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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Hydrogen has to be produced, unlike raw oil, which just sits there waiting to be extracted. So even if the other issues of it were solved, the extreme volatility (hard to contain it) and explosiveness (using just a lighter, you will not be able to ignite diesel), there is still the issue of how to get it.
ELI5 attempt: A long time ago, humanity found a warehouse full of charged batteries. And used them, for all kinds of toys. Once a battery is depleted, it turned into a nasty fart and was gone. When the warehouse was slowly depleting humanity looked around some more, and found more warehouses of charged batteries an emptied those, too. They had to travel further and further to find them, eventually even into deserts and in the oceans, hard to get to places, but it was worth it.
Humanity however realized that there are two issues, one is that it is harder an harder to find those warehouses, and the other is that really nasty smell of farts started to build up, and it is getting really bad. People started getting sick.
Some smart guy looked down at some point, and realized that there are actually empty batteries in every lake, ocean and even puddle, everywhere, and suggested testing those. And would you know it, once charged, those batteries would work mostly fine, not emit smell, and can be used again and again. Making them work like the other batteries is just a matter of testing and some fiddeling, that they can figure out, the bigger issues it that so far, the only way to charge them was to discharge one of the old smell batteries, so nothing was really gained there. Sure, you can charge one, and show it around and everybody will say “boy this is nice, and it doesnt smell like a fart” but since there is still the issue of clean charging, there is no real benefit. Now if we had some way to create electricity in some other way, and charge those water-batteries without the fart-batteries, the problem would be solved. So some humans said “what about solar, and wind, and all those unreliable energy sources, where people said they are bad because they are not always available? Why not charge the water batteries when we have more energy that we can use to watch TV and warm our houses?” And the rest of the people said “yeah, kinda, I get the idea, but it sounds like a lot of work, and effort, and those wind turbines dont look nice. I also invested into the fart battery company and another one making gas masks. I would rather just ignore the issue, but you keep on telling people we solved it, so they tolerate the smell a bit longer and stop asking questions”.
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