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.
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.
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.
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.
The green party has been pushing the green hydrogen goals for decades. Use google translate on https://www.mp.se/politik/energi/ or look at archive.org for historical goals. https://www.mp.se/just-nu/mer-el-och-gron-baskraft/ is more of the same.
If you want something more official, here is a discussion within the Swedish government and by the largest political party: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/webb-tv/video/interpellationsdeb...
A competitor that might be even better is very long duration high temperature thermal storage, if capex minimization is the priority.
Yes, but that's not the only option you have. With the absolutely awful efficiency of burning hydrogen you'd need to be building a massive amount of additional wind and solar - which in turn means you'll also have additional capacity available during cloudy wind-calm days, which means you'll need to burn substantially less hydrogen to generate power.
This leads to the irony that building the power-generation infrastructure for generating enough hydrogen means you won't even need to bother with the hydrogen part: you're basically just building enough solar that their overcast supply is enough to meet the average demand. As a bonus, you've now got a massive oversupply during sunny winter days and even more during summer days, so most of the year electricity will essentially be free.
So, yes, more input energy is needed. So what?
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?
The Mirai goes from empty to full in 5 minutes or less - which compares very well with fossil-fuel burners. Now that every OEM has abandoned battery-swapping, how fast can EV batteries be safely charged with the said 3 phases? How long were the charging time when the Mirai was debuted? That was the trade-off Toyota was hoping to fall on the good side of, nevermind the Japanese government bet on hydrogen and whatever incentives are available for Toyota.
It was with regard that 800V was the driving factor, it'd be possible to have 'fast' charging earlier with existing infrastructure, even home.
>be safely charged with the said 3 phases?
The limiting factor for charging would be charging current in lots of cases. Getting 60% of 75kWh battery, it's 45kWh to charge in 20mins, the output should be ~150kW (90% efficiency) or 325A (on 400v), 4x 12-15mm wires.
Note about 'home' charging - three phase 32A is widely available domestically or around 6-8h to fully charge
Turns out having to fill vehicles at 350 to 700 bar (5,000 to 10,000 psi) is a massive pain - especially when you can't keep it cryogenically cooled as a liquid in your storage tanks.
What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.
As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
Once you go battery electric, you never go back. It's the most efficient way to move vehicles.
They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.
Nuclear trucks and boats are what I envision so maybe I'm the one who needs a reality check.
To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.
Works a charm.
But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.
That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.
I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.
> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.
Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.
You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.
And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.
Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.
That's the experience I'm drawing from when I point out that "virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it" isn't based in reality. Everything is constantly wearing out. Anything rubbing on another thing, any fluid being pushed through a hole, anything that might be reacting with another thing, its all slowly getting more and more out of spec. And when it gets more and more out of spec, its performance gets worse. You might not immediately notice it, that performance might not be in the go go kind of performance, but it isn't working as well as it used to.
Are you really going to tell me a car with a couple hundred thousand miles on it running all original parts (assuming they didn't literally break apart yet) is likely to be anywhere near the same performance as when the car had 200 miles on it? Its not. Its almost like there's a reason why mileage is considered when people price cars. The suspension isn't going to keep the wheels as well planted, the cylinders likely don't have the same compression, those fuel injectors are likely tired and aren't spraying optimally, that coolant pump is worn down and barely able to pump coolant anymore, your timings are likely not optimal anymore due to slack in the timing chain or belt, your spark plugs aren't making as full or reliable of spark, etc.
If your response is "well you would have replaced those by now"...well, why would you have to do that? Because they...had their performance reduce over the life of the part?
And even then, a part of that break-in period of those parts is the part's performance actively changing over the life of the part with pieces of the part literally degrading, just pretty quickly and positively for performance as opposed to negatively. That positive slope of performance change is a pretty early hump though, otherwise as I mentioned you'd be taking me up for ensuring all your tires are near-bald (but not quite, they haven't actually failed yet!) all the time and you'd be dumpster diving for the good stuff out behind your auto parts store.
And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.
Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.
Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.
The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.
Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
> Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.
That theory didn't play out, mostly because the price of electrics kept dropping year after year, undercutting any appeal in early investment in hydrogen.
H2 will experience 20-30% over the same distance of natural gas line including compression and friction losses. DOA.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf
It's a common mistake to think efficiency dominates all other metrics. It's never just efficiency.
H2 makes sense for feedstocks but not energy distribution.
The same capex and opex can support 100x more Wh-km via HVDC, making HVDC at least an order of magnitude cheaper then the H2 pipeline.
What's interesting to me is that this is completely uncontroversial and incontrovertible, so I wonder where your insistence otherwise is?
"This paper compares the relative cost of long-distance, large-scale energy transmission by electricity, gaseous, and liquid carriers (e-fuels). The results indicate that the cost of electrical transmission per delivered MWh can be up to eight times higher than for hydrogen pipelines, about eleven times higher than for natural gas pipelines, and twenty to fifty times higher than for liquid fuels pipelines. These differences generally hold for shorter distances as well. The higher cost of electrical transmission is primarily because of lower carrying capacity (MW per line) of electrical transmission lines compared to the energy carrying capacity of the pipelines for gaseous and liquid fuels. The differences in the cost of transmission are important but often unrecognized and should be considered as a significant cost component in the analysis of various renewable energy production, distribution, and utilization scenarios."
I'm to read this as supporting your assertion that electrical transmission is several times cheaper??
Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.
So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).
Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.
Yes, if you actually have the batteries.
Between around 2014-2024, the common talking point was "we're not making enough batteries", and the way the discussions went it felt like the internal models of people saying this had the same future projections of batteries as the IEA has infamously produced for what they think future PV will be: https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...
I've not noticed people making this claim recently. Presumably the scale of battery production has become sufficient to change the mood music on this meme.
The fossil industry was always suspiciously keen on green hydrogen - partly because the path to green hydrogen would likely have involved a long detour through grey and blue hydrogen, and partly because it gave them an excuse to lobby against phasing out natural gas for domestic heating/cooking ("we need to retain that infrastructure to enable the hydrogen economy!").
You can see the same thing happening in their support for Carbon Capture and Storage - "we're going to need the oil producers to enable carbon sequestration, so we might as well keep drilling new wells to keep their skills fresh!"...
The Mirai uses the hydrogen in a fuel cell so it is an EV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai
It looks like a reasonable idea, but it needs infrastructure.
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.
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.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Electricity comes out the wall.
You can run electrolysis from a cup.
I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.
I’m willing to give it a go.
I’ve got the excess solar from the rooftop solar panels, the electrical and electronic knowledge, and the gas fitter and metal fabrication experience.
I have an oil free air compressor, and anyone can by a helium based cryo-cooler. I have an account with an industrial gas supplier.
Just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
If Nile Red hasn’t blown his lab up by the time I publish this comment, I reckon I stand a chance.
Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.
Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.
In fact, even this level of efficiency may be sufficient. Solar panels are so cheap that if we had affordable, long-term energy storage options, even with such efficiency, we would have completely abandoned fossil fuels. But, unfortunately, storing hydrogen is difficult and dangerous. It is not like natural gas.
> It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security. It's like a placeholder for real corn so that if there's a crop failure for a couple of years, the low-iq idiots who think it's stupid to make ethanol from corn don't starve to death.
Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.
I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"
I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.
Meat usually does that stabilizing. Fuel consumption not even is almost completely inelastic, but corn ethanol on the US is subsidized on every stage to the point that market forces become meaningless.
No, it's done to subsidize (bribe) farmers. Food security is merely the excuse used to sell it to the non-farmer voters.
If you had the knowledge necessary to do this, I would assume that would’ve surfaced reasonably early in the thought process.
Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.
Nothing is free.
That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.
Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.
Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.
Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.
This is compared to, for example, a coal plant, which is quite unsafe to be near constantly, all the time.
Keep in mind an off-white swan can be pretty bad too :)
The main thing about such uncommon or even unlkely events, is that nobody knows what to do about them.
Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.
10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.
Nuclear will always be in the backseat for the foreseeable.
The challenges are going to be political, not spatial or geographic. China could put enough solar panels in its western deserts to power the whole country. The US could do the same in its southwest. It would take about 15% of the land area of Arizona to power the entire US.
That's physically achievable but politically difficult.
The numbers say that nothing is extremely safe, and experience has shown that having more maturity may not be necessary to recognize that, but it helps.
It just hurts the case for positive progress to mindlessly exaggerate. Especially to the absolute max.
Plus I'm not one of the ones who follow any boomer lunatic trends when I can come up with my own which people of many ages have adopted quite a bit.
Remember wacky lunatic science turns into regular science more often than you think once the dust settles.
But the advantage of that doesn't really depend on elderliness, mainly dedication to science.
Any age can do it if you try.
Well, maybe not if you're completely non-gifted in some way or another.
I like the idea of getting better at math every decade.
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.
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.
There’s more of it now than in the reefs recorded history.
Well, 2022 data:
https://www.aims.gov.au/information-centre/news-and-stories/...
While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."
This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions
"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.
Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."
Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage
Don’t Panic.
Everything is O.K.
—-
Edited to add: Rate limited so can’t reply without creating more alt accounts than I’m willing to, so:
@Timon3 - that’s actually a really good point, and I follow at least a few folk that could be categorised as such at least some of the time.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
It's possible for information to be factual and opinions to be justified from a source while that source also benefits from the information/opinions existing.
I can easily provide counter examples from countless situations that occur each year.
----
If you feel that all scientists and researchers have a lower level of trust because of negative actions of some, that's wrong of course because their reputations aren't connected, but you try to confirm it. For example, find out if a cooler than normal El Nino season would help coral feeds (or whatever)
What you did was tell us you don't trust the information, not because of something specific, but a concept/rule you believe.
Considering you originally misrepresented their findings, perhaps by accident, you should have done more to make your case.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-re...
If, theoretically, you could produce hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere, then it could be a substantial reduction in net carbon dioxide being added; and it would be compatible with the fuel infrastructure of today.
The bind moggles.
2.5 billion years ago the earth would have been uninhabitable to most modern life. Single celled life evolved in those conditions and began creating glucose and oxygen from CO2 and water. When those primitive lifeforms died some of them became oil and the CO2 was sequestered.
Over time the CO2 levels dropped until about 20 million years ago the CO2 levels fell to about 300ppm. That's when life as we know it really took off. Yes, it took BILLIONS of years to get there.
Humans have only existed for about 200k years. During that time our CO2 levels have mostly been below about 280ppm. The are now at 429ppm and are rising exponentially. [0]
In time, the oceans have become less and less acidic, by dissolving from the volcanic silicate rocks the oxides of the alkaline metals and alkali earth metals, i.e. mainly of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. This dissolution has affected both the rocks on the bottom of the oceans and the continental rocks, where rain has washed the soluble oxides, transporting them through rivers to the oceans.
At some point, so much of the alkaline and alkali earth metals from the volcanic rocks have been dissolved that the oceans have become slightly alkaline instead of acidic, like they are today.
At that time, the carbonates of calcium and magnesium have precipitated from sea water, forming sedimentary rocks. Also around that time, many living beings have evolved mechanisms for controlling this precipitation process, in order to build skeletons for themselves. This has resulted in the fact that many sedimentary rocks are not formed by direct precipitation from sea water, but by precipitation from sea water into skeletons, followed by depositing on the bottom the skeletons of dead living beings.
Now, with increasing concentration of CO2, there is the danger that the oceans will become so acidic as to reverse this, dissolving again a part of the carbonate rocks, including the skeletons of many living beings that are made of carbonates.
There is an equilibrium between the concentration of CO2 in water and in air, depending on temperature and pressure. When the CO2 from water precipitated with calcium or magnesium into rocks, that has drawn more CO2 from air into the water, until a new equilibrium was reached, at a reduced concentration of CO2 in the air. If carbonates would be dissolved by acidic sea water, that would liberate CO2, a part of which would go into the air, further increasing the concentration there.
Thus the formation or destruction of carbonate rocks and skeletons adds a positive feedback to the changes of the CO2 concentration in the air, which has the potential to be bad for us.
Even worse is the fact that this is only one of multiple positive feedback mechanisms that can be triggered by changes in the CO2 concentration in the air, which make very difficult or impossible any long term predictions.
adrian puts it quite well though.
Keeping that in mind;
>What role, if any, did carbonate mineral formation have in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?
Looks like as much as it possibly could.
I get the idea that the throwaway account was suggesting we can just "do whatever forever" without consequences though, and that's just not true. Most CO2 sequestration on earth is now biological in origin and has been for a very long time.
Fischer-Tropsch and Sabatier process can both operate with scavenged CO2. There's been some work since the 1990s utilising seawater as a CO2 source, with CO2 capture being far more efficient than from atmospheric sources.
Whilst hydrocarbons have numerous downsides (whether sourced from fossil or renewable sources), they are also quite convenient, exceedingly well-proven, and tremendously useful. In some applications, particularly marine and aviation transport, there are few if any viable alternatives.
I've commented on this numerous times at HN over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
The Sabatier process looks like it might have much less of that! Very cool stuff. I would love to see a future in which we use uninhabitable, non-arable, desert land to generate cheap synfuel that we can ship wherever needed.
While now the cheapest way is to make syngas from methane or from coal, it is possible to make syngas from carbon dioxide that reacts with electrolytic hydrogen.
It is also possible to make equivalent precursors of synthetic hydrocarbons by the electrolysis of carbon dioxide in water.
For these 2 methods, you do not need any fossil fuels, but only electrical energy for electrolysis.
Where the energetic efficiency is still very low is when you want to use clean air as the source of CO2, instead of using a concentrated source of CO2. With very cheap energy, i.e. solar energy that is used at the point of capture, it should still be possible to devise a method of capture for CO2 from the air. Many such methods are known, their only problem being a high energy consumption per the amount of captured CO2, so they are impractical with energy that must be bought from the grid, but I do not see why they could not work when coupled directly with solar panels.
The latter might come from an existing hydrocarbon (as with so-called "blue", "grey", "black", or "brown" hydrogen), or from electrolysis, which is not carbon-neutral. If the latter is powered by a carbon-neutral source (surplus renewables, nuclear), it's "green", and carbon-neutral.
CO2 can also be obtained from numerous sources. One prospect suggested when US peak oil was a concern, in the 1960s, was limestone. More recently, the US Naval Research Lab, as well as Google's Project Foghorn, looked at separating CO2 (in the form of carbonic and carbolic acid) from seawater, which is far less energy intensive than direct removal from the atmosphere. I'd looked up the history of research and industrial applications circa 2014, noted here:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20170719101136/https://www.reddi...>
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230601122020/https://old.reddi...>
The US Navy has an interest largely for its carrier fleet. Whilst the carriers themselves are nuclear powered, their aircraft are not, and fuel provisioning for the aircraft fleets is a major logistical hurdle as well as a strategic vulnerability. No need to target the carriers themselves (heavily defended) if the supply tankers can be sunk, something present US adversaries might consider. One prospect would be to effectively recommission older carriers as fuel-synthesis platforms, capable of producing aviation fuel from seawater in situ and not having to transit between fuel depots and the fleet itself. Given the additional costs of transit and strategic significance, the economics should be somewhat more favourable than for civilian use. This was the subject of a number of papers published in the 2010s by the US Naval Research Laboratory (listed above). Earlier research based on other carbon sources was performed at MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1970s and 1960s, respectively.
Plants are highly dependent on their climactic settings, upending a climate equilibrium is awful to the average plant. And looking at past climactic change events, "another climate equilibrium" is something that happens on kiloyear scales (ages, in geochronologic units).
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/d4mMkA/verdens-stoerste-r...
https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/toyotas-best-selling-car-elec...
I want an appliance that just works. The Corolla and Camry were this for petrol.
I love my Leaf but it isn’t a Carolla.
What’s with the turning circle on the Leaf?
Dodge's Charger EV has been a sales flop [1] and pretty much universally panned by critics as something that nobody asked for.
The Camry and Corolla were the best-selling sedan and compact sedan of 2025 [2]. I think this shows that Toyota is listening to what Corolla and Camry drivers want - something inexpensive and reliable to get them to and from work every day without issue.
Some day Toyota will make an EV sedan. I think their 2026 bZ Woodland [3] shows that they are starting to figure out how make compelling EVs. And Toyota's EV strategy seems pretty reasonable to me overall - their delays to develop a decent EV don't seem to put them under threat from any legacy automakers. They are being threatened by Chinese EV makers, but so is Tesla - so even a huge head start likely wouldn't have benefited Toyota much either in that regard.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69927938/dodge-charger-da...
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g64457986/bestselling-cars...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...
The 2026 bZ Woodland [1] looks pretty nice in my opinion.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...
https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...
Toyota is in the game of selling cars. Toyota has been the best selling automaker for the last six years straight.
Toyota had record sales last year:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
It's possible that Toyota understands the car business better than you do.
For EVs the US will remain lower priority than China and Europe for a while yet. Toyota understands how to sell cars.
It's funny how this thread has gone from "Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines" to "Toyota is not prioritizing small EV markets first".
Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.
This is incorrect, unless you're viewing the US as a single market but the EU as multiple (which, I mean, ah, you do you, but that doesn't make any sense from an industry perspective). Last year about 1.3 million BEVs were sold in the US (a minor decline from 2024), 1.9 million BEVs were sold in the EU (up 33% YoY). In Europe more broadly defined, 2.5 million BEVs were sold (in practice, the industry largely treats EU+EFTA+UK as one market). In China, 8 million were sold, up about 25% YoY.
You can, ah, perhaps see why the US is not a top-priority market for the industry. In practice, the US _will_ get many of these Toyota models, or some variant thereof, but later. You mention VW, but they, too, treat the US as a second priority BEV market; their electric cars generally come out about a year late there if at all. Hyundai does release in the US at the same time as elsewhere (when they release at all; the Ioniq 3 will not be available in the US, for instance, because the US does not buy small cars in significant numbers).
There are of course still some tax differences and importing from another member state might be slightly trickier for a consumer than buying it from a dealership in their own country, but I don't see how that is any different from dealing with different kinds of sales tax in the various US states, or having to transfer your car title to another state.
The European single market operates as, well, a single market.
Post-Brexit, the UK has its own type certification (and of course it also has the left hand drive problem), and, again, some niche car models may be available in the EU but not the UK. But in practice, for mainstream stuff, the manufacturers tend to treat it as just part of the European market.
Nope:
https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/global-ev-sales-jump-21-in-20...
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
If you can get it to work (a big if) you get to subtract the weight of the old frame before you make calculate the pseudo-density,
That doesn't really nudge the power density needle all that much, especially when you consider that you don't throw batteries out the back as their energy is depleted, as you do with fuels.
Turbofans and supercritical airfoils are done to the point of engine manufacturers looking to propfans and alternative materials (carbon fibre) to eke out further efficiencies.
Although carbon fibre has significant down sides.
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.
I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.
As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.
There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.
And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.
When you are specifying valving or piping in a refinery one of the big things you have to find out is how much hydrogen is in the process because a lot of stuff in a refinery has at least some hydrogen and it will destroy common alloys.
No. Not for using Hydrogen for transportation. People have been trying to use Hydrogen for transportation for more than 50 years. These people are trying to bend the laws of physics. And there are a lot of con artists in the mix who prey on the gullible. See the convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.
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.
Given the great energy densities and stability in transport of hydrocarbons, there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources, so that could be a solution if we don't manage to increase battery densities by another order of magnitude.
I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.
Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.
Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.
From Wikipedia:
The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.
We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.
You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.
> burn petrol.
Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?
Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.
How is that supposed to help?
I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.
Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.
I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.
With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.
Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.
What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.
The Antipodes have such a problem with successful people we even invented a term for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
On the subject of free markets, Australia excels. We even let foreign entities extract and sell our LNG and pay no royalties and no tax.
https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/zero-royalties-charge...
Doesn’t get any freer than that!
Gold production by country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_countries_by_mineral_...
In only the first half-century or so of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the continent. - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...
Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.
For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.
Now we just give it away.
"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."
https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...
Green CO2 was recently (in geological terms) captured from the atmosphere into biomass, that's why its release is basically net zero.
Fossil CO2 hasn't been part of the atmosphere in eons (back in e.g. the Crustacean, the CO2 ratio was many times higher), so its release is additive.
You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.
You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?
Coal mines are sequestered trees.
The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.
Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.
Like, take 5 units of carbon out of the atmosphere to create the fuel. Burn it and release 5 units of carbon to the atmosphere. What's the net increase again? (-5) + 5 = ?
FWIW I'm not saying these processes actually achieve this in reality. Just pointing out that it could be carbon neutral in the end.
Significantly increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem. This happens when geological sources are used.
Unfortunately, burying dead trees in a landfill doesn't solve the problem because they decompose to methane which escapes. But you're right that geological CO2 production could be balanced by geologic CO2 sequestration, done properly.
Easy mistake to make, don't beat yourself up over it.
It's not the individual carbon atoms that carry the signature, it's the atoms in bulk that give the story ... eg: 6 x 10^23 carbon atoms
Jet engines work better. Boeing's next major plane will have jet engines, just like their previous major planes.
Synthetic, carbon neutral jet fuel will be the future for commercial jets.
Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.
How can batteries compete with that constraint?
Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.
I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.
Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.
It makes no difference, we’d still need gigawatt scale electricity production, with some multiple of that at peak, just for a fairly unremarkable airport.
The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x.
Batteries don't get lighter when they discharge.
Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.
Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).
The math leaves out a lot of important factors.
Electric motors are not 98-99% efficient.
As you alluded to, battery weight is more than ICE weight. EVs are significantly heavier than ICEs.
I'm sure we can expect improvements along the lines you mentioned, but I seriously doubt it will be nearly enough.
However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.
Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.
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.)
It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.
The main problem with an airship is they are vulnerable to weather.
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)
What's that old meme?
Stop trying to make ____ happen, it's not going to happen.
Kaizen and JIT are not good for revolutionary change. So I expect by bootstrapping different options early enough they can act on real market pressure once the condition to accurately assess the evidence is available.
For hydrogen getting to that point was a multi decade lead time.
I suspect most western commentary on this topic comes from people not understanding both how numerical/empirical based Toyota are, how self aware of their potential weaknesses they are, plus the ability of a Japanese business to hold to a multi decade hedging initiative.
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.
On the plus side we would be able to retire airport fire engines because they would never be able to get to a crash before it completely burns out.
As if LNG is effectively more dense in flight than ordinary LPG, which doesn't need to be cryogenic to handle.
Armchair fuel experts do still provide food for thought though ;)
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.
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.
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.
But hydrogen itself is SCARY. It has an extremely wide range of ignitable concentrations, and it has very low ignition energy. It also tends to leak through ~everything.
It is not such a fool proof technology that everybody should have one, but to me building and operating a hydrogen balloon isn't dissimilar to running a steam locomotive. It can be dangerous if done badly or incorrectly, but it can also be done safely with pretty well known and understood technologies and methods and practices. And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport I find it hard to dismiss its potential even so long after their heyday and previous problems.
What efficiency? You still need to orient it and propel it in the desired direction, unless you don't mind to simply float around on the wind (in which case, yes, we have weather balloons precisely for that and nothing much else).
wait...
Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.
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.
There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks. When the money dries up the public tends to go back to "what's practical and affordable?".
Well, it can be made to work, you know. Late (in the XX century) industrialization stories are like that: competitive (dis)advantages make any such attempts simply unprofittable for any businessman (or even a group of them), but if the government keeps skewing the market for decades... The Japanese car manufacturing has been heavily subsidized for most of the XX century, even after their several disastrous attempts to enter the US market. But it all worked out in the end.
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.
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.
This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.
Positive incentive please :)
That is how EVs got here as soon as they did.
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...
(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)
(Separate to whether the idea originally made sense back in the 2000s.)
Japan could have simply started their own refining business if they were really worried about REEs in 2010. Yes, it would take them until 2015 or so to ramp up, but that was still 11 years ago.
Why wait though ;)
With common metals hydrogen fits in between the matrix naturally to an extent.
Not like for efficient storage though, just the embrittlement, which gives researchers even more challenging things to be careful about.
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...
It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.
Wait until you hear about H+
(Atoms must have electrons - the definition in physics and chemistry is a structural one.)
The basic point is that a material that is highly flammable, needs to be compressed to high pressure in order to be useful, but also will seep through and damage steel containers because of the fundamental fact that the atoms and charged ions are just too small, is never going to be easy to work with. Compared to electrical battery tech now being widely and cheaply rolled out.
This goes some way to answering the "Why is it such a terrible idea?" question. Or at least it's an idea whose time has passed, due to the abovementioned battery tech maturing.
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.)
Also, compressing and cooling a gas takes another huge hit at the efficiency. Electrolysis comes out at atmospheric pressures.
Oh and the platinum electrodes you need…
I’m also just now visualising a hydrogen pipeline fire… terrible terrible idea.
Some advantages are that a fuel cell that accepts hydrogen and air at one end and emits electricity and water at the other can be lighter-weight than a big battery, and it can [potentially] be refueled quickly for long trips.
Some disadvantages: We need a compressed hydrogen tank -- which isn't as scary to me as it may be for some people, but that's still a new kind of risk we need to carry with us wherever we drive. And we still need a big(ish) battery and the controls for it in order for regen braking to do its thing (which hybrids have shown to be very useful).
And, again, the grid: If it were cheaper/better/efficient to move energy from electrical generating stations to the point of use using buckets [or trucks or trains] of hydrogen, we'd already be doing that. But it isn't. So we just plug stuff in, instead, and use the grid we already have.
A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving. There's far faster methods, but that's something that lots of regular people with a normal commute and normal working hours can already accomplish very easily if they have private parking with an outlet nearby.
For most folks, with most driving, that's all they ever have to do. It shifts concerns about refueling speed from "Yeah, but hydrogen is fast! I waste hardly any time at all while it refills!" to "What refueling stops? I just unplug my car in the morning and go. I haven't needed to stop at gas station in years."
The main advantages of hydrogen are real, but they just aren't very useful compared to other things that we also have.
And this gets significantly better once you start using 240v sockets - like the US is already using for dryers. Got a dryer in your garage? Guess what, you are only a weekend project away from having an overnight EV charger in your garage!
My main point is that many of us have a perfectly-usable method within reach that provides enough juice to keep the car going day after day for the driving we normally do, which can be used right now without knowing what a screwdriver even looks like.
Just buy the car and drive it to work tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), and leave it plugged in while it sits there at home. This is exactly what the folks I know who drive EVs and who do fast chargers already do; it's a habit for them. They get home, and if they don't plan on leaving again soon then they plug their car in.
Except: There's not even necessarily any weekend project required -- for most drivers, faster charging at home is completely optional. Needs vary, but for most people it maths out fine to just use the regular ass-plug[1] that's already right there on the wall.
Even for longer trips: Visiting family, out of town, overnight? No problem. Plug your car in after you get settled in. No big deal. It doesn't matter if they're an EV family or not; while the car is just sitting there, it may as well also be taking a charge. (As to the cost: Buy them a beer or something and fuhgettaboutit.)
[1]: https://xkcd.com/37/
1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...
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.
Hydrogen was meant to replace Oil so that the oligarchs can keep their oligarchy rather than "pull themselves up by bootstraps"
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.