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Nearly all major car companies are sabotaging EV transition, and Japan is worst, study finds (thedriven.io)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, it's much cheaper than green hydrogen, so you can guess what people would fuel their hydrogen cars with
Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful, you get less than a third the energy than you would if you went electricity to battery to electricity
It's really difficult to store and transport, it is very very low density. Being the smallest atom hydrogen can leak from practically any container or pipe, but that doesn't compare to (2) above

I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time. Toyota are really good at internal combustion engines

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago

Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels,

Presently yes. It's a by-product of natural gas production. There hasn't been much of a market for it. In Australia there's $230b of green hydrogen production projects on the table. Just one of which in Western Australia is going to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen per year.

Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful,

Yes but electricity transport is very wasteful. There's plenty of sun in Western Australia, falling in desert areas where land for solar arrays is practically free.

It’s really difficult to store and transport,

There's problems yes, but the industry believes these are solvable problems. Toyota is the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world. Japan has several other very large vehicle manufacturers. They're all betting on hydrogen. They've invested $2.3b in a hydrogen supply chain which is already shipping hydrogen.

I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time.

Hydrogen doesn't provide power through "internal combustion". A hydrogen fuel cell produces energy by running hydrogen over a catalyst which produces water and electrical energy.