To paraphrase Mean Girls, “stop trying to make hydrogen happen.”
For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it’s hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles’ exhausts. It’s just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.
Hydrogen’s main selling point is that it’s faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it’s a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects.
But in reality, that’s pretty far from true.
? You can get Hydrogen through simple water electrolysis. In fact you can do it at home. That’s like how 4% of all hydrogen is manufactured.
You may not realize this, but 4% is not most.
You should also ask yourself how most of the electricity is generated to electrolysis the hydrogen.
You didn’t say “most” on your original post. You might want to edit it if that’s what you meant.
I suppose that’s fair, but given the context, an insignificant amount of… still not green hydrogen is sort of irrelevant
I think the idea is that if the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel exists and using fossil fuels is penalized, there’s an incentive to start producing more of it via electricity by, as an example, using excess power produced by renewable energy sources when demand is low, balancing the grid and leveling out electricity price fluctuations at the same time.
This relies on a lot of technical, economical, and political ifs though. The end goal is desirable but it’s not clear if there’s a feasible path there, considering the physical properties of hydrogen alone.
It takes more energy than it’s worth.
The infrastructure isn’t there, and hydrogen is more dangerous than gasoline if it leaks.
I’d love to see a source on that.
This Report by the US department of energy says otherwise.
My chemistry lab experiment. 😅
Spicy gas go boom.
I suppose a slow leak wouldn’t be that bad though. A catastrophic failure from a collision would be not great.
I was definitely in the same camp of thinking (I mean Hindenburg etc, duh). But there’s been a bunch of studies where, because hydrogen basically immediately dissappates up and away, unless you’re in an extremely cramped area it’s much safer in collisions and unexpected containment breaches.
Even then, it actually poses less of a threat to life because it doesn’t create smoke or burn for awhile like gasoline does.
Yet, for these facilities to be economically feasible, they need to run 24/7, not just when there is an excess of electricity available.
Thus, solar power plants need to be constructed e.g. in Sahara with the sole purpose of hydrogen production.