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Shell closes all of its hydrogen refuelling stations for cars in California
- adrianN 3y agoHydrogen in cars never stood a chance. It was always used to grab government money to do expensive case studies.
- darkteflon 3y agoJapan to California: Hold my beer.
- akira2501 3y agoWell.. the government decided it wanted to control the car market, it has single handedly set it back several decades at this point.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoNow you get to explain in some detail through what modes a single nation's government controls multinational companies that preside over global markets. Be sure to account for regulatory capture in your explanation. We'll wait.
- akira2501 3y agoI am always eager to rise to the call of a rank bully. Well maybe less eager than you to have the opportunity to be completely rude to a total stranger you disagree with. Meanwhile, they control companies with laws. Isn't this obvious? Try charity next time. Or be this rude in real life to people you know and see how it goes. People like you ruin this site.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoIf refusing to let baseless handwaving pass for reasoned arguments ruins the site for you you're gonna have a bad time. In the mean time, "laws" hardly meets burden of proof here when the initial claim is a single nation's government controlling an entire global industry. An industry that is dominated by manufacturers that are not based in the country in question. Did you want to flesh that out a little?
- akira2501 3y agoWhat is baseless or handwaving about it? It's an incredibly simple statement. "Well.. the government decided it wanted to control the car market, it has single handedly set it back several decades at this point." The government /is/ attempting to control the car market. This is happening at both the federal and state level. These laws specify what the market can and cannot sell, the most direct form of control available. These laws inject government money into subsidies for both the consumer and the manufacturer, an indirect form of control. The article "it" is indefinite but it obviously refers to the /market/, and not the /industry/. A word which never appeared in my original statement. Did you want to constrain yourself a little?
- toast0 3y agoAfter looking into natural gas vehicles, I don't see how any high pressure gas vehicle could work in the states, except through fleets. At least natural gas had distribution already (but usually not anywhere near the pressure needed for fueling; and that compression is energy intensive!). The pressure tanks in the vehicle expire, at which point the vehicle turns into a pumpkin. At least early Mirais had 15 year tanks. In theory, you can replace the pressure tanks, but when I was looking at aging CNG Crown Victorias (circa 2017), it was very hard to find new tanks (and many of them had been sitting for some time, so you're not even getting the full tank lifetime), or someone to install them. When I saw cost estimates, it was in the couple of thousands; not really economical when that money would get you a similar age gas car that will probably never need its gas tank replaced.
- AndrewDavis 3y agoThat's interesting. In Victoria Australia (Melbourne to me more specific). LPG (liquid petroleum gas) cars were more very successful. Throughout the 80s and 90s almost every taxi was LPG, basically every petrol station also had (and many still do) have LPG. And it was super common if you bought a Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore, two of the most popular cars of the 90s and 00s here that you would convert them to LPG. Typically by installing an additional smaller tank in the boot (trunk as Americans call it) and have a switch in the cabin to switch between the fuels. Maybe the smaller tank might only get a couple hundred kilometres but it was quick, cheap and easy to fill up, simple to swap back to petrol if you needed the range etc. It was so common, I know Ford (and possibly Holden) were offering the factory ready for LPG without a petrol tank.
- Scoundreller 3y agoLPG = Liquified petroleum gas = propane (or butane?). CNG = compressed natural gas = methane. LPG tanks are much more straightforward, 100-200psi (and standardized) than CNG (thousands of psi to usable amounts in the tank because it stays as a gas unless you chill it to like -100C). NG is a lot cheaper, in theory. In theory, you could refuel at home.
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- standeven 3y agoVolkswagen has a good explanation of why they settled on electric instead of H2: https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/stories/battery-or-fuel-cell-that-is-the-question-5868 https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/stories/battery-or-fu...
- emacsen 3y agoFuel cells are not a good solution for small vehicles now, but I think there's an argument to be made fr their use in trucking, where electric vehicles don't make economic sense due to battery weight, poor range, long recharge times, and currently poor towing capacity. While hydrogen is expensive to produce, difficult to store, and less efficient in transfer than electrochemical batteries, I suspect they'd be a good technology for large fleets of trucks due to weight and range. Fuel cells can also be made to run on natural gas, which might end up being a good stop-gap, as we already have a strong natural gas production infrastructure and despite its downsides, it's far easier to store than hydrogen.
- armada651 3y agoMost hydrogen is already produced using natural gas as a stop-gap. So making a hydrogen truck operate on gas is just cutting out the middle man.
- more_corn 3y agoWait so hydrogen is just petroleum with extra steps? Was this whole thing a scam by the oil industry?
- MobiusHorizons 3y agoThe cheapest way to produce hydrogen today does indeed involve methane as the starting material, but the promise of hydrogen was that there is a clear path to producing hydrogen from renewables. We can easily do it today, it’s just currently more expensive. If you think of hydrogen like just the energy storage / transport mechanism this isn’t any different than electric infrastructure, where electricity can be produced by fossil fuels or greener alternatives. Lots of people get upset at hydrogen for this reason, but I really don’t think it is warranted. The real reasons to be upset with hydrogen are the various impracticalities with the infrastructure and storage. Hydrogen leaks out of solid metal tanks because the atom is so small, and it has to be kept under enormous pressure because it doesn’t liquefy without cryogenic temperatures. There is no reason that I know of to assume these practicality concerns will ever be solved for car sized applications.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoExactly. It's a very cynical play by oil and gas companies collaborating with car manufacturers. The play here is to get paid to "study" the obvious (it won't ever be profitable to produce these things) while delaying the inevitable (demise of the oil and gas industry and its dependent ICE car manufacturing business). The oil companies are also doing this because the goto method of producing hydrogen involves large amounts of gas. Much larger than would be used if you burned the gas directly in a combustion engine. So, they are getting subsidized to produce more gas while shedding crocodile tears over global warming and green washing their business. Toyota has very reluctantly produced more EVs in the last year than the total amount of hydrogen cars it has ever produced. That number is in the lower tens of thousands spread over a decade. Their EV production numbers aren't very good either but it absolutely dwarfs their hydrogen car production numbers. And soon on a quarterly and eventually even monthly basis. Toyota of course is by far the most enthusiastic hydrogen car proponent. They can't shut up talking about it and are flogging that dead horse at every opportunity they have to explain why they are so far behind producing EVs. But for all their talk about hydrogen, they are not lifting a finger to actually scale hydrogen car production. Because it doesn't make any economical sense whatsoever. Never has. They know this very well. Because they've been "studying" this topic for decades. They know everything there is to know about the viability of hydrogen cars. That's the whole reason the number of vehicles is so pathetically low. The number is the absolute bare minimum needed to grab the subsidies. Per vehicle, the subsidies are orders of magnitude the sales price of the car. Which is typically far below cost price. Producing hydrogen car has never been profitable. The game here is to minimize the money lost producing these things while maximizing the subsidies grabbed.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoIf only Toyota were as dumb as Ford and volunteered to lose $60k per EV. Now that would be economic sense. Now, let's not blame ourselves. It was the people we voted for who gave Toyota money to do nothing. Not us.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoPutting valid industry applications aside, consumer hydrogen was always just a FUD just slow down prevent EV adoption and PHEV use by the petroleum companies. It sucks because it should be a valid path for lots of things, but the grey black blue was all a bullshit screen for methane sales in perpetuity.
- emodendroket 3y agoThey're going to have to pay people to take those Mirais at the rate things are going.
- standeven 3y agoWow, you weren’t kidding. I just checked Autotrader and low-ish mileage 2017 Mirais start at $6k. Business idea: buy Mirais, pull out and sell the H2 systems, and drop in battery packs to make them BEVs.
- RandomWorker 3y agoRetrofit would be between 15-20k a piece, are you able to sell them for 30-40k? Where’s the profit?
- LoganDark 3y agoI think you'd have to lift the entire cabin in order to fit a big enough battery underneath it. Still, not quite outside the realm of possibility. Sillier things have been done by individuals before.
- dhahlen 3y agoIf you look at cutaways of the hydrogen vehicles, there is an enormous amount of space used for tanks and the fuel cell etc. The battery layout could be closer to that of a Polestar 2 rather than the more common 'skateboard' battery pack. Not that it would be an easy project!
- AgentK20 3y agoSo they're going to pay back the subsidies they took from the various governments that they received in exchange for opening those stations.....right?
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoNo, they proved they're good people by promising hydrogen, and the government is very pleased when good people receive public monies. if they actually deliver on their promise, that's just extra gravy. industry has signalled very clearly that it doesn't like strings attached to its money, and legislators have listened
- bawolff 3y agoPart of R&D is taking what works and abandoning what doesn't. Requiring companies to commit to a path forever in order to get a subsidiary is counter productive. We want companies to make green solutions that actually work. That requires trying things that might not work out in the end. We don't want them to continue an experiment if it is obviously not working just because the initial stage was gov funded.
- xg15 3y agoDid the government actually declare the plan over or did independent studies actually show it didn't work? The problem is who decides whether a solution works or doesn't work? Because the goals of the general public, government and private companies may not necessarily be aligned here. Taking the govt subsidiary is submitting to the government's goals in that regard - so if the company drops out again because that project isn't conductive to its own goals, that's all fine, but it should indeed pay back the subsidiaries.
- throwaway11460 3y agoSubsidies typically have rules, such as "will employ X people for Y years" or "will provide the service for X years". Subsidies are also very often paid out after the fact, but even if not, this is a very easy court case (probably not even that - just administer a fine). So if they're closing down now, it's very likely because the date has passed and they met all requirements. (I have experience with subsidies, though in EU)
- fgsfds028374 3y agoThe more I learned about H2 the less excited I became. The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.
- amarant 3y agoI think hydrogen has a place as a energy source, but cars are not it. There are some projects aiming to use it for steel production for example, and in a few areas where batteries aren't feasible, such as long distance flights. But hydrogen never had a chance at competing with batteries where batteries are an option. In part due to energy inefficiencies in it's production(I'm assuming green hydrogen, since otherwise, What's the point)
- pfdietz 3y agoHydrogen (or a related e-fuel made from hydrogen) is likely essential for a fully renewable grid, especially at high latitude. Not much of the total energy flow would go through hydrogen, but replacing that component with overprovisioning or batteries could be very very expensive. The hydrogen would be stored underground as a compressed gas, not as liquid. Done right, the energy of compression would be (mostly) recovered when the hydrogen was burned in a turbine.
- more_corn 3y agoThat story doesn’t make any goddamned sense.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt's not difficult to understand. The mismatch between supply and demand is a function of time whose Fourier transform has components at various frequencies. There will be a strong component around 1 per 24 hours, which batteries will be good for, but there will also be much longer period components (seasonal, or from rare extended solar and wind combined outages, so called "Dunkelflauten"). Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) are well suited to the latter. For those storage needs, round trip efficiency is far less important compared to minimizing the per energy storage capacity capital cost. That's because there will be many fewer cycles over which to amortize the latter (while the contribution of round trip efficiency to levelized cost of storage is not so affected.) The per energy storage capacity cost of hydrogen is two orders of magnitude less than that of batteries. To see this effect in action, go to https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ and get it to solve for the minimum cost combination of solar, wind, batteries and hydrogen to supply a steady power output in Germany. Then, disable hydrogen and solve again. The cost nearly doubles.
- fmajid 3y agoShell took a busy station next to my old office at South Park, San Francisco, out of commission for 6 months to install hydrogen pumps. Six months of forgone revenues, installation costs for likely no actual new revenues as most of those 2K registered hydrogen vehicles are owned by the state of California.
- ajb 3y agoIn countries where there is a natural gas network, in theory you could co-transport hydrogen with mixed the methane, and pay around 1% energy cost to extract pure hydrogen (assuming a 20% hyrogen mix). That seems to me to be the simplest way to deploy hydrogen infrastructure - you don't need to build much, and people are already looking at mixing the hydrogen into the natural gas anyway to reduce CO2 output. Eventually you switch over to pure hydrogen and drop the natural gas, saving the extraction cost. But that 1% energy cost is assuming thermodynamically optimal extraction. I don't know how close we get in practice. (I doubt it would be safe to actually have a hydrogen gas pump at everyone's house, either, even if there is a gas line going there, although it would be kind of cool)