• grue@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Considering that the vast majority of hydrogen isn’t even “green hydrogen” (produced from electrolysis) but rather “grey” or “blue” (produced from cracking hydrocarbons), I don’t think it was anything more than a straight-up greenwashing scam in the first place. Even the niches where people claim hydrogen is suitable (long-haul trips without battery charging infrastructure) would be better off just burning the damn hydrocarbon as-is to begin with!

    Even in the best-case scenario – “green hydrogen” produced from electrolysis – I think it would be better to immediately (at the point of production) combine it with CO2 pulled from the atmosphere to make synthetic gasoline and then handle that with our existing ICE vehicles and infrastructure. It’s just so impractical to store hydrogen (since it’s so small it leaks through everything, yet so low-density that it requires either extremely high pressures or cryogenic temperatures to fit enough of it in a reasonable amount of space) that it’s simply not worth the effort.