In Europe Hydrogen is a thing. H2 is touted as a smart fuel and a lot of money is spend to inject it into media content. It is obviously an attempt by the gas sector to prolong the use of natural gas, promissing carbon capture and storage with hydrogen generation. The mantra is H2, Nuclear, Natural gas.
It is frustrating for these people who have to repeat their braindead idea, especially for the bought university professors who’s opinion is still respected by many. Even as the right wing (always fossil lakeys) governments propose rules to reduce the growth of the EV market, it grows by leaps and bounds. Even as the grid developers have ignored the effects of solar generation and EV charging and pretend there are no solutions (grid batteries).
This is because the victory of battery-electric vehicles is unavoidable. It is just cheaper. Charging is easier even if whole regions have been prohibited from anticipating EV market growth. In the Amsterdam region in Holland planning for EV charging spots was just blocked for years. Fighting renewables has been a right wing hobby, in the North of Holland a school was even reprimanded and asked to break down a wind turbine experiment of more than 2 meter high, because the whole windy barely inhabited province had banned all wind turbine construction.
If you take a hydrogen filling station for a hydrogen car, its just a loser. You can use one filling spot only once every half hour (the pump needs to buffer H2 in a high pressure tank which takes time), and the next pump needs to be 7 meters away. So you need a lot of space to fill hydrogen cars and you will never serve enough to replace gasoline and diesel. Its high risk, one H2 gas station exploded in Norway recently.
But because H2 is a delay strategy for the gas industry pundits have to talk about it knowing that it makes no sense. It’s like a religious fanatic talking about a miracle that never happened. The feeling of being a morally degraded person to propose an expensive solution where resources need to be put into fighting climate change must also incur a cost. Its like that marketing guy at the Pall Mall sigaret factory we once say, who had yellow fingers and bad breath from smoking the product he sold.
H2 is proposed as storage medium for African (Desertec) energy with the argument it loses little energy in transit. A new pipe would be constructed to carry it to the industrial regions of Europe of course in a very slow and expensive process. Of course the loss would be about 60% of the solar energy turned into H2, or more if the H2 is burned. Compare that to batteries that can be build with a 95% efficiency. So if you run a battery rail service from Spain to Germany you are probably left with more energy!
Then there is ammonia NH3, a much easier substance to work with, much safer, for which there are ships and infrastructure in place. So if you want to move hydrogen you could do it in the form of NH3. Generation of NH3 is easy, and you can get it from farmers who are forced to consider it waste. This shows how the H2 economy is a lie to sell gas, because a real H2 economy would be eager to use NH3 : It has all the benefits of clean burning and your average diesel car can use it without much changes.
So hopefully H2 advocates will not shoot themselves or jump off a bridge for wasting their lives deceiving millions and burdening future generations. We hope they don’t revolt against their sick paymasters who want to waste more than 60% of wind energy coming in from the North Sea for no clear reason. When Napoleon marched towards Cairo many of his soldiers became so desperate from the dry emptyness of the desert and the boredom of their existence that they threw themselves into the Nile to be eaten by the aligators. H2 advocates must feel the same. Droning on about a dumb idea is soul destroying. Hang in there!