If Biden really wanted to stick it to the Chinese auto industry, he'd fund a national build out of hydrogen refueling infrastructure and substantial subsidies for fuel cell production.
Nope! And most hydrogen is fossil fuel (methane) derived and horribly energy inefficient. At this point it's green washing at best.
Edit: adding data:
Steam-Methane Reforming (SMR) accounts for about 95% of all hydrogen production on earth. It uses a huge amount of heat, water, and methane to produce hydrogen.
Hydrolysis, the main competing method, and the one most touted by hydrogen backers, accounts for about 4% of hydrogen production.
This method takes in only pure water and electricity, but it's efficiency is abysmal at some 52%. In every case, a modern kinetic, thermal, or chemical battery will exceed this efficiency.
Other methods are being looked into, but it's thermodynamically impossible for the resulting H2 to produce more energy than it takes to create the H2. So at best today we could use H2 as a crappy battery, one that takes a lot of methane to create.
Yes. There are too many Tesla fanboys (still) that have a misinformed understanding of the facts. They don't realize that Tesla is just lying to them. Tesla don't want people to think that there are better cars or better technologies out there.
Hydrogen can cause "hydrogen embrittlement," which makes the storage and transportation of hydrogen inconvenient.
"Hydrogen embrittlement" refers to a phenomenon where metal materials become brittle and prone to fracture after absorbing hydrogen. This phenomenon poses significant challenges for the storage and transportation of hydrogen.
Yes but hydrogen has storage problems in that it messes with storage containers making long term storage potentially hazardous. How much of that last part is bullshit I am not qualified to answer but it sounds fucky to me.
Yes. Battery powered vehicles are heavy, hazardous, and have significant pollution problems throughout their lifecycle. They're also dependent on grid uptime because EV charging stations don't store usable power on site (except in some notorious cases with diesel powered generators). Battery powered EVs don't offer any benefits over H2 powered vehicles, but they help to extend the tentacles of the deleterious just-in-time paradigm further into our lives.
Hydrogen weakens the metals that it touches and it explodes. Now you want to have tax dollars install time bombs across the country? Let's skip hydrogen for safety reasons and use electric. The grid is there and getting charging stations is infinitely easier to install than hydrogen infrastructure.
Hydrogen embrittlement is a solved problem. You just design for it. And the grid is not there to support a transition of ICE vehicle fleet to battery electric. A significant build out of infrastructure is required especially for recharging battery powered long haul trucks within reasonable times.
Hydrogen doesn’t make sense and never did as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in vehicles.
Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, and has a lot of emissions during manufacturing. But even green hydrogen, which is made by using carbon free generated electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen doesn’t make sense.
If you’ve build new renewable power it’s more efficient to use it to charge batteries than to use it to generate hydrogen.
There might be a case for compressed hydrogen, In vehicles where batteries are too heavy like aircraft.
But for road vehicles, batteries are more effective at reducing emission.
If you’re building any new renewable power, you’ll reduce more emissions by using it to displace coal power, the to generate green hydrogen.
Some day when we’ve eliminated fossil fuel based electricity generation, Green hydrogen might start to make sense. But anybody trying to do it right now is not being as helpful as they could be.
You're not really describing a problem with hydrogen powered vehicles. You're describing the problem with the way we've been trying to generate power free of greenhouse gas emissions. As long as the policy makers keep myopically insisting that we only do it with certain renewables, it doesn't matter if battery electric vehicles are actually more efficient or not. So, on balance, the relative inefficiency of a hydrogen powered fleet is more than made up for by avoiding a massive stream of battery waste that everyone seems to be ignoring.