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Hydrogen vehicles in Denmark left without fuel as all commercial refuelling stations shuttered
(www.hydrogeninsight.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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This is my main problem with hydrogen cars. I think it's a very cool concept that might eventually overtake pure electric cars but there's almost no places to get hydrogen yet.
It isn't going to overtake electric cars, too inefficient.
But it might be the future for airplanes, which need a lot more energy density.
Specifically density by weight. By volume, which is more important to cars, hydrogen also loses.
Yes also cargo ships and possibly American sized semi trucks. Although semis are right on border of battety vs hydrogen.
"American sized?"
There are semis all over the world...
Yean but aren't the trucks in america large. I have seen memes making fun american semi compared to smaller loris.
The problem with long distance airliners though is that the turbofan powered engine has such a huge power output that is only possible using a turbine.
It also requires dedicated infrastructure. EVs can have charging stations at basically anywhere with a power hookup (or a genset. A grocery store here puts small VAWTs to charge off of in their parking lots. And every new-ish building has added charging stations to some of their spaces.
Hydrogen cars would need refueling stations with dedicated pressurized gas hookups, tanks, and fill machines. And the tanks and the tankers to keep the tanks full.
Finally the ultimate problem is it’s rather low energy density.
And all that infrastructure is a problem that doesn’t need solving with EVs. An entire industry we don’t need to build/rebuild
I thought hydrogen had the highest energy density, like it's #1 in that metric.
By mass, sure, but not by volume; and that usually doesn’t take into account the mass of the tanks, and hydrogen is rather difficult to keep from leaking.
In cars we’re more concerned about volume than mass, in which it performs very low- aluminum as a fuel actually leads that (but is … impractical…)
For cars, amonia would be the better choice and can be synthesized at home fairly easily. It’s still fairly low energy, though. About the same as hydrogen
Something else no one has said yet (I think) is that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, so this is in no way a climate solution. It's been sold as one and it's bullshit.
While producing hydrogen from natural gas is cheaper, this company claims to produce it with electrolysis
But IMHO at the moment is a waste of energy
Yes but not for long.
As (generally climate denying) people love to point out, wind and solar is erratic power generation. For this reason you need triple capacity Vs requirements.
This means that for a huge amount of time you'll have excess energy, once we start to be predominantly renewables, battery storage is expensive. One of the solutions is to create hydrogen, also pumped hydrogen, etc.
The ones in Denmark were green hydrogen, made from water electrolysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production
That is irrelevant to the topic.
The reason why hydrogen is produced by steam reforming is because natural gas is cheap and is needed to produce ammonia. In Norway where there is plenty of cheap electricity from hydroelectric, there is hydrogen production via electrolysis.
The advantage of hydrogen as fuel is that can be used to decarbonise things like ships, and possibly things like branch rail lines, and planes. Passenger vehicle is probably the least attractive application, but somewhat lower capital investment than a green hydrogen plant on a industrial scale.
However this can only make sense if electricity is cheap i.e. if they are running with waste electricity from renewables.
in theory yes, in practice no
Okay but you have to use electricity to do that and currently you’re generating carbon by producing the electricity.
It’s not a solution.
The same is true of electric vehicles right now
Why do you think it'll overtake electric cars? The energy efficiency of hydrogen cars is significantly worse, as they introduce some extra steps in pipeline of energy-generation -> movement.
The only major advantage they have is "ICE-like" fuelling, which has a bunch of major caveats attached to it (as in: it's nowhere near as simple a system as ICE refuelling. Everything from generation, to transport to getting-it-in-the-car is way more complex and thus expensive and error-prone).
Wait getting in the car is more complex?
I hadn't thought of it before but it's obvious, hydrogen is a gas at room temperature, it had to be stored under pressure in order to get any significant mass into the volume of a tank. So it's under pressure in the refueling station and in the car's tank. How does it get from one to the other without boiling away?
Hydrogen is a gas, under very high pressure but you will never find it in a liquid form unless you cool it down to -250 C or so. It's not used in liquid form for such applications.
There is though the need to chill the hydrogen to about -20/-40C before delivery to the vehicles due to some anomalous properties of hydrogen respect to ever other gas known to humans.
oh there are a few ways. One group is researching turning H2 into a paste. the paste mixes with water and breaks down into water and Ca+ ions. You now have a energy density around liquid hydrogen and it only add some calcium to the exhaust. There is also storing hydrogen in metal disks.
They're still electric cars at their base. They just use a hydrogen reactor in lieu of a battery to power the motors.
I don't see a future where hydrogen supplants electric cars, unless there's some revolution in storage technology for it. In that case, progress in battery tech is more likely.
Is there even a possibility of better storage tech for hydrogen? It's not like batteries where you can use different elements in the battery out of different things. It has to store hydrogen. The processes surrounding that can be made more efficient, but the storage is just a physical limitation, not chemical.
not really. It's a gas. and a really low density one at that. physics is a bitch
I don't think there is, but I also gave up on predicting the future a while ago.
I dunno, everything I've always seen on it made it seem like a hyper-specific solution that's more suited to a few edge cases that could have their specific infrastructure.
For the average consumer, the recharging of EVs is actually Not A Big Deal™️. It seemed like one at first. Now all it does is ensure I take hourly short breaks which I should have been doing anyways, basically. The only big upside of Hydrogen is the ability to refill very quickly, but you pay with a whole bunch of downsides like inefficient generation, inefficient transportation, secondary infrastructure, energy inefficiency, etc.
You also can’t fill up at home!
Hydrogen also only manages fast refills with a break between vehicles. If you try and fill a lot of cars in a row like gas pumps do, you have to wait much longer while it compresses and cools the hydrogen.
So the number of hydrogen pumps you need to support fuel cell EVs winds up being similar to the number of fast chargers BEVs need, and hydrogen pumps are very expensive.
Those "edge cases" are major industrial processes that drive the modern industrial economy. Like steel making and ammonia production.
Another problem to the already mentioned ones (expensive, expensive dedicated infrastructure needed) is the range. Hydrogen is not very energy dense. For example the Toyota Mirai has a range of 500 km (310 miles) and its a pretty big, fuel-efficient car and the fuel storage is as big as the vehicle allows it.
So while you can refuel faster than electric, you need to do it more frequently and its less convenient.
What's wrong with that range? It's bigger than my bladder.
Just spitballing here, please pretend I'm some rando on the Internet and not some kind of expert.
On its own, there's not much wrong with it. It takes a little longer to fill than a normal gas dispenser, but not bad. But you'll still need to put hydrogen fuel stations everywhere similar to gas stations now.
Hydrogen's biggest competitor is pure electric. I love my EV in part because I can charge at home. There's just something really nice about waking up to a full battery every day, and realizing you haven't been to a gas station in months (I have an ICE as well, but it's not my daily driver). Having to go to a fueling station every week or so again would feel like a big step backward, especially if we need to create a from-scratch infrastructure for it. We already have power lines pretty much everywhere, and can generate power relatively easily, so much of the hard part is done.
Going back to range: in theory this problem could be alleviated if the range were enough that one had to refuel less often, but going through all that trouble to be in a similar situation to what you've had, when a better alternative exists? Nah.
500km is pretty close to the typical range for gas vehicles(500-600 usually).
The XLE does 410 miles. Few electric vehicle can touch that and EV ranges decline over time so almost no EV that's more than a couple years old could match it.
Same problem with gas waaaaay back in the day.
True, but "gas" is not a gas in the way that hydrogen is a gas. Hydrogen presents some unique storage and distribution issues.