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Wacky_Eyes t1_ittljji wrote

Reply to comment by NekuraHitokage in Move over, diesel: Ohio gets ‘first of its kind’ renewable gas station by redingerforcongress

Hydrogen is the way to go for the automotive industy and internal combustion engines. The only by-product is water. The only issue is that's it's incredibly expensive to produce liquid hydrogen, and it has a nasty habit of exploding.

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thisischemistry t1_itutwpo wrote

> Hydrogen is the way to go for the automotive industy and internal combustion engines.

Hydrogen has a lot of tough problems to conquer and it may never be a viable energy storage medium. It embrittles components, it tends to leak easily, it's expensive to produce, difficult to transport and store, and so on. It's also not a fuel, it's an energy storage medium so you need to produce the energy to create it in the first place. At that point you might as well put that energy into a medium that doesn't have all the problems that hydrogen has.

There are a few promising methods of using hydrogen to store energy but they are still in the experimental stages and may never get off the ground. For example, you can store hydrogen in metal hydrides or use it to produce ammonia and then release it from those to use as a fuel when you need it. There are still problems to be overcome with these storage methods but they are probably leaps and bounds better than storing hydrogen as a cryogenic liquid or under high pressures.

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garsk t1_itv19nd wrote

Flame less oxidation with a linear generator is the way to go.

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NekuraHitokage t1_ittnroc wrote

Indeed, it's a little out of realm for now... But should a breakthrough hit I'm immediately inboard. The most viable stopgap seems to be EV.

I'd love to just see a drop in EV engines. Maybe offer scrap discounts for trading the motor. I think a few are out there, but if it takes off... Hoo!

We need battery exchange stations and easily exchanged batteries at that. Why spend a year charging when you can have 100 in the back and hot-swap them for an exchange and charge a differential fee? If the battery is bad, maybe have a battery recycling fee. There are ways to do it that make sense in the interim!

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RDMvb6 t1_itukd2b wrote

Drop in EV batteries have been thoroughly explored and the industry has not found them to be viable yet. They are massively heavy and swapping something that weighs well over 1,000lbs cannot be done as quickly as just charging the battery from a fast 480V charger.

Similar for dropping in an EV motor into an existing gas vehicle. That is a massive structural change and by the time you get into replacing the frame, it’s cheaper to get a new vehicle. Sure it can be done in a lab but it is not large scale commercially feasible.

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NekuraHitokage t1_ituz450 wrote

My point was more that we make it feasible. It doesn't have to be all profit all the time when the planet is, in some places, literally on fire because of the changes being brought on.

Indeed it has its barriers and I never said it was a perfect solution either... But if we can find ways to build skyscrapers in weeks, we can find ways to do these things. The problem, as ever, is "profit."

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bpknyc t1_itu9bsl wrote

No hydrogen car burns the hydrogen. Theyre using fuel cell, which is full og platinum catalyst and makes electricity from hydrogen-oxygen reaction. The rest of the car is regular electric car.

Also, hydrogen for vehicle use isn't a liquid. Only highly compressed gas. It'd be cryogenic if it was liquid and freeze everything, just like ice forming on space shuttle main tank.

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