[craig1f]

It would. Yet there is no promising tech in this field. Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.

If hydrogen becomes inexpensive to produce, it will by by way of solar power used to generate it.

It will never be easy to store. Hydrogen is the smallest element, and can move through solid objects over time. It is violently explosive. You think these EV fires you see all the time are bad? They're nothing compared to gasoline fires. And gasoline fires are nothing compared to a hydrogen explosion.

[clouddrover]

> Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.

I always find this false hydrogen versus batteries narrative bizarre.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are EVs. It isn't an exclusive choice between hydrogen or batteries. Choose both hydrogen and batteries, both FCEVs and BEVs.

In any case, if you want your EV to be manufactured with green steel then you want hydrogen to be used in the production of that steel:

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/05/f34/fcto_may...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/the-race-to-produce-...

[taneq]

The hydrogen-is-the-enemy-of-EVs thing comes from the way that car manufacturers in the '90s pushed hydrogen as the "fuel of the future" in order to stall the CARB EV mandate from interfering with their ICE car sales. It was a cynical bait-and-switch where they simultaneously insisted that it was impossible to build acceptable BEVs (despite both the GM EV1 and the Rav4-EV being universally lauded) and extolled hydrogen fuel cell EVs as the Bright New Future that was "only 10 years away". This let them continue business as usual in exchange for the occasional puff piece on hydrogen.

If they hadn't been allowed to get away with it, we'd have had practical EVs by 2000 instead of having to wait another decade for Tesla.

[clouddrover]

That doesn't seem very likely. Nissan was mass producing EVs before Tesla:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_electric_vehicles

The hydrogen conspiracy theory doesn't make any practical sense.

[liketochill]

I know ammonia has safety challenges as well, but transport and storage of ammonia is routine. I believe there are new developments in using ammonia for hydrogen storage and transport, so ammonia has potential to enable hydrogen to be the fuel of the future.

[foobarian]

And what would ammonia be? Yellow hydrogen? :-)

[ncmncm]

Chartreuse?

[rstuart4133]

> Hydrogen is supported only to draw support away from EVs.

No, or at least not by everyone. Hydrogen is seen as a replacement for natural gas. For example: https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-japan-consortium-explo... There is no fancy fuel cell converting it to electricity in this plan. They are just going t burn it for heat, just as they do for natural gas.

Now there are a few problems, such as cost. Producing hydrogen costs around 4 times what it costs to produce natural gas. Or at least it did before the Ukraine broke out. Right now, if anyone was making renewable hydrogen, they would ge getting a tidy profit.

Another is storage. You can't economically liquefy it, it literally passes through metal walls and damages them on the way through. Converting to Ammonia is well understood, but getting hydrogen back was a problem. Until: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/fuels...

It might work. 100's of millions are being invested into finding out if it does.

[cagenut]

downvoted because the author makes it explicitly clear he's not talking about cars in the very first paragraph.