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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At the most simple level, it comes down to thermo. You take hydrogen gas, you react it with oxygen to get energy and water. The amount of energy you need to cleave hydrogen from water to create hydrogen gas is greater than the energy you get from hydrogen. … if you tried to use hydrogen to get more hydrogen, you’d run out of hydrogen. Making hydrogen is energy negative.
Soo you need energy to create it, where are you getting it from? If you used fossil fuels, you’d need more to get an equivalent amount of energy than using the fossil fuels directly….so it’d be more polluting and drive up costs.
Something like solar, again, more efficient to use the energy directly or even store it in a battery than to use it to create hydrogen. This is true for all renewables.
Besides special cases, the only real use for hydrogen as fuel is energy storage. Solar doesn’t work at night. If you had enough extra solar panels, you could convert some of that excess energy to hydrogen and then burn it at night. Same thing with wind or hydro…. if grid demand is met, produce hydrogen. I’d say though that we are pretty far off from having that much excess renewables and at a price that’s on par with our current fossil fuel prices.
If you were to imagine that battery tech completely stagnates…. maybe in 50-100 years, with excess renewables, people would be willing to pay a premium for the convenience of fueling with hydrogen….
Storage is the next issue. The stuff is pretty explosive. Compressed hydrogen can autoignite if it decompresses quickly. It diffuses through just about everything. The more you have sitting around or the longer the supply chain is, the more you’re losing…. but most peeps wouldn’t want a hydrogen storage facility in their neighborhood. Corrosive isn’t the right word, but that captures the concept….its pretty corrosive to its storage vessel. That’s gonna increase cost.
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