Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Stations | The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can’t make its operations work here.::The oil giant is one of the big players in hydrogen globally, but even it can’t make its operations work here. All seven of its California stations will close immediately.
Hydrogen was the future in the 90s, when the alternative was lead acid batteries. Nowadays hydrogen fuel cell cars don’t actually top the charts on range, battery EVs have taken the crown.
Hydrogen promised to be a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels. You still needed big industry to make and distribute it, you still needed filling stations to sell it to end users, you still took your car somewhere to fill it up. Everyone could just keep doing their thing. But it was going to be so expensive to switch over that everyone dragged their heels and kept using fossil fuels, so now we’re entering the post-hydrogen car era without it ever arriving.
If we’d had hydrogen fuel cell cars 30 years ago, today we’d have manufacturers putting bigger batteries and charging plugs on them to make plug-in hybrids and move away from expensive hydrogen.
I think this highlights it perfectly. The other reason teasing hydrogen was so popular with the established fuel companies, is that it meant we’d still “need” them, because it used similar distribution networks.
But the other side of their money making systems meant that they didn’t move quickly enough, and we may have just moved on past now.
You also have to get hydrogen in any significant amount from natural gas wells, which is why Shell was behind it. It was not a true solution.