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Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

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Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#171

Post by xoa »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #73
gmane wrote: post #5

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…

Hydrogen for cars is dead. However long haul flights, fertilizer, green steel, etc. very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.

>very difficult to find a carbon free alternative that isn’t hydrogen.

The basic mistake you're making here is thinking that "carbon free" is key. It is not, what matters is that a given energy source is carbon NEUTRAL. Anthropogenic global warming is driven primarily by net increase in atmospheric CO2 on our timescale. When CO2 in consumed from the atmosphere, and then shortly released again (textbook example being a plant fixing CO2/H2O into sugar and the getting eaten by an animal and the animal the metabolizing sugar back to CO2/H2O) the short term net change is zero. The problem has come from releasing stored carbon that was fixed in geologically long term ways, ie, fossil fuels.

We're used to thinking of "hydrocarbons" as equivalent to "fossil fuels" but that's not true. It's perfectly possible to directly synthesize any hydrocarbon from atmospheric CO2, water, and zero carbon energy like solar. Burning those hydrocarbons later will result in net zero change to atmospheric CO2, and thus are perfectly acceptable from an AGW POV (at ground level in particular burning fuels have other pollution issues that may be worth getting away from, but not global warming). The issue is "just" cost, it's much more inefficient and thus costlier to go solar -> fuel synthesis -> combustion -> useful work vs solar -> transmission -> battery -> work. But for applications where battery energy density is insufficient or other properties are required (like high performance aircraft that use fuel as coolant as well as energy) that could be worth it.

So green hydrogen directly faces not just batteries, but green methane, gasoline and other hydrocarbons. Which are far, far easier to work with and have many better properties than hydrogen itself. And on top of course feed seamlessly into existing infrastructure and system.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#172

Post by yread »

rootusrootus wrote: post #41
asdff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations and what becomes more compelling to the consumer flips overnight. Same cultural process of fueling up at the same place you've always fueled up in about the same amount of time as its always taken. It seems like there's a lot lot less inertia to get consumers over that hurdle than the EV hurdle, where charge times are long and convenient chargers not a guarantee in…

> All it takes is a new pump at existing gas stations "All it takes" is doing very heavy lifting in that sentence. There's a good reason that hydrogen fueling stations are basically non-existent aside from a few in California. Distribution and fueling is quite complicated compared to conventional liquid fuels.

there are 86 now in Germany.

https://h2.live/en/

basically most of the main highways are covered

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#173

Post by [deleted] »

rootusrootus wrote: post #65
paganel wrote: post #31

Electrification for millions and millions of cars will never work, we don't have the "green" energy resources to actually produce that electricity, and second, and just as important, we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power (both in the US and in Europe). So that leaves us with the logical conclusion that we won't have millions and millions personal cars going forward, for be…

> we don't have the distribution network that will be able to carry that extra power I think people overestimate the net change in consumption. Making a gallon of gasoline takes about as much electricity as moving a BEV the distance the ICEV would go on that gallon. What'll change a bit is the distribution of the energy. But given that much of it will happen at night when the grid has historically been very underutil…

[deleted]

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#174

Post by tremon »

oblio wrote: post #69
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Our ancestors will never believe that we were nuts enough to not only allow this, but actually legally manndate it. They will think it's an urban legend and no ancient people could have been so short-sighted and egotistical.

> Putting two tons of highly toxic and flammable lithium into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. And ICEs are powered by many thousands of mini explosions per minute with a side effect of producing an odorless gas that can kill us silently. Everything can be scaremongered. And personal transportation, as much as I wish wasn't t…

What happened in 1910? The first automobile dates from 1886, and I'm pretty sure the horse&buggy personal transportation method predates it by several centuries.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#175

Post by Pxtl »

dieselgate wrote: post #78
gmane wrote: post #5

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…

Am not well versed on these considerations but it appears one advantage of hydrogen is energy density compared to batteries. This may be less an issue for passenger vehicles but could be more relevant for air travel - as an example. No comments or opinions otherwise re: funding etc. Found the below article useful as a primer: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/fuel-cell-and...

Once you're already committed to green hydrogen (electrolysis-made hydrogen) you may as well go whole hog and do green methane (methane made through the Sabatier process, which consumes Hydrogen and CO2).

Making a methane-powered jetliner is far more practical than a hydrogen-powered one.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#176

Post by Retric »

dieselgate wrote: post #138
spott wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of energy density? There is energy density by volume (where it matches batteries, when you ignore all the stuff you need to keep hydrogen at 700bar safe), and energy density by weight (where it wins pretty handily against pretty much everything).

Am not historically familiar with this topic though the attached paper above shows a comparative figure of Specific Energy in terms of Wh/Kg at both 5k and 10k psi Edit: interesting to do the conversion and realize 700bar is just over 10k psi - misunderstood the parent comment regarding "700bar safe" Edit2: further interesting to note how the 5k compression of the hydrogen has _higher_ Specific Energy density than 10…

Just be careful with Hydrogen energy density as there’s a huge range of non obvious issues. Compressed you lose a great deal of energy converting it to kinetic energy and weight due to the containers + engines. Fuel cells also need electric motors and ideally a hybrid battery.

Cryogenic fuel looks great until you need to have it sit around unused. Embrittlement, volume, cost, and a rage of safety hazards make it unappealing for aircraft or ships.

So, my guess is the ideal long term solution barring “super batteries” is some sort of synthetic hydrocarbons that uses atmospheric CO2 but we are a long way from viability there.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#177

Post by theshrike79 »

idontpost wrote: post #13
gmane wrote: post #5

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…

> My gut is that the majority of hydrogen proponents are oil and gas lobbyists or funded by them I don't understand how any one looks at the electric car charging situation and thinks it makes sense to scale that out to 100% of vehicles. A 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.

Have you seen the queues for H2 stations? 2 hours is peanuts.

Also: the longest wait I've had in the almost 3 years I've owned an EV has been about 15 minutes and in that case it was a couple who had clearly rented an EV and was charging it for the first time ever.

The infrastructure is perfectly solvable. The US is just at a disadvantage because gasoline is practically free over there compared to the rest of the world so there isn't that much of an incentive to improve the charging infrastructure.

As a reference, currently gasoline at the station near to me is $7.47/gallon, which actually pretty cheap. The most expensive price here is $9.24/gallon at the moment.

Compare that to electricity, which costs 0.02c/kWh right now. That's 0,0002€/kWh. Looking at the market price it'll dip down to -0.18c/kWh in the morning hours, they're literally paying people to use electricity =)

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#178

Post by torginus »

People who are bullish for EVs I implore you to reconsider - current EVs containing a literal ton of batteries with limited lifespans belong in the green future, especially 80% of that doesn't get used for daily commute.

It's obvious to me that considering the full-lifecycle costs (both manufacturing, usage and ownership), some sort of hybrid solution is the greenest, for the current crop of personal cars.

But I believe once self-driving robotaxis arrive, they are going to reshape transportation - they're going to be used for short distance commute, and hauling people to train stations for long distance commute. At least in Europe.

Range anxiety won't be a thing, since these taxis won't ever cover large distances.

Re: Oil sector is lobbying for inefficient hydrogen cars to delay electrification

#180

Post by crote »

londons_explore wrote: post #85
gmane wrote: post #5

Anyone who has followed hydrogen as a fuel for a while sees pretty easily that its a solution in search of a problem. It really doesn't make sense to use renewables to make hydrogen fuel to then burn: batteries are better for storage of energy in most cases (I will grant that there are edge cases where a liquid/gas fuel is a better technical solution than batteries, but I think that options like ethanol are probably…

You know what does make it make sense? If you can take natural gas out of the ground, split it into hydrogen and CO2 (releasing heat, which can be used to generate electricity), and inject the CO2 back underground to help release more oil and gas. At this point, you have hydrogen gas. Sure, you could burn that hydrogen to make more electricity, but it works out financially better if you can directly use it. The benef…

Unfortunately it is a bit tricky in practice, and still have a very significant global warming footprint[0]. You're never going to capture 100% of the CO4, and oil and gas wells tend to leak quite a lot of methane to the atmosphere.

So-called "blue" hydrogen only results in about 10% less GHG emissions than traditional "grey" hydrogen. It's something, but not big enough of a difference to actually be usable.

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956

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