Recent searches
Search options
Thing I don’t get is people believing that hydrogen is going to be a useful automotive fuel. Are they all oil company shills?
Hydrogen is an objectively terrible fuel for pretty much any use with the possible exception of aviation.
It has abysmal energy density for a given volume, even if you liquify it (compare Falcon heavy to Delta IV heavy: similar lift capacities but the latter is fucking enormous because hydrogen takes up stupid amounts of space and the former runs on kerosene).
It doesn’t stay where you put it, ever. It’s literally impossible to keep hydrogen in a container. A hydrogen molecule is so small that it will fuck off through the gaps in soils iron. You cannot store it long term.
To get ANY kind of sensible energy density from it, you have to liquify it (where it’s still shit compared to pretty much any other energy source in the same volume), and that’s cold. Seriously, seriously, mind bendingly cold. It makes liquid nitrogen look like lava.
Oil companies like it because atom for atom, crude oil is mostly hydrogen. Go figure.
But it’s an objectively dreadful fuel. Stop trying to make hydrogen a thing. It’s never going to be (again, planes maybe excepted).
@goatsarah Why is hydrogen on demand not ever going to be feasible?
@goatsarah Hydrogen that is produced as you need it. NFW people are ever going to drive Hindenburg cars with hydrogen tanks. But if there is a catalyst that can extract hydrogen from water as the car requires, that would be most excellent. I just wondered whether you were up on that technology's future potential.
@markvonwahlde Water is what you get when you burn hydrogen.
So your “catalyst” is gonna need to procure energy to crack it, so you can then use (40% of) it to produce propulsion in an internal combustion engine.
The second law of thermodynamics wants a word.