Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.
And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the “if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it’ll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road” promise
It’s kinda like software development…every experienced dev is aware that when management says we’ll do it shitty for now and fix it later that later never comes.
I’m pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled – or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it’s no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; – but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on…
The thing is, hydrogen is a byproduct of damn near every industry. It’s usually just released into the atmosphere because it’s a pain in the ass to capture and store and isn’t worth much. If it starts being in demand, you can bet your ass they’ll start trying to gather it.
Remember, though, that it is currently profitable to reform hydrogen out of methane, at the same time as it’s not profitable to contain and sell ‘byproduct’ hydrogen. There are sure to be reasons why, and they might be fairly durable reasons that don’t change much even as the demand for hydrogen increases. I’m no expert on this so I won’t speculate too much on what those reasons might be – maybe factors related to scale and logistics?
Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).
Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid
With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it’s an efficiency suckfest.
But it’s awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives
We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen …… there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.
Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor
It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency
It’s not about cost
The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it
With electric, you waste less than 10%
We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).
With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results
You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.
That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears
But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing
Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol
Let’s start by agreeing Trump is an idiot and battery electric vehicle technology covers personal transportation. We need to move as completely as possible to renewable energy.
However
One possible choice to cover both storage and creation of renewable fuel for the cases where batteries do not scale, is hydrogen. We do need to overbuild renewables, because production is affected by the weather, plus we need to produce enough energy in part of a day to run everything for a full day. Production of hydrogen might let us productively convert that daylight (for solar) energy into nighttime energy, and might help other areas where batteries don’t scale. And it doesn’t have to be hydrogen directly: perhaps we need a liquid fuel that works at room temperature and green hydrogen can be a precursor to methane or some variation of synfuel. That can be stored or manipulated more regularly. A tank of green synfuel might be an effective storage for turning daylight energy into nighttime time energy. We already have an approved synthetic aviation fuel - using renewable energy to create that might be more efficient than the more difficult task of scaling batteries for aviation
While I completely agree on the limitations of green hydrogen as a primary fuel, I also see that there are many usages that neither renewable nor storage nor batteries can yet scale for. Hydrogen as a storage medium is no worse than those options