Hydrogen has been the future as long as I have been paying attention to electric cars. There are many problems with it, including Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. It leaks through seals, embrittles metals, and has terrible energy density by volume. You either compress it to 700 bar (heavy tanks), liquefy it at -253°C (energy-intensive), or store it in metal hydrides (heavy, slow release). Solid state batteries are much more interesting. They extend EV range to 600-1000 miles and enable 10-minute charging. If they work at scale, they kill hydrogen for cars, trucks, and probably short-haul aviation too.
While hydrogen fuel cell technology may not hold a distinct competitive advantage in the passenger vehicle market—where battery electric vehicles have achieved greater maturity in infrastructure and cost reduction—it retains significant merits in heavy-duty trucking and stationary power generation applications. This is particularly true when "grey hydrogen" (industrial by-product hydrogen derived from processes such as steam methane reforming or chlor-alkali production, rather than electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is readily available at competitive prices.
Under such conditions, the total cost of ownership for fuel cell systems can achieve parity with, or even fall below, that of lithium-ion battery solutions. Furthermore, when accounting for the end-of-life considerations—where fuel cells present fewer recycling challenges and material recovery complexities compared to the substantial battery waste stream associated with electrochemical energy storage—hydrogen fuel cells emerge as a fundamentally more sustainable and economically viable long-term solution.
Compressed hydrogen and cryogenic liquefaction also present explosive/BLEVE risks. Metal-hydride is probably the only reasonably safe-ish option. Other issues (like hydrogen embrittlement, leaking, slower flow-rate) are all very real challenges, but 'solvable'. Solving all of them at a price that consumers/businesses can stomach is quite debatable.
Batteries are just too good nowadays to expect hydrogen to receive the level of R&D and infrastructure investment to become at all competitive.
Good article, as always hydrogen for transport is dead. Unfortunately, as they say, what is dead can never die. And there will always be companies trying to siphon off public funds to do “trial runs”.
One thing that seems wrong is in the efficiency comparison: step 1 for hydrogen should be grid transmission, not electrolyzer.
Also, how come the BEV price doesn’t adjust in response to electricity prices (not that it would impact the result).
This analysis does not account for side benefit of the oxygen. If you split water to get hydrogen, then for every kilogram of hydrogen you get, you also get 8 kg of oxygen. Liquid oxygen is not an expensive commodity, its market price is about $1/kg, but in this context this makes a difference. For example, in the first infographic, the cost of green hydrogen produced today is listed as £16.97 which is about $23. If you can recoup $8 from this by selling the oxygen, or even only $5, then this makes a difference. If you select green H2 with 2030 assumptions, you get £7.67, or about $10s. If you sell the oxygen at $5, you basically get the hydrogen at half price, and this makes the hydrogen powered truck slightly more economical than the battery powered one.
The current market price is based on current supply and demand. Splitting water to create enough hydrogen for non-trivial fraction of the transportation sector would generate an enormous amount of oxygen. The price of oxygen would likely tank in that situation.
Except you can make oxygen for pretty cheap using oxygen concentrators. The technology is simple enough that home versions exist for patients with lung problems can lug one around at all times to have a feed of oxygen rich air. Oxygen is almost 21% of the air we breathe, it's trivial to capture. Hydrogen counts for only 0.000055%.
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.
I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
As much as I find H2 fuel cell technology - which is a type of a gas based electric battery with no moving parts - fascinating, I can't help but wonder if we would be better off just running hybrids on e-fuels.
e-fuels are just low quality gasoline, IIUC, made by (waves hands) ethical means from thin air using electricity. They still generate NOx gases, but ICEs just take them as is, and they're much more energy dense compared to long range batteries.
The only real problem is that there don't seem to be many green and scalable means to produce them, but if we could, I think it can be an overall better alternative to seemingly unworkable hydrogen based EVs and/or unrecyclable battery based EVs.
Would a system like the one in China - with the user of methanol conversion from excess Wind/Solar/Other power gen (even idle coal) making it much more flexible to generate/transport/store rather than trying to buildout gas distribution.
With the added advantage of fuel cell swaps [0] and reload giving the trucks a quicker turnaround time per charge (i think similar op is used for electric trucks as well as some consumer car models)
It certainly solves the problem of recharge points as the infra can be rolled out piecemeal, and since it would be for heavy trucks less disruptive of the rest of the cityscape (can have the outside metroplitan areas etc with maybe emergency stops within)
I think the Edison motors approach will be the most future-proof, using drop-in power supply bricks, one can abstract the power source to the point where it won't matter if it's a fuel cell, natural gas turbine or a new battery technology, to the truck it's just electricity (plus or minus some metadata for things like regen breaking or engine gear)
This has been tried a few times. The sticking point has always been twofold
0- this is a massive upfront investment for what amounts to a small time savings (having extra batteries on hand, charging them and the equipment to remove / move / install the heavy units
1- unless manufacturers agree to share a specification, you're tied to a single brand and risk being shut out of replacements when that inevitably goes away because it didn't catch on or got deprecated
2- for individual consumers, the battery is the most expensive component of their vehicle, and trading it for a used one of unspecified origen to save a few minutes instead of charging is not appealing.
Given one and two, overcoming the expense of 0 is not at all economical for many situations. The ones that most need it can't afford it, or could be satisfied with relatively short high voltage charging.
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
Or -hear me out- we can put these long I beams on the ground and put some cables above. Then tie 50 trucks to each other and they can get whatever kind of electricity from anything you can make electricity out of.
Well we already have a lot of those, at least in North America (best freight rail system in the world), and it might make sense to build even more tracks in some areas. But rail will never be practical for time-sensitive cargo. It just takes too long to assemble a train and move cars through switching yards. We're always going to need a lot of trucks no matter what.
Truely rail-fans are transportation equivalent to vegans in food or cross-fit in exercise. I've spent many an hour on the Isle of Sodor and appreciate how useful those engines are in so many contexts. Yet still, there are buses that move alongside Percy, and pick up stranded passengers, and the Fat Controller (aka Sir Topham Hat) still has a sedan. It's a multi-modal world out there and the tractor trailer still has a place in it.
Excellent analysis. Two points: what if 1) only surplus energy from offshore wind would be used for green H2 electrolysis and 2) the price would be at or below £/€/$ 1.50 per Kg?
Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot.
To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydrogen for road transport requires jumping in with both feet (due to infrastructure requirements) when there are dozens of smaller, commercially proven steps that get you equivalent results. Better route planning, driver training, aerodynamic retrofits, hybrid and battery electric for shorter routes, even just reducing empty running.
These aren't exciting and they don't get press releases, but they compound. The industry could cut emissions meaningfully with changes that pay for themselves today, without waiting for a national hydrogen infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
On surplus offshore wind: the economics only work if you assume the electricity is genuinely surplus, meaning there's literally no other use for it. In practice, the UK grid still runs gas plants for roughly 40% of generation. Every MWh of offshore wind that goes into an electrolyser instead of displacing gas is a missed decarbonisation opportunity. "Surplus" renewable electricity is a future state, not a current one, and even when we get there, interconnectors, grid storage, and demand response will compete for those MWh. The electrolyser only makes sense after all of those higher value uses are saturated.
On £1.50/kg: that would genuinely change the fuel cost picture, getting you to roughly 12-15p per mile which is competitive with diesel. But the distribution problem doesn't go away at any price point. You still need compression or liquefaction, transport, and a national network of dispensing stations. The UK has 11 public hydrogen stations. Even free hydrogen doesn't help if there's nowhere to fill up. The grid is already everywhere. Adding a charger to a depot is a transformer upgrade. Adding a hydrogen station is a £2-5M civil engineering project.
The place where cheap green hydrogen gets really exciting is exactly the applications where you can't just plug in: steel, ammonia, seasonal storage, maritime. Those don't need a distributed national refuelling network, they need point to point bulk delivery to industrial sites and ports, which is a much more tractable logistics problem.
Hydrogen has been the future as long as I have been paying attention to electric cars. There are many problems with it, including Hydrogen is the smallest molecule. It leaks through seals, embrittles metals, and has terrible energy density by volume. You either compress it to 700 bar (heavy tanks), liquefy it at -253°C (energy-intensive), or store it in metal hydrides (heavy, slow release). Solid state batteries are much more interesting. They extend EV range to 600-1000 miles and enable 10-minute charging. If they work at scale, they kill hydrogen for cars, trucks, and probably short-haul aviation too.
The path of most interest to many is Renewables -> bulk hydrogen as storage -> electricity grid.
The bulk storage method of interest is dissolved salt caverns: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160599
While hydrogen fuel cell technology may not hold a distinct competitive advantage in the passenger vehicle market—where battery electric vehicles have achieved greater maturity in infrastructure and cost reduction—it retains significant merits in heavy-duty trucking and stationary power generation applications. This is particularly true when "grey hydrogen" (industrial by-product hydrogen derived from processes such as steam methane reforming or chlor-alkali production, rather than electrolysis powered by renewable energy) is readily available at competitive prices.
Under such conditions, the total cost of ownership for fuel cell systems can achieve parity with, or even fall below, that of lithium-ion battery solutions. Furthermore, when accounting for the end-of-life considerations—where fuel cells present fewer recycling challenges and material recovery complexities compared to the substantial battery waste stream associated with electrochemical energy storage—hydrogen fuel cells emerge as a fundamentally more sustainable and economically viable long-term solution.
Compressed hydrogen and cryogenic liquefaction also present explosive/BLEVE risks. Metal-hydride is probably the only reasonably safe-ish option. Other issues (like hydrogen embrittlement, leaking, slower flow-rate) are all very real challenges, but 'solvable'. Solving all of them at a price that consumers/businesses can stomach is quite debatable.
Batteries are just too good nowadays to expect hydrogen to receive the level of R&D and infrastructure investment to become at all competitive.
Good article, as always hydrogen for transport is dead. Unfortunately, as they say, what is dead can never die. And there will always be companies trying to siphon off public funds to do “trial runs”.
One thing that seems wrong is in the efficiency comparison: step 1 for hydrogen should be grid transmission, not electrolyzer.
Also, how come the BEV price doesn’t adjust in response to electricity prices (not that it would impact the result).
This analysis does not account for side benefit of the oxygen. If you split water to get hydrogen, then for every kilogram of hydrogen you get, you also get 8 kg of oxygen. Liquid oxygen is not an expensive commodity, its market price is about $1/kg, but in this context this makes a difference. For example, in the first infographic, the cost of green hydrogen produced today is listed as £16.97 which is about $23. If you can recoup $8 from this by selling the oxygen, or even only $5, then this makes a difference. If you select green H2 with 2030 assumptions, you get £7.67, or about $10s. If you sell the oxygen at $5, you basically get the hydrogen at half price, and this makes the hydrogen powered truck slightly more economical than the battery powered one.
The current market price is based on current supply and demand. Splitting water to create enough hydrogen for non-trivial fraction of the transportation sector would generate an enormous amount of oxygen. The price of oxygen would likely tank in that situation.
Except you can make oxygen for pretty cheap using oxygen concentrators. The technology is simple enough that home versions exist for patients with lung problems can lug one around at all times to have a feed of oxygen rich air. Oxygen is almost 21% of the air we breathe, it's trivial to capture. Hydrogen counts for only 0.000055%.
This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.
I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.
As much as I find H2 fuel cell technology - which is a type of a gas based electric battery with no moving parts - fascinating, I can't help but wonder if we would be better off just running hybrids on e-fuels.
e-fuels are just low quality gasoline, IIUC, made by (waves hands) ethical means from thin air using electricity. They still generate NOx gases, but ICEs just take them as is, and they're much more energy dense compared to long range batteries.
The only real problem is that there don't seem to be many green and scalable means to produce them, but if we could, I think it can be an overall better alternative to seemingly unworkable hydrogen based EVs and/or unrecyclable battery based EVs.
Would a system like the one in China - with the user of methanol conversion from excess Wind/Solar/Other power gen (even idle coal) making it much more flexible to generate/transport/store rather than trying to buildout gas distribution.
With the added advantage of fuel cell swaps [0] and reload giving the trucks a quicker turnaround time per charge (i think similar op is used for electric trucks as well as some consumer car models)
It certainly solves the problem of recharge points as the infra can be rolled out piecemeal, and since it would be for heavy trucks less disruptive of the rest of the cityscape (can have the outside metroplitan areas etc with maybe emergency stops within)
[0] https://m.chinatrucks.org/news/10750.html
I think the Edison motors approach will be the most future-proof, using drop-in power supply bricks, one can abstract the power source to the point where it won't matter if it's a fuel cell, natural gas turbine or a new battery technology, to the truck it's just electricity (plus or minus some metadata for things like regen breaking or engine gear)
This has been tried a few times. The sticking point has always been twofold
0- this is a massive upfront investment for what amounts to a small time savings (having extra batteries on hand, charging them and the equipment to remove / move / install the heavy units
1- unless manufacturers agree to share a specification, you're tied to a single brand and risk being shut out of replacements when that inevitably goes away because it didn't catch on or got deprecated
2- for individual consumers, the battery is the most expensive component of their vehicle, and trading it for a used one of unspecified origen to save a few minutes instead of charging is not appealing.
Given one and two, overcoming the expense of 0 is not at all economical for many situations. The ones that most need it can't afford it, or could be satisfied with relatively short high voltage charging.
The point of the Edison motors approach is that you can just drop in a diesel engine - their initial goal is to electrify trucks used for industrial work in Canada by making them series hybrids.
It will work great for them because these trucks are designed to be modular and easily repairable (they are driven hard and WILL break when their owners need them). I would not be surprised at all if it develops into an impromptu standard just because so many eyes are on the system all the time.
Battery swaps are not practical, but the guy you're replying to is making the point that an electric vehicle could be built with a modular, removable power source, and converted between gas/hybrid/battery/hydrogen/natural gas/whatever later in life depending on the needs. That's just not possible with a vehicle which directly connects the powerplant with the wheels - there's too much nonsense like transmissions and differentials to deal with when you do that.
I think it makes a ton of sense for trucks, much less sense for cars.
Not only is it competing with battery electric, it’s potentially competing with just plain old electric.
There are truck pantographs being tested out. It seems like an idea that could have potential in major shopping routes.
https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
Or -hear me out- we can put these long I beams on the ground and put some cables above. Then tie 50 trucks to each other and they can get whatever kind of electricity from anything you can make electricity out of.
Well we already have a lot of those, at least in North America (best freight rail system in the world), and it might make sense to build even more tracks in some areas. But rail will never be practical for time-sensitive cargo. It just takes too long to assemble a train and move cars through switching yards. We're always going to need a lot of trucks no matter what.
Truely rail-fans are transportation equivalent to vegans in food or cross-fit in exercise. I've spent many an hour on the Isle of Sodor and appreciate how useful those engines are in so many contexts. Yet still, there are buses that move alongside Percy, and pick up stranded passengers, and the Fat Controller (aka Sir Topham Hat) still has a sedan. It's a multi-modal world out there and the tractor trailer still has a place in it.
Any sufficiently method of ground transportation contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a rail network.
Excellent analysis. Two points: what if 1) only surplus energy from offshore wind would be used for green H2 electrolysis and 2) the price would be at or below £/€/$ 1.50 per Kg?
Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot.
To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydrogen for road transport requires jumping in with both feet (due to infrastructure requirements) when there are dozens of smaller, commercially proven steps that get you equivalent results. Better route planning, driver training, aerodynamic retrofits, hybrid and battery electric for shorter routes, even just reducing empty running.
These aren't exciting and they don't get press releases, but they compound. The industry could cut emissions meaningfully with changes that pay for themselves today, without waiting for a national hydrogen infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
On surplus offshore wind: the economics only work if you assume the electricity is genuinely surplus, meaning there's literally no other use for it. In practice, the UK grid still runs gas plants for roughly 40% of generation. Every MWh of offshore wind that goes into an electrolyser instead of displacing gas is a missed decarbonisation opportunity. "Surplus" renewable electricity is a future state, not a current one, and even when we get there, interconnectors, grid storage, and demand response will compete for those MWh. The electrolyser only makes sense after all of those higher value uses are saturated.
On £1.50/kg: that would genuinely change the fuel cost picture, getting you to roughly 12-15p per mile which is competitive with diesel. But the distribution problem doesn't go away at any price point. You still need compression or liquefaction, transport, and a national network of dispensing stations. The UK has 11 public hydrogen stations. Even free hydrogen doesn't help if there's nowhere to fill up. The grid is already everywhere. Adding a charger to a depot is a transformer upgrade. Adding a hydrogen station is a £2-5M civil engineering project.
The place where cheap green hydrogen gets really exciting is exactly the applications where you can't just plug in: steel, ammonia, seasonal storage, maritime. Those don't need a distributed national refuelling network, they need point to point bulk delivery to industrial sites and ports, which is a much more tractable logistics problem.