Technology is a lot like policy: the good analyst looks at the short and long term issues and the primary and secondary and less obvious effects.
I recently heard someone blurt out that hydrogen is the solution to our energy problems on a libertarian-tangent show, and it was bugging me, so a bit of a rant.
From a libertarian perspective, hydrogen doesn’t help. It is not suited to rural use or use on machinery that may move on a rough surface (say, cars off road). The problem we have with the current push for electric cars is that they curtail our freedom of movement, and hydrogen does nothing to solve this problem.
From a physics perspective, hydrogen is extremely hard to store and hold. It has high energy density per kilogram, but the problem is that it’s extremely hard to hold a kilogram of hydrogen in a reasonable volume at a reasonable pressure.
Bottom line: to store a kilogram of hydrogen in the same volume as a kilogram of gasoline, you need a vessel about 50 times stronger than your standard compressed gas cylinder. Totally impractical.
Cryogenics don’t help enough, because they too are fragile and need constant power to maintain the low temperatures. Not good for off-the-grid operations.
My notes and numbers, with citations.
Video also available on BitChute.