this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Frankly, I'm skeptical that hydrogen belongs anywhere.
Also, trains have no excuse to be anything other than electric! If you're spending the money building the track in the first place, it's really not that much extra cost to put up overheard wires too.
Hydrogen is probably going to get pushed out of every niche where it might be viable. Batteries tend to get better by 5-8% per year, and there's every reason to believe that will continue to be the case. Run that forward for another decade or so, and even things like heavy construction equipment and transpacific airplanes are viable on battery power.
It's a waste of time and money at this point.
Considering that the vast majority of hydrogen isn't even "green hydrogen" (produced from electrolysis) but rather "grey" or "blue" (produced from cracking hydrocarbons), I don't think it was anything more than a straight-up greenwashing scam in the first place. Even the niches where people claim hydrogen is suitable (long-haul trips without battery charging infrastructure) would be better off just burning the damn hydrocarbon as-is to begin with!
Even in the best-case scenario -- "green hydrogen" produced from electrolysis -- I think it would be better to immediately (at the point of production) combine it with CO~2~ pulled from the atmosphere to make synthetic gasoline and then handle that with our existing ICE vehicles and infrastructure. It's just so impractical to store hydrogen (since it's so small it leaks through everything, yet so low-density that it requires either extremely high pressures or cryogenic temperatures to fit enough of it in a reasonable amount of space) that it's simply not worth the effort.