Wow, you truly are misinformed…
Quebec’s main line is over 1000km long, extending from northern Quebec all the way to Montreal, from the 54th parallel to the 45th it goes through the tundra and it just works! The longest one in the world is 2500km long.
You know what’s expensive? Transporting a gas that leaks through solids. Current hydrogen production is done in ways that release more emissions than burning burning coal for heating for fuck’s sake! Green hydrogen? You’re taking electricity to produce hydrogen to produce electricity to move cars… Sooooo skip the middle part and use electricity to move cars? Right?
Which is about the upper limit of a reasonable powerline. I’m pretty sure they had to resort to HVDC to get it that long. Note that I did not say it was impossible, only impractical. You lose a lot of energy when it gets very long.
I also know that Quebec is making hydrogen with their hydropower. Clearly, they know something you don’t.
Pipelines go for thousands of km too, and send far more energy with smaller losses than wires. This is due to physics: A pipe is a hollow tube and scales up better the larger the diameter of the tube. Wires do not scale up as well.
A battery car does not “skip the middle part.” It relies on a huge and resource intensive battery to store energy. This is electrochemical energy storage, and works the same way as how a hydrogen car stores energy. As a result, there is no fundamental advantage to using a battery. As costs comes down and as fuel cell technology advances, it is likely that there will be zero or next to zero efficiency advantage for the battery car.
You need to produce the hydrogen, if it’s green one you’re using electricity to do it, there’s losses there (and you’re using rate earth materials for the electrolysis). Then you need to liquify it to transport it, that’s electricity you’re using to bring it to -250°C, there’s more losses here (not even considering the leaks, just energy losses). Then you put in cars where it’s used to make electricity, there’s losses again. Now add up all the costs and think about the cost at the pump compared to…
The alternative is to just take the electricity from the beginning, putting it in batteries to move cars.
With hydrogen you’re using way more electricity to produce the same final output, you’re just wasting a ton of it.
Quebec has the cheapest electricity in North America and it’s still not financially reasonable to use our electricity to produce hydrogen. What ends up happening? Hydrogen for cars comes from the fossil fuel industry.
Where can we use it though? Where batteries aren’t a reasonable solution, that’s heavy transport.
You are not reading my post. The entire set of steps is exactly the same number of steps as charging a battery. Both are electrochemical processes and have similar losses. In theory, we can make a fuel cell that operates just as efficient as a li-ion battery.
The other point is that the process of moving hydrogen around is cheaper than moving energy via electricity. Losses of distribution are similar too. People are forgetting how big and complex the grid is.