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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Natural gas comes out of the ground along with oil. It is VERY cheap. Hydrogen needs to be made with power, and therefore costs a LOT more to get. Although burning hydrogen just makes heat and water.
In Ontario CA, near LA, there is a large truck stop I stay at there, that has Hydrogen fueling stations. I dont know what kind of vehicle is using it. This is in the truck fueling aisles that are mostly diesel, whit a few for compressed gas and hydrogen.
According to this article there are around 15000 cars right now mostly in CA that are using it. One reason is there is an infrastructure for the refueling in place in CA.
[https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/)
It takes more energy to produce the hydrogen than the amount of energy stored in they hydrogen. Herr is a [link](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/hydrogen-technology-faces-efficiency-disadvantage-in-power-storage-race-65162028) saying efficiency is 18% to 46%. Meaning if to produce 1 Kwh of hydrogen it takes 1.18 Kwh to 1.46 Kwh of solar energy. Better to consume the solar energy directly.
Hydrogen is more of a battery than a fuel source. It can store energy for a later time, albeit in a very inconvenient way.
Hydrogen is just an EV with extra steps.
Where an EV converts electricity into movement at an efficiency of 70-90%.
The hydrogen car needs electrolysis, compression and refrigeration, transport and filling, to convert 25-35% of that power into movement.
People have mentioned the storage problem, but a part is that hydride has been illegal to sell because it could theoretically be used to make home made i.c.b.ms
There was a guy who made his own hydrogen car with it a while back, but he got around the hydride by making his own… with a partical accelerator he had to build at home. If you Google Bob Lazar that is the guy.
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.
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…
I’d love an end to climate change, but hydrogen fuel cells only get us half way there.
One of the big concerns with climate change is melting ice caps raising the sea level. Hydrogen fuel cells emit water it has made. This will evaporate, form clouds and fall as rain. It will rain more, there will be more floods and the sea levels will rise.
We’d be much better off investing the money to make more efficient solar panels and wind turbines.
The worst part about Hydrogen is its a horribly powerful greenhouse gas. And it leaks everywhere.
It is disappointing that the top answer is plain wrong.
The ELI5 answer is: It takes more energy to create/isolate hydrogen than the amount of energy you get from burning hydrogen. Looking to hydrogen as a fuel source is the wrong perspective. You should be looking at hydrogen as an energy storage medium.
More in-depth answer:
The world needs to look at hydrogen as an energy storage medium instead of an energy source itself. Similar to a battery, it is where you put energy when you have too much of it (preferably from clean energy sources).
The current top answer is plain wrong because it does not answer the actual question of “Why is hydrogen not feasible”. While the top answer does mention that one primary way to get hydrogen is from fossil fuels, you can also generate hydrogen through renewable energy sources. Germany has multiple hydrogen plants utilizing this approach.
It is valuable in Germany because they have had periods of over-generation of electricity from renewable sources. Prior to the hydrogen plants they would have to encourage citizens to waste electricity because the power must go somewhere.
Unlike batteries though, you can easily load a ton of carbon onto a tanker in hydrogen tanks and take it all around the world with very little losses. Additionally batteries cannot fit within a pipeline infrastructure.
That though introduces another barrier of hydrogen adoption. Current energy transport systems (gas pipelines, oil tankers) are not suitable to transport hydrogen. I forget at the moment exactly why, I think its because they are not meant to be pressurized at the level we would pressurize hydrogen – or it might have been due to some side chemical reaction… Can’t recall that specific detail at this point.
Source: Masters in Energy Systems Engineering. One of my projects was a case study of one of the new hydrogen plants in Germany (might already be built/building at this point). In that project we addressed the hydrogen feasibility question in light of Germany building hydrogen plants.
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