this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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the biggest hindrance to hydrogen is the cost to build a hydrogen station vs out in ev chargers. why would anyone build a hydrogen station when they could install many ev chargers for the same price. maybe trucking and busses, like greyhound not metro or school, could be a usecase for hydrogen going forward.
It's cheaper to install hydrogen stations than it is to build charging stations. That's because it cost 10x less to move hydrogen around compared to electricity.
https://www.brinknews.com/could-hydrogen-replace-the-need-for-an-electric-grid/
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/21002-hydrogen-fueling-station-cost.pdf
https://futureenergy.com/ev-charging/how-much-do-ev-charging-stations-cost/
https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/evse_cost_report_2015.pdf
or its cheaper to install ev chargers.
More stations more greater economies of scale. At some point this will be no more expensive than a gas station. Also, you have a much greater capacity per station compared to a charging station. It will pencil out to being cheaper than building the much greater number of charging stations. Not to mention maintenance. The cost of maintaining millions of charging stations will be a major challenge.
im no business major but even i can see its a no brainer to go with an 38 ev chargers vs 1 hydrogen station. and the same economies of scale will make it cheaper to build more ev stations cheaper. hydrogen may have a place, trucking and busses like greyhound might make sense for hydrogen but currently it makes no sense to build a hydrogen station for normal passenger vehicles.
Until you realize that 1 hydrogen station can refuel hundreds of cars per day. Economies of scale are in hydrogen's favor. BEV advocates are simply lying about the facts.
and so can 38 ev charging stations.
At 38x time the land area and far greater power consumption. And it does not scale very well either. Double the number of stations and everything doubles in cost. Nor are you getting a full 400 miles if you are assuming fast charging. You're looking at only a 80% max charge in that situation. Meanwhile, with hydrogen, you just need bigger tanks to support multiple stations. Everyone is fully refueled after 5 minutes consistently. It is the same idea as natural gas refueling stations. Once costs drop due to increases production and economies of scale, the hydrogen stations easily wins this argument in a walk.
Again, BEV advocates are simply lying. They are just trying to defend their car purchase. It is completely at odds with economics and physics.
ev chargers can be installed in existing parking lots negating a lot of that space issues. however if a gas station wants to serve both gas and hydrogen theirs only so much room for the tanks needed underground. and if you want bigger tanks thats even less room for other tanks.
have fun waiting for hydrogen, the rest of us are gonna leave you behind.
You will have to tear up all those parking spaces to put up chargers. Meanwhile, those gas stations already exist and it would just mean repurposing them for hydrogen.
Guys like you are just stuck in the past. You'll end up cheering on a dead end because you cannot conceive of progress in the car industry.
a trench a few feet deep vs digging deep enough to put a giant pressure vessel underground. which is harder? theres some work, sure, to install ev chargers but its much less, hince the price difference to install, to run copper wire in a conduit than it is to dig a hole for the pressure vessel to hold the hydrogen.
You'll have to do this millions of times and wire it all up. Cost is going to be north of $1 trillion for there to be enough of them.
And you're wrong about that: It is cheaper to move and store hydrogen than it is to build wires:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-hydrogen-cars-refuse-to-die-2bfd6295
You're repeating too much BEV propaganda. It is just more expensive and that is fact.
well when theres hydrogen stations around me ill admit i was wrong. til then i keep seeing more and more ev chargers. and they arent even at gas stations. and as we replace or renovate buildings itll be easier to add chargers. and yeah copper isnt cheap but you only need to run it once, vs have a truck keep resupplying you with hydrogen. and those truck drivers deserve a good wage. and then you need a gas station attendant, adding to the cost. and then theres is possible cleanup of soil contamination at said gas stations to even build a hydrogen pump. and then theres the fact it needs to be chilled and pressurized, again adding to the cost. vs electricity thats already there.
Same story as those who doubted BEVs. Also the same story as those who doubted solar power. Same as wind power before that. The facts don’t change just because “my idea is already here.” The facts clearly state that it will be cheaper to go with hydrogen stations that charging stations. So it is only a matter of when it will happen.
And there’s no clean up problem. Hydrogen has no contamination issues. This is you just making stuff up.
gasoline and diesel do though. youre mixing a cost to do something once, make and run a copper line, to a recurring cost, buying and delivering hydrogen. hydrogens time for passenger vehicles has passed. they were supposed to be the bridge to evs. well we have evs now. we do not need a bridge anymore.
also if the 145,000+ gas stations went to hydrogen itd be $242,417,200,000. way more than itd cost to add ev chargers everywhere. and that is one pump. now if they wanted two or three or four...
Hydrogen is not gasoline nor diesel. This is a ridiculous argument.
Hydrogen can be pipelined at 1/10 the cost of sending electricity via wires. If you actually paid attention to the conversation instead of spamming BEV propaganda, you’d notice that I said that already.
It will cost over a trillion dollars to put up enough charging stations for all cars. For hydrogen, it will be far less. Those are facts you cannot deny.
This is just BEV fanboyism run amok. The world will not head towards a BEV monoculture with zero alternatives. The fact that we’re even having this conversation shows how much brainwashing is going on. It is so extreme that it is evidence that BEVs are secretly in big trouble. Otherwise, why do BEV fans need to spam FUD and marketing propaganda like there is no tomorrow? It shows a type of insecurity that suggests BEV fans actually do not really believe their own claims.
and where do you think hydrogen pumps are gonna be installed? oh yeah, existing gas stations as that makes sense for the type of fuel it is which can very much have contamination issues. and how much will it take to run these hydrogen pipelines to these stations? cause they dont exist now. and that not even talking about producing hydrogen. we might get green hydrogen in the future but today the vast majority isnt. meanwhile theres plenty of electric wires already in place.
You are replacing gas stations with hydrogen stations. You are removing contamination issues. And again, it is far cheaper to put hydrogen pipelines than wires. The economics will drive adoption. People will choose the cheaper option over the more expensive one. You are just advocating the status quo and insisting that nothing can change.
so youre suggesting its cheaper to run pipeline than it is to tie into the existing electrical grid?
and that not even going into hydrogen like to leak from any hole it can find so those pipeline have to be perfect all the time.
im not saying things cant change, just that weve already moved on from what hydrogen was meant to be. theres no point to use electricity to produce hydrogen, in the cleanest form, only to eventually turn it back into electricity. when we can just use electricity from the beginning cutting out a lot of losses.
I'm not suggesting. I brought sources indication that this, in fact, is the case.
Most of your counterarguments are just fearmongering. As if engineers haven't already looked at these issues before making such claims. In reality, it is the cheaper idea by far. BEV fanatics are just spamming propaganda in order to deny these facts. It is frankly out-of-control and it is a sign of desperation.
Its cheaper to install a DC fast charger than it is a mile of pipeline. And that's not even including the pumps themselves.
https://ingaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/21527.pdf
You get significantly more capacity with a pipeline than with wires. You are just obfuscating the facts.
Still doesn't make it any cheaper to get the pipeline from who knows where to the station. Much less building the station. And is shell and BP and whomever else gonna run their own pipelines or are they gonna be shared?
Where does the electricity for charging stations come from? BEV fans never answer this question honestly. They just pretend it will just be green electricity. In reality, this is an extremely hard problem. By the time you figure a way to guarantee green electricity, you'd realize that you're making hydrogen for energy storage already. So in truth, the solution will involve hydrogen no matter what.
Wind, solar, hydro, or hell even coal as it would still be cleaner than an ice vehicle. And no we don't need to store electric as hydrogen, we can store electricity as electricity it's called a battery.
You're not comparing to a ICE car. You're comparing it to a hydrogen car. A BEV running on dirty energy is going to be much worse than a hydrogen car on green energy.
Storing it in a battery would be incredibly expensive at scale. The point of hydrogen is that you can store large quantities of it.
Moving electricity around only requires aluminum wire and transformers. Incredibly cheap. Moving hydrogen around requires either roads and trucks (already more expensive than high voltage AC transmission) or a pipeline that won't leak hydrogen plus training for emergency response (also more expensive than high voltage AC).
Steel pipes are even cheaper. You are just regurgitating pro-BEV talking points. It is much cheaper to move hydrogen around than electricity.
But it isn't just steel pipe. It's steel pipe precision welded and leak checked, buried under ground, with lots of continual maintenance, pump stations to increase pressure, control systems, etc. More expensive even than natural gas piping, which is already difficult to get installed with municipalities frequently rejecting it for safety reasons.
We've been back and forth on this countless times over the years, you and I, but you keep coming back to these same points. None of which are correct. BEVs use existing infrastructure, and while they are NOT the best solution, they are the best solution people are going to choose. You're flat out not going to get someone to pay more for hydrogen than they would for any any other fuel, producing the hydrogen isn't as energy efficient as charging a battery, and installing an H2 station is significantly more expensive than installing even a DCFC station with four or six stalls and all the complimentary transformers necessary.
And yet that's the same idea as natural gas pipes. It is not any more expensive than natural gas pipes. In fact, natural gas pipelines are 10x cheaper than wires. This whole line of reasoning is just BEV propaganda. Wires are not magic and have huge costs associated with them.
In the end, an FCEV will be cheaper to own and by a huge margin. Hydrogen will be nearly free since it can be made from excess and unused electricity. The infrastructure will be cheaper by a huge margin too. People are just stuck in the past and are refusing to accept change. It is the same rhetoric as anti-wind and anti-solar. It is a doomed argument and its ridiculous to keep on repeating it.
It is, because hydrogen will leak more easily than methane.
Well now I damand you cite your sources, because natural gas pipelines are 5x the price per installed mile compared to high voltage transmission lines. I mean, the amount of material alone should be sounding alarms in your head. And that's from EIA. Even PG&E is citing $2M per mile to bury their high voltage transmission lines in California of all markets. Several markets in the US have absurdly low costs of under $300k per mile installed. So, yeah, I'm going to need to see a source that isn't hydrogenhype.org or something.
My guess is in 20 years time, the cost of buying an FCEV and a BEV will be equivalent. The cost of fueling the two vehicles will still strongly favor BEVs, and the only advantage that FCEV will have is refuel time (5 instead of 30 minutes) and range per kg. Batteries are going to be heavy no matter what the futurism weirdos claim and hydrogen gas is more energy dense per kg no matter what we do.
Here is the source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004221014668
You are simply regurgitating BEV propaganda by denying this. It's just all made-up bullshit from those people. Pipelines are radically cheaper than wires and that is undeniable.
Hell, if wires were really cheaper, why do natural gas pipelines exist at all? Just run gas turbines at a centralized locations and send the electricity to where it needs to go.
In the long-run, BEVs will end up being too expensive to be competitive. In fact, they're not competitive at all even now, and rely entirely on subsidies to be viable. The pathway to zero emissions will reveal these inconvenient facts and likely drive BEVs to a marginal niche. And if the future is not FCEVs, then it will be something like synfuel powered cars.
Let's take a couple things you've said and compare them to the link you just provided me. You said that the cost of hydrogen pipelines was equally inexpensive as methane / natural gas. Yet in the abstract of your link,
Now how could nat gas be 11x cheaper than electricity but hydrogen is only 8x if they cost the same? That sounds like it's 37.5% more expensive per MWh delivered. Interestingly, to deliver 1 MWh of hydrogen, you only need to deliver 30kg. Of course, the LCOE of that 30kg of hydrogen is hilarious compared to methane gas power plant.
And, of course, the very next paragraph dives into that.
That's only true for DC, not for AC transmission lines which regularly move 900 - 2200 MW of power. Not that it's even a point that matters much, since most power plants don't produce 2200 MW of power at one location. We tend to distribute the generation for reliability reasons at the very least.
Now, are you ready for the kicker? I mean, are you really ready for me to just put the final nail in this coffin for you? What kind of electricity transmission are they comparing pipelines to in this link?
And there it is. The cost of HVDC is overwhelmingly dominated by AC to DC and DC to AC conversion hardware, as noted by EIA in their reports. But, of course, if you compare to AC transmission as I mentioned above, this entire report is so upside down that it's laughable. And that is why we have electric transmission lines rather than natural gas generators at every home and business in the entirety of the US. You should read the whole report, it's really full of a lot of fun tidbits like this.
Here's a fun EIA link talking about HVDC transmission line cost per mile https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36393 and the report linked to from that page, which EIA commissioned. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/electricity/hvdctransmission/
You basically picked the highest cost method of electricity transmission with the least adoption, and wondered why piping natural gas was cheaper. The fact that the into to the research said that electricity was hard to move at such high MW levels was the first clue that something was wrong here. That's a rookie mistake for you.
You're just engaging in more obfuscation. 8x and 11x are pretty close to being 10x cheaper. It is sufficient for physicists or engineers to just say it is 10x as a first-order approximation.
AC suffers from more losses at long distances. It is also quite expensive. Both HVAC and HVDC are more expensive than pipelines: https://www.apga.org.au/sites/default/files/uploaded-content/field_f_content_file/pipelines_vs_powerlines_-_a_summary.pdf
You cannot fudge your way around the facts. If HVAC was really that much cheaper, there would never be HVDC connections in the first place.
No, I was building a case. And you very clearly do not understand what's being talked about in that research. Claiming that AC transmission lines are as expensive to build as HVDC is absurd in every way. https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmission_Facts.pdf
Even the EIA link I supplied shows that the conversion electronics are 60% of the cost of HVDC. Now you respond with Australia Pipeline & Gas Association? lmfao Dude. Come on.
Ok, now I know for a fact you don't understand what you're talking about. The only reason HVDC is a thing is to reduce transmission losses on very long runs. Something that we don't really do in the US, and the most popular installations are in Europe where nations sell energy among EU members. The increased cost serves multiple purposes in that case- It reduces transmission losses as I said, but it also allows you to build more compact systems, and you get less capacitance issues in under ground and under water installations. It's honestly crazy you'd even say that.
How about you actually read my link? I clearly stated that at long-distances, HVAC become inefficient and therefore costly. Your link is not comparing them to pipelines.
Yeah, we're done here. You've moved the goal posts so much we aren't even on the same field.
You're completing making shit up and none of your arguments are even relevant to the conversation. Fuck off with your Ludditism.
Making things up, got it. BTW, the luddites were correct. You might want to actually look up what their concerns were rather than just repeat bullshit. Like reading a gas company's research that says piping gas is cheaper than running electricity. BTW, do you find it strange that nearly every structure in the US has electricity running to it, but not gas? Hmm. Makes you wonder. Well, makes me wonder. I'm sure you'll just blame some climate change denial conspiracy.
A huge number of structures have gas piped in. Not sure what you're even arguing here.