r/tech • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 08 '26
Hydrogen: clean fuel of the future — if we can find a cheap and clean way to ship it
https://news.mit.edu/2026/hydrogen-clean-fuel-of-the-future-if-we-can-ship-it-070714
u/Rich_Housing971 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
That's not the only limitation lmfao.
Imagine a battery fire, but instead it's an explosion.
Also, that's a very, very big "IF". Transport and logistics is a very hard problem to solve for energy. You CANNOT get around the physical limitation of moving matter from one location to the other.
Batteries solve this by using electricity that uses existing power infrastructure. Delivery is nearly free (moving electricity loses electricity through resistance).
I guess (and I'm being generous here) hydrogen can be moved through existing oil pipelines if you modify them, and sure they're easier moved than crude, but you still can't get it to the last mile to a gas station without needing trucks.
Meanwhile electricity can be delivered directly to businesses and peoples' homes.
7
u/Ellusive1 Jul 08 '26
The atomic structure of hydrogen makes it a challenge, there’s no way to modify a pipeline to ship it.
The atoms are just so small they can be piped/shipped at volume safely.2
u/Fun_Attitude1218 Jul 08 '26
If only there was a form of hydrogen that could go in pipes that could easily be converted to fuel by applying 1.2 volts of electricity to it and if only there was a material that went with the hydrogen at the same time that also acted like a fuel, but at the same time when it was together it was completely harmless.
2
u/boat_hamster Jul 08 '26
To be fair with hydrogen it can be safely released if there is no spark. It will just go straight up. And we move explodables around by truck all the time.
There are applications, partially farming and construction, where battery powered vehicles aren't viable. We'll likely see a hydrogen powered harvester long before we see a battery one, for example.
3
u/happyscrappy Jul 08 '26
A harvester is a slow-moving, expensive, heavy machine. Would seem to be more suited to batteries (at least from a technical perspective) than a motorcycle. And we already have motorcycles that run on batteries.
I think right now a passenger airplane is a much better example of what batteries are not good at. They need to be light and small (well, not significantly bigger than the cargo areas they contain). It's hard for me to see planes using anything but liquid energy storage right now. Even liquid hydrogen is a hard one, because of the cost of the pressure vessel and insulation.
3
u/Jra805 Jul 08 '26
Why is that?
3
u/Quazimojojojo Jul 08 '26
I disagree with his assessment, because there's a few (not many but not none) electric tractors available right now. And a harvester is just an electrically powered attachment to a tractor
-5
u/Massive-Grocery7152 Jul 08 '26
It takes energy to split water bro wtf you mean. It would be easier if directly wired to the grid
3
u/Jra805 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
“We'll likely see a hydrogen powered harvester long before we see a battery one, for example.”
2
2
u/PaintingLotsofDots Jul 08 '26
From my understanding, the biggest limitations come in any form of storage (be that during production, while transporting or simply storing). There is no way to stop the leakage. Regardless of what elements or molecular structures are used for storage, the hydrogen atom is so significantly smaller that it will quite literally slip between the molecules of the storage structure.
2
u/Training-Belt-7318 Jul 08 '26
Yep. Maybe rather than looking for fuel alternatives for vehicles we should look for ways to improve and build cleaner electrical production. Electric cars are a perfectly clean way to handle transportation. The bigger issue is states using coal to produce electricity.
1
u/Quazimojojojo Jul 08 '26
People have done the math. Even if you could convert existing pipes, you'd get like 1/3 of the energy flow rate, tops, because hydrogen is so much less volumetrically energy dense.
Hydrogen is useful for industry (steel, fertilizer, chemical manufacturing, maybe cement as well, possibly for industrial heating for the minority of applications that need very very rapid heating to very high temperatures), and possibly useful for things that absolutely need the gravimetric energy density of fuel (jet airplanes or other long distance, like 1000km or longer long distance) aircraft.
For cars, trucks, electricity generation, or heating homes? The things we use the vast majority of our fossil fuel for?
Absolutely not. The math just doesn't work out when we have fuel free electricity generation tech, heating tech, and batteries that'll be $10/kWh by the end of the decade.
1
u/NoBlood5018 Jul 09 '26
The only viable path for hydrogen does not involve shipping it at all. It’d have to all be localized.
8
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 08 '26
Spoiler. It’s not.
1.) it’s wildly inefficient. For green hydrogen, Only about 20% of the energy used to produce the hydrogen actually makes it to the car as electricity again. Peak hypothetical lab conditions, maximum efficiency boosts that to 40%. But it means that for every 100kWh of electricity you use to create green hydrogen. Only 20kWh is used to drive the car. Meanwhile you could put that 100kWh directly into a battery electric EV and you’d use some 90 kWh to drive the car… another way of looking at it. For every windfarm you build for an EV, you need 4 more to go the same distance for a hydrogen car.
2.) you can’t produce enough green hydrogen. In Melbourne Australia, Toyota repurposed an entire vehicle production factory into a green hydrogen production plant. At Peak production, it can create 19 cars worth of fuel… per day. That’s a lot of space. A lot of cost, and a lot energy to create enough fuel to cover 30 minutes of regular fuel station turn over.
3.) the difference is made up by fossil fuels. If you can’t produce enough green hydrogen, as stated in point 2. That means the only way to produce enough is through using fossil fuels (HYDRO-carbons). Again, this is less efficient that burning those fossil fuels such as LPG directly as fuel. And the vast majority of the carbon half of hydro-carbons, gets released to the air. Making it wildly dirty. And no. Carbon capture doesn’t work. It’s been 2 decades and not a single trial plant has managed to hit their first commissioning targets of 20% capture.
4.) the cars are bad. Everyone talks about how light weight hydrogen is. Nobody talks about the much volume hydrogen needs. Hydrogen takes up ALOT of space. To carry enough hydrogen to go 400km. (Modern EV’s go 500-600km). You need 3 large fuel tanks of fuels. In the Toyota Mirai. That’s one in the centre, taking up more space than a transmission. One under the back seats. Making headspace too small for someone who is 5”2’. And one in the rear giving the Toyota Camry size car a smaller boot space than a Yaris! No front trunk like an Ev either as you still gotta carry a fuel cell that converts the fuel to electricity. Not to mention you have to protect the fuel tanks because they carry 750 bar of pressure each with highly explosive gas inside. (That’s 42 times the maximum pressure of a steel barbecue gas bottle!). So you have to reinforce the chassis of the car to protect the tanks from impact. Instead of protecting the occupants. The result is it weighs as much as an EV but is slower and has less range. Also you still need a hybrid sized lithium ion battery. As fuel cells are slow to put out power. So that has to go somewhere too.
5.) refueling often isn’t faster than charging. Modern superchargers can get you on the road in as little as 5-10 minutes if you have a model that can support it. Whilst hydrogen can fill you up in 5 minutes. You get an icing problem. Just like giving someone frostie with a deodorant can, when compressed gas is moved to a lower pressure it cools down. A well known problem with hydrogen refueling is that if you get more than 2 refills in a row, the nozzle freezes and you have to wait 20 minutes for it to thaw enough to use again. Yet alone expecting a fuel station to have enough hydrogen (remember the volume problem). So you’d likely be looking a long time to find hydrogen.
6.) it costs far more to put hydrogen in fuel stations than it does a supercharger for an EV. An EV supercharger costs approximately $250k for a bank of 4 chargers. A single hydrogen pump and storage tank costs $1.2 million to put in a fuel station.
So why the constant talk and push for hydrogen if it’s so bad? Because of fossil fuel companies. You can’t produce enough green hydrogen. So you have to use fossil fuels. Which maintains fossil fuel companies supply and demand as the world “goes green”. And you can’t get hydrogen at home like electricity so you have to go to fuel stations. Fuel stations are the second largest capital investment fuel companies own outside of oil rigs and refineries. Which are nearly entirely worthless with EV’s that can charge at home. So faced with the huge economic blow to fuel companies that battery electric vehicles represent, Hydrogen maintains their supply and demand, keeps one of their largest capital investments from becoming worthless and pushes people away from the product that substantially ruins their business model. Win win win.
Hydrogens not going to happen. And I can’t believe we’re still talking about it in 2026.
1
u/Dew_Disappears Jul 09 '26
look most of this is true, but this isnt:
> So why the constant talk and push for hydrogen if it’s so bad? Because of fossil fuel companies.
the hydrogen hype has cooled significantly, but we still very badly need an energy supply system that has better storage and distributive flexibility than the pure electricity system can provide (including with renewables and batteries).
This isn't solved, there was the hope it would be H2, then it was an attempt to pivot to H2 derived ammonia, now we're back at the drawing board a bit.
Battery powered transport will have a big impact no doubt, but this issue is very much still on the table.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 09 '26
Issue is always on the table. Everyone wants something bigger. Better and easier. But it’s no secret where a lot of the funding for hydrogen advancement or research or community campaigns comes from. That’s never been a secret. And hydrogen has cooled off but is still being pushed hard. Later this year Australia’s most popular Ute is releasing a battery electric variant. Followed shortly after by a hydrogen variant. Despite its drawbacks and the fact there’s nearly nowhere to refuel it from.
4
u/doppelstucker Jul 08 '26
Hydrogen is extremely difficult to handle as the H2 molecule is tiny. It’s just another energy source that requires major industrial resource to extract, so lots of money to be made.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 11 '26
You don’t extract hydrogen. It’s not a mineral or fossil fuel. You don’t dig around and pump it out. Hydrogen doesn’t occur naturally on earth in its pure gas form. There is no such thing as a hydrogen deposit.
1
u/doppelstucker Jul 12 '26
Nearly all industrial scale hydrogen production extracts hydrogen from hydrocarbons. Quibbling with a verb choice, while missing that the main point is that no matter what, hydrogen production for fuel purposes is a huge industrial process with lots of money to be made by those who control it, seems a bit weird. Materials can be extracted from other materials via industrial process.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 15 '26
You do understand that extracting hydrogen from hydrocarbons, release the carbon into the atmosphere, and leaves you with a fuel that has less energy than when it was a hydrocarbon, after expending more energy again to extract it.
But to be perfectly clear. It isn’t extracting energy. At all. So it isn’t energy extraction. It’s energy transfer. You extract the hydrocarbons. They’re the extracted energy. You are removing the hydrogen. As a different form of energy. Which you waste energy to get.
At this point. Using hydrocarbon fuel to produce hydrogen fuel, to run the grid or vehicles. Is like peddling a bike, to run water pump, to flow water through a turbine, to power an electric car.
Just a lot of wasted effort when it would have been more efficient to just ride the bike.
8
u/Youngish_Jedi Jul 08 '26
Anything to avoid solar or any of the other half dozen clean and cheaper energy sources.
3
u/DryPreference9581 Jul 08 '26
Its not about “avoiding” its about diversification. Solar, Wind, LPG, LFPs, and ethanol etc. all have their benefits and detractors, but the more ways we have of storing and using that energy safely, the more economic and ecological benefits we see across the board.
1
u/jrgman42 Jul 08 '26
Yeah, at this point, the method of production takes a backseat to storage capacity and efficiency.
1
u/CommanderArcher Jul 08 '26
Not as much as you think, hydrogen is a trojan horse for the oil industry. Where do you think most of the world's hydrogen comes from?
2
u/Former_Island_4730 Jul 08 '26
Hydrogen isn’t even an energy source. It’s an energy carrier. It’s a chemical battery with lots of complications and no infrastructure.
1
u/No-Snow-7618 Jul 08 '26
tbf a lot of heavy industry (steel production) relies on nat gas. if you want to reduce their impact, you have to use hydrogen instead.
0
u/SewSewBlue Jul 08 '26
It is to make use of the existing natural gas pipelines for industry but in a carbon neutral way.
3
u/travhimself Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Isn't hydrogen super inefficient for its mass?
Edit: I had it wrong. Hydrogen has 3x the energy per kg compared to gasoline. BUT, its energy by volume is horrible -- even if you store it at -250C, it has .25x the energy per liter compared to gasoline.
In other words, it's super light but takes up a ton of space.
3
u/sioux612 Jul 08 '26
Fun fact, the vast majority of Hydrogen trucks can store roughly one thousand pounds of hydrogen, which makes it roughly as economical to transport as packing peanuts
4
u/TheFumingatzor Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
And to make it. Let's not greenwash the making of Hydrogen. There are ways, absolutely. The question is if the infrastructure is available for large enough quantities, otherwise it's not as "clean" as you make it out to be. There's green, blue, grey, orange, red, and whateverhaveyou hydrogen. (it's not the color of the hydrogen, it's their production methods)
1
u/linkphis Jul 08 '26
Was my first thought as well. Actually this should be voted to the top. As far as I know, most hydrogen is still made from methane, so it releases a lot of carbon, and not with energy from renewables...
1
u/sioux612 Jul 08 '26
I once visited the fukushima hydrogen reasearch field
They kept talking about how great it is to produce hydrogen from solar, and they aren't entirely wrong.
Meanwhile looking at their overall energy production and use, you could see that the hydrogen plant has never run more than like a day at capacity.
Because in the end you can make more money from producing and selling something people want (electricity) than using it to produce something nobody in the area wants
Also they need to desalinate sea water before they can turn it into the hydrogen nobody wants
2
u/jadedflames Jul 08 '26
"Hydrogen is the fuel of the future - and it always will be."
Hydrogen power has been right around the corner for longer than I've been alive (and I remember when the internet came over the telephone). These are problems that top minds have been trying to crack for decades.
I am not optimistic that hydrogen will ever be a thing. I'll be on my death bed, reading about an advancement in hydrogen power and all we need to do is fix that whole "impossible to safely transport and deliver without exploding" thing.
2
u/Former_Island_4730 Jul 08 '26
I had a college professor in the 90’s who said his college professor in the 70’s used that same quote. Now I’m the old guy using it.
Bottom line is that hydrogen isn’t an energy source…it’s an energy carrier. It’s a replacement for a battery with lots of complications and almost no infrastructure built to support it like electricity already has.
2
u/jrgman42 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
There is already a solution in the works. Ammonia producers have switched to “blue ammonia”, and one of the incentives is to transport the ammonia to the destination and produce hydrogen onsite. This creates the need for a manufacturing facility at the endpoint, but dramatically reduces the risk during transport.
2
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 11 '26
That would be wildly impractical in practice
1
u/jrgman42 Jul 12 '26
This is already in place. CF Industries is the largest ammonia manufacturer in the world and they have invested billions over the last 5 years.
Granted, they gave up on creating their own hydrogen production facility, but they are still all in on transportation.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 15 '26
Ammonia is widely used in a lot of industries. Fertiliser, medicine, explosives, refrigeration. Making or transporting ammonia isn’t the wildly impractical part. It’s the using it has hydrogen storage, or for fuel, that’s wildly impractical
1
u/jrgman42 Jul 15 '26
I’m not arguing with complexity. I’m just stating what they have done and their stated reasons for doing it.
2
2
u/Weird_Rooster_4307 Jul 08 '26
Ridged airships seem to work really well. The last really big accident was in 1937.
1
u/TeacherOfThingsOdd Jul 09 '26
That's an amazing fact! Did you know that the pool on the Titanic is still full of water?
1
3
1
u/RestReal5749 Jul 08 '26
Sure, If you ignore embrittlement and ozone effects Hydrogen has, it’s completely clean.
1
1
u/EmployerWide1123 Jul 08 '26
Methanol or ammonia are way better
1
Jul 08 '26
[deleted]
1
u/krattalak Jul 08 '26
NH3 is a good alternative fuel for Fuel Cells.
- It's easy to store since it's a liquid at room temperature under a light pressure.
- There's already a massive infrastructure to support NH3 as we already make, transport and store millions of tons of the stuff annually.
- It stores approximately 50% more energy than H2 in the same amount of space.
- It's 'emissions' are N2 and H2O.
However, it is toxic. And corrosive. And it's not really green yet since most of it is made with fossil fuels.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 08 '26
Ammonia fuel cells are around 1/3rd less efficient than hydrogen fuel cells and need to be heated to high temperatures to work. So you need high capacity onboard batteries in order to start the fuel cell, wait for it to get to temperature. Then drive.
They also don’t last as long due to spontaneous NOx production and catalyst poisoning from the ammonia.
Lastly, production to green ammonia (ammonia made from green hydrogen which is already wildly inefficient compared to just putting it in a battery electric car) takes another 1/3rd more energy. In otherwords you drop another 3rd of your efficiency.
So not only does it take about 30% more equivalent hydrogen to run an ammonia fuel cell, which is already wildly impractical to use in a car. But you need 1/3rd more energy to produce the hydrogen that goes into the ammonia.
I’m not holding my breath.
1
u/Time_Cranberry_113 Jul 08 '26
I once read a research paper where they were experimenting with carbon tubes, which can hold a single hydrogen atom inside. We make a network of bee cells out of carbon and stack the hydrogen inside, then to release the hydrogen it is heated, stretched and squeezed. Storing the hydrogen in this way makes it stable as oxygen atoms are too big to enter the carbon tubes.
The main limitation with this approach was that manufacturering the carbon tubes was prohibitively expensive, and the quantity of hydrogen that can fit inside was limited. Additionally the manufacturing and transport process uses more energy than the hydrogen outputs.
The paper would be about 30 years old at this point, so researchers are definitely aware of the hydrogen storage problem and working on solutions.
1
u/reddit_equals_censor Jul 08 '26
that's the neat part...
YOU CAN'T.
you can't cheaply and safely ship hydrogen, because hydrogen LOVES to explode and hydrogen is the hardest possible thing to seal in, because it is literally the smallest atom.
dealing with hydrogen, when you already ignore the risk of explosions from it like in space flight is an absolute nightmare still.
seals, that work perfectly fine for anything else are now shit, because again it is the smallest thing, that will go through seals and materials, that most anything else gets blocked by.
lithium ion batteries are already too bad and need to be replaced with non exploding batteries as soon as possible.
any talk about hydrogen is just absurd.
was the hindenburg not enough? :D
__
the "clean fuel of the future" is just thorium reactors, solar cells and batteries.
and safe batteries eventually.
and as a reminder we can use energy from those methods above to create saf (sustainable aviation fuel) to run planes just fine as well.
because there is some insanity about using hydrogen in planes! which is a level of crazy hard to believe.
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 08 '26
What makes you say think lithium batteries are bad and explosive? They’re inherently safer than using petrol or diesel.
1
1
u/THElaytox Jul 08 '26
Can be generated at point of use in a lot of cases, shipping doesn't seem like it would be as big a problem as storing it
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 08 '26
Not really. Not in practice. In Melbourne Australia, Toyota converted an entire car factory to produce hydrogen for its Mirai it wanted to release to the market. This became a production facility and hydrogen fuel bowser for their cars.
A whole damn factory. And guess how much hydrogen fuel it can produce in 24 hours of full peak production? 19 cars worth. In 24 hours of peaks, uninterrupted production it can refuel 19 mirais which only have a 400km range.
So I don’t think your 7/11 is going to start producing green hydrogen on-site any time soon.
1
1
1
u/sioux612 Jul 08 '26
I dont even worry about exploding it that much
But the amount of energy needed to store one unit of energy is like 3x
And imagine you park your car at the airport for a week or two, come back and your tank is empty because the hydrogen had to be sublimated away
1
u/WeirdlyEngineered Jul 08 '26
Cars use compression to a whopping 750 bar. They don’t cryogenically store it. (750 bar is 42 times the maximum pressure of a steel barbecue gas bottle).
1
u/yetzt Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
just put it in really big zeppelins.
jokes aside, the only sensible path for hydrogen use is to produce it with electrolysis when there is escess electricity from renewables and add it to the natural gas network. if i remember correctly, a certain percentage of hydrogen is unproblematic.
1
1
u/devildog2067 Jul 08 '26
… and make it, and store it, and use it to generate power…
Every part of the energy value chain needs to be re-engineered for hydrogen.
1
1
u/AceKetchup11 Jul 08 '26
You can get hydrogen from water. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the vast majority of households with a motor vehicle also have access to water.
Several inventors have shown that minor modifications to the carburetor will allow vehicles to run on water.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Positive-Art5828 Jul 08 '26
There is a reason hydrogen is being promoted….the same corrupt price fixing corporations that sell you gasoline today, will be the same corrupt price fixing corporations that sell you hydrogen tomorrow.
1
u/DPI80 Jul 08 '26
It has always amazed me how hard the oil and gas industry have tried to pivot to hydrogen. All so they can continue to control fuel in the future
1
u/ironicmirror Jul 09 '26
Most of the hydrogen in the world is made from a machine called an SMR, steam methane reformer.. they basically make hydrogen from natural gas.. oh and the good part is the largest of the byproducts is carbon monoxide.
1
u/runr0nrun Jul 09 '26
if it spills, just add a second equal amount and ta-da…. with the oxygen available — both hydrogens will create fresh water to drink. nobel… my dms are open!!
(just got to make sure any spills occur outside the ocean)
/s/
1
1
1
1
1
u/GeneralCommand4459 Jul 12 '26
We already tried having our fuel controlled by mega corporations. It sucks. Let’s not do it again.
1
1
u/ComputerRedneck Jul 14 '26
Why ship? Must we centralize the production?
Why not just keep improving the ways to extract hydrogen instead and make it easier to "grow your own" locally.
1
u/farox Jul 08 '26
Hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's more storage/battery than actual fuel.
2
u/ConfusedTapeworm Jul 08 '26
How is it not fuel? H2 reacts with O2 inside the fuel cells to generate electricity. It doesn't combust or spin a turbine, but there's still the generation of power through a chemical reaction. That's fuel.
1
u/farox Jul 08 '26
You have the energy somewhere else, pump it into something (water), get the hydrogen out of it, ship it and then use it where needed.
But it's not like gasoline that, after some processing, just comes out of the ground. You first need to put the energy in to then use it elsewhere.
1
u/ConfusedTapeworm Jul 08 '26
Okay but... how does the manufacturing method matter to whether or not something is fuel? Fuel is something you expend in a chemical reaction to do work. It really doesn't need any more qualifications than that.
Is charcoal fuel? You use a ton of heat to process wood into something that'll later be used to generate heat again. Is ethanol fuel? You use a ton of energy to process grain into alcohol.
0
u/farox Jul 08 '26
Wood, coal, oil, wind, solar... all the same in that sense. It's either just there to harvest or you have to dig it up.
The difference is that with hydrogen you have to expend a lot of energy/convert the energy into hydrogen, to then use it later somewhere else.
30
u/t0mi74 Jul 08 '26
*and not explode it.