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Victoria warned against ‘very inefficient’ hydrogen buses after trial announced
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Melbourne Trains
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I'm no big fan of hydrogen fuel vehicles as an alternative to battery-electric, mostly because, as you said, it's difficult to process and store. But with that said, the argument that hydrogen isn't environmentally friendly because gray hydrogen is derived from fossils fuels has always rung a bit hollow to me. Most electricity in the world is also derived from fossils fuels. The advantage of both hydrogen and BEV over gas is that their fuel sources can also be derived using green methods. There's still work to do on the backend to make that happen, but from an end user point of view the transition is seamless.
Blue Hydrogen is the term you are looking for. i.e Hydrogen produced through electrolysis. And this process is less efficient than storing electricity in a battery. Fuel cells are typically in the 50-60% efficiency range and electrolysis is around 70-80%. Batteries are around 90% efficient. So the round trip efficiency of Hydrogen production and conversion back to electricity is 35 to 48%. So youve got a fuel source that converts electricity into motion around half as efficiently as batteries, that requires high pressure and/or low temperature storage, is an explosion hazard and burns with a clear invisible flame that has even less infrastructure than electric cars do. So many things would have to be improved for it to be more viable than battery electric. The transition to Hydrogen for transportation is not "seamless."
Hydrogen is better suited to chemical industries. Trying to shoehorn it into transportation is trying to wedge a square peg into a round hole. Let Hydrogen do what it is best at and let batteries do what they are best at instead of trying to force them into areas of the economy that they have no business being in.