Hydrogen, hydrogen, who's got the hydrogen?
-
Every kilogram of hydrogen doing useful work in America right now came out of a factory. Most of it gets cooked from natural gas in industrial plants, the cleaner kind gets split from water with electricity, and both routes share the same basic problem: somebody has to build the molecule before anybody can sell it. So the idea that you could skip all of that and simply pump hydrogen out of the ground, the way Texas pumps crude, has spent years living in the “sounds great, call me when it’s real” folder.
It now has a date on the calendar. HyTerra, an Australian-listed explorer drilling in rural Kansas, and Prometheus Hydrogen, an Illinois company that stores the gas in solid form, signed a collaboration agreement in late February to run a complete geologic hydrogen supply chain from one end to the other: out of the rock, through purification, into storage, onto a truck, and into the hands of a commercial end user. The target, according to Hydrogen Central, is completion before December 1, 2026. Nobody anywhere has ever billed a customer for purified hydrogen that came out of the ground. If these two pull it off, that sentence stops being true before New Year’s.
-
Well, for automobiles, the emissions are water vapor. There's been hydrogen cars on the road from Honda and I believe others in test programs limited to specific areas in specific states.
But however they produce it and whatever the environmental factors involved in its production (and thank you; this is fascinating) is there not a consensus that the oil industry will never really allow it?
The worst thing I've heard said about them is that they explode, as if gas and electric vehicles don't?
-
The Hydrogen powered Mirai.https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
Get your own little Hindenburg.
-
This is great. I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of hydrogen since, to date, it has basically been a battery technology not a true energy source. But this is different. Apparently there are around 2x the recoverable reserves of hydrogen as there are of nat gas. I had no idea!
-
The Hydrogen powered Mirai.https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
Get your own little Hindenburg.The Hydrogen powered Mirai.https://www.toyota.com/mirai/
Get your own little Hindenburg.I'd love to!
But anything with this level of technology will be expensive.
My car didn't arrive today and might not until Monday or Tuesday (it is insured as of last night, though).
It's old school-- normally aspirated internal combustion with a mechanically geared automatic. It has an electrical system of course but not "electronics" in the modern sense.
It has hand crank windows if I recall.
I'm excited but have always thought hydrogen had great potential.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login