this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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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.
Well the idea is that BEV is more efficient with the energy that it gets...
Which I understand...
But what I don't understand is what part of our usage is actually "efficient" from the get go? Also that 'extra' energy we lose to the electrolysis process could easily be made up with extra solar/wind/renewables... and Nuclear without much issue.
Further, desalination mechanisms are desperately needed for our water problem too... Guess what process can help with that... cough totally not electrolysis cough. It's almost like it's a win all around... Yet everyone is super against it for one nebulous reason or another... and none of those reasons ever make sense to me.
Yeah one of the big downsides of hydrogen is that you need massive amounts of clean energy to make it worthwhile.
No problem IF the energy is cheap and/or free