WITAF.
At best, he doesn’t understand what a Hybrid Car is.
I see the man has never witnessed a 1972 Ford Pinto
Oh, the HUGE MANATEE!
Wait till he hears about gasoline
The material safety sheet for gasoline is a lot scarier than the one for hydrogen
msds
The worst part about the gas you put in your car are all the additives they cram in there. Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full. Your finger doesn’t even smell afterwards unlike car gas where you stink for a week. Also no skin cancer! Next you drain some from the bottom to make sure there’s no water. After a quick visual inspection, you just pour it out onto the ground.
Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full.
I know some people have different practices, but myself and the pilots I’ve known use a dipstick to check fuel level. You do you, but remember that aviation fuel contains lead, which is easily absorbed through the skin. I always use gloves when checking fuel.
I can’t deny that most pilots don’t use gloves, that there are fewer additives in aviation fuel, nor that we are trained to dump checked fuel on the ground. But I don’t see those as “green flags” for aviation fuel.
For anyone interested, here’s the Material Safety Data Sheet for aviation fuel. For comparison, here’s the MSDS for automotive gasoline. I wouldn’t want to touch either without skin protection.
Real funny, because LEAD is an additive for avgas…
All natural, organic, free-range, gluten-free lead! With a name you can pronounce. Couldn’t harm a fly. Look at me! I turned out fine!!
‘THE ONE TIP FUEL MAKERS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!’
hydrogen cars “explode.”
Sounds like he’s getting reality mixed up with Fallout.
From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine’s also have a tendency to explode. I haven’t seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.
Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn’t hydrogen’s fault.
No… No, that’s not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won’t burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn’t have been a catastrophic fireball…
The Hindenburg’s skin was also highly flammable. Regardless of what gas it contained it would still have burned as fast.
The leaking hydrogen was just the initial fuel that the static arc ignited.
One the skin was burning it was over.
Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
If nothing else, hydrogen can’t burn without oxygen, and there’s very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
It wouldn’t have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn’t have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.
Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it’ll just burn up because it won’t all be released at once. And I’ve never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.
Are they routinely tested in high impact crashes too? Slamming into a phone pole might be more energy than a rifle round.
EV battery packs are also designed to mitigate thermal runaway events, even down to Tesla packs making every cell connection a fuse on case of issues. That doesn’t stop them from catching fire anyway after some accidents.
What hydrogen cars?
The sum total of Toyota and whoever else’s efforts still amount to an inconsequential fraction of the vehicles currently in operation, probably not even a notable portion of a percentage point.
We’re dealing with a man who saw pictures of a spray bottle and the sun and decided it meant injecting bleach and putting a lightbulb inside you. Do not presume he thinks rationally.
Lil bro remembers being traumatized by the hindenburg explosion when he was growing up. Fucking luddite.
Did you know: the Hindenburg was built before plastics were a thing. Most think that the metal shell held the gas but no. It full of animal bladders/intestines that were filled with hydrogen and tied up .
The late, great Heisenberg of New Mexico says that hydrogen explodes!
Could he not? It’s not just that he’s wrong. It’s that we’ll have to defend the factual errors around a deadend solution.
Hmm, dumbass gives rant against green energy, I see rise in dumbass arguments against green solutions, hmm.
Broken clocks and whatnot. Hydrogen cars are trash and completely unfeasible, not because they explode but because of the terrible efficiency and fueling problems
Hydrogen fuel cells actually show quite a bit of promise. Mostly for large trucks. Batteries have a scaling issue. A battery powered 18-wheeler needs a much larger battery for a much shorter range.
Adding more load means you need more battery, and that larger battery is just more load that you need to haul.
This is sort of true with everything, but the important note is that a full battery and empty battery weigh the same.
Anyway. Commercial use is where it makes sense. There are actually a few other technologies that make sense in the commercial transportation space. Like ammonia.
Keeping these rather dangerous fuels commercial also allows for more strict safety standards.
But nobody’s actually taking about subsidising or making them, so there’s no point in ranting about it.
Hydrogen buses were a thing for a while, but it’s probably cheaper to just go with batteries now.
Feels like something that was surpassed before it ever got popular.
I could see hydrogen being useful for some applications where you don’t need the public infrastructure. Buses that refuel at a central depot could be one of those if there’s issues with battery electric being too heavy and stuff like that.
But for ordinary people that can charge their car at home or work without needing to go to a third place it’s hard to beat that convenience.
Hydrogen also has a history of being pushed by fossil fuel companies, probably because initially most hydrogen would be generated using fossil fuels, so it’s not exactly a fast track to reducing emissions.
Yeah, the home and workplace charging has basically won the day for anyone that doesn’t spend most of their life driving.
Slightly sidetracking, I suspect nuclear power is also being pushed by the fossil fuel club as well, after 40 years of going “But Chernobyl!” Simply because it keeps people on gas and coal for about 20-30 years while it all gets built, is enormously expensive, and probably wouldn’t be enough to meet demand anyway. And they can also veto any large green projects with “But the nuclear is on the way!”
Yeah, that’s definitely been the strategy of the liberals/nationals in Australia. In a country that historically has never had nuclear, has a bunch of state and federal bans against nuclear and no infrastructure at all to deal with nuclear waste or fuel, they want to build a nuclear plants (oh , and those will be micro plants which don’t actually exist anywhere!) instead of continuing to build more renewables. And they’re pushing hydrogen as well.
It’s actually disgusting that an industry that knows it has no long term future decided that they should just delay the inevitable for just a few more years/decades at the cost of our only planet. I just can’t fathom being this fucked in the head to make that calculation.
and the need to build an entire new distribution network, but one that handles cryogenic fuel.
nah, no thanks.
Actually they can retro fit oil and gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen. Guess who is pushing the “huRdUGyun iS thE fuTuRe” narrative. Yeah the people who own the oil and gas infra.
Actually they can retro fit oil and gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen.
citation requested because this defies literal physics. I’d give you the benefit of the doubt if you suggested propane, but gasoline storage is NOT cryogenic, would not hold large enough volumes of it, and aren’t capable of the pressures involved.
Sure, you can bury a hydrogen tank and support plumbing NEXT to a gasoline storage tank, but you still have to deal with handling cryogenic fuel. Do they really claim that?
So even if that’s an agenda, it’s fucking bent. Green Hydrogen literally ISN’T.
Seems like every solution the petroleum industry pushes is really just another excuse to pump more oil to burn in an already choking atmosphere.
fuuuuuck.
And would need a huge new infrastructure for production and distribution. I’m convinced that most of the push for hydrogen is from oil and gas interests wanting to have essentially the same business they do now.
Clearly one of the advantages of EVs is how cheap and easy the infrastructure is compared to any other alternative (and somehow we’re still finding it difficult)
EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.
Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.
Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.
- Most manufacturers pledged to support NACs starting next year, and a couple already have. Also, Tesla is adding the older standard to at least some chargers
- We might be losing “pay at the pump”, that was required for federal money to build out charging. Now we’re switching to NACs but Tesla hasn’t supported “pay at the pump” and I don’t know if that’s still a requirement. While it is actually more convenient to use the app and Tesla has been consumer friendly so far, I’m uncomfortable with yet another app holding my credit card hostage just so I can adult.
- we should focus on rest areas on highways, both to build out the trip charger network and as something that can more easily be standardized/influenced
To add to that the system’s handling them degrade quite quickly if you think maintenance cost for a normal vehicle is difficult you should see one that has to handle high pressure hydrogen
Change in rhetoric since Elon jumped on board
Weird, the person that would have a personal stake in having hydrogen cars fail.
Helium cars! They will be safe!
Because we’ve never had vehicles powered by a highly volatile fuel source before. /s
Just wait till he finds out how modern combustion engines work
Wow, even when he’s accidentally correct (hydrogen cars really aren’t good), his “reasoning” (if you can call it that) is dumb as Hell.
The real problem with hydrogen cars (aside from H2 storage being a pain in the ass) is that they’re mostly a greenwashing scam, since the vast majority of H2 produced is not “green” hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by renewables, but instead so-called “blue” hydrogen produced from natural gas or coal. If you’re gonna do that, you might as well just fucking burn the hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine directly and save yourself all the damn hassle!
The part that pisses me off the most about this is that in states that have a very heavy amount of Renewables like let’s say California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there’s literally nowhere for them to put it.
Meanwhile they will simultaneously say they can’t do green hydrogen because it takes so much energy and isn’t super efficient, they will also say the same thing about desalination it needs too much energy where are they supposed to get it from. Motherfucker you are literally curtailing solar constantly just fucking dump it into one of those two things who cares if it’s not the most efficient 20% efficiency is better than 0% efficiency
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
In… California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there’s literally nowhere for them to put it.
Um…
?
They meant “no where to put the power”, which is true (although it’s not a new problem by any stretch and there’s a lot going on to address it).
Give me my coal powered steam car, assholes!
I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.
Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).
Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid
With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it’s an efficiency suckfest.
But it’s awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives
We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen …… there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.
Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor
It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency
It’s not about cost
The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it
With electric, you waste less than 10%
We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).
With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results
You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.
That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears
But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing
Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol
And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the “if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it’ll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road” promise
It’s kinda like software development…every experienced dev is aware that when management says we’ll do it shitty for now and fix it later that later never comes.
I’m pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled – or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it’s no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; – but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on…
The thing is, hydrogen is a byproduct of damn near every industry. It’s usually just released into the atmosphere because it’s a pain in the ass to capture and store and isn’t worth much. If it starts being in demand, you can bet your ass they’ll start trying to gather it.
Remember, though, that it is currently profitable to reform hydrogen out of methane, at the same time as it’s not profitable to contain and sell ‘byproduct’ hydrogen. There are sure to be reasons why, and they might be fairly durable reasons that don’t change much even as the demand for hydrogen increases. I’m no expert on this so I won’t speculate too much on what those reasons might be – maybe factors related to scale and logistics?
