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Refueling a hydrogen car in California is so annoying that drivers are suing Toyota
(www.latimes.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Wrong
Hydrogen production and transportation doesn't make sense unless it's done locally (ex: produce it at a port, transport it to fuel the ships stationed at the port). Hydrogen is pretty much impossible to transport long distance without wasting so much energy that it doesn't make sense to do it in the first place, then think about how hard it is for us to prevent leaks of petrol of all things, now think about the leaks if we're transporting hydrogen instead.
You have inverted reality here. It is much easier to transport hydrogen long distances versus electricity. Pipelines are cheaper than HVDC cables. You can actually ship hydrogen across oceans if necessary. It is electricity that has to be made locally, but hydrogen can made anywhere it is cost effective.
Hydrogen gas will leak though steel since the molecule is so small while making it brittle and incapable of handling pressure through hydrogen entitlement. It's not trivial to ship. Power lines are cheap and transport extremely high power density.
Only for certain types of steel. And there are many materials that are impermeable to hydrogen. This is mostly a marketing argument rather than one based on fact. Pipelines are far cheaper and send far more energy than high voltage wires.
That's just an indirect way of power a car via hydrogen. Sure, it can work. But it just implies that having cars directly powered by hydrogen are the better idea.
Using hydrogen as a bulk energy carrier will enable the hydrogen infrastructure. Unlike wires, you do not have to physically link it to every home. You can have last-mile solutions like using trucks. You also only need to convert existing fuel stations. So the scale is much lower, and likely much cheaper too.
Hydrogen cars are proving to be safer than gasoline cars. The fuel is lighter than air, so it does not linger like gasoline does. There are no known serious car fires in FCEVs. Even li-ion batteries have the same problem of gasoline, namely that the energy source of the fire stays in place. As a result, many people have died or been injured.