Why Elon is Wrong About Hydrogen Fuel

A few weeks ago Wheelhouse made an episode about how Hydrogen cars were supposed to be the future of automobiles. And in that episode Nolan made a pretty good economic argument for why they failed. An argument that everyone’s favorite billionaire, Elon Musket, might agree with. But like all things car related, I get curious about the engineering side of things. Outside of politics, why couldn’t the car of the future be hydrogen powered? Well today on B2B we’re gonna take a look at hydrogen-fueled tech, and explain why Elon Musk might just be wrong about hydrogen cars.

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[straightbusta]

Love how Jeremiah's analogy is basically a breakup that ends up in a threesome

[divyanshusrivastav]

Do a b2b on pre-war straight 8 engines.

[TwistedDTM]

9.1 seconds is a pretty quick when you're used to driving a 21 year old Ford Fiesta that wasn't even that quick when it was brand new lol.

[princekhaledus]

I really appreciate the video. However, as a scientist in this field, hydrogen coming from water splitting is the DUMMEST idea.
1- People look at the ocean and think that this is the water that will be used in producing this hydrogen - wrong. You need as pure water as possible to obtain hydrogen "efficiently" using electrolysis. The more impurities, the WAY more energy you need to split.
2- Please remember there are countries that doesn't have access to fresh water to drink, nevertheless, to use it as a source of energy.
3- Do you understand the magnitude of energy needed to maintain those hydrogen station? From compressing the hydrogen to storing it at absolute zero temp to liquify it? What a waste!!

Conclusion, enhance the desalination process first, then we can talk using it for energy purposes. I am not an Elon fan, but I have to agree with him.

[alolanstarboy]

That fuel cell analogy is suspiciously specific

[TheGardenSnake]

It’s all about supercooled liquid oxygen and methane. To the moon!

[fogbound]

9.1 seconds is slow huh? Me in a 2003 galant "I am speed"

[juancarlosceballos]

In 15 years of reading scientific papers this is the best fuel cell explanation I have ever seen 😂. Nice work!!

[EngelSpiel]

I think the Hyperion is vapor-ware, pun intended.

[niklas]

I can't believe Donut makes learning fun, screw school I'm signing up for the Donut Education Program

[BlazeMakesGames]

at the end of the day the core problem with hydrogen cars is that they're just EVs with extra steps. Ultimately you're just replacing the battery in an EV with Hydrogen tanks. But the issue is that in order to store energy as hydrogen, you have to spend energy.

Think about the most ideal situation for both a Hydrogen Vehicle (HV) and an EV. You have a refueling station where everything is made via Green Energy. One Station uses that energy to power an electrolysis machine to make Hydrogen, then the cars take that hydrogen and turns it back into electricity to run them. Whereas the EV station just puts electricity right into the car to use. However, every time you convert energy to another form, you end up wasting some of it along the way. And when you end up doing the math, you end up spending about twice as much energy per mile travelled in an HV compared to an EV.

So say you were to try and build a fully self sufficient station for both kinds of cars. For the EV station you would simply need X amount of Solar panels to Power a set number of charging stations, which don't really require any more infrastructure than a few pieces of tech installed next to a parking lot. For the HV station, in order to service the same number of cars, you would have to install twice as many solar panels, and you would need places to put electrolysis machines, and for those to work you need to hook up a water line connection so you'll still be paying water bills at least, and then you would also need somewhere to store all the hydrogen, and then finally you would need to have the actual stations to put the hydrogen in the cars.

Since you can't just make water out of thin air, you can't really make a truly self sufficient Hydrogen station, and you'll need to buy a lot more expensive machinery to make it work. And sure while at first blush using twice as much power as an EV might not sound so bad if we make sure it's all green power, that still means that at the very least if an Electric Station was put there instead, about half of the green energy that was going to powering that Hydrogen Station, could have gone to powering other things like people's homes and such instead.

Then On top of all of that, Electricity is just more versatile. A Hydrogen Station has to store most of its energy as Hydrogen, which means that you can't really use it for much of anything without putting it back through a fuel cell. Whereas an Electric Station just has a load of batteries that can be charged or discharged as needed. Which means that having an electric station is like having a giant energy backup system that can serve other potential purposes.

What this all amounts to is that it's so much easier for more companies to build Electric stations either commercially or at home. Having the ability to charge at home means you likely have a large battery as well which means you could potentially keep your lights on a little longer during a power outage. Or a Restaurant could set up a station in their parking lot due to how little infrastructure it needs, and then the people charging their batteries for 20 minutes could come in for a meal and if the restaurant loses power they could use their station as a backup. You can't really do much of that with Hydrogen since a home station would be way more expensive and require dumping a ton of energy into the hydrogen production, which means a much higher power bill cost compared to owning an EV, and you can't just set up Hydrogen stations in random parking lots due to how much other infrastructure you would need.

Electricity just has such a massive leg up in infrastructure thanks to the fact that even if there were 0 Charging stations in the world, at the very least anyone with a house could run a cable out to charge their car overnight. Whereas with Hydrogen you have to go out of your way to get a large scale electrolysis machine.

I don't see Hydrogen catching on for the simple fact that no matter what, it will always take so much more infrastructure to set up compared to electricity, all to just power an electric car at twice the cost

[Hi-Im-RubX]

A hydrogen fueled car, is just an electric car with more steps!

Think about it

[thetiger]

You explained redox reactions better than some college chemistry teachers lol

[maxrei]

Problems with points mentioned in this video:
1) No one actually says fuel cell cars don't work.
2) No one says we don't know how to produce hydrogen.
3) No one says we don't know how to put it in a car.

The actual problems of fuel cell cars are:
1) The efficiency of the whole process of creating electricity, using it to produce hydrogen, using it to compress the hydrogen, using it to cool the hydrogen.
2) Hydrogen atoms are very small and therefore hard to contain without some of it just diffusing to the outside- making it even less efficient.
3) Hydrogen is a gas down to -252.87°C, which means that in order to store it in a useful way it needs to be liquidized by pressure and cooling, which as well lowers the whole efficiency.
4) You said we also had no infrastructure when electric cars started to become wide spread: Are you joking? We actually didn't have an electric grid before Tesla's or what?
Now show me all the hydrogen lines that naturally are already used all across the world.
Again, pumping around hydrogen through the earth isn't as trivial as pumping around natural gas. Hydrogen is much much harder to contain and it's energy density in gas form is incredibly low.
That's not just a thing of putting some pipes underground.
5) Since this channel focusses on performance cars: performance cars that use fuel cells need to have a battery or capacitors on board as a buffer to provide enough peak power, since a fuel cell isn't as easy to ramp up to avoid power sag. That means that you need to have a battery in the car after all. The more performance you want- the bigger the buffer needs to be.


The main problem remains the efficiency. The big downside is, that despite all the manufacturers telling you the opposite, there is physically NO way you could make hydrogen production hugely more efficient than it already is. There's no way to avoid compressing and cooling the gas, and that always takes the same amount of energy no matter how efficient you make it. It's the same for gasoline cars: They cannot exceed an efficiency of somewhere around 40% since there's ALWAYS going to be combustion happening that ALWAYS produces heat and C02.

Theres no point in wasting 60% of the energy into producing and distributing hydrogen when you could also just put it into batteries directly (considering that those 60% are also heat, which makes the impact on the environment even greater).

[alistersutherland]

I have been saying this for years. Thanks so much for popularizing it. Near the end, you pointed out a key benefit; the output at the end of the chain is the cleanest, pure H2O possible (though spitting it out wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement). That has environmental implications on a global scale if Hydrogen is adopted. It can also supplement and displace fossil fuel-based power grid generation, using a portion of the renewables mix - along with methane (NG) during the transition - to derive Hydrogen.

I have deep concerns about the environmental impact of adopting purely electric cars with LI batteries on a global scale, and that is what's taking place. At least they last an increasing number of cycles/years, and are largely recyclable, but it is an expensive process in every respect.

I'll put it this way: develop energy technologies utilizing the most fundamental and plentiful element in the universe, or mine rare earth minerals and create vastly more environmental degradation utilizing a finite resource.

[cobra]

I am 83 years old. When I was in seventh grade I had a popular science magazine telling us about fuel cells being the next big thing.
A hydrogen powered farm tractor was on the cover of this magazine. LOL

[ford]

When Jeremiah said “Let’s-a-go” before the ad started it reminded me of that SNL skit with Elon Musk. Maybe that was intentional…

[TexRobNC]

I just love that you all are tackling more complex topics than just "car go fast!", this is the kind of unique content that I personally subscribe for. I love the automotive world, and the tech world, and this is a great look into both.

[jariollila]

Not a single word about energy efficiency, which is really poor for hydrogen compared to EV. More than 60% of the energy is lost in producing, transporting and using of hydrogen vs. about 20% for battery vehicles.

[WrathChild-NZ]

No mention of energy losses or cost?
That's literally the main reason.
It's a net negative return to make