Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store safely for the long term.
It’s tiny, fast, and extremely reactive to just about anything.
You’d need to cool it down to liquid for safer storage, but that takes extensive energy to cool it down and maintain that temperature.
Anything else, you’re making an actual bomb, and most people don’t take kindly to strapping pressurized hydrogen gas to a vehicle going 10s of kilometers per hour.
Hydrogen is hard to store. It is so small it tends to leak out of even airtight containers. It doesn’t have great energy density unless you pressurize the heck out of it, which can be dangerous. That’s why hydrogen fuel vehicles tend to be things like busses and other fleet vehicles. As someone who works with high pressure hydrogen occasionally, I wouldnt trust the average person to refuel their car with it.
Probably a combination of infrastructure and general population fears of Hydrogen being explosive.
Regarding infrastructure – Electricity is everywhere, you can plug into a 120v outlet and charge your car (very slowly, but the point remains). Road Trips are more complex, but charging networks came online between 2010 and today they’re continuing to expand.
Hydrogen works more like traditional Gasoline, but still requires a massive infrastructure investment.
There’s also the general fear of Hydrogen as a fuel. Maybe the Hindenburg disaster, maybe basic chemistry that teaches how hydrogen is “unstable” – people generally think of it as explosive. And yes, you can be electrocuted, and yes, gasoline explodes; but there’s just an element of trepidation around hydrogen that you don’t see with other fuels.
Also, and I know much less about this, but one other consideration is that Electric motors have been around for ages, and Tesla actually opened up their patents to anyone, so development on BEVs accelerated quickly because manufacturers were able to “copy the homework” of the original leader in BEV vehicles. As far as I’m aware, Toyota was leading on Hydrogen vehicles (there is a whole different conversation about industrial applications), and I doubt Toyota would do the same with any of their patents.
Hydrogen has lot of downsides. One of the big ones is that transitioning to hydrogen requires more infrastructure. Getting electricity is easy, you already have it in your house. How do you get hydrogen? They don’t have hydrogen stations all over. Are you going to set up a hydrolysis machine in your house?
If you want to switch over to hydrogen right now, on your own, you can’t. If you want to get an electric car, you don’t need your state to build any infrastructure, you don’t need anyone’s help. You just have to install a charger at home.
Hydrogen has a lot of difficulties. Firstly, it’s very difficult to store. It’s a gas at room temperature, so it either needs to be cooled down until it’s extremely cold, or compressed and stored at high pressure (which turns your fuel tank into a potential bomb). To make things worse, hydrogen absorbs into metal and weakens it
Also, there’s the fact that most hydrogen currently comes from fossil fuels so it isn’t actually cleaner. In principle, hydrogen can be made by electrolysis using clean electricity, but the overall energy efficiency of making hydrogen this way and then using it as fuel is much lower than using that power to charge batteries
TL;DR batteries transfer the electricity way more efficient
Think of this: gasoline carries energy, hydrogen carries energy, batteries carry energy. yet you think of hydrogen as a fuel, why? because it’s filled up in your car like a fuel.
Hydrogen however has much more in common with batteries. Like: to make Hydrogen, you need to put in the energy first (analogous to charging batteries) as opposed to gasoline, which (ignoring refining) already carries the energy at the moment it’s pumped out of the ground. (as a reminder: we can’t pump hydrogen out of the ground)
in this above paragraph it’s all a bit silly to compare directly in numbers between hydrogen and fuel, but for this sake, allow yourself to think of Hydrogen as a battery replacement and not a fuel replacement.
now, given all that, let’s more directly compare hydrogen to batteries.
it takes 3 to 4 times as much energy when you put it into hydrogen as when you put it into batteries, for the same amount of kilometers driven. (since hydrogen has losses everywhere: when it’s made, when it’s transported, when it’s combusted)
In order to have hydrogen powered electric vehicle, you would first have to use electricity to produce hydrogen, usually from breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen which comes with significant costs and risk, transport it to the fueling station safely, before transferring said hydrogen to the car. Every step of the process is difficult as hydrogen being the smallest element is very difficult to contain and prevent leaking. Afterwards inside the car, the hydrogen would have to be turned back to electricity before the car could be powered. This chain of processes causes a lot more inefficiency and losses than the flow of electricity from power plant directly to the battery in the car, hence hydrogen practically only makes sense in use case where very high energy density storage is needed.
subpar efficiency, high technical complexity because it needs to be stored under pressure, and lack of infrastructure
why would you inefficiently use electricity to create hydrogen to then inefficiently “burn”* it to recreate electricity if you can use electricity directly, without the need for high security pressurized storage?
hydrogen fuel cells are just small chemical power plants creating electricity. its much more efficient to “tank” electricity directly into batteries rather than fitting each car with its own power plant.
* the fuel is not burned, as the principle is electrolysis not combustion
Ignoring hydrogen from natural gas which is where we get most of our hydrogen today but that means its not a replacement for fossil fuel. You need to produce hydrogen from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen which is very energy intesive. So you first need to produce that energy from not fossil fuel and then you burn it at about 60% effiency. So you just waste 40% of the energy you put into hydrogen.
Then its also not realy dense as a gas so you have to store it as a liquid. Which means constant cooling until usuage which also consumes energy which means you need even more energy. Then there are loses because hydrogen is super hard to keep in any container so you dont even get to burn 100% of the hydorgen.
And after all that you always have to worry about it blowing up.
There’s barely any hydrogen infrastructure, whereas BEVs can charge theoretically on any electrical outlet. Thus making adoption much easier.
BEVs are just super efficient. HEVs are not. Best case they’re about as efficient as a regular ICE. So unlike BEVs they’re not cheaper or more environmentally friendly to drive.
Fuel cells for electric vehicles require platinum, which is one of the rarest metals on earth. We just can’t mine enough of it to produce fuel cells on a scale necessary to make a decent impact on transportation.
The only real advantage of hydrogen over batteries is that it’s faster to refuel. But this doesn’t work at scale, hydrogen fuel stations can usually fill up 1 or 2 cars before they have to repressurize for an hour or so. So basically current BEVs chargers are faster than hydrogen fuel stations.
As an energy carrier, it’s wildly inefficient. Google any chart that shows well-to-wheel efficiency. You’re looking at about 20% of your initial energy making it into forward motion in your car. Contrast this with battery electric at about 80%.
The next problem is that the infrastructure is wildly expensive. Hydrogen is basically the smallest atom out there. This means the equipment you need to handle it is extremely expensive because of the tolerances and materials needed. A single hydrogen pump is running 1-2 million to install.
There’s also environmental issues with hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very potent indirect greenhouse gas. (It prevents the breakdown of methane in the atmosphere). This means that a hydrogen leak has ~20x the global warming potential of CO2. A big problem with such a small, leaky substance. For those who want to burn it directly in an ICE style engine, combusting it in a nitrogen rich atmosphere creates copious amounts of NOX pollution. A key component of smog and a potent respiratory irritant. Then there’s the way it’s made. By far the cheapest way is by stripping it out of natural gas. This creates huge amounts of carbon pollution. You either spend way more money to try and sequester the CO2, or you dump it to the atmosphere and tell everyone ‘…no TAILPIPE emissions…’
At the end of the day, hydrogen was never an environmental solution. It was malicious delay sold by fossil fuel lobbyists.
Besides the issues of hydrogen, obtaining it in the first place is a lot more demanding than gasoline, and requires similar infrastructure to standard EVs.
You can either get it through electrolysis, which is basically converting water into a hydrogen battery, but this requires a massive amount of water and power. Or you can obtain it by cracking oil, which is far far cheaper, but then you’ve not only still got the massive logistical problems, but also not actually done anything about fossil fuels.
Then you almost can’t store it, since it’s the smallest element, and a gas, you physically can’t contain it completely. You could use similar underground tanks that gas stations use, but you have to have a far higher safety standard around it, and potential infrastructure for pressurising and maybe even liquifying it, neither of which are easy either.
Then the cars themselves come in two variants, either a hydrogen ‘ICE’ type, or the fuel cell type, which works kind of like a diesel-electric train, and the hydrogen is just functioning as a battery. Neither are very mature, and come with very few other use cases, so you’re developing exclusively for hydrogen transportation, and the market has to bear all the costs associated with a bleeding edge tech.
Comparatively, EV’s are a very mature concept (the first cars were electric for reference), and rechargable battery tech is used in a huge amount of other fields, so you’re not paying to develop new tech just for that purpose, and any advancements can be repackaged and sold to other use cases relatively easily, specially if you use the massive cell type designs as are common in many EVs.
This is also ignoring the safety issues of hydrogen as an element, which while not substantially different to gasoline vapors, have a lot more potential danger due to it’s difficulty in liquifaction and storage.
TL;DR: You’re asking for gas station level infrastructure, which in most cases will not be made any better for the environment, and will be paying a premium for the whole process.
First production cost – i could write like 5 paragraphs explaining it but to sum it up it would be the equivalent of an $35 a gallon gas price if not worse based on some models . This one is kind of a chicken and egg issue …price will go down with higher volumes of production and more money into R&D, but higher volumes need better pricing to begin with. hydrogen is more efficient so lets take that into consideration for the combustion – it would still be like $20 a gallon equivalent
Second issues related to first is the equipment to make it is extremely expensive and not many places can do it in any sort of volume again another chicken and egg issue really .
The bigger issues are INFASTRUCTURE
Fist the cars themselves – it has to be stored in high pressure tanks – one small leak and you whole car can be empty in seconds. Second pressure vessels have to be tested and recertified every few years
The repair shop as well need new gear – Hydro gas detectors – pressure testers , sealing equipment , pressurized storage tanks and pumps. Nothing is too expensive in this step though- your average paintball shop or firehouse has all that
Transportation -in gas form it can be transported fairly easily except most tankers are designed for liquid form .
Now liquid form is much better – you can compress it down to liquid and then have a much higher volume for the gas station for storage – however if its liquid form your burning a ton of energy to keep it cool as it needs to be extremely cool .
So what do you use gas – which needs all new infrastructure – there are not enough gas tankers to scale up and stations need compression tanks .
Or
Liquid – it fits into a lot of the existing infrastructure but there is a maintenance cost- your burring energy to run cooling systems to keep the tanks cool. You need much less delivers But it would still have to come out as a gas into your car .
The other issue is actually environmental . At scale with everyone driving will put so much additional liquid into the air that it will rain a lot more and cause higher relative humidity .
Which kind of impact is that going to have at scale – the models for this are ALL over the place everything from 1 additional rainfall a month to constant humidity causing pressure gradient and more common thunderstorms and possible other weather impacts.
There has never been anything in human history or data model to compare that to meteorologically so it hard to say .
Logistics – hydrogen is extremely difficult to store, and requires you to keep it under extremely low temperatures and/or extremely high pressure to achieve any reasonable energy density. Hydrogen is also desperately trying to escape its storage medium at any given time – the difference in engineering challenge is roughly comparable to the difference between laying down some barbed wire to hold a herd of sheep (a battery or a gasoline tank) versus building a Supermax prison to hold a gang of escape artists (a hydrogen tank).
Infrastructure – hydrogen cars require the creation of a whole new infrastructure for a single purpose. By contrast, EVs tap general purpose energy infrastructure that already exists (the electrical grid).
I’ve got a hydrogen car to sell you. It’s a great car and you like it a lot. But do you know where to get hydrogen? No. So are you going to buy that car? No.
On the other side, I’m a big company and I want to make a lot of hydrogen. I’ve also got to make all the infrastructure that’s needed to deliver hydrogen to everyone. That’s going to cost billions and billions of dollars. But who’s going to buy that hydrogen? Nobody’s got hydrogen cars. Why would I spend those billions of dollars?
___
There are technical issues with hydrogen but all of those are basically solved and we’re really in the “optimization” phase of development. People often forget the fact that we’ve been making and using hydrogen industrially for decades and decades. It’s not new.
The answer, in the end, is you need someone to put up the billions and billions of dollars to build the infrastructure and then be able to hold on to that debt until people start buying hydrogen cars and that investment starts to turn a profit but the only way that’s going to happen is if government pushes it forward (with money and regulations) but neither of that is happening soon in the US. In Europe and some other countries, it is moving forward faster than people realize (though I still wouldn’t describe it as “fast”).
May I direct you to the Hindenburg for an insight into why carrying vehicles full of hydrogen might be a bad idea. Imagine a car crash where both vehicles have tanks of hydrogen in them.
Hydrogen is a very inconvenient fuel to store energy. It’s very difficult to store in liquid form and in gas form it’s just not energy dense enough. And the overall efficiency of hydrogen cycle is just terrible. Energy lost at every step. Especially if you burn it in an engine. It’s just so bad.
It’s so much simpler to store electricity in a battery. Lithium-ion is really where batteries became viable for automotive use and there’s still room for improvement. Hydrogen is a dead end. It’s not going to get significantly better than it is now.
Hydrogen is normally made from natural gas, so in its current state it’s not going to do much for emissions.
You can make it from water, but it uses much more power doing this than sticking it in a battery and using it to charge a car later.
Other people have said how annoying it is to store and transport safely.
There’s also quite a lot of other uses for hydrogen it would be nice to use the from-water hydrogen for. It’s also possible to make steel with hydrogen rather than coal, which would be a big source of CO2 emissions significantly tidied up if anyone can commercialise it.
Hydrogen is the smallest elemental molecule. It will literally leak out of any container you put it in, no matter how hard you work to seal it.
Most designs for vehicles using hydrogen are called fuel cell vehicles. These are essentially battery electric vehicles that are recharged continuously using hydrogen. So it’s just a much more complicated BEV, with the main benefit being range extension.
The other options being looked at for hydrogen vehicles is using in a combustion engine (H2 ICE). This would require investing in major infrastructure development to transport, hold, and refuel hydrogen, which is more volatile than gasoline.
Comments
Hydrogen is notoriously difficult to store safely for the long term.
It’s tiny, fast, and extremely reactive to just about anything.
You’d need to cool it down to liquid for safer storage, but that takes extensive energy to cool it down and maintain that temperature.
Anything else, you’re making an actual bomb, and most people don’t take kindly to strapping pressurized hydrogen gas to a vehicle going 10s of kilometers per hour.
It comes down to price and availability. A Hydrogen car will need 4 times more energy to drive one km than an ev.
And battery cars are perfectly fine for 95% of the people driving out there. So people just take the cheaper alternative.
The process of making it is inefficient, storing it is complicated, and any accidents with it are potentially extremely dangerous.
And the infrastructure for it is just not there. And in that regard pulling a power cable is whole lot easier than laying pipes fit for hydrogen.
Hydrogen is hard to store. It is so small it tends to leak out of even airtight containers. It doesn’t have great energy density unless you pressurize the heck out of it, which can be dangerous. That’s why hydrogen fuel vehicles tend to be things like busses and other fleet vehicles. As someone who works with high pressure hydrogen occasionally, I wouldnt trust the average person to refuel their car with it.
Probably a combination of infrastructure and general population fears of Hydrogen being explosive.
Regarding infrastructure – Electricity is everywhere, you can plug into a 120v outlet and charge your car (very slowly, but the point remains). Road Trips are more complex, but charging networks came online between 2010 and today they’re continuing to expand.
Hydrogen works more like traditional Gasoline, but still requires a massive infrastructure investment.
There’s also the general fear of Hydrogen as a fuel. Maybe the Hindenburg disaster, maybe basic chemistry that teaches how hydrogen is “unstable” – people generally think of it as explosive. And yes, you can be electrocuted, and yes, gasoline explodes; but there’s just an element of trepidation around hydrogen that you don’t see with other fuels.
Also, and I know much less about this, but one other consideration is that Electric motors have been around for ages, and Tesla actually opened up their patents to anyone, so development on BEVs accelerated quickly because manufacturers were able to “copy the homework” of the original leader in BEV vehicles. As far as I’m aware, Toyota was leading on Hydrogen vehicles (there is a whole different conversation about industrial applications), and I doubt Toyota would do the same with any of their patents.
Hydrogen has lot of downsides. One of the big ones is that transitioning to hydrogen requires more infrastructure. Getting electricity is easy, you already have it in your house. How do you get hydrogen? They don’t have hydrogen stations all over. Are you going to set up a hydrolysis machine in your house?
If you want to switch over to hydrogen right now, on your own, you can’t. If you want to get an electric car, you don’t need your state to build any infrastructure, you don’t need anyone’s help. You just have to install a charger at home.
Hydrogen has a lot of difficulties. Firstly, it’s very difficult to store. It’s a gas at room temperature, so it either needs to be cooled down until it’s extremely cold, or compressed and stored at high pressure (which turns your fuel tank into a potential bomb). To make things worse, hydrogen absorbs into metal and weakens it
Also, there’s the fact that most hydrogen currently comes from fossil fuels so it isn’t actually cleaner. In principle, hydrogen can be made by electrolysis using clean electricity, but the overall energy efficiency of making hydrogen this way and then using it as fuel is much lower than using that power to charge batteries
TL;DR batteries transfer the electricity way more efficient
Think of this: gasoline carries energy, hydrogen carries energy, batteries carry energy. yet you think of hydrogen as a fuel, why? because it’s filled up in your car like a fuel.
Hydrogen however has much more in common with batteries. Like: to make Hydrogen, you need to put in the energy first (analogous to charging batteries) as opposed to gasoline, which (ignoring refining) already carries the energy at the moment it’s pumped out of the ground. (as a reminder: we can’t pump hydrogen out of the ground)
in this above paragraph it’s all a bit silly to compare directly in numbers between hydrogen and fuel, but for this sake, allow yourself to think of Hydrogen as a battery replacement and not a fuel replacement.
now, given all that, let’s more directly compare hydrogen to batteries.
it takes 3 to 4 times as much energy when you put it into hydrogen as when you put it into batteries, for the same amount of kilometers driven. (since hydrogen has losses everywhere: when it’s made, when it’s transported, when it’s combusted)
In order to have hydrogen powered electric vehicle, you would first have to use electricity to produce hydrogen, usually from breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen which comes with significant costs and risk, transport it to the fueling station safely, before transferring said hydrogen to the car. Every step of the process is difficult as hydrogen being the smallest element is very difficult to contain and prevent leaking. Afterwards inside the car, the hydrogen would have to be turned back to electricity before the car could be powered. This chain of processes causes a lot more inefficiency and losses than the flow of electricity from power plant directly to the battery in the car, hence hydrogen practically only makes sense in use case where very high energy density storage is needed.
No one here has said the real answer.
There’s no cheap way to make Hydrogen gas…
The “cheap” way right now is to process natural gas or other fossil fuels.
It’s more expensive than just burning the fossil fuel outright to make electricity or run a conventional motor.
subpar efficiency, high technical complexity because it needs to be stored under pressure, and lack of infrastructure
why would you inefficiently use electricity to create hydrogen to then inefficiently “burn”* it to recreate electricity if you can use electricity directly, without the need for high security pressurized storage?
hydrogen fuel cells are just small chemical power plants creating electricity. its much more efficient to “tank” electricity directly into batteries rather than fitting each car with its own power plant.
* the fuel is not burned, as the principle is electrolysis not combustion
Its super inefficent.
Ignoring hydrogen from natural gas which is where we get most of our hydrogen today but that means its not a replacement for fossil fuel. You need to produce hydrogen from splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen which is very energy intesive. So you first need to produce that energy from not fossil fuel and then you burn it at about 60% effiency. So you just waste 40% of the energy you put into hydrogen.
Then its also not realy dense as a gas so you have to store it as a liquid. Which means constant cooling until usuage which also consumes energy which means you need even more energy. Then there are loses because hydrogen is super hard to keep in any container so you dont even get to burn 100% of the hydorgen.
And after all that you always have to worry about it blowing up.
Because
Hydrogen is the second smallest molecule after helium; it leaks like crazy.
Hydrogen burns with a colorless flame that is hard to detect. In the lab we would use a broom to see if there was a hydrogen fire.
Before adding hydrogen to a tank you need to carefully purge the tank with inert gas.
Pressurizing hydrogen in the tank may require energy that is not recovered when removing the hydrogen.
Fuel cells are more complex than lithium batteries.
Oh, and hydrogen embrittles metal.
Because of the economics of hydrogen.
As an energy carrier, it’s wildly inefficient. Google any chart that shows well-to-wheel efficiency. You’re looking at about 20% of your initial energy making it into forward motion in your car. Contrast this with battery electric at about 80%.
The next problem is that the infrastructure is wildly expensive. Hydrogen is basically the smallest atom out there. This means the equipment you need to handle it is extremely expensive because of the tolerances and materials needed. A single hydrogen pump is running 1-2 million to install.
There’s also environmental issues with hydrogen. Hydrogen is a very potent indirect greenhouse gas. (It prevents the breakdown of methane in the atmosphere). This means that a hydrogen leak has ~20x the global warming potential of CO2. A big problem with such a small, leaky substance. For those who want to burn it directly in an ICE style engine, combusting it in a nitrogen rich atmosphere creates copious amounts of NOX pollution. A key component of smog and a potent respiratory irritant. Then there’s the way it’s made. By far the cheapest way is by stripping it out of natural gas. This creates huge amounts of carbon pollution. You either spend way more money to try and sequester the CO2, or you dump it to the atmosphere and tell everyone ‘…no TAILPIPE emissions…’
At the end of the day, hydrogen was never an environmental solution. It was malicious delay sold by fossil fuel lobbyists.
Besides the issues of hydrogen, obtaining it in the first place is a lot more demanding than gasoline, and requires similar infrastructure to standard EVs.
You can either get it through electrolysis, which is basically converting water into a hydrogen battery, but this requires a massive amount of water and power. Or you can obtain it by cracking oil, which is far far cheaper, but then you’ve not only still got the massive logistical problems, but also not actually done anything about fossil fuels.
Then you almost can’t store it, since it’s the smallest element, and a gas, you physically can’t contain it completely. You could use similar underground tanks that gas stations use, but you have to have a far higher safety standard around it, and potential infrastructure for pressurising and maybe even liquifying it, neither of which are easy either.
Then the cars themselves come in two variants, either a hydrogen ‘ICE’ type, or the fuel cell type, which works kind of like a diesel-electric train, and the hydrogen is just functioning as a battery. Neither are very mature, and come with very few other use cases, so you’re developing exclusively for hydrogen transportation, and the market has to bear all the costs associated with a bleeding edge tech.
Comparatively, EV’s are a very mature concept (the first cars were electric for reference), and rechargable battery tech is used in a huge amount of other fields, so you’re not paying to develop new tech just for that purpose, and any advancements can be repackaged and sold to other use cases relatively easily, specially if you use the massive cell type designs as are common in many EVs.
This is also ignoring the safety issues of hydrogen as an element, which while not substantially different to gasoline vapors, have a lot more potential danger due to it’s difficulty in liquifaction and storage.
TL;DR: You’re asking for gas station level infrastructure, which in most cases will not be made any better for the environment, and will be paying a premium for the whole process.
Lots of reasons .
First production cost – i could write like 5 paragraphs explaining it but to sum it up it would be the equivalent of an $35 a gallon gas price if not worse based on some models . This one is kind of a chicken and egg issue …price will go down with higher volumes of production and more money into R&D, but higher volumes need better pricing to begin with. hydrogen is more efficient so lets take that into consideration for the combustion – it would still be like $20 a gallon equivalent
Second issues related to first is the equipment to make it is extremely expensive and not many places can do it in any sort of volume again another chicken and egg issue really .
The bigger issues are INFASTRUCTURE
Fist the cars themselves – it has to be stored in high pressure tanks – one small leak and you whole car can be empty in seconds. Second pressure vessels have to be tested and recertified every few years
The repair shop as well need new gear – Hydro gas detectors – pressure testers , sealing equipment , pressurized storage tanks and pumps. Nothing is too expensive in this step though- your average paintball shop or firehouse has all that
Transportation -in gas form it can be transported fairly easily except most tankers are designed for liquid form .
Now liquid form is much better – you can compress it down to liquid and then have a much higher volume for the gas station for storage – however if its liquid form your burning a ton of energy to keep it cool as it needs to be extremely cool .
So what do you use gas – which needs all new infrastructure – there are not enough gas tankers to scale up and stations need compression tanks .
Or
Liquid – it fits into a lot of the existing infrastructure but there is a maintenance cost- your burring energy to run cooling systems to keep the tanks cool. You need much less delivers But it would still have to come out as a gas into your car .
The other issue is actually environmental . At scale with everyone driving will put so much additional liquid into the air that it will rain a lot more and cause higher relative humidity .
Which kind of impact is that going to have at scale – the models for this are ALL over the place everything from 1 additional rainfall a month to constant humidity causing pressure gradient and more common thunderstorms and possible other weather impacts.
There has never been anything in human history or data model to compare that to meteorologically so it hard to say .
Very, very simply:
I’ve got a hydrogen car to sell you. It’s a great car and you like it a lot. But do you know where to get hydrogen? No. So are you going to buy that car? No.
On the other side, I’m a big company and I want to make a lot of hydrogen. I’ve also got to make all the infrastructure that’s needed to deliver hydrogen to everyone. That’s going to cost billions and billions of dollars. But who’s going to buy that hydrogen? Nobody’s got hydrogen cars. Why would I spend those billions of dollars?
___
There are technical issues with hydrogen but all of those are basically solved and we’re really in the “optimization” phase of development. People often forget the fact that we’ve been making and using hydrogen industrially for decades and decades. It’s not new.
The answer, in the end, is you need someone to put up the billions and billions of dollars to build the infrastructure and then be able to hold on to that debt until people start buying hydrogen cars and that investment starts to turn a profit but the only way that’s going to happen is if government pushes it forward (with money and regulations) but neither of that is happening soon in the US. In Europe and some other countries, it is moving forward faster than people realize (though I still wouldn’t describe it as “fast”).
May I direct you to the Hindenburg for an insight into why carrying vehicles full of hydrogen might be a bad idea. Imagine a car crash where both vehicles have tanks of hydrogen in them.
Hydrogen is a very inconvenient fuel to store energy. It’s very difficult to store in liquid form and in gas form it’s just not energy dense enough. And the overall efficiency of hydrogen cycle is just terrible. Energy lost at every step. Especially if you burn it in an engine. It’s just so bad.
It’s so much simpler to store electricity in a battery. Lithium-ion is really where batteries became viable for automotive use and there’s still room for improvement. Hydrogen is a dead end. It’s not going to get significantly better than it is now.
Hydrogen is normally made from natural gas, so in its current state it’s not going to do much for emissions.
You can make it from water, but it uses much more power doing this than sticking it in a battery and using it to charge a car later.
Other people have said how annoying it is to store and transport safely.
There’s also quite a lot of other uses for hydrogen it would be nice to use the from-water hydrogen for. It’s also possible to make steel with hydrogen rather than coal, which would be a big source of CO2 emissions significantly tidied up if anyone can commercialise it.
A couple of reasons I’ve seen that stand out:
Hydrogen is the smallest elemental molecule. It will literally leak out of any container you put it in, no matter how hard you work to seal it.
Most designs for vehicles using hydrogen are called fuel cell vehicles. These are essentially battery electric vehicles that are recharged continuously using hydrogen. So it’s just a much more complicated BEV, with the main benefit being range extension.
The other options being looked at for hydrogen vehicles is using in a combustion engine (H2 ICE). This would require investing in major infrastructure development to transport, hold, and refuel hydrogen, which is more volatile than gasoline.