[–] 2 points 7 months ago

You can also turn water + atmosphere into synthetic fuels, such as methanol or even kerosene. Such fuels can be used without modification to existing ships. Alternatively, you can just electrolyze water and get hydrogen, which can also be used if you can deal with the lower volumetric density.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    The problems are mostly solved already. You wouldn't use metals known for hydrogen embrittlement. Often times, you'd use something else, like HDPE or fiberglass that avoids this issue. Storage facilities can even be naturally occurring geological features, like salt caverns.

    You would only use LH2 for specific cases, specifically where you are expected to use up the hydrogen quickly. But even this is changing, as self-refrigerating systems are being developed, allowing for very long-term LH2 storage.

    We already can make hydrogen via electrolysis. This is a long-solved problem. Efficiency is not that relevant. The main limitation of batteries is that you simply cannot make enough of them. There are huge resource limitation problems. Meanwhile, hydrogen can be made from water and is effectively unlimited as a resource.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    You can't store electricity by itself. The problem we are facing is massive curtailment, i.e. massive overproduction of green energy that can't be utilized. There needs to be way of storing it at a massive scale. There is no feasible way of storing that much energy in conventional batteries.

    If you can acknowledge that hydrogen is needed for dense energy storage and grid-level storage, then you should realize that we will eventually have a huge hydrogen infrastructure, and production capacity to match. That will create very cheap green hydrogen, and will mirror what happened with solar and wind.

    Cheap hydrogen alone will drive large-scale adoption of hydrogen cars, regardless of the popularity of BEVs. A lot of people will choose hydrogen cars (possible e-fuel cars too, since e-fuels can be made from hydrogen) simply because it is akin to an ICE-car in usage.

    The other point is that battery production is not green and is very resource intensive. Hydrogen cars let's you avoid that almost entirely. In the long-run, it will be pointless to care about efficiency when green energy becomes nearly free. That suggests hydrogen, not batteries, is the better idea.

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    If you go here: https://piefed.social/home/active/all

    It just looks like its showing the most recently commented post. That probably isn't how "Active" is suppose to work. On Lemmy, it works like this: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

    Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time

     

    As world leaders debate emissions reductions at COP30, JCB chairman Lord Bamford has revealed how hydrogen combustion engines could help to decarbonise British agriculture without the limitations of battery technology.

    The £5.7 billion construction equipment manufacturer has invested £100 million in developing hydrogen combustion engines that produce zero carbon emissions at point of use, with more than 130 engines already powering backhoe loaders, telescopic handlers and trucks.

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