Why do anti-EV people love hydrogen?

My posts on EVs often see people saying electric is not the future, the future is hydrogen. I don’t understand their reasoning and none have supplied any logic to date.

The reality is that humanity has never single-sourced their energy propulsion needs, and I don’t ever see that changing. Hydrogen will no doubt play a part somewhere in that mix. But for a huge number of use cases, electric is superior now, and will be increasingly so into the future as we develop batteries with better energy density. But that doesn’t mean to say the ‘everything will be electric’ people are right either.

Hydrogen offers advantages over electric, as indeed any energy source offers advantages over any other. The question is whether those advantages outweigh the relative disadvantages.

For passenger cars that answer is no, electric is more than adequate. The infrastructure, even household sockets, is everywhere, the technology is advanced, range is sufficient for many needs, costs are within reach and indeed many of my audience runs an EV plus a 4×4. And all the above is improving month-by-month. But that does not mean electric technology is at the point where it can replace all diesel use cases, notably 4×4 touring and towing. Edge cases of where an EV has towed do not mean it’s ready for the mainstream.

Hydrogen certainly seems attractive at face value. Clean, quick to refuel, long range – apparently the advantages of electric and ICE combined. But take a look at the bigger picture. Producing hydrogen takes a lot of energy which defeats the point of zero emissions at the tailpipe. There is ‘green hydrogen’ which uses renewable energy to produce hydrogen – but that’s inefficient as the electricity generated from renewables could go directly to electric cars, not be used to create hydrogen, a process which incurs energy losses, and that’s even before we get to the energy and infrastructure required for distribution.

It seems pointless to use electricity to create hydrogen, transport that hydrogen to a refuelling station, and then put it into a car which re-converts it back to electricity, all for a use case where that same electricity could directly charge a battery-electric-vehicle.

Does that mean hydrogen has no use cases? Of course not, and again people like to create a false dichotomy of being either pro-EV or anti-EV. Hydrogen would be suited to use cases which require long range or long operating hours with a quick refuel, with centralised operations which would amortise the cost of a refuelling station. Examples are interstate trucks depots, potentially agriculture, mining are possibilities but even these would be supplanted by electric as energy density improves. But realistically, hydrogen is not going to replace electric as a power source for everyday passenger vehicles, and nor should it.