We see so many battery electric cars being purchased but very little of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. What are the reasons?
In: Technology
While Hydrogen is as abundant as it is, it is EXTREMELY difficult (Energy intensive) to produce in to a compressed form for fuel, and then storing it safely (as Hydrogen is odorless and colorless), in other words, a Hydrogen fire, is near INVISIBLE (you can see the heat being radiated but that is it).
Electrical powered cars, you just need it to be plugged in to a suitable outlet that has the energy demands of the car for recharging. (Lets say a 32 amp outlet).
There’s almost nowhere to refuel a hydrogen car. In the entire US there are maybe 30 filling stations and all are in California. Installing a single new filling station costs somewhere on the order of millions of dollars.
A battery electric car can be recharged almost anywhere – any house, apartment building, or office building with an electrical outlet. A dedicated charger can be installed for somewhere in the order of a thousand dollars.
All the other explanations are great, but consider the wider point of, why would you hold your vehicle to one fuel source when electricity can be generated from all fuel sources. Not just hydrogen, but also gasoline, diesel, flex/bio-fuel, natrual gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hampster wheel, and more can all be used to generate electricity, which in turn can power your electricity vehicle.
I know it is funny to see an electric vehicle charging with a gasoline/diesel generator, but that is just an example for the flexibility of the electric vehicle.
Short ELI5: providing hydrogen fuel is a difficult and expensive task, which have not been perfected for the many decades of research dedicated to make “hydrogen economy” work. The case is opposite for electricity, obviously.
There are 62 hydrogen filling stations in north america, mostly in california:
[https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=HY](https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=HY)
There are about 75,000 electric chargers, not including private chargers.
[https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC](https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen-locations#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC)
I want to point out that hydrogen does have potential as bulk electric storage. Actually there’s a huge project being undertaken in Utah: [ACES](https://www.energy.gov/lpo/advanced-clean-energy-storage) project. But man this should be really scary, filling a cavern with hydrogen gas.
It’s just probably not going to break into transportation at a competitive price point quite yet.
So, so so so so many reasons. Here a link to an article written by a frustrated individual that does an epic run down of all the issues, (but be warned, it’s about 10,000 words.) [https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/12/the-life-story-of-a-committed-hydrogen-for-energy-worker-unfolds/](https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/12/the-life-story-of-a-committed-hydrogen-for-energy-worker-unfolds/)
Of course this is EILI5 so you’re not hear to read a war & peace length novel on all the shortcomings of hydrogen so let me give you the two main reasons hydrogen has failed.
1. NO INFRASTRUCTURE! For all the talk about how fast it would be to gas up a hydrogen car for that epic road trip… you can’t because there’s literally nowhere outside of California to actually obtain hydrogen.
But why is that? Well, that brings us to number 2:
Everything about hydrogen is EXPENSIVE. Hydrogen fuel is about 10x the cost of gasoline to drive the same distance. If everything works, maybe one day it will only be 3x. Toyota literally gives you $15,000 worth of fuel if you buy their car and it’s still not enough. But that’s just the fuel, the cost to install a nationwide network of hydrogen pumps would bankrupt every company on earth. It’s so so so so unbelievably expensive.
So there you go. There’s no where to fill up and even if there was, you couldn’t afford it.
Most of hydrogen is made from natural gas, so for environment it’s the same as driving CNG converted regular gas car.
Only difference is that car and fuel cost is 300% higher for hydrogen.
In short – because electricity is abundant and everywhere, and hydrogen is not.
In order to support a decent sized number of hydrogen vehicles, we’d need to build infrastructure to make hydrogen available around the country so they could be refuelled.
We don’t need to do that for electricity because the network already exists. It’s the national grid.
Having 100% renewable electricity we can load a battery with that energy.
or
convert this energy with a lost of >50% into hydrogen,
and lost again 50% while converting it back into electricity,
that we can load into the battery to drive the engine.
so even if electricity is free you need at least 4kWh for each 1kWh you like to use.
That makes no sense for most cars.
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