[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by EldrickOnIce

Isn't electric tech a placeholder between fossil fuels and hydrogen. Meaning surely the Iong term answer is hydrogen - understanding we are probably decades from commercial solutions. Or is it really just theoretical at this point?

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Hydrogen works fine, it's just got fundamental challenges due to storage pressures, and it being a tiny molecule that can escape. Due to a lack of natural free hydrogen, it's more of a battery itself than an energy source. You need to separate hydrogen from something else, which takes energy, and then you get that energy back later when you use it.

There are two ways to use hydrogen, either as a fuel source burned, or through a fuel cell which combines hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity and water.

Is it the long term answer? It takes a lot of energy to extract hydrogen, so if we had free energy it would be a decent enough "battery" to charge up. But without free surplus energy it's better to charge a traditional battery for efficiency.

Originally Posted by photon

Hydrogen might have a niche where weight vs energy density of batteries doesn't work and hydrogen just makes more sense but yeah the fact that there's a couple of more steps along the chain makes hydrogen less efficient than batteries.

If we had fusion reactors and could generate nearly unlimited free electricity like Fuzz says then it might make sense but the physics challenges are tough.

Park your hydrogen car and a week later all the hydrogen has boiled away.

Hydrogen will have some niche uses, but where battery storage works, Hydrogen really cannot have an impact.

The only abundant source of hydrogen we have is from natural gas extraction, so it's not very green. If the intention is to be green, we really can't count hydrogen from that.

We can make green hydrogen from Electrolysis, but the amount of electricity that uses is really high. Energy is always lost in conversions, and using hydrogen as fuel in an ELectric type vehicle means that you are converting electricity to Hydrogen, then back to electricity before being used. Fundamental laws of physics means that this will always be FAR less efficient than simply using the electricity to put into batterieis in the first place.

As an example, lets compare a BEV to a Hydrogen Fuel cell EV. At current electricity rates, operation costs for the BEV are roughly 1/4 to 1/3 as much as driving a similar ICE vehicle. Now for a HFCEV, the operational costs are about double what a similar ICE vehicle would use in fuel. Altogether, it's 6-8x more in "fuel" costs for a HFCEV, vs a BEV.

Hydrogen could have worked as a placeholder had battery technology not improved and rapidly gotten cheaper as it has. But long term, there is no future for Hydrogen passenger vehicles.

The very limited places in North America where Hydrogen infasructure WAS in place, are now mostly pulling that infrastructure out. Manufacturers are stopping Hydrogen Development, and Toyota basicall can't GIVE away their Mirai stock.

Any place where you do see "We are going to have a hydrogen fleet, its very green!" (Ahem, Alberta Government and YEG Airport, etc), its not because they want to be green - its because they want to support the Oil and Gas industry while sounding green (see where Hydrogen comes from above).

BEV infrastructure is rapidly expanding, technology is rapidly improving. Hydrogen infrastructure was always limited, and is going away.

The window for any Hydrogen era for vehicles is passed, and their won't be another one until such point where we can make nearly unlimited amounts of power for extremely cheap - so that the 6-8x cost factor is negligible anyway.