Latin America gears up for clean hydrogen boom but the road is not smooth

Why Hydrogen, when it is so easy to use clean electricity directly?

Battery electric power doesn't work for ships, or for rail transport in most of North America, Australia and Africa. Battery electric power doesn't work for long haul trucking either. But it is not so hard to make an internal combustion engine run on hydrogen, ammonia or a mix of the two, both of which can be produced using carbon free energy sources.

I will also tell you that a battery electric car in someplace cold and rural is not reliable transportation. The battery warmers soak up much of the available battery power just to keep the batteries warm, greatly reducing range. There are places in the western US where fuel stops are already getting close to the maximum range of some cars. Someplace like the Great Basin of Nevada and central Oregon where winters are bitter cold and towns are few and far between an electric car isn't going to get you where you need to go. City slickers don't realize these things and think battery electric is the answer to all problems.

There are battery electric municipal buses all over the place but there are bus routes in Southern California that are too long for any electric bus made. The same is true for school bus routes in many rural school districts. Battery electric is not the solution to everything.

Desert Tortoise

Please re-read the article. Green hydrogen is produced from renewable energy resources and does not use carbon to produce it.

These "renewable energy resources" themselves are not clean. Windmills are massively inefficient and have environmental impact, and solar panels turn into toxic plastic waste after their short lifetime of about 20 years. And storage of hydrogen is extremely difficult and needs huge ressources to realize. And all of this is based on rare earths and manufacturing in China. Basically, the hydrogen claim is to have invented a perpetuum mobile.

We are still a long way from clean hydrogen at scale. You have to build enough plants and then get the price down. 

That is happening faster than you are probably aware and it is being driven by the maritime industry. It has to decarbonize. Green hydrogen and green ammonia and possibly green methanol are the fuels of choice for ocean going vessels were battery electric power is not feasible. Green methanol is used by a growing number of ships using slightly modified versions of existing diesel engines. Mitsubishi and Warsila have test engines running on hydrogen and the first ammonia powered ship was commissioned in Singapore within the last couple of months. There is a big push in northern Europe to build a green hydrogen infrastructure to support shipping. The scale you mention will be here within a decade.

Hydrogen is not particular "clean" once you consider the resources needed to produce and store it.

Please re-read the article. Green hydrogen is produced from renewable energy resources and does not use carbon to produce it. From the article:

"Government leaders expect a major boon for the region from clean hydrogen, also known as green hydrogen, produced using electricity from renewable sources that do not emit carbon."

We are still a long way from clean hydrogen at scale. You have to build enough plants and then get the price down. And the locals would expect to benefit first. Hydrogen may be best suited for government-supported major facilities: steel plants and the like. Also to use to create domestic electricity, effectively transporting the green electricity used to produce it half way round the world. Would it be cheaper to lay cables or charge battery ships and send them off to foreign countries?

Why Hydrogen, when it is so easy to use clean electricity directly? Nothing will come out from the Hydrogen abortive talk. All the while, the climate crisis is execerbrating rapidly, and it is necessary to curb it in practice instead of talking nonsense.

Hydrogen is not particular "clean" once you consider the resources needed to produce and store it. This is the same simplistic thinking that calls electric vehicles "clean", just because there is no exhaust pipe.