Cars, trucks, buses, trains, HVAC, factories are what needs to be electrified ASAP.
Some places, current batteries just don't cut it.
Example https://www.visitaeroe.com/ellen
Big aircraft are more likely to move to liquified hydrogen, synthesized on demand at major airports; initially burning it in turbines, eventually using fuel cells and electric drive.
Ammonia will be pretty easy to switch to; the main impediment today is just raw production capacity, which needs to be scaled up by three orders of magnitude. Ships can be retrofitted in place with new, bigger pressure-vessel fuel tankage and more complicated fuel piping. The changeover will need to be driven by regulation.
LH2 is quite a bit harder, but the rewards for success are huge. It might need entirely new turbojet engines, and maybe new airframes with room for bigger tankage. It certainly needs truly huge scale-ups in both methods and raw capacity to synthesize LH2, and in production of cheap aerogels to insulate the LH2 tanks.
The first usable LH2 transport aircraft will have an absolutely crushing advantage over kerosene-fueled craft anywhere they compete. Kerosene craft will gradually be pushed out to shorter routes and smaller airports. How fast this happens will depend mostly on how fast LH2 production can be scaled, and how fast new airframes can be approved and then delivered.
And then, total efficiency for hydrogen fuel is much lower than batteries. In vehicles for example, while 70-80% of grid energy reaches a cars’ wheels, the figure for LH2 is about 25%, a lot more of it goes to production and transport than its actual purpose.
I think this clearly tells us that investing in new battery tech to increase density is a much more promising long term bet.
The ONLY economically viable source of H2 today is cracking Natural Gas (and to your point, nearly always producing CO2 in the process).
From both a lifecycle efficiency and pollution perspective (if you accept the ridiculous idea that CO2 is a pollutant), we're way better off just burning the NG, which is already the cleanest carbon-based fuel there is.
Obviously, the LH2 fuel must be produced electrolytically, from electricity generated from renewable sources like solar, wind, or geothermal, not from NG as it all is today; I specifically called that out in the text that the above pretends to reply to, so it is hard to see why NG-generated H2 is mentioned here at all. LH2 generated on demand at airports does not incur transport losses.
Identically, NH3 is today produced by consuming NG and exhausting CO2, which process also must be replaced with catalytic means powered from renewable sources, and H2 generated electrolytically.
And, obviously there are conversion losses from solar/wind to electric to separated H2 and to chilled LH2, and then to accelerated air, just as there are losses extracting crude oil, transporting, refining, transporting again, burning, and exhausting it. End-to-end cost, including externalized environmental cost, is what matters. We need a carbon tax to help drive conversion. But the favorable energy mass density of LH2 overrides enormous conversion losses, which is the whole point.
(The downside I must mention is that high capital cost low utilization low running cost => still high cost)
The USN have a solution in their back pocket: https://www.zmescience.com/research/us-navy-synthetic-jet-fu... , presumably for at-sea refuelling using surplus energy from the reactors of carriers.
Having a huge supply chain for corn also drives innovation and scale in that industry, should corn become rare because of a drought, it would be relatively straightforward to redirect the corn supply into food.
When watching the video, what struck me as absurd is more the energy waste from meat production.
Unfortunately, that assumes producing those synthetic fuels has no carbon output other than the fuel itself.
„Fossil“ is the actually bad property of these fuels.
To be honest, I don't know what they could use batteries for, but I also can't imagine that some aspects of factory work will be completely untouched by the upcoming battery revolution.
For the case of buses, I think there is an elegant solution that they have begun to use in my city. Historically, they already have been electric cables around the city for pantograph buses. However, it is expensive to run electric cables around the city, so they are only a handfull of lines using this technology.
Now they are introducing hybrid battery / pantographs buses. Which I think a good compromise because you only need to equip a fraction of the line with electric cables, and the battery takes care of the rest. Because of that, you don't need a huge battery for the bus to be able to run all day. It can recharge periodically on the line with the pantograph.
Concerning trucks and cars, yes that shit needs to be electrified ASAP.
On the other hand...the infrastructure requirements for a cross coast hyperloop venture...especially if impulsed by government would resolve a lot of things...besides couldn't it be used for cargo..Amazon might be interested ...and imagine the billboard/advertising opportunities..
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09jszr6/are-floating-pods-th...
You can’t replace a reliable mode of transportation with something that doesn’t exist yet. Even when it’s ready, it’d take decades. Political powers are reluctant to commit to something that’s going to take longer than their careers.
Then again, you don’t even need hyperloop. Germany has 250 km/h trains, those are more than enough for many routes.
I guess furnaces are still largely gas, oil or wood burning... that doesn't seem like a technological problem though.
I hope people find an electrical energy storage system (ie a battery) that’s cheap, and with high mass and volumetric energy density, soon. That would be huge for solving the impending climate (and pollution) crisis.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#In_chemical_r...
Otoh sitting in the sun for a few hours to charge some battery via rays from the sun is itself free.
Sounds wonderful, please show the math.
In ground vehicles the weight of the engine and transmission and running gear is more than an electric motor and controller with much simpler usually single speed transmission and drivetrain especially diesel. Then there is structural batteries where the structure of battery helps replace some of the vehicle structure reducing wieght. This is why electric cars are starting to be competitive.
Planes are somewhat different modern turbine engines are relatively light for their power output and there is not much of a transmission on planes, usually variable props instead and fuel tanks are sort of structural. Although having many multiple props driven by small electric motors can have advantages which would be complicated and heavy to do with a drivetrain in a plane. Still electric planes are far from practical IMO.
This has reshaped and is reshaping the supply chain, has localized production and has massive improved production efficiency. Now we are slowly starting to approximate production of a scale and efficiency where we are approaching raw materials cost.
A huge amount of effort has now shifted into improving density as that is a vector to reduce cost. Huge money is flowing into silicon and lithium metal anode study.
There is some hope to get there faster.
We have plenty of fossil fuel so if most of the world stops burning gas we can run aircrafts on fossil fuels for centuries. Even emissions wont be a problem as cheaper energy on ground can be used to capture green house gases and store them someplace.
> I think electric aircraft need another doubling or two in specific energy to become feasible
My trucker friends loved the electric semi trucks but what they were upset about was the charging time. Every hour the truck is idle you are basically losing money, losing rhythm of driving and so on. I think with aircrafts it is going to be an even bigger issue.
Does anyone know what stops us from building tech where batteries are rapidly switched ?