A promising development is physical-chemical storage that doesn't require compression for storage, that seems to make hydrogen powered vehicles far more likely to win out over current battery-based EV technologies.
One of the technologies metal organic frameworks (MOF) seems to have been creating some buzz recently.
> far more likely to win out over current battery-based EV technologies
As a BEV owner, I'll tell you right now that until the H2 can be filled at my house, I'm not willingly giving back the portion of my life I used to spend at a fuel station.
At the rate batteries and charging are improving year-over-year, compared with the practically non-existent hydrogen infrastructure (how many states have -any- hydrogen fueling stations? Two?), I can't see hydrogen ever taking over. We have a grid already which delivers electricity far more extensively than any liquid fuel infrastructure ever will.
Even with zero storage costs, hydrogen cars can't compete with batteries, since it's electricity -> battery -> electric motor vs electricity -> hydrogen -> battery -> electric motor and that extra step takes energy.
It's only on longer distances that it begins to make sense as a tradeoff but even there it's not clear there's much room for it in the market.
Surely with hydrogen it's a fuel cell (and relatively v. small battery for regenerative braking and such), not a battery like a BEV? And as the hydrogen, using a tech like MOF, would be cheaper to store, and easier to store longer term ... the extra energy expense seems a priori to remove a lot of e- waste and reliance on mining in developing nations.
I'm not sure how the life-cycle overall energy usage compares, would be interested in reading a study of someone wants to link one.
I'm hoping that hydrogen storage will become easy enough that we'll use that for large scale excesses like those from nation-size grids during excess production. So we can do seasonal shifting at scale.
Hydrogen Fuel Cell is about 4x less efficient than BEV because you lose about half the initial energy making the hydrogen and half of that going back to electricity again. It's just very hard to come back from that if you have an alternative that uses the electricity directly.
They're still better than conventional ICE (as long as the hydrogen is made from renewable energy) but just on energy alone BEVs are about 88% efficient, FCEVs 22% and ICE 18% efficient.
One of the technologies metal organic frameworks (MOF) seems to have been creating some buzz recently.
General overview: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/materials-based-hydrog...