Clean coal, green hydrogen, natural gas. An adjective doesn’t make something good for the environment.
Green hydrogen is not brown hydrogen, so there's that.
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall but hydrogen seems the best option for trucks. There are already companies using hydrogen hybrid trucks, with hydrogen generators at the home base.
From what I've read, the hybrid trucks need deisel for the hills as the hydrogen isn't powerful enough. I wonder if this is a barrier for full hydrogen use or if the limitations can be built around.
There seems to be a general push against hydrogen electric transport recently. I agree that it isn't suitable for small-scale transport, such as cars or even busses, but I do think there is a use-case for large transport.
Ultimately the problem comes how do we get the electricity from the generator to the vehicle where it needs to be. Obviously batteries are more efficient, but they come with their own problems. They weigh a lot, which damages infrastructure, they require rare metals, they have a maximum capacity per unit weight.
Of course they have advantages, but I think as the vehicle gets larger, and the charging time requirements drastically increase, I think there comes a point where hydrogen electric systems are worth looking at. Trains and shipping being the main ones, and potentially trucks.
Of course, if the hydrogen is not generated cleanly then it's moot, but the same is true for pure electric systems as well.
Ultimately, I would like to see renewable generation that turns excess power into hydrogen for a train and coastal shipping fleet.
Recently I saw on Lemmy that California has an excess of power generation. Sounds like a good opportunity to jam it into hydrogen generators.
Absolutely. If there was the political will in this country, we would have an excess of cheap, renewable, power.
Yeah it comes down to energy density and time to replace expended energy. That's why the most successful electric trucks i've seen basically go to a depot where the entire battery pack is swapped out for a pre-charged one.
Of course there's a whole other piece of calculus that is ignored in New Zealand - and that is energy efficiency. Reducing the size of, and need for, long distance trucking by utilising far more fuel efficient rail & coastal shipping would also reduce emissions; and would allow us to decrease maintenance and new build costs for roads.
I'm all for increasing rail and coastal shipping for cargo. Having lived overseas, it's criminal how much we rely on trucks here.
Yup; and the previous increases to size & weight of freight trucks bought in by National governments is a large factor in the cost of building and maintaining roads now. While at the same time we continue to let most of our rail network degenerate and have done nothing to try to recover coastal shipping from when it was destroyed in the 80s to de-power the maritime unions.
"I want my fuel bill to dramatically increase." - no fleet operator ever.
Battery trucks might not be able to do all routes yet, but they're dramatically cheaper to operate on the routes they can do. Hydrogen vehicles cost so much per mile that they wind up just parked in a field and forgotten as soon as trials finish and funding dries up.
The operator I was reading was generating their own hydrogen. They spent something like $20k for a shipping container sized hydrogen generator - water and electricity in, hydrogen out.
What makes hydrogen expensive after up front costs?
The inefficiency.
If you need 100 kWh into the truck's electric motor to drive somewhere, with a battery electric truck you need to generate around 120 kWh at the power station. After transmission losses, transformer losses, charging and discharging the battery, etc you wind up with your 100 kWh.
If you're driving a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, you still have an electric motor and you still need 100 kWh to reach your destination. But you need to generate something like 400 kWh to actually get 100 kWh into the motor, and that 400 kWh of generation and grid transmission is what you need to pay for. Turning electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity is incredibly wasteful.
This is hydrogens main problem.
It just costs so much more to make it.
There are some places in the world where it can be drilled for, eliminating some of the costs of production, but then you have to store and transport it. Hydrogen can't be stored easily (just big metal tanks), it requires pressure vessels made of exotic composites to reduce leakage, or worse cryogenic tanks that take a constant energy supply to stay cold.
Unlike nitrogen which we store as a liquid easily at industrial scales, hydrogen would be a nightmare to liquefy and store as any kind of scale. Nitrogen is liquid at -77 C, put it into a big metal tank and you are happy. Hydrogen is liquid at 20K (-253 C), metals are (mostly) to brittle at this temperature to be safely used. So exotic composites are required again to make cryogenic storage tanks.
The energy required to liquefy hydrogen is ridiculous, taking something to 20K is difficult and energy intensive.
I could go on, but beyond very specific use-cases hydrogen is a non-starter from a cost perspective.
Citation needed.
Sadly
Okay, so let's talk about a whole four stations here and what energy source the hydrogen being generated is coming from.
Still going to be interesting to see how this pans out vs all of the other hydrogen attempts there have been so far.
This is a great video about hydrogen powered vehicles: https://youtu.be/Zklo4Z1SqkE?si=oqnXgBoVs4F_XK8r
The humanity!
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