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?
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Fuel Cell Engineer here. The main reason is that it is not yet profitable simply because oil and gas (O&G) is cheap, and O&G and the battery manufacturing industry are already well established. Hydrogen is currently mainly produced by using steam, methane, and electricity, but it’s cheaper and easier to just produce energy with the methane directly. We have to invest a ton of money into large-scale production, storage, transportation, and consumer products that use it in the first place (this will likely only be the stationary energy storage, heavy transportation, and aviation industries)
The hydrogen industry will be established once carbon taxes are heavily implemented and solar/wind generation catches up to the O&G industry ~15-20 years. The problem with solar and wind is that production depends on inconsistent weather. Therefore, energy storage is needed to balance grid supply and demand. This will ultimately end up being hydrogen since large scale batteries are expensive, heavy, and limited by materials (when compared to H2 tanks), whereas H2 can be produced by electrolysis, stored, and then reused by fuel cells. Fuel cells will be cheaper for this than batteries, basically. I wish money wasn’t always the limiting factor in technological development…
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