenly got more efficient.
Smoosh 3y ago
I think that it is just as important for the oil industry to make it look like alternatives are being tried, but they just don't work out, so that the status quo seems more acceptable.
parineum 3y ago
This is true and is contrary to this headline/quote. The oil sector is lobby for hydrogen but the attribution of motive is off. They are lobbying _for_ hydrogen, not against EVs.
- g-b-r 3y ago
  EVs happen to not need their oil, I have the feeling that they have and are still lobbying the sh*t against EVs; lobbying for hydrogen is one way to lobby against EVs, and if hydrogen were (or had been) successful it's potentially infinitely more profitable than EVs for oil companies.

Clent 3y ago

I didn't realize this wasn't common knowledge. They oil companies own a lot of infrastructure for moving fuel around. They cannot use this infrastructure to move electricity but they can use the existing infrastructure to move hydrogen around.

malchow 3y ago
The oil companies don't own many pipelines. Pipeline companies own those. And pipeline companies are eager to do business with hydrogen companies. The fight here is over whether natural gas-made hydrogen (SMR) is an interesting fuel at all. I think the numbers say no, while solar-made hydrogen is in fact extremely interesting.
Pxtl 3y ago
More to the point, currently only 1% (edit: some articles I've seen put it less than 0.1%[1]) of hydrogen is "green". The rest is mostly made out of natural gas, a process that releases just as much CO2 as if you'd burned it. H2 isn't a way to save the Earth, it's a way to save the Natural Gas industry. [1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-green-hydrogen/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...
- b112 3y ago
  Ridiculous. You're conflating source and fuel. H2 can be produced in large quantities from green power. Part of the problem is, some people see everything as non-green. Dams? Oh, carbon and cement! Nuclear? Oh risk. Windmills? Oh birds. Solar? Short cell lift and manufacturing waste. So let's start with the snae assumption that a dam is green. Now you want to get power to cars. Guess what. You can make h2 on site, at night (low power demand), then send it anywhere using existing gaslines. And yes, you can. No, h2 isn't hard to store, hard to move. Frankly, it is the oil industry flooding green forums with false crap about h2, because they know h2 is the only complete threat to them Batteries, with their wonderful waste, slow charge time, massive weight, and vast dangers in a accident, won't be enough to break oil's back. We need h2 for that, and that's why all this bullwark is spewed at h2. A tech demonstrated as workijg quite well in buses, cars, and spaceships for 50+ years.

exabrial 3y ago

please feel free to vote me down into oblivion because, you know, "I'm wrong"... But I would prefer a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle over a battery-electric for a number of reasons. The first is theoretical recharge/refuel times, but the second is firefighter rescue personnel safety. BEVs are here-and-now technology though, and I don't oppose them, it's just I plan to wait until hydrogen technology matures and reaches deployment, or BEV finally solves those two problems.

tw04 3y ago
If you're worried about firefighters, I'm not sure why you think hydrogen would be the solution. Hydrogen fires are invisible to the human eye, and carry an extremely high risk of catastrophic explosion. While a lithium fire isn't great, it's more the issue of "this is going to ruin the roadway that it's burning on" than "the firefighter is going to die trying to put it out". https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion#:~:text=lower%20flammability%20limit.-,Hydrogen%20used%20in%20the%20fuel%20cells%20is%20a%20very%20flammable,that%20a%20flame%20is%20present https://www.osha.gov/green-jobs/hydrogen/fire-explosion#:~:t....
- petre 3y ago
  The firefighters will mainly sit and watch while H2 gets vented or burns off. A lithium battery fire is much more worse, not even mentioning the smoke. https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0 https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0
cycrutchfield 3y ago
The rescue personnel will be safe because there won’t be anything of you left to rescue.
onethought 3y ago
But a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has a battery that is cycled much more than a BEV (because it’s small). So a fuel cell vehicle has less durability not more. How can you have an opinion on firefighter rescue and personal safety when there is next to no comparable data on fuel cell vehicles?

Pxtl 3y ago

Yup. It's painfully obvious here in Canada, where the loudest champion of hydrogen-powered vehicles is the Premiere of the oil-and-gas-generating province of Alberta, and she's an ideological-conservative pro-oil leader at that. Seeing people like that rally to hydrogen over EVs is the loudest argument against the tech. Hydrogen technology doesn't exist to save the Earth, it exists to save the natural gas industry. The business model for hydrogen that's generated is 1. Hydrogen is extracted from natural gas. 2. A miracle happens, capturing the carbon dioxide from this process. 3. Hydrogen goes in cars. The amount of truly "green" hydrogen out there is functionally zero. So it's a tech that isn't green, has no refueling infrastructure, and practically no adoption in the car industry. At this point it only exists so that anti-environmentalists can claim there's an alternative they prefer, since it's politically unacceptable to be pro-apocalypse.

malchow 3y ago
Green hydrogen is developing now, and is very real, and is based on polysilicon solar advancements and PEM electrolyzer advancements, both of which provide ~3 decadal cost-down paths. See these two companies of ours: [1] https://ohmium.com https://ohmium.com [2] https://novohydrogen.com https://novohydrogen.com
- Pxtl 3y ago
  At present, the amount of green hydrogen in the total hydrogen economy is less than 1%. (edit: possibly less than 0.1% [1]) Green hydrogen is vapourware. [1]https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-green-hydrogen/ https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...
  - malchow 3y ago
    I don't think you know what the word "vaporware" means. 1 GW per day of new solar is being installed globally. Where do you think the excess mid-day production is going to go? It doesn't have to go anywhere, actually. But it will go somewhere.

jacquesm 3y ago

I wish them much good luck, but it's a bit like the dinosaurs complaining about those uppity mammals getting underfoot: their days are numbered. BEVs are here to stay, hydrogen is - as far as I can see - a non-starter except when it comes to heavy traffic and possibly rail or air but even there I have my doubts. Meanwhile BEVs are rapidly building momentum and coupled with solar and wind make very good sense. Even the last holdout for a passenger hydrogen vehicle (Toyota) has finally seen the light and is making BEVs now, I don't remember ever seeing a Mirai but given how many have been produced that's not so strange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

semi-extrinsic 3y ago
I'm not so sure that BEVs will reach anything close to 100% of all cars on the road. My primary reason is this: as long as you "only" have 10%, 20%, even 30% BEVs the electric charging infrastructure is mostly free, we already have it. But after that, BEVs will require expensive infrastructure to be built in the electricity transmission grid. Think "we need to dig up all of the roads". Because it's not just cars going electric, it's everything else as well at the same time. At that point hydrogen cars could very well see a resurgence. Especially in places with cold weather, where the fuel cell waste heat can be used for the climate control, while the BEV needs to spend energy running a heat pump, so the efficiency advantage of BEVs is mostly gone.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Yes, that's a good point. But: the grid can be expanded and probably will be expanded. I don't have a BEV but I've run the numbers and it would work very well for me today, it's just that I have an old, non-connected and fairly recently rebuilt car that I'll drive into the ground. But if I were younger and still in the market for a new vehicle I would definitely consider an electric one, though I'd make sure it had LiFePO4 or maybe even LTO in it (not yet available). Battery tech is getting better rapidly now that sufficient funds is pumped into it and I would expect the next two generations to be major improvements over what's on the market today.

paganel 3y ago

Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work, we don't have the "green" energy resources to actually produce that electricity, and second, and just as important, we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power (both in the US and in Europe). So that leaves us with the logical conclusion that we won't have millions and millions personal cars going forward, for better or for worse.

reducesuffering 3y ago
> Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work 26+ million BEV already running in the world... Like 2 million driving around the US. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in-electric-light-duty-vehicles https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/trends-in...
- nomel 3y ago
  Less that 1% of the cars in the US are electric [1]. The majority of those are powered by natural gas, at night [2]. With 5% in CA, we already have "do not charge" notifications on hot days, here in California. What does 100% look like in California (definitely unrealistic, but can be scaled)? California uses 13 billion gallons of gasoline, per year [3]. Let's say electric is 50% more efficient than gas, so we'll need 6.5 billion gallons worth of energy. At 33.7 kWh of per gallon of gas, that's 219 TWh of energy per year. In 2020, California produced 277 TWh [4]. They'll need to nearly double energy production, which matches most developed countries in Europe. [1] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-percent-of-us-car-sales-are-electric https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/what-percent-of... [2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46236#:~:text=Both%20demand%20for%20electricity%20and,evening%20as%20the%20sun%20sets https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46236#:~:tex.... [3] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transportation-energy/california-gasoline-data-facts-and-statistics https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transp... [4] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

ahs1 3y ago

[flagged]

otabdeveloper4 3y ago
[flagged]

boringalterego 3y ago

The person in the thumbnail for the article is hitting my uncanny valley.

dainiusse 3y ago

The problem is simple - EVs are overpriced and battery density is too low. It needs to be at least twice of current ones. EVs are Definitely going to be over hydrogen, but the tech is just not there yet for many markets. 200 kilometers in harsh conditions is wayyto small range

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Why? Commuting 100 miles to work each day is ridiculous. For anything less than that, your 300 mile range is going to be plenty. There's an argument to be made that the tech isn't quite there yet for long haul trucking and the like, but 95+% of commuter vehicles could and should be replaced with EVs tomorrow.
- dainiusse 3y ago
  I think this implies that a family has multiple cars. It is good enough to be a second car (yet IMO to expensive still and while Tesla gets on the cheap side, its interior is not for everyone). However, my point is - I don't want 2 cars and EVs don't yet tick all boxes.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    How so? What I'm implying is that most families don't need a car that can drive more than 300 miles a day. And on the rare occasion that a family that doesn't drive more than 300 miles in a day has to do so, charging for 45 minutes every 270 miles or so isn't such a huge inconvenience that it justifies burning hydrocarbons the other 364 days of the year.
    - dainiusse 3y ago
      The problem is that in reality it is not every 270 miles :) Take it a a normal winter with -20 celsius and it is impossible to drive 270 miles on one charge in a motorway. My parents live 240 miles away and yet it is almost impossible to get there on a single charge in winter (not talking about super expensive cars).

bparsons 3y ago

There are good use cases for both technologies. For smaller, lighter vehicles in warmer climates, lithium batteries make a lot of sense. For heavy, long haul trucks that require minimal refueling, hydrogen fuel cell makes a lot of sense. You need to build out the infrastructure for both.

flkenosad 3y ago
Finally, not an either/or perspective.
theshrike79 3y ago
The difference here is that long haul infrastructure needs a H2 station every 200 maybe 300 kilometers. For personal vehicles we need orders of magnitude more, because refuelling a H2 vehicle is even slower than liquid fuels.
beefandcheese 3y ago
Its mostly the infrasctructure thats the problem though. Its complex, expensive and overall just less efficient than full EV. Ageing wheels has an entertaining vid of the Toyota Mirai where he discusses the pros and cons of hydrogen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZQLUtckS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZQLUtckS4

firebaze 3y ago

Renewable power calls for massive over provisioning to minimize time where backup energy has to be used. Over provisioned energy could power hydrogen production, in which case the "inefficiency" doesn't really matter, as long as there is no other better purpose for which the energy can be spent. There's obviously a sweet spot which may invalidate this argument. But to me it sounds like a win-win, even if only focusing on aviation.

rootusrootus 3y ago
Aviation could be interesting, but when it comes to cars the problem is not hydrogen production, it is delivery. The hydrogen could be produced for free and it would still be a bad solution.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

From the article: > At the bottom “uncompetitive” end of the ladder are hydrogen cars and domestic heating — which he says make no sense when you have battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and heat pumps. which begs a question: might we see hybrids with electric motor drive, small batteries for regenerative energy capture, and hydrogen fuel cell for quick refills? That is, hybrids that only involve battery and fuel cell to both drive a single electric powertrain?

cpymchn 3y ago

Toyota was betting big on hydrogen. Were they being engineer-minded or where they being lobbied? I would like to think they were betting on Beta -- the superior technology -- in the Beta v VHS battle of our time. What am I missing here? Toyota's engineers have a great track record and the company isn't easily swayed by fads or Wall Street.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
I would assume they were maintaining a visible (and subsidized) presence in a non-fossil technology, while ensuring their profitable ICE business faced no immediate threat.
wilg 3y ago
Beta was the inferior technology, like hydrogen.
jbm 3y ago
It is also possible that Toyota's engineers are not the level they used to be, much like Fujitsu's engineers (who caused one of the largest banking outages ever) or (other company of your choice that used to be a great engineering company but was hollowed out). Considering the work load at Toyota (it is often referred to as a "black company" by people I know), the level of pressure that is put on their shita-uke companies, and changes in what people consider acceptable work environments, I imagine that they might not attract the same level of talent in 2023 that they did in 1983.

drewg123 3y ago

The YouTube channel Engineering Explained has an excellent video regarding why hydrogen is not a practical replacement for gasoline/petrol/diesel in a traditional internal combustion engine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8

cracrecry 3y ago

There is an Oil Sector Lobby and there is an electric sector Lobby too. All Lobbies hate competition. The electric sector wants to destroy Hydrogen because it competes with them, of course, they want to destroy the seed so no tree comes out of it. Hydrogen disappearing is not going to happen, because it going to be necessary for some things, like heavy transportation. Just because clean Hydrogen is in the early stages in development(like EV were 15 years ago) does not mean that we should not develop the technology. I personally believe that NH3 is great for storing energy and energy transportation, and extremely useful for things like growing food. It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil, but in lots of sectors(like heavy industries) it makes lots of sense. In other sectors, electricity and batteries make more sense. Different technologies will coexist together and compete.

rasz 3y ago
What are you talking about? Mazda had hydrogen concept car in 1991, Toyota started selling hydrogen cars in 1996 before EV, Honda in 1999.
meindnoch 3y ago
>It is also toxic and difficult to handle, like oil Except oil is a liquid, while ammonia is a gas. You can put oil in an open container and it won't hurt anyone. Now try doing the same with ammonia...
- cracrecry 3y ago
  Oil burns and CH3 explodes easily, but we use it anyway because it makes economic sense. The same will happen with ammonia. There are risks, but the energy that you could store is immense at a very low price. Don't get me wrong, I was working in batteries and solar panels research in the early days. I heard the same arguments against it( why we should spend money when batteries and solar panels are so expensive and work so badly? They were expensive and worked badly) Now we work on fuel cells. They are expensive and there is room for improvement.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  Ammonia is more comparable to natural gas or propane than oil. Also crude oil is really toxic. It off gasses all sorts of questionable things, and touching it isn't recommended. I get what you mean by your comment, but oil isn't some super stable, safe material.

mem0r1 3y ago

The argumentation is flawed. 1. Just imagine the required charging infrastructure if all vehicles were suddenly battery powered. Charging electric vehicles requires quite some power. Can the power grid installations sustain that (power lines, Transformer stations...) ? What resources (financial and physical (e.g. Cooper)) are required in order to adapt the infrastructure ? Just an example: A supercharger station which can charge a few cars at "full speed" simultaneously can draw > 1 Megawatt. Furthermore, superchargers are quite complex (and expensive) technology; 2. Batteries are not a suitable large scale energy storage. However, non-dispatchable, fluctuating energy sources such as solar and wind power require huge amounts of storage in order to sustain the power demand.

tekknik 3y ago
You forgot that the power station is a centralized point of failure, where as the fuel distribution network is not. This make the power stations a much more valuable target as you can easily disable a country’s transportation infrastructure.
jrajav 3y ago
Source for either of these claims other than "just imagine?" Of course infrastructure is a concern but I haven't seen any sources that claim we are unprepared to sustain significant EV deployment - and of course it will not ever happen overnight, so that's a strawman.
- tekknik 3y ago
  have you not paid attention to the rolling blackouts in CA? or what happened in TX recently?
re 3y ago
> The argumentation is flawed. Which argumentation are you referring to? You're re-iterating an anti-electric talking point that is explicitly debunked in the article. > “That's nonsense,” says Liebreich. “[In] 1995, [people said] ‘we'll never use the internet because there are not enough modems’. [In] 2000, ‘we'll never do online video because there isn't enough bandwidth’, then, ‘you can't do multiple streams of video because you will never get fibre to the home’. We’ve got 30 years between now and 2050 [when countries plan to reach net-zero emissions] and we will simply have more and more investment. We’ve dug up the streets for cable, phone, gas, cable, fibre, electricity. It's a thing we do. We know how to just build slowly over time. This is not rocket science. > “Plus, there's smart charging. And of course, we know we're going to be doing this because we're also going to be having to add capacity because of electric heating. And so the idea that you'll say, ‘no, no, we mustn't do that extension of existing infrastructure, we must build a completely new one [for hydrogen refuelling], it's nonsense, frankly.”

z_rex 3y ago

One thing I never see discussed about why hydrogen is so popular as a replacement for hydrocarbons: You can fairly easily generate hydrogen from natural gas via methane pyrolysis, and the carbon falls out as carbon black, a solid. The waste heat from a single gas turbine can generate enough hydrogen to power about 3 turbines of the same size, so when it's all said and done at a combined cycle plant with a steam turbine on the other 2 units, you're down about 12% on your net energy production, but it's not releasing any carbon into the atmosphere.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

One irony is that hydrogen cars are actually a better option than ICE. They're just both blown away by BEVs because batteries and supporting tech has progressed so dramatically.

robertlagrant 3y ago
A better option in what circumstance?
- ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  In the circumstance that we wanted to deal with climate change, local air pollution and inefficiency of ICE, but didn't have modern battery tech available. If we somehow magically knew that we'd hit a physics limit with battery tech over a decade ago, hydrogen for personal vehicles would be a good range extender option and worth rolling out the infrastructure to support. And bear in mind, basically every FCEV containts a small battery BEV at its heart.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I thought hydrogen was still difficult to handle and store. Is that information out of date?
    - ZeroGravitas 3y ago
      Gasoline is difficult to handle and store too. It can cost over a million to remediate a single gas station, totaling billions across the US. See HN discussion on "The hidden cost of gasoline" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471601

linsomniac 3y ago

What can we do to make it so that motivations are more clear around messaging? It feels like so many things are ruined because industries are so good at messaging and people are so bad and disadvantaged at recognizing misleading messaging. I took the afternoon off work to drive around town supplying school kids doing walkouts and walking across town to the administrative buildings to protest drastic changes that were announced <5 days ago, completely change 6 schools, and have apparently been planned in secret, for no good reason. We're starting to do some deep dive investigations because of the secrecy. It just feels like so much of the system is impossible right now.

Reason077 3y ago

Article is from [2021]. But it might as well be from 2015 for all the relevance it has to today's automotive industry. Electric already won.

throwaway5752 3y ago

Scratch an inch deep and this is always hydrogen stripped from methane. Still fossil fuel based. They oil industry are filthy liars, aided by petrostates like KSA and Russia. They are like the tobacco industry, but many thousands of times worse.

torginus 3y ago

People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute. It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars. But I believe once self-driving robotaxis arrive, they are going to reshape transportation - they're going to be used for short distance commute, and hauling people to train stations for long distance commute. At least in Europe. Range anxiety won't be a thing, since these taxis won't ever cover large distances.

Beached 3y ago
in their current format no. but I think there is sufficient demand for long range personal vehicles, and as the world gets more electric, battery tech will get better. I can easily see a future where 1000 mile range on a single charge will be a norm. and I can easily see an America that requires that. range anxiety will decrease as charging gets faster and easier to access. but I just can't see an America household going 2x electric vehicles until 1000mile range with a charge up time of an hour or two is the norm. I'm actually a huge fan of full ev hybrids that have on board gasoline generators
- jbm 3y ago
  I generally agree with you about 2 electric cars. That said, I don't see how a 1000 mile car is possible. You can't even get that with generally available gas cars (The Volkswagen XL1 only has a 650 km range for those curious.) I own a used EV (a 2019 Model 3 that I picked up this year) with real-world 300km range. It's an amazing main car, except that it is too small for my family. Still, we use it for about 80% of our transportation now (the other 20% being handled by a minivan). More saliently, the charge time at home from 5% to 80% was ~30 hours on my level 1 charger. The idea of getting 5 times as much range in 1/30th the time sounds dangerous, unless we are talking about much smaller vehicles. I've heard Toyota talking about solid state batteries, and I hope someone eventually succeeds in bringing them to market. However, I assume it will be used to reduce the weight and cost of the vehicle, not drastically increase range (and cost and charge time)

ezekiel68 3y ago

I'm not trying to put white hats on petroleum executives, but it must be pointed out that -- given the overall incentives and regulatory environment -- they cannot do other than to attempt this.

Joel_Mckay 3y ago

Hydrogen systems have zero advantage over GMO biodiesel (short-cycle carbon neutral) for energy capture, storage, and distribution. The local Ballard H2 bus test platforms were reverted to diesel after 6 years. Mostly, people see Hydrogen as a way to green-wash catalyzed natural gas (30000 years to reach carbon neutral). The Battery people seem to think $7000/Kg for global lithium deployment is feasible. Look, a EV/pollution-relocation device is impressive, but is still unsustainable. I retain the opinion goat-carts are the future. =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0

SCAQTony 3y ago

Water is a greenhouse gas as is the methane infrastructure that will be used to create the hydrogen. I don't say this disparagingly, but an ignorant populace will fall for it, and that includes Congress.

contravariant 3y ago
I'm not too sure we need to worry too much about the additional water vapour becoming a problem. About a third of all sunlight that reaches earth is spent just evaporating water [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Energy_Budget_with_GHE.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Earth_Energy_Budget_with_...

0wis 3y ago

My view on hydrogen is that we will look at it like pressurized air in the 1900’s. Some industrial applications exists but its not the silver bullet many articles are talking about. It is inefficient and we shouldn’t spend many ressources on it. However, I am happy some people experiment with it, we may discover an innovative application that may be a true breakthrough. But I won’t bet on it.

cromka 3y ago

Meanwhile Toyota announced an amonia engine. I guess we’ll have to live and see what comes out of it.

pornel 3y ago
NOx, most likely.

julienreszka 3y ago

´Green’ hydrogen produced by nuclear is just fine

Apocryphon 3y ago

And whatever was the corn ethanol biofuel thing about?

freedude 3y ago

In a free market-based economy all options are on the table. An entrepreneur (like Elon Musk) can invest in a technology and market it in such a way to capture some share of the market. I would encourage these "oil executives" to find creative solutions. Diverse market options drive costs down and promote innovative products. To say one technology is always better than another because "some oil executive" does or doesn't promote it, is FUD. In tech we hear enough FUD we should be immune to it. We are not. It is a proven fact enough electricity is not produced to handle the charging of enough BEVs to replace the current number of ICE vehicles. We need more options not fewer.