After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit

After many false starts, hydrogen power might now bear fruit
economist.com

Tldr: Impossible for civilization to make an instantaneous non-gradual switch to hydrogen fuel cells.

People like Hydrogen because they're hyped about how it is:

- Clean

- Plentiful

- Emission-less

Hydrogen is difficult to handle.

- Unwieldy as a gas

- Boils at 20 degrees F/ - 6 degrees C / ~420 Kelvins

- Tough to maintain at a high pressure.

To go 300+ miles or ~480km or more on hdyrogen is ugh tough.

H - 120 MJ/kg

Gasoline - 44 MJ/kg

Volume wise, ugh.

H- 8 MJ/L

Gasoline - 32 MJ/L

You need ~5-10 kilograms of H2 to deal with light duty vehicles.

Compressing the stuff is annoying.

Training and retraining all the gas station attendants to deal with cryogenic materials is no small undertaking.

There's 100K gasoline/diesel stations in the USA.

Very special handling for hydrogen.

Hydrogen penetrates metals.

Makes metals the enemy and things can wear down unexpectedly. Scary stuff. Preventative maintenance is complicated.

Gasoline has ~4x-8x the kwh per a gallon to compressed hydrogen fuel. (my calculation might be a bit off, but not that far off.)

Pumping hydrogen into a vehicle is done slowly from my recollection.

Hydrogen's explosion risk is extreme, the spark from the leak could cause it. eekkkkk.

Hydrogen's flames are invisible. It's a pale blue flame that's difficult to see during the day.

People might come back and say there's progress with magnesium adn/or carbon nanotubes or other things, but they're all meh and don't scale.

Hydrogen has a shitty power to mass ratio. It escapes independently/leaks out easily without you knowing. It's dangerously explosive!

It emits lots of CO2 to make the stuff. CH4+O2 = CO2+2H2 Makes the whole thing seem like a pointless exercise.

The efficiency of manufacturing hydrogen for fuel usage is probably like 10% to 30%. Can't imagine it being more than that.

I'm not a Chem E though.

To make a cryogenic pipeline system in the USA for H2 would cost $1T+

Every year I get asked about Hydrogen, it's all BS.

Any scientist that says it's highly viable has me wondering how much money they wasted on their degree.

Hydrogen fuel cells are clean where you use them. But so are batteries. Inner cities could be kept cleaner using either. Inner city traffic is mostly short range, so batteries are at an advantage.

Batteries have a rare earth problem. But so do Hydrogen fuel cells. There is work to reduce it for both technologies.

Hydrogen fuel cells have a problem with varying loads. You would use additional batteries in cars to supply peak demand when accelerating or store braking energy. For comparable weight, range, and price you could replace all hydrogen technology with more batteries. Those bigger batteries would also wear out slower because the power demand per cell is lower.

So, when would hydrogen make sense? I think only if you don't care for efficiency. When you have so much electrical power that it costs you nothing and is available at least a few hours every night. Hydrogen would do well in a combination with large scale nuclear fission/fusion. It could take decades until we get there if we ever go that route.

I see that, as batteries become less and less expensive, the niche where Hydrogen could have good advantage is getting smaller and smaller. However you twist and turn it, either oil&gas or batteries have the advantage.

1. The only hydrogen produced from electricity is ecological. Carbon capture doesn’t work today.

2. The hydrogen from electricity is expensive, though as wind and solar get exponential cheaper, we will end up with spikes excess cheap electricity (negative prices today or disconnecting plants). It makes sense to produce hydrogen during those spikes.

3. Cars on hydrogen don’t make sense at all. The massive cost of infrastructure plus batteries are superior and getting better on that front.

4. Hydrogen from electricity can replace the first reformation from natural gas.

5. Next promising use cases are industrial heating, such as steel production (instead of coal).

6. Least profitable, but still plausible, uses hydrogen as long-term energy storage and mixing it with natural gas.

7. I wonder whether generating hydrogen from seawater and getting back freshwater would improve the economics of this form of energy storage.