this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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Every post about hydrogen gets a negative reaction, like someone has proposed using coal to power cars.
There are different suitable applications for different types of energy, it's not a situation where you have to pick one solution and that's it. I notice the same happens to some degree with posts about nuclear power.
Hydrogen has potential in things like shipping, aviation, trains and industry. Even if the exact concept in the article doesn't work, the lessons learned might advance technology in other projects.
The negative reaction comes from the fact that most hydrogen is produced by an energy intensive process that uses steam to crack petroleum products, and oil companies like BP have invested millions in greenwashing it to sound good.
I understand there is green hydrogen and blue hydrogen and considered adding a paragraph on that in my comment, but didn't.
I know most hydrogen isn't green, but there isn't a reason it couldn't be some day.
It makes some sense to me to use the currently more economically viable blue hydrogen in developing technology, but I do agree it is far from perfect.
Considering all this, I still think the negativity to hydrogen progress isn't proportional.
This is why the negativity is not proportional enough… why are the oil companies pushing for this? It’s not so the wind and solar farms can split water in the future and cut them out of the equation, it’s to delay BEV adoption and try to create a future where they are needed to supplement the horrible efficiencies of hydrogen production, and the need to transport it all over the world.
None of these companies are trying to be altruistic, they are actively destroying the environment and buying influence, to continue making money by doing it.
Batteries are more efficient, more energy dense, cheaper, last for decades and can be 97+% recycled after those decades of service to produce batteries that are even more efficient.
Hydrogen has lost the battle for transport power.
I will cheer any Hydrogen progress that is not attempting to be applied to something that already has a greener alternative.
I think it’s the knowledge that hydrogen tech is being pushed so hard by the oil lobbies because it’s currently most cheaply made by refining it out of oil using massive amounts of electricity which they can generate by burning more oil.
The astroturfing of hydrogen as a green fuel is disgusting, and straight out of the “Natural gas” playbook that got it piped to virtually every home in the western world over the last 200 years.
I replied to the person above you who made essentially the same comment.
I understand that part and somewhat agree, but still think progress is cool. Especially in a futurology post.
I'll agree that learning how to better work with and contain hydrogen could have some future benefits, and research should absolutely be made in those directions. Until those key issues are dealt with, hydrogen isn't useful as a consumer energy source/store since it has been surpassed by batteries/electricity in almost every area it would be useful (and isn't mature enough to be competitive in the areas it hasn't been surpassed),
The "problem" is that hydrogen is an extremely complicated way for some people to save like 40 minutes per year over charging an EV in a handful of very specific circumstances, which really highlights just how fucked we actually are in terms of direct climate action.
Like, as it stands an EV already means you get to wake up every morning with a fueled vehicle instead of needing to divert to a disgusting gas station every other week. The only circumstance where charging time is an issue is on long trips, where it adds roughly 20 minutes for 4 hours traveled. and we are supposed to believe that the solution to this is handling a pressurized gas which readily defuses through solid steel containment vessels? Because that is somehow the solution to the one trip per year you take which requires highway charging? The information space here is literally "owning an EV means you can only watch 137 reruns of House in 2025 instead of 138," but you actually think people are going to be fine with an 800psi hydrogen tank which leaks at a rate of $1 per day?
If you only want to talk about EVs, current technology and specific circumstances, sure.