- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
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That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That’d be my big concern; where tf would you re-fuel it?
There one single hydrogen fuel station in each of the two major cities near me.
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They just announced they’re shutting down some in California.
Most Hydrogen fuel is still made from natural gas. It’s greenwashing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html
And most electricity is still made from fossil fuels. The point is that it doesn’t have to be, unlike gasoline.
Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables
Yup, I think there is a solid argument BEVs will win in the long run (once battery technology improves … all the downsides of BEVs start disappearing rapidly). However, I haven’t ever liked the argument that “most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels” that’s looking too short term.
However, I haven’t ever liked the argument that “most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels” that’s looking too short term.
There’s loads of studies surrounding that. It isn’t expected to change. This because they’re planning to create hydrogen from gas in such amounts that it’ll not cause too much of a change in the percentage of green hydrogen (which is currently as good as non existant).
Hydrogen is also expensive, so it’s pretty difficult to get a factory (e.g. steel factory) to switch to hydrogen.
We will run out of fossil fuels someday. We can also just ban making hydrogen from fossil fuels and then selling it to car manufacturers. Just like with battery demand … you get the demand increased and research will take off from there to find ways to make it cheaper and faster.
Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the “future centuries” sense of the long term things might be different, but in the “we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so” sense it’s a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn’t have enough hydrogen.
It’s basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn’t necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.
My thought is we could feed electrolysis with nuclear, solar, or tidal generation plants to create hydrogen. That doesn’t mean it would be cheap, but maybe it could get us to the quick refill infrastructure we have with gasoline currently that we’re having trouble mirroring with BEVs for long trips.
I haven’t run the math … so if you have or you know a source that has and this is beyond uneconomically feasible (like it would cost $$$$$ for a single “tank of
gashydrogen”), fair enough.For comparison, grey hydrogen currently costs around $2 per kg, and green hydrogen costs around $12 per kg. Filling a Toyota Mirai tank with green hydrogen would cost you about $70. That’s production at today’s electricity prices. The cost to fully charge a Tesla is about $15, same rates.
So for green hydrogen to beat grey hydrogen on the open market, costs need to drop by a factor of 6. And because it can only do this if electricity prices drop off a cliff, it’d be doing this in an environment where you can fully charge a luxury BEV for $3…
Hydrogen is also not the only game in town in terms of competitors with BEV. For those niches where fully battery-operated vehicles aren’t practical, there are also biofuels, which are (from a climate change point of view) greener than green hydrogen anyway (although they have their own controversies).
I don’t think battery tech needs to improve, it will, but I don’t think it needs too.
Prices are going to drop. Will be interesting to see what happens is BYD sets up in Mexico. But lithium for high end cars and sodium for cheap cars I think is enough to push the revolution.
I’ve written about my delima with buying a BEV (beyond the price) a bit already … here’s a link to that https://social.packetloss.gg/comment/1334210
Basically, I do think either the battery technology or the charging infrastructure themselves need a fair bit of improvement before we’ll see the average person adopting them enthusiastically.
As time goes on there will be more chargers and less petrol stations.
What I’m saying is if the price keeps coming down battery tech is good enough today.
Like hypothetically if electric cars were half the price of normal cars and there was 10x as many charging stations you wouldn’t need better battery technology.
But battery tech will get better and cheaper and there will be more charging stations. I get their are issues now.
That’s not true, Gasoline doesn’t have to be made from Fossile fuels either. It’s pretty easy to make actually - there are a number of European companies doing it and with the Co2 Taxes, it will be a viable option by 2028.
Gasoline is made from petroleum.
It is certainly synthesisable by some method without using petroleum. But the person you replied to probably meant Power-to-Gas.
However synthetic or not, burning it produces same gases, which are the problem. Cleaner, but not the end solution.
Biogasoline is a thing, although I’m not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.
Yeah but you can charge EVs with solar panels if you have them installed. Not everybody can make hydrogen for their Toyota Mirais.
We could use wind electricity, instead of stopping the windnturbines when the production gets so high that prices drop…
At some point hopefully we will realize
I think the hydrogen is intended to be sourced from natural gas, which is not a great thing. The only way I see this working in an environmentally sustainable way is an efficient means of solar hydrolysis (much more efficient than photosynthesis).
It’s important to see where the hydrogen is being sourced from. Grey Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is not ideal as you point out.
Green hydrogen is promising however, and comes from electrolyzers. The key there is where the electricity to operate them comes from, but that’s true for electric vehicles as well. It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.
In any case, I think we do want to build out hydrogen infrastructure (and I’m biased since I work in hydrogen energy). The future we’re envisioning is one where solar and wind provide us excesses fairly often. That’s where it’s perfect to run electrolyzers to store the energy as hydrogen.
It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.
Well the idea is that BEV is more efficient with the energy that it gets…
Which I understand…
But what I don’t understand is what part of our usage is actually “efficient” from the get go? Also that ‘extra’ energy we lose to the electrolysis process could easily be made up with extra solar/wind/renewables… and Nuclear without much issue.
Further, desalination mechanisms are desperately needed for our water problem too… Guess what process can help with that… cough totally not electrolysis cough. It’s almost like it’s a win all around… Yet everyone is super against it for one nebulous reason or another… and none of those reasons ever make sense to me.
Considering I have no hydrogen stations within a 100 mile radius, if they give me the car I would only get one tank out of it.
You could fill the tank with the hot air from the pro-hydrogen crowd.
We must compress them first
I would assume this falls into the “you couldn’t pay me” category for most people.
I don’t have a single hydrogen station here in Michigan. (There might be one in Detroit.) Meanwhile, I can plug in my electric car at home, or go to a public charger 10 miles away. Hydrogen’s good as dead. At least to me, anyway.
Hydrogen was as good as dead for years because compressing it is so wasteful
We had one in my town until it closed down 3 years ago. Now the nearest one to me is a 90 mile round trip away.
Hydrogen definitely feels like a fad which has had its moment.
I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you’re driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don’t have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren’t doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn’t need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Granted, the oil company only had seven to begin with (five of which had been out of order), but that still represents more than 10% of the Golden State’s stations, nearly all of which are clustered around Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Just don’t tell Honda, which recently found the time to convert its best-selling CR-V into an automotive equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster: a plug-in hybrid, fuel-cell vehicle.
The crossover’s 17.7 kWh battery provides 29 miles of electric-only range, and once that’s spent, the front-mounted fuel cell starts sipping hydrogen from a pair of carbon-fiber tanks.
Now, hydrogen has great potential as a fuel source for many parts of a carbon-free economy, from industrial heat to steel production and long-distance shipping.
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
If today’s hydrogen startups succeed, and if they’re able to build enough capacity to satiate industrial and shipping demand, then it might make sense to start selling fuel-cell vehicles to the masses.
The original article contains 810 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
How expensive would it be to re-fit as a chargeable hybrid?
The ones at the Washington state border are actually in Canada. I’d love to see hydrogen take off, not necessarily take over. But that’s the car enthusiasts in me and seeing all the new technologies. Doubt I’ll see it in my working career.
This podcast episode strong critiques the technical challenges, lifecycle costs, and market effort of hydrogen. I was hydro-curious before this, but it really seems unfeasible.
The chemical engineer being interviewed, Paul Martin, has been working with hydrogen for years.
Paul Martin is a Canadian chemical engineer with decades of experience making and using hydrogen and syngas. As a chemical process development specialist, Paul offers services to an international clientele via his private consultancy Spitfire Research. He is also co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a nonprofit organization providing science-based information about hydrogen from a position free from commercial interest
From really long term hydrogen makes a lots of sense, much more than Li-* batteries. There is no need for digging up rare earth metals, H2 is a byproduct of creating graphene and various processes can create it. Also filling up liquid hydrogen takes still less, than any charging available. And IMO it can be much cleaner than any other technology on horizon currently. Only more effective but not necessarily cleaner are the plans for small nuclear power plants.
Hydrogen makes loads of sense at the point we have huge amounts of excess electrical energy. Until that point it’s just too inefficient compared to alternatives.
Crash it and you have your own private Hindenburg.
Not really. Hindenburg had hydrogen at air pressure.
Pressurised hydrogen tends to fail in a much safer way (or just not fail). A regular fossil fuel car fire is much worse.
The thing is you’re not just burning hydrogen (or gas). You’re also burning oxygen in the atmosphere and how bad the fire is depends how the gas mixes with the oxygen. The mix has to be just right or it won’t burn at all (Hindenburg was just right).
Gasoline tends to burn quite slowly which is particularly catastrophic as it generates heat over a long time which causes everything else in the car to also catch fire, while still burning fast enough that you might not be able to escape the car before it the fire gets dangerous.
I don’t know enough about hydrogen to know how big of a bang that would even make.
I’ve edited my comment - it has been tested extensively and they’re not very bad at all.
Thanks, that’s actually really comforting to know. It’s not something I’ve had reason to read into. So I’m glad somebody has
As someone who works in the hydrogen space, this is something we’re always considering too. We’re very aware that hydrogen explodes, and it’s a core facet of our safety analyses.
I think we should make a show about our various theories about a big bang. I propose we call it The Big Bang Theory.
I’ll see myself out.
Please do, and don’t let the door hit you on the way. LOL.
I read somewhere that with the Hindinburg, the hydrogen pretty much just went straight up, while most of the deaths and burns were caused by the fuel for the engines.
What do you think gasoline does when it’s set on fire?
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That’s true. Or at least when you set too much of it on fire at once. Because obviously, engines set it on fire, but in a controlled manner.
