by guerby on 3/14/25, 3:03 PM with 482 comments
by neves on 3/14/25, 9:40 PM
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog...
> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.
by fraserharris on 3/14/25, 9:24 PM
The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta
by calibas on 3/14/25, 9:05 PM
Not to disparage the talented scientists and engineers working on hydrogen power, but now that 20 years have passed I believe it was designed to fail.
by comte7092 on 3/14/25, 5:40 PM
1. Transit agencies have no way to reasonably validate what the future holds. From the standpoint of today, a hydrogen bus can be expected to replace a diesel bus 1 to 1, while battery electric is a 2 to 1 replacement. This might not be a huge issue except:
2. FTA regulations have strict requirements on how many spare busses may be kept at any time (defined by the ratio of peak vehicle usage vs the size of the overall fleet), doubling the size of the fleet blows this ratio out of the water.
3. It doesn’t matter what BYD offers or what’s possible in China, US transit agencies are required (FTA regs again!) to buy busses made in the US. American manufacturers do have somewhat decent battery electric products, but they are clearly not at the leading edge. With the proterra banktrupcy, there are limited competent suppliers in the market. To a large degree, gillig et al do get to decide what gets pushed into the market.
by sholladay on 3/15/25, 4:41 AM
But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.
And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.
If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.
by rsynnott on 3/14/25, 4:31 PM
I still can't quite get used to the electric buses. A 20 tonne double-decker bus should sound like it might explode at any moment; it is unnatural for them to move around more or less silently.
by jpm_sd on 3/14/25, 4:32 PM
by manchego on 3/14/25, 9:00 PM
by andix on 3/14/25, 8:18 PM
Hydrogen is produced by the big oil and gas companies. By pushing hydrogen vehicle instead of battery electric vehicles they stay in business.
They market hydrogen as a green alternative to oil, although most hydrogen is currently produced from fossil sources, and this won't change soon (next 10 years).
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on 3/14/25, 5:25 PM
"Electric is short range, fuel is expensive, guess I have to pick one"
The ideal drivetrain was invented over 20 years ago by Toyota and apparently nobody but me and Honda noticed it!
by jillesvangurp on 3/14/25, 7:41 PM
It's actually pretty simple to figure out. Making hydrogen takes energy. You lose some of the energy making the hydrogen. This is not a fixable problem. At least not unless you break the laws of thermodynamics.
When you have created hydrogen, you lose more energy compressing the energy. Then you have to transport it to wherever it's going to be pumped into the vehicle ... both of which take more energy. Then it goes into a fuel cell, which loses more energy. All these losses multiply. And if you know your maths, you know that multiplying numbers smaller than 1 means the result gets smaller and smaller. These losses are significant.
And we're comparing it with putting the energy into a battery directly. It has inherently better round trip energy. Even if hydrolyzers, and the infrastructure to store, compress, and transport hydrogen were free (which they are not), using hydrogen would still be more expensive than that. Because it wastes more of the energy that goes in. So, in addition to the energy losses, you also need to deal with infrastructure cost. On top of regular energy infrastructure.
Anyway, that's all theory. For practice, just look at market price of hydrogen. Most of that stuff is of the dirty grey hydrogen variety creating that wastes a lot of methane. So much, that it would be cleaner to just use the hydrogen in a combustion engine in the bus and you'd have less CO2 emissions. Expending more methane to make hydrogen to have less emissions makes no logical sense.
If you are using grey hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than methane. Nothing can change that. If you are using green hydrogen, it is more expensive per mile than battery electric. Nothing can change that either. That's just physics and simple economics. Yes there are some innovations in this space happening that reduce the gap a little. But it's never going to be enough.
Right now it's not even close. Unless somebody is subsidizing the hydrogen fuel, you'd be paying way more per mile than with diesel. And not just a little bit. And a common reason to switch from diesel to BEV is that it actually costs way less per mile than diesel. So, instead of saving money, you are spending more money.
Subsidies are hiding the true cost of hydrogen. That's the only reason there are some vehicles on the road. As soon as the subsidies dry up, hydrogen transport use cases evaporate. There are of course plenty of other use cases where hydrogen is needed that make much more economical sense. Using scarce and expensive hydrogen for transport is a poor use of resources. The utopian world where we have vast amounts of hydrogen surpluses does not exist.
by Beijinger on 3/15/25, 4:22 PM
"stuck with 19 buses that they have to drive a long way to refuel at great overall expense, something I wrote about this week."
This seems like a problem that can be solved, but it is a hen and egg problem. Not enough refusing options, system less attractive. Electric cars had this too.
I wonder why city buses have this problem. I am not aware that city buses use regular gas station, I always assumed that they get refilled in their "home base". This would make the refueling infrastructure not very challenging.
Is hydrogen the future for cars? Manufacturers haven’t given up on it yet https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/is-hydrogen-the-future-f...
by genev on 3/14/25, 4:27 PM
by egypturnash on 3/14/25, 7:36 PM
I'm just gonna assume the rest of the article is from the same source and close this tab.
by ZeroGravitas on 3/14/25, 4:00 PM
The article only makes this claim via a link to another article:
> the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), is riddled with conflicts of interest and bias toward hydrogen.
In which they reveal gas pipeline companies and fuel cell manufacturers are members of that org and on its board.
by someonehere on 3/15/25, 2:34 AM
If green energy were a money making business, the oil companies would get into it tomorrow.
by javiramos on 3/14/25, 7:18 PM
by ninalanyon on 3/14/25, 9:24 PM
by hatthew on 3/14/25, 7:18 PM
Isn't waste heat pretty much free by definition?
by esjeon on 3/16/25, 12:12 PM
by acc_297 on 3/15/25, 1:30 PM
But to be fair busses and trains and other public transit that does fixed routes every day is the perfect bench for any clean energy drive train that needs real world testing.
Also public money should never be overly shy of coordinating with companies who are trying to in good faith to solve our climate crisis.
Some discussion on this thread about hydrogen being a poison pill promoted by oil interests which I don’t really know about.
Electric bus programs have been broadly successful and no doubt have contributed in a real way to our understanding of that technology.
by tim333 on 3/14/25, 8:11 PM
>34-bus expansion, jointly funded by Brighton & Hove Buses and Surrey County Council, bringing their total hydrogen fleet to 54 vehicles – the largest hydrogen bus operation in the UK. https://drivinghydrogen.com/2025/02/04/hydrogen-buses-34-new...
I'm not sure how cost effective it is compared to battery though.
by WalterBright on 3/14/25, 4:34 PM
The investors are getting bilked.
by londons_explore on 3/14/25, 10:57 PM
That approach turns this technology maturation and cost risk into a market, and those with most expertise can then put their own money on the line to help everyone make the right decision.
by aagd on 3/14/25, 7:52 PM
by fredgrott on 3/15/25, 11:34 AM
https://www.science.org/content/article/new-type-water-split...
In production in probably 5 years from now...
by scojjac on 3/15/25, 12:19 AM
by jimnotgym on 3/15/25, 9:09 AM
I heard 100kw. If I have 100 buses charging overnight at 100kw I guess I need 10Mw grid connection? Is that an easy thing to get to a city bus depot in the US. In the UK I believe that would require moving to a location with a HV line and building a sub-station.
by fifilura on 3/15/25, 7:04 AM
They are very common here in Sweden.
The engine is more or less the same as a gasoline/diesel engine.
The biogas can be (and is) locally produced by food/farming waste or similar but can also run on fossile gas.
And for the buses it is no problem to carry the somewhat bulky cylinders on the roof.
by cf100clunk on 3/14/25, 6:12 PM
If the goal is anything-but-diesel-or-gasoline/petrol, the use of propane (a fossil fuel that is a byproduct of oil and gas refining) is a well-understood, well-implemented practice. I am not advocating for propane as a primary solution, but rather as part of the journey towards truly clean vehicle emissions and the ramp-down of heavily polluting fossil fuel refining. Propane and the equipment to operate engines with it are available today, and we have the knowledge going back over a century to implement it successfully.
BTW, I wish I could find the article from the 1970s discussing how Ford Motor Company engineers had converted a brand-new 1960s Lincoln to propane and ran it with 100% synthetic motor oil, never changing the oil or filter. After 500,000 miles of daily use, they stripped the engine down to its parts and found it to be shiny and not exhibiting the expected amount of wear seen in usual engines of those years with much lower mileage. I'd have to pour through old magazines for that story, but life gets in the way, so let's treat my recollection as apocryphal.
by ThinkBeat on 3/15/25, 3:34 PM
by guerby on 3/14/25, 3:03 PM
by from-nibly on 3/15/25, 6:26 AM
Just like public companies don't sell stuff they sell shares.
Just like private equity doesn't buy companies they buy loans they can disappear by defaulting a company.
by jimnotgym on 3/15/25, 7:45 AM
1) hydrogen buses must be more expensive than electric. I don't see how that is true. Hydrogen uses an ICE that is much cheaper to purchase than batteries + motor. Of course early stage niche designs might be more expensive, but that doesn't mean that it will be more expensive at scale
2) somehow the hydrogen fuel must be a long way from the bus depot, because it was in one case. Bus depots often have their own diesel, why couldn't they have hydrogen?
3) it is much quicker to refuell a hydrogen vehicle than a battery vehicle. Superchargers can recharge a piddly car battery in 20 minutes. How much larger would they need to be to recharge a bus and how long would it take? How big a grid connection would you need to have 100 buses on charge overnight. It doesn't sound trivial at all
4) depreciation. An electric car depreciates very quickly because the battery lifetime is short. Think of how many batteries a bus would need, and write that down over 3 years. A hydrogen bus would have a similar lifetime to a diesel however
5) JCB who make earth moving and farm equipment realised that batteries would never have the energy density for those uses has gone all-in on hydrogen and has demonstrators of its main machines, a hydrogen bowser that can be brought to the field and a very compact hydrogen plant with solar panels that can allow a major user like a bus company to make their own hydrogen on site.
6) hydrogen can be produced using surplus electricity, making good use of renewables by storing the energy.
I would say that rather than transport operators demonstrating naive thinking, they have demonstrated their own.
I'm also suprised by the people on here think that this must be the result of advicacy from the petrochemical industry, then going on to shill for the electric vehicle industry themselves. The electric car industry is only alive due to subsidy, and is only just alive at that.
by kumarski on 3/15/25, 4:59 AM
by emchammer on 3/15/25, 12:55 AM
by gblargg on 3/14/25, 9:38 PM
by bawolff on 3/15/25, 5:44 AM
by LatteLazy on 3/15/25, 2:22 AM
People keep falling for the myth that we are making progress (we’re not).
Hydrogen powered busses are just a specific case of a much much larger communication/coordination issue…
by dathinab on 3/15/25, 8:23 PM
To be clear no necessary corruption of the people in agencies themself,
- but of the people consulting them
- and/or influential investors in a sunk cost fallacy where they think they still can save their investments
- again often a place they ended up in due to corruption, not necessary them themself being corrupt but other which gave them wrong consultancy
Even when I looked into the topic around 14~ years ago it was very clear that hydrogen will likely not be a competitive technology for cars "in general", through maybe somewhat competitive in some niche (i.e. trucks). But the thing is if you considered marked dynamics back then it never looked long side promising. As whatever wins outside of the niche (batteries) will get so much more traction weather it's infrastructure or science investments.
Now the question is what kind of corruption?
Russian Money (and any other natural gas exporter, but in Germany mainly Russian Money)
Again not necessary Russia directly going to people and bribing them. But mainly by using co-investments, potentially with obfuscated source, to convince people that a lot of other reliable investors are investing into it and therefor you should, too. Which, with a bit of more direct corruption, is quite an efficient strategy to push investments into a specific direction. Because the more you convince ("in general" independent) investors to invest into hydrogen the more they will lobby for hydrogen themself.
Now the key question here is why would Russia want to convince countries to use hydrogen as a "green future technology"?
Because why it technically looks like it can work, _it practically does not_!
This isn't even about hydrogen cars by themself.
But about hydrogen production, the simplest cheapest way to produce hydrogen is from natural gas in a non green way. While you can produce it green it has a pretty bad efficiency and exiting (and long term planed!!!) infrastructure is barely enough to move the hydrogen usage from other industries which do not it anyway to green methane.
And while lobbyist go on and on about how it's just a question to spin up the infrastructure it not only doesn't seem to happen even ~14 years ago it didn't seem that likely and today it's very clear it won't happen because it makes no sense. I mean sure e.g. Australia will likely produce a ton of green Hydrogen in the future, but again in comparison of what is needed to move all trucks & busses etc. to it it's not that relevant.
This doesn't mean there is no use ever for green hydrogen (like mentioned various existing industries need hydrogen). But today you can very clearly say it doesn't make sense for PKWs (full stop) and due to constant battery improvements in all areas and high investments into future improvements and not having reached a wall in science in that are it has moved from "it might make sense for some decades for trucks" to, nah, seems dump for trucks, too.
So to sum up:
- It seems doable enough so that (potentially corrupt) lobbyist can be convincing.
- Russia spend a ton of money in co-investing into research to push research in the EU and especially Germany in that direction. Implicitly making it look like a good investment deal.
- Then a lot of people which can influence political decisions got stuck with it as they are worried about losing their investment and worse, having missed the window to get a foothold into the actual future technologies.
- Then this people using their vast influence, including e.g. the "Springer Verlag" (most influential new publisher in Germany).
- Leading to a loop where more people get mislead into tinging it's good and invest themself, and then lobby for it and then worry to lose their investment so now lobby against any of it's competition.
- And even companies and politicians not stuck in that loop in any way might thing it's not "viable" and as such don't push against that nonsense.
by m463 on 3/14/25, 9:00 PM
by anenefan on 3/14/25, 3:53 PM
by abetancort on 3/15/25, 12:07 AM