what are the negatives of Hydrogen powered vehicles?

So what are the negatives of Hydrogen powered vehicles? I didn't want to hijack the EV thread but I'm curious why there is little development discussion of hydrogen powered vehicles? I saw back in 1999 in Munich BMW 7 series running around the city with "HYDROGEN POWERED" signage and thought for sure this was the clean vehicle of the future. My guess was it failed because the petroleum companies would lose the most market with hydrogen as compared with electric produced by petroleum or other sources of energy also produced by petroleum?? Hydrogen as far as I know is clean(er?) quicker to replenish in vehicles and can be available at "gas" station type locations, and have similar mileage distances as current petroleum vehicles gasoline and diesel. So why are we headed so deep into EV's with the hidden issues and low mileage range???

Does Hindenberg ring any bells.

Seriously though there is virtually no infrastructure in place for refueling hydrogen cars or charging EV vehicles.
It will take years and cost billions to build either system. I certainly won't be interested in either vehicle until I can drive all day without worrying about where I can fill up or charge. I suspect we will all be dead before that can happen.

Hyundai has some hydrogen powered vehicles running around California but yeah the infrastructure for it just isn't there and probably wouldn't be for a very long time. I'm left wondering about natural gas, it's clean and performs well on current engines. There is even some infrastructure for it that could be expanded on.

Supposedly a converted gasoline car loses big time power. If its 200hp on gas it'll be down to 120 on hydrogen

Good question.

First question is, where does the hydrogen come from? Most of it is reformed from natural gas, which still needs a fossil fuel as a base. Until we have a huge surplus of renewables or nuclear, I don't think it makes sense to use electrolysis to get it from water.

Second, it takes another big amount of energy to compress it, chill/liquify it, then transport it. To the point where one chart I saw put EVs at getting 3x more "work" out of the same electricity input than a similar car would get from hydrogen. For comparison, an EV can go ~30 miles on the energy it takes to create a gallon of gas from the feedstock, so there's that too.

Then, it needs to be stored and transferred under high pressure. We've all seen the dumb things people do putting gas in their cars, and that's easy. Imagine everyone trying to fill their own propane tank

The cheapest source of hydrogen is hydrocarbons, i.e. oil. So I doubt the "oil companies" care.

My experience with hydrogen gas, in semiconductor manufacturing, is that they like to leak. Special fitting that are not cheap are needed. Last I heard about hydrogen fuel cell systems though is that they were working on a matrix to store the hydrogen that would alleviate the leakage issue and the claims of "remember the Hindenburg".

As for an ICE losing power on hydrogen, that really depends on the implementation. If you try do do it like an LNG conversion with a mixer where the carb goes then yeah, you get about 80% of the gasoline powered version's HP due to hydrogen displacing about 29% of the air in the air/fuel mixture going into the combustion chamber.. But if you direct inject it the 100% of the air goes into the combustion chamber and you can gain up to 15% more power than the gasoline version.

Infrastructure notwithstanding, the main byproduct of hydrogen combustion will be the biggest problem.

Kevin

Hydrogen combustion converts oxygen into water steam, a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Also it converts atmospheric oxygen into water that is not easily converted in nature back into oxygen so we would slowly deplete our own oxygen. CO2 on the other hand gets turned back into oxygen by plants and higher CO2 levels help plants grow even faster. If they are making hydrogen by splitting water molecules you are obviously going to also create oxygen to replenish the air butt it take more energy to split it than you gain from burning it.

The problem with natural gas (methane) is it needs a lot of energy to keep it cold enough to be a liquid, if you store it as a gas, even at extremely high pressure, you will burn it up very quickly, or in other words a very short driving range. Seems to me the best way to use the methane is to finger out a way to dissolve it into gasoline somehow.

Toured some GM facilities in Detroit this fall....trust me, they are far from done with Hydrogen

Yep. Pretty much nailed it. I work for a major industrial gas/air separation company. I managed a couple of different projects around H2 for transportation. Southern California has the most dense infrastructure for H2 dispensing. Coincidnetly, we have a large H2 production facility near Ontario CA, so delivery costs is pretty low to these refueling stations which is a plus.

It is true a majority of H2 comes from Steam Methane reforming. There are some newer technologies currently being deployed (I was just at a new facility two weeks ago that is getting ready to start up) that is much more efficient and doesn't produce as much CO2 as by product. Other methods of H2 generation is from tail gas from other chemical processes. We are also looking at installing some green energy H2 generation at one of our plants that gets power from a renewable resource. For transportation use, its delivered to the refueling stations as either liquid, and vaporized and pressurized at the station, or delivered as high pressure gas and small compressors refill cylinders in a cascading fill system. Some of the limiting factors was how to store enough H2 to make a vehicle practical. High pressure storage on board has been limited by the DOT approval of storage tanks. The new technology is storage tanks that have a steel thin wall liner with carbon fiber wound out casing. The manufacturers of these tubes have been pushing the limits and we are seeing 520 bar (7500 psi) and soon 620 bar tubes. The costs of H2, as measured per energy used per mile is comparable to gasoline but in everything we deal with, it isn't combusted, but used in on board fuel cells to generate power for electric motors.

There, as mentioned, the refueling issue. I performed a product safety analysis on refueling stations many years ago. Statistically speaking, incidences were comparable to regular gasoline fuel pumps. But, the technology at the time wasn't widely distributed. There was an indecent at one of our customers where there was a failure of an interlock that let H2 leak. H2 will ignite almost instantly.

Ford is betting the Farm on Hydrogen powered cars...I was given a ride in one, and they operate very safely.

To the original OP's question, there are no natural sources of pure consumable Hydrogen.
Our current technology is only using Hydrogen as an energy storage medium/source, aka a "gas" battery.
Something needs to contribute energy to produce the pure hydrogen to "burn" later, that can by a number of processes, solar being the least environment impacting..
That original energy used to make pure hydrogen is energy source for the consumption of using hydrogen for vehicle propulsion.
The good thing, water is made partly of hydrogen, so its availability is nearly unlimited as a source for hydrogen..

I don’t think this has been mentioned but I have not heard of a current ICE hydrogen powered vehicle. All I have seen have fuel cells. I agree that the biggest problem is fueling. Look at how many electric cars are on the road and the gaps in over the road coverage

Keep in mind that hydrogen vehicles do not burn hydrogen in a combustion engine. Rather the hydrogen is in a fuel cell and when combined with oxygen it creates electricity - which powers the vehicle.

https://www.wisegeek.com/how-does-a-fuel-cell-hydrogen-car-work.htm

There are "hydrogen generator" kits which can be built and installed in vehicles. Using the charging system to extract the hydrogen from H20, the hydrogen is then fed into the combustion stream. However, there are some laws of physics out there that say you can't get more energy out of a process than you put in so its questionable as to whether there are any gains from this process. Like anything, there are people out there who've built and use these things and swear by them, I know a few. None of them are getting a hundred miles to a gallon in a full size pickup !!!

Correct, in the case of an onboard generator, it takes more power to create the hydrogen than you could get from burning it, so it's a net loss.

Like JCC mentions above, hydrogen should be considered an energy storage solution, not a generation solution. Since we get less energy out than it took to produce, it only makes sense when the input power is either incredibly cheap and the hydrogen can displace a more costly power source later, or when the input power would otherwise be curtailed and thrown away. This effectively turns the hydrogen into a large battery that can be used later.

Australia has some pretty neat hydrogen projects in the works:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/tasmani...omic-opportunity-for-island-state-91275/
https://reneweconomy.com.au/adelaide-green-hydrogen-plant-underway-at-tonsley-54545/
https://reneweconomy.com.au/worlds-largest-green-hydrogen-pilot-commences-operation-66722/

Well look at it differently. If you use hydro electric dams to produce the electricity to produce the hydrogen then its essentially free, clean energy (other than what it took to build the dams of course). Now you're using that free" hydrogen, combined with oxygen to create electricity to power other things in different places. So its a very clean energy if looked at this way.

Of course if Americans continue to use coal to generate electricity, then not so much

Greenies are doing away with dams, not environmental enough, with the emphasis on mental.

Hydrogen has a ton of power, comparable to gasoline.

Hydrogen can be made from electrolysis. Set up a hydrogen plant near a windfarm and make all the H2 you like. Use ocean water for a make-up source if you want. Run a de-salinizing process and use the salt by-product on the roads for winter time. Yep, I'm a genius, I know, look at my profile under "occupation".

I can't believe some of the responses here on emissions from a hydrogen vehicle.

The by-product of the combustion process is water vapor.................which is safe for the environment. .


The main problem with the process above is that it's simple and we can't have that. Anything fuel cell and compressed hydrogen is an inefficient joke. But, that's the way they are going. It's a dead end to keep the petroleum industry in business.

Shall we all talk about the eMmIsSiOnS of the Grizz ? ....

A friend of mine was an engineer for the GM fuel cell projects in Honeoye NY. There were a bunch of retro-fitted production cars running around, and the skateboard chassis was pretty novel for the time. They were convinced that GM was going to produce a hydrogen car as the tech was ready to go. Then, without warning, the Honeoye research center was closed and research 'consolidated'.

But, GM has invested a huge amount of money partnering with other firms for continued research, so I figure that at some point, GM may be hedging that EV will be a fad more than a practicality.

And, on the plus side, the biggest fraud in all of autodom, Elon Musk, has consistently said that hydrogen cars are stupid and not going to be successful.

I'm going to side with REAL engineers at GM on this one.

GM has "REAL" engineers?

Why I refer to them Amateurs as "Blunder Motors". I digress though, they do make their Turds easy to work on............of which has to be done on a frequent basis.

In other news, their stylists are pretty "REAL", lol. I keep thinking they can't make them any uglier and then they go and out-do themselves:

Yes water is safe for the environment unless you're drowning in it which is what would happen if hydrogen were to attempt to replace oil.

Kevin

Evidently it is a race to the bottom of the grand central station septic tank to see how ugly it can get and have people still flock to them.

Up with gasoline & diesel powered machines. We have an absolutely unlimited supply, & we keep on finding more. My big complaint is we have not been building refineries in over 30 years. We should be building a bunch of them right now.

No need to try & re-power & re-invent. It's already been done, now run on it & work on other stuff.

modern refineries would be more efficient and way safer, but it seems the oil companies don't want to re-invest their billions of profits.

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Not entirely true. The NIMBY effect and environmentalists are a major deterrent to building new refineries. Existing infrastructure is grandfathered in, but a lot of locations are not approving new builds.

If I can't get in it and drive anywhere I want with the same convenience as a gasoline or diesel powered vehicle, I'm not interested. If I can't do the majority of the maintenance myself, I'm not interested. It's a novelty that is not worth the aggravation. I'm not going to have something that's such a PITA to operate, just to show everyone how socially responsible I am. Be my guest.

What could possibly go wrong ?