Hydrogen!!! The Deadly Unsafe Gas Of Death!!!

The massive omission in this narrative is that at no point did Fran cover the fact that making hydrogen from renewable electricity is incredibly inefficient taking 8-10x the electricity to produce hydrogen, compress, cryogenically store, transport and then use a fuel cell to make electricity again in a hydrogen vehicle per mile driven than a battery electric vehicle. That means we would need to have 8-10x the renewable energy generation to do the same number of miles driven than simply charging a battery electric vehicle. This inefficiency is massive! The whole point of battery electric vehicles is that you get extremely high efficiency when charging directly from the grid in comparison to all the unnecessary steps in making hydrogen. This by the way includes the entire solar/wind to wheels turning efficiency and all losses included in the calculation. Agreed hydrogen has its place in shipping, aerospace, heavy plant equipment and mobile power generators etc but it’s not ideal at all for passenger vehicles. For grid storage other types of storage like flow batteries and low density chemistries make more sense where the storage doesn’t need to be portable.

Really surprised to hear that nobody is talking about hydrogen. This is not the case in Europe that predicts the share of hydrogen to reach 14% in it's total energy mix for 2050. There are several technology and region oriented pilot projects for testing hydrogen in most of EU countries. For more information see European Hydrogen Strategy https://ec.europa.eu/energy/topics/energy-system-integration/hydrogen_en . For more international approach visit International Hydrogen Council https://hydrogencouncil.com/en/ .

Marek

Toyota Mirai and on-station generation. It's already there, just not in the far-behind US.

Great Joe

I love H2. It is keeping my balloon W8VPV-1 floating around the world at 40,000+ feet. See https://aprs.fi/w8vpv-1.

Jim Grover

Also the use of coal of natural gas to generate electricity is irrelevant in an argument of hydrogen, since the production of hydrogen would use the same electricity much less efficiently than charging an electric car. We have no good way to produce hydrogen. Maybe some day we will. And the 1L hydrogen tank would have the energy of a 1/4L tank of gasoline. That's not useful. You would need more like a 200L tank of hydrogen (the hydrogen would not be heavy but the tank probably would) to match a typical gasoline car with a 50L tank. And can you store hydrogen as a liquid without keeping it cooled? Too many of the places mentioning hydrogen's energy density are doing it by mass, not volume. For an airplane that is interesting, but not nearly as much for a car. After looking up the specs of the Mirai it has a 122L tank to store 5kg hydrogen (tank is 87kg) with a 500km range. So it looks like yes they can store it at 10000psi without cooling and it probably weighs less than a battery for the same range and can be refueled in 3 minutes if you can find a place to do it. New infrastructure is a pain.

Lennart Sorensen

Hydrogen has several problems yet to be solved. Additional to what has already been mentioned, three come to mind: Production of nitrates when burned using air as source of oxidizer. Embrittlment of metals exposed to it. Flame color exactly same as sunlight, making a fire due to leak invisible in sunlight.

Michael F Barushok

So apparently Toyota is nobody. Interesting. I am totally not convinced hydrogen has any chance of being useful due to inefficient production, storage problems, etc, but Toyota sure doesn't seem to want to give up on it, and they sure are slow at getting into electric cars. Maybe they know something I don't (they have been studying it after all). Bio fuels certainly do appear to be mostly nonsense, and most parts of the world seem to be abandoning it (and at least most places that are still trying it are not stupidly using corn for it).

Lennart Sorensen

Hydrogen is horribly inefficient to produce. It's a solid thermodynamic wall that makes it worse than lithium-ion. You lose so much energy in the process. Worse than the life cycle of batteries, worse than the least efficient viable bio-fuel. The ONLY viable method of production would be the use of waste heat, such as sending steam to a nearby city for people to heat their houses. Of course, you could say the same for damn near any fuel system. We could cut winter coal usage by a third if we utilized the waste heat. We could cut gas usage by 1/4 if we utilized the waste heat. Almost no cities do this. So hydrogen isn't special, it would still require systems well beyond the concept of hydrogen itself.

Michael Eagan

The hydrogen economy has a lot of very significant blockers to viability, unfortunately. The hydrogen molecule is small compared to the molecules of anything that you might store it in, so it has a nasty habit of leaking through the walls of the container. Mixed with air, it is explosive rather than merely flammable, so you don’t get a chance to put out a hydrogen fire because ignition has a habit of removing the surrounding building structure instantaneously. On top of this, hydrogen is also highly reactive, so it degrades container materials, making them more likely to rupture under the insanely high pressures required to store it efficiently because it has such low energy density. You have multiple layers of inefficiency in the hydrogen economy too. Creating it has very low efficiency but transporting it is really bad. Shipping a truck load of hydrogen from point of manufacture to point of sale consumes the majority of the energy that you can store in the volume of the truck. Turning it into a solid form such as a hydrate and leveraging that addresses some of the safety issues, but adds a lot of complexity and yet more inefficiency so there is nothing out there that represents a super-cheap technology that is viable for mass consumer adoption.

Terry Cox

I fully agree Fran, Hydrogen is the way forward. I believe there are plans for offshore hydrogen production plants powered by nuclear/wave/solar power plant.

Dr Andy Hill

Hydrogen fuel cells are ridiculous. They basically just exist because companies can patent things having to do with them and build an intellectual property portfolio. A normal internal combustion engine can run just fine on hydrogen - very well, in fact. If you can find them, check out a series of videos about running internal-combustion engines on hydrogen by Roy McAlister, president of the American Hydrogen Association. He talks about the problem of hydrogen storage tanks and makes the point that tank technology is constantly progressing and tanks are capable of holding higher and higher pressures. He modified a Geo Metro with such a tank and runs it on hydrogen as a demonstration. He also shows small engines running this way and producing nothing but clean water from their exhaust pipes. It's really eye-opening stuff.

Circuitmike

When people think of hydrogen they think of the Hindenburg. But that was 1937 and the practices of making tanks has changes a lot.

Daniel Bingamon

If you have local power production then you can have hydrogen production right at a lot of fuel stations. It's what's done in Iceland: The places offering hydrogen share a parking lot with a safe, secure miniature hydrogen production plant, which serves the adjacent pump. This eliminates the need for transportation entirely. These stations serve buses and the somewhat recent Toyota Mirais that have been sold here since 2018.

Great Joe

Completely killing an industry is bound to provoke pushbacks. But that does not need to be the case. You could produce H2 by electrolysys with green electricity but instead of handling molecular H2 you could use it to synthesise methane or ammonia. Both of which are far cheaper and safer to handle than H2. And the handling of both is not too far from oil and natural gas so you can offer the "dying industry" a way forward.

I found the comparison of conversion losses between BEVs and FCEVs especially interesting: https://youtu.be/dWAO3vUn7nw?t=302 She states 20%-30% energy loss when producing H2 by electrolysis. I always thought electrolysis was a pretty efficient process

Here in New Zealand our government is encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles by offering cash rebates on the purchase of new or used imported EVs and plug-in hybrids. Unfortunately there aren't yet many affordable options for EV's for the average person. The Nissan Leaf is by far the least expensive and we seem to import a large number of these used vehicles from Japan. An emerging problem is going to be that we don't have the electric grid generation capacity to cope with all the domestic EV charging that will be required. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may ultimately be the best way to go. I hope there is progress in that direction.

The long rant about biofuels threw me off. Here in Germany nobody talks about biofuels any more. For personal transportation pretty much everybody has accepted that in the long run the internal combustion engine has no future, no matter what fuel. Cars will be electric, thats that. Personally I think molecular hydrogen has a place in Industry (foundries and such) and for lage scale energy storage but the logistics overhead of hydrogen for personal energy consumption seems preventative. Think how much energy you need to move H2 1000km across the country via containers versus moving the same amount of energy electricly through a piece of copper.

Bullseeeeeye Fran! This video, by far and by a very long chalk is my video of 2021 so far.

Well said.

William Alsing

Diana Cowern (Physics Girl) is currently running a YouTube series exploring the potential of hydrogen fuel while driving a Toyota Mirai. They are certainly worth watching to provide an alternative view to the current dash to battery electrical power.

David Peaker

Liquid hydrogen for cars is unlikely as it needs to be cryogenically stored. The liquid hydrogen would just boil off over few days even if held in a cryostat. More likely it will be just very pressurised gaseous hydrogen. Even so, the chart in the video shows energy density of liquid hydrogen as being 8.4MJ/litre, compared to 33.9MJ/litre for diesel. So Fran said we only need a tiny tank for liquid hydrogen, I think this is the wrong as we'd need much bigger tank compared to diesel. Sure, liquid hydrogen doesn't weight much itself, it has high energy density for its weight, but the tank to contain it would be very substantial.

I agree with the idea of using hydrogen, but even here the oil and gas industry are trying to get involved by pushing the producition of hydrogen from natural gas, with carbon capture to deal with the resulting CO2. This seems to be madness! Let's spend billions to prop up a dying industry instead of committing to produce hydrogen by the seemingly much simpler process of water and electrolysis.

David Peaker

There is a hydrogen gas station for cars 2 minutes drive from my house. Europe is working on it. https://h2me.eu/ An example of a car that drives around here is the Toyota Mirai has a tank capacity of (only) 5.6 kilos, the car has a range of 650 kilometers. Costs for a full tank are comparable to petrol (here in the Netherlands) unfortunately, if it were (much) cheaper I think it could be seen more as an alternative.

Airbus has already decided to put immense thrust behind hydrogen power for aircraft. Their plans are to use liquid hydrogen in cryotanks. They already have experimental tanks and an aircraft being modified to carry them. The interesting part is that they are going to be exploring hydrogen-powered fuel cells supplying power to electric motors. but also hydrogen-fueled turbines both as traditional prime movers and as turbogenerators supplying electric power to electric motors swinging props or driving open rotors. Keeping am open mind about the winning architecture would seem to be in order considering the numner of unknown unknowns.

Mike O'Dell