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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for heating a lot of people uses natural gas but swapping that for hydrogen is not straight forward, the appliances will need to be suitable for hydrogen use so new appliances required
natural gas pipping is also not suitable for hydrogen because hydrogen leaks easily and corrodes metal so suitable pipping and gaskets infrastructure needs to be used
long term hydrogen storage is also an issue, tanks needed to sustain the above plus the pressure they are not cheap plus still there are loses
for vehicles, there is no advantage in performance compared to modern electric cars
battery technology is improving slowly, eating any advantage in range hydrogen may have
and while hydrogen could add the benefit of faster refuelling battery charging times and stations are becoming good enough so that when taken into consideration all the needed hydrogen infrastructure is just more efficient cheaper simpler and quicker to electrify directly
Most hydrogen is currently produced from oil and gas as we move away from that, hydrogen production would only slow the closing down of such facilities
there are ways to produce “green” hydrogen, but it isn’t cheap or easy, it would be never as efficient as powering directly from electricity and all the infrastructure issues still apply
the ideal case for hydrogen is industrial/commercial uses where electrical wiring could be installed for the green hydrogen to be produced on site or near by as in industrial parks using it, and as needed helping to minimize the amount of time in storage, it also would eliminate the need for hydrogen to be transported to far away locations
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