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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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

Even in the US it is mostly a solved problem for Tesla owners. There are a few places that are consistently problematic (eg, Las Vegas), but there are new stalls planned there to help.

Several companies are in the early stages of national DCFC rollouts. It will get better quickly in a lot of places.

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

#212
post #92
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, currently only 1% (edit: some articles I've seen put it less than 0.1%[1]) of hydrogen is "green". The rest is mostly made out of natural gas, a process that releases just as much CO2 as if you'd burned it. H2 isn't a way to save the Earth, it's a way to save the Natural Gas industry. [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/22/0-03-of-hydrogen-is-gre...

Ridiculous. You're conflating source and fuel. H2 can be produced in large quantities from green power. Part of the problem is, some people see everything as non-green. Dams? Oh, carbon and cement! Nuclear? Oh risk. Windmills? Oh birds. Solar? Short cell lift and manufacturing waste. So let's start with the snae assumption that a dam is green. Now you want to get power to cars. Guess what. You can make h2 on site, at…

"Existing gaslines" won't work because hydrogen leaks. It's literally the smallest molecule in the universe. Very different from natural gas.

Also you need around 55kWh of electricity to get 11kWh of power out of a Toyota Mirai's wheels to the ground. It'd be more efficient just to send that 55kWh to a waiting plugged in EV using existing power lines.

As for "slow charge", you're behind on tech. The current Hyundai/Kia platform supports 800V charging, meaning it can take in power at 350kW. It'll take under 10 minutes to fill it from 0 to ~80%.

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

#213
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it an excellent large-scale stationary energy store though? I mean, it seems like it should be but * Hydrogen really likes to leak. * Hydrogen breaks down the container holding it over time. * Hydrogen is very low density. This means you need either a very large container or very high pressure. Combined with 1 and 2 this is going to be expensive. I'm really asking the question. I would love to know the full cost d…

> * Hydrogen really likes to leak. Yes, but the rate of leakage is tiny enough that for any reasonable sized tank it's going to be years till it's all leaked away. The real risk is the leakage causing explosions if you ever put a tank in a confined space.

That's probably only the 'primary' real risk, there are some number of secondary real risks of hydrogen being a very reactive chemical. Not in the flammable boom boom, but the interacting with stuff it shouldn't and causing degradation and corrosion.

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

#214
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We don’t have the infrastructure” is a temporary problem. The same could have been said about gas stations and the electrical grid capacity needed for widespread air conditioning. Weight isn’t such a crazy thing either. The Tesla Model Y long range weighs 900 pounds more than a Honda CRV. It’s a lot, but the most popular car in America is the Ford F-150 which weighs about the same as a Model Y at the low end. The we…

> The weight efficiency can only improve from here I don’t think this is a given. I can imagine plenty of future battery tech that is much more physically dense, and also more energy-dense, but with an overall mass that’s heavier than what we have now. Consumers really want more range, and they don’t really care about their car’s weight so long as it isn’t prohibitive. (They will definitely care collectively as the r…

> They will definitely care collectively as the roads deteriorate faster and they have to pay more in tax dollars and wasted time spent in construction to repair them, but that will end up being a tragedy of the commons

The difference in wear between a 3600 pound RAV4 and a 4400 pound Model Y is so minor that it'll disappear in the noise. Nobody will notice. The only time it'll even come close to mattering is on residential streets that never see any commercial trucks. And even then, nobody cares now about the 6500 pound HD pickups that are so popular, so I can't see why that would suddenly become an issue.

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

#215
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…

The fdp, a small german party part of government, that holds the traffic ministry, managed to block an EU-wide phase-out of ICE vehicles to promote e-fuels. Whats e-fuels you ask? Its even more ridiculous than hydrogen cars - using renewable energy to synthesize fossil fuels. The beauty is that this makes ICE vehicles supposedly green, so then you can just keep selling them forever. And at some point down the line u just kill the e-fuel requirement.

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

#216
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.

> 2 hour wait to get a charger spot isn't a workable transport system.

That rules out widespread use of hydrogen, then. Hydrogen filling stations need to periodically recompress their hydrogen. Which is never a problem because current hydrogen stations are virtually always idle. However, if they were continuously busy, you'd have to wait.

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

#217
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…

Your comment contains no substance. You are just pushing a conspiracy theory.

Hydrogen based fuels make sense on multiple fronts: long term storage (batteries cannot do this), scale (adding more tanks is cheaper than whole battery packs) and energy/power densities are still above what the best batteries can provide.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires. Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.

That fun fact may be true, but ask any firefighter that has had to put out a lithium based car fire how fun that fact is. The lithium based fires require 12-15 times the amount of water to extinguish.

They can also be put out with a blanket apparently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv2L_QYg4oA

Although weirdly enough the video demonstration doesn't seem to be of a battery fire. :facepalm

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

#219
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...

For boats, fuel cells can make sense. But air travel not only requires a high energy density but also a high power density, and here the fuel cells are relatively weak even by car standards. The alternative is to burn hydrogen, which introduces an inefficiency that eats up most of your advantage. For a car, you can have a small auxiliary battery, but a jet engine will run at max power for several minutes continuously during take-off, and for existing jet engines the power-to-weight ratio is considered a crucial figure of merit.

For hydrogen storage, the DoE targets are truly sobering [1]. That whittles down hydrogen from roughly 100 times as dense as batteries to about 5. Throw a 50% thermodynamic efficiency (jet engines are not efficient!) on top of that and hydrogen still has an advantage, but it lags quite badly behind jet fuel. There have been four decades of intensive government-sponsored research effort into hydrogen storage materials, but all existing systems in practical use rely on fiber-composite tanks at 700 bar.

You get better results with an ammonia-burning jet engine. Here the tank weight is negligible and the hydrogen storage density is effectively 15% (after correcting for the enthalpy of formation). But ammonia still has just half the energy density of jet fuel, and it's rather unpleasant to work with. Plus, the existing production process of ammonia faces its own serious inefficiencies, and extensive investigation of more efficient ammonia production has been painstaking with only one Japanese startup [3] that is behind its timeline (probably a little COVID-influenced) and other contenders at lab stage.

With the direct ammonia fuel cell, the power density issue is even worse, but the energy density is very good. This technology competes well with fossil fuels for weight-sensitive applications that do not require high power (DARPA has been interested in a DAFC drone). But ammonia fuel cells are mostly at lab stage, partially because ammonia production remains disappointing (despite a theoretical energy cost of zero) despite considerable research effort.

1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-storage

2: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-lm&q=tsubam...

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

#220

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 beli…

Feels pretty green charging an EV at home with solar panels.
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