Technology

The best way to store and transport hydrogen is to combine it with carbon so that it becomes a convenient liquid fuel. As a bonus, then you don't even need fuel cells to make electricity from it, but can instead simply burn it in something called an "internal combustion engine"

Tons of experts believe the only way hydrogen based transportation makes sense is by using it to fuel heavy transport right at the source instead of trying to transport it via pipeline.

Electric is far more efficient too, thus cheaper. Electricity you can transit over distance over wire and generate however you like. We've done it a long time, far and wide.

Turning electricity into hydrogen, distributing it, and then turning it back into electricity to move a vehicle, is so wasteful/expensive.

Just use a big battery.

As Toyota has demonstrated (and speaking from my own experience), it's not that tricky. As for cooking with the stuff, sometimes you just need portability and/or a flame. Electric is a poor choice in those cases.

TBH I respect Toyota for being realistic more than grifters like Musk. The fact is that car will never be a sustainable replacement for cars. They're here to save the auto cartels, not the planet.

But on the other hand public transit and LEVs are much more realistic. I would very much like to see a Toyota e-bike.

Key words being “current supply”. There are major moves being made to change this. Supply and demand need to grow at the same time if this is to work though.

Blue hydrogen is made by stripping the hydrogen from fossil fuel hydrocarbons (chains of hydrogen and carbon, hence the name), and sequestering the carbon. It produces a fuel that contains enough chemical energy to be burned as fuel, but without the carbon atoms that would turn into greenhouse gases.

Most hydrogen currently produced though, is gray hydrogen (made from natural gas, but without sequestering the carbon, so that CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere).

The biggest use-case I see for hydrogen is more of an energy storage and transfer mechanism. With the world switching to renewables that generate power inconsistently, some countries are looking at putting the extra power into hydrogen generation via electrolysis, which can then be used at night/low-wind days to keep the power grid stable.

If we ever get to the point that we've got a surplus of renewably generated hydrogen, then it could make sense to start using to power cars, heating, cooking, whatever.

Fossil fuels, including coal, are also used to produce electricity. They simply need to be prohibited or at least strictly rationed. Fortunately, hydrogen can be produced without emitting greenhouse gasses because it is still necessary for processes like steel and fertilizer production. It's also a practical replacement for fossil fuels in transportation and, as Toyota demonstrated, food preparation. As I replied to someone else, sometimes we need portability and/or a flame when it comes to cooking. Electricity just doesn't cut it in those cases.

Generate hydrogen at night from nuke plants.

If the process to make hydrogen is clean, burning h is way way way cleaner. That's the math, not the source. The source can become an economics problem rather than necessarily an environmental one (imagine like 45 footnotes for where we do stuff that makes this not true, I'm just trying to capture the goal)

Burning methane also produces steam. Methane produces 891 kJ/mol, hydrogen 286 kJ/mol, methane has four hydrogen atoms that'd be 1144 kJ per what should the unit be in any case: Methane produces less heat per unit of produced water than hydrogen (the hydrogen first needs to get ripped off the carbon). Those ovens burn dryer than your current gas oven.

Never used steam when making pizza, they're not in there long enough for steam to make a difference. For bread it's indispensable to get a proper crust, though.

EDIT: Did I get moles right? It's been a while and I am no chemist.

Hydrogen is so much smaller than natty light that on a Continental scale the losses could be significant, but that's neat history. It's fun how long stuff has been around like gasification.

That depends on how easy it is to deal with the explosion when it happens. The issue with lithium-ion is that they can't just be smothered like an ICE fire, so there's really nothing you can do once it starts. Also, ICEs don't spontaneously catch fire when parked in your garage, they tend to catch fire when you're driving, which means you're immediately aware when it starts to happen.

An EV catching fire while it charges at night is extra scary because I'm likely to be asleep, and therefore I'll have a smaller chance to react properly (especially if I need to run up/down stairs to round up small children). So even if it's less likely, it's potentially worse because I'm less likely to be able to get away from it safely.

I don't know much about what a practical hydrogen failure looks like, but my understanding is that it's quite violent. But maybe they have controls around that now, idk.

I would call this "harsh" and indirect lighting with a shallow depth of field. It seems like a relatively low-light room, and there's tons of shadows making the images noisey. On cameras, the more you open the aperture to let more light in, the narrower your focus becomes. That's why there's so much blur or "bokeh" in the images.