Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

Trump’s Hydrogen Cars Bit Is Funny and Inaccurate

The man can structure a joke.

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Ever since Elon Musk “persuaded” Donald Trump to take it easy on his electric vehicle-bashing, the former president’s EV riffs have gotten pretty boring. Thank goodness, then, that there’s a new boogeyman in town: hydrogen cars.

Never mind that there are only about 18,000 hydrogen cars on the roads in the U.S. and so few refueling stations that one of the two manufacturers of them, Toyota, is getting sued. According to Trump, hydrogen cars are “the new thing,” as he warned his supporters last week during a stop in Savannah, Georgia (roughly 1,900 miles from the nearest hydrogen refueling station):

“They say the new thing is hydrogen cars, but they’re having a problem. If it explodes, you end up about seven blocks away. And you’re dead. So personally, I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna take a pass. But maybe they’ll figure it out. But right now, I wouldn’t recommend it.” [via RawStory]

This is, admittedly, a pretty funny bit — even if it’s totally inaccurate, according to Bill Elrick, the executive director of the Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership, a nonprofit group of auto manufacturers, energy providers, and government agencies that promote hydrogen vehicles in California. “I get where it comes from, and it is one of our biggest challenges in the industry — helping people understand what hydrogen is without diving into the depths of how a vehicle operates,” he told me.

As Elrick pointed out, when most people hear “hydrogen,” they think either of water (“which is fine”), the Hindenburg disaster (“we don’t do anything 100 years later the same way that we used to”), or, most problematically, the hydrogen bomb. “That’s something that is a completely different chemical reaction and, I think, where some of the safety scare comes from,” Elrick told me.

But hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (or HFCVs) are no more a bomb than gas-powered vehicles — perhaps less so, because they must meet the same rigorous safety codes and standards as any other car or truck on the road in addition to extra precautions to ensure the fuel cells won’t be punctured in a bad accident or potentially leak.

In a HFCV, hydrogen stored in a high-pressure tank is mixed in a fuel cell with oxygen from the air to induce a chemical reaction that produces electricity, which powers an electric motor that drives the car, just as it would in an EV. While batteries and electricity are familiar concepts, however, and therefore less scary as automotive power sources, current popular uses of hydrogen, such as refining oil and producing fertilizers, are not as visible to most people going about their daily lives as, say, their cell phones.

That’s not to say hydrogen is 100% safe. “Anything that moves a vehicle that weighs two tons or more — if it’s electricity, gasoline, or hydrogen — clearly has dangers and risks associated with it,” Elrick said. “If we could power our cars with peanut butter, it would have that energy potential.” But car manufacturers (just like electric boat manufacturers) have considered the possibility of their vehicles being involved in crashes and designed them accordingly.

The Center for Hydrogen Safety maintains a database of hydrogen-related accidents to serve as “lessons learned” as the technology continues to develop. Though there are still relatively few HFCVs on the roads, as of this spring there had been no recorded automotive fatalities credited specifically to hydrogen fuel cells. (In other words, no one has ended up “about seven blocks away” dead from an explosion.) One researcher even found that “in a collision in open spaces,” an HFCV should actually have “less potential hazard” than a gas car due to the extensive precautions taken when building their tanks (“their hardware would likely survive even if the rest of the car were destroyed in a crash,” per Car and Driver).

But Trump’s HFCV-phobia probably isn’t the biggest takeaway here. Some sectors of the hydrogen industry are potentially on the chopping block if Trump returns to the White House — since, as my colleague Katie Brigham writes, “green hydrogen made from renewable-powered electrolyzers is expensive and the proposed strict rules that would allow it to qualify for the most generous tax credit [would likely be] goners” under a Republican administration. Trump’s suspicion of new uses for hydrogen certainly doesn’t bode well.

As for any lingering fears about exploding hydrogen cars that Trump might have planted — hey, at least it’d be a quicker end than death-by-shark.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate Tech

If Natron Couldn’t Make Batteries in the U.S., Can Anyone?

The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.

An out of business battery pack.
Heatmap Illustration/Natron, Getty Images

When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.

But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Electric Vehicles

For EVs, Charging Speed Is the New Range

They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.

A clock with lightning hands.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.

The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
AM Briefing

Mass Firings

On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief

The White House.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.

THE TOP FIVE

1. White House orders agencies to prepare for mass firings

The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue