Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
Carbon Dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which makes the world warmer on average. It also lowers the PH levels of the oceans.
If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.
Factually correct, but you also missed the joke.
It was only kinda a joke. It's a joke in the same way that uncle on Facebook makes jokes. You know the one.
Take The Great Barrier Reef for example.
There’s more of it now than in the reefs recorded history.
Well, 2022 data:
https://www.aims.gov.au/information-centre/news-and-stories/...
"The picture is complex. Recovery here, fresh losses there.
While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."
This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions
"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.
Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."
Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage
The problem is all the effort = energy you need to spend collecting carbon atoms.
> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Yes, it's not the new oil, it's the same oil in "green" packaging. Plus some comforting lies about carbon capture.
Even if it was fully green, you can’t run an electrolysis system from home. So you have to buy it, so there’s a market and an expensive solution.
Electricity comes out the wall.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
See: the Hindenburg disaster
afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.
Pointing to the Hindenburg as an example of why hydrogen is a bad idea is the same as pointing to Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear is a bad idea.
wait...
Ehh, the Hindenburg had a flammable skin. Barrage balloons from the World Wars were most often filled with hydrogen and yet were extremely difficult to ignite or take down even with purpose build incindiary ammo for that purpose shows hydrogen balloons can be safe. Often they would be riddled with dozens of holes but still take many hours for them to lose enough hydrogen to float back down to the ground.
The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
> the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.
What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!
(I think it's called kerosene.)
Diesel, kerosene, rocket propelled RP1, and fuel oil / bunker fuel in the case of cargo ships.
It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.
Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
There are some innovation like hydrogen paste but it’s not going to be useful for a combustion engine cycle.
The Mirai does not combust hydrogen.
> Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?
No. Not for using Hydrogen for transportation. People have been trying to use Hydrogen for transportation for more than 50 years. These people are trying to bend the laws of physics. And there are a lot of con artists in the mix who prey on the gullible. See the convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.
We store hydrogen all the time for industrial processes. It's not some super science, it's just expensive.
We do? Where? Using what fabrication technologies.
I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.
As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.
There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.
And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.
> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
The bZ4X? 10+ years after the Nissan Leaf?
And the bZ3, bZ5, bZ7, bZ3X, bZ Woodland, C-HR+, the Lexus RZ, and soon the Hilux EV:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...
Toyota sells bad EVs and was the last OEM to offer one. It’s the most anti-EV OEM by far and engages/engaged in the most EV FUD.
> Toyota sells bad EVs
The 2026 bZ Woodland [1] looks pretty nice in my opinion.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...
The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.
> The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold
Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/d4mMkA/verdens-stoerste-r...
[2]: https://www.tek.no/test/i/OkQAwE/toyota-urban-cruiser
They’re also just phenomenally ugly cars.
It shares the same ugly design language as much of Toyota’s lineup.
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
An electric Corolla or Camry is my ultimate. I hate driving.
I want an appliance that just works. The Corolla and Camry were this for petrol.
I love my Leaf but it isn’t a Carolla.
What’s with the turning circle on the Leaf?
That's essentially the bZ3. But a Corolla branded BEV will eventually happen:
https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/toyotas-best-selling-car-elec...
And yet they had one of the first hybrids (although not a plug-in hybrid) in the Prius.
We're actually not that far off.
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
> Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
Jet engines work better. Boeing's next major plane will have jet engines, just like their previous major planes.
Synthetic, carbon neutral jet fuel will be the future for commercial jets.
> So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x.
Batteries don't get lighter when they discharge.
Well, there's also burning regular fuel in a fuel cell, a FCEV. That doubles the efficiencies over ICE, so I guess that bumps it back up to 8x away?
Given the great energy densities and stability in transport of hydrocarbons, there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources, so that could be a solution if we don't manage to increase battery densities by another order of magnitude.
> there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources
I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.
Its the time shift. Burning a plant releases CO2 and it is still considered to be carbon neutral.
And, the two major byproducts of burning hydrocarbons are water and carbon dioxide.
Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.
Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.
From Wikipedia:
The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
Please, the media didn't report on this because natural disasters affecting the climate is not controllable by humans and thus doesn't warrant a global effort to address unless it's so large as to be species ending.
Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.
Yes, and it doesn’t fit the narrative.
We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.
You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.
> burn petrol.
Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?
Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.
How is that supposed to help?
I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.
Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.
I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.
With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.
Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.
Also some time after that other guy copied and pasted his canned Hunga remark into his big spreadsheet of climate denial comments the international community of climate scientists concluded that Hunga cooled the atmosphere, on balance.
"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."
https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...
More accurately, the calculation needs to factor in the fact that battery weight doesn’t decrease as charge is used.
Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.
How can batteries compete with that constraint?
Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.
I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.
An A320 can store 24k liters of fuel. Jet fuel stores 35 MJ/L. So, the plane carries 8.4E11 J of energy. If that was stored in a battery that had to be charged in an hour 0.23GW of electric power would be required.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
You laid it out better than I. Thank you!
Thanks Walter!
The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).
One of the trade offs is that engines are actually ridiculously heavy. Compact, extreme high power electric motors are starting to be commercialised. But also, fuel burns so you lose weight as you’re flying whereas batteries stay the same.
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
Structural batteries were supposed to be the solution where the density wasn't so important. I don't really have a good understanding of the ration of fuel weight to structural weight in existing aircraft though.
casing is around 25% of the mass of a cylindrical cell, with the rest being actual battery bits that can't have any stresses applied. is 25% weight saving that significant?
Jet engine and wing efficiency have increased enormously over the last 50 years.
What does this mean? They have electric vehicles too.
It might also be because the Japanese government works very hard to have full employment and EVs require less labor.
They are just too much in bed with big oil to want to switch, instead they spend rnd on hydrogen in order to mess up with renewables on purpose.
Hydrogen only makes electric vehicles look good and the only alternative. In fact, if this purposeful which I doubt, it probably helped stopped other companies from making hydrogen
The Mirai is a fuel cell EV. There is no engine. Not sure what your point is regarding engines?
Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.
Ignoring some of the other issues:
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
It’s not even the grid, by the time you’ve done the electrolysis you’d be better off just charging a battery.
Also, compressing and cooling a gas takes another huge hit at the efficiency. Electrolysis comes out at atmospheric pressures.
Oh and the platinum electrodes you need…
I’m also just now visualising a hydrogen pipeline fire… terrible terrible idea.
It’s horrible to work with - dangerous, embrittlement issues etc., and very energy intensive to compress into very heavy cryogenic storage containers…
> dangerous
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Hydrogen mixed with air has a very wide range of concentrations where it is explosive. It accumulates inside containers or just the roof of the car… where the passengers are. It takes just one lit cigarette for it to go boom.
And it burns really hot
It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).
Check out the "Clean Hydrogen Ladder" document.
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
Unless you produce it using the Sulfur-Iodine cycle in a high-temperature nuclear reactor.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...
The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to use fossil fuels.
Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...
Remember that China briefly embargoed Japan for rare earth metals in 2010, and Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014. My theory was that it was developed as a national fallback for Japan in case that embargo continued or got worse. Think 1930s Volkswagen. Anyone can comment on that?
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
I'm pointing out that the timeline of continuing funding it, to the point of a major model design and launch, and nationwide network of hydrogen stations, might well be linked to China's emergent REE dominance and that Japan doesn't have those raw materials.
(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)
I think Japan made there plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.
Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.
It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.