Originally Posted By: Dave1027
Originally Posted By: billt460
It will never happen. Hydrogen takes more energy to produce than it makes.
It can be a lot cheaper if you use solar power to extract it from water.
Electrolysis is not efficient, as already covered above. There are far better ways of extracting hydrogen if that's the end game, that have significantly higher yields and most of them involve nukes.
On the topic of doubling the efficiency of electrolysis, which is covered here:
https://phys.org/news/2016-03-efficiency-electrolysis.html
Quote:
Only four per cent of all hydrogen produced worldwide are the result of water electrolysis. As the electrodes used in the process are not efficient enough, large-scale application is not profitable. "To date, hydrogen has been mainly obtained from fossil fuels, with large CO2 volumes being released in the process," says Wolfgang Schuhmann. "If we succeeded in obtaining hydrogen by using electrolysis instead, it would be a huge step towards climate-friendly energy conversion. For this purpose, we could utilise surplus electricity, for example generated by wind power."
And from the Wiki on hydrogen production:
Originally Posted By: Wikipedia
Efficiency of modern hydrogen generators is measured by energy consumed per standard volume of hydrogen (MJ/m3), assuming standard temperature and pressure of the H2. The lower the energy used by a generator, the higher would be its efficiency; a 100%-efficient electrolyser would consume 39.4 kilowatt-hours per kilogram (142 MJ/kg) of hydrogen,[20] 12,749 joules per litre (12.75 MJ/m3). Practical electrolysis (using a rotating electrolyser at 15 bar pressure) may consume 50 kilowatt-hours per kilogram (180 MJ/kg), and a further 15 kilowatt-hours (54 MJ) if the hydrogen is compressed for use in hydrogen cars
So 65kWh per kg of hydrogen produced for automotive fuel let's say. 1kg of hydrogen is 14L/3.73 gallons. To fill a 30 gallon tank then, you'd be looking at 523kWh, which is almost my entire month's hydro usage.