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Theres something clickbaity and missing from this article, I encourage watching youtubers like 'mirai club' for better info. What i recall from his videos is:

- The Mirai made financial sense AS A LEASE for folks in Southern California back in 2022 (possibly 2023) because:

  - Car prices in general (including EVs) were fairly highly priced at the time due to demand, the chip shortage, etc.

  - There were clean vehicle incentives to get a Toyota Mirai, including things like a hydrogen fuel fill up card to cover expenses.

  - At the time there was some assumptions that hydrogen fuel costs would go down over time, but they actually went up.

The article does talk about the lack of investment in hydrogen infrastructure, this is true and theres been a huge split between announced infrastructure investments and what has actually happened (see https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3labfzi... for a chart going through 2021-2024). The current US political situation and its impact on clean energy probably doesn't help either.

The Mirai was _only_ available as a lease, back in the 2018 timeframe anyway, in Southern California.

There were also really good financing deals during Covid. Net for me after all costs after resale was $1k for the years I owned the car (the 2nd gen).

But I got in near the bottom and got out before the market for it dumped.

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.

The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.

The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.

Agreed on "green steel".

In general, "green hydrogen" makes the most sense if used as a chemical feedstock that replace natural gas in industrial processes - not to replace fossil fuels or be burned for heat.

On paper, hydrogen has good energy density, but taking advantage of that in truth is notoriously hard. And for things that demand energy dense fuels, there are many less finicky alternatives.

> , and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.

Even if you assume that is true. It will always be more expensive then straight electricity.

> The more sensible project were the green steel project.

Not sure I agree. I think Boston Metal solution is better long term carbon free steel solution.

> natural gas with bio fuels

There was a huge 'bio' fuels hype around like 15-20 years ago if I remember correctly. Huge amount of controversy and false claims with politicians support.

Funny how this now comes back again and nothing was learned.

I had to Google what is green hydrogen. It is hydrogen produced by electrolysis.

If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?

> If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?

Yes, if you actually have the batteries.

Between around 2014-2024, the common talking point was "we're not making enough batteries", and the way the discussions went it felt like the internal models of people saying this had the same future projections of batteries as the IEA has infamously produced for what they think future PV will be: https://maartensteinbuch.com/2017/06/12/photovoltaic-growth-...

I've not noticed people making this claim recently. Presumably the scale of battery production has become sufficient to change the mood music on this meme.

To be fair, there are still plenty of people on HN talking about lack of battery capacity as a reason to delay solar/wind rollout; I suspect it'll take a bit more time for the new reality to sink in fully.

The fossil industry was always suspiciously keen on green hydrogen - partly because the path to green hydrogen would likely have involved a long detour through grey and blue hydrogen, and partly because it gave them an excuse to lobby against phasing out natural gas for domestic heating/cooking ("we need to retain that infrastructure to enable the hydrogen economy!").

You can see the same thing happening in their support for Carbon Capture and Storage - "we're going to need the oil producers to enable carbon sequestration, so we might as well keep drilling new wells to keep their skills fresh!"...

The value proposition of hydrogen is energy density. Batteries have low energy per unit of volume and awful energy density by unit of mass. You will never, ever, fly across the Pacific on a battery powered aircraft. Transoceanic shipping is also not feasible with batteries (current and proposed battery powered shopping lanes are short hops of a couple hundred kilometers or less).

The Toyota Mirai is a passenger vehicle, not an airplane nor a transatlantic container ship.

Sure, but if the economics of hydrogen motors worked out for planes and shipping, the argument is that it would also economically work out for cars.

Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen, but smaller passenger vehicles will stay on batteries. The nature of hydrogen containment favors larger capacity, on account of better volume to surface area ratios.

Hydrogen was marketed as a stopgap until batteries are good enough. Well, batteries are good enough for trucks now:

https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...

Once you go battery electric, you never go back. It's the most efficient way to move vehicles.

Many jurisdictions require that commercial drivers take a 30 minute break every 4 hours. Those that don't should. Those stops make battery trucking feasible.

And if you want to stop for 5 minutes instead of 30 you can use battery swapping solutions like the one Janus uses.

Batteries are feasible for long distance trucking today.

Green Hydrogen trucking uses 3X as much electricity as using it directly. Trucking's biggest expense is fuel, so that will be the killer factor ensuring battery will beat hydrogen for long distance trucking.

Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe.

The problem is that those mandated breaks are mandated and happen (with a small amount of wiggle room) wherever the truck happens to be at that moment. Rolling out enough charging infrastructure to make that work is an even more immense challenge than the already massive challenge of adding sufficient charging infrastructure to places like existing truck stops.

Imagine the cost of installing 1MW chargers on, say, half the wide spots on every highway.

Imagine the cost of installing massive diesel depots at half the wide spots on every highway. And yet, there they are. And we already have car chargers every few dozen miles on the highways. A larger number of smaller chargers adding up to likely a larger wattage than what the trucks need.

>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...]

They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.

Life expectancy. A hydrogen tank can be refilled forever. A battery is normally limited to a few thousand cycles. A truck, or airplane, is expected to be fueled/recharged daily for decades. A car is designed to survive the length of a standard lease. Those running fleets of trucks/aircraft will always care more than car owners about long-term ownership costs.

There is something called hydrogen embrittlement. Where hydrogen causes cracks in metal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

Yeah, Li-ion batteries already have comparable life cycles to hydrogen tanks 1-2k fills/recharges, _but_ batteries are improving rapidly and tanks are already a mature technology.

This isn't necessarily true. Most cylinders storing compressed gasses need to be hydrostatically tested in regular intervals to ensure continued safety and will need replacement when they fail. Other kinds of composite cylinders have fixed ages where they should be replaced.

Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means extra expense. A tank that needs inspection every decade is a known problem. A battery that looses 1% to 5% capacity every year, depending on weather/use factors, is harder math.

> In the transport industry

I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store.

> Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it.

Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after x number of miles with performance that changes with the wear of the part, there's a whole service manual of when to replace certain parts.

Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.

So tired with 2/32nds will have better grip in the rain than warmed up fresh ones? They just get better until they pop?

You're not being honest, and you know it.

Lol yes lets just casually plug into a 1.2MW charger and not take down the electricity of the nearby town while I charge my truck.

Nuclear trucks and boats are what I envision so maybe I'm the one who needs a reality check.

Around where I live, we have electric car ferries.

To avoid having to upgrade the grid massively, we use large battery banks shoreside which are being charged at a sustainable (to the grid) rate, then the ferry charges rapidly by depleting the battery bank, leaving the grid alone.

Works a charm.

Well, of course countries would have to modernize their electrical grid. But that's a good outcome.

I worked in one of the top 5 logistics companies in the world and I can recall them investing in electric trucks and charging infrastructure. Idea was to have strategically placed overhead lines that could recharge trucks without need for them to stop. Can't recall any mentions of hydrogen.

I have seen at least one stretch of highway in Germany that has overhead power lines for trucks. I think it's a very interesting concept: the big downside of batteries is slow charging (compared to diesel) and limited range. Charging while driving on highways would largely solve these downsides.

Cargo trolleybuses? An interesting idea.

True, but it is a good first step. Start small, increment to larger solutions.

I think that is the way it is headed. But you never know. Sometimes when comparing it helps me to reduce these things down to lower levels.

What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.

As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.

Before the introduction of 800V charging architectures, long charge-time for EVs was a big con. Hydrogen Cell vehicles were supposed to be EVs with drastically faster fill-up times. The tradeoff was more complex delivery infrastructure.

The faster fill-up time of hydrogen was mostly a lie. It could fuel a single vehicle at that speed, but then the filling station would need a significant time to build up enough pressure for the next one.

Turns out having to fill vehicles at 350 to 700 bar (5,000 to 10,000 psi) is a massive pain - especially when you can't keep it cryogenically cooled as a liquid in your storage tanks.

Yet, most of the world has had 3 phase (400V phase to phase) for ages. At the wall.

I don't know why you prefixed with "Yet" when I clearly spelt out the trade-offs and contrasts in distribution between H2 and electricity.

The Mirai goes from empty to full in 5 minutes or less - which compares very well with fossil-fuel burners. Now that every OEM has abandoned battery-swapping, how fast can EV batteries be safely charged with the said 3 phases? How long were the charging time when the Mirai was debuted? That was the trade-off Toyota was hoping to fall on the good side of, nevermind the Japanese government bet on hydrogen and whatever incentives are available for Toyota.

North America has 3 phase power for any necessary purpose (factory, DC rapid charging station etc). It's 480V/227V.

Green hydrogen is a way to ship solar power elsewhere that doesn't have it, similar to a battery, but with the advantage of being able to be piped/pumped/liquified etc.

For that purpose and for long-term storage of energy and for aircraft/spacecraft, synthetic hydrocarbons are much better.

Making synthetic hydrocarbons was already done at large scale during WWII, but it was later abandoned due to the availability of very cheap extracted oil.

So when oil was not available, the economy could still be based on synthetic hydrocarbons even with the inefficient methods of that time (it is true however that at that time they captured CO2 from burning coal or wood, not directly from the air, where it is diluted).

Today one could develop much more efficient methods for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 and water, but the level of investment for such technologies has been negligible in comparison with the money wasted for research in non-viable technologies, like using hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, or with the money spent in things like AI datacenters.

Liquid hydrogen loses 1% of its volume per day due to boil-off. Hydrogen is incredibly difficult to move without huge energy losses.

It would be moved by pipeline as a compressed gas, not as LH2. The US already has > 1000 miles of H2 pipelines.

All between co-located industrial generators and consumers. H2 pipelines are DOA due to the absurd compression costs.

A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.

It does, definitively.

If it does, then it also rules out long distance transmission of electrical power, as that is even more expensive. And the hydrogen advantage is even greater when one considers one can piggyback storage onto this system, as is done in natural gas pipelines. The electrical system would need additional batteries which are much more expensive per unit of storage capacity.

You are simply wrong on this. HVDC losses total ~5% for 1,000km, including step up and step down losses.

H2 will experience 20-30% over the same distance of natural gas line including compression and friction losses. DOA.

I said expensive. Total cost is the relevant metric, not efficiency.

https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81662.pdf

It's a common mistake to think efficiency dominates all other metrics. It's never just efficiency.

Capex for H2 pipelines is higher than new HVDC, and opex is 5-10x HVDC per MWh-km so you're just wrong on this.

H2 makes sense for feedstocks but not energy distribution.

> If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?

The Mirai uses the hydrogen in a fuel cell so it is an EV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

It looks like a reasonable idea, but it needs infrastructure.

Sweden has very little natural gas in its energy mix:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.

That was extremely stupid of them then. Hydrogen has been very good at one thing: subsidy extraction. But I don't think it was or ever will be a viable fuel for planetary transportation.

The idea was to transition from coal to natural gas while using solar and wind to reduce fuel consumption, thereby significantly reducing CO2 emissions. Any claims of hydrogen being burned were either lies to the public to get the gas plants built despite the non-green optics or lies to investors as part of a fraud scheme.

Hydrogen burning could have a place in an all-renewable grid: it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries. The last 5-10% of the grid becomes much cheaper to do with renewables if something like hydrogen (or other e-fuels) is available.

A competitor that might be even better is very long duration high temperature thermal storage, if capex minimization is the priority.

> it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries

Yes, but that's not the only option you have. With the absolutely awful efficiency of burning hydrogen you'd need to be building a massive amount of additional wind and solar - which in turn means you'll also have additional capacity available during cloudy wind-calm days, which means you'll need to burn substantially less hydrogen to generate power.

This leads to the irony that building the power-generation infrastructure for generating enough hydrogen means you won't even need to bother with the hydrogen part: you're basically just building enough solar that their overcast supply is enough to meet the average demand. As a bonus, you've now got a massive oversupply during sunny winter days and even more during summer days, so most of the year electricity will essentially be free.

Efficiency is not very important for very long duration storage. What's important is minimizing cost, which is dominated by capex, not by the cost of the energy used to charge the storage system. Paying more to charge it can make sense if that greatly reduces capex.

So, yes, more input energy is needed. So what?

Good context. It's a shame none of these people did high school chemistry.

I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.

I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.

But I think battery / biofuel is the future.

> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil

There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.

Yes, it's not the new oil, it's the same oil in "green" packaging. Plus some comforting lies about carbon capture.

Even if it was fully green, you can’t run an electrolysis system from home. So you have to buy it, so there’s a market and an expensive solution.

Electricity comes out the wall.

> Electricity comes out the wall.

Which unless you have solar, you are paying for. Even if you have solar, you are paying off the panels, batteries and inverter/chargers over a period of time.

Nothing is free.

What do you mean?

You can run electrolysis from a cup.

I know, I have one of those weird H shaped flasks with the plat electrodes.

I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.

You can’t make and store bulk hydrogen at home

You can’t.

I’m willing to give it a go.

I’ve got the excess solar from the rooftop solar panels, the electrical and electronic knowledge, and the gas fitter and metal fabrication experience.

I have an oil free air compressor, and anyone can by a helium based cryo-cooler. I have an account with an industrial gas supplier.

Just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

If Nile Red hasn’t blown his lab up by the time I publish this comment, I reckon I stand a chance.

Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50% and at worse half that. You have the horrendous efficiency of electrolysis and then the equally bad efficiency in the fuel cell.

Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.

Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.

Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.

> Round trip efficiency of hydrogen is at best 50%

In fact, even this level of efficiency may be sufficient. Solar panels are so cheap that if we had affordable, long-term energy storage options, even with such efficiency, we would have completely abandoned fossil fuels. But, unfortunately, storing hydrogen is difficult and dangerous. It is not like natural gas.

> It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.

Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security. It's like a placeholder for real corn so that if there's a crop failure for a couple of years, the low-iq idiots who think it's stupid to make ethanol from corn don't starve to death.

> Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security.

No, it's done to subsidize (bribe) farmers. Food security is merely the excuse used to sell it to the non-farmer voters.

Well... How successful is the US in cutting ethanol consumption on the years the corn production is lower?

Meat usually does that stabilizing. Fuel consumption not even is almost completely inelastic, but corn ethanol on the US is subsidized on every stage to the point that market forces become meaningless.

> Ethanol is produced from corn not for energy purposes, but for food security

Source? First time I read this, might make sense. Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.

> Although I don't see how this corn should be unaffected by crop failure if all other corn harvests failed.

I believe the argument being made here is "we need to overproduce corn in order to get food security; what can we do with the spare capacity in the good years given we're already eating too much?"

I don't know if this argument is correct, but I believe that's what's being claimed.

No air compressor can compress hydrogen, nowhere near the necessary tip velocity.

I hope you’re not my neighbor.

You're not my HOA

Same with nuclear. The most expensive form of electricity generation there is. No grid operator wants to touch it, but the nuclear industry has been very busy lobbying congress and both the current and last administration.

Nuclear is incredibly energy dense, can be stockpiled for a long time and is extremely safe. Yes its expensive but its one those industries any serious nation needs to subsidise for the energy security it offers and the countless high skill jobs it fosters.

Well, no it's never been extremely safe by any stretch of the imagination.

That's just an extreme interpretation of the way it's not as extremely unsafe as it could be.

Plus at the rate it's being addressed by a few enthusiasts, it could be getting remarkably safer, maybe even in one person's lifetime someday.

Developments may be positive but it makes the most sense to be realistic and avoid the completely unfounded hype involved.

Plus when nuclear works best the high-skill jobs resulting have to be as non-countless as possible, that's one of the big factors which might someday allow the economics to be less unfavorable.

It's extremely safe, except in the event of a black swan event, in which case it becomes extremely unsafe.

This is compared to, for example, a coal plant, which is quite unsafe to be near constantly, all the time.

Pull back from the extremes a little bit and it's an excellent synopsis.

Keep in mind an off-white swan can be pretty bad too :)

The main thing about such uncommon or even unlkely events, is that nobody knows what to do about them.

I suspect it's all a moot point.

Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.

10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.

Well, this is just boomer lunatic anti-nuclear FUD. It is not what the numbers say.

Do the math again.

The numbers say that nothing is extremely safe, and experience has shown that having more maturity may not be necessary to recognize that, but it helps.

It just hurts the case for positive progress to mindlessly exaggerate. Especially to the absolute max.

Plus I'm not one of the ones who follow any boomer lunatic trends when I can come up with my own which people of many ages have adopted quite a bit.

Remember wacky lunatic science turns into regular science more often than you think once the dust settles.

But the advantage of that doesn't really depend on elderliness, mainly dedication to science.

Any age can do it if you try.

Well, maybe not if you're completely non-gifted in some way or another.

The only reason nuclear is expensive is because of ignorant and neurotic ativists FUD and the idiot politics listening to them.

There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:

Bind it to various length carbon chains.

When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.

Environmentalists will love it!

And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.

Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which makes the world warmer on average. It also lowers the PH levels of the oceans.

If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.

The major problem with hydrocarbons today is that we are releasing carbon dioxide stored hundreds of millions of years ago.

If, theoretically, you could produce hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere, then it could be a substantial reduction in net carbon dioxide being added; and it would be compatible with the fuel infrastructure of today.

What must have been the composition of the atmosphere all those hundreds of millions of years ago for all that carbon dioxide to have been removed from the atmosphere and sequestered as biological matter, to then be buried and reacted to form vast quantities of hydrocarbons.

The bind moggles.

Your mind should boggle. It's all pretty amazing.

2.5 billion years ago the earth would have been uninhabitable to most modern life. Single celled life evolved in those conditions and began creating glucose and oxygen from CO2 and water. When those primitive lifeforms died some of them became oil and the CO2 was sequestered.

Over time the CO2 levels dropped until about 20 million years ago the CO2 levels fell to about 300ppm. That's when life as we know it really took off. Yes, it took BILLIONS of years to get there.

Humans have only existed for about 200k years. During that time our CO2 levels have mostly been below about 280ppm. The are now at 429ppm and are rising exponentially. [0]

[0] https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2

What role, if any, did carbonate mineral formation have in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

In the beginning, the oceans were acidic, because they were formed by the condensation of volcanic gases, which consisted of water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride (i.e. hydrochloric acid) and a few other less abundant acids.

In time, the oceans have become less and less acidic, by dissolving from the volcanic silicate rocks the oxides of the alkaline metals and alkali earth metals, i.e. mainly of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. This dissolution has affected both the rocks on the bottom of the oceans and the continental rocks, where rain has washed the soluble oxides, transporting them through rivers to the oceans.

At some point, so much of the alkaline and alkali earth metals from the volcanic rocks have been dissolved that the oceans have become slightly alkaline instead of acidic, like they are today.

At that time, the carbonates of calcium and magnesium have precipitated from sea water, forming sedimentary rocks. Also around that time, many living beings have evolved mechanisms for controlling this precipitation process, in order to build skeletons for themselves. This has resulted in the fact that many sedimentary rocks are not formed by direct precipitation from sea water, but by precipitation from sea water into skeletons, followed by depositing on the bottom the skeletons of dead living beings.

Now, with increasing concentration of CO2, there is the danger that the oceans will become so acidic as to reverse this, dissolving again a part of the carbonate rocks, including the skeletons of many living beings that are made of carbonates.

There is an equilibrium between the concentration of CO2 in water and in air, depending on temperature and pressure. When the CO2 from water precipitated with calcium or magnesium into rocks, that has drawn more CO2 from air into the water, until a new equilibrium was reached, at a reduced concentration of CO2 in the air. If carbonates would be dissolved by acidic sea water, that would liberate CO2, a part of which would go into the air, further increasing the concentration there.

Thus the formation or destruction of carbonate rocks and skeletons adds a positive feedback to the changes of the CO2 concentration in the air, which has the potential to be bad for us.

Even worse is the fact that this is only one of multiple positive feedback mechanisms that can be triggered by changes in the CO2 concentration in the air, which make very difficult or impossible any long term predictions.

I am fairly certain they teach the gist of all of that in even in school-level textbooks on biology/geography.

Hopefully they never stop.

adrian puts it quite well though.

Keeping that in mind;

>What role, if any, did carbonate mineral formation have in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

Looks like as much as it possibly could.

It was the primary driver until life happened. Then life was, and now they exist in a delicate balance.

I get the idea that the throwaway account was suggesting we can just "do whatever forever" without consequences though, and that's just not true. Most CO2 sequestration on earth is now biological in origin and has been for a very long time.

It's possible to synthesise hydrocarbon analogues of petroluem-based fuels. The problem to date has been that this isn't cost-competitive with petroleum, though the difference is narrower than you might expect. Most famously, a Google X Project attempted this and succeeded technically, but the economics were unfavourable: Project Foghorn: <https://x.company/projects/foghorn/>. Both Germany and South Africa have performed synfuel production (from coal) at industrial scale since the 1930s / 1950s, respectively. Using non-fossil carbon is largely the same chemistry; the process does in fact scale.

Fischer-Tropsch and Sabatier process can both operate with scavenged CO2. There's been some work since the 1990s utilising seawater as a CO2 source, with CO2 capture being far more efficient than from atmospheric sources.

Whilst hydrocarbons have numerous downsides (whether sourced from fossil or renewable sources), they are also quite convenient, exceedingly well-proven, and tremendously useful. In some applications, particularly marine and aviation transport, there are few if any viable alternatives.

I've commented on this numerous times at HN over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.

I hadn't heard of Fischer-Tropsch. Looks like it usually works based on gassification of biomass or existing fossil fuels, so it seems at first glance that it has the same negative externalities as just burning the source material doesn't it?

The Sabatier process looks like it might have much less of that! Very cool stuff. I would love to see a future in which we use uninhabitable, non-arable, desert land to generate cheap synfuel that we can ship wherever needed.

Fischer-Tropsch is based on the reaction of carbon monoxide with dihydrogen (free hydrogen). This mixture is known as syngas.

While now the cheapest way is to make syngas from methane or from coal, it is possible to make syngas from carbon dioxide that reacts with electrolytic hydrogen.

It is also possible to make equivalent precursors of synthetic hydrocarbons by the electrolysis of carbon dioxide in water.

For these 2 methods, you do not need any fossil fuels, but only electrical energy for electrolysis.

Where the energetic efficiency is still very low is when you want to use clean air as the source of CO2, instead of using a concentrated source of CO2. With very cheap energy, i.e. solar energy that is used at the point of capture, it should still be possible to devise a method of capture for CO2 from the air. Many such methods are known, their only problem being a high energy consumption per the amount of captured CO2, so they are impractical with energy that must be bought from the grid, but I do not see why they could not work when coupled directly with solar panels.

Factually correct, but you also missed the joke.

It was only kinda a joke. It's a joke in the same way that uncle on Facebook makes jokes. You know the one.

Take The Great Barrier Reef for example.

There’s more of it now than in the reefs recorded history.

Well, 2022 data:

https://www.aims.gov.au/information-centre/news-and-stories/...

Bad news, there has been a fourth great bleaching event going on since January of 23. This time 80+% of all reefs have been impacted and the consensus seems to be that its unlikely there will be any reefs left at all before too long.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-re...

Yes yes, The Sky Is Falling™.

All the more reason to give our ounce great nation away to fuck wits who think shooting up Jews is a reasonable idea, making electricity expensive chasing a target that will have approximately no impact on global carbon emissions and further drive manufacturing out of the country, all the while making even my generation (Xillenials) worse off now than we were ten years ago.

Young people and the working poor? They can freeze in the dark on the streets, fuck them.

Turn up unannounced and utter the shibboleth asylum seeker and we roll out the red carpet. Low interest loans so they can start businesses, and priory social housing. Fuck the locals.

And you cum guzzlers keep voting for more of it.

There’s only so much ideology we can take. Check One Nations recently polling.

I’m encouraging young people to get in to the trades, especially brick laying and masonry because if things keep going they way they are…

We’re going to need more walls.

Know what I’m sayin’.

I like the false equivalence between reducing air pollution and not doing hate crimes against Jewish people. I haven’t asked them all individually, but I’m pretty sure my Jewish friends all enjoy breathing clean air.

You’re going to have to explain how you read from what I wrote.

From the site guidelines:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's quite impressive to quote the guidelines to someone when your first post breaks a whole bunch of them.

If you can’t be bothered helping, maybe just shut ya ugly face?

Where’s a report button when you need one?

I think you've been listening to the wrong people. That's a whole lot of dog whistles in that screed.

Right, don’t address the substance of the message, just drive-by-dismiss the concerns of a growing segment of voters.

My comment you responded to didn’t happen overnight.

You’re welcome to go through my comment history and address my concerns as detailed over the previous thirteen years, many of which are much more level headed and many contain references to thinkers much more intelligent and way more eloquent than anything I’ll ever write.

Yes yes, The Sky Is Falling™. :)

Haha! Yeah, embarrassing to say that then go on to write that screed.

Time for a top-up!

> Know what I’m sayin’.

I do, and if I were you I would stop to think about your priors. You have stacked an awful lot of ideas on top of each other to build a world view that has lies, misinformation, and unsound science at the base of it. Worse, a lot of it is selfish, but in a way that only works if the entire global economy is a zero sum game. Enlightened self-interest can be right, and even noble, but only if you know the game well enough to comprehend why altruism is still important, and you don't. The world is NOT a zero sum game, and this kind of self-interest is the bad kind.

Some of the logic at the top of your pyramid would be sound, if the bottom wasn't a pile of mush. A few minor points:

1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity). It's been that way for awhile now, but one particular bubble tries really hard to stop people from learning that. If cost is your concern you should be pushing for more solar, and less of the fuel you literally set fire to and have to keep digging up forever until it runs out.

2) Giving money to hostile Arab nations who hate you is not going to stop anyone from "took 'er jorbs"ing you. In fact, you would have more money if your car didn't literally burn your money constantly and also require expensive oil changes and other maintenance constantly.

3) Pretty much everything you said about loans and housing is based on absolute fabrications, or extreme exaggerations. Even if it weren't, other people receiving assistance doesn't actually cost you anything. The national debt has INCREASED at a record pace under Trump, exactly as it does during every Republican presidency, and it's not because Trump loves helping people so much.

Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913. During my lifetime there has never been a Republican president who was fiscally conservative in the slightest. Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.

4) There's nothing wrong with the trades, if your body can physically handle it for 40-50 years. It's good and honest work, and we need more folks to go into them. It's also likely to be more stable and less demanding than the kind of work most of us here do.

5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots. Robots are getting cheaper every day. Moving them here will get us a few (even richer) billionaires. Not more jobs (at least not the kind you're probably thinking of). It will also increase the cost of ALL THE THINGS.

The worst part of this mistake is that while normal people spend most of their money billionaires spend only a miniscule fraction of their income. Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time, or is engaged in parasitic interest gathering via obscure financial instruments. Giving money to billionaires is kind of like throwing it in the garbage. Giving it to the middle class is good for everyone, because they buy things and drive demand.

Lastly, I'm also a Xennial, and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?

Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.

> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now

No, that's simply not true.

It's cheaper for MOST of the year, but overall, it's more expensive. Because you can't just tell people, "Well, now, during this cold January, please don't waste electricity because our panels are producing almost nothing." You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.

> Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.

It's very strange. In all cases of interaction with the USAID that I know about directly from those interacting with it, and not from media sources, in EVERY case it was liberal propaganda or direct anti-Trump propaganda. And none of the starving children that I know about directly from those who interacted with them, and not from the media, have ever received any food aid from.

I know, of course, that this is an anecdotal case, but I prefer to trust people with whom I am at least superficially acquainted, rather than media companies that are apparently run by pedophiles.

> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots.

Because the era of US hegemony is ending, and at some point you simply won't be able to live off the rest of the world. At that point, you'll either have production or you'll simply starve to death. Because food (and robots) don't fall from the sky. And if you don't produce it (and don't take it from the rest of the world through your hegemony), you'll starve and die.

> Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time

American workers spend as much money EACH YEAR as billionaires accumulated over generations (mostly in the form of productive capacity, not idling in the piles)

> and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?

The best choice is to rob the rest of the world and live off them? Well, congratulations on making the better choice that allows you, unlike the REST OF THE WORLD, not work for less than $2 an hour (as 90% of the Earth's population does, thanks to American hegemony).

You do not need backup with fossil fuels.

You need backup with hydrocarbon fuels synthesized from water and CO2, like all the living beings have done for billions of years.

Storing energy in hydrocarbons has a lower efficiency for short term storage, but it has a better efficiency for long term storage, in which case batteries would auto discharge.

So energy storage must use a combination of batteries for short term (for a few days at most) together with methods useful for long term (from a few months to many years), including hydrocarbon synthesis, pumped water, etc.

Synthesizing hydrocarbons from concentrated CO2 has already been done at large scale almost a century ago. Now there are much better methods, e.g. using the electrolysis of CO2.

The most difficult part remains capturing the CO2 from normal air and not from exhaust gases where it is concentrated.

This is a difficult engineering problem, but one solved by bacteria billions of years ago, and which probably would already have some good solution if any serious and well-funded research effort would have been done in this direction, instead of only talking about how it would be desirable but without any concrete action.

> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels.

I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas.

How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark.

As you said, in practice you either need batteries that don’t exist and would be prohibitively expensive because they would sit idle most the year where only hours to days of backup are required, but in winter you need weeks of storage and the output from the panels are significantly reduced so you need to massively overbuild…

OR you need to build gas peaker plants, which also sit idle most the year, but need to be run frequently and maintained to ensure they’re ready to run when needed.

The real world data is available for anyone who wants to run the numbers.

I was in Adelaide and participated in the discussions where Dr Barry Brook[1] and others ran the numbers over ten years ago. Exhaustively ran the numbers, both with real world data from recently built solar and wind, and optimistic projections of future improvements

The fundamentals haven’t changed. Even if the panels themselves were free, the amount or steel and concrete required to replace total global energy requirements with solar and wind is… it’s incomprehensible.

If I recall correctly, it worked out to requiring something absurd like more copper, steel, and concrete, than humans have produced to date (2013 figures) since the start of the Industrial Revolution, every year for the next fifty years just to replace existing energy production and distribution infrastructure, and in so doing we would double or triple atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. We’d then have to work out how to pull those emissions back out of the atmosphere, which wound require further resource use to produce the infrastructure to generate the energy required to extract and sequester the carbon dioxide.

Compare to what we’re doing now which has barely scratched the surface in replacing global energy requirements, with no reduction in carbon dioxide levels.

It all makes a pretty strong case for existing nuclear technology (Gen IV / Gen IV+) to give us time (hundreds of years with existing know uranium reserves) to perfect fast breeder technology so we can use Thorium as nuclear fuel for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist)

A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source.

But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable renewable sources like solar and wind that definition is now insufficient and under counts the true like-for-like cost of solar.

By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.

> By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.

This is wildly incorrect. Batteries have gotten cheaper, solar has gotten cheaper, and even accounting for storage solar now wins by a wide margin even in "wintery" climates.[0]

Ten years ago you were right, but the cost has been falling by a huge percentage every year for about 15 years straight now. There will never be another time when it makes sense to dig up fossil fuels, ship them all over the world, process them, and then set them on fire when we can just slap up a solar panel and store the power for something approximating free on a 20+ year timeline.

Even if we discount the tax breaks (which we should since Trump is a doofus) both the LCOE and LCOS (levelized cost of storage) of PV + battery are lower than for natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. Wind beats it by a small amount but less of our land is suitable for wind.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...

You are literally wrong about almost everything you've just said and have been for many years.[0]

There's a great video on Youtube from Technology Connections on youtube if that's more your speed. He talks a bit about how you're being lied to about it regularly and explains the technology a bit.[1] You really should watch it as he explicitly addresses each of your issues here including "what about the batteries."

Solar is literally, and provabley, cheaper than gas. Including the cost of batteries, which are recyclable. That's why something like 96% of investment in new energy is in solar or wind now. It's not activists, it's literally the cheapest way to do it now.

> over ten years ago.

There's your problem. The cost has been coming down by over 90% per year for the last decade. It WAS more expensive, a decade ago. The fundamentals HAVE changed. The panels ARE almost free, and the amount of steel and concrete are negligible.

[0] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un-energy-transiti...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

All in good spirit:

> 1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity)

You’re going to have to show your calculations with references for LCOE - Levelised Cost of Electricity. I’ve run the numbers, you can find them and references in my comment history, and I’m not impressed with solar. Solar needs batteries, or some other type of storage, and there are roughly none of those in service so we can only theoretically predict life time costs. I can’t be fucked repeating myself here at the moment for the benefit of someone who thinks I’m a right wing nut job or whatever. Wind too.

> 2) Giving money <blah blah> more money

Again, you’re going to have to show the numbers here. Prove that an equivalent electric vehicle I need for my job is going to be cheaper on a total cost of ownership basis. This is going to be difficult to prove as there isn’t an equivalent EV that can do the miles per day required. And even if there is, can it do it for 500,000km on the same engine and gearbox / battery whatever? Without getting StacheD[1] in my garage while I sleep? It remains to be seem.

> 3) Pretty much …

No no no. The correct answer is: I’m an Australian living in Australia, reading my own governments policies, the social welfare entitlements to new arrivals, seeing the result of zoning restrictions across the road, and experiencing the results of the locals having a fertility rate below replacement, 100,000 abortions a year, resulting in the “need” to import 500,000 foreigners a year from counties no one wants to live in. I actually prefer white culture, I think it’s better, and that we should import more people from the countries we traditionally have, including India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam, and the Europeans too. I’m not racists, I just like the level of multiculturalism we had not this shoot up a Jewish festival / pro Palestine bullshit.[2]

4) There's nothing wrong with the trades

No shit cunty. I am a tradesman with … 28 years experience in and adjacent to fabrication / manufacturing / primary industries. I’ve also worked as remote-hands for the likes of Google and Akamai in data centres, so a bit of technical experience. I also have some higher education qualifications, and acquaintances in academia.

> 5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs?

Now listen here mate ;) because lots of people, but particularly men, some women too, enjoy making things, breaking things, building things, and getting dirty. We’ve been doing it for millennia and it’s got us this far. It’s my belief that taking that away from society is going to turn out to be a general bad idea, if it ever eventuates.

> I'm better off now than 10 years ago

So am I, for various reasons. Mostly luck really. But that doesn’t negate the numbers. Houses cost more years of income, food costs more hours of labour, eggs cost more than chickens! on a per kg basis. Rent around here tends to cost more than one third of income, which is the definition of housing stress. I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a young person starting out today. The young people around here who are winning are in the trades and come from families who made at least some good choices and can offer finance from the Bank of Mum & Dad, so there’s some hope for ‘em.

I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t smoke.

____

Edited to add:

> Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.

It sort of doesn’t though. Most of the effects of alcohol consumption that result in a hangover are caused by an accumulation of acetaldehyde[5] in the blood, the clearance of which is rate limited by an aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme[6]. That is to say, the clearance of acetaldehyde isn’t rate limited by water …

And the dehydration hypothesis can be debunked empirically by anyone who drinks, for example, beer, which, around here, tends to contain less than 7% alcohol by volume, so beer drinkers are getting a lot of water already and yet they get hungover too. So it can’t be the water.

You can’t say I’m not thorough, and if you check my comment history you’ll find a multi-year period where most of my comments contained extensive references, because that used to be the done thing around here.

_____

Try not to characterise everyone who disagrees with you as wrong, uneducated, out of touch, or whatever. Some of us have been watching and living this slow moving train wreck and we reckon our country deserves better. We’re not uneducated, we are politically engaged, we don’t place all the blame on brown people or whatever. We voted No to the Voice[3] because we see ourselves and each other as literally one nation. We’re not racists, we’re not homophobic or whatever, but the + can go fuck themselves.[3]

Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful response, and appreciate the conversation (Y)

1. StacheD - https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=Lp6dDc5wstRvltFU

2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-16/bondi-beach-terrorist...

3. Referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Voice_to_Parliament

4. Aussie comedian Jim Jeffries on ‘+’ https://youtube.com/shorts/zoPxLAE6jEM?si=veUBBHTBiv9aVysJ

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde

6. aldehyde dehydrogenase ADLH2 - ALDH2 plays a crucial role in maintaining low blood levels of acetaldehyde during alcohol oxidation.[7] In this pathway (ethanol to acetaldehyde to acetate), the intermediate structures can be toxic, and health problems arise when those intermediates cannot be cleared.[3] When high levels of acetaldehyde occur in the blood, facial flushing, lightheadedness, palpitations, nausea, and general "hangover" symptoms occur. It also is thought to be the cause of a medical condition known as the alcohol flush reaction, also known as "Asian flush" or "Oriental flushing syndrome". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldehyde_dehydrogenase

> Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913.

That doesn’t sound right, so I spend twenty three seconds looking it up:

New Report Reveals Democrats Generated 90% of Federal Debt Held by the Public since WWII - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2011...

As of April 5, 2024, the national debt has grown by about $6.17 trillion, or 21.7%, since Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. - https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president...

Joe Biden - $6.66 trillion - https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/banking/national-de...

Your last source contradicts your first (partisan) source, and also mentions:

> The national debt grew by more than $8.1 trillion during Donald Trump’s presidency, the largest four-year increase in the nation’s history.

I was addressing the claim that Democrats had added merely $1.2 trillion since 1913.

I apologise if that wasn’t clear enough.

You misunderstood. That number is per 4 year term, and is an average. I probably could have phrased it more carefully to make that clear.

"The picture is complex. Recovery here, fresh losses there.

While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."

This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions

"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.

Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."

Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage

No one ever attract public support and funding by saying:

Don’t Panic.

Everything is O.K.

—-

Edited to add: Rate limited so can’t reply without creating more alt accounts than I’m willing to, so:

@Timon3 - that’s actually a really good point, and I follow at least a few folk that could be categorised as such at least some of the time.

No, many people say exactly that and make a lot of money doing so while also telling us that all the evidence is fake.

Trump asked for a billion. [0] He didn't get the whole billion (as far as we know), but he's keeping up his end of the deal.

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...

Unless you have other evidence that this particular report is exaggerating without justification you can't solely rely on the fact that their opinions/results would benefit them as evidence they are providing misinformation.

It's possible for information to be factual and opinions to be justified from a source while that source also benefits from the information/opinions existing.

I can easily provide counter examples from countless situations that occur each year.

----

If you feel that all scientists and researchers have a lower level of trust because of negative actions of some, that's wrong of course because their reputations aren't connected, but you try to confirm it. For example, find out if a cooler than normal El Nino season would help coral feeds (or whatever)

What you did was tell us you don't trust the information, not because of something specific, but a concept/rule you believe.

Considering you originally misrepresented their findings, perhaps by accident, you should have done more to make your case.

We live (or at least used live) in a very nice climate equilibrium with the CO2 level we had. Pushing us into another climate equilibrium looks very dangerous for human civilization. However I concede that it might be advantageous for certain plants, but I am not a plant so I am mostly concerned about human civilization.

> However I concede that it might be advantageous for certain plants

Plants are highly dependent on their climactic settings, upending a climate equilibrium is awful to the average plant. And looking at past climactic change events, "another climate equilibrium" is something that happens on kiloyear scales (ages, in geochronologic units).

The problem is all the effort = energy you need to spend collecting carbon atoms.

Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains, and aircraft where the energy density is a big plus. Those are where you'd expect to see hydrogen take off first, not passenger cars. Same as how diesel started in trucks - expensive engines but economical when amortized and worth it for heavy usage applications.

If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.

Reality already caught up with synthetic fuel for buses.

Shenzhen electrified its entire 16,000-vehicle bus fleet in 2017 - that's almost a decade ago. Since then virtually all of China has transitioned to electric, and other countries aren't far behind. Electric buses have completely taken over the market.

And it isn't just rich Western countries playing around either. We're seeing countries like Slovenia and Romania at >90% electric, and even countries like Ecuador and Colombia and targeting 100% electric in 2030 and 2035!

All the hard technical and financial problems have been solved. If your city isn't adopting electric buses yet, it will be solely due to political reasons.

> trucks, buses or trains

Trains no, electrify everywhere is clearly better. Maybe for really old legacy branch lines, batteries.

Trucks should as much as possible move to rail, much better solution.

For the rest, the waste majority of short-haul trucking, should be electric. In Europe, the amount of stopping trucks have to do already can be used to charge.

Only ultra long haul trucking has to stay on traditional fuels, and that a small %. And then you might as well just use conventional fuels.

Some aircraft is the only really good application. But I think not hydrogen, and instead syn-jet fuel.

> Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains

Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).

Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.

And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.

Trucks and busses would be better off with battery swaps at depo like electric forklifts do. More mileage more towing weight for trucks, just stack more batteries. Overweight? Use a diesel.

Trains is an easy one, over head lines.

Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.

With the upcoming MCS charging standard you won't need battery swaps for trucks or busses. Even today you have trucks that can charge with up to 400 kW, which is good enough for charging during mandatory pauses or downtimes.

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.

It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

> the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.

What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!

(I think it's called kerosene.)

Diesel, kerosene, rocket propelled RP1, and fuel oil / bunker fuel in the case of cargo ships.

It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.

What if you just, like, put the hydrogen in a big balloon?

Dude so like, one time some guy did that and like the entire thing just blew up bro. Seriously knockered.

Hydrogen airships are unfairly demonized. Airplanes burn and blow up, too - we've just learned over time how to minimize that risk.

The main problem with an airship is they are vulnerable to weather.

Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?

Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.

There are some innovation like hydrogen paste but it’s not going to be useful for a combustion engine cycle.

The Mirai does not combust hydrogen.

We store hydrogen all the time for industrial processes. It's not some super science, it's just expensive.

We do? Where? Using what fabrication technologies.

I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.

As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.

There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.

And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.

There is hydrogen all over the place in exactly where you'd expect to see it: petroleum refineries and petrochemical process plants. The metallurgy of handling and storing hydrogen is well understood and has been for a long time. You just have to use alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement. Hydrogen is squirrelly - it doesn't like to stay put but you can make it stay put long enough to make it useful.

When you are specifying valving or piping in a refinery one of the big things you have to find out is how much hydrogen is in the process because a lot of stuff in a refinery has at least some hydrogen and it will destroy common alloys.

> Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?

No. Not for using Hydrogen for transportation. People have been trying to use Hydrogen for transportation for more than 50 years. These people are trying to bend the laws of physics. And there are a lot of con artists in the mix who prey on the gullible. See the convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.

WTF , you are commenting about FCEV - these things dont have engines!

The strategy clearly stated by Akio Toyoda is multiple power train technology. You can listen to his interviews on the subject, some are in Japanese, but as you have stated a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Toyota's policy I will assume you have that fluency.

(Automotive OEMs are assemblers, the parts come from the supply chain starting with Tier 1 suppliers. In that sense TMC does not do "making engines", but possibly the nuance and consequences here of whether not it "wraps it's head" to "makes things", vs if it has the capability to specify, manufacture distribute something at scale with a globally localized supply chain AND adjust to consumer demand/resource availability changes 5 years after the design start - in this context i ask you, can you "wrap your head" around the latest models that are coming out in every power train technology fcev, (p)hev to bev)

Toyota has had this hydrogen bug since the early 90's.

What's that old meme?

Stop trying to make ____ happen, it's not going to happen.

The point I was trying to make was I'm not sure it was ever about making something happen completely, but being prepared on all fronts for whatever the outcome is.

Kaizen and JIT are not good for revolutionary change. So I expect by bootstrapping different options early enough they can act on real market pressure once the condition to accurately assess the evidence is available.

For hydrogen getting to that point was a multi decade lead time.

I suspect most western commentary on this topic comes from people not understanding both how numerical/empirical based Toyota are, how self aware of their potential weaknesses they are, plus the ability of a Japanese business to hold to a multi decade hedging initiative.

> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.

Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.

The bZ4X? 10+ years after the Nissan Leaf?

And the bZ3, bZ5, bZ7, bZ3X, bZ Woodland, C-HR+, the Lexus RZ, and soon the Hilux EV:

https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...

A list of cars that aren't available for purchase yet doesn't disprove the argument that Toyota is late to the game.

They are available for purchase.

Toyota is in the game of selling cars. Toyota has been the best selling automaker for the last six years straight.

Toyota had record sales last year:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...

It's possible that Toyota understands the car business better than you do.

All of the bz* models you listed are Chinese models, and while the Woodland and C-HR are listed on their US website, they aren't really available for purchase (though I did find one C-HR if I'm willing to drive 500 miles to buy it). Obviously the world auto market is greater than the US, but the US is the leading market for Toyota in terms of total units sold, so it's odd to me that if I drive to the Toyota dealership 10 minutes from my house, their game of selling cars only leaves me with one model to purchase if I'm committed to buying a BEV.

China is the biggest EV market, Europe is the second biggest, and North America is third.

For EVs the US will remain lower priority than China and Europe for a while yet. Toyota understands how to sell cars.

It's funny how this thread has gone from "Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines" to "Toyota is not prioritizing small EV markets first".

You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined. That's an odd way to define a small EV market. Funny thing is, in terms of rankings, the US is actually a "small market" when it comes to gas-only cars.

Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.

> You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined.

This is incorrect, unless you're viewing the US as a single market but the EU as multiple (which, I mean, ah, you do you, but that doesn't make any sense from an industry perspective). Last year about 1.3 million BEVs were sold in the US (a minor decline from 2024), 1.9 million BEVs were sold in the EU (up 33% YoY). In Europe more broadly defined, 2.5 million BEVs were sold (in practice, the industry largely treats EU+EFTA+UK as one market). In China, 8 million were sold, up about 25% YoY.

You can, ah, perhaps see why the US is not a top-priority market for the industry. In practice, the US _will_ get many of these Toyota models, or some variant thereof, but later. You mention VW, but they, too, treat the US as a second priority BEV market; their electric cars generally come out about a year late there if at all. Hyundai does release in the US at the same time as elsewhere (when they release at all; the Ioniq 3 will not be available in the US, for instance, because the US does not buy small cars in significant numbers).

Nation-based segmentation makes the most sense to me because as I understand it (coming from a US-centric perspective, so I may have misunderstandings) there may be additional friction (fees, regulations, etc) buying from another EU country as opposed to someone in the US buying a vehicle from a different state. In many cases, you don't even have to go to another state; dealerships regularly transfer inventory (with a shipping fee, but not anything at the government level)

The entire point of the European Union is to eliminate all of that friction. Most of the rules and regulations have been pushed to the EU level, just like the USA pushed most of its rules and regulations to the federal level. A car only needs a single type approval granted by a single member state, and it can be sold across the entire EU.

There are of course still some tax differences and importing from another member state might be slightly trickier for a consumer than buying it from a dealership in their own country, but I don't see how that is any different from dealing with different kinds of sales tax in the various US states, or having to transfer your car title to another state.

The European single market operates as, well, a single market.

> but the US is number two

Nope:

https://electrek.co/2025/12/11/global-ev-sales-jump-21-in-20...

Toyota sells bad EVs and was the last OEM to offer one. It’s the most anti-EV OEM by far and engages/engaged in the most EV FUD.

The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.

> The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold

Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.

The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.

[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/d4mMkA/verdens-stoerste-r...

[2]: https://www.tek.no/test/i/OkQAwE/toyota-urban-cruiser

They’re also just phenomenally ugly cars.

It shares the same ugly design language as much of Toyota’s lineup.

> Toyota sells bad EVs

The 2026 bZ Woodland [1] looks pretty nice in my opinion.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...

I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.

> it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry

Dodge's Charger EV has been a sales flop [1] and pretty much universally panned by critics as something that nobody asked for.

The Camry and Corolla were the best-selling sedan and compact sedan of 2025 [2]. I think this shows that Toyota is listening to what Corolla and Camry drivers want - something inexpensive and reliable to get them to and from work every day without issue.

Some day Toyota will make an EV sedan. I think their 2026 bZ Woodland [3] shows that they are starting to figure out how make compelling EVs. And Toyota's EV strategy seems pretty reasonable to me overall - their delays to develop a decent EV don't seem to put them under threat from any legacy automakers. They are being threatened by Chinese EV makers, but so is Tesla - so even a huge head start likely wouldn't have benefited Toyota much either in that regard.

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69927938/dodge-charger-da...

[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g64457986/bestselling-cars...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...

An electric Corolla or Camry is my ultimate. I hate driving.

I want an appliance that just works. The Corolla and Camry were this for petrol.

I love my Leaf but it isn’t a Carolla.

What’s with the turning circle on the Leaf?

That's essentially the bZ3. But a Corolla branded BEV will eventually happen:

https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/toyotas-best-selling-car-elec...

And yet they had one of the first hybrids (although not a plug-in hybrid) in the Prius.

Honda also was early in hybrids, but they like Toyota are also late on EVs.

The difference is probably philosophical. A (non-phev) hybrid is primarily an ICE car in every way. Building hybrids is building ICE cars with a little extra. Building EVs is different.

Honda and Toyota invested a lot in hybrid tech, they probably want to milk that investment more and the hydrogen distraction kept them from also investing in BEV tech. China was basically starting a car industry from scratch so didn’t have those sunk costs to worry about.

We're actually not that far off.

Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.

That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.

> So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.

The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x.

Batteries don't get lighter when they discharge.

It's not that simple.

Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.

Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).

The math leaves out a lot of important factors.

The fuel tanks are compartmentalized and have baffles to prevent sloshing. It's a solved problem.

Electric motors are not 98-99% efficient.

As you alluded to, battery weight is more than ICE weight. EVs are significantly heavier than ICEs.

I'm sure we can expect improvements along the lines you mentioned, but I seriously doubt it will be nearly enough.

Not to mention that jet planes routinely take off heavier than their max safe landing weight today too, relying on the weight reduction of consuming the fuel to return the plane to a safe landing weight again while enjoying the extra range afforded. This trick doesn't work well with batteries either.

There isn't any battery technology on the horizon that would lead to practical airliners.

You could do it with a ground effect plane for inland sea jaunts, like Seattle to Victoria. If you can float, then you don’t technically need a huge reserve like is normally needed.

> Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.

Jet engines work better. Boeing's next major plane will have jet engines, just like their previous major planes.

Synthetic, carbon neutral jet fuel will be the future for commercial jets.

Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster...

However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.

If we do simple extrapolation, a cellphone-sized battery will reach the 80kWh needed to power a car in as little as 180 years.

Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.

Well, there's also burning regular fuel in a fuel cell, a FCEV. That doubles the efficiencies over ICE, so I guess that bumps it back up to 8x away?

Given the great energy densities and stability in transport of hydrocarbons, there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources, so that could be a solution if we don't manage to increase battery densities by another order of magnitude.

> there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources

I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.

> I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom.

Easy mistake to make, don't beat yourself up over it.

It's not the individual carbon atoms that carry the signature, it's the atoms in bulk that give the story ... eg: 6 x 10^23 carbon atoms

See: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7757245/

The problem isn't CO2 it's pulling carbon out of geological deposits. Thus the carbon atoms in synthetic fuel can be considered "green" provided an appropriate energy source was used.

I understand that, but it's a fallacious argument. It's still emitting the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.

You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.

You misunderstand the problem. The act of emitting CO2 into the atmosphere is not a problem.

Significantly increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the problem. This happens when geological sources are used.

Unfortunately, burying dead trees in a landfill doesn't solve the problem because they decompose to methane which escapes. But you're right that geological CO2 production could be balanced by geologic CO2 sequestration, done properly.

The point is that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere was never the problem. Adding geological carbon back into the carbon cycle is the root cause of the entire thing.

You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?

> I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture.

Coal mines are sequestered trees.

Correct, but burying trees today isn't going to turn them into coal.

The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.

Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.

But if the CO2 recently came from the atmosphere it's still a net zero impact though.

Like, take 5 units of carbon out of the atmosphere to create the fuel. Burn it and release 5 units of carbon to the atmosphere. What's the net increase again? (-5) + 5 = ?

FWIW I'm not saying these processes actually achieve this in reality. Just pointing out that it could be carbon neutral in the end.

Its the time shift. Burning a plant releases CO2 and it is still considered to be carbon neutral.

Sorry, that's just verbal sleight of hand. There's no such thing as "green" CO2.

Yes there is. I used to fall for the same lie, but it's just not true. It's a question of system boundaries.

Green CO2 was recently (in geological terms) captured from the atmosphere into biomass, that's why its release is basically net zero.

Fossil CO2 hasn't been part of the atmosphere in eons (back in e.g. the Crustacean, the CO2 ratio was many times higher), so its release is additive.

So bury the trees. Or run them through the sawmill and build houses.

How do you justify exhaling then?

Well, you don't. Everything you do has a carbon footprint, you know, haven't you heard? Everything.

Have you always had difficulty with abstraction?

And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.

Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.

Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.

Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.

From Wikipedia:

The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...

Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.

Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.

Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.

"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."

https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...

Thanks for linking that document, I’ll have a read.

Yes, and it doesn’t fit the narrative.

We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.

You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.

> burn petrol.

Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?

Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.

How is that supposed to help?

I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.

Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.

Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.

I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.

With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.

Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.

Natural resources are not required to make a country an economic powerhouse. See Japan, for example. Hong Kong, Taiwan, S Korea.

What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.

And political will.

The Antipodes have such a problem with successful people we even invented a term for it.

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

On the subject of free markets, Australia excels. We even let foreign entities extract and sell our LNG and pay no royalties and no tax.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/zero-royalties-charge...

Doesn’t get any freer than that!

Spain stripped S. America of its gold and silver, and neither Spain nor S. America benefited from it.

Doesn’t South America collectively produce more gold in one year than the Spanish usurped from them in their entire conquest period?

Gold production by country:

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

In only the first half-century or so of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, over 100 tons of gold were extracted from the continent. - https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2045/the-gold-of-the-co...

Context is for kings though. In the context of what occurred when it occurred, you’re right.

For a while there, Australia was known as ‘the lucky country’ because despite the folly of politicians, and general fallibility of humans, we had wealth for toil.

Now we just give it away.

More accurately, the calculation needs to factor in the fact that battery weight doesn’t decrease as charge is used.

Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.

How can batteries compete with that constraint?

Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.

I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.

You laid it out better than I. Thank you!

Thanks Walter!

An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.

So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.

Jet engines are not 100% efficient.

Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.

Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.

Halve it to 0.11G then.

It makes no difference, we’d still need gigawatt scale electricity production, with some multiple of that at peak, just for a fairly unremarkable airport.

The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).

One of the trade offs is that engines are actually ridiculously heavy. Compact, extreme high power electric motors are starting to be commercialised. But also, fuel burns so you lose weight as you’re flying whereas batteries stay the same.

Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.

Structural batteries were supposed to be the solution where the density wasn't so important. I don't really have a good understanding of the ration of fuel weight to structural weight in existing aircraft though.

casing is around 25% of the mass of a cylindrical cell, with the rest being actual battery bits that can't have any stresses applied. is 25% weight saving that significant?

Jet engine and wing efficiency have increased enormously over the last 50 years.

With diminishing results.

Turbofans and supercritical airfoils are done to the point of engine manufacturers looking to propfans and alternative materials (carbon fibre) to eke out further efficiencies.

Although carbon fibre has significant down sides.

I have patented the idea of replacing the nitrogen in the cabin air with helium. I'm waiting for the money to roll in!

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.

> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.

Which is also the reason why its plug-in hybrids are so reliable, despite being dramatically more complex than either an EV or an ICE.

Toyota is very good at making engines, and it would be insane to throw away all that expertise to deliver a half-assed new product.

What does this mean? They have electric vehicles too.

Biofuel makes more sense for airplanes. No conversion even necessary. You could fuel up a 737 with properly formulated biofuel and fly it now, though a lot of validation would be needed to be generally allowed especially for passenger flights.

If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.

Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.

Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.

LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.

LNG aviation does not make any more sense than H2 aviation. Even LPG does not make any sense since you neither can haul 16 bar fuel tanks, nor can you realistically maintain temperature for 1-2atm pressure. And any leak is not 'oh. look, a kerosene stain on tarmac', it's ready-made fuel-air explosion.

On the plus side we would be able to retire airport fire engines because they would never be able to get to a crash before it completely burns out.

You can't get much better than ready-made, for rocketry.

As if LNG is effectively more dense in flight than ordinary LPG, which doesn't need to be cryogenic to handle.

Armchair fuel experts do still provide food for thought though ;)

It might also be because the Japanese government works very hard to have full employment and EVs require less labor.

The Mirai is a fuel cell EV. There is no engine. Not sure what your point is regarding engines?

They are just too much in bed with big oil to want to switch, instead they spend rnd on hydrogen in order to mess up with renewables on purpose.

Hydrogen only makes electric vehicles look good and the only alternative. In fact, if this purposeful which I doubt, it probably helped stopped other companies from making hydrogen

> When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.

Politicians are conduits. Someone wanted this to happen.

But yea, subsidies. I've been on many a call where "there's govt funding available if we shape this like x" is one of the major selling points.

Politics has a habit of being very insular once elections are finished.

There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks. When the money dries up the public tends to go back to "what's practical and affordable?".

> There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks.

Well, it can be made to work, you know. Late (in the XX century) industrialization stories are like that: competitive (dis)advantages make any such attempts simply unprofittable for any businessman (or even a group of them), but if the government keeps skewing the market for decades... The Japanese car manufacturing has been heavily subsidized for most of the XX century, even after their several disastrous attempts to enter the US market. But it all worked out in the end.

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.

See: the Hindenburg disaster

afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.

Ehh, the Hindenburg had a flammable skin. Barrage balloons from the World Wars were most often filled with hydrogen and yet were extremely difficult to ignite or take down even with purpose build incindiary ammo for that purpose shows hydrogen balloons can be safe. Often they would be riddled with dozens of holes but still take many hours for them to lose enough hydrogen to float back down to the ground.

The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.

That's because regular bullets are actually pretty cold, especially by the time they reach the height of anti-air balloons.

But hydrogen itself is SCARY. It has an extremely wide range of ignitable concentrations, and it has very low ignition energy. It also tends to leak through ~everything.

But hydrogen is also so easy to produce on demand that you can design your balloon to be at small positive pressure all the time and always leaks outwards into the open air. If oxygen is allowed to leaked in undetected, yeah that's a death trap. The same if hydrogen leaked into semi contained oxygen enclosures. But leaking through the skin of the balloon to open sky even with decent size holes and a bit of positive pressure doesn't ignite particularly well, despite hydrogen's wide range of ignition conditions.

It is not such a fool proof technology that everybody should have one, but to me building and operating a hydrogen balloon isn't dissimilar to running a steam locomotive. It can be dangerous if done badly or incorrectly, but it can also be done safely with pretty well known and understood technologies and methods and practices. And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport I find it hard to dismiss its potential even so long after their heyday and previous problems.

> And considering the massive efficiency of lighter-than-air transport

What efficiency? You still need to orient it and propel it in the desired direction, unless you don't mind to simply float around on the wind (in which case, yes, we have weather balloons precisely for that and nothing much else).

Slow moving free floating objects are super easy to move around. You can push a 100 ton piece of equipment with your hands if it is floating. That is why cargo boats still beat out shipping efficiency of rail. There is almost no practical size or weight limits, your only real potential loss, and potential gain, is the movement of your floating fluid be it wind or water, which in the case of air is fairly predictable these days, on top of moving in different directions at different altitudes.

Pointing to the Hindenburg as an example of why hydrogen is a bad idea is the same as pointing to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear is a bad idea.

wait...

Green hydrogen makes sense as a way to ship solar power to places that don't have it.

Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.

Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.

No . No . No. Please No. Absolutely fucking not.

Shipping hydrogen is literally one of the dumbest things you can ever do.

Its pure and utter nonsense that is only getting pushed for political reasons. It has 0 actual viability.

Even if you were willing to pay 5-10x more for hydrogen, shipping doesn't make sense.

The only way we are ever moving any quantity of hydrogen anywhere is with pipelines. Literally everything about hydrogen makes it a complete nightmare to ship.

And nobody is likely ever going to build these hydrogen pipelines.

Hydrogen is completely idiotic as a 'energy move' medium.

> Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.

No it doesn't and it never did. Only such a tiny amount were ever sold, and those were only sold because of massive subsidies and sold below value by car companies who wanted to push the concept (and farm subsidies).

EV by 2008 already outsold hydrogen vehicles and have grown every year, hydrogen vehicles never became more then marketing gimick and were never sold in numbers that even approach relevance.

Also the losses are much higher when converting electricity to hydrogen and then burning that hydrogen.

Yeah, it might make sense for some industrial processes as natural gas or coal replacement, but not really anywhere else just because all the tricky leaks and invisible fire hazards.

> When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.

Really, they shouldn't be punished, they should be rewarded if they can become more sensible.

Positive incentive please :)

That is how EVs got here as soon as they did.

Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.

Ignoring some of the other issues:

Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.

But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.

So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.

And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.

Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.

It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.

But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.

So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.

(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)

It’s not even the grid, by the time you’ve done the electrolysis you’d be better off just charging a battery.

Also, compressing and cooling a gas takes another huge hit at the efficiency. Electrolysis comes out at atmospheric pressures.

Oh and the platinum electrodes you need…

I’m also just now visualising a hydrogen pipeline fire… terrible terrible idea.

It's the everything, yeah. There's a lot working against using hydrogen as the local energy source for automotive propulsion in the world that we presently have.

Some advantages are that a fuel cell that accepts hydrogen and air at one end and emits electricity and water at the other can be lighter-weight than a big battery, and it can [potentially] be refueled quickly for long trips.

Some disadvantages: We need a compressed hydrogen tank -- which isn't as scary to me as it may be for some people, but that's still a new kind of risk we need to carry with us wherever we drive. And we still need a big(ish) battery and the controls for it in order for regen braking to do its thing (which hybrids have shown to be very useful).

And, again, the grid: If it were cheaper/better/efficient to move energy from electrical generating stations to the point of use using buckets [or trucks or trains] of hydrogen, we'd already be doing that. But it isn't. So we just plug stuff in, instead, and use the grid we already have.

A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving. There's far faster methods, but that's something that lots of regular people with a normal commute and normal working hours can already accomplish very easily if they have private parking with an outlet nearby.

For most folks, with most driving, that's all they ever have to do. It shifts concerns about refueling speed from "Yeah, but hydrogen is fast! I waste hardly any time at all while it refills!" to "What refueling stops? I just unplug my car in the morning and go. I haven't needed to stop at gas station in years."

The main advantages of hydrogen are real, but they just aren't very useful compared to other things that we also have.

Also, what pipeline operator is going to want to move hydrogen when almost all other products are more valuable?

It’s horrible to work with - dangerous, embrittlement issues etc., and very energy intensive to compress into very heavy cryogenic storage containers…

Yeah it is so bad that it is common that rockets are launched with a hydrogen leak here or there.

> dangerous

It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.

That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.

If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.

Hydrogen mixed with air has a very wide range of concentrations where it is explosive. It accumulates inside containers or just the roof of the car… where the passengers are. It takes just one lit cigarette for it to go boom.

And it burns really hot

Zubrin's "Hydrogen Hoax" from 2007[1] is basically an ironclad critique. The physics are inescapably poor, and always will be. (Zubrin makes other points in that article which should probably be taken with more salt, but his critique of hydrogen stands).

1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...

It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).

Check out the "Clean Hydrogen Ladder" document.

Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.

Unless you produce it using the Sulfur-Iodine cycle in a high-temperature nuclear reactor.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle

and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...

The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to use fossil fuels.

>you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel.

Correction, a very low density, lightweight fuel.

Burns clean though with no carbon in the exhaust.

But the upstream carbon emissions have not come close to zero when you look at total hydrogen use in the real world so far.

Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.

Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.

1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...

Remember that China briefly embargoed Japan for rare earth metals in 2010, and Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014. My theory was that it was developed as a national fallback for Japan in case that embargo continued or got worse. Think 1930s Volkswagen. Anyone can comment on that?

Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.

I'm pointing out that the timeline of continuing funding it, to the point of a major model design and launch, and nationwide network of hydrogen stations, might well be linked to China's emergent REE dominance and that Japan doesn't have those raw materials.

(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)

I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.

Independent of that. I'm saying there was some wisdom to continuing to fund it in Japan post-2010 as a hedge in case REEs were unavailable.

(Separate to whether the idea originally made sense back in the 2000s.)

Rare earths aren’t really that rare though. China has been the only country to invest in refining, sure, but any other country, including Japan or USA could have made similar investments and simply didn’t, because Chinese refiners were cheap and they couldn’t compete. Yes, the market failed to solve the REE problem at us, but it is not because we don’t have access to the inputs and we don’t know how to refine them.

Japan could have simply started their own refining business if they were really worried about REEs in 2010. Yes, it would take them until 2015 or so to ramp up, but that was still 11 years ago.

The rare earth metal matrix can be a bit more optimized and I think progress is being made.

Why wait though ;)

With common metals hydrogen fits in between the matrix naturally to an extent.

Not like for efficient storage though, just the embrittlement, which gives researchers even more challenging things to be careful about.

Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.

It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.

>Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron.

Wait until you hear about H+

Yes, hydrogen will ionise into loose protons.

The basic point is that a material that is highly flammable, needs to be compressed to high pressure in order to be useful, but also will seep through and damage steel containers because of the fundamental fact that the atoms and charged ions are just too small, is never going to be easy to work with. Compared to electrical battery tech now being widely and cheaply rolled out.

This goes some way to answering the "Why is it such a terrible idea?" question. Or at least it's an idea whose time has passed, due to the abovementioned battery tech maturing.

That’s a type of ion, or of course a proton. An ion with no electrons is not considered an atom normally. GP is correct.

(Atoms must have electrons - the definition in physics and chemistry is a structural one.)

With solar/wind oligarchs can't charge you every time you charge your EV at home

Hydrogen was meant to replace Oil so that the oligarchs can keep their oligarchy rather than "pull themselves up by bootstraps"

>When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

You could say the same about EVs. Most people in the US who bought an EV decided to go back to ICE for their next vehicle.

It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off.

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...

This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.

EV depreciation is a very different beast. Basically, EVs are still being sold at a higher price point than their actual cost justifies in some markets. Part of that is manufacturers being a bit behind on their cost cutting and part of that is just because the market is incentivizing selling vehicles at inflated prices.

If you strip that away, you get to more reasonable price points already getting common all over Asia, Australia, and even the EU market right now. There you might find reasonably priced new vehicles at around 25K euros or even below 20K. A few years ago, those vehicles didn't exist and ASPs were closer to 40-50K for a cheap one. So, the second hand value of those older vehicles has indeed depreciated enormously. Because they simply are not worth as much relative to the much cheaper newer generation of cars. These vehicles got obsoleted by a better and cheaper generation of cars.

With hydrogen cars, companies sell them at a loss. They always have. That's why Toyota, the biggest proponent, sells more EVs than they ever built hydrogen cars. Pretty much every quarter now.

The better/cheaper generation of hydrogen cars never materialized. And it probably never will. The hydrogen distribution network never happened either. Because as it turns out, making hydrogen is really expensive. So aside from a few heavily subsidized filling stations, the economics for those is so terrible that they tend to shut down as soon as the subsidies run out. So, that's why they are relatively worthless as a second hand car. You are better off buying a second hand EV. And since those have depreciated a lot, hydrogen cars simply aren't worth more second hand.

And since there is no realistic prospect of ever producing hydrogen cars or hydrogen at price points that can match those of EVs and electricity, hydrogen based transport is at this point dead as a door nail.

The part that's interesting to me is how much the depreciation is posed as negative rather than positive.

The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.

> The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value.

Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.

With EVs the factors driving depreciation are concerns about rapid tech obsolescence, battery degredation and replacement costs, incentives and new price cuts, and charging infrastructure. You also hear stories about Tesla drivers waiting 6+ months for a replacement part, Rivians being totaled because of a dent in a rear quarter panel, etc. These are all reasonable things for a buyer to be concerned with, in my opinion.

But I agree that if you are ok with all of the above in a used EV (range and charging speed may not matter if you have a place to charge at home, for example), there are good deals to be found.

I would point out a subtlety here: deprecation is based on perceived value, and this perception tracks much more closely with the glacial knowledge of the larger public than it does with that of an informed individual.

Battery degradation is extremely overrepresented in the minds of the public for example and based mostly on the performance of early entrants like the original Nissan Leaf. Since then, chemistries and management systems have progressed dramatically and rendered it a moot point — most EVs made in the past several years will have their batteries outlast the useful life of the vehicle. In the case the Ariya, Nissan appears to have overcorrected for the Leaf's reputation to such an extreme that they can be fast charged to 100% for many dozens of cycles and still show no capacity loss.

This is a gap in knowledge that smart buyers who are willing to do a little bit of research can exploit and get much more car for their money than would otherwise be possible.

I don't understand why this is grey, this is exactly correct. Depreciation is good actually ignores the realities of why a car's value is tanking in the first place. The only time high depreciation is good for you as a buyer is if you think the market is mispricing cars and they're actually far more valuable than the cost they're being sold for. But best keep that secret because the market will be quick to correct once it's discovered.

My state assesses annual car taxes based on MSRP rather than real market value, unfortunately, so these fake MSRPs matter to me. :-(

It's extremely fair to compare depreciation against MSRP. What's not fair is to say that they were being "sold new at massive discounts" when in reality it's an asterisk-ridden rebate process that applied to one model year under specific circumstances. That article was spam when it was written, can you provide a first party source for these massive discounts?

Depreciation is measured against the price someone actually paid.

The MSRP doesn’t matter. The S stands for suggested.

At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.

An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.

$15,000 worth of fuel card sounds generous until you find that hydrogen stations have jacked up prices to $36/kg.

still means nothing, what is the mileage or $/mi there?

Apparently 1kg of hydrogen is about 60 miles range, which seems like a lot, but apparently fuel cells are that good.

Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.

By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.

> This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric

Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.

According to [1] it breaks down like this:

EV at rapid/ultra-rapid chargers: 25p/mile

Petrol, diesel: 15p/mile

EV charging at home: 8p/mile

This is because there's a government price cap on home electricity, but not on commercial electricity - and rapid chargers are all commercial (and of course for-profit).

[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-...

It is if you use a rapid charger. If you're fortunate enough to be able to do what you need with a car within 50 miles or so of your house and leave it overnight to charge, it's cheaper.

At present, EVs do not solve any problem I have.

Very few people would use 100% rapid charging. Even on a long journey, they can arrive home with, say, 5-10% remaining, and recharge at home. (The car calculates this automatically.)

The range of most EVs is only about 120 miles, which isn't especially useful when they take around six hours to charge.

Maybe most EVs in the wild, but no way for EVs being sold today. There are only 5 cars on this list below 200: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons..., and more than half above 300.

If you can get a cheap electric overnight home charging tariff in the UK, then the electric cost is lower. Mid week, I charged 43kWh for the cost of £3.04 (7p per kWh). My home charger does 7kwh in a hour. Usual mileage is about 4 miles per kWh (typical rush hour drive into Edinburgh). That should give me about 170 miles of range.

Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).

I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.

The problem is that using an EV makes living in the Highlands far more expensive even allowing for the cost of diesel, because you're forced to use rapid chargers at great expense - if they're available, and actually working - or a quick trip to the shops becomes an overnight stay.

Full tank capacity of a Mirai is ~5 kg / (120 liters in volume).

I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.

Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.

For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.

Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.

The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.

Hydrogen fuel solves a long term strategic problem for Japan, which is why the Mirai got as far as it did.

Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.

Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.

Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.

Japan has a lot of potential for wind and geothermal power. And much of it isn't too bad for solar either.

The madness with hydrogen in Japan is that they produce most of it from imported LNG. If they'd solve domestic clean energy, they'd have no need for hydrogen in transport. EVs are a lot more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. So they'd need a lot less clean energy to power those.

Japan is slowly and belatedly figuring out that physics and economics just won't favor hydrogen, ever. The Mirai is an exercise in futility. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever. It never has. Toyota at this point is grudgingly producing more EVs per quarter than it ever produced hydrogen vehicles (in total). They only sell a few hundred per year at this point. The only reason they still make them at all is because they are being subsidized to do that.

^^^ This.

But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].

The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.

On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.

Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/idemitsu-build-pi...

[1] - https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-pric...

I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.

And more to the point, if you want to use synthetic fuels, why on earth would you pick hydrogen?

Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.

I'd assume because it is complicated. Capturing enough carbon, splitting it, generating enough H2, combining it with the carbon to make long enough chains. That all sounds complicated and expensive and probably needs even more surplus green power that we don't have. It also doesn't solve the problem of local pollution when burning carbon based fuels.

Why go for long synthetic chains?

Methane has good energy density, doesn't demand cryogenics or diffuse through steel, burns very cleanly, and can be used in modified gasoline ICEs - without even sacrificing the gasoline fuel capability.

Isn't the point that it is as simple and convenient as normal gasoline and also that you can use your gasoline car? If you are using gases it is a hassle for everyone and you need a new car or a full retrofit. At some point we have to ask ourself why we would even do that. Is it really worth it compared to just using a battery?

Without cryogenics, methane has such low energy density that a low-pressure fuel tank would still have to be as big as a bus for your compact methane-powered vehicle to go as far as you could on a few gallons of gasoline.

Why?

CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits.

They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.

Good question.

It's just the physical properties of methane.

That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car.

Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.

Again: current day CNG ICEs don't actually have "fuel tanks bigger than the car".

My understanding is most hydrogen fueling stations produce the hydrogen onsite via electrolysis of water.

EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...

Completely wrong.

Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.

Maybe that's what it was - produced onsite via steam extraction from piped in natural gas (which means you could just as easily burn the natural gas in the vehicle).

Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.

The electrolysis needs power and could be fueled by fossil fuels.

That’s not a thing. Anyone who’s seen hydrogen being split from electrolysis knows it takes a lot lot lot of electricity and is very slow. If two people needed to fill up in the same day it would run the well dry.

If you can do that at a meaningful rate you might as well install ev charging and just not electrolyse when cars are charging

He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage.

This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.

But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.

Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.

We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.

Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.

All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.

Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.

Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.

This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.

h2 can be co-mingled with Ng and extracted with a molar filter at the other end.

Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.

None of the pipes or valves are designed for hydrogen. It will steal leak. And leaking a very flammable gas isn’t great.

Let alone the compressors or the flow measurement equipment. Also significant portions of the pipesline (especially in neighborhoods / last mile) aren't metal anymore.

[dead]

Your understanding is entirely wrong.

Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.

this is the case while they're in the hype building phase, when people are paying attention

if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas

(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)

Natural gas vehicles make way more sense than hydrogen. But they didn't survive in the (US) market outside specific fleet applications.

Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.

They were popular in Thailand and Cambodia for awhile due to domestic natural gas reserves. But after those wells began to dry up Thailand at least decided EVs were the future instead.

That makes no sense. If the oil companies were pushing H2, every car would be H2 by now.

H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.

We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.

H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable. Both are alternatives to BEVs, which are the better approach to electrifying transport. If Toyota had gone all in on BEVs when it began its H2 strategy, it would be selling more EVs than Tesla. Instead it entirely ceded the field to others, first Tesla and BYD.

H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable.

Irrelevant. It seems like everyone who argues against H2 is stuck on "now". Had that been the case with battery powered cars, they'd have never got off of the ground.

Batteries were terrible, wildly expensive, extremely unreliable. It's only been the immense research poured into them, that has brought their costs down.

Meanwhile, the cost of storage on an H2 car is nothing, compared to the immense and exorbitant cost of all those batteries. Batteries which make a car extremely heavy. Batteries which cannot be charged below -20C, and require heaters. Batteries which are incredibly dangerous in car accidents. Batteries which are costly, and damaging to the environment to create, difficult to recycle, and damaging to the environment to recycle.

Compared to battery tech of any type, H2 is a dream from the gods.

Yet because there hasn't been 17 trillion dollars of cash thrown into h2 generation tech, people prattle on about how expensive h2 generation is.

And it doesn't matter where h2 comes from now. It matters where it can and will come from. The goal isn't to make sources of power to generate h2 clean, the goal is to get end-polluters, cars, clean.

If the only goal was "clean", then most electric batteries charging right now, would fail that very goal. After all, there are still coal and gas power plants this very moment, and if we pulled all electric cars off the road, those would close.

No, the goal is to work towards more and more solar power, wind, etc. And in parallel, get cars ready for the day when power they're charged from isn't polluting.

The myopic view of what I deem hyper-environmentalists, is disturbing to me. It is paramount that we don't let short sighted views fog the reality around us.

Anyone arguing 1000lbs of batteries, all environmentally damaging in their construction, recycling cost, and disposal, is superior to h2, is arguing from a pedestal of sandy, earthquake prone, unstable support.

What I don't understand is why we would use H2. It's not like batteries are not getting better all the time. Not just the getting H2 for a good price but the whole system seems so much more complicated than just using a battery. What is it that H2 can do so much better that we would even spend the time and money to develop better solutions? Tell me what is the killer feature?

Because it must be a really killer feature to justify wasting about 50% of the electricity you put in and developing a distribution network and building cars that can handle H2 and even using the H2 for driving instead of steel mills or other places that might need green H2. Not to forget about the hassle of refueling with gasses that is totally different from a normal gas pump where you have to create a high pressure seal and the handle gets to cold to touch.

Also comparing a technology that will be only useful in many years with the battery technology from today is an odd choice, to say the least. Not only is the content of problematic materials constantly shrinking, the number of batteries that need recycling is currently so low that there is very little need for a big industry. But it is very likely that just like with the classic car battery recycling the more recent batteries will definitely be stripped for their precious materials.

You raise dying some good points, but hydrogen is really hard to store. It leaks out of everything. You have to very carefully design three containment vessel in order for it not to go wrong.

But isn't that a counter point? Just putting the electricity directly into a car seems sensible instead of converting it to H2 and then back to electricity. Especially now that wo don't usually have a huge oversupply of green energy. We can think of ways to use the oversupply when it really becomes a problem. But I'd assume then BEV will be so dominant the no one will go through the hassle of supporting H2.

> We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.

Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.

And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".

It is entirely feasible. And it is made up to claim that "Well, this second it looks like there's no infra for green h2, so it can never happen! So there!"

If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.

I haven't seen any cost models where green hydrogen is feasible without a lot of super cheap excess electricity. And those situations also boost batteries. Do you have one you can show me? It's not just lack of infrastructure, even if you solved the problem of building everything out green hydrogen is still not worth it under conditions close to the present day.

And I didn't say it could never under any circumstances be feasible.

> If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.

I don't follow your logic here. Nobody went out and built tons of lithium ion batteries for cars until they were actually feasible. We're living in the world where companies wait, and it worked out for electric cars.

Research. Battery tech was terrible. Horrible. It was only through endless research, trillions spent, that battery tech can do what it does today.

Now apply the same logic to h2.

I didn't suggest stopping research.

But while research and scaling up made batteries 50x cheaper, batteries are mostly about material costs and technique. For hydrogen there's a huge per-unit energy cost and that limits how much research helps.

say you're Shell

you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")

if transport switches to electric, what's your role?

answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant

but what if hydrogen took off instead?

if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel

but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business

at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas

... and that's exactly what they're trying to do

There's no point. EVs go 50% further on the same amount of energy, are easier to charge and are, of course, cheaper.

EVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic. They are not cheaper long term, for they rely upon thousands of pounds of heavy batteries.

If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.

Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.

But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.

Pumping gases is not really fast. That goes for H2 or natural gas. It pumps slowly as to not overwhelm the tank and it needs time to equalize after the pump. Also connecting the nozzle is much more of a hassle because it needs to be a tight seal. Not remotely comparable to pumping gasoline.

Apart from that a modern BEV can charge pretty fast. Just enough time to get a snack and eat it.

> EVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic.

You'll find EVs that will go 700km+ with just one, 15min stop, as they charge at over 350kW in this day and age:

https://ev-database.org/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&rs-pr=10...

You'd want to make that 15min stop at least once on such a trip. Or fly instead.

> It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.

Problem is that while batteries only needed scale and improvements in manufacturing processes to become cheaper, there's no such path with hydrogen.

The tank and the fuel cell are inherently expensive. The fueling station costs literally 10x that of a fast charger and in this day and age doesn't even charge faster as while the first customer will be done in less than 15min, the next needs to wait for the system to repressurize and that takes time. Also it goes kaboom if it fails, which is something we know, because it already happened. The fuel itself cannot be cheaper than electricity unless you want to make it from natural gas, in which case you better just use that instead.

> (batteries are terrible, environmentally)

The sheer energy that's wasted by a hydrogen car vs EV over its life cycle is enough to produce and safely dispose of a battery.

And this is what it really boils down to: hydrogen is not energetically efficient, therefore you can't make it cheaper unless you use fossil fuels. We already have fossil fuel cars.

There is only one car in that database that has even close to a 700km range on long trips, and that is only under perfect conditions.

As with any car, you don't wait until out of fuel to recharge. Instead, you seek to do so well before. These pages at least understand a little of that, and cite a real-world range under perfect conditions of 450km before recharging, with a range of 300km afterwards.

Yet these figures are with no heat or AC, with it not below -10C, and with an incredibly slow speed of 110km/hr, which is illegal on some freeways in the US and Canada (yes, too slow on a freeway is illegal). At least, according to this page.

And yes, this is a "long trip" after all. I often have circumstances where I drive 1600km a day.

For current situations, although the future can be different, if you click on the details, it's actually 22 minutes to get an 80% charge, and of course with 400kw thrown at it. You have to get to the charger, hope one is free, then start this business. Just the on/off plus charging would realistically be 30 minutes, and taking 1 1/2 hours off to charge is ridiculous.

The current real world problems are, you'll never find that level of charging anywhere along the route of your long trip. Not with assurances it actually works, and that you don't have to redirect 100s of kms out of the path you wish to take. I cite current, because the future is just that. However, you'll literally have to spend trillions on infra just to do anything more than that, because if you're having literal parking lots full of cars charging at turn-offs on interstates, that's going to require massive, new long-haul electricity infra.

Which is really the point. Very slow to charge, hard to get charged, and once the infra is in place, there's still issues. Like recycling. And weight of car. And peak demand vs storage (such as with h2). And more.

Each tech stands poorly against gas cars, in terms of usability, reliability, range, fueling issues, and so on. That's to be expected though, with over 100 years of relentless development of carbon beasts, in planes, ships, cars, engines of all sorts.

It will take decades at the very least to get as good with electric in any form.

Yet what do I hear and see?

What madness do I see relentlessly spouted?

That one tech is the only answer, that R&D will change nothing, that even though range is an issue, the person is the problem, not the range, and so on.

Like the crass "use an airplane" comment.

Ah well.

> I often have circumstances where I drive 1600km a day.

Do you not do stops? The ranges I've shown include a 15min stop to recharge.

Anyway, I used to do such trips regularly. Covered over 100k km like that. I still did stops every ~400km because a man's gotta eat and, more importantly, wee.

Also sleep, because after a few close calls caused by 18h+ of driving I figured it makes more sense to find a hotel after 1200km or so.

Overall, current-day EVs and infrastructure wouldn't add more than 30min (if anything at all) compared to a combustion car if I were to do the same trip today.

In hindsight I should have flown and take taxis at my destination - would have been cheaper.

My view is that you're arguing about a non-issue, because the small minority that actually runs down a full tank before stopping is endangering others and being unkind to their bodies.

> But sure, let's not work on multiple paths.

The article is about a sign of failure of one of the multiple paths that was pursued by Japan and Ca State subsidies that was attempted over the last 20 years.

You can work on multiple paths, but to not measure and adjust defeats the purpose.

>We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.

No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.

EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.

Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.

Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.

Okay not driving it around then. But somehow it's worse. You still have to build the special tank and the special pump and also get an electrolysis device that is big enough to create enough hydrogen and also you have to get heaps of power somewhere that could instead be just straight put into a battery in a car. Make it make sense. What's the point? Who is willing to do that?

Don’t forget keeping everything cold enough.

On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.

High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.

Is the shape round? I bet it's round.

No need as I have shown in my other coment.

Ultimately, it's shrapnel-shaped.

Is that shrapnel arranged in a roundish pattern?

One of the reasons we use cryogenic liquidfied gases is so the density can be in the same ball-park of more-easily liquified gases which do not need low temperature to keep from expanding until the tank ruptures.

>One of the reasons we use cryogenic liquidfied gases is so the density can be in the same ball-park of more-easily liquified gases which do not need low temperature to keep from expanding until the tank ruptures.

Propane, butane, LPG are all gases but the pressure which needs to be contained as the gas is turned into a liquid using pressure, is not too high for the typical welded BBQ tank. Designed to hold about 350 psi.

The two lighter hydrocarbons, methane & ethane can be compressed way beyond what a high-pressure spun cylinder (like the typical 3000 psi rated heavy oxygen tank welders use) can handle, and still not liquefy.

So similar to oxygen, nitrogen, argon, hydrogen and other "fixed" gases, methane needs to be liquefied cryogenically or any reasonable size tank will still not hold enough to last but a very small fraction of the time compared to the same capacity cryogenic storage.

But "storage" is doing a lot of work here.

Interestingly, with cryogenics you're going to need to handle even less pressure than the BBQ tanks, and the same size container ends up holding way more than the high-pressure cylinder at 3000 psi.

A typical liquid nitrogen cylinder runs at about 50 psi, the tank will be rated quite a bit higher than that but not considered "high-pressure" by anybody. Thinner and non-curved shapes can be fine which can be lighter in weight than higher-pressure ratings would require, but you really have to have plenty of good thermal insulation to boot.

The thing is, once you refill your cryogenic tank with cold liquid gas, you can never actually shut the tank completely. There is no additional cooling. The only thing keeping it cold is the low temperature of the liquid itself, no matter how good the insulation is, heat will gradually soak in and given enough time the whole thing would eventually end up at ambient temperature. Not cold enough to remain as a liquid any more.

That would be eventually explosive whether it was a flammable gas or not.

Instead, the tank is continuously venting a constant stream of gas from top.

IOW the rate of heat absorbtion is compensated for under equilibrium as it boils the liquid a little bit constantly and there has to be a way for that gas to escape. The remaining liquid maintains the low temperature because the boiling point of the gas (at that low pressure) is still in the cryogenic range.

The liquid self-refrigerates by evaporation to the (negative) boiling point of the substance. Which is why liquid helium is so much colder than liquid nitrogen in an identical cryo tank.

That means if you fill a tank with one of these cryo gases, depending on your usage rate the losses to evaporation may be more than the amount you are utilizing.

Or if you fill the cryo tank and don't use any at all for a while, it will empty itself by evaporation anyway and it could be before you got to use any of it.

> battery

Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?

Batteries do not create a lot of toxic waste and are essentially fully recyclable.

The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.

Isn’t this bad? This means H2O molecules are being destroyed and the water is not returning to the water cycle to be reused. We will literally run out of water if everyone did this.

Water gets split into oxygen and hydrogen using energy. The hydrogen then gets burned to release usable energy, which creates water. At least as far as I remember from chemistry class ages ago.

There's some truth to what the gp said. Some hydrogen will escape, enter the upper atmosphere, and be blown away by the solar wind and thus be permanently lost.

I assume that this has been happening to all gases in the atmosphere for aeons, and thus, while technically correct, it is completely negligible for the relevant time scale.

I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve.

This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.

These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.

Storage is the bigger problem, specifically very long duration or rarely used storage (to cover Dunkelflauten, for example) for which batteries are poorly suited. Hydrogen (or more generally e-fuels) is one way to do that, but another very attractive one is very low capex thermal storage. Personally, I feel the latter would beat hydrogen: the round trip efficiency is similar or better, the complexity is very low, power-related capex should be lower, and there's no need for possibly locally unavailable geology (salt formations) for hydrogen storage.

With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.

Moving renewable power is easy, we have a grid for that. Infrastructure for movement of electricity is ubiquitous in places that have never seen a hydrogen pump.

If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.

Storage is a bigger issue for sure.

Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.

Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.

At that point you're just building a weird battery storage system again though.

> It is just so much simpler with electricity.

Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.

We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.

I am not comparing BEV with ICE. That would be stupid. ICE is not and will never be a solution to the fact that we are burning oil and destroying the environment. But EV has to compete with ICE and many people don't like the fact that they might be a small inconvenience. The environment is just not part of the calculation so to make BEVs even slightly competitive the price has to be lowered.

H2 doesn't compete with ICE. It competes with BEV. That and in that comparison I do think it is much simpler. I'd be open to be enlightened why the killer feature of H2 is that makes it even worth considering with all these downsides.

Maybe if we had smartphones that emitted greenhouse and toxic gases by using a mini ICE engine that were so cheap nobody would buy anything else, we would subsidize the electric ones. We may even ban the gas phones.

We also wouldn't need to if environmental externalities were costed into petroleum prices.

ICE love is cultural, and there's a bunch of FUD from entrenched interests.

> we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.

Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.

Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!

Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.

The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.

> Pretty much every gas station already has [electricity].

Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.

They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.

Still seems like a smaller investment to get a bigger cable than H2 infrastructure (Tanks, Pumps, maybe even electrolysis system).

Bigger cable is a laugh.

Bigger cable, upgraded delivery infrastructure to support that cable (think more or stronger poles), transformer upgrades, and finally the charging stations which unlike the home ones aren't just a complicated switch because DC fast charging.

H2 is a stupid fuel, but the idea that high power vehicle charging stations are a cheap or simple upgrade to a gas station is ridiculous.

You are correct that neither option is free BUT there are options. I don't know but to me it seem like the cheaper option than building the H2 infrastructure. Second of all there are options like on site battery/capacitor banks that can buffer the energy used for the faster charging. It might not be for everywhere but as a final option there is slower charging.

True, but they already exist.

Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?

And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.

If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.

H2 can be transported by trucks. Must lay expensive hydro infrastructure to do the same for electricity.

But not by the same trailers, not stored in the same tanks as gasoline, nor transferred by the same pumps.

This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.

Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.

With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.

Edit: typo

Approximately zero regular consumers purchased hydrogen cars. They were all fleet purchases designed primarily to publish burnish eco-friendly credentials, like this:

"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."

https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...

Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.

Well… I did/do see many around the Bay Area. Especially during the morning commute. But I agree, overall it was a low volume car.

Funny thing, Air Liquide. They were going to build a massive green hydrogen plant in upstate NY and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...

https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224...

> and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...

As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.

If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.

Hydrogen systems just don't make sense. Neither do molecular Hydrogen Fuel Cells.

Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.

It's got the EV problem, but 100x worse. No only do you have to worry about where to find a place to refuel, there are far fewer of them, and level 1 charging isn't a fallback. It also doesn't have the EV upsides.

It's really simple.

1 Kg of hydrogen is SUPER EXPENSIVE (equivalent ~ 1 gallon of gas)

$17/gallong when I looked at the pumps

When the Mirai first came out, owners didn't care because the fuel was free.

But after that ended, they had to buy it for themselves.

who wants to pay that?

(also, stations weren't plentiful like EV chargers, and even though you could fill up faster than an EV charge, who cares when you can't go very far (distance-wise from home).

Hydrogen gas-stations have blown up in the past https://www.nrk.no/norge/eksplosjon-ved-hydrogenstasjon-1.14...

I went to the Toyota museum where they actually have one of these cars as a cross section. I would never drive one. It's like driving around with a massive bomb under the rear seat. Forget thermal runway from batteries, I wonder how big the crater of the explosion from one these would be.

Safer than liquid fuel. There are videos out there of what a leak+fire looks like on a hydrogen and gasoline car. You would rather be trapped in the hydrogen car.

https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0

Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.

Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car

I lived a block away from a hydrogen fuel station in Oakland, and in the ten years I was there I maybe saw two different Mirais use it.

This technology is completely amazing - for large fleet vehicles like buses, trucks, ferries, etc. Also airplanes! Getting this so compact and refined is a technological miracle. Now put it where it fits!

Buses are already largely electric (with the US as a notable exception), and trucks are quickly getting there:

https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...

Meanwhile, hydrogen trucks are nowhere to be found...

A huge tank of hydrogen is a bomb. This isn’t like gasoline that takes a lot to ignite.

You only see Mirais within spitting distance of the one place where they can tank. The network just isn't developed to the point that owning one of these makes any sense at all.

Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?

I think that + it's an EV that Toyota don't have to source the battery cells. FCEVs are full EVs just like Tesla, that uses a different kind of battery than Li-ion.

The latest model comes with a li-ion battery pack. Previous model had Nimh cells I think.

The point is, it is a full EV. The "hydrogen fuel cell" thing is a type of a battery. A lot of people somehow misses this, and thinks it of an EV-ICE hybrid. It's not.

The FC is a magic non-moving fin stack that generates electricity proportional to the amount of H2 and O2 fed through it. It's a type of a primary(non-reusable) battery. Nominal cell voltage is 3.7V and pack voltage is 370V for Mirai.

Not that it makes the car great, but it is literally an EV.

To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now.

I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.

I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.

I think there's some truth to this. Toyota desperately needs the future to play to their strengths, something more complicated than EVs, which I think is behind their obsession with hybrids.

Not sure that a fuel cell vehicle isn't just an EV with extra steps, however.

[dead]

I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...

This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.

The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.

It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user.

Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.

In fairness, hydrogen from gas would enable the CO2 to be sequestered. If the vehicle itself burned the natural gas that would require recapturing the CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which is much more challenging.

None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.

Carbon sequestration is another of those "if we did this, it might solve the problem, but there's no serious move to do it and pay for it on the scale required, plus it's prone to cheating".

How do you solve aeronautical and maritime applications?

Certainly not with hydrogen directly. It might be involved in the production chain, but it's such a pain. If it's at all possible to electrify, that'll very likely win.

For flights, a combination of batteries for smaller, regional planes starting with "islands hoppers" now and SAF from either Biofuel or produced from Electricity (with Hydrogen as an intermediate step). Although I think that we might first see moves to reduce the 2x non CO2 Climate Impacts which can be much cheaper to tackle (such as Contrails).

For maritime applications, batteries when regularly near ports, probably hybrids with methanol for cross-ocean passage far away from coasts.

The Toyota Mirai neither flies nor floats.

There's a bit of a movement for battery electric ships, but currently limited to short haul ferries. I have a suspicion this simply won't be "solved" for quite some time after car and heating electrification.

Hydrogen is not great for airplanes since the extremely low density makes the tanks too large. The best solution would be synthetic hydrocarbons (synthesized using hydrogen) which can outperform fossil jet fuel.

Creating hydrogen isn't the only problem. Storage and transportation is a big one since it is an actual gas instead of a liquid. Needs to be compressed, causes embrittlement, highly flammable, etc...

It's possible to create hydrogen from coal and carbon capture is supposed to be feasible. Though I don't know how commercially viable this is.

Carbon doesn't really contain all that much hydrogen.

Feasibility is key.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSV2kVkO1w

> Carbon doesn't really contain all that much hydrogen.

The hydrogen also comes from water reacted (mildly endothermically) with carbon, and by further reaction of carbon monoxide with water.

C + H2O --> CO + H2

CO + H2O --> CO2 + H2

Obligatory paper - Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? (2006)

https://alpha.chem.umb.edu/chemistry/ch471/evans%20files/Pro...

Nothing fundamental has changed in the last 2 decades to refute the arguments Bossel made in 2006.

Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km.

This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).

> And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen

That original owner was probably doing all those miles on the free hydrogen given by Toyota.

That program was not available in my region

I'm surprised it's only 65%. There's hardly anywhere to fuel these things up and the price of hydrogen isn't exactly a bargain.

This article is too long because it's written by a llm

Cars are not investments.

Depends on the car. Some are so special they will have a better ROI than your retirement plan.

https://www.myartbroker.com/investing/articles/top-10-most-i...

The last time I checked local ads, they were giving these cars away free, and you could get a tax deduction. They were paying you to take it.

According to some youtube (doomer) videos I watched a lot of EVs and luxury cars also had this kind of depreciation lately.

When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.

An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.

Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.

I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.

> An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.

Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?

> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.

It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.

EVs are cheaper to own – the fuel savings are enormous.

EVs aren't cheaper to produce yet, but battery costs are still falling and they will reach parity with ICE vehicles soon.

EVs are so much more cheaper to own that it is difficult to explain to people who own ICE cars as they, in majority of cases, just cannot comprehend it

You're both wrong, the Mirai uses a fuel cell as the voltage source for an otherwise EV drive train. The Mirai is an EV with a fuel cell instead of a battery.

There is no ICE in a Mirai.

My EV has cost me ~$1,100/yr less to operate over the last few years for the same mileage compared to my ICE, and I didn't even have any major issues with my ICE. Meanwhile its been charged with almost exclusively 100% renewable, zero-emission energy.

>Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?

Because batteries are very expensive. But they aren't particularly complex.

This argument just does not make any sense at all. Of course simple components can be more expensive. The cost of ownership is even less relevant, since it depends almost entirely on outside factors, which vary by region and government.

>It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.

This is totally false. The hydrogen storage alone is enormously complicated. Hydrogen, especially at the pressures needed for a car to be viable is far more complex to store safely then fuel storage for a regular diesel/gasoline car.

Pretending this is not the case is just delusional.

I've seen exactly one of these in person while in San Diego for a month or so. I never did see a fueling station for it though.

There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment).

Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.

Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.

https://h2-ca.com/

And they are not even supposed to explode anymore!

the reality is no where to get the fuel. hydrogen stations are shutting down not building up.

I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.

Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.

A full tank would cost $200 for about 300-350 mile range.

Sorry. EVs won.

Toyota should have bought a page from pre-brain-damage Elon Musk's book and built a nationwide hydrogen-fueling infra-structure.

Teslas may not be anymore the future of EVs, but we can't deny that by building the Power Charger infrastructure, Tesla gave consumers the confidence to buy an EV knowing that it wouldn't be basically a geofenced vehicle.

In the US. How does their value fare in Japan?

Given the complete collapse in sales last year (-83% to 432 units, in a market of over 4M cars sold), I'd venture to guess they're faring pretty badly.

https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fal...

https://www.carsensor.net/usedcar/bTO/s235/index.html

If you think depreciation on a few cars is bad wait until you find out how many hundreds of millions taxpayers spent to build hydrogen stations for cars that don’t exist.

At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.

It looks like Mirai has no future after all...

I am sorry. ;-)

I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.

The convenience of filling is only there if you have the fuel stations. Considering how expensive it is I’d argue that it’s far better to spend that money on EV charging infrastructure, you get a lot more bang for gour buck. And EVs are arguable significantly more convenient when you have the infrastructure. Would you buy a phone that lasted a week or two, but you had to go to a phone filling station to refill it?

And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.

It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.

The inefficiency of creating, transporting, and converting hydrogen into motion is way too much to bear for the purpose of eliminating a 45 minute charging stop.

I'll take the convenience of being able to charge my car every night compared to having to drive out of my way to go to the extremely rare hydrogen fuel station.

I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.

> The convenience of refilling quickly is great.

Is it more convenient than plugging in an EV overnight at home, and having a full "tank" every morning?

It is not.

Electricity supply is everywhere. More so than Gasoline supply, and far far more so than hydrogen supply.

Not that much worse than an ev.

Used models for my five year old EV are still selling for ~50% of what I paid for, so no, its far worse than most EVs.

Looking at Ford Mach-E. I don't see the number you are seeing. I can find 2024 Mach-E 50% off its MSRP.

Looking at 2021 Mach E Premiums around me in good shape and normal mileage, most are ~$22k. The car was originally $49k MSRP. So ~45% retained value, I rounded. Mea culpa. But when you factor in that the original owner really got it for $7,500+ in rebates that's more like 52% of retained value. So the truth is really somewhere in between.

2024's around me are listed around $34-36k. MSRP was $47k. Didn't qualify for federal rebates. 34/47 is 72% of retained value, a loss of 28%. Also a 2024 model year is two model years old not one. That's far from 65% lost value.