Submitted by Sorin61 t3_z90dii in technology
BallardRex t1_iyefrdq wrote
Reply to comment by DBDude in The days of the hydrogen car are already over by Sorin61
Hydrogen in a car makes zero sense, and never did. At that point using renewables to make growth medium for algae diesel would make more sense, but all of that was before the modern electric car proved itself. Now the only question is how we want to power our grid, and accepting that the greener we make it, the better off we’ll be. The grid is going to be the source of power for consumer and some commercial vehicles, not tanks of fuel on board.
pickleer t1_iyf7833 wrote
The hydrogen hype comes from Big Oil/Gas trying to pivot to a similar fuel-delivery model and so maintain their incomes/power. Ammonia might make sense if the part that cracks off the nitrogen progresses to the point of viability. Until then, hydrogen will make some sense for 18 wheelers and larger applications like trains and industry.
itchyeyeballs2 t1_iyekxwo wrote
Isn't there also the question of battery manufacturing as well?
Supplying all the stuff that goes into them isn't great for the environment.
lonewolf420 t1_iyen8jt wrote
ownership of a BEV after 1.5 years of ownership is less damaging as a manufacturing and energy use case compared to ICE. Studies have been done on this yet people will still bring up "but mining is bad!" yea we know we just want to do it for resources that won't continue to be worse while we figure out recycling of batteries which can be profitable for their rare earth metals like nickel and cobalt.
Hydrogen was a non-starter simply on the infrastructure side, both generating it (little known fact that 95% of hydrogen is made by steam forming liquid natural gas a byproduct of the hydrocarbon refining cycle) and shipping/storage are not very useful unless you are talking about using it for flight both rockets/airplanes need high impulse energy along with high weight restraints that make batteries not a good energy source.
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>Supplying all the stuff that goes into them isn't great for the environment.
Neither is Hydrogen in its current state, so what's your point? some far off future where we can store liquid hydrogen at room temperatures in some un-obtainium vessel when we have working fusion reactors?
itchyeyeballs2 t1_iyep99q wrote
My point was just that powering the grid is not the only consideration.
Battery tech is still messy and limited IMO, we still need a step change in the capabilities which may or may not come.
lonewolf420 t1_iyes795 wrote
Less messy and limited than hydrogen without the handwaving of electrolysis which isn't how 95% of hydrogen is produced. Hydrogen has its place, but not for cars IMO I think its a foolcell where people like to pretend its green but never look into how hydrogen is actually produced to be consumed. If you really look into it, hydrogen used for making "green steel" is often the only place you find electrolysis used at an industrial scale to get the "green" title, everywhere else just uses oil refining byproduct hydrogen when they crack liquid natural gas by the steam forming processes.
At the end of the day, mining for energy and resources still happens with consumer vehicles hydrogen or otherwise and to try and say its more messy to build EVs than hydrogen fuel cells is missing the important fact that hydrogen production is an extra step over just using LNG turbines to generate energy. They then move the goal post saying "well we can use it for energy generation and hybrids/BEVs to transport" and sure it will work but then again why not just use LNG instead of cracking it for hydrogen?
We would also still need to mine materials to build hydrogen cars, so just because it doesn't use rare earths which are already trying to be squeezed out of the battery cell supply chain due to cost? what/how exactly does hydrogen fuel cells benefit from less resource intensive mining or less limited? I feel like hydrogen is more limited due to not being a significant part of our infrastructure and how capital intensive it would be to add it in beyond just renewable energy generation excess storage of which there are plenty of other methods of less complexity.
BallardRex t1_iyelftn wrote
The damage to the environment resulting from extraction of REE isn’t an existential issue in the way that greenhouse gasses are.
itchyeyeballs2 t1_iyemujj wrote
Sure but how we power our grid isn't the only question.
I also wonder what effect battery life and potentially needing to scrap cars sooner than ICE versions will have on overall energy consumption.
BallardRex t1_iyen1wz wrote
Cars are already the most recycled thing on Earth, and batteries full of valuable minerals are no exception.
DonQuixBalls t1_iyesivf wrote
Electric drive trains are designed to outlive combustion engines.
doalittletapdance t1_iyexcu0 wrote
Electric drive trains are powered by diesel generators.
You'd have to run power lines along the rails to be able to do away with that. no battery is going to run a train the distance those things move
DonQuixBalls t1_iyey0s0 wrote
The comment I responded to specifically said cars.
doalittletapdance t1_iyf6ur3 wrote
Ah ya got me
TheLazyD0G t1_iyeljqb wrote
But the batteries are very recycleable.
The ev fires are another story can take up to 1 montg under water to fully extinguish
rechosuave t1_iyelwk1 wrote
Why not? Basically an ICE design running on hydrogen. Only change is to fuel delivery. Please remind me of how many EVs are in service? Plenty of room at the table for all types of green designs.
raygundan t1_iyep6cv wrote
> Why not?
Thermodynamics, mostly. A hydrogen FCEV ends up using about 3x as much energy for the same miles driven as you would if you used the same energy source to power an EV, no matter what that energy source is. A hydrogen ICE is even less efficient than that.
So there's an efficiency gap that you can't ever get over to begin with that will make hydrogen an unattractive option in any niche where an EV is workable-- so for cars, it's probably too late for hydrogen to find a niche.
But there's also a second complication with hydrogen deployment for cars. EVs were a sort of "self-starting" deployment, because you could sell them as second cars to people even before there were public charging stations. It's rare for a home not to have electricity available. Hydrogen, on the other hand, will require filling station infrastructure just to get started. There's no halfway option like there is with EVs. Sell a few EVs, market for chargers increases, build a few chargers, market for EVs increases, repeat. With hydrogen, you have to have the filling stations built before you can sell the cars at all. Saying "the only change is to fuel delivery" is true-- but that's a huge, expensive change that has to happen before you can sell your first hydrogen car.
None of this should be taken as saying hydrogen will have no uses-- just that it's very unlikely at this point to compete in the personal-vehicle niche.
Enchydrogen t1_iyeqro9 wrote
What are your thoughts on a hydrogen fuel container that can be quickly swapped out for a filled one? I think Toyota is working on this. If this was an option, could charged containers no be delivered or carried on the vehicle for longer trips? Just curious what you think about that concept. Thanks!
raygundan t1_iyesvha wrote
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept that I can see-- it just has the same chicken/egg issue. That infrastructure doesn't yet exist, but you can't sell hydrogen cars that use swappable hydrogen containers until it does.
It also doesn't help at all with the efficiency issue. Making, compressing, and transporting hydrogen ends up losing a rather substantial fraction of the energy you started with. It really doesn't want to be squeezed into tanks at high pressure-- you'll lose roughly 10% of the energy in your hydrogen just compressing it down to fit in the tank, let alone all the other losses.
Enchydrogen t1_iyewp7j wrote
Thanks I appreciate the response. The efficiency of creating it does seem to be an issue but can we look past that if the "price is right" and the advantages of using a green energy are apparent? For example, lets say I could drill down deep enough where I had essentially infinite geothermal energy producing hydrogen and then export it from there, would the efficiency issue even come in to play at that point as long as the transportation costs were low enough to sustain business?
raygundan t1_iyeyggz wrote
> For example, lets say I could drill down deep enough where I had essentially infinite geothermal energy producing hydrogen and then export it from there, would the efficiency issue even come in to play at that point as long as the transportation costs were low enough to sustain business?
All sorts of things start to make sense once you have "essentially infinite energy" from a clean source. When you get to that point, you can even do things like synthesize gasoline from scratch, burn it in hilariously inefficient 1940s race cars built from WWII aircraft engines, and then run a carbon capture system to undo the damage.
But we're not there yet. The efficiency issue still matters because our grid still gets the majority of its energy from dirty sources, so when you look at two options to do a particular job (passenger transport in this case) and one of them needs 3x the energy per mile driven... it's a hard sell. Ask me again when we're on 100% clean energy with some surplus to spare, and it may suddenly make sense despite the huge efficiency hit if somebody can build an FCEV substantially cheaper than an EV.
Enchydrogen t1_iyf03a1 wrote
Efficiency only matters in that case when you are extracting the energy to create the hydrogen from the grid and in my scenario that is not the case. Also, I think it worth mentioning that energy transportation plays a part here. We have never really had an energy medium that can be created anywhere where there is excess energy and transported to where it is needed. I totally get the reinforcement of the inefficiency point but I feel as though if it can be produced in mass, somewhere we have excess energy that cant be power lined to the grid, and transported, it should be used just for the shear abundance of it and the advantages of carbon reduction regardless of efficiency of creation. Let alone the benefit of reliance on foreign powers. Just some thoughts, but I appreciate your feedback.
raygundan t1_iyf0zwp wrote
> Efficiency only matters in that case when you are extracting the energy to create the hydrogen from the grid and in my scenario that is not the case.
Sorta. What you've proposed might not be grid-connected-- but connecting your hypothetical geothermal power plant to the grid is still an option instead of using it to make hydrogen.
But broadly speaking, I'm with you-- if you have excess clean energy that for some combination of reasons cannot be utilized in any other more-efficient way than by shipping it out as hydrogen, go for it!
If somebody suggests to me "what if I build a power plant, don't connect it to the grid, and use that to make hydrogen" my first question is always going to be "what if we connected it to the grid instead?"
Enchydrogen t1_iyf3njl wrote
Totally get that point and the only thing I can think of is (and I'm just spitballing here) something far enough away that you may lose power using traditional power lines to transfer to where its needed. What if the deserts are one of the most unused and underappreciated natural resources on the planet? Essentially becoming "oil fields" with how much they could output in solar hydrogen. No other way to get that energy from the Sahara Desert to my house/truck/airplane to transport it via H2 that I can see. Its a fantasy today, yes but I hope those places in the world that are viewed as desolate and useless can be looked at with new eyes. A desert could be a gold mine.
raygundan t1_iyf791f wrote
> far enough away that you may lose power using traditional power lines to transfer to where its needed.
Certainly possible, but even long-range power transmission has fairly low loss compared to something like producing and shipping hydrogen.
> No other way to get that energy from the Sahara Desert to my house/truck/airplane to transport it via H2 that I can see.
You're basically saying "what if we build in this difficult area" but the difficulty of building the plant and shipping infrastructure there aren't likely to be radically different than the difficulty of connecting it to the grid. One option is going to require a pipeline, road, or rail all the way to this out-of-the-way facility-- and one option is going to require a power line. You're going to have to build "a connection" one way or the other, and it seems like it would take pretty narrow conditions to make a road viable but a power line not.
Enchydrogen t1_iyf95lo wrote
Copy that. Thanks for the insight, man. I am hopeful but I know hydrogen has a long way to go to prove itself. Hopefully it can find a way to solve some of the worlds problems. Cheers, brother and have a good night.
raygundan t1_iyf9g7i wrote
> Hopefully it can find a way to solve some of the worlds problems.
Agreed on that! It's one more option in the toolkit, and just because some of the more obvious niches (cars, for example) are probably better done other ways doesn't mean we won't find good ways to put it to work.
IvorTheEngine t1_iyf0f3d wrote
The problem there is the same reason swappable batteries for EVs never caught on. You'd need all the vehicle manufacturers to agree on a design, and the filling station networks would have to agree to accept each other's old bottles. And that has to still work if you drive from the US into Mexico, or Europe to Asia.
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