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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.
Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).
Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid
With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it's an efficiency suckfest.
But it's awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives
We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen ….. there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.
Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor
And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the "if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it'll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road" promise
It's kinda like software development...every experienced dev is aware that when management says we'll do it shitty for now and fix it later that later never comes.
I'm pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled -- or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it's no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; -- but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on...
The thing is, hydrogen is a byproduct of damn near every industry. It's usually just released into the atmosphere because it's a pain in the ass to capture and store and isn't worth much. If it starts being in demand, you can bet your ass they'll start trying to gather it.
Remember, though, that it is currently profitable to reform hydrogen out of methane, at the same time as it's not profitable to contain and sell 'byproduct' hydrogen. There are sure to be reasons why, and they might be fairly durable reasons that don't change much even as the demand for hydrogen increases. I'm no expert on this so I won't speculate too much on what those reasons might be -- maybe factors related to scale and logistics?