[aunty_helen]

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

[belorn]

People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.

The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.

The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.

[ACCount37]

Agreed on "green steel".

In general, "green hydrogen" makes the most sense if used as a chemical feedstock that replace natural gas in industrial processes - not to replace fossil fuels or be burned for heat.

On paper, hydrogen has good energy density, but taking advantage of that in truth is notoriously hard. And for things that demand energy dense fuels, there are many less finicky alternatives.

[dotancohen]

I had to Google what is green hydrogen. It is hydrogen produced by electrolysis.

If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?

[throwaway473825]

Sweden has very little natural gas in its energy mix:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.

[jacquesm]

That was extremely stupid of them then. Hydrogen has been very good at one thing: subsidy extraction. But I don't think it was or ever will be a viable fuel for planetary transportation.

[panick21]

> , and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.

Even if you assume that is true. It will always be more expensive then straight electricity.

> The more sensible project were the green steel project.

Not sure I agree. I think Boston Metal solution is better long term carbon free steel solution.

> natural gas with bio fuels

There was a huge 'bio' fuels hype around like 15-20 years ago if I remember correctly. Huge amount of controversy and false claims with politicians support.

Funny how this now comes back again and nothing was learned.

[scraptor]

The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.

[aunty_helen]

Good context. It's a shame none of these people did high school chemistry.

I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.

I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.

But I think battery / biofuel is the future.

[marcosdumay]

> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil

There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.

[pjc50]

Yes, it's not the new oil, it's the same oil in "green" packaging. Plus some comforting lies about carbon capture.

[KennyBlanken]

Same with nuclear. The most expensive form of electricity generation there is. No grid operator wants to touch it, but the nuclear industry has been very busy lobbying congress and both the current and last administration.

[nandomrumber]

There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:

Bind it to various length carbon chains.

When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.

Environmentalists will love it!

And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.

[mapontosevenths]

Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which makes the world warmer on average. It also lowers the PH levels of the oceans.

If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.

[_fizz_buzz_]

We live (or at least used live) in a very nice climate equilibrium with the CO2 level we had. Pushing us into another climate equilibrium looks very dangerous for human civilization. However I concede that it might be advantageous for certain plants, but I am not a plant so I am mostly concerned about human civilization.

[ViewTrick1002]

The problem is all the effort = energy you need to spend collecting carbon atoms.

[HPsquared]

Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains, and aircraft where the energy density is a big plus. Those are where you'd expect to see hydrogen take off first, not passenger cars. Same as how diesel started in trucks - expensive engines but economical when amortized and worth it for heavy usage applications.

If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.

[masklinn]

> Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains

Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).

Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.

And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.

[aunty_helen]

Trucks and busses would be better off with battery swaps at depo like electric forklifts do. More mileage more towing weight for trucks, just stack more batteries. Overweight? Use a diesel.

Trains is an easy one, over head lines.

Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.

[crote]

Reality already caught up with synthetic fuel for buses.

Shenzhen electrified its entire 16,000-vehicle bus fleet in 2017 - that's almost a decade ago. Since then virtually all of China has transitioned to electric, and other countries aren't far behind. Electric buses have completely taken over the market.

And it isn't just rich Western countries playing around either. We're seeing countries like Slovenia and Romania at >90% electric, and even countries like Ecuador and Colombia and targeting 100% electric in 2030 and 2035!

All the hard technical and financial problems have been solved. If your city isn't adopting electric buses yet, it will be solely due to political reasons.

[panick21]

> trucks, buses or trains

Trains no, electrify everywhere is clearly better. Maybe for really old legacy branch lines, batteries.

Trucks should as much as possible move to rail, much better solution.

For the rest, the waste majority of short-haul trucking, should be electric. In Europe, the amount of stopping trucks have to do already can be used to charge.

Only ultra long haul trucking has to stay on traditional fuels, and that a small %. And then you might as well just use conventional fuels.

Some aircraft is the only really good application. But I think not hydrogen, and instead syn-jet fuel.

[theshrike79]

Some people legitimately think we can just suck hydrogen out of the air or ground and store it in tanks. (We can, to a limited degree, there's a fancy color attached to that kind of hydrogen).

Then when you attempt to explain that no, that's not how it works, we need to always separate the hydrogen molecules from another substance, which takes energy. A significant amount of energy. So much energy that it's better to shove the same amount of kWh to a battery instead.

The only vaguely useful thing for Green Hydrogen would be renewable overflow storage. When your solar/wind farm is producing too much energy for the grid, you shove it to an electrolysis station that converts water to hydrogen and pressurises it.

Then you pump that into a gigantic fuel cell when the sun is down or it's not windy anymore.

[dehrmann]

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.

It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

[WalterBright]

> the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.

What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!

(I think it's called kerosene.)

[nandomrumber]

Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?

Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.

[hogehoge51]

WTF , you are commenting about FCEV - these things dont have engines!

The strategy clearly stated by Akio Toyoda is multiple power train technology. You can listen to his interviews on the subject, some are in Japanese, but as you have stated a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Toyota's policy I will assume you have that fluency.

(Automotive OEMs are assemblers, the parts come from the supply chain starting with Tier 1 suppliers. In that sense TMC does not do "making engines", but possibly the nuance and consequences here of whether not it "wraps it's head" to "makes things", vs if it has the capability to specify, manufacture distribute something at scale with a globally localized supply chain AND adjust to consumer demand/resource availability changes 5 years after the design start - in this context i ask you, can you "wrap your head" around the latest models that are coming out in every power train technology fcev, (p)hev to bev)

[api]

Biofuel makes more sense for airplanes. No conversion even necessary. You could fuel up a 737 with properly formulated biofuel and fly it now, though a lot of validation would be needed to be generally allowed especially for passenger flights.

If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.

Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.

Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.

LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.

[breve]

> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.

Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.

[Plasmoid]

We're actually not that far off.

Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.

That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.

[vkou]

> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.

Which is also the reason why its plug-in hybrids are so reliable, despite being dramatically more complex than either an EV or an ICE.

Toyota is very good at making engines, and it would be insane to throw away all that expertise to deliver a half-assed new product.

[qingcharles]

The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).

[Braxton1980]

It might also be because the Japanese government works very hard to have full employment and EVs require less labor.

[satvikpendem]

What does this mean? They have electric vehicles too.

[dev1ycan]

They are just too much in bed with big oil to want to switch, instead they spend rnd on hydrogen in order to mess up with renewables on purpose.

[beAbU]

The Mirai is a fuel cell EV. There is no engine. Not sure what your point is regarding engines?

[foota]

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.

See: the Hindenburg disaster

afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.

[AngryData]

Ehh, the Hindenburg had a flammable skin. Barrage balloons from the World Wars were most often filled with hydrogen and yet were extremely difficult to ignite or take down even with purpose build incindiary ammo for that purpose shows hydrogen balloons can be safe. Often they would be riddled with dozens of holes but still take many hours for them to lose enough hydrogen to float back down to the ground.

The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.

[beAbU]

Pointing to the Hindenburg as an example of why hydrogen is a bad idea is the same as pointing to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear is a bad idea.

wait...

[dmix]

> When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.

[aunty_helen]

Politicians are conduits. Someone wanted this to happen.

But yea, subsidies. I've been on many a call where "there's govt funding available if we shape this like x" is one of the major selling points.

[rswail]

Green hydrogen makes sense as a way to ship solar power to places that don't have it.

Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.

Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.

[panick21]

No . No . No. Please No. Absolutely fucking not.

Shipping hydrogen is literally one of the dumbest things you can ever do.

Its pure and utter nonsense that is only getting pushed for political reasons. It has 0 actual viability.

Even if you were willing to pay 5-10x more for hydrogen, shipping doesn't make sense.

The only way we are ever moving any quantity of hydrogen anywhere is with pipelines. Literally everything about hydrogen makes it a complete nightmare to ship.

And nobody is likely ever going to build these hydrogen pipelines.

Hydrogen is completely idiotic as a 'energy move' medium.

> Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.

No it doesn't and it never did. Only such a tiny amount were ever sold, and those were only sold because of massive subsidies and sold below value by car companies who wanted to push the concept (and farm subsidies).

EV by 2008 already outsold hydrogen vehicles and have grown every year, hydrogen vehicles never became more then marketing gimick and were never sold in numbers that even approach relevance.

[Hendrikto]

Also the losses are much higher when converting electricity to hydrogen and then burning that hydrogen.

[jjtheblunt]

> When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.

[fuzzfactor]

Really, they shouldn't be punished, they should be rewarded if they can become more sensible.

Positive incentive please :)

That is how EVs got here as soon as they did.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, it might make sense for some industrial processes as natural gas or coal replacement, but not really anywhere else just because all the tricky leaks and invisible fire hazards.

[ForHackernews]

Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.

[ssl-3]

Ignoring some of the other issues:

Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.

But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.

So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.

And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.

Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.

It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.

But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.

So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.

(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)

[stephen_g]

It’s horrible to work with - dangerous, embrittlement issues etc., and very energy intensive to compress into very heavy cryogenic storage containers…

[loeg]

It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).

[nkoren]

Zubrin's "Hydrogen Hoax" from 2007[1] is basically an ironclad critique. The physics are inescapably poor, and always will be. (Zubrin makes other points in that article which should probably be taken with more salt, but his critique of hydrogen stands).

1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...

[CamperBob2]

Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.

Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.

1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...

[fuzzfactor]

>you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel.

Correction, a very low density, lightweight fuel.

Burns clean though with no carbon in the exhaust.

But the upstream carbon emissions have not come close to zero when you look at total hydrogen use in the real world so far.

[Rygian]

Check out the "Clean Hydrogen Ladder" document.

Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.

[L-four]

The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to use fossil fuels.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.

It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.

[thewhitetulip]

With solar/wind oligarchs can't charge you every time you charge your EV at home

Hydrogen was meant to replace Oil so that the oligarchs can keep their oligarchy rather than "pull themselves up by bootstraps"

[laughing_man]

>When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

You could say the same about EVs. Most people in the US who bought an EV decided to go back to ICE for their next vehicle.