What is actually the simplest answer why hydrogen is not feasible yet for a replacement of our usual ways to heat buildings or drive cars. I heard that Hydrogen makes sense for larger vehicles that have to drive for a lot of miles but smaller ones are not really in development outside of toyota’s experiments. Is there already a way to when it could get feasible?
In: 475
Today there is no large scale carbon-emission free production of hydrogen. So called “green hydrogen”..
There is just “blue hydrogen” which comes ultimately from oil and needs to be coupled with undeveloped or unproven carbon capture methods to be environmentally friendly.
This explains the lack of interest in going down that path from everyone except oil companies.And if they were serious, and not just using the prospect to confuse people, they would do it.
hydrogen is explosive in almsot any concentration with air, hydrogen is very hard to store because it leaks out of most things, hydrogen takes up a huge amount of space because you either; need to make it liquid which only happens if you cool it to -253°C, or store it as gas at extreme pressures, which need massively strong tanks
In some places like the Netherlands, to a limited degree it’s already a reality and automotor companies have H2 engine prototypes, but they won’t roll them out until monitoring and safety capabilities are improved.
It’s just not demonstrated to be as economically or ecologically better than your good ol’ fossil engines.
It’s also a chicken vs. egg thing. There isn’t much infrastructure for delivering hydrogen, and no one wants to invest in a delivery method because there’s little hydrogen, because there’s little infrastructure, because there’s little hydrogen and round and round.
Hydrogen explodes. Like big. People are justifiably hesitant to put a giant hydrogen bomb into every vehicle on the road and into every home.