Ok, Let’s talk about #hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (#FCEV) as an alternative to Battery Electric Vehicles (#BEV).
A FCEV uses the same electric motors as BEVs but gets its power from chemically reacting H₂ with O₂ from the air in a way that produces an electric current - a fuel cell. None of this is new technology Fuel Cells were a mature and reliable power source by the time the Apollo program was landing people on the moon. The issue with fuel cells is the same as with Enteral Combustion Engines(ICE) they are most efficient in a very narrow energy band great if the goal is to power the life support on a space craft, but not for the extremely variable loads needed to drive a car.
For this reason, FCEVs are hybrids with the same Li batteries as BEVs and ICE Hybrids like the Prius. Like ICE Hybrids they use the battery to accelerate and as storage for regenerative breaking with the fuel cell providing a constant recharge.
Why I’m skeptical of FCEVs
Greenwashing Hydrogen. FCEV advocates will point out that the only tailpipe emission is water vapor. The question is where does the hydrogen come from. By far the least expensive way to produce hydrogen gas is to crack the hydrogen atoms off of petrochemical hydrocarbons. As a mater of basic chemistry it takes far less energy to crack hydrocarbons than it does to electrolize water. And unlike the electrical grid where technologies like solar, wind and nuclear are already deployed and becoming an increasing share of our electric grid. Processes to produce hydrogen from water at anything close the the cost to strip it off fossil fuels is in the same development stage as cold fusion. at least for the next decade green hydrogen will be a premium product only available to the wealthiest buyers.
Hydrogen storage is hard. To fit enough hydrogen on a moving passenger car for it to have a 300 mile range requires pressures of 10,000psi (700 bar). The kinds of pressure vessels that can safely handle that pressure are expensive, and need regular inspection. Having had to keep a compressed air tank of just 200 psi in a fixed certified, I can tell you that there will be significant costs to regularly inspecting a 10,000 psi tank full of flammable gas that needs to survive a collision with one of the 2023 lineup of full sized puck up trucks.
But that is just the start. Hydrogen leaks. No matter how good you think your valves and fittings are the smallest molecule in the universe stored under huge pressure will find a way out. Ask anyone who has experience in the space industry where hydrogen is already the fuel of choice and they will tell you that hydrogen leaks are just a fact that has to be engineered around. On a vehicle this will be a small annoyance but at a fueling station this will be significant. The farther Hydrogen is transported and the longer it must be stored the higher the losses. There is also the energy factor of compressing that gas. To the best of my knowledge the prodigious amount of work done to pressurize the fuel is never recovered
FCEVs and BEVs both started to be produced about a decade ago, and while Tesla has scaled out its supercharger network world wide in that time. Hydrogen has less than 100 filling stations all in California. While these stations can fill a car in 5 minutes, they can only fill 2 to 5 vehicles before spending an hour refilling their high pressure storage tanks. One could argue that all Hydrogen needs is an eccentric billionaire ready to lose money for a decade building out infrastructure, however I think the infrastructure challenges with hydrogen exceed even Musk levels of ambition.
Cost. My M3 already costs noticeably less per mile that the equivalent ICE vehicle. Baring a huge technological leap, hydrogen will always be more expensive. because the least expensive hydrogen is processed out of the same fuel that runs ICE cars and provides less energy per molecule than those hydrocarbons when reacted with O₂ hydrogen cannot help but be a more expensive fuel.
So why are hydrogen FCEV still a thing? Well the vehicles are lighter, fueling times are comparable to gasoline, and the petrochemical industry is desperate for them to succeed. The oil industry can see the writing on the wall as states like California will ban new ICE vehicle sales in 2030. While holding out hope for a green hydrogen future a generation away, they can continue to have a market for their product as gasoline and diesel phase out. “Hydrogen will become the green fuel of the future” explain their sock puppets knowing that dirty hydrogen from their product will always have a price advantage. And to be fair, turning a mobile source into a point source of emissions does provide the opportunity for carbon capture (so called Blue Hydrogen), but all this still add even more cost while BEVs already have a price advantage in their fuel - not to mention that every home in the developed world has the infrastructure to charge BEVs.
Why write all this? Because when you get down to it most of the #FUD being spread around #EV s is coming from FCEV advocates who are trying not to let hydrogen become the betamax of the transition away from ICE transportation. In doing so they are making it harder than necessary for the world to move away from ICE transportation.
The US government is pouring billions into this concept, not because they think it will ever work — they know it won't — but because it allows them to pretend they're doing something positive about the climate crisis, while in reality they're telling their fossil fuel buddies that Business As Usual is here to stay.
And it's working. Corporate news outlets are on board promoting the plan, and everyone is happy. 😃
Especially the oil industry!
Here's a quote from Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum:
“We believe that our direct capture technology is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time. This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
For once, an oil executive is NOT lying. She's telling the truth, and that truth is going to kill us all.
Guess what? Any plastic marked with this symbol (for "recyclable") is not, in fact, recyclable. & stands for "OTHER" aka "everything else", and despite having a "recyclable" symbol in it, is not actually recyclable. #recycling#greenwashing
Anyone else feels like we need to delete the label 'carbon-neutral' from any sustainability vocabulary because, well, it's an enormous, gigantic lie whose only purpose is to shield business-as-usual and to make individuals feel good without them having to engage in any meaningful substancial change?
After watching the Carbon Offsets episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It makes me wonder.... without 'offsetting' how are companies realistically reducing thier footprints?
Here's part of the introduction to an article describing "Climate 'solutions' that don’t help"...
Many shiny new 'green' ideas do more to preserve fossil fuels than to replace them.
The world continues to face a major obstacle to addressing the climate crisis: deliberate distraction with a proliferation of new whiz-bang technologies and ideas.
Some are well-intentioned, some are strategic, some delusional, but most are outright greenwashing to justify the continued use of fossil fuels and to distract from the inevitable move to less expensive renewable energy.
All the items on their list --
🔴 The mother of all distractions: Carbon Capture and Storage
🔴 Deceptively distracting: Dirty hydrogen branded as “clean” by its proponents
🔴 Net nothing: 2050 Net Zero targets
🔴 BS: Chevron’s “renewable” cow dung
🔴 Silly: Renewable race fuel
🔴 Embarrassing: Exxon’s Ill-fated green algae gas
🔴 Most intense distraction: “Least carbon intensive” oil and gas from Saudi Arabia and the UAE
🔴 Most annoying: A 50 billion tree planting project
🔴 Endlessly distracting: Traditional fission nuclear power
If you care about your website’s CO₂ emissions, but still eat meat, you have been greenwashed.
Datacenters already are one of the greenest industries (electricity-wise) and rapidly improving. AWS and Azure will be carbon neutral by 2025. GCP has been neutral for 6 years and will be carbon-free by 2030.
We cannot live sustainably within today’s economic system. Yet that is what we are constantly being told we can do.
We can buy sustainable cars, travel on sustainable motorways powered by sustainable petroleum. We can eat sustainable meat, and drink sustainable soft drinks out of sustainable plastic bottles. We can buy sustainable fast fashion and fly on sustainable airplanes using sustainable fuels. And, of course, we are going to meet our short- and long-term sustainable climate targets, too, without making the slightest effort.
“How?” you might ask. How can that be possible when we don’t yet have any technical solutions that can fix this crisis alone, and the option of stopping doing things is unacceptable from our current economic standpoint? What are we going to do?
Well, the answer is the same as always: we will cheat. We will use all the loopholes and all the creative accounting that we have conjured up in our climate frameworks since the very first conference of the parties, the 1995 COP1 in Berlin.
We will outsource our emissions along with our factories, we will use baseline manipulation and start counting our emissions reductions when it suits us best. We will burn trees, forests, and biomass, as those have been excluded from the official statistics. We will lock decades of emissions into fossil gas infrastructure and call it 'green' natural gas. And then we will offset the rest with vague afforestation projects – trees that might be lost to disease or fire – while we simultaneously cut down the last of our old-growth forests at a much higher speed.
"#Ohio’s bill labeling gas as “green” appears to be more of a public relations stunt than anything. #Tennessee’s new law, on the other hand, has a specific, anti-#climate policy intent. It doesn’t just vaguely say that “#gas is #CleanEnergy;” it says that local governments attempting to set “clean energy” standards must include gas in that definition.
Three of the Tennessee bill’s co-sponsors are #ALEC members"
You may want to take a seat on the fainting couch before reading this, because I regret to inform you that . . . oil companies are LYING to us!!
A new analysis of the activities of twelve major fossil fuel giants shows that the companies are misleading the public about their emission-reduction commitments while raking in record profits from fossil fuels, which are driving catastrophic extreme weather events across the globe.
In a report published Wednesday, Greenpeace examines the decarbonization pledges, investments, and profits of six global fossil fuel giants — including Shell, BP, and TotalEnergies — and six European oil companies.
The results indicate that in 2022 close to 93% of the oil giants' investments on average went to keeping the companies on the "fossil oil and gas path" while just 7.3% were aimed at promoting "low-carbon solutions" and sustainable production.
Kuba Gogolewski, a finance campaigner at Greenpeace, said that "as the world endures unprecedented heat waves, deadly floods, and escalating storms, Big Oil clings to its destructive business model and continues to fuel the climate crisis."
"Instead of providing desperately needed clean energy, they feed us greenwashing garbage," Gogolewski added. "Big Oil's unwillingness to implement real change is a crime against the climate and future generations. Governments need to stop enabling fossil fuel companies, heavily regulate them, and plan our fossil fuel phase-out now. They will never change on their own."
Yes, that is the point. They will never change on their own.
Climate optimists like to claim that as soon as we reach “net zero” — the point when we are (theoretically) emitting less CO2 than the amount being absorbed by oceans, rocks, or plants, and taken out of the atmosphere through carbon capture — then global warming will stop almost immediately.
It’s a nice message, one intended to make us feel better, reassured that our leaders know what they’re doing. Don’t worry, we are told, everything is under control. By 2050, if not sooner, they’ll have the situation turned around.
In the meantime, we can all relax and go ahead with Business As Usual. 😃 Keep shopping, keep buying, keep driving, keep flying. And don’t forget to do your part: buy those paper straws and recycle that water bottle!
BUT — there are big problems with this phony net zero claim, and the way countries report their emissions is one of them. Investigators have found huge discrepancies accruing through the use of spurious carbon offsets, outsourcing, and other UN-approved loopholes. Also, CO2 emissions from the military are not required to be included, nor are emissions from international trade.
Some estimates suggest that actual emissions could be at least twice as high as what’s being shown in the official reports. No wonder global temperatures keep rising even though we’re constantly assured that great progress is being made.
In addition, there’s a risk that climate change itself will trigger “natural” emissions of greenhouse gases as peat bogs dry out, as drought-weakened forests burn, as permafrost melts, and as the sea floor warms, releasing previously frozen methane clathrates. So it’s not just the emissions of human industry we need to worry about.
The point is, net zero is NOT zero. Don’t fall for their lies. It’s time for real change, for system change. We must demand the end of #capitalism and a pivot toward #degrowth.
Hydrogen is NOT and energy source, it is an energy carrier; aka a battery.
What is true for all batteries, is that they don't work with 100% efficiency. You loose energy when you put energy into the battery (convert electricity to H2) and you loose energy when you get it out of the battery (convert H2 to electricity in a fuel cell for example).
So, when we make 'green' hydrogen, we have solar panels or windmills - already disputable 'green' sources - with a relatively low efficiency and convert the generated electricity to H2 (60% efficiency) and later back to electricity (60% efficiency again), so we are left with 36% of the original electricity of the 'green' source.
See also the attached copy from my book Crash Course
Also realise that currently >90% of H2 is produced from fossil fuels! See Wikipedia below:
... As of 2020, the majority of hydrogen (~95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming of natural gas and other light hydrocarbons, partial oxidation of heavier hydrocarbons, and coal gasification....
“If you're an oil and gas company, in a way, talking about hydrogen is kind of a two-way bet because if it works, then you're embedded in the hydrogen industry — but if it doesn't work, you've delayed the transition to the thing you don't make, which is electricity,” he tells Recharge. “So why wouldn't you promote hydrogen for inappropriate use? [...]"
Pour vous illustrer à quel point on est pas juste dans la merde mais en fait on s'y embourbe volontairement : on continue de construire des GOLFS en France 🙃
Avec un argument de greenwashing imparable : la piste de golf permettra d'éviter de bétonner toute la zone. Littéralement le même argument que les chasseurs qui avancent qu'ils ont besoin qu'il y ait toujours des animaux sauvages à buter pour perpétuer leur activité. Genre si on ne construit pas de golf ça sera forcément autre chose qui y sera construit.
"Greenwashing"-Verdacht: Wenn "grüne" Werbung in die Irre führt
Laut einer EU-Studie ist Werbung mit Nachhaltigkeit oft vage, irreführend oder nicht fundiert. Verbraucherschützer fordern mehr Klarheit: durch Regeln, Kontrollen - und im Zweifel auch Klagen. Von Ingo Nathusius.
KANADA erwärmt sich doppelt so schnell wie der Rest der Welt.
Kanada und Trudeau verkaufen sich als Vorreiter im Klimaschutz.
Trudeau: "G7 sollen weiterhin [❓] eine Führungsrolle [❓] bei Klima und Energie einnehmen, um bis 2050 Netto-Null zu erreichen". [❓]
KANADA ist das einzige G7-Land, dessen Emissionen seit dem Pariser Abkommen dramatisch ANGESTIEGEN sind: zwischen 2016 und 2019 um 3,3 %‼️
The term "natural gas" is pure #greenwashing. Let's start calling it what it is: #methane gas. Or, use it's full name:
"the powerful greenhouse gas methane"
To put it politely, this is greenwashing. To put it impolitely, calling these busses "green" or "zero emission" is a whopper of a lie.
If you read about these busses at the company's website, they're very careful not to reveal the source ("colour") of the hydrogen. https://www.transitsystems.com.au/hydrogen-bus-new
They're using grey hydrogen. "Grey" Hydrogen is not Zero Emission. It's made by extracting hydrogen from fossil gas, and there's no effort put into capturing the carbon during the processing.
These busses are just as polluting — considerably more polluting when you consider inefficiencies and losses due to processing, transport, and storage — as a bus powered by any other fossil fuel, but the pollution happens at a processing plant far away. The pollution is out of sight; out of mind.