Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
That’d be my big concern; where tf would you re-fuel it?
There one single hydrogen fuel station in each of the two major cities near me.
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They just announced they’re shutting down some in California.
To be fair, EV’s had that same obstacle, and have pretty much overcome it.
I disagree, EV are the exact opposite. Electricity was EVERYWHERE even before the EV were a thing.
A regular plug can charge an electric car and for few thousands $ you can install an 11 or 22kW charger.
Hydrogen on the other hand is extremely hard to store and transport. Unlike electricity the hydrogen production is very limited right now and full of unknown.
Exactly, the point is scarcity
I don’t think they’re the same at all. Electricity distribution is practically everywhere already. Even if you need fast charging, setting it up in comparison to setting up a petrol or especially a hydrogen station, is extremely easy and extremely cheap, relatively speaking.
One hydrogen station cost millions to install. People assume based on the appearance that they’d be like a petrol station, but it’s actually a fair bit more of an engineering challenge. Plus there’s shitloads of costly red tape surrounding them (because hydrogen go boom if you’re not careful).
As did ICE vehicles when they came on the scene. People seem to get really upset that manufacturers are exploring multiple possibilities rather than all of them collectively deciding on a single option as if everyone in the country drives the same car and has the same needs.
Most Hydrogen fuel is still made from natural gas. It’s greenwashing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html
And most electricity is still made from fossil fuels. The point is that it doesn’t have to be, unlike gasoline.
Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables
Yup, I think there is a solid argument BEVs will win in the long run (once battery technology improves … all the downsides of BEVs start disappearing rapidly). However, I haven’t ever liked the argument that “most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels” that’s looking too short term.
However, I haven’t ever liked the argument that “most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels” that’s looking too short term.
There’s loads of studies surrounding that. It isn’t expected to change. This because they’re planning to create hydrogen from gas in such amounts that it’ll not cause too much of a change in the percentage of green hydrogen (which is currently as good as non existant).
Hydrogen is also expensive, so it’s pretty difficult to get a factory (e.g. steel factory) to switch to hydrogen.
We will run out of fossil fuels someday. We can also just ban making hydrogen from fossil fuels and then selling it to car manufacturers. Just like with battery demand … you get the demand increased and research will take off from there to find ways to make it cheaper and faster.
That’s not true, Gasoline doesn’t have to be made from Fossile fuels either. It’s pretty easy to make actually - there are a number of European companies doing it and with the Co2 Taxes, it will be a viable option by 2028.
Gasoline is made from petroleum.
It is certainly synthesisable by some method without using petroleum. But the person you replied to probably meant Power-to-Gas.
However synthetic or not, burning it produces same gases, which are the problem. Cleaner, but not the end solution.
Biogasoline is a thing, although I’m not aware of anyone really pushing it as viable fuel above biodiesel, ethanol, and bioLPG.
We could use wind electricity, instead of stopping the windnturbines when the production gets so high that prices drop…
At some point hopefully we will realize
it is however extremely easy to make from water. Making the switch to green easy and seamless, and it will surely happen if there’s demand.
It might be theoretically easy, but the massive power demands (and loss) make it pretty hard in practice.
And not every car requires a ton of lithium, like it would if everyone wants to go both EV + massive range.
We really need a more nuanced discussion around EV’s.
I see a lot of “gas bad ev good”. While gas IS bad, really bad, we also need to allow into the discussion all the ways ev’s are also bad, not just range, but environmentally.Hydrogen is really interesting to me
The problem with all these discussions is they ignore that things improve with research. I fully expect we can find a better battery eventually. Supposedly we’re getting close to extending the maximum capacity and the charging time within the next few years. I also fully expect we can improve the economics of hydrogen.
It’s also faster to fill the tank, making it suitable for longer travels. Greenwhashing or not, battery powered is not where its at.
It’s also faster to fill the tank
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car. That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
You’re spreading doubt about EVs while promoting hydrogen while ignoring the known drawbacks of hydrogen.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car.
Ever heard of pumps? You do realize pump can build up pressure from lower pressure container? Even if the time needed to fill the tank is the same as EV you’d still get higher mileage per joule of energy simply by not having 700kg battery onboard.
That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
Not sure where you got these numbers from but pretty much none of them make sense. I’d love to see some sources on that.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
Completely pointless comparison. You are comparing centuries of battery evolution to a technology that started being developed recently. Per whatever price is not comparable. If you want to go that direction, then bicycle is cheapest followed by a public transport and gasoline. This is not a question about price, this is question of finding a solution that’s scalable enough to replace gasoline, and batteries are not that. Lithium is rare enough, batteries weigh a ton and lose performance in the winter. They also take time to charge. Time which you can’t reduce without affecting battery life. Not to mention excess weight wearing down roads faster, wearing down tires. All that affects environment.
To make matters worse, Toyota has released its newest engine which can run on hydrogen, methane and gasoline. Making transition very easy. Sure hydrogen production is expensive at this point, but prices will drop once there’s competition and new greener ways are found to produce it. But change can start happening now. And by the way, am not talking about hydrogen EVs, but hydrogen ICEs.
In the near term, it’s pretty clear that zero-emission, light-duty vehicles will need to rely on batteries. So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it’s clear the infrastructure isn’t there right now, isn’t hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev’s? The biggest problem with EV’s being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn’t hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
Hydrogen is incredibly inefficient compared to using electricity directly. You have to first use the electricity to make the hydrogen, this is very inefficient in itself. then you have to “burn” it to drive the vehicle, which wastes most of the energy just like ICE vehicle. So you need several times the initial energy generation to drive a hydrogen vehicle the same distance compared to using electricity directly.
Of course the batteries is then the issue when it comes to EVs, so they’re not a magic bullet. But I wouldn’t say hydrogen is the obvious better choice either since it is so wasteful with the energy.
In a conference that in attended, they talked about usbhavimg to look at energy sources like a flow of energy and not as limited sources.
Currently, wind turbines are imtemtionally stopped, when there is so much wind that the generated electricity becomes too cheap to sell!
Instead, you could run them and use the electricity to convert the energy into hydrogen. Yes some energy is lost but it would be lost anyway as wind
With wind, sun, wave energy, we can look at energy in different ways that we usually do with fuel and coal. It’s there and it just keeps coming.
Yes but the overhead we have is nothing compared to the energy needed to make everything hydrogen powered. we would need an absolute absurd amount of overhead to generate all the hydrogen from overhead alone.
It’s kind of dumb to intentionally waste 75-80% of the total electric energy initially generated to power hydrogen vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea, it should absolutely be done ASAP…but it’s not a solution to hydrogen powered vehicles.
Using hydrogen to store the occasional grid overhead to be used for the grid later is a great idea
A factory which only runs some of the time will be really expensive. From what I’ve seen it’s way more cost effective to rely on batteries for surplus electricity.
So far grid scale battery storage only scales to stabilizing the grid. It’s better than anything else at that, but it’s not cost effective to for example power a town overnight until solar is back
Oh, that’s a good reason, I didn’t know that.
Agreed, but 2 important things in my eyes.
1 - renewable surpluses. As wind and solar keep ramping , hydrogen is a fantastic way to store that energy. Sure, there are efficiency losses but it’s transportable, able to be stored long term, and able to be used from small scale to grid scale applications.
2 - total life cycle cost. There is an incredible amount of emissions embodied in evs. Haven’t seen a comprehensive analysis of a h2 vehicle but I would imagine a few hundred kilos of missing lithium is a good thing.
1 - renewable surpluses
Creating hydrogen is incredibly inefficient if you look at all the steps involved. It will be significantly more inefficient if you don’t create hydrogen 24/7. Meaning, it’ll cost significantly more to rely on a surplus of electricity. Meaning, it is way more expensive per mile or km driven.
2 - total life cycle cost.
The tank in an hydrogen car is only good for 8 to 10 years. You’re replacing one bit that might fail with loads of other bits that might fail.
I think people aren’t understanding how inefficient hydrogen is. Especially with the suggestion that hydrogen somehow is better than EVs, despite hydrogen cars often still having all the EV tech in a car.
But the hydrogen also has to be transported, which produces CO2, you need containers for that that also produce CO2 when getting manufactured. I’m not saying it’s more than with a battery but it could be. We’d need actual numbers to really know tho.
I’ve seen plans for hydrogen fuel stations to create the hydrogen there on site.
Hydrogen cannot be greener than an EV, because it’s just an EV with more steps. It’s energy intensive to turn electricity + water to hydrogen, transport it, pump it, then convert it back to electricity.
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
E: ok people. You live in your little fantasy world where thermodynamics aren’t a thing.
There are laws of thermodynamics and there are laws of kinetics.
Fuels have much more power density than batteries. You can’t deliver power as fast with a battery compared to a fuel. It doesn’t matter if thermodynamically one is more efficient or greener than the other. You would be crazy to suggest moving an airbus with a battery, that’s physically impossible.
I’m a researcher in both fields (batteries and hydrogen)
Sure, but I’m not talking about jets, which yeah, do need a far greater energy density than batteries can currently provide.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
Yes.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
I didn’t. Those are very small. Compared to the losses of a HFCEV or even worse, a combustion hydrogen car.
Honestly, the article answers its own question and acts oblivious to it, but I’ve been saying it for years.
It’s for boats. The easiest and most convenient place to store hydrogen is near a port, which conveniently also generally has the infrastructure for natural gas, used to make hydrogen.
Honda and Toyota do make EVs, as does Hyundai, as well as patents for batteries, which would put them near the top of the market. Clearly, they’re also betting on BEV cars. But they all also have a marine sector, and Toyota just partnered with a company to test out fuel cells for marine applications. The cars might as well have been a useful test bed which had its costs subsidized by consumers. Seems pretty clear what their angle is.
Or maybe they’re out of their mind. Who knows?
Hydrogen is good when it’s green hydrogen- made via electrolysis. Blue hydrogen is produced by gas companies, so it isn’t clean, unfortunately. There are some other snags, such as designing a really hard gas tank that cannot be punctured, and hydrogen storage is a bit challenging. It’s less dense than gasoline, particularly at normal temps. So it has to be cooled down, which takes additional power and delivery complications, and it’s still less dense even as a liquid, so you don’t get as far of a range vs gasoline or jet fuel.
Hydrogen storage as a battery medium for overproducing wind, solar, even solar towers might make sense. I, for one am excited about the idea of hydrogen blimps coming back for lifting heavy loads to remote places, which Canada is toying with right now.
Hydrogen might make sense for something like container ships, but short term, I think other efuels will be used for things like planes, buses, trucks, maybe cars. Stuff that is more inert or just less expensive to design across a supply chain. It also has potential offworld uses in the further future. It definitely has its uses, it just seems a bit difficult in personal vehicles.
In H2 car the H2 is just a really inefficient battery. Sure it can hold a lot, but it loses a lot. You lose it in energy conversions (to H2 and from H2) and you have to transport the stuff, and it leaks (smallest element) and it has to be cooled and compressed.
Battery tech is getting all the time, and really, you only need 300 mile range (many have that now) as humans have to stop for a rest/wee. With a charge network like or petrol network, you can charge then.
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For personal vehicles, no, that is not at all clear and many of us would say clearly the opposite.
However there are more heavy duty applications where batteries are unlikely to ever scale. I don’t think we have a clear winner yet so hydrogen is likely still in the running for things like aviation, shipping, construction and farm equipment, industry, maybe even grid scale energy storage
There’s no need for a “winner”, why are people so fixated that it has to be one or the other?
All the technologies we have are not exclusive, having more options is always better when it comes to energy.
This “winning” debate has to stop. There’s no gas vs diesel vs natural gas winner… There is no hydro, wind, PV winner… They all can coexist just fine.
There is a place for hydrogen fuel, and there’s a place for battery vehicles.
Stop debating this like they are football teams.
Firstly: winner, as in the more appropriate and mature technology
Secondly: while it may appear the technologies are not mutually exclusive, they each depend on a lot of infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense to build put multiple sets of infrastructure for multiple technology vehicles. The reason it may make sense for heavy equipment is you typically have a central hub everything comes back to, so the infrastructure can be much simpler
More appropriate in terms of what? Batteries and renewable fuels could serve two applications. And be more practical in certain locations.
The infrastructure can be location based. Doesn’t make sense to have EV in certain locations with poor grid coverage, or renewable fuels in big cities.
We have plenty of technologies with double infrastructure, I mean EV and carbon based fuels are both around, no problem whatsoever, even better on because we don’t rely on a single infrastructure. Renewable fuels can use a similar infrastructure to natural gas with a few tweaks. We have fiber optic, cable phone, 4/5G, all serve the “same” purpose but for different applications. There’s no “winner” there.
Batteries don’t deliver power as fast as fuels, so depending on what you need as a consumer you can decide to go for EV (single passenger small car for cities) or renewable fuels for long range, or high powered trucks for freight and heavy load.
I think the hydrogen is intended to be sourced from natural gas, which is not a great thing. The only way I see this working in an environmentally sustainable way is an efficient means of solar hydrolysis (much more efficient than photosynthesis).
It’s important to see where the hydrogen is being sourced from. Grey Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is not ideal as you point out.
Green hydrogen is promising however, and comes from electrolyzers. The key there is where the electricity to operate them comes from, but that’s true for electric vehicles as well. It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.
In any case, I think we do want to build out hydrogen infrastructure (and I’m biased since I work in hydrogen energy). The future we’re envisioning is one where solar and wind provide us excesses fairly often. That’s where it’s perfect to run electrolyzers to store the energy as hydrogen.
It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.
Well the idea is that BEV is more efficient with the energy that it gets…
Which I understand…
But what I don’t understand is what part of our usage is actually “efficient” from the get go? Also that ‘extra’ energy we lose to the electrolysis process could easily be made up with extra solar/wind/renewables… and Nuclear without much issue.
Further, desalination mechanisms are desperately needed for our water problem too… Guess what process can help with that… cough totally not electrolysis cough. It’s almost like it’s a win all around… Yet everyone is super against it for one nebulous reason or another… and none of those reasons ever make sense to me.
Yeah one of the big downsides of hydrogen is that you need massive amounts of clean energy to make it worthwhile.
Considering I have no hydrogen stations within a 100 mile radius, if they give me the car I would only get one tank out of it.
You could fill the tank with the hot air from the pro-hydrogen crowd.
We must compress them first
I would assume this falls into the “you couldn’t pay me” category for most people.
I don’t have a single hydrogen station here in Michigan. (There might be one in Detroit.) Meanwhile, I can plug in my electric car at home, or go to a public charger 10 miles away. Hydrogen’s good as dead. At least to me, anyway.
Hydrogen was as good as dead for years because compressing it is so wasteful
I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you’re driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don’t have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren’t doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn’t need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Granted, the oil company only had seven to begin with (five of which had been out of order), but that still represents more than 10% of the Golden State’s stations, nearly all of which are clustered around Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Just don’t tell Honda, which recently found the time to convert its best-selling CR-V into an automotive equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster: a plug-in hybrid, fuel-cell vehicle.
The crossover’s 17.7 kWh battery provides 29 miles of electric-only range, and once that’s spent, the front-mounted fuel cell starts sipping hydrogen from a pair of carbon-fiber tanks.
Now, hydrogen has great potential as a fuel source for many parts of a carbon-free economy, from industrial heat to steel production and long-distance shipping.
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
If today’s hydrogen startups succeed, and if they’re able to build enough capacity to satiate industrial and shipping demand, then it might make sense to start selling fuel-cell vehicles to the masses.
The original article contains 810 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The ones at the Washington state border are actually in Canada. I’d love to see hydrogen take off, not necessarily take over. But that’s the car enthusiasts in me and seeing all the new technologies. Doubt I’ll see it in my working career.
How expensive would it be to re-fit as a chargeable hybrid?
This podcast episode strong critiques the technical challenges, lifecycle costs, and market effort of hydrogen. I was hydro-curious before this, but it really seems unfeasible.
The chemical engineer being interviewed, Paul Martin, has been working with hydrogen for years.
Paul Martin is a Canadian chemical engineer with decades of experience making and using hydrogen and syngas. As a chemical process development specialist, Paul offers services to an international clientele via his private consultancy Spitfire Research. He is also co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a nonprofit organization providing science-based information about hydrogen from a position free from commercial interest
Crash it and you have your own private Hindenburg.
Not really. Hindenburg had hydrogen at air pressure.
Pressurised hydrogen tends to fail in a much safer way (or just not fail). A regular fossil fuel car fire is much worse.
The thing is you’re not just burning hydrogen (or gas). You’re also burning oxygen in the atmosphere and how bad the fire is depends how the gas mixes with the oxygen. The mix has to be just right or it won’t burn at all (Hindenburg was just right).
Gasoline tends to burn quite slowly which is particularly catastrophic as it generates heat over a long time which causes everything else in the car to also catch fire, while still burning fast enough that you might not be able to escape the car before it the fire gets dangerous.
I don’t know enough about hydrogen to know how big of a bang that would even make.
I’ve edited my comment - it has been tested extensively and they’re not very bad at all.
Thanks, that’s actually really comforting to know. It’s not something I’ve had reason to read into. So I’m glad somebody has
As someone who works in the hydrogen space, this is something we’re always considering too. We’re very aware that hydrogen explodes, and it’s a core facet of our safety analyses.
I think we should make a show about our various theories about a big bang. I propose we call it The Big Bang Theory.
I’ll see myself out.
Please do, and don’t let the door hit you on the way. LOL.
I read somewhere that with the Hindinburg, the hydrogen pretty much just went straight up, while most of the deaths and burns were caused by the fuel for the engines.
What do you think gasoline does when it’s set on fire?
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That’s true. Or at least when you set too much of it on fire at once. Because obviously, engines set it on fire, but in a controlled manner.
