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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It’s energy-intensive to produce, and very difficult to store and ship safely.
Hydrogen is literally the smallest molecule possible. As a gas it leaks readily through the kind of containers and seals that can contain other gases, and it takes either enormous pressure or extremely low temperatures to keep it in a liquid state.
Hydrogen gas is also extremely combustible (when it mixes with air at least). The Hindenburg was a hydrogen fire.
So there are some significant engineering challenges to be overcome before large-scale distribution becomes feasible.
Hydrogen isn’t magic. You need to produce it because it doesn’t really exist on its own on Earth. Currently hydrogen is usually made from fossil fuels (because they are, you know, HYDROcarbons) so that isn’t really useful as you can just use the fossil fuel instead. The idea is that you create hydrogen by separating it from water with electricity. It is rather electricity intensive though so it’s not really plausible until we get really cheap electricity from renewables. In fact, due to the losses at every stage in the production and usage of hydrogen, it makes more sense to use the electricity directly if at all possible. But when there’s excess production of electricity (aka cheap or even free electricity), hydrogen production would enable us to store some of that energy for later use. Think of it as a complicated battery.
Hydrogen is the leakest stuff in world. Designing foolproof / leakproof connectors for hydrogen in a consumer environment would be challenging to say the least.
Hydrogen is incredibly hard to store. Since it’s such a tiny molecule, it easily leaks out of pressurized tanks. Cryogenic storage is super energy intensive. Metal hydrides are super heavy
* Production. The current way of making hydrogen essentially converts fossil fuel into hydrogen and CO2. This is obviously a really bad idea. They have been trying to “greenwash” this by storing the CO2 in oil&gas fields afterwards, but this still results in quite a few CO2 emissions due to things like leaks.
* Efficiency. There *is* a way to make clean hydrogen by essentially running electricity through water, turning water into hydrogen and oxygen. However, this is not 100% efficient, so you lose quite a lot of energy. Hydrogen has a best-case scenario of about 70% efficiency for something like driving, compared to batteries at 95%+. When you burn it for heating, you are *way* below that 70%, compared to the 400%ish (not a typo!) for grid-powered heat pumps.
* Safety. Hydrogen contains relatively little energy per volume. Luckily it is a gas, so we can just compress it. However, that means you now have to carry around a tank pressurized to 700 times ambient pressure, filled with a highly flammable gas. If you thought battery fires were bad, hydrogen fires are *way worse*.
Some people claim we can solve the first two issues by generating hydrogen from excess green energy. However, this means building a conversion plant which sits idle most of the time – which is incredibly expensive. In reality it’d be way cheaper to just build more solar panels and windmills to keep the plant running – at which point it is no longer taking up the excess!
There *are* valid use cases for hydrogen because some industrial processes physically **need** it to properly function without fossil fuel. But for stuff like heating or driving, it’s just a subsidy-seeking distraction for which way better alternatives are already being used.
It’s take energy to get hydrogen, so it’s really just a form of energy storage that is not very dense. There are applications for it, but a typical battery has higher energy density. Hydrocarbons have a very high energy density, and thus less energy going into extraction and processing is less than the output.
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
Purely the cost. We can make hydrogen pretty easily and cheaply, but it uses natural gas to do it, so it is sort of pointless.
The holy grail is green hydrogen made using the electrolysis process. Splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The technology is still being worked on, as it isn’t reliable and too expensive at the moment. Also it is energy intensive, so it won’t be viable unless you are producing tons of excess solar or wind energy. Then you could store all the excess as fuel. The cheaper solar gets, the cheaper hydrogen will get.
Germany has about 100 hydrogen filling stations and counting. There are a dozen in Britain. The U.S. lags behind every progressive solution, again. And again. And again.
Many of these “reasons” for not using hydrogen as a fuel source are the same crappy propaganda talking points that claim that solar and wind are not viable alternatives.
*8 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes.*
The simplest answer is that hydrogen is just another type of battery. Currently, it is a battery that is difficult to produce at scale, hard to transport, and extremely challenging to hold.
The idea that hydrogen is good for larger vehicles comes from the idea that you can store a lot of energy in a small volume of space. The problem is that the requirements bring so much weight back into the mix, that the entire thing is not better than just using some common battery.
There is an additional problem with this idea. Batteries continue to get smaller and cheaper. It already looks like hydrogen has lost the battle for trucks. Planes and boats are perhaps still in play, but even those are becoming questionable.
Toyota is going after hydrogen for two main reasons. The first is that the electrical grid in Japan is, scientifically speaking, a little fucked up. The second reason is that they have waited so long on aggressively going into batteries that they stand no chance of catching up to either Tesla or the Chinese. So hydrogen is a Hail Mary.
At the moment, there are no clear paths for hydrogen to become feasible. This could change, of course. Fifteen years ago, it looked like hydrogen had the easier path compared to batteries. But unless somebody is keeping a really good secret, hydrogen is at least ten years away from even reaching a stage that BEVs reached 5 years ago. In the meantime, batteries keep improving.
Even if hydrogen would develop to the point that it is somewhat better than batteries, nobody is going to completely redo the entire infrastructure to switch to hydrogen. And in this game, that means that hydrogen is already dead for this use case.
One last thing: there are areas in industry where hydrogen has a good future. As a replacement for heating or for manufacturing, hydrogen could be extremely useful. So the problem is not that hydrogen is useless; it’s just not really any good for transport.
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