Shell closes all of its hydrogen refuelling stations for cars in California

They're going to have to pay people to take those Mirais at the rate things are going.

Shell took a busy station next to my old office at South Park, San Francisco, out of commission for 6 months to install hydrogen pumps. Six months of forgone revenues, installation costs for likely no actual new revenues as most of those 2K registered hydrogen vehicles are owned by the state of California.

In countries where there is a natural gas network, <i>in theory</i> you could co-transport hydrogen with mixed the methane, and pay around 1% energy cost to extract pure hydrogen (assuming a 20% hyrogen mix). That seems to me to be the simplest way to deploy hydrogen infrastructure - you don&#x27;t need to build much, and people are already looking at mixing the hydrogen into the natural gas anyway to reduce CO2 output. Eventually you switch over to pure hydrogen and drop the natural gas, saving the extraction cost.<p>But that 1% energy cost is assuming thermodynamically optimal extraction. I don&#x27;t know how close we get in practice.<p>(I doubt it would be safe to actually have a hydrogen gas pump at everyone&#x27;s house, either, even if there is a gas line going there, although it would be kind of cool)

Hydrogen in cars never stood a chance. It was always used to grab government money to do expensive case studies.

So they&#x27;re going to pay back the subsidies they took from the various governments that they received in exchange for opening those stations.....right?

The more I learned about H2 the less excited I became.<p>The stuff literally boils out of the tank when your car is stationary. The refueling process is a weird process of suck and blow and it takes 5-10 minutes.