To paraphrase Mean Girls, “stop trying to make hydrogen happen.”
For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it’s hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles’ exhausts. It’s just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.
Hydrogen’s main selling point is that it’s faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it’s a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects.
But in reality, that’s pretty far from true.
I think the idea is that if the infrastructure for hydrogen fuel exists and using fossil fuels is penalized, there’s an incentive to start producing more of it via electricity by, as an example, using excess power produced by renewable energy sources when demand is low, balancing the grid and leveling out electricity price fluctuations at the same time.
This relies on a lot of technical, economical, and political ifs though. The end goal is desirable but it’s not clear if there’s a feasible path there, considering the physical properties of hydrogen alone.