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Titanium carbide nanotech approach hints at hydrogen storage breakthrough

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Batteries have all the issues of recharging times that are unlikely to be reduced that much as there is a trade off of charge speed/battery cycles."

Charging speed is not an issue. EVs aren't an exact drop in replacement for ICE vehicles. You have to adopt the mindset that you will be charging overnight at home or at work. You aren't going to be visiting a specialized dispenser when the battery is low and spending 10 minutes or so. Yes, refilling a petrol tank is very quick because the fuel is incredibly energy dense. We then go on to waste the energy potential in horribly inefficient vehicles while spewing pollution out the back end.

You are correct that it takes a large amount of energy to process crude oil into transportation fuel. About 7.46kWh per US gallon according to a study done at the Argonne National Laboratories. The conversion is easily thought of as 25 miles of range in an EV just for the leccy.

"Now if you are producing hydrogen using wind or solar then to a certain extent it does not matter that it is inefficient."

It matters a great deal. Investors will want to put money in technology that has the best return. There are so many other things the electricity from a solar or wind source can be used for that will make investors far more money. As a consumer, you don't want to spend $85 to travel the distance in a FC car that an EV car will do with $12 of electricity.

I get the argument that many people don't have off-street parking and it would be difficult for them to charge an EV regularly. Many people also live in densely packed flats that would make rehearsing a Sex Pistols/PIL tribute band problematic. The rise of the automobile also changed the way planners laid out cities. They could pack people in like a tin of kippers with no place to park because it was assumed that the people would use public transportation and forego having a car, never mind 2. Cities will have to rethink their zoning and planning as we go forward. The pandemic has finally forced companies to realize that they don't need to have their entire staff in a big city downtown high rise. It's no longer matters if HR is 3 floors away or several hundred miles north of the marketing department. Interactions were moving towards non-personal communications anyway. The art department can be in a small office building in Cornwall or Paris where the artists get to see nature by looking out of the office window rather than being confined to a gray cubicle in the middle of the seventh floor with only other skyscrapers viewable out of the window. Having viable charging options at home will be a major selling point of homes going forward. Employers are going to need to provide charging whether free or charged to the employee. There will still be plenty of situations where a person has neither, but EVs are being mandated and ICE's are being banned/restricted so people better be poised to get their bum on a chair for when the music stops.

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