Hydrogen won't ever make sense for personal transportation since the cost of batteries has come down way too far. Green hydrogen under perfect conditions has way too many efficiency penalties to compete with pure battery vehicles, so the cost per unit distance just won't ever make sense compared to the tiny losses for batteries.
I don't even care that much if companies like Toyota want to waste their development dollars on personal hydrogen transport that won't ever happen. I just want to make sure subsidy dollars are spent correctly. Use government money on decarbonizing farms and long distance heavy transport with hydrogen. Don't waste that money on cars that will always be too expensive to operate compared with BEVs.
People are stuck in an innovation trap with BEVs. It is pretty much what Clay Christensen wrote about in his book Innovator’s Dilemma. You cannot just linearly improve a single idea until it surpasses all other ideas, now and forever. Especially one that has many limits as BEVs. It is inevitable that there will be step functions in change, i.e. disruptive changes, coming to the market. Forward thinking companies will plan for that inevitability, not pretend BEVs are the final destination of personal transportation.
The world has already squandered billions of dollars on every kind of green technology. That could easily imply BEVs themselves. It is the biggest of double standards to not insist on hydrogen subsidies. If you truly oppose the idea, then oppose all subsidies for all green energy. If not, then accept hydrogen subsidies as a good idea.
I'm for hydrogen subsidies, just not for personal transport. Use the money for heavy transport, agriculture, and forestry. If that also happens to make fuel cells cheaper all around and changes the economics of fuel cell vehicles, that's fine, just don't subsidize hydrogen personal cars directly because it's deeply unlikely they will ever be more than a curiosity.
Thermodynamics means green hydrogen always has to pay the round trip conversion loss, so it will always be more expensive than raw electricity. I do agree there is opportunity to soak up excess renewable generation with hydrogen, but if you're right about hydrogen demand that won't ever affect the price more than a few %. Raw, direct electricity use will always be cheaper, so people will figure out ways to make that arbitrage work for them in ways other than hydrogen storage.
The lack of losses with batteries will mean there is a huge incentive to shoehorn them into anything where it possibly makes sense. That doesn't necessarily mean current lithium chemistry and that's where your innovation will come from.
Again, hydrogen cars can be as cheap as ICE cars to manufacture. Your argument here is pure shortsightedness and is insisting on a double standards. What was the cost of BEVs when they first came out? It took subsidies to drive cost down in the early days. Same is true for hydrogen cars. As mass production expands, hydrogen cars will get cheaper until they are cheaper than BEVs.
You do not understand the thermodynamics of the subject matter. Again, electrolyzers/fuel cells are an electrochemical systems. It basically doesn’t have “thermal-dynamics”. Theoretical efficiency is the same as li-ion batteries. A fuel cell car is effectively the equivalent of a battery car whose battery is made from water. Although there are practical issues to deal with in reality, so this isn’t totally the case, but it is much closer to being true than what you’re imagining.
If you can understand that electrolyzers/fuel cells are functionally the same thing as li-ion batteries, and are subject to the same basic physics, then the real conclusion is to replace li-ion batteries with hydrogen systems wherever possible. After all, if the long-term level of efficiency will be parity between the two, then why insist on the one that is much more resource dependent?
There is also the reality that certain company have taken a lot of money for a long time without producing many results. Specially if its fossil fuel companies that rubs people the wrong way. Just as giving money to Ford and GM wasn't the solution to get EV going. So its understandable that many people don't love the promotion of it.
I am as anti-hydrogen as anybody but I do believe it has a place. However, it should be limited and only used in places where you really need it. So instead of using it in transportation, using it in the chemical industry makes much more sense. Its simply not needed for the overwhelming majority of transportation applications. And even for the the stuff that is left over its often questionable if its worth developing the new infrastructure. Using it for personal vehicle and most cargo transport is utterly idiotic. Using it for most trains is idiotic. The list goes on.
Some people believe the massive steel CO2 use will be solved with hydrogen, but as with transport, there are better ways forward then that in my opinion. But again, hydrogen is getting the lions share of investment there too.
In general I am much more against they 'hydrogen economy' idea and concept, rather then hydrogen. Using energy to split water is reasonable, but most of the time hydrogen is just a short temporary state until it gets turned into something else. Very different from the hydrogen economy people in-visioned.
Another question is if electrolysis of access renewable production is really a great path forward.
And how can you have hydrogen for steel production without necessarily reducing the cost to the ballpark of coal or natural gas? If you can grasp that part, you should realize that it must be a cheap fuel in the future. Cheap enough that it can be easily affordable for transportation purposes. And for those who can't afford BEVs or don't have access to chargers, that is major motivation to pursue hydrogen cars.
Ultimately, you're left with many unsolvable problems if you try to tackle climate change without looking at hydrogen where it is applicable. You also need to think seriously about the downside of alternative ideas, and not pretend they are magically perfect. Batteries are heavy and expensive, nor are they environmental friendly to produce. If you see hydrogen as a far greener type of energy storage, then you will see there are upsides too. In other words, you are only looking at the cons, not the pros and the cons.
Steel and other metals can be made with direct Molten Oxide Electrolysis. That is a far better path forward then hydrogen.
> You also need to think seriously about the downside of alternative ideas, and not pretend they are magically perfect.
Given your absurd defense of hydrogen cars, I will just say, look in the mirror.
> Batteries are heavy and expensive, nor are they environmental friendly to produce. If you see hydrogen as a far greener type of energy storage, then you will see there are upsides too.
As a complete engineering solution end to end, batteries are far more environmentally friendly, far more efficient and far cheaper. Let alone if you also include infrastructure cost. Anybody who seriously investigates these things will come to the same conclusions.
Aside from container shipping there is raw bulk material shipping, eg: Western Australia ships > 800 million tonnes of raw ores to China annually (not local, not light).
Looking at just container shipping and the major major routes; there is
* 42 million TEU's intra asia (within asia, 'local' but not necc. 'short')
* 42 million TEU's 'far east' to Europe + North America.
and then a long tail of lesser volume routes, many quite lengthy (asia -> south americas, north | south americas, etc.)
Point being by "vast majority" are you talking raw ship numbers (there are many small ships) or cargo volumes | weights?
There is a truly vast amount of heavy tonnages being moved long distances and these consume the majority of shipping energy.
If this is your line of argument then it deserves some refining to move past a handwave.
MOE has not actually been invented yet, and there is no evidence it will be either cheap nor scalable. It's currently very expensive and requires plenty of exotic materials to work even as a concept.
No one is claiming hydrogen cars are perfect. But you are making highly delusional claims about batteries. Many of them are totally impossible.
It's pretty obvious that you have never thought about these problems. It's just a serious of assertions from the marketing department of BEV companies designed to shut down critical thinking. The fact is, a hydrogen infrastructure is cheaper than a battery infrastructure. That is simply due to the nature of pipelines versus wire. A pipe is hollow but a wire is not.
So it is 5-10x cheaper to make and move hydrogen around compared to electricity: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-hydrogen-offshore-wind
Reality doesn't not favor batteries or excessive electrification.
