Zubrin is not an honest interlocutor in this issue, though the basic message is probably sound. Examples of his dishonesty:
1) The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product.
2) The delivery argument: this doesn't even begin to make sense. Straw man argument where he claims it couldn't be delivered efficiently in the domains he suggests. It is harder to deliver hydrogen than hydrocarbons, but the numbers he quotes are just garbage.
3) Limiting the vehicle storage to compressed gas (muh hindenberg) and cryo. No serious people really talk about this to my knowledge. Metal hydrides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...) are the way hydrogen probably would be transported in a hydrogen economy. It's still less efficient volumetrically than hydrocarbons, but then so is everything else. The argument that it must be as dense as hydrocarbons is just goalposting. People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. At least at one point, the envisioned hydrogen economy was you just retrofit hydride "gas tanks" to existing internal combustion machines. If you can make everything else work, that's a fairly reasonable thing to do. Which is probably why Zubrin never mentions it.
4) Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. I think this is Zubrin's biggest fear. His goalposting about fuel cell efficiency is silly: so what if they're not more efficient on some measurement than an ideal diesel motor? They don't smell as bad either.
Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
Agree with most of your points. There are some valid observations that he then smoothly extrapolates to invalid conclusions.
There has been considerable progress in fuel cell vehicles, for example. The Honda Clarity fuel cell version has an estimated 360+ mi (US EPA) range: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-cl... . Fill times are significantly better than current high-rate battery electric vehicle charging.
It seems to me the key will be in whether we make advancements faster in higher energy-density batteries vs. scale up of direct hydrogen production (e.g., https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells ) . Electrolysis using grid power probably does not make sense. It would be valid to question, even if we could directly scale up hydrogen production from renewable sources, wouldn't it make more sense to use the same area for electricity production? If we're talking about ground transportation, the only advantages would be in range and fill time of FCVs over BEVs. Simplicity strongly favors BEVs over FCVs.
Hydrogen combustion for ground transportation (although neat!) just does not seem compelling. It will take a lot of plumbing refits, fuel injector changes, ECU recalibration, etc. to make an existing IC car burn hydrogen. And if you're designing from scratch, why continue the burden of using an Otto cycle reciprocating machine over fuel cells?
Absent compelling reasons to do otherwise (which the Zubrin article does not present), it seems like continuing the research relevant to BEVs and renewable hydrogen production on parallel paths is the prudent thing to do.
Random fact: gasoline was initially a waste product of producing kerosene - essentially free.
So yes prices of gasoline went up once it started being widely used.
IMO the storage and transportation issue is what kills hydrogen. Also compression losses are nontrivial.
Assuming we need to manufacture fuel in renewable way methane or ethanol sounds like good ways to go. Both can be done in scale by abusing bacteria/algee.
Overall I want my car to just have a standard form factor "power unit" and swap it out to whatever the new hotness is.
> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
This credibility attack doesn't wash at all. Zubrin is a conservative thinker, yes, but he's not a spokesperson for the defense industry. He is a staunchly independent aerospace consultant whose project is humans-to-Mars. He's actually worked against industry interests since his plans are vastly less profitable than the cost-plus boondogles the traditional industry lobbies for (SLS, etc.).
I think he might be speaking outside his element here, but I also think the date (2007) is very important. This was back in the middle of the worst parts of the Iraq war, with rising oil prices. Oil we got then was mostly from the middle east. People felt we needed to get off oil for economic and national security reasons, not because of climate change per se. The predictable result was blue-sky research into the hydrogen economy on things that really couldn't be deployed at that time (and still are barely deployed now, 12 years later). Zubrin's argument at the time, which this essay is a part of, was that we should switch to "flex fuel" engines which can take diesel or biofuels. Then we wouldn't be dependent on the sweet crude from the middle east.
Now, in 2019, most of the oil we get is from relative friendlies in Canada and Venezuela, and we have better refineries for converting poor-quality crude from these sources into gasoline for cars. Improved battery efficiencies driven by mobile phones and notebooks have made electric storage for cars actually feasible. Solar efficiencies make locally produced energy economically viable. In short, energy world in 2019 looks nothing like 2007, and I don't think this article is very interesting at this point in time.
Robert Zubrin is a visionary, who I'm sure wouldn't compromise his credibility to churn out some paid-propaganda.
I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.
Do hydrides have any advantages at all over synthetic hydrocarbons or biofuels? It seems like an effort to shoehorn hydrogen in there somewhere instead of just admitting that it has literally no place at all in the energy economy
> the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
How is this measured? Are you saying that a gasoline car has 100x the range of an EV car with a battery volume equal to the gas tank's volume? That seems excessive.
Wait, are you telling me that someone who complains about backwards Islamic cultures and government wasting money before he even starts addressing his main point is not completely fair and impartial?! Colour me surprised. The use of emotional language and pejoratives almost had me convinced it was a genuine science article!
(Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).
> The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product.
Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. The comparison is totally sound. The hydrocarbons for gasoline are readily drilled out of the ground. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured either from these hydrocarbons (which is pointless for fuel, you can just use the hydrocarbons directly) or via electricity (which is far more expensive).
A mass market for carbon could not reduce the price below that of its inputs. Even if we had abundant cheap electricity it's unclear that hydrogen would really be economical against all alternatives.
> People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
He's comparing fuels, you're comparing batteries to fuels, which doesn't make sense.
> Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in.
So the six billion dollars of investment mentioned aren't enough?
> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry.
This habit of putting people into ideological boxes inhibits your ability to make rational assessments.
> For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed.
You must have overread the part where he argues for ethanol fuel as a means to break up OPEC.
> I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
That's not the message though. The message is "it doesn't work, period" and "it is a hoax". I'm not in the position to say that his calculations are right or wrong, but given the lack of progress on hydrogen as a fuel, it's probably not far off the truth.
I think the article's issues with hydrogen as a small-vehicle fuel have mostly been borne out -- one thing that seems to have happened since 2007 is that battery technology has gotten a lot better, and electric cars are proving to be a practical solution for a lot of use-cases.
But the article seem to condemn Hydrogen as any part of any zero-carbon economy because of this, as though any energy medium unsuitable for cars is automatically disqualified entirely from the green economy. I can imagine other use-cases where Hydrogen actually works well.
In large vehicles, for example, where a heavy reinforced tank isn't as much of a liability, like maybe a locomotive.
The use of hydrogen as an energy-storage medium for large stationary power plants also seems reasonable, maybe a solar power plant could split water when sunlight is abundant, and recombine it in the fuel-cell when energy-demand is high, using hydrogen storage to bridge the gap.
Or, similarly, a nuclear plant could split water at an efficient, steady "base-load" rate, and recombine it at different rates to match demand.
Viewed as an industrial-scale energy-storage medium, it makes more sense. It still has to compete with other industrial-scale energy storage media, but it's a very different landscape from vehicle fuels.
Hydrogen storage in underground caverns is not only feasible, it's actually practiced in several places around the world.
Hydrogen's place is for rare times when renewables or short term storage can't do it. This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market, the part nuclear fans seem to harp on (even though nuclear would be terrible for filling it also.) For such rare uses fuel cells would be inappropriate; gas turbines would be better (even if the round trip efficiency were lousy.)
It's pretty clear that hydrogen-powered automobiles are not going to be a thing -- electric batteries work very well for that use case. There are some cases where I think hydrogen might still work better than the alternatives.
The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft.
However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable.
It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.
The additional costs related to cryonics, aerodynamic drag, safety issues, and material embrittlement mean that liquid hydrogen will never be a viable commercial aviation fuel. It seems attractive in theory but ends up being totally impractical when you get into real world details.
The way forward is absolutely going to be battery power for short flights and synthetic liquid hydrocarbons for longer distances.
Hah. It’s really quite fascinating to see how the tides have turned on alternate fuels. I wonder if the alternative battery tech will materialize or if we’ll look back on that with a similar chagrin.
Oh, plus thousands of words, with numerous arguments, detailed calculations, examples, and formulas, for why hydrogen doesn't work.
But don't let that affect your bias towards the article, or god forbid, temp you to at least keep the former (anti-hydrogen arguments) and ignore the former (ethanol push).
Are we just going to ignore the fact that hydrogen cars exist now in California, they work, the fuel is affordable, and the efficiency is fine?
Hydrogen is useful as a solve for the energy storage problem in green energy. For example, excess solar energy can be stored as hydrogen fuel. Also this solves the "fuel quickly" problem for people who need to drive long distances.
Yes we should ignore those. They are compliance vehicles sold only to satisfy CARB rules and are not otherwise economically viable. Most of the hydrogen is created from natural gas, which means zero reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Yes in theory hydrogen could be created by electrolysis with renewable energy, but the efficiency is so low as to make it pointless.
Too many people commenting who have absolutely no idea nor knowledge about how hydrogen works or anything related to it. Plus: the old "efficiency" argument should go out of the window altogether and be replaced by an "environmental impact" argument.
[+] [-] scottlocklin|6 years ago|reply
1) The price argument. Hydrogen will generally be more expensive than gasoline; his argument about current prices is like making an argument about gasoline before it was a widely used industrial product.
2) The delivery argument: this doesn't even begin to make sense. Straw man argument where he claims it couldn't be delivered efficiently in the domains he suggests. It is harder to deliver hydrogen than hydrocarbons, but the numbers he quotes are just garbage.
3) Limiting the vehicle storage to compressed gas (muh hindenberg) and cryo. No serious people really talk about this to my knowledge. Metal hydrides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydride...) are the way hydrogen probably would be transported in a hydrogen economy. It's still less efficient volumetrically than hydrocarbons, but then so is everything else. The argument that it must be as dense as hydrocarbons is just goalposting. People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density. At least at one point, the envisioned hydrogen economy was you just retrofit hydride "gas tanks" to existing internal combustion machines. If you can make everything else work, that's a fairly reasonable thing to do. Which is probably why Zubrin never mentions it.
4) Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in. I think this is Zubrin's biggest fear. His goalposting about fuel cell efficiency is silly: so what if they're not more efficient on some measurement than an ideal diesel motor? They don't smell as bad either.
Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry. For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed. I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
[+] [-] ThenAsNow|6 years ago|reply
There has been considerable progress in fuel cell vehicles, for example. The Honda Clarity fuel cell version has an estimated 360+ mi (US EPA) range: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a15096419/2017-honda-cl... . Fill times are significantly better than current high-rate battery electric vehicle charging.
It seems to me the key will be in whether we make advancements faster in higher energy-density batteries vs. scale up of direct hydrogen production (e.g., https://solarfuelshub.org/192301-vapor-fed-cells ) . Electrolysis using grid power probably does not make sense. It would be valid to question, even if we could directly scale up hydrogen production from renewable sources, wouldn't it make more sense to use the same area for electricity production? If we're talking about ground transportation, the only advantages would be in range and fill time of FCVs over BEVs. Simplicity strongly favors BEVs over FCVs.
Hydrogen combustion for ground transportation (although neat!) just does not seem compelling. It will take a lot of plumbing refits, fuel injector changes, ECU recalibration, etc. to make an existing IC car burn hydrogen. And if you're designing from scratch, why continue the burden of using an Otto cycle reciprocating machine over fuel cells?
Absent compelling reasons to do otherwise (which the Zubrin article does not present), it seems like continuing the research relevant to BEVs and renewable hydrogen production on parallel paths is the prudent thing to do.
[+] [-] extropy|6 years ago|reply
So yes prices of gasoline went up once it started being widely used.
IMO the storage and transportation issue is what kills hydrogen. Also compression losses are nontrivial.
Assuming we need to manufacture fuel in renewable way methane or ethanol sounds like good ways to go. Both can be done in scale by abusing bacteria/algee.
Overall I want my car to just have a standard form factor "power unit" and swap it out to whatever the new hotness is.
[+] [-] garmaine|6 years ago|reply
This credibility attack doesn't wash at all. Zubrin is a conservative thinker, yes, but he's not a spokesperson for the defense industry. He is a staunchly independent aerospace consultant whose project is humans-to-Mars. He's actually worked against industry interests since his plans are vastly less profitable than the cost-plus boondogles the traditional industry lobbies for (SLS, etc.).
I think he might be speaking outside his element here, but I also think the date (2007) is very important. This was back in the middle of the worst parts of the Iraq war, with rising oil prices. Oil we got then was mostly from the middle east. People felt we needed to get off oil for economic and national security reasons, not because of climate change per se. The predictable result was blue-sky research into the hydrogen economy on things that really couldn't be deployed at that time (and still are barely deployed now, 12 years later). Zubrin's argument at the time, which this essay is a part of, was that we should switch to "flex fuel" engines which can take diesel or biofuels. Then we wouldn't be dependent on the sweet crude from the middle east.
Now, in 2019, most of the oil we get is from relative friendlies in Canada and Venezuela, and we have better refineries for converting poor-quality crude from these sources into gasoline for cars. Improved battery efficiencies driven by mobile phones and notebooks have made electric storage for cars actually feasible. Solar efficiencies make locally produced energy economically viable. In short, energy world in 2019 looks nothing like 2007, and I don't think this article is very interesting at this point in time.
[+] [-] rm445|6 years ago|reply
I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.
[+] [-] bcoates|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tom_mellior|6 years ago|reply
Could you be more specific?
> the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
How is this measured? Are you saying that a gasoline car has 100x the range of an EV car with a battery volume equal to the gas tank's volume? That seems excessive.
[+] [-] Carpetsmoker|6 years ago|reply
(Whether he is right or wrong on those points is not important here; they're completely unrelated to the main point of the article, and that he goes off on those tangents reveals a lot about the author and his intentions, IMHO).
[+] [-] gridlockd|6 years ago|reply
Hydrogen is a widely used industrial product. The comparison is totally sound. The hydrocarbons for gasoline are readily drilled out of the ground. Hydrogen needs to be manufactured either from these hydrocarbons (which is pointless for fuel, you can just use the hydrocarbons directly) or via electricity (which is far more expensive).
A mass market for carbon could not reduce the price below that of its inputs. Even if we had abundant cheap electricity it's unclear that hydrogen would really be economical against all alternatives.
> People like electric cars just fine, and the batteries they use are 100x less efficient in energy density.
He's comparing fuels, you're comparing batteries to fuels, which doesn't make sense.
> Fuel cells; yes, these are very hard to do for a consumer product. They are amazingly cool though, and they should still be invested in.
So the six billion dollars of investment mentioned aren't enough?
> Zubrin is a neocon type who works in the defense industry.
This habit of putting people into ideological boxes inhibits your ability to make rational assessments.
> For all we know this could have been commissioned by some oil company types, or maybe he's just being cussed.
You must have overread the part where he argues for ethanol fuel as a means to break up OPEC.
> I don't disagree with the over all message though. You'd have to change a lot of major infrastructure to make hydrogen work for a portable energy source.
That's not the message though. The message is "it doesn't work, period" and "it is a hoax". I'm not in the position to say that his calculations are right or wrong, but given the lack of progress on hydrogen as a fuel, it's probably not far off the truth.
[+] [-] reidacdc|6 years ago|reply
But the article seem to condemn Hydrogen as any part of any zero-carbon economy because of this, as though any energy medium unsuitable for cars is automatically disqualified entirely from the green economy. I can imagine other use-cases where Hydrogen actually works well.
In large vehicles, for example, where a heavy reinforced tank isn't as much of a liability, like maybe a locomotive.
The use of hydrogen as an energy-storage medium for large stationary power plants also seems reasonable, maybe a solar power plant could split water when sunlight is abundant, and recombine it in the fuel-cell when energy-demand is high, using hydrogen storage to bridge the gap.
Or, similarly, a nuclear plant could split water at an efficient, steady "base-load" rate, and recombine it at different rates to match demand.
Viewed as an industrial-scale energy-storage medium, it makes more sense. It still has to compete with other industrial-scale energy storage media, but it's a very different landscape from vehicle fuels.
[+] [-] pfdietz|6 years ago|reply
Hydrogen's place is for rare times when renewables or short term storage can't do it. This is the last 10-20% of the electrical power market, the part nuclear fans seem to harp on (even though nuclear would be terrible for filling it also.) For such rare uses fuel cells would be inappropriate; gas turbines would be better (even if the round trip efficiency were lousy.)
[+] [-] curtis|6 years ago|reply
The most obvious one is aviation. There are a few battery-electric aircraft flying today but they have very short range. I don't think there's any conceivable battery chemistry that will allow anywhere near the range of hydrocarbon-powered aircraft.
However, liquid hydrogen has much greater energy density than hydrocarbon fuels. It's also quite difficult to work with. But when you're talking about a vehicle the size of a 737 (much less an A-380), the economics might ultimately be favorable.
It would probably require aircraft models specifically designed for liquid hydrogen -- the tanks are so large that the aircraft will have to be designed around them. That's probably a major impediment to adoption. It's possible that biofuels or synthetic fuels made from CO2 will instead replace fossil fuels in aviation, instead.
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
The way forward is absolutely going to be battery power for short flights and synthetic liquid hydrocarbons for longer distances.
[+] [-] advertising|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
Oh, plus thousands of words, with numerous arguments, detailed calculations, examples, and formulas, for why hydrogen doesn't work.
But don't let that affect your bias towards the article, or god forbid, temp you to at least keep the former (anti-hydrogen arguments) and ignore the former (ethanol push).
[+] [-] nothrabannosir|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macspoofing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjensen|6 years ago|reply
Hydrogen is useful as a solve for the energy storage problem in green energy. For example, excess solar energy can be stored as hydrogen fuel. Also this solves the "fuel quickly" problem for people who need to drive long distances.
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techlands|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garmaine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccsalvesen|6 years ago|reply
We heard the explosion 7km away.
[+] [-] phkahler|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602407
It's 2019 and this is still going on.
[+] [-] macspoofing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KibbutzDalia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjbenedikt|6 years ago|reply