this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I definitely think hydrogen and batteries solve different problems, and we're going to need both. Batteries have lower energy waste when recharging, and can handle power fluctuations better, while hydrogen has a far higher energy density, and scales much better to large scale storage. In addition, hydrogen tanks don't wear out the same way as batteries after many empty-full cycles.
This makes hydrogen very good for large scale applications, where the power requirements don't fluctuate much.
Hydrogen has a whole host of problems of it's own. The absolute lack of infrastrucure is a massive, massive, massive hurdle, but if you limit that infrastructure to just large scale applications (like airports) then it becomes much less of a problem. Still hydrogen storage is extremely tricky simply because the gas is so tiny. On an atomic level, it is hard to keep it contained. That seems trivial, but is really isn't. But ultimately if hydrogen is just one part of a wider energy solution, then things can get worked out.
Hydrogen storage is definitely something we need to do more research on. Cooling as well turns out to be quite a bit more complex than for most other fluids because of the quantum effects that become relevant once you close in on the critical temperature (which is very relevant if you want to store liquid hydrogen). It's not only a problem that hydrogen escapes when diffusing through a container, but it usually degrades the material the container is made of in the process, reducing the life time of the containers.
We're currently looking into using various materials that can adsorb and desorb hydrogen in a controlled manner for large scale storage applications, that's one of the possible solutions to the fact that hydrogen can diffuse through pretty much anything.