That's a decent attempt at a back-justification, but to my knowledge the hydrogen program is running purely on momentum from many years ago when the economic superiority of battery-electric cars was not yet perfectly clear.
Hydrogen is not something that could work, it already does work. Battery EVs make a lot of tradeoffs making them unsuitable for a lot of workloads. Hydrogen solves them and does not need much development to make it useful for consumer vehicles.
You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well.
Nuclear to hydrogen is workable and the way I'm imagining it going. There's also options to create hydrocarbons from air using the heat of a reactor.
BEV solve 99% of the problem and hydrogen is not worh investing in for the rest. The battle is already over, and just like with cars 10 ago its totally clear but it will be another 5 years until the hydrogen defenders admit it.
And claiming that hydrogen doesnt need much development is an insane claim given the money put in and the total lack of success.
Most hydrogen is produced from methane and is actually worse than gasoline for global warming because methane leaks and is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
It makes indeed more sense to just use renewable gasoline, e.g. using the Fischer-Tropsch process like VW's eFuel.
Tell that to the person with the Tesla who is trying to drive from one side of Australia to the other and is completely dependent upon the generator powered charging station in the middle of the Nullarbor Plane to complete the trip.
Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.
Or we can just use hybrid technology where needed and pure EV elsewhere?
Not much development except for developing generation capacity that doesn't exist (and electrolysis is wildly inefficient, by the way), a distribution chain that doesn't exist, familiarizing everyone from consumers to service staff with a fuel system unlike anything they've used before (CNG only ever took off in mass transit, and only to a limited degree), and oh by the way, it's centered around a gas that is so prone to leaking it leaks through metals and embrittles them in the process.
I can plug in an EV into the wall in my garage and charge it every night without a single change to my house. An L2 charger installation is an hour or two's work for an electrician.
I suspect with enough R&D focused on ease of use the CNG fuel system won't require more consumer intervention than the 1500lb battery pack under the car.
> You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well.
That's exactly it, but maybe not in the way you meant.
Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
> Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
This is not the case, at least over here in Australia. Whenever hydrogen is mentioned as a fuel, it is implicitly Green Hydrogen. It only became necessary to explicitly start saying Green Hydrogen after the fossil fuel spokespeople were using existing production to belittle green initiatives and pilots.
The actual reason hydrogen is being pushed here is because of what happens when you shut down large, centralized coal power plants and shut down coal mining capacity. You end up with rural towns with no jobs, or in the eyes of a politician an electoral district who isn't going to vote for them. Hydrogen means big solar and wind farms connected to hydrogen plants and jobs and votes linked to those jobs, and you can guess where they are going to be built. The elephant in the room is who is going to buy all this hydrogen when in most cases it seems batteries are the better choice for consumers.
