'It explodes': Trump's latest rant against green energy falsely attacks 'hydrogen cars'

Wait till he hears about gasoline

The material safety sheet for gasoline is a lot scarier than the one for hydrogen
- 'THE ONE TIP FUEL MAKERS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!'
- msds
- The worst part about the gas you put in your car are all the additives they cram in there. Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it's full. Your finger doesn't even smell afterwards unlike car gas where you stink for a week. Also no skin cancer! Next you drain some from the bottom to make sure there's no water. After a quick visual inspection, you just pour it out onto the ground.

From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine's also have a tendency to explode. I haven't seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.

Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it'll just burn up because it won't all be released at once. And I've never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
- I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.
- It's also a pressure vessel. Rupturing that might be scarier than just fire.
Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn't hydrogen's fault.
- No... No, that's not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won't burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn't have been a catastrophic fireball...
- Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
  
  If nothing else, hydrogen can't burn without oxygen, and there's very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
- It wouldn't have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn't have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.

Lil bro remembers being traumatized by the hindenburg explosion when he was growing up. Fucking luddite.

What hydrogen cars?

The sum total of Toyota and whoever else's efforts still amount to an inconsequential fraction of the vehicles currently in operation, probably not even a notable portion of a percentage point.

We're dealing with a man who saw pictures of a spray bottle and the sun and decided it meant injecting bleach and putting a lightbulb inside you. Do not presume he thinks rationally.

Broken clocks and whatnot. Hydrogen cars are trash and completely unfeasible, not because they explode but because of the terrible efficiency and fueling problems

And would need a huge new infrastructure for production and distribution. I’m convinced that most of the push for hydrogen is from oil and gas interests wanting to have essentially the same business they do now.

Clearly one of the advantages of EVs is how cheap and easy the infrastructure is compared to any other alternative (and somehow we’re still finding it difficult)
- EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.
  
  Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.
  
  Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.
- To add to that the system's handling them degrade quite quickly if you think maintenance cost for a normal vehicle is difficult you should see one that has to handle high pressure hydrogen
and the need to build an entire new distribution network, but one that handles cryogenic fuel.

nah, no thanks.
- Actually they can retro fit oil and gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen. Guess who is pushing the “huRdUGyun iS thE fuTuRe” narrative. Yeah the people who own the oil and gas infra.
But nobody's actually taking about subsidising or making them, so there's no point in ranting about it.
- Hydrogen buses were a thing for a while, but it's probably cheaper to just go with batteries now.
  
  Feels like something that was surpassed before it ever got popular.
Hydrogen fuel cells actually show quite a bit of promise. Mostly for large trucks. Batteries have a scaling issue. A battery powered 18-wheeler needs a much larger battery for a much shorter range.

Adding more load means you need more battery, and that larger battery is just more load that you need to haul.

This is sort of true with everything, but the important note is that a full battery and empty battery weigh the same.

Anyway. Commercial use is where it makes sense. There are actually a few other technologies that make sense in the commercial transportation space. Like ammonia.

Keeping these rather dangerous fuels commercial also allows for more strict safety standards.

Hydrogen cars aren't even something likely to catch on at this point anyway I'd think, despite Toyota's attempts to the contrary. Battery-electric cars have improved a lot of late making the advantage in range from using an energy dense chemical fuel less apparent, and hydrogen has to deal with both lower energy efficiency and the fact that hydrogen storage is rather difficult, while the infrastructure getting built has overwhelmingly been EV charging rather than hydrogen filling stations.

Hydrogen is completely unsuitable for land based transportation because building the infrastructure and actually making the stuff is pretty hard to do at scale. The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists. And once you've built the charger, you don't need to send a truck to refill it on a regular basis.
- H2 is way better for trucks and planes than batteries, because even with the reinforced tanks it doesn't weigh much, and the refueling does not take long.
  
  I agree that battery electric is probably the way to go for consumer passenger vehicles, though.
  
  /owns a hydrogen car
- The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists
  
  ...largely in the same appalling, copper-line state it has been in since its original installation 100 years ago. Which is woefully and catastrophically unprepared for an America full of EV drivers.
  
  Not disagreeing with your core point, but just saying. The American electrical backbone system is absolutely in no way prepared for a mass shift to electric vehicles at this time. We're getting there, and if EV adoption continues at its current pace we run a pretty good chance of being fine so long as proper upgrades are actually being made, but we're not there yet and demand for EVs absolutely could still outpace the ability of our electrical infrastructure to support them.
The raw material waste/cost/emissions to produce those batteries isn't great though. There's not really much that hydrogen can't do better if the infrastructure was in place and the storage/safety stuff is worked out.
- Hydrogen for cars is not.. let’s just say it’s not great.
  Granted: the cars drive very well (try it if you have the chance) and the fuel cells give them a serious range. However, distribution of fuel similar to regular gas is hard. Storage is dangerous, and pipelines continuously leak (H2 molecules are very small). Hydrogen gas cannot be mixed with stinky stuff that will warn you if the gas is leaking. It is much harder to keep under pressure than oil or regular natural gas. And last but not least: it is very inefficient to generate, the electricity used to generate it from (sea)water is significant and could have been used to charge batteries directly (note that it’s currently mostly distilled from natural gas, about 90% iirc). Mind you: I know it’s useful, just not for cars.
- It is fundamentally less efficient to run electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen, and then reverse the process again in a fuel cell to produce electricity to turn a motor, vs taking the electricity used for that electrolysis and storing it in a battery that is then taken back out to turn a motor. Granted, modern lithium battery chemistry isn't the cleanest thing to extract and use, but it's also not the only possible battery chemistry, just the one currently most used for vehicle batteries. It also doesn't allow for certain benefits to BEV like home charging (I mean technically one could run a hydrogen line to one's house, but that doesn't seem likely). The only scenario I can think of for hydrogen cars taking off is if the needed infrastructure was built out for something else and so was readily available. I could maybe see that if hydrogen ends up getting used as the solution for decarbonized aviation fuel, but my understanding was that it (along with basically every other proposed tech for that admittedly) had some pretty serious cost drawbacks and so there's no garuntee of it getting built out for even that application.
I can see it making sense for long distance hauling, semi trucks for example, where batteries can't really compete very well. But for the average person that doesn't need to put on thousands of miles in a short time hydrogen doesn't make much sense.

Wow, even when he's accidentally correct (hydrogen cars really aren't good), his "reasoning" (if you can call it that) is dumb as Hell.

The real problem with hydrogen cars (aside from H₂ storage being a pain in the ass) is that they're mostly a greenwashing scam, since the vast majority of H₂ produced is not "green" hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by renewables, but instead so-called "blue" hydrogen produced from natural gas or coal. If you're gonna do that, you might as well just fucking burn the hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine directly and save yourself all the damn hassle!

The part that pisses me off the most about this is that in states that have a very heavy amount of Renewables like let's say California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there's literally nowhere for them to put it.

Meanwhile they will simultaneously say they can't do green hydrogen because it takes so much energy and isn't super efficient, they will also say the same thing about desalination it needs too much energy where are they supposed to get it from. Motherfucker you are literally curtailing solar constantly just fucking dump it into one of those two things who cares if it's not the most efficient 20% efficiency is better than 0% efficiency

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
- In... California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there’s literally nowhere for them to put it.
  
  Um...
  
  ?
I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.
- Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).
  
  Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid
  
  With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it's an efficiency suckfest.
  
  But it's awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives
- I'm pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled -- or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it's no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; -- but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on...
- And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the "if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it'll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road" promise
Give me my coal powered steam car, assholes!

Hmm, dumbass gives rant against green energy, I see rise in dumbass arguments against green solutions, hmm.

Could he not? It's not just that he's wrong. It's that we'll have to defend the factual errors around a deadend solution.

Because we've never had vehicles powered by a highly volatile fuel source before. /s

Just wait till he finds out how modern combustion engines work

Change in rhetoric since Elon jumped on board

Weird, the person that would have a personal stake in having hydrogen cars fail.
- Clearly a coincidence, a multiple bankrupt billionaire wouldn't sell out
- Hydrogen cars didn't need any help with failing. I'm sure there's niche applications for it, but battery electric has basically won that particular fight.

Toyota didn't like that.

I actually read the safety reports from the NTSB, and they did an awful lot of testing on this Toyota hydrogen fuel cell cars. Even far surpassing the test parameters, the fuel cells remained intact and undamaged. In fact, it was pretty incredible.

nothing short of a .50 Cal armour piercing bullet gets through those tanks. And even then a chance of an explosion is very very low, it would probably just produce a fire just like gasoline (which can also explode under the right conditions). But that safety requirement is still a barrier, as it raises the cost of an already extremely expensive technology. Personally I can see hydrogen catching on for some niche applications, but for every day driving I don't see the price ever going low enough for it to make sense compared to electric.