Hydrogen Fuel vs. Electric

For the past couple of class periods, my Physics professor has been going on rants regarding Electric Cars - telling his students to not bother buying Electric cars because Hydrogen Fuel cars will become a thing in 10-15 years. Does he have a point Veeky Forums? Or is he just talking nonsense? From what I've heard and read in the past, hydro fuel isn't as viable as electric.

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Hydrogen will never be this clean futurist fuel that will power everything. It could be a clean-ish energy storage system, but production involves large amounts of electricity, which leads to a minor energy bonus when proper electrolytes and catalysts are used. As such, you wind up putting a lot of effort into an unstable energy storage system which drives an engine that doesn't put out any more horsepower than an electric car, all with a comparable range to the electric car.

In layman's terms, hydrogen probably won't be able to compete with electric vehicles in any impressive way. Shut up and let the professor stroke his intelligence and kiss ass for your grade's sake.

he might. multiple OEMs are working on fast-response hydrogen cells and have come quite far already. plus, batteries have always been the natural enemy of car OEMs since they're fucking expensive and there's no real leverage over corporations like Samsung, who provide them.

so much for the pros. the cons are, and have remained for quite some time:
- production and distribution of hydrogen in a safe manner is a nightmare, same for costs
- batteries are still getting better at enormous rates, so the jury is still out on which technology will have less drawbacks
- producing hydrogen cells is not exactly a manufacturer's dream, even compared to buying battery cells and even if they're awesome
- the cost of transferring vast networks of contracted workshops to new technology are at least estimatable for electric with batteries; for hydrogen cells, nobody knows

so yeah. he might be right. difficult to say right now. then again, 10-15 years is probably what you can expect from current electric cars in terms of economically sensible life expectancy, so if you want to buy an electric ride now, go ahead - you'll need a new one in at most 10-15 years anyway.

>shut up and let the professor stroke his intelligence and kiss ass for your grade's sake

exactly what I've been doing. thanks for the reply!

In terms of energy per g hydrogen fuel does release more energy but only in liquid state in which it takes a special container to keep its temp low within the car and this does make it expensive. It is explosive but this isn't much of a problem if containers are made to withstand and protect the fuel. Teaching people to actually take care is an issue and the populace isn't exactly smart let's be honest. I've missed some stuff out but it may only be viable to those with a lot of money not a student. Things would have to be thought over like ways of keeping it as safe as possible. Some cars already use this but it isn't available to the public fully yet.

Splitting water takes a ton of electricity. You won't get anywhere near as much back as you put in, regardless of how you use the hydrogen.
Just use the electricity to charge a battery and run an electric motor.

hydrogen fuel has been a big scam for a long time now
He probably personally makes money off pushing this

Hydrogen especially makes no sense at all as a car fuel

You take the electricity that could be used to charge batteries
Instead you split water for hydrogen, store it, then burn it for fuel later? How much % of the hydrogen will be lost during storage/piping?

They already burnt the gas to produce that electricity in the first place. So it just makes sense to import the gas directly to you, then burn it in the car.

>since they're fucking expensive
>and there's no real leverage over corporations like Samsung, who provide them.
And as Tesla has demonstrated, the solution is just
"Build it yourself"

Still it's going to be a long time before electric cars are economical compared to low price combustion vehicles. Unless the government comes out and puts more taxes on em.

He's half right, half wrong.
He's right about battery powered cars because batteries have terrible gravimetric energy density.
He wrong about hydrogen fuel cars because hydrogen has terrible volumetric energy density.

Chemical hydrocarbon fuels will remain the fuels of choice because they have high gravimetric and volumetric energy density and allow to use the surrounding air as oxidizer, which makes up about three quarter of the weight of the fuel/oxidizer combination.
They may be burned in internal combustion engines or generate electricity in a fuel cell. They may be made from crude oil, biomass or synthesized from some carbon source and water with renewable energy. That we don't know. But it will remain chemical hydrocarbon fuels.

>because they have high gravimetric and volumetric energy density
It's not even that
Its that you don't need to PRODUCE the hydrocarbons, you just dig them out of the ground

You do have to produce them...drilling and such isn't free in any sense of the word.
Eh, I see hybrid as being the real way of the middle-term future, especially for the US where you can easily find yourself driving over 300 miles in two days without a full night's charge being possible. For most people, these kinds of drives are rare, but common enough to want a vehicle that can do it. Most of the time, they'll just operate within the battery's range, but have the gas there for when they need it.

>drilling and such isn't free in any sense of the word.
It is however a net energy gain
While electrolysis or batteries are net energy losses

Yes, hybrids with short range batteries for the daily needs within the city and hydrocarbon fuel for range do make sense. But these kinds of hybrids are only a viable option for people who own homes and can therefore recharge the battery overnight. Without that infrastructure they're simply impractical.

They can fully charge a battery in like 30 minutes at special stations
obviously its not common yet, but that'll expand fast

Not really. Differences in electricity prices in different locations would make electrolysis viable at places where energy is cheap and water abundant, like near hydro power stations. Same goes for different prices at different times of day, like at night when base load is cheap and abundant. So that's not the problem. The problem is storage and transportation of hydrogen.

>fully charge a battery in like 30 minutes
Which is an order of magnitude worse than hydrocarbon refueling. And this fast-charging only recharges like 80% and causes quite some heat. A regular tank can be topped off without problems.

I wonder how that affects the lifespan of the battery.

the bulk of fuel cost is taxes
You think your hydrogen will be exempt from that?

Here's my thing about electric cars:

If, god forbid, I run out of gas on the side of the road, I can walk/hitchhike/somehow get to a gas station, then generally, get even just a half gallon of gas, put it my car, and that'll be enough to get me to a gas station to fill up.

If you run out of a charge, you pretty much have to have a tow and that shit is expensive as hell.

the jury is still out on whether or not Tesla's "build it yourself" solution is optimal. they battery manufacturers may be big, unleverageable corporations, but they are in direct competition with each other and pump the kind of money into R&D you normally run African countries with.

also, Musk's giant battery factory may be good to build mediocre wall batteries, but whether or not they can keep up with the current rate of cell development is still to be seen. i wish them luck, but wouldn't exclude the possibility that the batteries Tesla actually put in their cars in a few years will get there on a freighter from China.

>He thinks fuel cells burn hydrogen
Good joke.

Hydrogen fuel cell powered cars sorta ARE electric powered cars... they just use a particular technology for energy generation.

>mediocre wall batteries
Who makes better ones?

I like the idea of having a home energy storage unit

Of well built, modern batteries we can make pretty accurate predictions about the number of load cycles and the capacity decrease.

ok? But this is 2016, so you'll have an accurate count of how much fuel/power is left
And GPS to find nearest stations
So you never end up in that situation.

>the bulk of fuel cost is taxes
[citation needed]
In the Netherlands or Germany maybe...

>You think your hydrogen will be exempt from that?
You think that's a rebuttal of the possibility of making use of price differences?

Short answer is no, hydrogen cars just don't make sense.

Long answer is really long as there are a lot of minor things that dramatically change the economic viably of the systems, given a few extreme cases (that will likely never happen) hydrgen cars could make a lot of sense. That said I doubt either will take off to the extent people claim, but electric is orders of magnitude more likely if you are restricting the comparison to just those two.

> t. clueless cultists/paid shills

Hydrogen car is such a hoax that Stanley Meyer had to be assassinated

...

Shit happens faggot.

>He probably
Lrn2probabilly fgt pls

Boobs!

currently, nobody, and they maybe won't be mediocre for use as a wall battery in the near future. i meant that they may be too mediocre for automotive application in a few years when the big players in terms of battery r&d have outdeveloped them. which they could, in terms of money. nobody knows if they will. nobody knows if battery development will suddenly hit a brick wall at some point. right now, the only way is up, and if it stays this way, the big battery corps certainly have an edge over Musk Enterprises.

only to dumbasses that dont know how to read a fuel gauge

This guy is the closest but he misses a bit of the point. In highly urbanised metropolitan areas, which happens to be where the vast majority of the world's traffic takes place, electric cars have significant advantages, and the technology is being pushed heavily for that reason.

No emissions whatsoever are key, but so is the energy efficiency considering it is much more desirable to generate the power at a centralized plant and then to distribute it, rather than having a lot of miniature inefficient plants (the car engines) generating the power.

The extra capacitance also helps with renewable power generation, as now you have an additional crowd sourced method of storing energy, and energy storage is one of the major bottlenecks in wind/solar generation.

As far as longer distance travel, well Tesla has already shown that you can actually get pretty damn far with a lithium battery, and the extra battery weight is more than made up for by the total lack of a conventional engine.

For extreme rural needs, probably nothing will ever replace diesel-like fuels. But thats really not a big problem if you replace 90% of the world's transport fleet with electrics.

This still leaves generating the electricity of course. Beg and pray for fusion, or we are fucked hard and it will happen in our lifetime.

Tho actually there is a very interesting article in Nature about osmotic power generation that can provide up to 1 MW (!) per square meter atomic film MbS2, which is frankly amazing.

>Hydrogen vs. Electricity

They are literally not even the same category. The fact that you even had to ask is pretty retarded. Hydrogen is a pretty dumb choice.

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Tesla wall battery energy densities are excellent but not the pinnacle. The highest I've ever calculated was from a drone lithium-polymer battery.

>For the past couple of class periods, my Physics professor has been going on rants regarding Electric Cars - telling his students to not bother buying Electric cars because Hydrogen Fuel cars will become a thing in 10-15 years. Does he have a point Veeky Forums? Or is he just talking nonsense? From what I've heard and read in the past, hydro fuel isn't as viable as electric.

Hydrogen cars ARE electric cars.

The only question is - once the power plant has produced electricity, how should the car transport it?

You can store it in Lithium or in Hydrogen, then allow chemistry (through battery or fuel cell) to turn it back into energy.

I'm gonna need sauce on that image

>No emissions whatsoever are key, but so is the energy efficiency considering it is much more desirable to generate the power at a centralized plant and then to distribute it, rather than having a lot of miniature inefficient plants (the car engines) generating the power.
If that were the case our fleet of cars would be already 90% electric. Electric cars aren't anything new. In fact they're older than cars with internal combustion engines. Yet, the earlier invention and the supposed desirability of central power generation with higher efficiency as opposed to distributed generation with lower efficiency did not establish itself, because these considerations are simply not based in the real world.

The real world is about practicality. If you need to take half an hour (at least) to recharge instead of 2 minutes to refuel (not to mention what kind of power lines recharging stations would need to have to service only as many cars simultaneously as today's gas stations, which would also mean less throughput due to longer service time per customer btw...) and if those same cars can't transport significant loads anymore because otherwise they'd weigh twice as much as the internal combustion engine version (eating away all the advantages in efficiency) due to the absymal energy density of batteries then you know why the internal combustion engine vehicle rules the world.

Who is this seaman daemon?

>The real world is about practicality.
The "real world" is about money, pleb.
You idealists are so cute.