#HydrogenPoweredCars #ElectricVehicles #AlternativeFuel
In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles. This shift is influenced by several key factors that have played a significant role in shaping the automotive industry. Let’s dive into the reasons behind this transition and explore why electric vehicles are gaining more traction compared to hydrogen-powered cars.
### Environmental Impact 🌿
1. **Emissions**: One of the main reasons for the shift towards electric vehicles is their minimal carbon footprint. Electric cars produce zero tailpipe emissions, making them a cleaner and more environmentally friendly option compared to hydrogen-powered cars, which still rely on hydrogen production methods that can be harmful to the environment.
2. **Efficiency**: Electric vehicles are more energy-efficient than hydrogen-powered cars. The process of converting electricity to power the vehicle is more efficient than producing hydrogen through electrolysis or steam methane reforming. This improved efficiency translates to fewer emissions and a reduced impact on the environment.
### Infrastructure Challenges 🛠️
1. **Charging Stations**: The infrastructure for electric vehicles, such as charging stations, is more developed and widespread compared to hydrogen refueling stations. This makes electric vehicles more convenient and practical for everyday use, as drivers can easily find charging stations at home, work, and public locations.
2. **Cost**: Building hydrogen refueling stations is more expensive and challenging compared to installing charging stations for electric vehicles. This cost factor has hindered the growth of hydrogen infrastructure, making it less accessible and efficient compared to electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
### Technological Advancements 🚗
1. **Battery Technology**: Advances in battery technology have significantly improved the performance and range of electric vehicles. With the development of lithium-ion batteries and solid-state batteries, electric cars now have longer driving ranges and faster charging capabilities, making them more competitive and appealing to consumers.
2. **Fuel Cells**: While hydrogen fuel cells have the potential to offer long-range driving and quick refueling times, the technology is still in its early stages and faces challenges in terms of cost, efficiency, and infrastructure. The complexity of hydrogen fuel cell systems has made them less practical and feasible compared to the simpler design of electric vehicles.
### Consumer Preference 🚘
1. **Range Anxiety**: Electric vehicles have addressed the issue of range anxiety by offering longer driving ranges and faster charging times. This has boosted consumer confidence in electric cars and alleviated concerns about running out of battery power during long trips.
2. **Cost of Ownership**: Electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and cost-effective over time, with lower maintenance costs and government incentives for purchasing electric cars. This has made electric vehicles a more attractive option for consumers looking to save money on fuel and maintenance expenses.
In conclusion, the shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles can be attributed to various factors such as environmental impact, infrastructure challenges, technological advancements, and consumer preference. While hydrogen fuel cells still hold promise for the future, electric vehicles have emerged as a more practical and sustainable option in the present automotive landscape. As the automotive industry continues to evolve, electric vehicles are likely to remain at the forefront of the transition towards cleaner and more efficient transportation solutions.
Electricity is distributed everywhere. Hydrogen isn’t. This remains one of the biggest problem for hydrogen based transportation – lack of hydrogen distribution infrastructure. And this is not going to be cheap since hydrogen very likely has to be compressed and cooled to make it easy enough to transport in quantity.
The other issue is that hydrogen, at that volume, is going to be produced and hydrogen production (existing) requires energy. If countries have excess energy (say lots of cheap solar during the day), then it might make sense to utilize this for hydrogen production (aka green hydrogen). Otherwise the cheaper method is to generate it from natural gas.
Its questionable if hydrogen can work at scale even now, The only semi economic way to generate it is to break down gas and oil in an energy intense and pricy way. Which means to be a clean source the carbon produced must be controlled, which isn’t really any better than carbon capturing a fossil power plant. Then the hydrogen must be stored in bulky high pressure tanks and you need something similar for the pipework, which is no good for transport.
Its trapped in a worst of both worlds situation where it combines the worst features of clean energy from 10 years ago with the worst features of fossil fuel. And its not clear that there is a way forward. And its increasingly got to compete with clean sources that have their issues worked out and becoming very cheap.
It’s mostly about batteries becoming cheaper and electricity being more available / not needing to retrofit as much compared with hydrogen .
A hydrogen car is actually mostly an EV already, at least in the sense that it uses an electric motor to move the car. The main difference is where the power comes from – in an EV it’s a battery and in a hydrogen car it’s a fuel cell.
Hydrogen itself is still being looked at in cases where batteries don’t make sense. As an example, ships would be a more attractive use of hydrogen because batteries are still very expensive per unit energy and can be very dangerous if they catch fire. There’s also a very limited number of ports that the average shipping vessel ever docks at, so retrofitting wouldn’t be much of a problem either.
first off, hydrogen cars ARE electric vehicles. They just use hydrogen fuel cells instead of batteries, so there is a lot of overlap in technology.
after that, the problem is just that hydrogen is pretty hard to contain at scale. its the lightest and smallest element in the universe and has a nasty habit of [leaking through steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement). But its not like hydrogen cars are conceptually dead, its just that the companies in charge see a more promising future in battery tech. With the added advantage that you can use batteries in other places hydrogen fuel cells arent practical, like phones and solar battery walls. This makes batteries a technology that cant fail, even if EVs do.
Batteries are large and heavy for the amount of energy they can store. Hydrogen, as a compressed gas, is more energy dense (but the containers and fuel handling equipment are heavy). 20 years ago, it appeared that batteries would be too heavy and short range to be useful. Improvements to batteries, largely motivated by portable electronics, have led to much more capable and low cost batteries than the predictions of 20 years ago assumed.
Hydrogen is small, so it can slip out of most materials so you need extra thickness on tanks and hoses which means more weight and less efficiency. Hydrogen is not very dense, so you have to compress it (it is really expensive to liquify, so gas it is). Hydrogen is also extremely flammable. Hydrogen is hard to move around or store because of these factors, we can’t use existing pipes or tanks or tanker truckers. We have plenty of water, which is a good source of hydrogen, but getting the hydrogen usually means cracking water through electricity, so while water is plentiful it actually takes nontrivial amounts of work to get the hydrogen.
There’s a lot of promising research that’s being done right now regarding using hydrogen as a fuel in the engine and ammonia as the transportation medium. Ammonia is cheap and easy to make and could be made at scale easily around the world. Ammonia can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and use the same piping as gasoline without too much work. The engine would crack the ammonia using a catalyst and then use the hydrogen directly.
Practical electric cars seemed impossible with 1990s batteries. It doesn’t feel like it but in the last 30 years batteries have gotten massively better. Having better batteries made a convoluted hydrogen system seem less needed.
You got a lot of technical answers already and one conspiracy based answer. I’m going on a different track… Apathy.
Those with the finances to do the R&D were dragging their feet on both technologies because of the great cash cow that is ICE vehicles. Even companies like Toyota that were “going hard on Hydrogen” weren’t really spending all that much to try to bring it to fruition. I take it back, GM *did* produce an electric car, but they were too scared of falling behind financially against their competitors so they killed it (the government didn’t help in this regard either.)
Then along comes an upstart tech billionaire who decides he will do it. He has to choose between electric and hydrogen and went with electric. Huge surprise to all the other car companies, his company was wildly successful. So now the big car companies are jumping on the band wagon and hydrogen is left behind.
From what I’ve read, toyota is moving toward hydrogen and away from electric, so I don’t think it’s dead yet
It takes a lot of energy (often electricity) to produce hydrogen in a usable manner for cars. It’s a lot easier to just put that same electricity directly into a battery electric vehicle
Lots of things, cost, how efficient they are, also they don’t really solve an issue. The byproduct of hydrogen engines is water vapor, which is about 4x worse than what we release now when suddenly dumped in mass quality into an environment such as a state or city etc.
Also what is a fuel cell and how does it work?
Basic economics. Handling hydrogen in a portable manner is bleeding expensive, and energy efficiency is poor in comparison to batteries.
Now, if you had an overabundance of renewable energy and more hydrogen than you knew what to do with, that’s another matter. But building hydrogen cars before that situation is putting the cart in front of the horse.
The hydrogen economy will not start with cars. It’ll start with stationary industrial uses.
even where there were infrastructure to fill up a tank, it was extremely expensive. Like $30/100miles. People rather charge EV than pay so much. So sales never picked up and thus even those few filling stations started to close.
Not to mention that EV charging costs about $30k per charger, so maybe $120k for station of 4, while hydrogen station is closer to $2 mil.
Hydrogen is inefficient. First, you have to put it huge amount of energy to split water which has losses. Then converting it back to electricity too has losses. You could have used the same energy to charge a battery instead which are like 95% efficient.
This is one of the most important factor other than the issues with hydrogen generation, storage, and safety challenges.
The storage and transport of hydrogen is very difficult as it can very easily leak. It’s also a bit expensive currently because most hydrogen being produced is a byproduct of other processes and we have no large scale production for it which would make it cheap enough to compete with gas.
However a lot of these issues are being worked on and solving them would be a massive breakthrough, mainly because hydrogen powered cars can provide good alternatives to both internal combustion and electric cars.
All industrialized countries have power grids throughout the country, which means it’s not outrageously difficult to build charging stations for electric cars.
Hydrogen vehicles need hydrogen fuel cells, which require special hydrogen refueling stations that cost many millions of dollars to build. To make hydrogen work, we’d need to build many hydrogen plants, and fleets of special trucks to transport it.
In my opinion, hydrogen power could work well for commercial aviation and cargo shipping, since you could have a modest number of large refueling stations at airports and seaports, instead of trying to build a huge number of small stations for personal cars.
1. Hydrogen keeps failing in the market. You can go buy a hydrogen car right now. Nobody is… But you can. They’ll even give you $15,000 worth of free fuel. Still no takers.
2. After all these decades and decades in development, hydrogen still hasn’t overcome most of the initial problems. Storage, generation, handling, using platinum group metals in the fuel cells. Basically everything you see on the road is still in the experimental stage.
3. It’s completely unaffordable. You may have gotten a clue with all the free fuel Toyota was willing to give you with the purchase of a hydrogen car, but if not, it bares emphasizing that there’s no company on earth that could afford to install the infrastructure necessary to make hydrogen refiling easy and ubiquitous. It will require massive government subsidies, to the tune of the GDP of all the large developed countries in the world. How do you think taxpayers will feel to double their respective national debts just so we can have hydrogen instead of pure battery electric.
4. Keep in mind, fuel cell cars ARE battery electric cars. They just have an exotic range extender that enables the consumption of very expensive fuel bolted on. So any criticism one levels against electric cars ALSO APPLIES TO FUEL CELL CARS.
5. We could go on and on and on about all the issues with hydrogen, but fundamentally it’s an exercise in greenwashing and delay. “Look, we’re developing a hydrogen car so don’t bother making us offset ICE sales by shipping something that’s going to actually work!” Or “The world needs energy, we’ll just keep fracking up all the methane we can till hydrogen is ready, and whenever that is we will be able to supply hydrogen by cracking off the CO2 and venting it to the atmosphere so that some well meaning soccer mom can pretend she’s saving the planet because she has no TAILPIPE emissions.
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is loss. Electricity can be stored with relatively low levels of loss for most batteries. Hydrogen is small so it leeches out fairly easily.
From what I’ve read hydrogen not being a good option is a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing. There’s no one big problem just a ton of small ones.
Government Legislation requiring ev as opposed to renewable resoyrce powered cars, according to an ev ebgineer.
The real pivot point came during the Obama era. When he came into office, the global economy was in a massive recession. They put together a massive spending package to update certain aspects of infrastructure while putting people to work in order to ease unemployment. Many of these projects had the intent of creating a greener infrastructure in the future. There were a lot of propositions as to where this (I think $800 billion would go.) investment in infrastructure for both EV and hydrogen cars were considered. They chose EVs. That rational was that this was an easier transition. Electricity already runs everywhere. All you need are charging points, which can literally sit in front of a parking spot. Hydrogen on the other hand would’ve required a massive infrastructure overhaul. There is no “pipeline” for mass produced liquid hydrogen to be created, transported and distributed at stations. A hydrogen station basically requires either a new gas station or a phasing out of an existing gas station, which we obviously aren’t able to get rid of yet. So the EV won out.
Several problems with Hydrogen:
1. If you produce it by electrolysis you spend more energy than you get back. Using fictitious numbers just to illustrate: if you spend 10 KW of energy to produce 10 cubic meter of hydrogen, it will give you 6 KW of energy when you try to use it.
2. Hydrogen is highly reactive. It will react with everything, like the tank you use to store it, making it brittle.
3. Hydrogen is dangerous. You can make it “less” dangerous by lowing its temperature to very extreme values but that requires a complex machine and more energy or
4. or you can compress the hell out of it, to liquefy it by force. Then you are carrying a bomb around.
5. If you produce it by reacting butane with water, you use less energy than electrolysis but you produce huge amounts of CO2, the thing you are trying to prevent and you are using fossil fuel, other thing you are trying to prevent.
6. A new option they have discovered is that hydrogen is produced by earth and you have points, across the planet, where hydrogen can be extracted such as oil. This hydrogen is produced by hot rocks interacting with water, meaning it can be an infinite renewable source, but as far as I read, when you pump that, you also pump other gases, as, guess which… CO2…
7. Hydrogen molecule is small. The smallest of them all. It is so small that keeping it contained on a tank is a problem and it will eventually leak and guess what… BOOM!
I sincerely don’t see a future for hydrogen, at least not in its purest form because it requires a lot of safety procedures and exposes everyone to a lot of dangers.
[Why Hydrogen Cars Flopped](https://youtu.be/b88v-WvqzeQ?si=96MeAy4Ft34b3kK8)
Couldn’t explain better if I wanted to 🙂
The well-to-wheel efficiency is abysmal. Main issues are surrounding transportation and storage. Its energy density is terrible which is what ultimately causes those issues. Did you know that a litre of petrol contains more hydrogen atoms than liquid hydrogen itself?
Hydrogen has extremely low energy per unit volume. To make the tank sizes manageable you need to increase the density by either storing it at high pressures (10,000+ PSI) or at extremely low temperatures (-423°F). Both of those options require expensive storage tanks for the trucks hauling it to gas stations, the gas stations themselves, and the cars that fill up at the gas station. For the low temperature option, the hydrogen will boil as it heats up, requiring a vent to periodically reduce the pressure in the tank. This vented hydrogen is both flammable and a waste of money.
Hydrogen is mostly produced via natural gas, which isn’t the cleanest of processes. Might as well just run the car on natural gas if you are going to use that process. The other common method is electrolysis, where water is zapped with electricity and it splits into oxygen and hydrogen. This isn’t particularly efficient from an electricity standpoint. Then it needs to be compressed or chilled, consuming more electricity. Then it needs to be trucked or piped to a gas station, consuming even more energy. From there it needs to be continuously chilled or compressed to be able to put it into a vehicle. And then it needs to go through a fuel cell to recombine with oxygen and form water, creating electricity, which is not all that efficient either.
TLDR, It takes a lot of electricity to make hydrogen, store hydrogen, and move hydrogen, just for the hydrogen to make electricity in the car. It’s way easier and more efficient to just directly put electricity in the car.
– hydrogen is very hard to transport, needs to be refrigerated/cryogenic
– the molecules are tiny so there is no viable container at the car size that doesn’t leak them out. Park your car at 100% fill, wake up in the morning and you have 80% left. There is a reason the only passenger hydrogen car from Mercedes or bmw comes with a warning not to park indoors
– see point above, can’t park in an enclosed space
– most viable source of hydrogen is oil / gas drilling until there are wide spread green sources
– it’s not an easy retrofit for a gas station to go hydrogen, totally different infrastructure
– pumping hydrogen into car is complex and can be dangerous
– we already have an amazing network for distribution of electricity, so why ignore that and try to build out a non-existent network
– hydrogen engines or fuel cells are nowhere as efficient as EV’s
There are some basic physics problems that will likely never get solved. Hydrogen is however a great option that has a real future in fleet vehicles (since refueling can be managed centrally), off grid energy generation (data centers already use these power plants in a box), heavy shipping, trucking, heavy shipping, even light commercial aircraft’s. It will not happen for personal cars.