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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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The raw material waste/cost/emissions to produce those batteries isn't great though. There's not really much that hydrogen can't do better if the infrastructure was in place and the storage/safety stuff is worked out.
Hydrogen for cars is not.. let’s just say it’s not great.
Granted: the cars drive very well (try it if you have the chance) and the fuel cells give them a serious range. However, distribution of fuel similar to regular gas is hard. Storage is dangerous, and pipelines continuously leak (H2 molecules are very small). Hydrogen gas cannot be mixed with stinky stuff that will warn you if the gas is leaking. It is much harder to keep under pressure than oil or regular natural gas. And last but not least: it is very inefficient to generate, the electricity used to generate it from (sea)water is significant and could have been used to charge batteries directly (note that it’s currently mostly distilled from natural gas, about 90% iirc). Mind you: I know it’s useful, just not for cars.
It is fundamentally less efficient to run electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen, and then reverse the process again in a fuel cell to produce electricity to turn a motor, vs taking the electricity used for that electrolysis and storing it in a battery that is then taken back out to turn a motor. Granted, modern lithium battery chemistry isn't the cleanest thing to extract and use, but it's also not the only possible battery chemistry, just the one currently most used for vehicle batteries. It also doesn't allow for certain benefits to BEV like home charging (I mean technically one could run a hydrogen line to one's house, but that doesn't seem likely). The only scenario I can think of for hydrogen cars taking off is if the needed infrastructure was built out for something else and so was readily available. I could maybe see that if hydrogen ends up getting used as the solution for decarbonized aviation fuel, but my understanding was that it (along with basically every other proposed tech for that admittedly) had some pretty serious cost drawbacks and so there's no garuntee of it getting built out for even that application.