• makeasnek@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t understand how hydrogen didn’t win the race. Transports and explodes just like gasoline. Make car go fast. Doesn’t degrade like lithium. Can be “mined” by throwing electricity at water during times of excess generation by renewables. When you burn it, it turns into water. Has none of the national security concerns of distribution of lithium mining and production in other countries.

    • jabjoe@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      Hydrogen for cars is a nonsense. It is so inefficient. Unless you are making it from oil, which why the oil companies are pushing it, you lose loads of energy making it. Then it has to storages and transported, which is hard. Then the car use of it is inefficient too.

      So ignoring the oil industries’ “blue hydrogen”, and looking only at “green hydrogen”, you are looking at about 22% of the energy generated ending up pushing the car forward! With an EV it is about 73%. So hydrogen car are over 3 times more expensive to run.

      Plus you can just plug in an EV anywhere. With an EV, if need be, you can charge, slowly, off a normal home socket. Of course, normally, you fit faster charging at home.

      Hydrogen cars is lie pushed by big oil.

      • Sonori@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, i think it may have some use for fleet vehicles like taxis and long range buses because these are applications where being able to refill in minutes at a fuel depo you already run actually matters as compared to the stress you would put on a large battery fast charging day in day out. I also believe that Japan has a nuclear plant that is being built with the capacity to efficacy generate hydrogen directly. That being said, for personal vehicles I can’t really see the market of people who need that fast of a refil being large enough to reach the economies of scale necessary to be practical.

        • shrugal@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Afaik it has a higher energy density than common batteries, so it could be useful in things like aviation where this is the main concern and you can build special infrastructure to support it.

          The frustrating thing is that a car running on hydrogen works really well, has a pretty long range and can be refueled quickly, so it looks like a good alternative. It’s only when you ask how that hydrogen was made and how it arrived at the refueling station that things start to fall appart.

        • Litron3000@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Yes, but turning electricity into hydrogen doesn’t have 100% efficiency, during transport, storage and filling the car with hydrogen you lose some of it and only then you get to the fuel cell, which isn’t very efficient in itself. And then you lose a bit more (although very little) in the electric motor. All this amounts to the 22% of the guy above (didn’t check the number btw, but it sounds plausible)

    • royal_starfish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You can use liquified hydrogen which need to be chilled and insulated, and will evaporate away in a short time if not properly sealed

      Or you use compressed hydrogen which means you are basically carrying an IED that weighs several hundred kilograms with the amount of pressure inside the gas tank

      And hydrogen combustion is as others have said, inefficient.

      Another issue is that you also need to use basically pure oxygen if you want to use a hydrogen fuel cell, otherwise the catalyst inside the cell would get poisoned

      And well, there is a car that did all that, the Toyota Mirai, but that also pretty much ended in commercial failure, due to lack of hydrogen filling infrastructure and a whole load of other reasons.

    • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      You need green energy to produce climate friendly hydrogen. This is a LOT more inefficient than to just use that green energy directly in EVs. Thus green hydrogen is also expensive and most importantly it is needed in the industry. It’s the same with e-fuels.

    • Lintson@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Hydrogen currently doesn’t produce, store or transport well. This means it is not as economical as gasoline.

      Not really a fan of lithium batts either. We’re going to end up with some environmental problems down the line but its the most economically viable tech we have at present if we’re intending on living the way we currently live.

    • the_sisko@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      As I understand it, the big issue is energy density? A tank of gasoline takes you quite far compared to an equivalent tank of hydrogen.

      And don’t get me wrong, lithium batteries are super bad at this too, but I do think that has been a limiting factor for H cars.

      And then there’s the whole tire dust issue which is definitely a conversation worth having.

        • the_sisko@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, but they require somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds of batteries to do so. Some of the more egregious ones need multiple thousands, e.g. the electric hummer whose battery alone is heavier than an ICE Honda Civic. Whereas a dozen gallons of gasoline (roughly 72lbs at 6lb/gal) can power that same ICE Civic for a nearly equivalent range, while causing much less wear & tear on the roads, and likely releasing less tire particulates due to the reduced weight. Of course it still releases CO2 and other nasties…

          But yeah, the energy density of EVs is still super bad. It’s just “good enough” that we’re making it work.

    • TheWheelMustGoOn@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Because right now we don’t have that much excess energy… Therefore it’s just a waste of energy to use it, because it is way less efficient. AND on top of it an hydrogen car also needs a battery just a smaller one. So it has all the downsides without any upsides. The only upside is that you can recharge your car faster and it has some more range. But both those things don’t matter for the average consumer

    • Overshoot2648@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It makes sense for long haul trucking and aviation vs batteries, at least for now, but it doesn’t scale well for most common consumer vehicles. Any hydrogen vehicle needs to be a hybrid because there isn’t the fine tune fuel ratio control you get on traditional gasoline.

    • nucleative@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think any average person would know of these advantages. So theres a general lack of education about the topic.

      There is also a hydrogen refueling network problem to overcome. Before public electric charging stations existed, electric people could charge at home and install their own chargers where required so the electric industry has been able to partially side step that issue at the beginning.

      Finally I think it just doesn’t seem sexy. To a casual bystander it’s like gas in, pay, then drive as usual.

    • foreverandaday@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      probably because of infrastructure. electric charging stations were one of the first around and if you ask a new car buyer to choose between two renewable fuel sources, they’ll chose the one with the most stations. In the US at lease, hydrogen stations have always been few and far between, and often quite pricey.