Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can’t make its operations work here.::The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can’t make its operations work here. All seven of its California stations will close immediately.
What part of that confuses you? Hydrogen is better for cars VS batteries in every meaningful way in 2024. Long range, quick fill ups, zero harmful emissions, don’t need to live in SFH or rely on landlord/HOA to grant you the privilege of charging your car.
Hydrogen cell cars are electric cars that don’t rely on severely underdeveloped technology of batteries we have today.
And where are you gonna get the hydrogen from? You have any idea how power inefficient electrolysis is!?
https://www.airproducts.com/equipment/hydrogen-onsite-generators
Uhh there are tons of companies making these now. You can literally drop one of these in the middle of nowhere running off solar, pulling hydrogen from the atmosphere.
Because solar is free?
Guys, we can stop trying to solve climate change, we already have free energy!
Are…you suggesting solar isn’t free energy?
Solar costs whatever it costs to buy, install and maintain a solar PV farm, which is not nothing.
If you’re going to build a solar PV farm, you’re obviously going to want to sell the power you generate in whatever way is most profitable.
At the moment, it’s still magnitudes more profitable to sell solar back to the grid than it is to feed it into an inefficient hydrolysis plant, create a load of hydrogen and oxygen, and then move it by leaky tanker somewhere to sell it.
These are designed to be setup and turned into fueling stations, not creating the hydrogen and shipping it elsewhere. You still need substations near superchargers, which requires a lot of power lines to be run. In the middle of nowhere they’re pointless to build.
Jesus, of course it’s not free. Solar panels are not free, the land you put ten on is not free, construction is not free and the infrastructure needed to supply energy during the nigh (storage or another source of energy) is not free. How is this not obvious?
Lol yes because a super charge station is free…and so is the land and the wires and the sub station to get it out in the middle of nowhere… totally more economical to put in a fucking substation for superchargers in the middle of nowhere than to use solar hydrogen lol
WTF are you talking about? So solar if free because ‘solar hydrogen’? You’re not making any sense.
Solar energy is free, I’m not the one that’s made a claim that it’s not. I’m also not the one that has zero understanding on how superchargers work…all of you keep thinking they can just dump one in the middle of rural America and it’ll just magically work. You don’t seem to understand the huge amount of power draw these things have.
Yes. Do you have any idea how much energy we’re wasting because nuclear power plants produce way more than we need because they can’t scale easily or that most green energy generation is at the time people don’t actually need it? Hydrogen is a prefect storage solution for that power.
It is somewhere to put energy, when you filled the efficient storage. But that doesn’t make it good for transport.
Not really. Since grid storage doesn’t have the same weight limits as EVs, there are a hundred different viable technologies. Everything from flow batteries, to flywheels, to pumping water uphill. Hydrogen fits in there, but it’s not likely to be widespread.
You’re mostly right. But I don’t agree on the last part. Hydrogen production can’t be done in your backyard. But electricity can (and I forgive you if have no backyard, these next few points may be less relevant if that is the case).
Unlike hydrogen, electricity production is affordable, scalable, and ubiquitous. And that small detail changes the benefits dramatically.
Again, I can see that these are less compelling points if you live in a super dense area and utilities and supply chain there are really dependable. But this is hardly the case everywhere.
And then there’s the build of the car itself. Honestly, I know nothing about it, but something tells me the simplicity of battery and electric motors makes those cars more practical to build, especially if the battery itself is commoditized as part of a complete electric grid solution.
I can put two electrodes in salt water and run it off an old power brick and generate hydrogen. It’s not efficient, industrial hydrogen isn’t primarily made that way (it mainly comes from oil instead), and hydrogen has a list of other problems, but it can be done.
The trick isn’t making hydrogen, it’s capturing it, refining it (so that it isn’t mixed with a tonne of air), and compressing it into a pressurised storage tank for later use.
None of that is magic, or even especially expensive. You can do it with stuff available off the shelf to a hobbyist. It’d be a silly way to run cars, but you can do it.
Honestly, and I don’t want to sound selfish here, but never having to get out at a gas station in the middle of winter again is the biggest draw of an EV for me. Especially since I rarely drive more than about 60 miles.
You… actually can.
https://www.airproducts.com/equipment/hydrogen-onsite-generators
Lots of companies make stations like these. Granted they’re not cheap.
Most people in the world cannot put solar panels on their roof today. Even if you exclude all the places people don’t own cars I still think my statement will be true.
Whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t invalidate their points
Yes it does. If you cannot generate electricity at home, all those points are moot.
Only if you’re looking at it from a purely all-or-nothing view since those infrastructure points will be improved as adoption progresses… And building that infrastructure is just the endpoints for the most part since the electricity is already being delivered, which you seem to continue to ignore or handwave as having to do with adopting the “wrong” tech (which even with your arguments is only the “wrong” tech because of infrastructure, which is a circular argument)
Right now, plenty of people can adopt this and benefit from it. Over time, as it becomes more ubiquitous, it’ll make more financial sense for places where people can’t put in their own stations to set those up, possibly backed by solar. Which will be far less infrastructure needed than hydrogen stations, hydrogen production facilities, and hydrogen trucks to haul it to the distribution points (stations).
My argument is it is wrong tech because of current state of development of batteries. Slow charging, low energy capacity, heavy weight, using dangerous chemicals, etc.
I’m one of those people - I have an EV, but I wish I had a hybrid that has a tiny, light battery for ~50 miles of city driving I can charge at home and a proper size hydrogen tank I can use to travel as far as I want.
I stand by my argument that we should have invested heavily in hydrogen cars and infrastructure. Batteries will inevitably make it into cars as their development progresses. They are just not the right tech now.
Lol, no.
Lol, no.
Hydrogen is a great way of storing and transporting energy.
If we could find more efficient ways of manufacturing hydrogen, it may be very worthwhile as a storage technology for power plants when there is a surplus of energy.
Or for powering equipment that needs a ton of energy but can’t be tied to the grid…freight ships come to mind.
But for cars? It was a workable idea when battery technology was terrible. There has been a lot of movement in that area. There’s still environmental and political concerns over lithium…but ultimately i think either lithium will be replaced by something even better, or we’ll find solutions to those concerns, and at this point, the cons of lithium are outweighed by the pros.
Yes! A clean platform that needs METRIC GIGATONS of carbon positive infrastructure to set up and maintain. That is why I call shenanigans on your zero harmful emissions claim.
VS
We already have wires, and batteries are more than good enough for a vast swath of the everyday commuting public.
Hydrogen can be generated any time. Like when nuclear or solar or wind energy is otherwise going to waste. We don’t have and likely won’t have batteries that could replace it for decades.
Modern batteries are absolute shit and definitely not good enough. I think a good indication that batteries are anywhere near useful will be when you can fly on battery power across the Atlantic.
Wait, so … They’re nowhere near useful when we can already use them for daily commuting easily because of some arbitrary goalpost for an unrelated transportation method? How does that even make sense?
Infrastructure for hydrogen fueling requires production facilities, trucks to transport, and stations set up, to even start moving one vehicle let alone taking over any percentage of commuter traffic of any significance. EV fueling infrastructure requires… Pretty much the same grid we already have, at least as a functional baseline (yes, it needs improvements, but we’re not switching overnight so we have the time we need to make those changes; meanwhile, it’s already functional)
It isn’t arbitrary. Just a simplified example of stored energy to weight ratio.
Infra would show up if people didn’t jump on wrong tech just like electric charging infra is starting to show up.
There’s that subjective “wrong tech” again
And again, the wholesale infrastructure needed is what I’m talking about, not the infrastructure availability.
Again: hydrogen requires, at a minimum, production facilities, trucking to distribution nodes, and fueling stations to get the fuel to the consumer.
Electricity… Is already being delivered. It just needs a way to plug in.
This has precisely zero to do with which tech has been “jump[ed] on”.
I’m talking about public infra, not charging at home since most people cannot charge at home. Almost the same amount of infra is required since current capacities are nowhere near sufficient. So it has everything to do with people jumping on wrong tech and money being wasted on useless infra.
Wrong. There are tons of options for grid storage batteries that are gearing up for mass production right now.
Ok chief, you know best. Better sit out buying a vehicle until the dust settles then I guess.
Meanwhile, I’ll be charging my ‘not good enough’ EV and trying not to let the fact that it doesn’t measure up to your standards weigh to heavily on me.
I already have an EV and I still think batteries in them are shit. These are not mutually exclusive.
Hmm is it a leaf perchance? I’m very very happy with the 2020 Ioniq, it’s been solid, reliable, and true to its mileage estimate (I actually get 25km more range at 100% than the advertised specs)
I’ve heard negative stories about Nissan’s battery tech - which is why I ask. Air cooling is not really helpful to lithium battery cells.
It’s also possible you just got a bad module, and/or that you just have higher standards and expectations than I do, and these are also not mutually exclusive.
I have an Outlander and I’m also getting more range than advertised specs. My issue with batteries isn’t defects in tech, but the stage of its development. There are simply no batteries that can even come close to energy storage capacity of hydrogen and unlike with gas (12-30%), hydrogen’s conversion efficiency when using fuel cell is ~60%.
They make solar stations that will pull hydrogen right from the atmosphere. What carbon are you talking about…and you do realize the same power that would be used to make hydrogen in your example would also be charging batteries.
That is a waste of solar. It’s more efficient to put in batteries then kinetic. If there is no more batteries to put it in, you transmit the power over wires.
With hydrogen it’s wasteful to create from electricity, then wasteful to turn into kinetic. Its wasteful to store as it’s the smallest atom so escapes easily, it’s low density so needs compressing. Then, to move it, you have to move storage around instead of just transmit over wires.
Exactly. And just to be clear, because it’s annoying me every time people gloss over this, it’s not just some percentage points lost in the conversion of energy, it’s actually ~75% of the energy that goes to waste, from energy production to the final motion of the wheels. EVs on the other hand only waste ~25% of energy. Even with the wishful thinking that the hydrogen can simply be created in times of energy overproduction, you can’t beat a factor of 3.
Yep. H2 cars are pushed by the ignorant or the corrupt (oil money).
Hydrogen is basically free energy though. Using solar to pull it from the atmosphere and then it goes in an ICE motor. Stations like these can supply hydrogen basically anywhere without needing to run wires to it. Providing fuel to ICE powered hydrogen cars.
You know that 75% loss of energy the GP mentioned above? That’s for hydrogen fuel cells, not hydrogen ICE. It’s even worse for ICE. Why the hell would we do that rather than putting that solar directly on the grid?
Because you can drop one of these and fuel hydrogen ice cars in the middle of nowhere. You can’t do that with solar and superchargers , they require substations.
Sounds like all of you people live in the city. Figures how ignorant you all are, the USA is massive people don’t just live in apartment blocks in walking distance of their jobs and stores.
So hydrogen just appears somewhere? There’s no other infrastructure involved?
This is crackpottery and your repeatedly re-posting this assertion without citing anything isn’t really supporting your position.
Yes, yes, electrolysis is a thing.
No, it is not free.
FFS if you’re going to go for crazy theories why not dream big: here is a potential paint we could research for a few megacredits and buff our science to coat our walls and make hydrogen with. For not free but cheaper than electrolysis.
It’s not free though. There’s such a thing called ‘opportunity costs’: If I have the choice between a ‘free candy machine’ that spits out one candy every hour, and one that spits out three candies every hour, I know what I’ll choose.
I also wasn’t aware you ware talking about ICE powered hydrogen cars, where the efficiency is even more comically abysmal.
Cool your candy machine requires 10xs the investment and maybe even more because supercharger stations need substations near them. They can’t run on a 400amp box.
It seems to me like you’re comparing the costs for building one at the most out there location possible. Putting the questions aside if building anything in such locations would ever be profitable enough for something to be build, or if fast-charging is absolutely necessary: This absolutely isn’t true for the majority/average location, where your solution is the one that prohibitively expensive, not to mention that a good chunk of people wouldn’t even need a charging station at all when they can charge at home, maybe even using the solar panels already on their roof.
There may be some limited space for hydrogen ICE cars on the market, but it won’t be the solution that’ll see widespread adoption and support by car manufacturers as long as there’s a much cheaper and comfortable solution for 99.9% of people on earth (number made up).
Though if anything, I predict that specialized EVs with swappable batteries (which already exist) that can then be charged slowly with solar will become viable as they’re much cheaper and efficient in those areas.
Right now, it doesn’t seam like we energy to waste. Not until all the energy is clean. Also, it’s always going to be cheaper to use a lot less energy. Until energy is free, which it isn’t even with renewable because of install cost and maintainance cost.
A…waste of solar…internal ICE hydrogen motors is what these would be used for not fuel cell hydrogen.
How are you wasting solar? Lol this makes no sense. These can be stood up anywhere, you cannot use these as super chargers for batteries…
Because you can put that electricity directly into the grid rather than wasting it making hydrogen.
Lol that’s not the goal, the goal is to charge a car… you’re finding a problem to solve that’s not even in the same area…
You can use electricity on the grid to charge a car. Not sure if you were aware of that. It’s going to be a whole lot more efficient at it than hydrogen.
No shit. You know you need a substation to power a supercharger grid…you know how many substations just randomly exist in rural areas to power superchargers? And how expensive they are to build and maintain?
Look at the efficiency of the energy conversions. It is literally wasting solar.
How is it wasted if it completely free energy? You cannot charge up electric cars quickly via solar…hell solar in general isn’t super efficient anyways lol
No energy is free because there is always installation and maintance cost. Lot’s of people change their cars off solar. Most of a car’s life is sat parked for hours. So slow is fine. My charger has a solar divert function I’m yet to get the solar for. Also, you change a house battery slow and then a car fast from it. Even here in the UK there are people doing it. Not solar all the time, but a lot in summer. House battery changed when your in the office, car overnight from that.
Hydrogen isn’t in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is 20.9% oxygen, 70% nitrogen and some trace other gases, none of which are hydrogen.
Hydrogen is produced either by splitting water (the H in H²O) or splitting hydrocarbons like Methane which produces CO² (the carbon part bonding with oxygen from the atmosphere, making that stuff we’re trying to cut back on).
That second method is why the fossil fuels companies are so keen on it. Hydrogen can be a repacked form of natural gas.
Yes totally forgot how there is no water in our atmosphere…forgot the globe just has water in a few places and humidity doesn’t exist…
Oh yes, that 1% water vapour (on average) that you want 2/3rds of.
Gimme a break. I don’t think your machine producing hydrogen “straight out of the atmosphere” is going to be fueling many cars.
Sure. All that’s great.
But I’m talking about infrastructure, not technology.
Infra is result of people jumping on wrong tech. Batteries don’t belong in cars in their current state of development.
Instead you rely on Shell to provide hydrogen to you when there’s no pre-existing infrastructure to deliver it and… Oh, looks like they decided to put an end to it, have fun with your brick on wheels 🤷
that’s the whole point tho, for them to sell you special fuel, that you can’t get yourself, like you could with solar panels. this is more serious threat from fleets of trucks, those companies are already building their solar farms to charge their trucks. that’s somewhat catastrophic for companies selling fuel nowadays. of-course they’ll push their magic fuel solution, forcefully. who do you think pays the hydrogen shilling campaigns?
Shell is one of many companies providing hydrogen fuel stations. Infra may not be where it should be, but I blame that on all the people who jumped on battery powered cars at a time battery tech is years of not decades away from being good in vehicles.
I’m genuinely curious why you think battery tech is decades away from being good in vehicles when it’s working very effectively in vehicles right now and over the last decade. In what way are they ineffective currently when they can have 250+ miles of range now when most people don’t put that many miles on their car in a day? And at least for the people who have the option to put a charging station in their home (which is not at all cost prohibitive), refueling is a matter of plugging it in when you get home which takes like fifteen seconds rather than ten to twenty minutes (or more) to stop somewhere along the way? (This is assuming, of course, that there is a station along the way, which likely isn’t the case at least right now for hydrogen)
You keep bringing infra into conversation when I already said it is simply a result of people jumping on wrong tech too early.
Yes, batteries sort of work for some people. I’m one of those people. I still say they are shit because they are only useful in very specific cases like low mileage city driving for people lucky enough to live in SFH with solar panels on the roof. Most people cannot charge at home.
For most people hydrogen is a better choice. I would actually love a hybrid with a small battery for 50 miles or so I can charge at home and hydrogen for 600 mile range.
“Most people can’t charge at home.”
And no one can fill up their tank at home.
Electricity is already reaching all buildings, hydrogen storage and transport is a bitch, you’re using electricity to produce it anyway so it still puts as much stress on the grid but in a centralized manner.
The only way hydrogen is a good alternative is for heavy transport.
I recently did the math on this in another thread comparing BEVs to ICE on range. It details the absolute worst case for driving range that I could find with zero gas or charging infrastructure in between. The BEV can actually do it better (in that it gets you closer to the goal under the most stressed conditions) with no further advancements in battery tech.
With only one charging point halfway on this trip, many BEVs would make it fine. Two charging points at a third of the distance each would open up the list very nicely. It looks like there are already high voltage lines near this very route (guessing a little from a map of Canadian lines), so the infrastructure is already most of the way there.
Speaking more generally, outside of this worst case scenario, all we need is more charging infrastructure. A 250-400mi EV would otherwise work fine for the majority of people with little to no new battery tech required. We should take advancements we can get, anyway, but it’s not a hard requirement anymore for the average driver.
Original post of mine copied below:
Let’s take the absolute worst case I could find for North America: in Quebec between Matagami and Radisson there is a 620km (390mi) distance between gas stations. This exceeds the range of many ICE cars, but let’s continue. It gets real cold up there, and there’s a few days out of the year where it’s well below 0F. To account for the cold, let’s increase that distance by 40% to get to about 550mi.
There is one EV on the market right now with a 516mi range, the Lucid Air. So it can’t quite make it under the absolute worst case conditions that, even up there, will only happen for portions of the year. Many ICE cars would also fail to make it.
This problem is completely overblown. The 1,994 combined population of those two Canadian towns will have to wait. Literally everyone else in North America will be fine if we just get our charging infrastructure better.
Oh, and ICE cars lose gas mileage in cold weather as well. 15% lower at only 20F. So ICE cars that could barely make that trip under warmer conditions probably couldn’t under the extreme cold of this exceptional situation.
Right, except you can put several gas cans in your trunk in this extreme scenario.
Green hydrogen–where it’s produced entirely using renewable resources–currently costs at least twice as much as producing it from hydrocarbons. Depending on the details, it can be seven times as much. Pink hydrogen–water electrolysis powered by nuclear–is barely much better.
The vast majority of production comes from hydrocarbons. Most of it currently goes to the agricultural industry for making nitrate fertilizer.
This is entirely the petrochemical industry trying to open up a new market before it loses its current biggest one.
I get it, but cost is irrelevant if it is produced using green power that would otherwise be wasted anyway from overproduction.
Wait what? How in the fuck could an HOA prevent you from charging your car or installing a charger inside your space? The charger lives inside your garage, so it doesn’t effect curbside appearance and isn’t within what they can control.
At absolute worst, if you have no garage and street parking, wouldn’t you just be running the cord over to your vehicle? Non-commercial charging stations aren’t normally weather proof, so that wouldn’t be outside, and again, none of their business. If they have an issue with an extension cord running across your lawn, or a cable slightly larger than a hose, then they’d have to make sane rules about how long it can be left out, like not just leaving it plugged in for a whole weekend straight. Otherwise they’re making it against the rules for people to use corded yard equipment or use a hose.
I might be missing something here, but I don’t see any way an HOA could do anything against it.
No offense, but your response means you’re either the luckiest person in the world and live in a utopian HOA or much more realistically have zero experience with the stupid fucking cancer that is currently infesting more and more properties.
It took me years of paying lawyers and dealing with some of the stupidest and most stubborn people on the planet to try to install a charger near my spot in a shared garage. At my expense and with all requirements met, it was still easier to move than convince those fucking assholes that we’re in 2020 and cars use electricity.
No HOA on this planet will let you just run a cord even if you don’t consider that this would likely restrict you to level one charging and expose you to power theft.
Not to mention all the ecological damage mining for battery components does. I’m with you, hydrogen is the way to go
300kg of battery -> environmental catastrophe
The other 1,500kg of car? Made of unicorn kisses and butterfly dreams.
Also, hydrogen grows on trees apparently.
Yes, the batteries are smaller, but you also need the fuel cells catalyst. It’s not a clear win for the HFC car.
A huge portion of our battery materials come from the Atacama Desert. There is no life at all in a lot of it.
You do know that we get most of our hydrogen from burning fossil fuels, right?
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Unfortunately they’re both death sentences. It’s either public transport or climate apocalypse.
I am well aware we are doomed.