| | | Hydrogen is a bad idea as a fuel for vehicles. Even if it's called Green Hydrogen it's still just a green-washed bad idea. Fifty years ago, about 1972, my 1986 BP Oil International boss had been working on hydrogen with Shell. I was the 1986 gasoline man for BP. Don said hydrogen was a good idea for vehicles and what did I think. At the time, the oil industry had spent several years trying to come up with ways to avoid using crude oil because it got to $40 a barrel in 1980, up from $2 a barrel 10 years earlier. Horrors. That's like $2000 per barrel now [near enough].
I explained to Don White, my boss, that getting hydrogen out of water was hard work and then compressing it and lugging huge heavy cylinders around to retail points was harder work. Then it had to be stored in heavy tanks in cars and finally burned in internal combustion engines, or potentially fuel cells [not invented then] to drive gearbox and wheels or electric motors and wheels.
I was already an electric car fan club member. I thought it would be much better to just deliver the electricity directly to vehicle batteries, thereby cutting a lot of cost and inefficiency. Line losses to the retail points 5% or 10%, and a small loss in charging a battery [2% done right], compared with big losses in electrolysis and hydrogen storage, delivery, combustion or fuel cell.
36 years later, Elon Musk agrees with me that photovoltaic electricity should go straight to car batteries. Photovoltaics direct to stacks of batteries at 7SecondSwapStopSerivceStations. Elon tried doing battery swaps but his system was bad = inconvenient, slow [90seconds], batteries huge, heavy, expensive and he charged too much money.
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