Just today, Bank of America research released a 103 page "Hydrogen Primer" in which they predict that the hydrogen space will generate $2.5 trillion in direct revenues and $11 trillion of indirect infrastructure potential. They believe that a tipping point is coming soon because of the falling cost of renewable energy and electrolysers used to produce "green" hydrogen, as well as better efficiencies in fuel cells.
My question is for the experts in the crowd here, either based on engineering experience or on first principles and physics, does this seem likely to you? Why do we really need hydrogen? It seems we are getting to the point where wind power and particularly solar power are now cost effective. Once we have better batteries for storage, what problem do we have left that requires hydrogen to solve? Is this just a giant promotional bubble being pushed by Wall Street and unscrupulous companies trying to sell a dream? I may sound skeptical but I genuinely don't know and would like to hear from people with more expertise.
Therefore the relevant comparison is between H2 fuel cells and Li ion batteries. Batteries have much higher full cycle efficiency (energy input -> storage -> energy output), but they are large and heavy. H2 can be stored in less volume and less weight, but it is less efficient. In my opinion, batteries will be a technically and economicly superior solution for all uses other than where weight is extremely critical such as in aircraft.
Yeah, I know, not helpful. Hydrogen storage continues to be a huge issue. It is just so much more efficient to manufacture long chain molecules with hydrogen that you can then drive around in tanker trucks, store underground for pumping into units which burn them to recover the energy.
Once there is enough excess energy I expect you will see Fischer-Tropsch[1] type refineries that convert hydrogen and CO2 into liquid fuel rather than trying to ship around the hydrogen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
When he was nearing the end of the project I asked if he thought the future of energy was battery technology or hydrogen or both? He answered both. The energy density of hydrogen is too good to ignore for commercial vehicles (buses, construction, 18 wheelers). The momentum in battery technology and infrastructure for (car) 'limited' range use is going to carry forward.
This friend now makes high end technology based liquor cabinets (chuckle). Probably too much pressure in his last gig.
Without data to back this belief: I tend to think that synthesized jet fuel is probably going to be a technically easier solution than converting the jet fleet to hydrogen fuel (or to battery-electric storage). If you take yesterday's carbon from the atmosphere to make today's fuel, it's even carbon-neutral.
[0] - $NKLA's Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure does. ;)
Then to transport H2 efficiently you need to compress it to several hundred bars. That process, again, consumes a lot of energy.
Then you'll have to transport and distribute that H2 around the country, to fill your car's tank.
All in all, the energy efficiency of the whole cycle is at most 15%, more or less the same as diesel.
H2 is a made-up response to the terrible ROI of wind turbines and solar when not backed-up with storage. That's how it's supposed to be the future. However when you do the math you quickly realize that it would be much more cost-effective to use nuclear power for combined thermolysis/electrolysis, that would get a way higher yield and ROI...
My general understanding is that Hydrogen doesn't make much sense for cars because it won't compete at that scale with the qualities (and size and weight and infrastructure) of Lithium Ion batteries, but where Hydrogen has a lot of room to grow/"disrupt" is in the long-tail of "heavy/occaisional diesel applications". This is things like ships (and cruise ships), festivals/food-trucks and other sorts of "off-the-grid" mini-grids, grid-scale batteries for load timeshifting (though Li-Ion looks quite competitive there too), possibly aircraft, and a very long tail of so many other ways that diesel especially gets burnt to generate mostly electricity (or refrigeration).
If your goal is to get off fossil fuels, hydrogen is completely not the way to go.
Moreover, if it's performance that you want. Hydrogen 0-60 will be at best grandma speed.
Oh and let's not forget that it's hydrogen. In my jurisdiction, all pressure vessels for hydrogen must be inspected quarterly. Who wants to take their car in quarterly for inspections?
(1) Does hydrogen make sense as a store of energy?
(2) Will the various companies pushing hydrogen be financially successful in the medium term?
I think the answer to (1) is pretty clearly "no". But That doesn't strongly imply that the answer to (2) will also be "no". I can picture a world where hydrogen companies use hype to get funding, then use funding the get subsidies, then use subsidies to get more hype and install more infrastructure and generally push the concept to adoption. When big subsidies or externalities are on the table, it's very easy for the social/info/misinfo side of things to win and for the whole economy to do something stupid for 50 years. See, e.g., smoking, leaded petrol, nuclear power, etc.
As for why it doesn't make sense: hydrogen has essentially the same performance as batteries in terms of the car itself, but lower overall efficiency. So it costs you more energy, and it is less convenient because hydrogen requires a gas station whereas electricity doesn't.
Another related problem has been solved though: Hydrogen cannot just be put in a normal tank, it dissipates through Hydrogen bonds which is a quantum mechanical effect.
The basic idea is: hydrogen is by far the chemical fuel with the highest energy density in terms of mass: about 3 times the energy density of gasoline or jet fuel. However, liquid hydrogen has very low (mass) density so in the end the volumetric density of hydrogen is about 3 times lower than that of gasoline. But that works out ok. For example, an Airbus A320 has a max takeoff weight of about 75 tons, out of which about one third is fuel. If you replace that fuel with the liquid hydrogen that has the same caloric content, you need only a third of that in terms of mass (so about 8 tons), but since that occupies pound for pound 3 times as much volume, these 8 tons will fill the same volume as the 25 times of the regular jet fuel. This is great news: you don't need to modify the shape of the airplane, you don't need to make it like a beluga to fit bigger tanks.
Moreover, there are reasons to believe hydrogen-fueled engines have higher efficiency, maybe 10-20% higher. On top of that, if you reduce the takeoff weight from 75 tons (which is 25 tons of fuel + 50 non-fuel) to only 58 tons, you end up needing less fuel to carry this airplane around. It's the curse of the rocket equation working in reverse, in other words it's a blessing: using a more dense fuel means you need to carry less fuel, therefore you need to carry less fuel that moves the fuel, etc. In the end you probably get a few percentages of savings right there for free.
So, these are the pros.
What are the cons? You need cryogenic storage, you probably need tanks with a special interior lining to limit the leakage, you need infrastructure to move the hydrogen around. On top of that, there's a chance you increase the NO2 pollution (and it's not like an airplane can carry with it a catalytic convertor to take care of that).
An obvious pro is no CO2 emissions. An obvious con is the cost of producing the H2.
All in all, I think there's a fair chance that H2-powered airplanes could be a good idea.
An obvious short-term problem is weight-efficiency - hydrogen is still far better than best batteries, and weight is of crucial importance on aircrafts, so if you want to fly green - jets, turboprops, electric propellers - you can use hydrogen.
Well... also storage. The cheaper it becomes to store energy as hydrogen the better. The fact that the overall process is less efficient than battery storage does not mean hydrogen will not be used.
The amount of energy that can be stored in batteries is relatively small, and there are only so many viable hydroelectric storage sites. We'll need more than one way to store energy on the grid level.
Hydrogen also enables countries to export energy. For instance, quite a few oil-producing countries receive lots of sunshine. Moving away from oil, they could produce hydrogen using solar power and export it elsewhere in the world. That might be less efficient than transporting the electricity directly, but much easier politically: just imagine building a power line from Saudi Arabia to Germany. How many countries would have to collaborate to make it work?
Edit: hydrogen can also replace other substances in process engineering. For instance, there are ways to produce steel with hydrogen instead of carbon-based fuels as a reducing agent.
For heavy transportation hydrogen might have a small market for extremely long distance transport. But if you ask me, even that market is practically out of reach already. Companies like Daimler want to have a hydrogen truck 'in the second half of the decade' but by then batteries should clearly outclass it. And that is before you have even solved the infrastructure issue.
I think equally in storage, it makes little sense to use hydrogen outside of some specialized applications. There are other chemical alternatives as well but here I would still bet on the battery for a much, much, much larger part of the grid, both home and grid-scale.
The two industries where hydrogen might be interesting is long distance container ships and flight. There it still has some chance against batteries but for the majority of flight, battery is within clear distance of known technology. There is long range flights, but for those hydrogen competes with other chemical fuels as well.
I don't know enough about the shipping industry. You can do things like using dimethyl ether but you essentially need hydrogen to produce that, so I guess it sort of counts. The same goes for things like methanol.
The predictions of 'Bank of America' seem like total nonsense to me. The battery is riding a cost curve with governments and privates from all over the world putting massive resources into it. Fuel cells have some government that love it, and some companies that believe in it but its not near the same scale of investment.
Lots of nonsense has gone up if it is connected to something clean energy, its the 'next Tesla' hunt.
Despite what people say, main problem with hydrogen (when compared to other energy storage/sources) is not efficiency or safety, but overall cost. What drives the energy market is $/watt for a given solution, not raw efficiencies.
That said, cheap hydrogen production is an active research area. Some ideas under research include hydrogen producing bacteria and analogs to photosynthesis. Some methods, even appear to be nearly perfectly efficient [1]. Now could hydrogen become a major source of power in 10 years? Probably not, as there are lots of costly problems to overcome - not just in production. Will it be in the distant future? Probably, given that it's the most abundant element in the universe, the power source of most stars, the easiest element to do fusion with - that it's hard to fathom us becoming a successful space faring civilization without it...
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/su-shp060220... [1]
Power is rate of energy transfer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(physics)
You would not typically call something "source of power". Rather, we would typically discuss "source of energy" which is then converted to power by expending it (transferring/converting) at different rates depending on application (think in terms of your power at your academia letting you force undergraduates doing work for you).
As to sources of energy, the only way hydrogen can be used as a source of energy is through fusion which is currently unattainable on commercial scale in 10 years. There are also no sources of hydrogen that can be mined or otherwise exploited on Earth.
There exist, arguably, fossil fuels that are rich in hydrogen. A cell using such a fuel could technically be called hydrogen fuel but in normal use they are typically called cars.
Batteries are killing hydrogen on scale and cost improvement. We may already have reached a "curve superiority" by batteries much like DRAM vs MRAM, as in MRAM may have had overall potential superiority to DRAM, but was way too late to the party to beat out DRAM's constant incremental improvements. The lead on economies of scale mean and allocation of research means that hydrogen cannot "catch up".
Even if massive investment in hydrogen started, presumably in transportation, it is probably 5-8 years from reaching the point Tesla was with the release of the first Model S.
Which cedes Tesla and battery tech another 5-8 years of "main curve" improvement. Consider that the great leap of lithium metal/solid state seems an almost guarantee in 10 years time, and likely 5 years.
For short term storage batteries make more sense because short term efficiency affect economics more.
But when you store long term that storage needs to be cheap. Hydrogen or a synthetic fuel derived from hydrogen gives you that.
There are also use cases where batteries are too heavy. For long flights batteries are too heavy but hydrogen will work. After all plenty of rockets use hydrogen fuel, none use lithium-ion.
Then there are plenty of industrial process which can use hydrogen. E.g. a lot of coal is used as a reducing agent when producing silicon, iron etc. This cause emissions when creating solar cells e.g.
By using hydrogen as a reducing agent instead we don’t get CO2 emissions.
Hydrogen Fuel Cells seem like a marginal solution - it can make sense in some situations. For example the military loves it because they can make electricity without the noise of a generator.
Fuel Cells could make sense for some transportation problems, but they never will for other problems.
H2 gas will always have problems with pressure, containment, embrittlement, and conversion/production costs.
However, be on the lookout for other storage mediums, some of which are mentioned by other comments - Aluminum Hydride (Alane), Methane, Ammonia.
In fact, look out for anything that can take excess electricity from renewables and store it. Aluminum Air batteries for instance.
If we're producing chemical fuel on a large scale, hydrocarbons are a nearly perfect form.
More likely, some kind of battery breakthrough will replace lithium ion. We only need 3-5x current power density to replace fuel for most uses. Lithium ion was about 3x better than NiCad when it came out. If we can repeat that just once more, there will be a battery revolution
Hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, so I don't understand this point.
Yes you can make hydrogen from electricity, but why. There are better uses for excess electricity.
> Ask HN: Is hydrogen likely to be a major source of power in the next 10 years?
Nothing will happen in 10 years. But it might be clear it'll be the way forward in 10 years.
Batteries are not a solution to hydrogen generally.
The answer to hydrogen I think will be the same as now, fossil fuels. But we will work on cleaning the PM 2.5 coming out. That will be big in 10 years.
Also, batteries are not going to be unseated because they have a massive head start here. The vast majority of the industrial R&D effort either is (or will be shortly) behind them now. We've seen this movie before: LCDs vs. plasma displays, silicon vs. gallium arsenide, RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) vs the optical LaserDisc.
Few materials are suitable for tanks as hydrogen being a small molecule tends to diffuse through many liner materials and hydrogen embrittlement causes weakening in some types of metal containers
taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economyBut there's little point investing in long-term energy storage while there remains market opportunity in short term storage, which will still be the case in ten years.
So, yes, hydrogen powered fuel cells are likely to be a major source of power in the next 10 years. It is just that there will be other major sources of power as well. Different energy storage systems have different attributes and are viable in different applications.
whether the energy stored is green or not
There is a developing consensus that in order to get to "net zero" by 2050, hydrogen will need to be a significant part of the energy mix. For example, here [1] are two forecasts that predict H2 will account for ~10% of global energy use. This could just be dismissed as "hype" but across China, Europe, and elsewhere, real money is going into electrolyzers and fuel cells (at, I dunno, 500% YOY growth?) which I think is why stocks are acting as they are.
Here's a list of where H2 fits in, and other sustainable alternatives. (Of course, for all entries, "indefinite fossil fuel usage" is an option in some sense!)
Current H2 usage. Fossil-derived hydrogen is a cornerstone of the economy (for eg fertilizer), and responsible for a few % of global GHG emissions. Replacing that with low-carbon-intensity hydrogen would be a major win by itself. Kind of by definition, there are few alternatives here.
Other industrial uses. The production of steel, plastics, etc are complicated systems, each too complicated to explain here, but eg HYBRIT [2], a fossil-free steel plant, could reduce emissions from Nordic countries by 7-10%. I have not heard of many alternative decarbonization pathways here.
Non-passenger-vehicle transport (trucks, ships, planes, trains). Molecular fuels have higher energy density than current-gen batteries by 1-2 orders of magnitude. I predict that these vehicles will mostly not be battery-powered. Biofuels are another prospect. "E-fuels" (sourced from H2 and an atmospheric carbon source) are another.
Lots more. Intermittent renewable valorization, building heat, power storage, gas pipeline admixtures... but this comment is already too long. I also like this story [3] about the Intermountain Power Plant, the largest H2 project in the US that I'm aware of.
[1] ETC: Page 38-39 of https://www.energy-transitions.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
BP: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/ener... https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/ener...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-steel-hydrogen/swe...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-12-10/los-ang...
The three biggest problems that come to mind are (a) meeting peak energy demand, (b) process heat for some industrial processes where there’s no current adjective to a burner, and (c) fuelling long distance vehicles like planes, ships and long distance truck and train routes away from big electricity infrastructure.
Hydrogen looks like a good candidate to be at least a part of the solution to all of these as it is currently expected to be the cheapest chemical fuel to produce at sufficient scale in a net zero manner. Multiple (proprietary, not all publicly available, but see [0]) predictions say that as scale grows hydrogen from electrolysis powered by dedicated renewable plant could reach prices comparable to those of natural gas in most parts of the world (not the US) today. The recurved advantage of hydrogen could disappear, but there’s no clear alternative today.
For (a) meeting demand peaks - a big problem in cold regions where space heat is a big part of energy demand and the occasional winter is very cold - hydrogen can be produced when the wind blows and the sun shines and then stored. This is easier in places with the right geography to store hydrogen directly (e.g. salt caverns), but hydrogen may still play a part elsewhere. Batteries are energy efficient, but very cost inefficient at long duration (in this case, months to years) energy storage.
For (b) fuelling industrial processes, hydrogen can usually be used as a direct alternative to oil or natural gas. Sometimes this would require new plant, sometimes not.
For (c) transport, batteries are more likely to develop to solve many challenges. Where they don’t (my guess: all but short distance aviation and shipping; very long distance trucking), hydrogen is the most likely chemical starting point to create net zero fuels - maybe hydrogen itself, maybe synthetic hydrocarbons, maybe ammonia.
Note that none of these is an immediate challenge anywhere today, so hydrogen is seldom a commercial solution. But they all will be to get a net zero future.
Now none of this means today’s hydrogen companies will be successful. In fact, based on past transformations, most will probably fail. And those that do succeed and grow, whilst technology driven companies, may well not be anything like either software developers or oil producers in terms of return. I’d guess a mix of smaller technology providers (maybe c.f. Arm if they’re very lucky) and something more like regulated utilities or merchant renewable developers: relatively low risk and thus return, capital intensive industries.
[0] https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promisin...
People seem to misunderstand how institutionalized most of our infra is.
If we had a 'great car, and great tech' today in 2020, it would take 10 years to start to see common adoption.
But we really don't have proper hydrogen solutions and infra taking shape, so it's unlikely anything material will happen in 10 years.