this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Is fuel cell tech actually easier, cheaper, or better than batteries in any way?
Nope! And most hydrogen is fossil fuel (methane) derived and horribly energy inefficient. At this point it's green washing at best.
Edit: adding data:
Steam-Methane Reforming (SMR) accounts for about 95% of all hydrogen production on earth. It uses a huge amount of heat, water, and methane to produce hydrogen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SMR%2BWGS-1.png
For inputs:
The outputs are:
The overall energy in vs energy out is at most 85% efficient. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016236122001867
Hydrolysis, the main competing method, and the one most touted by hydrogen backers, accounts for about 4% of hydrogen production.
This method takes in only pure water and electricity, but it's efficiency is abysmal at some 52%. In every case, a modern kinetic, thermal, or chemical battery will exceed this efficiency.
Other methods are being looked into, but it's thermodynamically impossible for the resulting H2 to produce more energy than it takes to create the H2. So at best today we could use H2 as a crappy battery, one that takes a lot of methane to create.
It's called electrolysis, and is now at 95% efficiency: https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-hydrogen-mass-production/
When it's a documented scientific process and it's scaled up and used in the real world to displace the other methods, I'll be ready to acknowledge hydrogen as a valid part of energy infrastructure.
Hydrogen can cause "hydrogen embrittlement," which makes the storage and transportation of hydrogen inconvenient. "Hydrogen embrittlement" refers to a phenomenon where metal materials become brittle and prone to fracture after absorbing hydrogen. This phenomenon poses significant challenges for the storage and transportation of hydrogen.
No it doesn't. It's a well understood, predictable phenomenon that is reasonably addressed in any application involving hydrogen.
Yes. There are too many Tesla fanboys (still) that have a misinformed understanding of the facts. They don't realize that Tesla is just lying to them. Tesla don't want people to think that there are better cars or better technologies out there.
Lol. Blaming Tesla for all of hydrogen's woes is just buying your head in the sand.
I've been following hydrogen vehicle development long before Tesla even existed. The field has effectively stagnated since the 90's. Same promises for the past 3 decades with no substantial improvement. The hydrogen car of today is still the same hydrogen car of 1995 with a better infotainment system. Cost, storage, distribution, range are all problems that have yet to be solved and again are still not substantially better than what we had in the 90's. Every "revolutionary" hydrogen technology from the labs have basically gone nowhere.
It seemed like a viable competitor to batteries in the 90s and early 2000s because battery technology and prices weren't up to snuff. But hydrogen has stagnated while batteries have improved. Hydrogen is a "solution" that is 2 decades behind at this point
It's the primary source of this type of rhetoric. And you sound like someone who fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Battery powered cars are well over 100 years old. They only exist in number right now because of huge subsidies and because governments are mandating they happen. They would not be popular at all otherwise. If we subsidized hydrogen cars to the same extent, we'd be talking about the success of hydrogen cars right now.
The problem is that battery cars are not a viable alternative to most types of ICE cars. People have drank so much kool-aid that they forgot this obvious fact. So they engage in this delusion where the BEV industry is somehow already ascendant, when in reality it is barely a viable business. Which is also why Biden is raising tariffs on Chinese EVs (the OP BTW). Only China is subsidizing BEVs to the levels needed to make it work. Something few other countries are willing to do.
You keep saying stupid phrases like "people drinking the kool-aid!!!" while you're doing nothing but pouring out Kool aid yourself.
In case you weren't aware, Hydrogen cars ALSO got massive subsidies. They received these subsidies far before Tesla even existed, before BEVs took off, when hydrogen looked like the more viable alternative.
They had the head start, they got government subsidies, government backed infrastructure, AND manufacturer incentives. They had the public opinion back then too, with celebrities like Top Gear endorsing hydrogen over batteries. They are STILL getting government incentives today.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-04/california-s-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-lose-traction-against-battery-models
It's still not enough. The bottom line is that it's still inconvenient, expensive, and highly limited. If they spent the US military budget to force the issue, they could, but why?
Battery vehicles won because they met consumers' needs, not some grand conspiracy against hydrogen, and not because everyone hangs on Musk's every word.
Even 10 years ago, I could buy an EV anywhere in the country and it would meet 99.5% of my driving needs if my home had a garage. Hydrogen cars were STILL limited to a 100 mile radius to the nearest filling station, which is basically the California coast. And you had to pray the filling stations didn't run out of hydrogen. It didn't matter how much the vehicles themselves cost. Whether they were $200,000 or free, with a hydrogen car you could only go 100 miles from the pumping station, and only when the pumping station was full. With batteries, you were always full all the time, and you could always go 100+ miles from home. Even before any fast charging stations were built, if you took a short road trip and stayed in one location for a few days, you could go 250 miles away and slow charge at your destination simply by bringing an extension cord.
Electricity is cheap, too. Hydrogen was, and remains, expensive. EV buyers could look forward to not paying ridiculous gas prices. Hydrogen buyers had to look forward to paying MORE per mile than gasoline.
You keep whining about batteries not being the perfect solution to every single vehicle on the planet. Guess what? Average consumers are not driving every single vehicle on the planet. Average consumers are buying midsize crossovers. They drive to work and around town, and maybe do a road trip once a year. They can charge at home and never worry about whether or not the local filling station will run out of electricity. BEVs have won the suburban consumer segment, period.
As charging stations get built out, they will soon meet urban consumer needs, too.
Hydrogen might have some place in industrial processes or long haul trucking, possibly aviation maybe. But it makes absolutely no sense for regular consumers.
Hydrogen got a tiny fraction of the subsidies that batteries got. We probably looking at well beyond $1 trillion for the latter, if you include everything, such as all the subsidies and government loans from China. If were serious about making hydrogen a thing, we would've increase subsidies by a factor of something like 100x.
Battery cars have not "won." In fact, they are barely alive as a self-sustaining industry. ICE cars still dominate, and if anything they are gaining ground with blended solutions like hybrids or PHEVs. This is what I mean by "drinking the kool-aid." BEV fans are making claims that fly in the face of reality. And it's more than likely that if we take away the subsidies, the BEV industry would quickly collapse and shrink to a tiny niche.
The problem is that BEVs only really make sense as urban commuters for people with garages, and smaller ideas like e-scooters or e-bikes. It's not really something that make sense for larger vehicles or long-distance vehicles. And trying to force the issue just means a lot of SUV sized BEVs, which are definitely not a solution to anything. By admitting they're not perfect is admitting we should scale back BEV subsidies and start seriously promoting alternatives.
Again, you are obviously deliberately downplaying the limitations of hydrogen. BEVs make sense for "smaller" vehicles... And by "smaller" that means everything up to a midsize SUV, currently. Which is basically 80% of the consumer car market.
As battery technology improves, the upper limit of what makes sense for batteries only expands.
Hydrogen has a problem scaling DOWN. They are already range limited with a full size sedan. Hydrogen tanks and storage improves when you scale UP in size, and have huge amounts of empty volume to fill. So hydrogen only makes sense for semi trucks or larger.
So no, you're still spewing kool-aid that there was some conspiracy against hydrogen and that BEVs only exist because of subsidies.
BEVs already made sense 10 years ago for SOME consumers, regardless of subsidies. That niche existed, and expanded, because BEVs offered CONVENIENCES to their buyers. Hydrogen, even at their peak hype, offered zero conveniences and only additional inconveniences. No amount of government incentives are changing the fundamentals of hydrogen vehicle ownership.
Then you are creating an imaginary set of problems for hydrogen. We already have hydrogen cars that can go 400 miles. The range problem is already a solved problem. Future innovations will improve this even further. We already have hydrogen drones and bikes too. So there is no problem scaling down. Not to mention SUVs make up nearly 80% of the market these days. You're basically inverting how the real world car market works.
As we run into the fundamental problems of batteries, such as needing charging stations everywhere, and very high powered ones if we want fast charging, it will eventually become obvious that no amount of advancements will solve some of those issues. We will want to look at alternative solutions.
And again, BEVs are not competitive right now. They are a artificial market propped up by governments around the world. ICE cars still rule the world. And likely BEVs will retreat in the market as subsidy reductions and trade wars make them even less uncompetitive.
I'm confused. Why are we talking about Tesla?
The idea that fuel cells are bad or impossible is marketing from Tesla. It's the reason why you see posters talk negatively about fuel cells.
What are the benefits of fuel cells?
Do they outweigh the benefits of batteries?
It is another way of converting chemical energy into electricity. Basically, another way of building an EV. And since you don't need nearly as big of a battery to power an EV, it is a sensible way of reducing cost, weight, etc. while still achieving zero emissions. There are absolutely situations where those upsides significant outweigh the downsides.
If people were honestly in favor of EVs or zero emissions in general, they would definitely look at fuel cells seriously. But unfortunately, they don't, because they are mostly Tesla fanboys who want Tesla (and only Tesla) to succeed. So they demonize it, alongside everything else including PHEVs and hybrids. Which is why you see posts from "EV fans" that hate most types of EVs.
What's the efficiency of the process then? Say, I generate 1kWh of electricity somewhere in the middle of the day on a sunny field, how much of that kWh arrives at the wheels of a car at the end of this described H2 workflow?
A much better question is asking what happens when it is not sunny? Because the scenario is always constructed in such a way that exaggerates the efficiency of battery cars. Of course, a solar powered car would be even more efficient in that scenarios, but we don't talk much about those.
The problem is that we have to store energy, often for very long periods of time. For the grid, this is called grid energy storage, and usually includes a wide variety of options. One of which is hydrogen itself, since it is the best to store energy for very long periods.
So in practice, there's not much difference in efficiency, since every idea requires some kind of compromise somewhere. BEVs will often need hydrogen to back it up. But the main point is that once you make the switch to some kind of EV, the issue of efficiency is mostly moot, since you already well beyond ICE cars in terms of efficiency. The rest of the argument is a distraction, mostly made by people who want to promote one idea specially.
Yeah, yeah, but, numbers please, not the PR talk.
Yeah, I know what a hydrogen fuel cell is.
What I'm saying is that the cost to develop hydrogen infrastructure, the complexity of it's distribution, the risk due to its high volatility, and the uncertainty of a relatively underdeveloped technology all seem to be losing to batteries, which are very mature tech and are already in the supply chain and for which we already have a well developed electricity distribution grid.
I just don't see what investing in fuel cells will do other than slow the adoption of zero emission vehicles by another decade.
We are nowhere near capable of replacing all cars with battery powered cars. Their supporters are just handwaving away the problems. In particular, we have no straightforward way of both converting the grid to 100% renewable energy, while also massively increasingly electrical demand for things like BEVs and every other electrification proposal. In reality, it's just a big fantasy.
The "success" of battery cars right now is really due to huge subsidies and a willingness to overlook fundamental problems (such as mining challenges, child and slave labor, no way for non-homeowners to charge conveniently, etc.). If we actually looked at those problems honestly, we'd realize that they are as big or even bigger than the challenges of building a hydrogen infrastructure.
This gets much more problematic once we look at heavy transportation or industry. We have no method of electrifying airplanes or ocean-going ships and many other things. So all of the expense of electrifying cars is just one part of a much larger decarbonization process. And that larger process absolutely requires a hydrogen infrastructure somewhere. So we pretty much have to build a hydrogen infrastructure anyways. As a result, dismissing hydrogen is just not taking climate change seriously.
It's better for the oil companies and petro states
Yes but hydrogen has storage problems in that it messes with storage containers making long term storage potentially hazardous. How much of that last part is bullshit I am not qualified to answer but it sounds fucky to me.
That is not true. I'm working on a hydrogen refueling project right now with a steel, ASME code storage vessel. I asked the manufacturer specifically and they confirmed that hydrogen embrittlement is not a concern and does not affect the lifetime of the vessel.
And last I checked (it's been a few years) hydrogen through electrolysis is still net negative from a power standpoint.
Yes. Battery powered vehicles are heavy, hazardous, and have significant pollution problems throughout their lifecycle. They're also dependent on grid uptime because EV charging stations don't store usable power on site (except in some notorious cases with diesel powered generators). Battery powered EVs don't offer any benefits over H~2~ powered vehicles, but they help to extend the tentacles of the deleterious just-in-time paradigm further into our lives.