this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Yeah. I think there are lots of vested interests making compelling rhetoric.
Rare earth metals cornered by China globally, so that battery technology is just a play by China to become an energy exporter
Oil and other historical hydrocarbons, controlled by the petro states
The one battery technology that looks kind of promising are sodium batteries, but I haven't seen enough data for me to make a real decision yet.
The engineers I talk with, more or less, agree that hydrogen is the future, if you can get production costs down. Part of the equation, is looking at market rates today, rather than future infrastructure. Right now there's more renewable capacity than can fit on the grid by two x in the US. That capacity could be used to generate hydrogen....
So when I do talk to people in the green spaces about hydrogen, I get the rhetoric about its more expensive today, so the cheapest way is to use hydrocarbons... Conveniently ignoring the vested interest, and the consumable nature of electric batteries which are net worse for the environment long term
And honestly batteries are too expensive today lol, I manage a farm and I couldn't imagine the electricity costs for charging all my tractors everyday, not to mention the need for more because they couldn't do the jobs as long as my diesel tractors could. We use farm diesel which is significantly cheaper than road diesel and its cheaper than charging multiple tractors
But, If I could just have a hydrogen tank and convert them all to hydrogen it would be no difference
One difference, you lose about 10% of the energy density with hydrogen, so you'd have to refuel a little bit more often. But I think that's close enough that it's good enough for most applications.
Yeah. I think most people are not aware of the energy requirements of industrial machinery. There's a huge difference between gliding a car across well maintained concrete with wheels, and moving literal tons of earth out of the way.
There is a reason we have not seen backhoes, tractors, bulldozers, moving to batteries. Batteries just are not energy dense enough
I'm confused by one thing, we should be seeing countries without domestic fossil fuels moving to hydrogen for their Air forces. Just as a domestic security issue. Unless they've been doing it really quietly, I've missed it. There is one demonstrator flight transatlantic flight from France to the USA using hydrogen fuel. But that's all I've seen. I would really expect China to be going 110% on hydrogen for their air force. Germany too for that matter. Any rich country without domestic oil, which is fair few of them
But, Russia has Domestic oil and China and Russia best buds.
Sorry all my points are broken up I think of them sporadically lol
Also a gas or diesel powered engk e can be converted to hydrogen meaning most current cars could be converted for less than the cost of buying a new electric car. This makes it more possible for people going forward.