I work in hydrogen and I have semi-solid information* that there is a real economic case for hydrogen as a fuel for large mining equipment. The story as I heard it: the overall output of a mine is often bottlenecked by air quality permits, which effectively limit the amount of diesel/gas/etc that can be burned. How can you run giant mining vehicles in the middle of nowhere without fossil fuels? You can truck in hydrogen or you can truck in batteries, and apparently, hydrogen is the cheaper answer. Hydrogen is not cheaper than burning diesel, but I can believe it's cheaper than shutting down a mine or trucking around lots of batteries.
* This information came from an employee of a technology company working on fuel cell mining equipment, on contract from a major US mining company. We were talking shop and it was an offhanded conversation that I haven't researched since.
Hydrogen fuel is one of the ultimate tarpit ideas.
The concept hasn’t really evolved much during the last 30 years. When I was in elementary school I was supposed to write a paper for science my science ‘class’ and was encouraged by my uncle, who was in the oil industry, to write about this miracle fuel. Even with the primitive technology available to me at the time (Alta vista?), it did not take long to shoot holes in the hydrogen fuels narrative:
It’s difficult to store; there is no infrastructure to support it; said infrastructure is expensive; it is almost exclusively produced from hydrocarbons (which is fine, but that’s typically antithetical to the values of the audience that it is ostensibly marketed as an alternative fuel to).. the list goes on.
And now Hyundai has invested in building this into a niche (wheeled excavators) of a niche (excavators) product.
I don't get it, what am I missing? Does this help them at trade shows?
Governments offer incentives for green tech. The oil industry likes green tech which still uses oil and gas. Hydrogen fills both niches.
Hydrogen is perfect, because it can theoretically be made fully green, but practically it never will be due to the terrible economics of electrolysis. But the fact it theoretically could be means it can qualify for all those tax breaks and grants.
Some tax breaks are contingent on investing in 'green' stuff - so for the oil industry it makes perfect sense to invest in the only green tech which will never not use oil and gas.
It's particularly bad because the steam reforming process starts with one unit of methane, then throws away 25-35% of the energy it contains to make hydrogen. You're literally starting with a usable fuel, then throwing away a bunch of energy to make a much nastier fuel.
There are other problems besides just being inefficient. In a world where energy is cheap and abundant, you still have to deal with leaks (hydrogen is small, so tends to escape everything over relatively small periods of time) and embrittlement (again, hydrogen is small, so it tends to fuse into other materials and destroy them).
I don't know if these limitations are fundamental, or if we'll eventually come across some breakthroughs that make them economical to deal with, but it's something we've struggled with for a very long time so far.
> Hydrogen fuel is one of the ultimate tarpit ideas.
The problem is, there are some applications that reasonably cannot be made to run on electric anywhere near soon (i.e. at least 20 years from now): oceangoing ships, planes larger than a Cessna and heavy machinery that runs for longer than a few hours every day.
For both environmental reasons and the foreseeable peak oil, these applications need to shift off from fossil fuel - and for that in turn, it's either biofuel (which is ethically questionable because it takes so much space) or hydrogen.
There are plenty of battery electric excavators on the market. Including from Hyundai. Volvo has a 23 ton one on the market, for example (bigger than this thing). They works just fine and Hyundai know this very well.
The reason Hyundai is doing this is for the same reason they've been doing loads of stuff with hydrogen for many years: subsidies. They get loads of government money. In Korea. In the US. And elsewhere. There's lots of money to be had. Hyundai gets paid to perpetuate the myth that hydrogen has a future in transport.
And the beauty of it is that it isn't wasted effort. Most hydrogen vehicles are battery electric vehicles where a tiny battery is powered by a fuel cell. Most of the tech aside from the fuel cell and hydrogen stuff is kind of 100% the same. When it flops, you just ditch those bits and shove in a bigger battery and boom nice battery electric excavator.
The market is pretty much rejecting hydrogen on roads (too many battery electrical trucks being sold debunking the myth that they'll never work at this point). So, they switch to construction. Of course the exact same stuff is going to happen there. Cheaper batteries are driving down cost. There are loads of products targeting this market already from a wide range of vendors. Hydrogen is going to be a complete and utter dud there too.
> Of course the exact same stuff is going to happen there. Cheaper batteries are driving down cost.
The thing with batteries is that currently they require stuff sourced from one autocracy or another in pretty large quantities if you want decent power density. Hydrogen in contrast, that is pretty easy to make, any reasonably smart highschooler can whip up an electrolysis apparatus.
Hydrogen is definitely orders of magnitude worse in efficiency (especially if it, or the synthfuel it is used to produce, is burned of all things), no question. But we as the Western countries definitely need expertise and capabilities for geopolitical reasons.
And how are these synthfuels made? They all (except of biofuel, which as I said is ethically questionable) require hydrogen as precursor, and that's my point. It's all carbohydrates, which means you need hydrogen and oxygen (these you can get from water electrolysis) and carbon (these you can get from e.g. CO2 sequestration).
Even if hydrogen is required as a precursor for methanol production, transportation and storage (especially long-term) of methanol is vastly cheaper than hydrogen.
I wouldn't bet against ocean going ships going (partway) electric. At least if you run through either Suez or Panama you need to spend time in the locks anyways and since those places are reasonably sunny, recharging batteries there is possible. So in principle you should be put a couple of container batteries on top and swap those in locks. Since the propellors are driven by electric motors anyways, the integration in the ship should be reasonably straightforward.
Problems right now are: Battery availability, capacity and charging space. But smaller (feeder) vessels seem to already use these kind of booster batteries (not sure where I read that story though..) for short haul routes. So I'd expect to hear about some longer routes starting to use these too
> Since the propellors are driven by electric motors anyways, the integration in the ship should be reasonably straightforward.
Oh hell no. In large container freighters, they usually have the engine crankshaft directly attached to the prop shaft. Something like the RTA96 - that thing has a rated continuous power output of 80 megawatts. No gears, no nothing. That's also part of the reason why you need tugboats in ports or rivers like Hamburg's Elbe.
The only thing that is electric are the maneuvering thrusters. A ship of that size has a few of them but they are only used when precision navigation is needed.
> So in principle you should be put a couple of container batteries on top and swap those in locks.
At cruise speed large container ships burn thousands of liters of fuel. Even assuming you could get a quarter of the energy density of petroleum from batteries, one 40 ton container worth of batteries would be only one hour worth of runtime.
The power and energy involved in maritime traffic is absurd on an absolute scale, but the sheer size and transport capacity makes more than up for it (IIRC even the dirtiest container ship run on the dirtiest possible fuel has less emissions per kilometer and ton than the cleanest euro6 truck).
I agree there will still be a market for fuel for the foreseeable future but I believe there are better alternatives given the logistical challenges and other tradeoffs of hydrogen.
The problem is that they are unlikely to run on hydrogen either. Hydrogen requires heavy storage containers that make it inappropriate for flight (among other uses.) We're much better off going to ammonia or some other e-fuel.
None of your suggestions allow for a movement in space. I haven't actually ran the calculations^ myself, but most of your "complaints" are wrt to energy efficiency. And that won't matter (too much), if we overbuild production capacity. Upthread someone claims that mines could benefit from hydrogen simply because they are not permitted to produce any more CO2. That would make this niche a realistic target, where you need to move energy.
And yes, in that scenario I would absolutely expect all your alternative suggestions to be deployed already. But we are also just starting to have excess production at all.
^ I also don't think those are possible right now, as the number of electrolysis apertures would need to increase by orders of magnitudes (plural)
A cryogenic pressure vessel that's not affected by hydrogen embrittlement is hardly portable, cheap, or energy dense. Maybe if you're using a vehicle that's otherwise going to use bunker fuel, sure, you've got space for a reasonable hydrogen tank.
If we're speaking from a practical perspective not green-washing, using a methane fueled engine in an electric motor / generator setup is going to be way more efficient and flexible than some insane setup where you've got cryogenic hydrogen tanks hanging out a rock quarry.
[edited to add this:]
Let's distinguish between "pull more carbon from the ground and put it in the air" and "pull carbon from the air and make methane with it". Any H2 system today is going to use a hydrocarbon feedstock. Any "we'll crack water and save the H2" story is a pure fiction. Any process that relies on some theoretical "we've got spare energy so we're going to use that to crack water, then compress the everloving hell out of those H2s and then chill the crap out of that" could just as easily be "make methane using spare energy and spare CO2" likely with substantially less "spare" energy.
[edit]
There are, I think two questions:
1) will we have enough energy to do “split water and use H2”?
2) how is the energetic ratio between “compress and move the H2” on the one side and “filter CO2 out of the atmosphere, split that and integrate the H from 1) into the COs from here”?
I think 1) will come with a storage and movement demand anyhow (at least short term and for steel making), so there is a feed source for funding (that is not just state subsidies) for the former. Whereas 2) fundamentally requires the CO2 removal from the atmosphere. And I do not see a clear funding source (besides state subsidies) for _that_ problem. (So I think we may mostly disagree on the existence of “spare CO2” as a cheap feeding source)
Do you have any comparison of the physical limits of energy required for those processes? As I said, a lot of my thoughts still rely on “intuition” and that’s always reasonably dangerous. But for me “move H2” sounds like a solvable problem. Yes probably not for longterm, cheap and pressurized storage, but that’s also not required. If you have “pressurized and short” and “longterm and plentiful” that would be fine too.
At "low pressures" (5-30x normal sea level atmospheric pressures) H2 needs roughly 2.5meters cubed to store 1kg of H2.
Apparently it's "normally" stored at 350 to 700 bar (700x sea level air pressure). Compressing it that much requires a bunch of specialized equipment and a lot of energy.
It needs to be stored in complex pressure vessels at -160C or below[2]. I'd hate to have this stuff in big pipelines in a giant network, when utilities still can't quite do normal pressure natural gas correctly[3].
It leaks through just about everything, and lots of "normal" things that it leaks through it also destroys it while leaking through it[4].
A hydrogen economy would require trillions of dollars of infrastructure to work. A methane economy can just work -- it's basically what's already in use to move natural gas around.
So -- I can't point to an existing technology that'd be 100% ideal for a zero net pollution (overall, not just at the point of use) for a mega truck or similar big utility vehicle running a strip mining operation. But H2 really seems like a non-starter once you look at the details. I think maybe better batteries, hot-swapped batteries, hybrid methane generators plus batteries, etc, is a start, and it can be done today. I personally would take a 60% improvement now over a maybe 90% improvement later but probably never.
There's lots of carbon floating around; you can collect it from industrial processes (cement / steel making). You can pull it out of the air or water if you really do have enormous amounts of "spare" energy, which realistically, you probably don't.
Well the concept hasn’t received the same amount of government investment or subsidies or private capital either. So I think it’s unfair to compare it to the more mature state of battery electric vehicles. Infrastructure could be built at cost, hydrogen production could be enabled by nuclear energy sources, etc. I think it is too early to write it off, especially because it does come with advantages over batteries like faster refueling.
The point I don't understand is this: why are you so invested in Hyunday?
I think it's fantastic that a big company is exploring and innovating in one direction. The world needs diversification in research because you never know what you'll find.
There is no way to level the distribution and storage problem.
If there was, the time to do that was before the world had invested trillions in capex.
If all of the subsidies and regulations incentivizing adoption of BEVs and hybrids were to end tomorrow, they would still continue to grow market share.
Are you aware of some hydrogen storage technology that is becoming exponentially better year over year?
Why are you anchoring to Hydrogen specifically, instead of a broader category of fuels where that argument would make more sense?
The problem for Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is that there are many superior alternatives.
I’m not knocking hydrogen in general.
In fact: I appreciate what you have done for humanity, Hydrogen. I think the sun is great. I appreciate that you upgrade Canadian crude into premium transportation fuels for the US market. I’m sure you also do a lot of other great things for me that I don’t even care about.. but you suck as a transportation fuel, and the sooner you quit pretending to be something you are not, the sooner you can really get out there and be the Hydrogen we always knew you could be.
Serious Green Hydrogen production projects (as in the ones that already have pilot plants and have several billion in capital investments lined up for expansion) aren't about Hydrogen as a transportation fuel or even transporting Hydrogen.
They're a mixture of direct on site storage of hydrogen to use as overnight energy when the solar farms no longer work, and largely about ammonia for transport and methanol as a sulfur free marine fuel.
Ammonia can be shipped overseas form Australian solar farms using methanol as shipping fuel to supply ammonia as fertilizer and ammonia as a power station input to generate electricity.
Dicking about with slippery hydrogen in tens of thousands, hell, millions of small personal transportation pods is a waste of resources and a safety hazard, it's too many individual things to keep maintained to the high degree required to prevent leaks, etc.
I was surprised when I saw a dump truck pass by and seconds later realised there was no engine noise or stank… turns out it was an EV wow! It was a BYD but not the one in the ref[0].
Perhaps something to consider is that Korea and Japan both don't have extensive lithium deposits within their country. Both countries already know what it's like to be stuck importing nearly all of their energy (oil). They've both been relatively lucky with the geopolitical climate of the last 50 or so years.
I think it's perhaps not unreasonable (once again, looking at a many decade long scale) to look at possible futures and perhaps understand why both countries might be looking to try to eke out some greater degree of independence from both China and America.
Excavators are perhaps a good use for electric tech, because so much that an excavator does theoretically uses zero energy.
Eg. moving a pile of soil from one place to another. Picking up the soil uses energy, but when you put the bucketload down again you recoup all the energy.
Gasoline engines don't recoup the energy, and it just becomes heat in the hydraulic fluid - so much heat that excavators need cooling systems to keep the fluid cool.
I don’t think that’s how hydraulics work. You need to move oil to move the piston the other way (lowering/releasing) which means turning a pump, consuming energy.
Theoretically an excavator could be designed which uses a winch-type system to curl the bucket (maybe a highly-geared transmission from an electric motor) and then, to uncurl it, lets gravity pull it and lets the spinning winch drive a generator. I can’t think of any way to do it that isn’t extremely inefficient though.
Plus as you say, excavators don’t use a winch and motor, they use hydraulics, and I don’t think the former would be powerful enough to move lots of earth. But OP said “theoretically”, which makes them technically correct (the best kind of correct.)
There are proposed energy storage systems that involve simply lifting a lot of heavy stuff to store energy, and then lowering it again to recover it. So the idea isn’t even new. But said systems have terrible energy density (lifting and lowering stuff doesn’t store very much energy overall) and are basically a terrible idea as it is.
theoretically hydraulics can be regenerative. Whilst lowering a heavy load to the ground, the pump is being 'sucked', and the engine could be consuming no fuel during such an operation.
Practically they rarely are, because the way a piston is moved 'slowly' is to have a half-open valve with a pressure drop across it, and that half open valve wastes all the energy into heat in the fluid.
Don't excavators usually lift the dirt somewhere higher, either a mound or a dump truck? Otherwise they'd use bulldozers to push it lower/flat. Good thinking though.
With electricity, each thing we convert from petrochemicals to electricity, prevents us from offlining the first power source we'd otherwise decommission.
And the first thing we'd decommission would be the dirtiest power plants, eg Ng, coal, or some such.
H2 can be made clean, and so can electricity. No difference.
What we need to do is scale up clean h2, and support it. More clean tech is better, it's not a competition.
H2 has higher losses in converting energy into hydrogen and hydrogen back in to energy though. And currently like 99% of hydrogen is obtained via fossil fuels, not split from water. Hydrogen could at some point be the equivalent of electricity and batteries, but currently it isn't any different than using straight fossil fuels.
Its a lot cleaner than directly burning fossil fuels, and carbon capture is possible. If the fossil fuel is methane then by product is solid carbon, not CO2.
Also, if we have hydrogen supply chains we can use them to hand hydrogen from different sources in the future.
The technology is not here yet, but it is being developed. Battery EVs were completely impractical not long ago.
The problem with h2 compared to electricity is that it has abysmal round trip efficiency. It makes sense for a few, limited use cases and an excavator may be one of them - if they’re used in places where no electric grid is available. In almost all other use cases, batteries provide a better efficiency.
The biggest problem with electricity is the batteries. Right now an EV pollutes more an ICE engine, the pollution is just moved to the power plants. But then you have to take into account the batteries. Making them pollutes a lot and they don't last forever.
Fully agree on minimizing the use of cars. But I still wanted to do this computation to compare:
EPA says a gallon produces 8.8 kg CO2/gal tailpipe emissions [0]. A best-case sedan does about 50 mi/gal [1]. That's 17.6 kg CO2/100 mi for a best case sedan.
A Tesla Model 3 uses about 25 kWh/100 mi [2]. 1 kWh produces about 1 kg CO2 when produced in the dirtiest way (coal), but in the US it's currently about 0.4 kg CO2/kWh on average [4]. That gives you 10-25 kg CO2/100 mi.
So the best case ICE is better only if you are producing the electricity from coal (even gas power is better than ICE). The nice thing about EVs is that you can often charge them with the cleanest power (e.g. solar), but I'm not sure how common that optimization is.
CO2 emissions from the gasoline does not account for the energy necessary to refine the oil to produce it. These days refineries use electricity for that so if that comes from a coal plant, it adds like 25% of CO2 emission. So the best sedan is pretty much equivalent in the carbon emission to Tesla when that car uses electricity from an old coal plant with 30% efficiency.
A statement like "EVs pollute more than ICE engines" needs substantiation.
Large power generation systems (even messy ones like coal) are tremendously more efficient per unit CO2 produced than a car engine[1]. You could make a case, though it's been proven wrong many times, that the production of the battery in an EV generates more waste than a comparable ICE vehicle.
This is a common myth. Most of the pollution of a vehicle is in its use, both for EVs and ICE [0]. The average EV, even on the dirtiest fuel, still has much higher efficiency than the average ICE. On top of that, things are only going to get better:
- more of our electricity is coming from clean (renewable/nuclear) sources every year. We reached 40% in 2023. [1] Solar and wind are dominating fossil fuel in new generation. [2]
- we're evolving battery materials for cleaner batteries, and more new battery materials will be sourced from recycled batteries instead of new mining. (EVs are still so relatively new and batteries live long enough that we haven't yet reached that point).
Commuter EVs are the rare kind of electric consumers that can efficiently absorb the unstable solar-generated electricity. Having your car charged while you're in the office during daytime can effectively be free in many places.
H2 could solve intermittence, on-vehicle batteries can't. Not if the charging has to be squeezed into a tight work schedule.
The biggest challenge, besides the obvious one of just building a huge quantity of wind and sun harvesting installations, is hydrolysers that make sense technically and economically when they operate far from 24/7, as the inverse of peaker plants.
H2 is a terrible substance; it destroys whatever you use to store it, it leaks like crazy, you need to compress and chill it to get any kind of density, you need to store it at crazy low temperatures.
For instance, the toyota Mirai's tank has a finite lifetime of 15 years from when it was made before it has to be replaced.
A good setup might be a nuke plant with a couple huge batteries along side, mixed with some grid PV and wind, and per-home battery, smart hot water heaters, and local PV.
H2 is just a silly fuel and a silly battery. Except on rockets where it's still silly but not quite as silly.
That's why you'd usually want to only use the H2 as an intermediate step on the way to some other e-fuel. Which can be as simple as iron powder to be oxidized at the application site. But the first step, in all e-fuel processes, is always the hydrolyser. Coupled with with local H2 storage so that at least the downstream processes can operate closer to 24/7 than the hydrolyser. Batteries don't scale to seasonal, fuels created downstream of a hydrolyser do. The trick is to build the hydrolysers (and downstream processors) at sites where that H2 buffer is easily created. Salt caverns are the usual candidate.
(yes, this is a little off topic under an article about an H2 excavator. But if they solve all those problems, I'll applaude them, because at one point we'll either have green H2 available or we'll cease to be an industrial society, of they don't, well it's their problem they tried, not mine)
>The Sea Change gets deliveries of hydrogen from a truck, which is comparable to what boats already do, receiving a refueling of diesel. There’s no new infrastructure required; just a new kind of power.
I attend the SF Port meetings regularly and they had a whole presentation on it.
It starts with another piece of infrastructure the port already has put in place. Most cruise ship ports in most major cities do not have the heavy power needed to power the cruise ships when they're docked at that particular city. Sf does. So rather than run their big polluting generators, cruise ships can just plug in while docked here. More than that, it's hydro power from Hetch Hetchy.
Now back to the ferry. They have a barge which takes that clean hydro power and disassociates bay water into hydrogen to power the ferry.
It's a great example of interconnected and symbiotic systems working together to benefit us all.
This doesn't sound absurd:
"The Port calculated that the shoreside power supply will prevent 140 pounds of diesel soot emissions and 1.3 tons of airborne nitrogen oxide emissions for every 10-hour ship call. It will also reduce carbon dioxide by 19.7 tons."
20% of the grid and running all cruise ships off shore power is only the beginning, you are right. But the fact remains most other major cities don't even do that.
Don't let better be the enemy of good. Just because it's not 100% right out of the gate doesn't mean that 20% isn't better than 0%.
I want the marketers to say it's 80% emissions when it's 80% emissions. When it's zero emissions then they can say zero emissions.
Better is not the enemy of good. But lying is still the enemy of trust. We need trust if you want to push policy.
Example; a "zero emissions" plan that actually produces 80% emissions might get funded over a better plan that produces just 60%. Why? They claimed zero!
If you care to show me how it's zero, I'm happy to listen. I'd prefer if the answer is not based on lying because it's "better." For me, actual science is better.
>That's better right?
Not if it could have been better than that but wasn't because someone lied to get their product purchased over a better one.
The better product being selected because it's factually better for the environment; that's better.
I see. You're right, I assumed the implication because of my original comment. It seems I lost the context of the discussion then.
I'm arguing to defend science because I believe claims of zero emissions when in fact they are not hurts progress both economically and through wear on trust in science.
I appreciate the invitation. Maybe next time I'm in the bay.
What an odd choice of words for a headline.
Expecting something to do with big balloon tyres that could drive on water or something.
They meant hydrogen powered wheeled excavator.
I could understand it if it was just the hacker news title but the article headline doesn't either.
Not sure if this human error, bad AI or deliberately click bait.
>The thing is, it’s highly unlikely that hydrogen will ever become a mainstream alternative to battery power – at least when it comes to on-road transportation
The author concluding this, doesn't make it so. And his conclusions are linking to another article, claiming current h2 cost and production means the future will be the same.
Which is the same as claiming we'd never have solar now, because solar was expensive years ago.
The article also says South Korea is full bore on h2, so this will have a market, and thrive there.
BEV doesn't have the capacity to do this. These units cannot be charged for 1hr 4 times a day. H2 is an instant recharge.
In practice, hydrogen cars take significantly longer than gas cars to fill, and the filling station can’t have a high duty cycle because the nozzle will freeze to the car. (Ideal gas law means the hydrogen cools as it goes from high pressure to low pressure.)
Synthesizing fuels from CO2, water, and electricity seems like a better solution. It works with existing infrastructure and doesn’t have the storage or safety issues of hydrogen.
H2 is not instant, it is a pressurised gas. Recharging h2 vehichles is as fast as the pressure difference between the intermediate tank and the vehichle tank.
Try 10 to 12 hours as most construction jobs are waiting on weather and run overtime when they can.
Second, where is the charge point when you are building a new highway? Roads are usually the first to go in, so if you have to spend an hour driving to a charge point, that's an hour of productive lost
If it's out in the boonies, yeah, power usually follows the roads. If it's existing infrastructure being upgraded, just tap in to what is already there
You may laugh, but running an optimized diesel generator to charge battery-powered heavy vehicles can be much more energy efficient than running the vehicles directly on diesel engines. Check out Edison Motors, who are in the process of developing a mass-market diesel-electric hybrid truck: https://www.youtube.com/@EdisonMotors
Diesel generators running at a fixed duty cycle and optimized for efficiency can be way more efficient than a mobile diesel engine operating at a wide range of workloads.
"Diesel" can run on a variety of fuels (diesel, natural gas, propane, etc) so you could probably start synthesizing the fuels if you've somehow got a bunch of energy that'd otherwise be wasted; methane's still a bit of a pain to deal with but not nearly as nasty as H2; for feeding remote generators you'd just compress it not liquefy it, and that's something that's already commonplace today.
I like electric vehicles, they make sense. I think most construction workers would like electric equipment as well, not as loud, less fumes, less heat. Overall better but it has to make sense.
Large mine trucks are either electric or hybrid. They recharge as they go into the pit.
Well, the guy in the YT video is clearly not logical. One diesel genny feeding all of those trucks vs all of those trucks being ICE powered. Some people just can't connect the dots.
Modern train engines are just diesel powered generators pushing electric motors. That's how they can claim 100mpg. They could do similar to the construction equipment, and still improve vs just powered by diesel engines directly.
I agree that the guy re-posting is not logical but I would also say that having a gen-set charge the delivery van when they could run power from the mains is rather crazy.
Endurance is a relatively simple problem to solve: just add more batteries. It's already a 14-ton vehicle, adding another ton or two of batteries probably won't be a dealbreaker. Worst-case scenario you put them in a trailer for long-endurance scenarios - they often already need one to bring a variety of buckets to the work site.
There's a more interesting question, in my opinion: what happens when it inevitably runs out?
Diesel is of course absolutely trivial. It can be refueled from any petrol station, you can bring your own barrel with a small pump, or even use a jerrycan. Easy to use both in urban areas and out in the boonies. Battery is a bit trickier. Worksite electric hookups and superchargers are viable urban options, and in remote areas you could use some kind of generator.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. Demand for hydrogen is unlikely to be high enough to warrant a very dense network of fueling stations, so even in urban areas it's going to take a significant amount of time to refuel. And in rural areas you're screwed: a fueling station could be hundreds of miles / kilometers away, and you're not exactly going to fill up a jerrycan with hydrogen either! There's no way you are refueling it on-site, having a regular worker messing around with hundreds or thousands of liters of hydrogen at 600x atmospheric pressure or cryogenic temperatures is just waiting for an accident to happen.
Hydrogen work vehicles require hydrogen storage and delivery. PEV work vehicles can also use hydrogen powered generators on site but they can also use anything from an on-site solar to a standard grid connection.
As long as 98% of our hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels it’s only a net negative here.
Whatever, good luck hauling electricity on a truck. We’re talking in the context of „you’re building a new highway, good luck getting enough electricity to charge those machines in that place”. What, you gonna haul your solar farm as the construction moves on for dozens of miles?
Why exactly would you want to haul electricity using a truck a rather than wires exactly?
PEV’s are often more convenient and cheaper to use on a work site than diesel and are actually being adopted for that reason, it’s hydrogen that’s lacking distribution infrastructure.
Are you seriously showing me a mining truck and some micro machines you can use to dig a trench in your garden as an example of EV machines being „adopted”?
Do you even know what makes those mining trucks functional for this use case? The deeper the mine, the more effective they are!
Yes, people buying EV work vehicles are examples of EV work vehicles being adopted, which is pushing manufacturers to make ever more diversified product lines.
A work crew putting in a trench really benefits from the equipment being quit. What you think of as “digging in your garden” is just one of plentiful examples of home construction scale equipment. There’s a lot of equipment that fits such purposes like rollers for people’s driveways etc.
Here’s a preproduction equivalent to the hydrogen prototype mentioned in the article:
We started this thread from someone asking „will it do 8 hours of work on a single charge”. The little 301.9 digger from cat proudly says „ Run time: up to 8 hours on a single charge”, the big one says „Long single charge run time allows for ability to perform intended work with minimal disruption”. Will it do 8 hours? Otherwise I root for a hydrogen digger.
Looking at that battery pack 320KWh vs typical fuel consumption on similar machines and its battery is oversized for 8 hours of work when new and could still handle that with significant degradation.
That said, people don’t work 8 hours without taking a break so arguably a smaller battery might be a good tradeoff.
* This information came from an employee of a technology company working on fuel cell mining equipment, on contract from a major US mining company. We were talking shop and it was an offhanded conversation that I haven't researched since.