You’d need huge cryogenic tanks due to the volume density of hydrogen over kerosene. Good for rockets that you can jettison tanks from, but less so for planes. I just don’t see it ever being practical for aviation over just creating our own hydrocarbons out of something else. Either catalyst based or otherwise. That’s potentially carbon neutral as well.
Edit: my comment, but with numbers https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/74/9/11/928294/Hydrogen-as-an-aviation-fuel It’s not a problem with how heavy the fuel would be or just how much space they’d take. It’s how heavy the damn tanks would need to be and how much of the aircraft would be devoted to them on long distance flights.
There was an article around here about Germany ditching hydrogen for their trains, which, if justifiable, seems damning for anything in the air.
As someone from Germany that’s the first time in reading that it was ever a thing for trains
Pretty much all our rails have electric lines on top and most trains are working electrically already
I really don’t see a point to waste hydrogen on cars or trains where pure electricity is working fine
Planes seems to be the main target that absolutely will never work electrically so it needs hydrogen - there even was an article about a ship running on batteries a couple of days ago
The thing with trains is twofold: First of all, it’s relatively easy to ensure that a train is more or less always hooked up to the grid (lines over the tracks). That means it can charge almost constantly, and doesn’t need a large battery.
The second thing is that the energy required to run a train scales very slowly with mass, because there is almost no rolling resistance (steel wheels on steel tracks have that advantage). That means you can increase the base weight of the train a bit without worrying about increased energy consumption.
Hydrogen can compete in applications where you need large amounts of energy, that needs to be transported, and where you don’t have regular access to the grid. Prime examples could be long-distance shipping, flight, and long-distance trucking through areas with little or no electric infrastructure (e.g. rural Australia).
It’s no more of a problem than dealing with LPG, surely? Pressurise it for storage.
I think it is, not sure but it requres bigger pressure and hidrogen is smallest atom that escapes even from high presure tanks.
You can’t keep liquid hydrogen by pressure alone and even as a liquid it’s volume density it’s very low compared to other liquids.
A couple issues have been mentioned, but what hasn’t been mentioned is that hydrogen is difficult to store, because the molecules are small enough do migrate through most containers and escape. If your container is made of metal, you also get something called hydrogen embrittlement which breaks your container over time.
Germany just announced they will discontinue their hydrogen-powered train service in favor of a battery-based solution due to the higher running cost.
Hydrogen may be an alternative, but it has yet to make continuous, solid financial sense for any type of transport.
If weight isn’t an issue, then it makes sense to use a system that only costs a fraction of a hydrogen-powered setup.
Trains don’t need to fly. Just pack them full of batteries or - arguably even better - just electrify the line wherever possible.
That’s just not an option for planes, so hydrogen remains a potentially viable approach.
Same goes for large container ships. It won’t make sense to use batteries unless there are significant breakthroughs in capacity technology.
One of the advantages of hydrogen is that tanks and fuel cells can withstand a large number of “charging cycles” much better than batteries. Additionally, for ships, the amount of energy needed to move is so enormous that I fear we’ll have a hard time creating batteries that are feasible for long-distance shipping.
For short distance ferrying (including large, car carrying ferries) on the other hand, Norway has already implemented quite a few electric stretches. The major issue there is building the infrastructure to charge the ferries.
No they can’t, the membranes of fuel cells degrade extremely quickly, as I a couple of 100 cycles before significant efficiency loss. That’s currently one of the biggest issues with fuel cells and one of the biggest areas of research. Currently, batteries are far more reliable as an energy source.
I’m just happy that there are efforts being made into alternatives to oil… at any level.
Sadly industrial hydrogen production is done by reforming petroleum with steam which releases huge amounts of CO2.
Oh. Well shit.
It’s true but the hope is to replace this with green hydrogen production through electrolysis of water. The idea behind this being, in a grid built on a large amount of renewable power there will be times (sunny windy days) with a huge amount of power overproduction. So you could run the electrolysis on all that surplus power and get hydrogen for it, instead of wasting it.
It’s hard to say at this point if that idea is going to be successful.
So in theory, it could become self sustainable. But it’s still very difficult and a long ways off. Thanks for the insight.
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No… No, it isn’t… But you can imagine what it would be like if it was, right?
Hydrogen sounds like a great idea for decarbonization until you get around to asking, “wait, where do we get the hydrogen from?” and realize that it’s incredibly energy intensive and the most popular process releases a lot of CO2 directly.
Hydrogen is an energy storage, like a battery, so of course it requires a lot of energy to produce, that’s the energy that you get back when consuming it (minus inefficiency losses of course).
The advantage of hydrogen over fossil fuels is that it can be produced from renewable energy, while fossil fuels cannot.
There’s a comment on another post with this article doing the math on this, and it seems like the net emissions (when you account for efficiencies) actually favour steam-reforming + fuel cells.
Last time I checked, CO2 released at that altitude has 3x the effect on radiative forcing, so it’s good that we’re not dumping it up there. I know water is also a greenhouse gas, but I expect the residence time to be substantially lower than for CO2. So it would be a net positive as long as we’re emitting on the ground the same amount of CO2 as emitted up there (we’re probably emitting more, but probably not 3x more and it would be easier to capture at the exhaust than from up there)
PS: more on radiative forcing factors here https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26701/files/media/file/s3-radiative-forcing-rfi-memo_public.pdf
Imagine the explosion upon impact. 🤣
Leaking hydrogen into the upper atmosphere sounds like a bad idea. It extends the life of methane, making the green house problem worse. I really hope that they reduce the leaking issue to a minimum.
Isn’t it flammable? I’d think leaks would have to be zero for even more basic reasons.
Yes, it’s very flammable. But it’s also very light. Lighter than Oxygen. And the molecules are small which means most air tight applications don’t work well. Even the tanks they make now still has this issue where hydrogen molecules can escape through the barriers over time.
But the short term profits!!!
Hydrogen-powered planes almost ready for takeoff
No they aren’t, and they never will be (save for maybe a few small private one-offs). Certainly never for anything commercial.
While I certainly agree with the first part of your comment, what makes you sure they’ll never be commercially viable? The energy density and application of liquid hydrogen is getting pretty good these days.
The output is water, right? Wouldn’t this put more water vapor in the atmosphere? Because water vapor also increases the greenhouse effect.
Water doesn’t linger in the atmosphere like CO2, and so much water evaporates from the oceans that anything we could do to put more water in the air is negligible. The only real way we can influence the humidity of the atmosphere is by changing the temperature with carbon.
It’s ok, well drink it
a bigger problem is that hydrogen that leaks out reacts with free hydroxides that would otherwise break down methane into co2
