Featured Hydrogen Fuel Cell's Dark Side(s)

According to Argonne National Laboratory:

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Sales
There were 18 Toyota Mirai and 6 Hyundai Nexo sold in the United States in May 2024.
Cumulatively, 295 FCEVs have been sold in 2024. In total, 18,262 FCEVs have been sold since 2014.

24 fuel cell cars sold last month! Think about that. Of course, all these have been sold in California (the only state with stations). This is despite the state spending 100s of millions of dollars in subsidies for fuel cell vehicles and stations. And fuel cell trucks get twice the subsidy as EV trucks. I could go on, but this is all very painful as a California taxpayer to see all this money going down a rathole.

 

I'd always thought of hydrogen as just being an energy storage technology, as it either has to be produced from fossil fuels e.g methane using steam reforming which emits a large amount of CO2 (9.3 kg of CO2 for 1kg of hydrogen), so called grey hydrogen, or using electrolysis of water with no CO2 emission, so called green hydrogen. I thought that there were no naturally occurring sources of hydrogen, but it seems I was wrong. There are potentially large amounts of underground hydrogen (dubbed white hydrogen) that could be extracted: Natural Hydrogen: A Potential Clean Energy Source Beneath Our Feet - Yale E360

If large scale extraction of naturally occurring hydrogen proves feasible it could be a bit of a game changer, it would be a true energy source rather than just an energy storage medium where you have to input energy in the first place to generate the hydrogen. However I agree with other posters that because of storage space using hydrogen directly is better suited to large scale transport applications such as ships, trains and trucks rather than small size vehicles. Incidentally to my mind using hydrogen directly to power aircraft is a technological mistake, as aviation in particular requires a fuel with a high energy content in a small weight and more importantly small volume. Liquid hydrocarbon fuel is ideal for this aviation purpose, but that doesn't mean that technically aviation can't be carbon neutral since synthetic hydrocarbon fuel can be manufactured from CO2 from the air and hydrogen e.g Carbon Neutral Synthetic Fuels | Our Vision | Zero

 

White hydrogen still has to face the hurdle of transportation. For uses like ammonia or power production, those facilities can be built near the sources. That is what uses of grey hydrogen did. For vehicles, the hydrogen has to be brought to them. For PEM fuel cells, which Toyota, Honda, and others use, the natural hydrogen will also need to be purified. Something that green hydrogen won't need.