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Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

hydrogeninsight.com

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Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#31

Post by jiggawatts »

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a "green energy" world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a "zero pollution fuel" while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal.

If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indirectly. That, or fossil fuel powered vehicle manufacturers that are reluctant to completely retool their factories.

Hydrogen has a few legitimate use cases, such as iron ore refining and chemical feedstock, but that's about it. In all other scenarios, battery-based technology is vastly superior along multiple metrics.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#33

Post by TheRealPomax »

kuon wrote: post #26

This youtube video does a good job explaining a few problems about hydrogen in cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE

Maybe, but https://www.youtube.com/@EngineeringExplained is probably a better person to ask to explain why this is just not going to work, through his "The Unfortunate Truth About Toyota's Hydrogen V8 Engine" [1] and "BMW's Hydrogen V12 Engine Is A Hilarious Engineering Stunt" [2] videos.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjKwSF9gT8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AouW9_jyZck

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#34

Post by kube-system »

xt00 wrote: post #16

I would imagine somebody has floated this idea before, but I wonder if the distraction of hydrogen rather than electric cars was a ploy by Japanese automakers to give them time to build up the cars / supply chain etc to switch to electric. Typically cars (at least in the US) take around 4-5 years of development to get to market, so rather than assuming the Japanese policy makers just made a dumb decision, it could be…

Toyota started dumping money into hydrogen vehicle R&D more than 25 years ago. They just picked the wrong technology, and they’ve been advocating for their horse in the race ever since.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#35

Post by rr808 »

grahar64 wrote: post #25

For example, Toyota makes good reliable cars, and saw massive success with the Prius because it was the only good alternative to a full internal combustion engine. Now, years after that success, Toyota has only a very limited selection of fully electric plug in vehicles, and all their competitors are a decade in front of them because they continue to chase some pipe dream of hydrogen, is just disappointing.

RAV4 Prime is awesome and huge wait list. PHEV is a great solution, it doesn't require these huge heavy batteries.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#36

Post by cbkeller »

pfdietz wrote: post #23
cbkeller wrote: post #12

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery. After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been…

Hydrogen is a battery with very particular uses cases. In particular: hydrogen is bad for use cases with large numbers of charge/discharge cycles, because the "cost of inefficiency" is proportional to the number of such cycles. However, for use cases with small numbers of charge cycles, like seasonal storage or backup against rare grid outages, hydrogen's big advantage -- the low cost of storing it, vs. typical short…

Seasonal storage is an interesting idea. Rare grid outages seems pretty easy with batteries if the South Australia example is anything to go by though, and for medium-term storage there's also pumped hydro -- not sure where that compares in cost?

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#37

Post by TheRealPomax »

jiggawatts wrote: post #31

Hydrogen is 100% an attempt by fossil fuel companies to remain relevant in a "green energy" world. The primary source for hydrogen would be from methane in natural gas, and they could then sell this as a "zero pollution fuel" while continuing their non-renewable energy business as normal. If you read between the lines and look at the companies involved, they're always linked to fossil fuel companies directly or indir…

I didn't know Toyota was a fossil fuel company, or was owned by one?

Japan is uniquely trying to make this thing work. They have no domestic oil production, and so few coal mines as to basically be irrelevant: all their fossil fuel is imported. Anywhere else on the planet: sure, this might be another way for big fossil to push for relevancy, but in Japan's case, hydrogen would be something that they can produce themselves, literally freeing them from fossil fuel dependency, which is a big part of why they keep trying to make it work.

And yeah, the math says it's physically impossible to make it work without constant refueling, but again: it's Japan. The very idea of "my car needs to go 300 miles on one charge/tank" just isn't a thing there.

Hydrogen, despite this article's claim, is actually perfect for Japan. Any tanker of import fuel saved is CO2 saved both on the tanker's transit, and on that fuel getting burned, but at the same time: it's also perfect much perfect only for Japan.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#38

Post by Panzer04 »

Telemakhos wrote: post #29
cbkeller wrote: post #12

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery. After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been…

I think most of the enthusiasm lies in the toxicity or safety of the energy store. Lithium batteries are toxic waste that doesn't get recycled well yet and requires minerals currently produced by child laborers in appalling conditions. Hydrogen fuel cells produce pure water as their byproduct and could theoretically be loaded with hydrogen fuel produced through green-powered electrolysis. They both explode on a bad d…

Disagree - the biggest nominal advantage of hydrogen is mass storage. In theory, tanks scale up in capacity more easily than battery cells (perhaps to the point of seasonal storage). In almost every other respect hydrogen would be worse than lithium batteries (requires complex infrastructure for power conversion, terrible roundtrip efficiency, etc)

In the end, the shortfalls of hydrogen are turning out to be simply too insurmountable.

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#39

Post by the-anarchist »

cbkeller wrote: post #12

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery. After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been…

I'm lost, I thought hydrogen is the goat. Many manufacturers (eg Benz) push it no?

Re: Japan's hydrogen strategy does nothing for decarbonisation: study

#40

Post by etherael »

cbkeller wrote: post #12

I'll go one further: Hydrogen does nothing. It's a bad battery. After following this for more than a decade (starting with a bit of undergrad research on possible alternative fuel cell electrode materials -- albeit not a field that I'm in any way involved with any more), it just feels like there's been very little progress on fuel cells, or on storage and transport. Meanwhile, progress on Li-based batteries has been…

Energy density. I'm not sure exactly what it is for lifepo4 but it's lower than 1,406.6 kWh/m^3 for hydrogen at 700 bar, i think roughly half.

Both compare poorly against diesel though so I'm left wondering if synthetic fossil fuels produced from renewable inputs might not actually be the way to go. In the beginning it seemed like efficiency was going to be important and a limiting factor to all this, and batteries definitely have an edge on fuels produced from renewable sources. But now it's seeming like actually producing large amounts of energy isn't as much of a problem as ensuring that it is available at the point of consumption economically and logistically. Synthetic fossil fuels that pull carbon from the atmosphere would be carbon neutral and fit neatly into the existing system with no other modifications.

It stands to reason there's a threshold at which the cost of production is so much lower than the cost of transmission and storage that it makes sense to take efficiency losses for storage and transmission gains.

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