this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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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.
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.
Currently literally 99% of the world supply of hydrogen is fossil fuels. Yes, in the "future centuries" sense of the long term things might be different, but in the "we need to stop climate change in the next decade or so" sense it's a non-starter. If you banned companies from making hydrogen from fossil fuels, the world simply wouldn't have enough hydrogen.
It's basically not possible to make electrolysis more efficient; the energy requirements are simple physics. The only way that technology can make green hydrogen cheaper is to reduce the capital cost of building an electrolysis plant, and to make enough surplus electricity that the cost to ring it comes down. Although as the latter also makes recharging a BEV cheaper too, that doesn't necessarily get hydrogen anywhere closer to being competitive.
My thought is we could feed electrolysis with nuclear, solar, or tidal generation plants to create hydrogen. That doesn't mean it would be cheap, but maybe it could get us to the quick refill infrastructure we have with gasoline currently that we're having trouble mirroring with BEVs for long trips.
I haven't run the math ... so if you have or you know a source that has and this is beyond uneconomically feasible (like it would cost $$$$$ for a single "tank of ~~gas~~ hydrogen"), fair enough.
For comparison, grey hydrogen currently costs around $2 per kg, and green hydrogen costs around $12 per kg. Filling a Toyota Mirai tank with green hydrogen would cost you about $70. That's production at today's electricity prices. The cost to fully charge a Tesla is about $15, same rates.
So for green hydrogen to beat grey hydrogen on the open market, costs need to drop by a factor of 6. And because it can only do this if electricity prices drop off a cliff, it'd be doing this in an environment where you can fully charge a luxury BEV for $3...
Hydrogen is also not the only game in town in terms of competitors with BEV. For those niches where fully battery-operated vehicles aren't practical, there are also biofuels, which are (from a climate change point of view) greener than green hydrogen anyway (although they have their own controversies).
I don't think battery tech needs to improve, it will, but I don't think it needs too.
Prices are going to drop. Will be interesting to see what happens is BYD sets up in Mexico. But lithium for high end cars and sodium for cheap cars I think is enough to push the revolution.
I've written about my delima with buying a BEV (beyond the price) a bit already ... here's a link to that https://social.packetloss.gg/comment/1334210
Basically, I do think either the battery technology or the charging infrastructure themselves need a fair bit of improvement before we'll see the average person adopting them enthusiastically.
As time goes on there will be more chargers and less petrol stations.
What I'm saying is if the price keeps coming down battery tech is good enough today.
Like hypothetically if electric cars were half the price of normal cars and there was 10x as many charging stations you wouldn't need better battery technology.
But battery tech will get better and cheaper and there will be more charging stations. I get their are issues now.
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.
Yeah but you can charge EVs with solar panels if you have them installed. Not everybody can make hydrogen for their Toyota Mirais.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.