Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
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┻━┻
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.
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
It’s kinda like software development…every experienced dev is aware that when management says we’ll do it shitty for now and fix it later that later never comes.
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…
The thing is, hydrogen is a byproduct of damn near every industry. It’s usually just released into the atmosphere because it’s a pain in the ass to capture and store and isn’t worth much. If it starts being in demand, you can bet your ass they’ll start trying to gather it.
Remember, though, that it is currently profitable to reform hydrogen out of methane, at the same time as it’s not profitable to contain and sell ‘byproduct’ hydrogen. There are sure to be reasons why, and they might be fairly durable reasons that don’t change much even as the demand for hydrogen increases. I’m no expert on this so I won’t speculate too much on what those reasons might be – maybe factors related to scale and logistics?
Give me my coal powered steam car, assholes!