earthman34 t1_j57p89v wrote on January 20, 2023 at 11:50 PM

Reply to comment by stivo in The race to make diesel engines run on hydrogen by FDuquesne

The price will not drop. It will increase.

stivo t1_j57rqkm wrote on January 21, 2023 at 12:08 AM

Hydrogen will definitely drop. When they make it at scale it'll be heaps cheaper.

earthman34 t1_j589xc5 wrote on January 21, 2023 at 2:28 AM

You have no clue how markets work. As soon as there's demand, the price will increase, not go down...in the same way the price of electricity is increasing even as more and more wind and solar comes online. "Make it at scale"...how? By cracking it from hydrocarbon? This is not only not green, it creates more carbon than just burning the natural gas. This is the only "at scale" method that currently exists. Increasing the scale doesn't decrease the refining cost, because the energy cost doesn't change. It takes around 33kwh per kilogram using electrolysis. A kilogram of hydrogen is like a gallon of gas. Hydrogen is currently around 5-6 times the cost of gasoline here in the US, without even beginning to delve into the difficulties of storing, transporting, and figuring out how to actually get it into a car. It's a red herring.

stivo t1_j58rvtf wrote on January 21, 2023 at 5:05 AM

You are so confident and so wrong. I am not going to waste any more time on this conversation. Look up Dunning Kruger effect.

earthman34 t1_j5c1q9r wrote on January 21, 2023 at 10:28 PM

I suspect you're leaving the conversation because you can't prove me wrong. Here's what I suggest: go buy yourself a tank of hydrogen, hook it up to your car and get it to run, and then devise a method to refill this quickly and conveniently. Do this, and then come back here and continue the discussion about the practicality of hydrogen as a combustion fuel.

But before you go to all that trouble, let me give you just a little fyi. You see, unlike you, I've actually worked with this shit in the past doing plastic brushing. I've actually handled hydrogen. The stuff is violently explosive, extremely flammable and completely odorless and colorless. It also burns with no visible flame. Leaks are about impossible to detect. A standard size 300 steel compressed gas tank is about 5 ft tall and about 10 inches in diameter and weighs about 132 lb. At 300 bar (4500 PSI) this tank will hold maybe a kilogram of hydrogen. A kilogram of hydrogen is equal to about a gallon of gasoline in pure energy. So you can start to get some kind of idea just how much hydrogen you would actually need to drive your car even a short distance assuming you could devise a system to deliver it... Which I'm assuming wouldn't be too difficult because it would be similar to the natural gas delivery systems which are in fairly wide use in the trucking industry right now, and which have been around for decades. I actually had a van years ago with a dual-fuel CNG conversion. Total pain in the ass. Huge tank hanging underneath gave a range of maybe 120 miles. Only one place in town to fill it, 20 miles away. Took it all off and threw it away. So there you go. There's your Dunning-Kruger epic.