this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Hydrogen was the future in the 90s, when the alternative was lead acid batteries. Nowadays hydrogen fuel cell cars don't actually top the charts on range, battery EVs have taken the crown.
Hydrogen promised to be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels. You still needed big industry to make and distribute it, you still needed filling stations to sell it to end users, you still took your car somewhere to fill it up. Everyone could just keep doing their thing. But it was going to be so expensive to switch over that everyone dragged their heels and kept using fossil fuels, so now we're entering the post-hydrogen car era without it ever arriving.
If we'd had hydrogen fuel cell cars 30 years ago, today we'd have manufacturers putting bigger batteries and charging plugs on them to make plug-in hybrids and move away from expensive hydrogen.
You also have to get hydrogen in any significant amount from natural gas wells, which is why Shell was behind it. It was not a true solution.
Hydrogen will be a big chunk of the future but probably not in cars, or generally car-sized vehicles, unless we're talking stuff like catastrophe relief (and with that ambulances, fire trucks etc) because it's a good idea to be able to fuel those things even if the grid is down.
We'll need hydrogen infrastructure and production anyways for steel smelting as well as the chemical industry, those are things that just don't run on electricity, no way. With that in place hydrogen is going to be available pretty much all over, similar to how you get natural gas anywhere nowadays. And then you have an unelectrified railway somewhere, electrifying it would cost a fortune and not amortise, but a fuel cell locomotive? Sounds easy and reasonable. Flow batteries are also an option in that kind of operation but you really need a lot of space to get power output from those so they wouldn't work for an ambulance.
So if you're a car manufacturer with your head screwed on right you're probably not developing and selling hydrogen cars now because they believe they're the future, you're doing that to have affluent liberals pay for your ticket to play in the future market of hydrogen utility vehicles.
Also of note: European car manufacturers at least seem to be completely fine with there being fewer cars on the streets. First, they can also make money off building public transport infrastructure and running car shares, secondly, cheap everyday cars aren't that profitable, if the cars they then do get to sell are fancy with high profit margin that's completely fine with them. Their suppliers care even less, a seat manufacturer doesn't care whether the seat ends up in a car or a train.
That's a lot easier in countries whose cities are closer together and were devolved centuries before the car was invented.
You should look at pictures of Amsterdam in the 70s, 80s, completely car-dependent. Europe made the same mistakes as the US regarding the car, difference is we noticed the mistake and what you see now is the product of decades of rolling back those decisions, first hesitantly, now quicker.
Also cities being further apart is actually an argument for more trains.
Yeah, I would love to have fewer cars on the streets too.
Unfortunately it looks like most Americans are going to be priced out of private car ownership long before we have any sort of suitable alternatives.
That’s not something I’m looking forward to. When enough people can’t afford to get to work but have no other way to get there.
Can’t be investing in new mass transit or walkable cities when the highways are in a state of disrepair. Nobody even takes mass transit anyway.
I would. Believe me I hate the 1.5 hour drive into the office and 2.5 hour drive back. Except they changed the train schedule on me so there are no routes that work with my schedule, and once I add in the slowdowns and congestion on the subway, it’s almost faster (and certainly more convenient) to drive. And then everyone else has the same idea and then the highways are even more congested. And then there’s less funding for mass transit because nobody wants to use it.
So glad I get to work from home 99% of the time. I’m not going back to that drudgery.
I am also interested in the flow batteries.
Iron ore + hydrogen = Iron + water. It's used to tear oxygen off the ore, currently that's done with carbon, generally of fossil origin. thyssenkrupp is already doing it at scale. Not all the hydrogen they use right now is green but unlike the old furnaces the new ones are ready to be carbon-neutral, they just have to switch over fuel sources no need to mess with the furnaces themselves.
It is possible to do the reduction directly with electricity but that's less energy-efficient than going via hydrogen. For the chemical industry the situation is even more extreme they need hydrogen as an ingredient for the final product, not just as a reactant.
Because batteries suck for any application where weight (ie. energy density) matters. Running long haul semis off batteries is not a super practical thing. Even with consumer cars, there are people for whom hydrogen will be a better fit.
Basically we've been in a world where the happy medium of energy density and efficiency (gasoline) was used for everything. Now we likely need to split those things up into what energy density is more important for, and what energy efficiency is more important for.
There's a lot of activity on the hydrogen-fueled aviation front.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/hydrogen-fuel-cell-aircraft-explained/
The infrastructure issues for planes are way less. You need fuel available at airports, which significantly fewer and farther between than consumers require for cars. Planes (and least of the jet variety) already use specialized fuel they keep available at airports. The phase-in is a lot easier too, since most running planes only travel between a few airports in their route — so you'd only need the hydrogen fuel available at the airports hydrogen planes are using to start.
There's certainly a lot of challenges to solve there too, but hydrogen remains the most promising solution for decarbonizing air travel.
Batteries (currently) are way too heavy for commercial planes. They can be used for the smaller propeller planes, but not for jets.
I don't know what you were expecting to see to indicate activity. Flight tests are a pretty far along milestone, given the expense and time it takes to make a test plane. That nothing went wrong on the test flight is even more impressive, given that the engineering of using hydrogen in planes is still ongoing (as the article mentions).
Yea it’s such a weird direction to go right night. Manufacturing and delivery of hydrogen for fuel cells is complex, expensive, and poses some unique dangers with the temps and pressure of the hydrogen. It’s cleaner, assuming manufacturing of the hydrogen uses green energy, but right now most energy production isn’t green.
It has its advantages but some pretty big disadvantages too. I don’t think it’s the way to go just yet. Maybe eventually but not today I don’t think.
I don't understand why people think we have to pick a single solution for all vehicles on the road. We can have BEV and hydrogen at the same time.
Seems like the winning standard I'd ICE then as it's worked well for over a hundred years and all the infrastructure is in place. Why should anyone pursue any other option?
You're arguing that it's the best solution for everyone simply because it's the best solution for you. Hydrogen has a major advantage in that you can just refill the tank in an instant which is a major factor in people's decision not to buy a BEV and a major drawback for people who regularly drive long distances.
I just find it incredibly ridiculous that people (typically laypeople) think they have all the answers and can make calls on what's the right or wrong decision, how the future will play out, and what the one-size-fits-all solution will be. It's closed-minded and only prevents progress as it limits what's possible. Companies investing in hydrogen with their own money has literally zero impact on you, so why are you arguing against it when it has clear advantages in certain instances? What do you gain?
Yeah electricity along with a driveway/garage at your owned single family home.
I can't help but roll my eyes at the assertion that "instant battery charging" is not only feasible but simply being held back because nobody really wants it in a world where almost every person on the planet has at least one battery powered device that they charge daily. I'd love to hear the breakdown on how you can instantly supply 40-100kWh of energy through a wire small enough for a human to hold in their hands and input it into a Li-ion pack without it exploding.
Your close-minded layperson bullshit is certainly responsible for spreading the exact same FUD about hydrogen as the close-minded right-wing yokels who spread bullshit about BEVs leaving you stranded on the road before trapping you inside the vehicle and burning you alive from a battery fire. All that for what, so you don't have to suffer the terrible fate of choosing more than one option if you ever buy a new car? The horror.
We did explore both options over the last 30 years or so. Batteries won for cars. Holding out otherwise at this point is silly.
Hydrogen might be what ends up powering long haul trucking, but I'd prefer that be replaced by electrified rail, anyway.
Who's "we" here? Seems like major manufacturers are still pouring money into both technologies, meaning nobody but you and these other closed-minded commenters feel that they have everything all figured out and hold all the answers. GM and Honda just announced new investments into hydrogen vehicles as well.
This line of thinking is why EVs were crushed out of existence long ago until Tesla made them popular again just a few short years ago relatively speaking.
Public funding for research; in other words, all of us.
A bunch of companies connected to the oil industry want hydrogen to happen, because the oil industry knows they're the only economical source of hydrogen. Even among them, Toyota is about the only one who was willing to do the full nose dive into the tech, and it's biting them in the ass.
Forgive me but which of these major manufacturers rely on publicly funded research when designing new vehicles?
Also where's your source for companies like GM, Honda, and Toyota being connected to the oil industry and doing their bidding when it comes to releasing new vehicles? How is it biting them in the ass? Toyota is currently on the forefront of solid state battery tech for BEVs. Perhaps you shouldn't believe every article you read on the internet.
Public funding tends to go on at universities. Major manufactureres then buy the patents and take the credit.
According to whom? Companies also do tons of research since they're building proprietary products to sell. Which patents used in my Toyota Camry were publicly funded?
The problem we have is energy density. Gasoline is pretty damn dense energy-wise. Storing 20-30 gallons of gas in a tank That's easy and safe to refill is hard to replace.
Lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate batteries are slow to refill.
Hydrogen is kind of neat. You can make it from splitting water with solar or nuclear. It's also a byproduct of the oil industry. And you can fill a tanker up or even an entire train and move fuck ton of hydrogen from one place to another. You can pipe it, people can generated for themselves and get a byproduct of pure oxygen.
But alas, it's still hydrogen. Give it access to the air in a little bit of fire and it makes a big boom. The infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and we're not swimming so much and renewables then it makes sense to bottle it up and sell it to people.
It can make sense for limited uses like cross country trucking (or maybe airlines) where battery will probably never have the range and you live and die by the schedule and refuel stops need to be relatively quick. Refilling semis at a limited number of truck stops with hydrogen stations can be useful if you can also get non petro-derived hydrogen. But for soccer moms and commuters it makes zero sense. Just charge smaller batteries at home and work and have a good interstate charging network for longer trips. We just need to normalize taking breaks on a road trip. It’ll help make more relaxing drives anyway and people already drive angry.
I'd just as soon see the majority of long haul trucking be replaced by electrified rail.
Likewise with a big chunk of the airline industry.
Oh absolutely. Rail is a better option for almost everything. However, some stuff will always need trucking (oversized, dangerous cargo, rural, etc.) but also the US is currently so overrdependent on roads it’s at least an intermediate tool.
I really wanted to see solar to hydrogen storage and then a hybrid fuel cell plus battery powerwall. Use all the solar that you get in the morning and not have to burn a battery pack out every 5 to 10 years.
You could do the same with the car, throw a small fuel cell plant in there a couple liters of hydrogen and a decent but not too big battery pack. When you park your car at work or at home it just sits there and slowly charges when you're not paying any attention. If it gets into a true low state or you know you're going to need it the next day to go further you can plug it into your home electric. It's just absolutely reasonable to put enough solar on a lot of houses that you could be completely sufficient from the grid.
No, they get shorter range at a higher price than batteries.
People push for it because they are either middlemen who want to sell the hydrogen and get a cut of ongoing profits, or Luddites who believe EVERYTHING must operate exactly the same way gasoline cars do or else they'll never switch.