What factors led to shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles?
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Hydrogen is stupid. Low energy density, practically no availability, difficult to manufacture, difficult to transport, difficult to keep contained. Basically without a switch to all nuclear energy it isn’t a feasible source of fuel. It’s much better/easier to just make batteries and use the electricity that would otherwise be used to make the hydrogen just to charge those batteries.
Edit: I used to be a proponent of Hydrogen engines until battery technology caught up
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is loss. Electricity can be stored with relatively low levels of loss for most batteries. Hydrogen is small so it leeches out fairly easily.
From what I’ve read hydrogen not being a good option is a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing. There’s no one big problem just a ton of small ones.
Government Legislation requiring ev as opposed to renewable resoyrce powered cars, according to an ev ebgineer.
The real pivot point came during the Obama era. When he came into office, the global economy was in a massive recession. They put together a massive spending package to update certain aspects of infrastructure while putting people to work in order to ease unemployment. Many of these projects had the intent of creating a greener infrastructure in the future. There were a lot of propositions as to where this (I think $800 billion would go.) investment in infrastructure for both EV and hydrogen cars were considered. They chose EVs. That rational was that this was an easier transition. Electricity already runs everywhere. All you need are charging points, which can literally sit in front of a parking spot. Hydrogen on the other hand would’ve required a massive infrastructure overhaul. There is no “pipeline” for mass produced liquid hydrogen to be created, transported and distributed at stations. A hydrogen station basically requires either a new gas station or a phasing out of an existing gas station, which we obviously aren’t able to get rid of yet. So the EV won out.
Several problems with Hydrogen:
1. If you produce it by electrolysis you spend more energy than you get back. Using fictitious numbers just to illustrate: if you spend 10 KW of energy to produce 10 cubic meter of hydrogen, it will give you 6 KW of energy when you try to use it.
2. Hydrogen is highly reactive. It will react with everything, like the tank you use to store it, making it brittle.
3. Hydrogen is dangerous. You can make it “less” dangerous by lowing its temperature to very extreme values but that requires a complex machine and more energy or
4. or you can compress the hell out of it, to liquefy it by force. Then you are carrying a bomb around.
5. If you produce it by reacting butane with water, you use less energy than electrolysis but you produce huge amounts of CO2, the thing you are trying to prevent and you are using fossil fuel, other thing you are trying to prevent.
6. A new option they have discovered is that hydrogen is produced by earth and you have points, across the planet, where hydrogen can be extracted such as oil. This hydrogen is produced by hot rocks interacting with water, meaning it can be an infinite renewable source, but as far as I read, when you pump that, you also pump other gases, as, guess which… CO2…
7. Hydrogen molecule is small. The smallest of them all. It is so small that keeping it contained on a tank is a problem and it will eventually leak and guess what… BOOM!
I sincerely don’t see a future for hydrogen, at least not in its purest form because it requires a lot of safety procedures and exposes everyone to a lot of dangers.
[Why Hydrogen Cars Flopped](https://youtu.be/b88v-WvqzeQ?si=96MeAy4Ft34b3kK8)
Couldn’t explain better if I wanted to 🙂
The well-to-wheel efficiency is abysmal. Main issues are surrounding transportation and storage. Its energy density is terrible which is what ultimately causes those issues. Did you know that a litre of petrol contains more hydrogen atoms than liquid hydrogen itself?
Hydrogen has extremely low energy per unit volume. To make the tank sizes manageable you need to increase the density by either storing it at high pressures (10,000+ PSI) or at extremely low temperatures (-423°F). Both of those options require expensive storage tanks for the trucks hauling it to gas stations, the gas stations themselves, and the cars that fill up at the gas station. For the low temperature option, the hydrogen will boil as it heats up, requiring a vent to periodically reduce the pressure in the tank. This vented hydrogen is both flammable and a waste of money.
Hydrogen is mostly produced via natural gas, which isn’t the cleanest of processes. Might as well just run the car on natural gas if you are going to use that process. The other common method is electrolysis, where water is zapped with electricity and it splits into oxygen and hydrogen. This isn’t particularly efficient from an electricity standpoint. Then it needs to be compressed or chilled, consuming more electricity. Then it needs to be trucked or piped to a gas station, consuming even more energy. From there it needs to be continuously chilled or compressed to be able to put it into a vehicle. And then it needs to go through a fuel cell to recombine with oxygen and form water, creating electricity, which is not all that efficient either.
TLDR, It takes a lot of electricity to make hydrogen, store hydrogen, and move hydrogen, just for the hydrogen to make electricity in the car. It’s way easier and more efficient to just directly put electricity in the car.
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