Toyota wants hydrogen to succeed so bad it’s paying people to buy the Mirai::Toyota is offering some amazing deals for its hydrogen fuel cell-powered Mirai. That is, if customers can find the hydrogen to power it.
Most Hydrogen fuel is still made from natural gas. It’s greenwashing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/climate/hydrogen-fuel-natural-gas-pollution.html
And most electricity is still made from fossil fuels. The point is that it doesn’t have to be, unlike gasoline.
Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables
That’s not true, Gasoline doesn’t have to be made from Fossile fuels either. It’s pretty easy to make actually - there are a number of European companies doing it and with the Co2 Taxes, it will be a viable option by 2028.
Gasoline is made from petroleum.
It is certainly synthesisable by some method without using petroleum. But the person you replied to probably meant Power-to-Gas.
However synthetic or not, burning it produces same gases, which are the problem. Cleaner, but not the end solution.
Yeah but you can charge EVs with solar panels if you have them installed. Not everybody can make hydrogen for their Toyota Mirais.
We could use wind electricity, instead of stopping the windnturbines when the production gets so high that prices drop…
At some point hopefully we will realize
it is however extremely easy to make from water. Making the switch to green easy and seamless, and it will surely happen if there’s demand.
It might be theoretically easy, but the massive power demands (and loss) make it pretty hard in practice.
And not every car requires a ton of lithium, like it would if everyone wants to go both EV + massive range.
We really need a more nuanced discussion around EV’s.
I see a lot of “gas bad ev good”. While gas IS bad, really bad, we also need to allow into the discussion all the ways ev’s are also bad, not just range, but environmentally.Hydrogen is really interesting to me
It’s also faster to fill the tank, making it suitable for longer travels. Greenwhashing or not, battery powered is not where its at.
It’s also faster to fill the tank
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car. That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
You’re spreading doubt about EVs while promoting hydrogen while ignoring the known drawbacks of hydrogen.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
That’s not true. A hydrogen gas station needs to be under a high pressure to be able to fill up just one car.
Ever heard of pumps? You do realize pump can build up pressure from lower pressure container? Even if the time needed to fill the tank is the same as EV you’d still get higher mileage per joule of energy simply by not having 700kg battery onboard.
That pressure is gone after 4 or 5 cars. After which it’ll take 45 minutes to build up pressure again.
Not sure where you got these numbers from but pretty much none of them make sense. I’d love to see some sources on that.
Simply stated, per mile or km driven it’s significantly cheaper to “fill up” an EV vs hydrogen. That’s due inefficiencies around hydrogen.
Completely pointless comparison. You are comparing centuries of battery evolution to a technology that started being developed recently. Per whatever price is not comparable. If you want to go that direction, then bicycle is cheapest followed by a public transport and gasoline. This is not a question about price, this is question of finding a solution that’s scalable enough to replace gasoline, and batteries are not that. Lithium is rare enough, batteries weigh a ton and lose performance in the winter. They also take time to charge. Time which you can’t reduce without affecting battery life. Not to mention excess weight wearing down roads faster, wearing down tires. All that affects environment.
To make matters worse, Toyota has released its newest engine which can run on hydrogen, methane and gasoline. Making transition very easy. Sure hydrogen production is expensive at this point, but prices will drop once there’s competition and new greener ways are found to produce it. But change can start happening now. And by the way, am not talking about hydrogen EVs, but hydrogen ICEs.
Considering I have no hydrogen stations within a 100 mile radius, if they give me the car I would only get one tank out of it.
I think the hydrogen is intended to be sourced from natural gas, which is not a great thing. The only way I see this working in an environmentally sustainable way is an efficient means of solar hydrolysis (much more efficient than photosynthesis).
It’s important to see where the hydrogen is being sourced from. Grey Hydrogen comes from natural gas and is not ideal as you point out.
Green hydrogen is promising however, and comes from electrolyzers. The key there is where the electricity to operate them comes from, but that’s true for electric vehicles as well. It seems an unfair criticism against hydrogen vehicles to hold that against them when the same isn’t done for electric vehicles.
In any case, I think we do want to build out hydrogen infrastructure (and I’m biased since I work in hydrogen energy). The future we’re envisioning is one where solar and wind provide us excesses fairly often. That’s where it’s perfect to run electrolyzers to store the energy as hydrogen.
I would assume this falls into the “you couldn’t pay me” category for most people.
I don’t have a single hydrogen station here in Michigan. (There might be one in Detroit.) Meanwhile, I can plug in my electric car at home, or go to a public charger 10 miles away. Hydrogen’s good as dead. At least to me, anyway.
Hydrogen was as good as dead for years because compressing it is so wasteful
In the near term, it’s pretty clear that zero-emission, light-duty vehicles will need to rely on batteries. So why are Toyota and Honda (and Hyundai and others) still so bullish on hydrogen?
To some degree, it’s like they wanted to invest in an image of being climate-conscious and technologically innovative while eschewing electric vehicles — the most common vision of a low-emissions transportation future.
Why is this article so agressively angled?
While it’s clear the infrastructure isn’t there right now, isn’t hydrogen in the long term a clearly better alternative than ev’s? The biggest problem with EV’s being the battery, with all the horrible chemicals that go in to making them.
Shouldn’t hydrogen, in the long term, be the obviously greener alternative, or am I missing something?
Hydrogen cannot be greener than an EV, because it’s just an EV with more steps. It’s energy intensive to turn electricity + water to hydrogen, transport it, pump it, then convert it back to electricity.
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
E: ok people. You live in your little fantasy world where thermodynamics aren’t a thing.
There are laws of thermodynamics and there are laws of kinetics.
Fuels have much more power density than batteries. You can’t deliver power as fast with a battery compared to a fuel. It doesn’t matter if thermodynamically one is more efficient or greener than the other. You would be crazy to suggest moving an airbus with a battery, that’s physically impossible.
I’m a researcher in both fields (batteries and hydrogen)
Sure, but I’m not talking about jets, which yeah, do need a far greater energy density than batteries can currently provide.
It is physically impossible for hydrogen cars to ever be as green as EVs. In order to do so you’d have to break laws of physics.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
The losses from simply running electrons through a wire are very small.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
In a pure fuel comparison sure, does that still hold true when you also factor in manufacturing?
Yes.
You conveniently forgot about battery charging and discharging losses.
I didn’t. Those are very small. Compared to the losses of a HFCEV or even worse, a combustion hydrogen car.
Honestly, the article answers its own question and acts oblivious to it, but I’ve been saying it for years.
It’s for boats. The easiest and most convenient place to store hydrogen is near a port, which conveniently also generally has the infrastructure for natural gas, used to make hydrogen.
Honda and Toyota do make EVs, as does Hyundai, as well as patents for batteries, which would put them near the top of the market. Clearly, they’re also betting on BEV cars. But they all also have a marine sector, and Toyota just partnered with a company to test out fuel cells for marine applications. The cars might as well have been a useful test bed which had its costs subsidized by consumers. Seems pretty clear what their angle is.
Or maybe they’re out of their mind. Who knows?
For personal vehicles, no, that is not at all clear and many of us would say clearly the opposite.
However there are more heavy duty applications where batteries are unlikely to ever scale. I don’t think we have a clear winner yet so hydrogen is likely still in the running for things like aviation, shipping, construction and farm equipment, industry, maybe even grid scale energy storage
There’s no need for a “winner”, why are people so fixated that it has to be one or the other?
All the technologies we have are not exclusive, having more options is always better when it comes to energy.
This “winning” debate has to stop. There’s no gas vs diesel vs natural gas winner… There is no hydro, wind, PV winner… They all can coexist just fine.
There is a place for hydrogen fuel, and there’s a place for battery vehicles.
Stop debating this like they are football teams.
Firstly: winner, as in the more appropriate and mature technology
Secondly: while it may appear the technologies are not mutually exclusive, they each depend on a lot of infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense to build put multiple sets of infrastructure for multiple technology vehicles. The reason it may make sense for heavy equipment is you typically have a central hub everything comes back to, so the infrastructure can be much simpler
More appropriate in terms of what? Batteries and renewable fuels could serve two applications. And be more practical in certain locations.
The infrastructure can be location based. Doesn’t make sense to have EV in certain locations with poor grid coverage, or renewable fuels in big cities.
We have plenty of technologies with double infrastructure, I mean EV and carbon based fuels are both around, no problem whatsoever, even better on because we don’t rely on a single infrastructure. Renewable fuels can use a similar infrastructure to natural gas with a few tweaks. We have fiber optic, cable phone, 4/5G, all serve the “same” purpose but for different applications. There’s no “winner” there.
Batteries don’t deliver power as fast as fuels, so depending on what you need as a consumer you can decide to go for EV (single passenger small car for cities) or renewable fuels for long range, or high powered trucks for freight and heavy load.
I am not in love with the idea of pure hydrogen cars due to the inefficiencies involved, but I can see a hydrogen/BEV plug in hybrid being a good option if hydrogen infrastructure gets built out. As is, I drive a Chevy Volt, and while its battery range is low it is enough for the majority of my daily driving. The biggest downside of pure EVs is charging time when you’re driving on long trips, and in my Volt I don’t have to worry about that as I can just fill up with gas. Well, do the same thing but with hydrogen rather than gasoline and you have a car that can refill quickly like a gas car but can be powered entirely from renewable energy sources like a pure BEV. You need some lithium but less than you would for a full size battery. You still have the capability to charge at home and assuming the battery can do a reliable 50 miles or so you would only need hydrogen for longer trips. You could leave the hydrogen tank empty to avoid leakage and safety issues when you aren’t doing a road trip. Also, hydrogen cars are EVs anyways so the drivetrain doesn’t need the extra complexity of a conventional hybrid, just switch power between the battery and hydrogeb fuel cell.
The ones at the Washington state border are actually in Canada. I’d love to see hydrogen take off, not necessarily take over. But that’s the car enthusiasts in me and seeing all the new technologies. Doubt I’ll see it in my working career.
How expensive would it be to re-fit as a chargeable hybrid?
From really long term hydrogen makes a lots of sense, much more than Li-* batteries. There is no need for digging up rare earth metals, H2 is a byproduct of creating graphene and various processes can create it. Also filling up liquid hydrogen takes still less, than any charging available. And IMO it can be much cleaner than any other technology on horizon currently. Only more effective but not necessarily cleaner are the plans for small nuclear power plants.
Hydrogen makes loads of sense at the point we have huge amounts of excess electrical energy. Until that point it’s just too inefficient compared to alternatives.
This podcast episode strong critiques the technical challenges, lifecycle costs, and market effort of hydrogen. I was hydro-curious before this, but it really seems unfeasible.
The chemical engineer being interviewed, Paul Martin, has been working with hydrogen for years.
Paul Martin is a Canadian chemical engineer with decades of experience making and using hydrogen and syngas. As a chemical process development specialist, Paul offers services to an international clientele via his private consultancy Spitfire Research. He is also co-founder of the Hydrogen Science Coalition, a nonprofit organization providing science-based information about hydrogen from a position free from commercial interest
