this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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Hydrogen is a dead end. Always has been. But a bunch of people are stuck with sunk costs now.
Its just not aiming for the right markets. Its perfect for replacing heavy fuel user where fueling up is already restricted to limited locations like diesel generator trains, massive 18 wheelers and boats, but not for individual car market.
And any number of industrial processes. It's great for smelting steel from ore, for example.
Or injecting into natural gas. Up to 10% hydrogen is generally tolerated.
A green component is better than nothing, I guess.
Hydrogen is already in development in commercial vehicles.
It's already in production in industrial vehicles such as fork lifts.
It would’ve been a great transition from fossil fuel, had we embraced it before EV tech was consumer ready. Now it’s just a step backward.
Hydrogen was never and will never be a viable and efficient transportation fuel
Special exception maybe for aviation and rocketry. But even then, methane (if made using green energy and the Sebatier process).
You can get comparable isp with methalox engines without any of the weight required to keep the hydrogen inside the rocket, right?
Hydrogen ISP is still king by a significant margin, but ISP isn't the whole story -- hydrogen comes with additional tank weight (due to lower density) and storage issues (pesky molecular size...). So that trade-off for ISP only really makes sense for an upper stage like Centaur. I'm not sure it makes sense for New Shepherd even...
Why do you think that? The fuel production side or the fuel consumption side?
Production, consumption, electrolyzer efficiency limits and capital cost, storage problems, fueling problems, transportation problems, pretty much every aspect of this stuff makes it terrible for use as a vehicle fuel. All green hydrogen efforts should be focused on fertilizer production before anything else.
Pshh you haven’t seen the peaks of blimp technology. On May 6th when they launch the Hindenburg we’ll see who gets the last laugh.
Honestly, this is probably the best utility out of FCEB I've seen so far. It was always a dead-end for cars, but for short-term portable uses, this is great. There's actually a HUGE industry around portable butane that could be replaced with something like this.
Recreational, Construction, Culinary, Aviation...imagine replacing all of that with this as a solution, and you've got something. We'd obviously need to see some specs to see if it's possible. It's not going to make as much money as millions of cars on the road, but perhaps useful enough it will get uptake.
Including culinary in there doesn't help your cause.