Its just not aiming for the right markets. Its perfect for replacing heavy fuel user where fueling up is already restricted to limited locations like diesel generator trains, massive 18 wheelers and boats, but not for individual car market.
Honestly, this is probably the best utility out of FCEB I've seen so far. It was always a dead-end for cars, but for short-term portable uses, this is great. There's actually a HUGE industry around portable butane that could be replaced with something like this.
Recreational, Construction, Culinary, Aviation...imagine replacing all of that with this as a solution, and you've got something. We'd obviously need to see some specs to see if it's possible. It's not going to make as much money as millions of cars on the road, but perhaps useful enough it will get uptake.
Every post about hydrogen gets a negative reaction, like someone has proposed using coal to power cars.
There are different suitable applications for different types of energy, it's not a situation where you have to pick one solution and that's it. I notice the same happens to some degree with posts about nuclear power.
Hydrogen has potential in things like shipping, aviation, trains and industry. Even if the exact concept in the article doesn't work, the lessons learned might advance technology in other projects.
The negative reaction comes from the fact that most hydrogen is produced by an energy intensive process that uses steam to crack petroleum products, and oil companies like BP have invested millions in greenwashing it to sound good.
I think it’s the knowledge that hydrogen tech is being pushed so hard by the oil lobbies because it’s currently most cheaply made by refining it out of oil using massive amounts of electricity which they can generate by burning more oil.
The astroturfing of hydrogen as a green fuel is disgusting, and straight out of the “Natural gas” playbook that got it piped to virtually every home in the western world over the last 200 years.
The "problem" is that hydrogen is an extremely complicated way for some people to save like 40 minutes per year over charging an EV in a handful of very specific circumstances, which really highlights just how fucked we actually are in terms of direct climate action.
Like, as it stands an EV already means you get to wake up every morning with a fueled vehicle instead of needing to divert to a disgusting gas station every other week. The only circumstance where charging time is an issue is on long trips, where it adds roughly 20 minutes for 4 hours traveled. and we are supposed to believe that the solution to this is handling a pressurized gas which readily defuses through solid steel containment vessels? Because that is somehow the solution to the one trip per year you take which requires highway charging? The information space here is literally "owning an EV means you can only watch 137 reruns of House in 2025 instead of 138," but you actually think people are going to be fine with an 800psi hydrogen tank which leaks at a rate of $1 per day?
FFS Japan . . stop this noise. Do the hard (and right) thing and go fix your grid. Yes, you got rather screwed post war. Deal with it - and sort it out.
Hydrogen. I don't know how Toyota has handled it and didn't read the article yet, but those molecules are so tiny they get into everything and cause problems.
Edit: Article says nothing of use on the subject, and it sounds like this is at the concept phase anyway, so it's probably vapourware.
That hydrogen cartridge I assume is about the same size as the battery and contains 5 liter, roughly a gallon. Hydrogen at 300 bar is 0.75 kWh / liter, so 3.75 kWh. Then it goes through a fuel cell at 50% efficiency and you get 1.9 kWh usage power. Not better than the battery. And if you want to power a car with, say 60 kWh battery car, it means 32 hydrogen canisters to swap.
There is also liquid hydrogen that has 2.36 kWh per liter. With 5 liter you get 5.9 kWh usage power per canister, almost triple the battery, but don't park these indoors. 10 of these are needed for a 60 kWh car.
For those scooters, the battery solution already works good.
So how long until one of those blows up? No matter how good the insulation, cryogenic hydrogen needs cooling to stay stable. You can't just put it in a tank and store it for extended periods of time.
Portable to me implies that it’s not cryogenic or else it would have to let the hydrogen boil off and can’t do long term storage.
So either these are room temperature and rely in unspecified magic to store the gas, or they’re short term only and require a truck based delivery/recycling system.