Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars

Here’s a big problem I have with this: those vehicles are *not* zero emissions, because nothing ever is, and that makes all the difference in the world.

As you stated yourself, it takes twice as much energy (at least) to power FCEVs as is does for BEVs. This, in turn, doubles the amount of carbon linked to the production of the required electricity, no matter how clean the source is, because it’s *never*  zero. You’re simply never going to get rid of that inefficiency, no matter what you do, because you’re always going to have more steps in the energy conversion process when compared to BEVs, which are already very well optimized for this.

The reason this matters is that this changes the amount of carbon being emitted *per kilometer travelled* and not flat. In other words, you’re changing the _slope_ of the line that accounts for the total amount of carbon that was emitted since the beginning of the manufacturing process at any given point in time. Given the relatively long life of a typical car, this means the total CO2 emissions of a FCEV over its entire lifetime is likely to be quite a bit higher than that of a BEV for the same usecase. Obviously, here, we’d need to compare the initial intensity of manufacturing to be sure, but I’m ready to bet that they’re similar, and the lifetime emissions are generally dominated by the per-kilometer component anyway.

Unless you can find some other major advantage of FCEVs that’s good enough to justify this discrepancy, this sounds very much like a deal-breaker here. One example of such an advantage would be, for instance, the extreme weight efficiency of fuel cells, which makes them a perfect fit for aircraft, since they are primarily concerned with being lightweight.

In the case of terrestrial vehicles, though, this doesn’t quite work out.