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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen is a terribly dangerous thing to keep around for fuel. I've been in garages where fuel cell vehicles were being developed alongside EVs. They had hydrogen detectors and alarms. In case of leaks, evacuate. It has a very wide range of concentration where it will not just burn but explode. You don't want this in your neighbors garage.

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Lesser-known, but there are solid-state hydrogen storage options that compare favorably to liquid storage (energetically, volumetrically, and inherently temperature & time stable). Best example is storing hydrogen in an aluminum matrix -- Aluminum Hydride, aka Alane. Companies like FuelX are commercializing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_hydride

https://fuelx.tech/

It'd be great in a renewables-based grid for energy storage and transport. It could be carefully controlled and monitored because of the partial centralization. I'm not sure it'll ever make much sense for vehicles unless you could increase the density so it's stored as a slush without needing a high-pressure or an ultra low-temp holding tank.

Right now, for planes and ships, it’s either hydrogen or syngas, because batteries are too heavy.

You can't just put hydrogen in a tank like you can with i.e. propane. It's a real pain to deal with, and I don't think grid scale hydrogen will ever work out.

It would make more sense to use the hydrogen to synthesize methane, and then use that for grid scale storage and generation. This would be carbon neutral.

These are the types of conversations we need. So many people crap on hydrogen, but you can use it in a variety of ways. We can run cars on methane or convert it to ethanol. This makes converting our current fleet of vehicles cheaper and more realistic than converting to an all EV future. Even if we really, really wanted to move to EV, we can convert the existing fleet to carbon neutral ethanol for the next 50 years while slowly introducing EVs.

Electrocatalytic oxidation of methane to ethanol via NiO/Ni interface - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09263...

What if we had a process to stabilize it? Say, mix it with carbon somehow....

I mean it's not as if oil based fuels are good in that regard either.

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