Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?

I work for an oil and gas company. It has been specifically stated by my company that they are seeking support for hydrogen as a fuel because it adds value to their gas reserves - natural gas is roughly 75% hydrogen on a molar basis.

The idea is to stimulate demand for "green-ish" hydrogen (that is by grid-connected electrolysis); once demand for the hydrogen is there, it can be supplied by blue hydrogen. The O&G companies aren't super keen on green hydrogen made by dedicated renewables off grid, and they LOVE the approach of "we'll start off with grey hydrogen then we'll move to blue and green in the future".

This is very specifically a strategy to increase the amount of natural gas that can move from resources to possible reserves to probable reserve to proven reserves. That's how you increase the value of your company, which is how you get a fat bonus as a CEO.

You don't get a fat bonus by telling the truth or being right.

The current US administrations moves against renewables should make you realize how powerful the oil gas lobby is. They got some pushback from local politicians so were slowed down but the way they started they were looking to end all wind and solar for a false promise of nuclear tomorrow.

It'd be reasonable if hydrogen was competitive with electric, but it's not.

Given how hard and how long the fossil fuel industry has been fighting tooth and nail to suppress science, kill public and private projects, and fund bogus studies, all to avoid ever losing even a fraction of their ironclad control of the energy market, I think it's fair to deny them the benefit of the doubt at this point.

If they're saying or doing something that would stand in the way of or compete with the existing rise of renewable energy, even without any specific evidence, I believe it is fully justified to say they are doing it for selfish reasons that will harm literally every other human being on the planet.

Oil companies, vehicle manufacturers, tire companies and other powerful lobbyists have been doing this for decades so it’s an unsurprising theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

It’s why we don’t have rail in the US like you see in Europe. At one point in time we had a ton of rail and streetcar networks but these groups destroyed it all because it was a threat to their business. For oil companies, so is hydrogen.

This just sounds intentionally naive.

One can extract hydrogen from fossil fuels. So if a hydrogen break through is coming, they already have a cheap source for the material. Not really green though...

"trying to get aboard the hydrogen train to diversify their future revenue sources" sounds very close to what op claims. For them, the goal is to get aboard, not to get to a destination.

Are you sure the hydrogen storage is still active? That page does say "This project has been operating autonomously since 2009" but the projects page on the same site lists the hydrogen village as lasting from 2008-2010 https://frontierpowersystems.ca/projects/. Frontier Power Systems is also a "wind-diesel" provider - so they certainly aren't separated from oil companies (though this doesn't automatically mean their intentions aren't genuinely to reduce fossil fuel usage as GP was saying, they even seem to be doing battery storage systems now).

Checking further into the projects list, the first project in Ramea for "wind-hydrogen-diesel" (first time I've seen that one) demonstration is listed as lasting longer but this article notes it hardly ever ran because "issues were experienced with the storage aspect of the project" i.e. the hydrogen storage https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/ramea-w... I didn't exhaustively check the project list but, of the ones I did, I didn't see an active wind-hydrogen systems. Only active wind-battery or wind-diesel systems. WEICan also has active wind+battery systems running on Prince Edward Island https://www.weican.ca/ (click view details for the specifics) but no hydrogen.

Maybe all of that is in same way inaccurate and there are actually great details of the hydrogen storage success. Unfortunately I can't find any such details saying "that's the case and here is the data about how successful it has been for the last decade", just the above info saying it was tried for a short period, didn't work out, and other system types are currently in place.

Where are all the details? All the articles of project seem to be pre-build.

How many MW of wind turbines? How big electrolyzer? How big energy storage? Investment cost? Running costs? Reliability?

this is amazing

I don't think its really viable to transport hydrogen via existing (oil) pipelines.

Hydrogen leaks everywhere.

I don't know what you are talking about, electricity is a fluid.

Maybe because there is evidence of fossil companies doing exactly that since the sixties?

Benefit of doubt has it's place but this is just naivety or outright trolling.

I mean, read the current top sibling comment to yours. Someone who worked at an oil & gas company confirmed that this was their strategy.

Now, I don't think these people are sitting in their carved-out mountain lair, scheming to destroy the world; I'm sure they don't see themselves as villains. But they are making deliberate decisions to protect their business models and bottom line by adopting -- and, importantly, lobbying for -- technology that is polluting and emits greenhouse gases.

To be fair a lot of us had a lot of education on the topic, and come from engineering backgrounds.

If I'm reading that right the Battery Electric busses had the lowest maintenance costs? The need to charge is a potential issue, but at the same time busses do lots of low speed stop and go where battery systems are most efficient. As long as the bus has enough capacity for an entire day and can be recharged overnight it seems like an ideal solution, minus of course the up-front cost of the bus. Lower fuel costs, no noxious pollutants, less noise, lower maintenance, there is a lot to love.

I think the case for using hydrogen today is pretty weak, but a lot of the details for why it's a bad choice are (as you say) exacerbated by the one-off deploys of the technology. If you were testing gas busses and needed to truck gasoline in just for your busses you would expect the numbers to get worse too.

My view is that if you want a clean alternative today you'd go with electric and also the tech seems worth continuing to develop for other applications. I also think that public transit doesn't seem like it plays to the strengths (such as they are) of hydrogen.

The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.

It’s hard to imagine it not. And also kudos and crazy respect for all the thousands of engineers that poured their work into making combustion engines as efficient and reliable as they are. A true marvel of humanity, and something to be respected even as we leave it behind.

Based on personal experience my guess is that the unreliability would be in the battery not the drive train.

Or more precisely put, batteries are a sort of black box they ether work or they don't work but either way you are not going to be able to open one up and find out why. that is, they are a high cost unrepairable item on the vehicle and this is a huge liability.

Limerick City in Ireland has electric double decker buses. They are dead quiet and it's a total treat to be a pedestrian without the buses passing by and blowing my ears off.

What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California...

Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.

Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!

See the EV1, a popular, mass produced electric vehicle that was controversialy "discontinued" in 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1?wprov=sfla1

The parent commenter to you never claimed that electric cars were already viable or mass market, I would say the implication is that it was very obvious to the car industry at the time that EVs would be viable and even affordable extremely soon.

The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.

As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.

So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.

Electric cars were driven on the moon before Elon Musk was in diapers

Isn't that the only plan right now? Is commercially viable hydrogen being made from any process other than the shift reaction?

You realize you can just as easily (if not more so) produce electricity with fossil fuels, right?

US manufacturers absolutely make electric busses, but when you’re talking about global trends/capabilities in the market, you have to keep in mind that the core competency of most suppliers on the US market is still diesel drivetrains, their EV products are new/secondary.

The relevant comparison is to an equivalent energy battery, not the tank enclosure vs fuel.

The tank weighs at least 10x what the hydrogen weighs, so yes it’s relatively little per trip, but it does add up over the lifetime of the vehicle and I thought it was worth mentioning. Same goes for very high voltage in BEVs. There’s weight savings to be had by maximizing voltage which allows you to reduce the thickness of the wiring. But the savings are small compared to the weight of the battery.

Tell that to Colin Chapman!

Although yes, agreed, a few kilos makes little difference to a bus.

Maybe. There are certainly companies doing this, such as SUN Mobility and BYD. But I think battery swapping will remain fairly niche, unless and until a few standardized battery shapes, sizes, and connectors emerge. Fixed route buses might be able to rely on custom solutions but that will of course increase the price and make it less tenable for the long-term.

See https://alphastruxure.com/news-press-release/emtoc-microgrid... for an example of on-site hydrogen production.

The stop-start nature of city busses makes them a real low hanging fruit for battery electrification, benefiting from instant torque to start and regen to stop and, as you say, fixed known routes within larger fleets.

The only nation that seems to have capitalised on this basic fact is China which bootstrapped its EV industry on busses, pulling ahead from 2010 and hitting 90% of global market share for EV busses in 2020, and now a big exporter.

> But if it can't, you just design the route so that the driver can switch busses and buy another bus

Oof, that's a huge 'just' in many cases.

That said, current electric buses have sufficient range that this mostly isn't an issue. The unnervingly silent double-deckers I mention have a claimed range of 320km, which, at least here, is sufficient.

The big problem with Dublin's electric buses, ridiculously, was that the operator was late in applying for planning permission for the substations required to charge them. With the result that for about a year, there were about a hundred of them stored and unusable.

Many bus routes have a 5-10ish min break at some point (usually the main station) in the route. If you can utilize those ten minutes to do a top-up, you can go a lot further on the same sized battery.

> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.

This is such an odd insight. Most problems in the world can be described as a "money problem", and it's usually the problem that problem solvers are pushing up against.

> That means the technology problem is now a money problem.

And not even a horrible one. A bus that is driven half as much per day will wear out (about) half as fast. Which means, although you do have to buy twice as many buses up front, the number of buses you have to replace per year won't change.

So in the steady state, the cost of buses isn't actually that much worse.

There is still some penalty for needing more buses, though. For example, you have to pay more to store buses. Also some maintenance is more of a function of time than mileage driven. And you're tying up more capital, which may mean more bonds or opportunity costs.

https://apnews.com/article/chicago-electric-bus-cold-weather...

Good article on this topic.

It's a lot of infrastructure investment but the per-mile running costs are so much lower that it should eventually pay off, especially as buses get cheaper when volume ramps up.

As someone who has witnessed EV buses in person, I think the local pollution and to a lesser extent noise benefits are really great for cities that have or want to move more toward human-friendly streetscapes. They just eliminate so much bus engine stench that just can't be good for breathing in.

It also seems to me that they have to be a lot more reliable. I have seen so many broken down buses with the engine compartment open on the side of the road in my lifetime.

> (if you ignore CNG busses, which have existed forever and are "almost as good as hydrogen could be")

In most of the US yes, in dense big cities they're still quite a bit worse (especially if they run at night too) because they're very noisy compared to electric or hydrogen.

I live in such a place where the buses were all CNG and are now shifting to electric. Unfortunately the switch isn't going too quickly, but every time an electric bus goes by the peace and quiet is blissful. I think every new bus they buy is electric, but I get that they don't want to throw out all of the existing CNG stock.

CNG buses were about a 10-year experiment in Toronto. There were a number of bus terminals where CNG vehicles were prohibited, either due to clearance or because of the associated explosion risk.

A second batch of buses were converted to diesel so that the fuelling station could be decommissioned.

Five months before the company filed for bankruptcy, Proterra's CEO was appointed to the President’s Export Council (PEC), "the principal national advisory committee on international trade."

Thanks for your insight. The amount of damage that Proterra did to the overall BEB adoption rates should not be underestimated. I work with many agencies and so many of them are running from BEBs toward FCEBs in large part because of their, or sister agency, experience with Proterra buses.

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This process happened in Madrid a few years ago. It's an incredible quality-of-life improvement for everyone in the city. Diesel buses were phased out a few years ago. The newer hybrid CNG buses are uncannily quiet, and some lines in the city core, where distances are smaller and speed is slower, are fully electric.

Yup, wasn’t being entirely serious. They’ve gotten progressively quieter over the last few decades; when I was a kid, they really did sound like they were within seconds of complete failure when going up a hill. The electric ones are a shock the first time you get on one, though - very futuristic.

Busses are not going to be quiet. Around here we have pretty cool "Van Hool ExquiCity" trolley busses and they can glide gracefully at slow speeds, but when they are hurtling down patched up streets they are not much quieter than the traditional busses.

You missed the last and most funny one

>Driving a gyrobus has the added complexity that the flywheel acts as a gyroscope that will resist changes in orientation, for example when a bus tilts while making a turn, assuming that the flywheel has a horizontal rotation axis.

So you have a giant blender than can travel one mile in a straight line before needing to be recharged

I personally think Battery buses with SAE J3105 'docking' points at key stops (basically, the stops that are used to loiter to set timing, rather than leaving as soon as possible) is a better solution than the cost of stringing OHL through every major road in a city.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_electric_bus#Chargin...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J3105

Think that’s bad? Look at this thing! https://www.en-former.com/en/mammoth-flywheel-for-irelands-g...

4GJ of stored energy, dischargeable in eight seconds.

Same for me with boats in Oslo (but less than 10 years).

As a simple driver of cars, I've never understood why no one has mass produced an EV with a built-in generator. That would avoid the complexity of the hybrid drive train, allow easy plugin and short range electric-only travel, and could even be offered as an optional attachment. So what am I missing? Is the efficiency gained by the generator offset by losses through the EV system?

Some hybrid drivetrains have fewer moving parts than a traditional ICE and are more reliable.

> virtually all modern cars have a turbocharger

This is not really true in the US, but maybe moreso in Europe, where engine displacement is penalized?

> that needs time to spin up

Porsche's latest 911 does something very cute here ("T-Hybrid"): they have a small electric motor in the turbo. They use the high-voltage hybrid battery to rapidly spin up the turbo on demand to significantly reduce turbo lag (one of the major drawbacks of a turbo engine). Then, at lower load, they can also regen the battery using the exhaust gases and that same motor.

Not disagreeing with anything you're saying, just adding as a note, that as of a few years ago, Toyota's entire line-up of cars are hybrid vehicles.

Hybrids are better for road trips in my experience. We have an EV and a hybrid, and nearly always choose the hybrid for road trips, because the EV needs to stop 2x as often, for 3-4x as long.

What is TCO?

What drove the TCO so high that ditching already paid for hybrid busses made sense?

The fallacy with that argument is that hydrogen's volumetric energy density is very low.

In liquid form, methane has about 2.7x more energy by volume than hydrogen. Diesel has 4.2x more energy. Keeping and transporting hydrogen in liquid form takes a lot of energy and requires constantly boiling it off to keep it liquid. In practice, most hydrogen is transported in compressed gas form (700 bars). In that form, you need about 11 hydrogen truckloads to a single diesel truckload.

So, it takes up a lot of space. This makes it very impractical for transport use cases. Unless you convert it to something that maybe contains hydrogen but also other atoms. Like carbon (carbohydrates) or nitrogen (e.g. ammonia). Converting it to those forms takes more energy. And those multiply. And doing the chemical conversion back to energy in a combustion engine has the same problem as all combustion engines: it loses most of the energy as heat. Fuel cells might improve on that; but they'd still be losing energy.

This is why battery electric trucks easily match the ranges of most hydrogen trucks on the road. There are currently no production hydrogen trucks or buses that offer a longer range than their battery-electric equivalents. You'd need significantly larger tanks and adding the same volume in battery would match the range easily. Even with current production batteries (160-200 wh/kg), which are about a third of the energy density of already announced new state of the art batteries (500wh/kg). Batteries are on a path of steady volumetric an mass density improvements. Hydrogen will never get better than it already is.

It's also why hydrogen planes are no longer being considered a viable plan by the likes of Airbus; most of the plane would have to be reserved for hydrogen containment.

For ships, using hydrogen as a fuel is not a serious option either. Simply too much volume. Transporting hydrogen by ship in liquid form loses 1-2% of the load per day to boil off. This is the only way to keep it liquid; boiling it off cools the liquid. The longer the journey, the more hydrogen is lost to unavoidable boil-off, making long-distance transport highly inefficient.