'It explodes': Trump's latest rant against green energy falsely attacks 'hydrogen cars'
'It explodes': Trump's latest rant against green energy falsely attacks 'hydrogen cars'
Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode." During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry. "We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,.....
WITAF.
At best, he doesn't understand what a Hybrid Car is.
Wait till he hears about gasoline
51The material safety sheet for gasoline is a lot scarier than the one for hydrogen
15'THE ONE TIP FUEL MAKERS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!'
8msds
1The worst part about the gas you put in your car are all the additives they cram in there. Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it's full. Your finger doesn't even smell afterwards unlike car gas where you stink for a week. Also no skin cancer! Next you drain some from the bottom to make sure there's no water. After a quick visual inspection, you just pour it out onto the ground.
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From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine's also have a tendency to explode. I haven't seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.
44Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it'll just burn up because it won't all be released at once. And I've never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
14It's also a pressure vessel. Rupturing that might be scarier than just fire.
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Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn't hydrogen's fault.
-12No... No, that's not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won't burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn't have been a catastrophic fireball...
11It wouldn't have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn't have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.
2Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
If nothing else, hydrogen can't burn without oxygen, and there's very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
2
Lil bro remembers being traumatized by the hindenburg explosion when he was growing up. Fucking luddite.
40Did you know: the Hindenburg was built before plastics were a thing. Most think that the metal shell held the gas but no. It full of animal bladders/intestines that were filled with hydrogen and tied up .
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What hydrogen cars?
The sum total of Toyota and whoever else's efforts still amount to an inconsequential fraction of the vehicles currently in operation, probably not even a notable portion of a percentage point.
36We're dealing with a man who saw pictures of a spray bottle and the sun and decided it meant injecting bleach and putting a lightbulb inside you. Do not presume he thinks rationally.
10
Broken clocks and whatnot. Hydrogen cars are trash and completely unfeasible, not because they explode but because of the terrible efficiency and fueling problems
31And would need a huge new infrastructure for production and distribution. I’m convinced that most of the push for hydrogen is from oil and gas interests wanting to have essentially the same business they do now.
Clearly one of the advantages of EVs is how cheap and easy the infrastructure is compared to any other alternative (and somehow we’re still finding it difficult)
13To add to that the system's handling them degrade quite quickly if you think maintenance cost for a normal vehicle is difficult you should see one that has to handle high pressure hydrogen
2EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.
Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.
Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.
2
and the need to build an entire new distribution network, but one that handles cryogenic fuel.
nah, no thanks.
11Hydrogen fuel cells actually show quite a bit of promise. Mostly for large trucks. Batteries have a scaling issue. A battery powered 18-wheeler needs a much larger battery for a much shorter range.
Adding more load means you need more battery, and that larger battery is just more load that you need to haul.
This is sort of true with everything, but the important note is that a full battery and empty battery weigh the same.
Anyway. Commercial use is where it makes sense. There are actually a few other technologies that make sense in the commercial transportation space. Like ammonia.
Keeping these rather dangerous fuels commercial also allows for more strict safety standards.
2
Hydrogen cars aren't even something likely to catch on at this point anyway I'd think, despite Toyota's attempts to the contrary. Battery-electric cars have improved a lot of late making the advantage in range from using an energy dense chemical fuel less apparent, and hydrogen has to deal with both lower energy efficiency and the fact that hydrogen storage is rather difficult, while the infrastructure getting built has overwhelmingly been EV charging rather than hydrogen filling stations.
18Hydrogen is completely unsuitable for land based transportation because building the infrastructure and actually making the stuff is pretty hard to do at scale. The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists. And once you've built the charger, you don't need to send a truck to refill it on a regular basis.
10The electricity grid, on the other hand, already exists
...largely in the same appalling, copper-line state it has been in since its original installation 100 years ago. Which is woefully and catastrophically unprepared for an America full of EV drivers.
Not disagreeing with your core point, but just saying. The American electrical backbone system is absolutely in no way prepared for a mass shift to electric vehicles at this time. We're getting there, and if EV adoption continues at its current pace we run a pretty good chance of being fine so long as proper upgrades are actually being made, but we're not there yet and demand for EVs absolutely could still outpace the ability of our electrical infrastructure to support them.
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I can see it making sense for long distance hauling, semi trucks for example, where batteries can't really compete very well. But for the average person that doesn't need to put on thousands of miles in a short time hydrogen doesn't make much sense.
1The raw material waste/cost/emissions to produce those batteries isn't great though. There's not really much that hydrogen can't do better if the infrastructure was in place and the storage/safety stuff is worked out.
-3Hydrogen for cars is not.. let’s just say it’s not great.
Granted: the cars drive very well (try it if you have the chance) and the fuel cells give them a serious range. However, distribution of fuel similar to regular gas is hard. Storage is dangerous, and pipelines continuously leak (H2 molecules are very small). Hydrogen gas cannot be mixed with stinky stuff that will warn you if the gas is leaking. It is much harder to keep under pressure than oil or regular natural gas. And last but not least: it is very inefficient to generate, the electricity used to generate it from (sea)water is significant and could have been used to charge batteries directly (note that it’s currently mostly distilled from natural gas, about 90% iirc). Mind you: I know it’s useful, just not for cars.6It is fundamentally less efficient to run electrolysis on water to produce hydrogen, and then reverse the process again in a fuel cell to produce electricity to turn a motor, vs taking the electricity used for that electrolysis and storing it in a battery that is then taken back out to turn a motor. Granted, modern lithium battery chemistry isn't the cleanest thing to extract and use, but it's also not the only possible battery chemistry, just the one currently most used for vehicle batteries. It also doesn't allow for certain benefits to BEV like home charging (I mean technically one could run a hydrogen line to one's house, but that doesn't seem likely). The only scenario I can think of for hydrogen cars taking off is if the needed infrastructure was built out for something else and so was readily available. I could maybe see that if hydrogen ends up getting used as the solution for decarbonized aviation fuel, but my understanding was that it (along with basically every other proposed tech for that admittedly) had some pretty serious cost drawbacks and so there's no garuntee of it getting built out for even that application.
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Wow, even when he's accidentally correct (hydrogen cars really aren't good), his "reasoning" (if you can call it that) is dumb as Hell.
The real problem with hydrogen cars (aside from H2 storage being a pain in the ass) is that they're mostly a greenwashing scam, since the vast majority of H2 produced is not "green" hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by renewables, but instead so-called "blue" hydrogen produced from natural gas or coal. If you're gonna do that, you might as well just fucking burn the hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine directly and save yourself all the damn hassle!
16Give me my coal powered steam car, assholes!
3The part that pisses me off the most about this is that in states that have a very heavy amount of Renewables like let's say California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there's literally nowhere for them to put it.
Meanwhile they will simultaneously say they can't do green hydrogen because it takes so much energy and isn't super efficient, they will also say the same thing about desalination it needs too much energy where are they supposed to get it from. Motherfucker you are literally curtailing solar constantly just fucking dump it into one of those two things who cares if it's not the most efficient 20% efficiency is better than 0% efficiency
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
3I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.
2Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).
Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid
With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it's an efficiency suckfest.
But it's awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives
7I'm pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled -- or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it's no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; -- but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on...
6And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the "if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it'll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road" promise
6
Hmm, dumbass gives rant against green energy, I see rise in dumbass arguments against green solutions, hmm.
13Could he not? It's not just that he's wrong. It's that we'll have to defend the factual errors around a deadend solution.
9Because we've never had vehicles powered by a highly volatile fuel source before. /s
8Just wait till he finds out how modern combustion engines work
3
Toyota didn't like that.
7Change in rhetoric since Elon jumped on board
7Weird, the person that would have a personal stake in having hydrogen cars fail.
1Hydrogen cars didn't need any help with failing. I'm sure there's niche applications for it, but battery electric has basically won that particular fight.
1Clearly a coincidence, a multiple bankrupt billionaire wouldn't sell out
1
Nuking hurricanes is cool though.
6I actually read the safety reports from the NTSB, and they did an awful lot of testing on this Toyota hydrogen fuel cell cars. Even far surpassing the test parameters, the fuel cells remained intact and undamaged. In fact, it was pretty incredible.
6nothing short of a .50 Cal armour piercing bullet gets through those tanks. And even then a chance of an explosion is very very low, it would probably just produce a fire just like gasoline (which can also explode under the right conditions). But that safety requirement is still a barrier, as it raises the cost of an already extremely expensive technology. Personally I can see hydrogen catching on for some niche applications, but for every day driving I don't see the price ever going low enough for it to make sense compared to electric.
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hydrogen cars "explode."
Sounds like he's getting reality mixed up with Fallout.
4I see the man has never witnessed a 1972 Ford Pinto
4He’s just shitposting from the mouth again
3You'll need a ginormus piece of paper to write down everything that Donald does not understand...
2Especially because he writes in Sharpie marker only.
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Helium cars! They will be safe!
2Oh, the HUGE MANATEE!
2That was a dugong impressive pun….
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Hydrogen comes from water. Oil comes from pits deep in the earth. To turn an engine: We make controlled explosions inside a steel chamber to turn a crank using refined oil. The theory of operation does not change for hydrogen powered cars, the process of extracting it does. Hydrogen: A truck pulls up to a beach - drop a hose - tank is full so wrap up the hose and drive off. For oil - first you need gigantic oil pumps, then you drill a massive damned hole in the ground. At this point hydrogen is easier. The absolutely insanely stupid statement of "they explode", yeah you moron, so did the Gremlin when they got rear ended, you don't blame the fuel you blame the engineer. Complete idiots speaking their mind think they know, but in reality hydrogen and oxygen could replace oil and natural gas over night and there would be no change so long as the systems were engineered to handle the change in gases. Mostly it would be flow reducers because hydrogen and oxygen burn hotter and faster than oil and natural gas. But any explosions outside of the engine itself, are engineering failures, not of the fuel type which is one of the dumbest uneducated statements I have ever heard about a fuel type - " it blows up so I don't like it" you rancid hotdog, what do you think gas does? A gallon of gas can send a 1 ton car 30miles, if you ignite it directly it can send every part of your body 30miles in every direction. IT'S WHAT FUEL DOES!!! WHAT MATTERS IS HOW WE ACQUIRE IT! THE TECH IS BUILT AROUND THE FUEL! Weak damn humans.
2I get your point but hydrogen isn't just sea water, you've got an awful lot more energy to put in after the "tank is full so wrap up the hose and drive off" stage to separate the hydrogen from oxygen to get the fuel. The difficult bit comes after "get water".
4And It generally requires a lot of electricity. So, batteries cut out the middleman.
3
Gonna clarify a few things...
Hydrogen comes from water.
This is like saying flour comes from cake. You've got it backwards.
To turn an engine: We make controlled explosions inside a steel chamber to turn a crank using refined oil. The theory of operation does not change for hydrogen powered cars
Hydrogen opens up the possibility of using a fuel cell, skipping the noisy and inefficient combustion in favor of directly creating electricity and driving an electric motor.
Hydrogen: A truck pulls up to a beach - drop a hose - tank is full so wrap up the hose and drive off.
Not even close. To get hydrogen from water, you need a shit-ton of electricity and a lot of infrastructure, or you need to free it up with a chemical reaction (Aluminum and hydrochloric acid if I remember correctly). Right now the chemical way is lower cost and more available.
It's better to use that electricity to move the car around, rather than split water with it and using the resulting hydrogen to move cars.
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The late, great Heisenberg of New Mexico says that hydrogen explodes!
1Not a Walter White fan?
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