this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Hydrogen trades volumetric energy density for gravimetric energy density. It is too difficult to build a car that can safely hold a reasonable amount of hydrogen without making it bigger or sacrificing cargo space, and building a distribution network on the same scale as gasoline is a problem we still have no idea how to solve.
I think hydrogen will be much more viable in shipping, where these problems are much less pronounced. Big trucks and container ships are less concerned with volume (weight is more important). And they move along common and predictable routes meaning you don’t need quite so many hydrogen gas stations. You distribution just needs to cover truck stops and ports.
Also cars like the Toyota Mirai have a range of 400 miles, which is not bad at all considering that the median range for a car in the US is 403 miles.
The same infrastructure argument could go for electric though. It's difficult to build infrastructure for these vehicles yes I agree but why would electric be any easier?
Also don't quote me on this but i think there are ways to collect hydrogen at a home, which would reduce the need for these stations, at least in the city
It’s easier to build charging stations when we already have a massive grid for distributing electricity. We have no such infrastructure in place for distributing hydrogen. Producing hydrogen cleanly and efficiently is still a hard problem we haven’t really solved.
DC fast chargers cost something like $70k each. Hydrogen filling stations cost around a million each.
Also, with battery EVs home charging does most of the heavy lifting, you only use fast chargers for long trips. So just a handful of fast chargers on the main roads between cities makes battery EVs viable for a lot of people.
It's not enough to collect hydrogen, a filling station also needs to compress it to 10,000 PSI to actually get it into a vehicle's tank. So there's no home filling for fuel cell EVs, you need a similar footprint to gas stations. Nobody's interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars building all those filling stations.
The difference with hydrogen stations is that the vehicle turnover would be incredibly higher despite the larger cost, similar to a regular gas station
It actually isn't. Hydrogen filling stations can only fill a couple of cars in a row before they need time to pump hydrogen from the storage tank to the buffer tank and compress and cool it to -40 degrees. So the number of cars they can handle in a day is not massively higher than a DC fast charger.
If it doesn't have time to prepare between vehicles, it starts taking 20 minutes to fill each vehicle.