Hydrogen fuel is one of the ultimate tarpit ideas.
The concept hasn’t really evolved much during the last 30 years. When I was in elementary school I was supposed to write a paper for science my science ‘class’ and was encouraged by my uncle, who was in the oil industry, to write about this miracle fuel. Even with the primitive technology available to me at the time (Alta vista?), it did not take long to shoot holes in the hydrogen fuels narrative:
It’s difficult to store; there is no infrastructure to support it; said infrastructure is expensive; it is almost exclusively produced from hydrocarbons (which is fine, but that’s typically antithetical to the values of the audience that it is ostensibly marketed as an alternative fuel to).. the list goes on.
And now Hyundai has invested in building this into a niche (wheeled excavators) of a niche (excavators) product.
I don't get it, what am I missing? Does this help them at trade shows?
Governments offer incentives for green tech. The oil industry likes green tech which still uses oil and gas. Hydrogen fills both niches.
Hydrogen is perfect, because it can theoretically be made fully green, but practically it never will be due to the terrible economics of electrolysis. But the fact it theoretically could be means it can qualify for all those tax breaks and grants.
Some tax breaks are contingent on investing in 'green' stuff - so for the oil industry it makes perfect sense to invest in the only green tech which will never not use oil and gas.
It's particularly bad because the steam reforming process starts with one unit of methane, then throws away 25-35% of the energy it contains to make hydrogen. You're literally starting with a usable fuel, then throwing away a bunch of energy to make a much nastier fuel.
There are other problems besides just being inefficient. In a world where energy is cheap and abundant, you still have to deal with leaks (hydrogen is small, so tends to escape everything over relatively small periods of time) and embrittlement (again, hydrogen is small, so it tends to fuse into other materials and destroy them).
I don't know if these limitations are fundamental, or if we'll eventually come across some breakthroughs that make them economical to deal with, but it's something we've struggled with for a very long time so far.
> Hydrogen fuel is one of the ultimate tarpit ideas.
The problem is, there are some applications that reasonably cannot be made to run on electric anywhere near soon (i.e. at least 20 years from now): oceangoing ships, planes larger than a Cessna and heavy machinery that runs for longer than a few hours every day.
For both environmental reasons and the foreseeable peak oil, these applications need to shift off from fossil fuel - and for that in turn, it's either biofuel (which is ethically questionable because it takes so much space) or hydrogen.
There are plenty of battery electric excavators on the market. Including from Hyundai. Volvo has a 23 ton one on the market, for example (bigger than this thing). They works just fine and Hyundai know this very well.
The reason Hyundai is doing this is for the same reason they've been doing loads of stuff with hydrogen for many years: subsidies. They get loads of government money. In Korea. In the US. And elsewhere. There's lots of money to be had. Hyundai gets paid to perpetuate the myth that hydrogen has a future in transport.
And the beauty of it is that it isn't wasted effort. Most hydrogen vehicles are battery electric vehicles where a tiny battery is powered by a fuel cell. Most of the tech aside from the fuel cell and hydrogen stuff is kind of 100% the same. When it flops, you just ditch those bits and shove in a bigger battery and boom nice battery electric excavator.
The market is pretty much rejecting hydrogen on roads (too many battery electrical trucks being sold debunking the myth that they'll never work at this point). So, they switch to construction. Of course the exact same stuff is going to happen there. Cheaper batteries are driving down cost. There are loads of products targeting this market already from a wide range of vendors. Hydrogen is going to be a complete and utter dud there too.
> Of course the exact same stuff is going to happen there. Cheaper batteries are driving down cost.
The thing with batteries is that currently they require stuff sourced from one autocracy or another in pretty large quantities if you want decent power density. Hydrogen in contrast, that is pretty easy to make, any reasonably smart highschooler can whip up an electrolysis apparatus.
Hydrogen is definitely orders of magnitude worse in efficiency (especially if it, or the synthfuel it is used to produce, is burned of all things), no question. But we as the Western countries definitely need expertise and capabilities for geopolitical reasons.
And how are these synthfuels made? They all (except of biofuel, which as I said is ethically questionable) require hydrogen as precursor, and that's my point. It's all carbohydrates, which means you need hydrogen and oxygen (these you can get from water electrolysis) and carbon (these you can get from e.g. CO2 sequestration).
Even if hydrogen is required as a precursor for methanol production, transportation and storage (especially long-term) of methanol is vastly cheaper than hydrogen.
I wouldn't bet against ocean going ships going (partway) electric. At least if you run through either Suez or Panama you need to spend time in the locks anyways and since those places are reasonably sunny, recharging batteries there is possible. So in principle you should be put a couple of container batteries on top and swap those in locks. Since the propellors are driven by electric motors anyways, the integration in the ship should be reasonably straightforward.
Problems right now are: Battery availability, capacity and charging space. But smaller (feeder) vessels seem to already use these kind of booster batteries (not sure where I read that story though..) for short haul routes. So I'd expect to hear about some longer routes starting to use these too
> Since the propellors are driven by electric motors anyways, the integration in the ship should be reasonably straightforward.
Oh hell no. In large container freighters, they usually have the engine crankshaft directly attached to the prop shaft. Something like the RTA96 - that thing has a rated continuous power output of 80 megawatts. No gears, no nothing. That's also part of the reason why you need tugboats in ports or rivers like Hamburg's Elbe.
The only thing that is electric are the maneuvering thrusters. A ship of that size has a few of them but they are only used when precision navigation is needed.
> So in principle you should be put a couple of container batteries on top and swap those in locks.
At cruise speed large container ships burn thousands of liters of fuel. Even assuming you could get a quarter of the energy density of petroleum from batteries, one 40 ton container worth of batteries would be only one hour worth of runtime.
The power and energy involved in maritime traffic is absurd on an absolute scale, but the sheer size and transport capacity makes more than up for it (IIRC even the dirtiest container ship run on the dirtiest possible fuel has less emissions per kilometer and ton than the cleanest euro6 truck).
I agree there will still be a market for fuel for the foreseeable future but I believe there are better alternatives given the logistical challenges and other tradeoffs of hydrogen.
The problem is that they are unlikely to run on hydrogen either. Hydrogen requires heavy storage containers that make it inappropriate for flight (among other uses.) We're much better off going to ammonia or some other e-fuel.
None of your suggestions allow for a movement in space. I haven't actually ran the calculations^ myself, but most of your "complaints" are wrt to energy efficiency. And that won't matter (too much), if we overbuild production capacity. Upthread someone claims that mines could benefit from hydrogen simply because they are not permitted to produce any more CO2. That would make this niche a realistic target, where you need to move energy.
And yes, in that scenario I would absolutely expect all your alternative suggestions to be deployed already. But we are also just starting to have excess production at all.
^ I also don't think those are possible right now, as the number of electrolysis apertures would need to increase by orders of magnitudes (plural)
A cryogenic pressure vessel that's not affected by hydrogen embrittlement is hardly portable, cheap, or energy dense. Maybe if you're using a vehicle that's otherwise going to use bunker fuel, sure, you've got space for a reasonable hydrogen tank.
If we're speaking from a practical perspective not green-washing, using a methane fueled engine in an electric motor / generator setup is going to be way more efficient and flexible than some insane setup where you've got cryogenic hydrogen tanks hanging out a rock quarry.
[edited to add this:]
Let's distinguish between "pull more carbon from the ground and put it in the air" and "pull carbon from the air and make methane with it". Any H2 system today is going to use a hydrocarbon feedstock. Any "we'll crack water and save the H2" story is a pure fiction. Any process that relies on some theoretical "we've got spare energy so we're going to use that to crack water, then compress the everloving hell out of those H2s and then chill the crap out of that" could just as easily be "make methane using spare energy and spare CO2" likely with substantially less "spare" energy.
[edit]
There are, I think two questions:
1) will we have enough energy to do “split water and use H2”?
2) how is the energetic ratio between “compress and move the H2” on the one side and “filter CO2 out of the atmosphere, split that and integrate the H from 1) into the COs from here”?
I think 1) will come with a storage and movement demand anyhow (at least short term and for steel making), so there is a feed source for funding (that is not just state subsidies) for the former. Whereas 2) fundamentally requires the CO2 removal from the atmosphere. And I do not see a clear funding source (besides state subsidies) for _that_ problem. (So I think we may mostly disagree on the existence of “spare CO2” as a cheap feeding source)
Do you have any comparison of the physical limits of energy required for those processes? As I said, a lot of my thoughts still rely on “intuition” and that’s always reasonably dangerous. But for me “move H2” sounds like a solvable problem. Yes probably not for longterm, cheap and pressurized storage, but that’s also not required. If you have “pressurized and short” and “longterm and plentiful” that would be fine too.
At "low pressures" (5-30x normal sea level atmospheric pressures) H2 needs roughly 2.5meters cubed to store 1kg of H2.
Apparently it's "normally" stored at 350 to 700 bar (700x sea level air pressure). Compressing it that much requires a bunch of specialized equipment and a lot of energy.
It needs to be stored in complex pressure vessels at -160C or below[2]. I'd hate to have this stuff in big pipelines in a giant network, when utilities still can't quite do normal pressure natural gas correctly[3].
It leaks through just about everything, and lots of "normal" things that it leaks through it also destroys it while leaking through it[4].
A hydrogen economy would require trillions of dollars of infrastructure to work. A methane economy can just work -- it's basically what's already in use to move natural gas around.
So -- I can't point to an existing technology that'd be 100% ideal for a zero net pollution (overall, not just at the point of use) for a mega truck or similar big utility vehicle running a strip mining operation. But H2 really seems like a non-starter once you look at the details. I think maybe better batteries, hot-swapped batteries, hybrid methane generators plus batteries, etc, is a start, and it can be done today. I personally would take a 60% improvement now over a maybe 90% improvement later but probably never.
There's lots of carbon floating around; you can collect it from industrial processes (cement / steel making). You can pull it out of the air or water if you really do have enormous amounts of "spare" energy, which realistically, you probably don't.
Well the concept hasn’t received the same amount of government investment or subsidies or private capital either. So I think it’s unfair to compare it to the more mature state of battery electric vehicles. Infrastructure could be built at cost, hydrogen production could be enabled by nuclear energy sources, etc. I think it is too early to write it off, especially because it does come with advantages over batteries like faster refueling.
The point I don't understand is this: why are you so invested in Hyunday?
I think it's fantastic that a big company is exploring and innovating in one direction. The world needs diversification in research because you never know what you'll find.
There is no way to level the distribution and storage problem.
If there was, the time to do that was before the world had invested trillions in capex.
If all of the subsidies and regulations incentivizing adoption of BEVs and hybrids were to end tomorrow, they would still continue to grow market share.
Are you aware of some hydrogen storage technology that is becoming exponentially better year over year?
Why are you anchoring to Hydrogen specifically, instead of a broader category of fuels where that argument would make more sense?
The problem for Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is that there are many superior alternatives.
I’m not knocking hydrogen in general.
In fact: I appreciate what you have done for humanity, Hydrogen. I think the sun is great. I appreciate that you upgrade Canadian crude into premium transportation fuels for the US market. I’m sure you also do a lot of other great things for me that I don’t even care about.. but you suck as a transportation fuel, and the sooner you quit pretending to be something you are not, the sooner you can really get out there and be the Hydrogen we always knew you could be.
Serious Green Hydrogen production projects (as in the ones that already have pilot plants and have several billion in capital investments lined up for expansion) aren't about Hydrogen as a transportation fuel or even transporting Hydrogen.
They're a mixture of direct on site storage of hydrogen to use as overnight energy when the solar farms no longer work, and largely about ammonia for transport and methanol as a sulfur free marine fuel.
Ammonia can be shipped overseas form Australian solar farms using methanol as shipping fuel to supply ammonia as fertilizer and ammonia as a power station input to generate electricity.
Dicking about with slippery hydrogen in tens of thousands, hell, millions of small personal transportation pods is a waste of resources and a safety hazard, it's too many individual things to keep maintained to the high degree required to prevent leaks, etc.
The concept hasn’t really evolved much during the last 30 years. When I was in elementary school I was supposed to write a paper for science my science ‘class’ and was encouraged by my uncle, who was in the oil industry, to write about this miracle fuel. Even with the primitive technology available to me at the time (Alta vista?), it did not take long to shoot holes in the hydrogen fuels narrative:
It’s difficult to store; there is no infrastructure to support it; said infrastructure is expensive; it is almost exclusively produced from hydrocarbons (which is fine, but that’s typically antithetical to the values of the audience that it is ostensibly marketed as an alternative fuel to).. the list goes on.
And now Hyundai has invested in building this into a niche (wheeled excavators) of a niche (excavators) product.
I don't get it, what am I missing? Does this help them at trade shows?