Thread by @bopinion

The world appears to be betting on hydrogen being the future of energy:

🇬🇧U.K.: $664 million
🇪🇺EU: $550 billion

🇨🇳China, 🇯🇵Japan and 🇰🇷South Korea have also committed to huge amounts of spending on the gas trib.al/WqkEVDF

The enthusiasm about hydrogen has a simple reason. Whether it’s burned to create heat or used in a fuel cell the only exhaust it emits is:

💦Clean water trib.al/WqkEVDF

The worldwide race to dominate the various niches of a market is projected by some banks to be worth trillions of dollars by 2050.

But several hydrogen bubbles have been popped before:

📆1980
📆2000 trib.al/WqkEVDF

There are daunting disadvantages:

🌎It doesn’t appear in its pure form on earth
💰Expensive
🚛Hard to transport and store
❄️Must be compressed to 700 times atmospheric pressure or refrigerated at -253C
💥Likes to explode trib.al/WqkEVDF

⚡️To get hydrogen, an electric current is run through water to split the oxygen and hydrogen atoms apart.

That takes energy, which really ought to be green trib.al/WqkEVDF

One application currently gets a lot of hype: hydrogen-powered vehicles.

But on almost every count, vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells lose against their “clean energy” rivals — electric cars running on batteries trib.al/WqkEVDF

For a start, hydrogen cars are only half as efficient:

If an electric car converts 86% of the energy originally harnessed by a wind turbine into moving the vehicle forward, the hydrogen car has access to only about 45% trib.al/WqkEVDF

Compared to an electric car, a car with a hydrogen fuel cell:

⚙️Has more moving parts
💸More expensive to maintain
🔌Can’t be “reloaded” at home

That’s bad news for Toyota, Hyundai and Honda, who have placed the biggest bets on hydrogen in transportation trib.al/WqkEVDF

🚆Hydrogen also doesn’t make sense for trains: It eliminates the need to electrify the track, but locks in a more complex, less efficient solution.

✈️It’s only long-haul flights or 🚢 oceanic shipping where hydrogen starts to make sense trib.al/WqkEVDF

The solution to climate change is to power everything with electricity from renewable sources.

But that’s the problem: We simply can’t run everything on electricity. And we won’t ever have enough sun and wind to keep the lights on all the time, everywhere trib.al/WqkEVDF

Here’s where hydrogen becomes useful.

It could be the fuel that picks up the slack whenever the clean power grids of the future can’t keep up trib.al/WqkEVDF

It could look something like this:

↪️Electrolyze hydrogen when we have excess sun or wind
↪️Store it underground near our power grids, where it can be used during lulls in direct electricity generation

Hydrogen then makes decarbonization possible trib.al/WqkEVDF