Technology

Hydrogen was the future in the 90s, when the alternative was lead acid batteries. Nowadays hydrogen fuel cell cars don't actually top the charts on range, battery EVs have taken the crown.

Hydrogen promised to be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels. You still needed big industry to make and distribute it, you still needed filling stations to sell it to end users, you still took your car somewhere to fill it up. Everyone could just keep doing their thing. But it was going to be so expensive to switch over that everyone dragged their heels and kept using fossil fuels, so now we're entering the post-hydrogen car era without it ever arriving.

If we'd had hydrogen fuel cell cars 30 years ago, today we'd have manufacturers putting bigger batteries and charging plugs on them to make plug-in hybrids and move away from expensive hydrogen.

Hydrogen will be a big chunk of the future but probably not in cars, or generally car-sized vehicles, unless we're talking stuff like catastrophe relief (and with that ambulances, fire trucks etc) because it's a good idea to be able to fuel those things even if the grid is down.

We'll need hydrogen infrastructure and production anyways for steel smelting as well as the chemical industry, those are things that just don't run on electricity, no way. With that in place hydrogen is going to be available pretty much all over, similar to how you get natural gas anywhere nowadays. And then you have an unelectrified railway somewhere, electrifying it would cost a fortune and not amortise, but a fuel cell locomotive? Sounds easy and reasonable. Flow batteries are also an option in that kind of operation but you really need a lot of space to get power output from those so they wouldn't work for an ambulance.

So if you're a car manufacturer with your head screwed on right you're probably not developing and selling hydrogen cars now because they believe they're the future, you're doing that to have affluent liberals pay for your ticket to play in the future market of hydrogen utility vehicles.

Also of note: European car manufacturers at least seem to be completely fine with there being fewer cars on the streets. First, they can also make money off building public transport infrastructure and running car shares, secondly, cheap everyday cars aren't that profitable, if the cars they then do get to sell are fancy with high profit margin that's completely fine with them. Their suppliers care even less, a seat manufacturer doesn't care whether the seat ends up in a car or a train.

Because batteries suck for any application where weight (ie. energy density) matters. Running long haul semis off batteries is not a super practical thing. Even with consumer cars, there are people for whom hydrogen will be a better fit.

Basically we've been in a world where the happy medium of energy density and efficiency (gasoline) was used for everything. Now we likely need to split those things up into what energy density is more important for, and what energy efficiency is more important for.

Yea it’s such a weird direction to go right night. Manufacturing and delivery of hydrogen for fuel cells is complex, expensive, and poses some unique dangers with the temps and pressure of the hydrogen. It’s cleaner, assuming manufacturing of the hydrogen uses green energy, but right now most energy production isn’t green.

It has its advantages but some pretty big disadvantages too. I don’t think it’s the way to go just yet. Maybe eventually but not today I don’t think.

The problem we have is energy density. Gasoline is pretty damn dense energy-wise. Storing 20-30 gallons of gas in a tank That's easy and safe to refill is hard to replace.

Lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries are slow to refill.

Hydrogen is kind of neat. You can make it from splitting water with solar or nuclear. It's also a byproduct of the oil industry. And you can fill a tanker up or even an entire train and move fuck ton of hydrogen from one place to another. You can pipe it, people can generated for themselves and get a byproduct of pure oxygen.

But alas, it's still hydrogen. Give it access to the air in a little bit of fire and it makes a big boom. The infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and we're not swimming so much and renewables then it makes sense to bottle it up and sell it to people.

That's it of course isn't it the hydrogen is generated through fracking so they're just trying to maintain the existing business model.

That alone is the reason that no one should have ever paid attention to it. It wasn't ever intended to actually work it was supposed to just look like it might work so that they would continue to get some money.