this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Did they stop subsidizing Shells greenwashing?
No they've just been subsidizing an inferior technology (batteries might be better if we had room temperature superconductors, plus the hurdles for hydrogen are so much smaller and it doesn't rely on digging hundreds of millions of tons of rare earth metals out of the ground just to replace all the vehicles on the road today)
No, hydrogen just requires processing methane. How superior!
Only cheaper in small volumes, not in every car everywhere volumes.
You can use the same electricity you'd use to charge an electric car to separate water, but basically you're saving the problem of having to deliver that power to every supercharger station at the time of your convenience, which is the biggest hurdle.
I live in the area with the most electric cars of anywhere and our power costs have passed the point where $6/gallon gas in a regular car is actually cheaper per mile than charging a Tesla.
ALL the power infrastructure needs to be replaced to handle multiples higher demand just to keep up.
The same can be said about transporting and storing hydrogen. You can't just use existing infrastructure. Hydrogen has to be kept under high pressure and it leaks out of most containers since it's the smallest element on the periodic table. Not to mention the energy density per volume (compressed) is much lower than gas.
Making hydrogen through electrolysis is possible and we've all seen it in school but it is pretty inefficient if you compare storing energy in a lithium battery to making hydrogen from fresh water sources. Not to mention liquid hydrogen, after being generated and compressed, must be transported which uses huge amounts of energy. And even given that, it's pointless to talk about green hydrogen when it's less than 1% of global hydrogen production and even optimistic projections don't show it growing that much in the following decade. It's also old technology meaning there isn't much room for improvement to the process, transportation and storage problems.
Hydrogen production is dominated by the fossil fuel industry because it is much more cost effective to extract it from coal and natural gas. Something like 6% of use of these fossil fuels currently go to hydrogen production.
I'm sorry where you live the power costs are so high. Hopefully things will improve with newer power infrastructure.
With a huge power loss, even if you just look at the hydrogen production and not the transport, storage and maintenance of the specialised facilities necessary to distribute it.
Hydrogen is super inefficient compared to electric vehicles.