I could never understand what makes some people believe that using hydrogen makes sense.
Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
If we restrict the discussion just to storing energy as chemical energy, like with hydrogen, then almost any alternative has either better energetic efficiency or better energy density and in most cases is much better for both criteria.
For example, flow batteries have excellent energetic efficiency, much better than hydrogen could ever achieve, but they have low energy density, i.e. they must be very large for a given storage capacity.
For high energy density, nothing beats the method invented by the living beings a few billions of years ago, i.e. storing energy in hydrocarbons.
How to make synthetic fuel has already been known for about a century, it just is not much used yet because fossil petroleum is cheaper.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of money in pointless hydrogen research, all the efforts should have been directed to improving the efficiency and cost of fuel cells using some hydrocarbons and of the synthesis of some hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide.
That these targets are indeed achievable, unlike using hydrogen for storage, which has fundamental limitations, is proved by the existence of the living beings which use their equivalents.
> Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
People who say this aren't thinking clearly.
There are different storage use cases. For diurnal storage (daily charge/discharge cycles), hydrogen is indeed inferior to other technologies.
But this is not the only storage use case.
Other use cases are seasonal storage (particularly important at high latitudes) and backup storage (especially for rare events when it's both cloudy and windless over large areas for extended periods). For those use cases, hydrogen can be much better than things like batteries or compressed air (or flow batteries, or storage in synthetic hydrocarbons).
Hydrogen cannot be better than hydrocarbons, because the efficiency of the cycle can reach very close values for both, while storage tanks and associated devices are much smaller and cheaper for hydrocarbons.
Converting the energy stored in hydrocarbons back to electrical energy can be done with the current technology at efficiencies well over 50% using Diesel engines.
Higher efficiencies can be reached with fuel cells. It is true that for now, especially for room-temperature fuel cells, much more research has been done for fuel cells with hydrogen.
However room-temperature fuel cells are handicapped anyway by the need for expensive catalysts. High temperature fuel cells can be made to work almost as well with hydrocarbons as with hydrogen. Their lifetime needs improvement, but it is likely that better results could have already been obtained if the research efforts in energy conversion would not have so dispersed over a very large number of directions, most of which were obviously wrong since the beginning.
Right now it is indeed possible to obtain hydrogen from water with a higher efficiency than hydrocarbons, because it can be done in a single simpler step, the electrolysis.
Nevertheless, in an optimized synthesis, the efficiency of obtaining hydrocarbons instead of hydrogen, also sequestering carbon dioxide as an added benefit, should have a very close efficiency, as proven by the countless bacteria that do a similar job.
It is possible right now to capture carbon dioxide and store energy in synthetic hydrocarbons, then generate electrical energy from the stored hydrocarbons.
However the cost and efficiency of doing that would be much less than desirable and possible.
That is why I said that this would require much more R&D than now, but this would be a certain solution for the long term storage problem.
For short term storage, high-efficiency solutions, e.g. flow batteries, pumped water, compressed air and so on, are better solutions.
> Hydrogen cannot be better than hydrocarbons, because the efficiency of the cycle can reach very close values for both, while storage tanks and associated devices are much smaller and cheaper for hydrocarbons.
So, where do you get the carbon from? Atmospheric capture? That blows the "easier" claim right out of the water. Biomass? Not practical on the very large scale needed.
Efficiency of conversion in combined cycle plants is around 60%.
Hydrogen is just a means of STORING energy and it is one of the worst for this purpose.
If we restrict the discussion just to storing energy as chemical energy, like with hydrogen, then almost any alternative has either better energetic efficiency or better energy density and in most cases is much better for both criteria.
For example, flow batteries have excellent energetic efficiency, much better than hydrogen could ever achieve, but they have low energy density, i.e. they must be very large for a given storage capacity.
For high energy density, nothing beats the method invented by the living beings a few billions of years ago, i.e. storing energy in hydrocarbons.
How to make synthetic fuel has already been known for about a century, it just is not much used yet because fossil petroleum is cheaper.
Instead of wasting huge amounts of money in pointless hydrogen research, all the efforts should have been directed to improving the efficiency and cost of fuel cells using some hydrocarbons and of the synthesis of some hydrocarbons from water and carbon dioxide.
That these targets are indeed achievable, unlike using hydrogen for storage, which has fundamental limitations, is proved by the existence of the living beings which use their equivalents.