When I first saw this drop I went down so many rabbit holes...so much sauce in this post alone....😉
(media.greatawakening.win)
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If you were running a truck off of hydrogen for 8 months either you were never driving it or it was not using chemical energy. It's pretty much that simple.
As for the rest, a "battery" is something that stores energy for later use. We use the term to mean something that stores chemical energy in such a way that when released charged particles will move between two nodes, thus creating a current. But really, a battery is any storage of energy. In the case of stored chemical energy, it really is just like a battery (electric) except it doesn't have a path for charged particles to flow and thus is really a heat battery (or photon battery, depending on how you look at it).
He was running hydrogen into the intake, where you would normally put gasoline. He was working on techniques to mix/spray oil lubricants in the process. He was burning up rings, valves and all sort of stuff. So I do expect that having to fix the truck all the time meant he was not driving it constantly. He was aiming for combustion energy. I think your description of chemical energy includes combustion, is that correct?
Yes. "Combustion" means to start a chemical reaction using an input of heat as a catalyst (and keep the reaction cycle running by a high heat chamber). No matter how you slice it, there is only so much energy stored in a chemical bond. Its pretty much the exact same amount of chemical energy for any given bond.
In the case of using hydrogen as a combustion fuel that would be (almost certainly) mixing with oxygen which would produce water. I have given the amount of energy in such bonds (i.e. H2 + 1/2 O2 = H2O = 232 kcal/mol). It's a perfectly acceptable amount of energy, but its not meaningfully different than in hydrocarbons. There aren't really any chemical bonds that are meaningfully more than hydrocarbons. I'd have to look it up, but I think all chemical bonds are in the 50-150 kcal/mol range (a single O-H is half of the above, i.e. 116kcal/mol).
Chemical energy is chemical energy. There is no secret sauce in chemical energy. Not to say there aren't some processes that are better than others, but its not OMG, its more like, "This is 10%/20%/30% better or worse than that one," etc.
While hydrogen as a fuel source is perfectly viable, and it may even be suppressed for oil, it isn't a game changer by any stretch, at least not in a chemical process.
One difference is in the exhaust, which is something he was excited about. IT was the 1980 during the "acid rain" and "ozone hole" media fear mongering.
Yes, water is not too bad of a byproduct. Neither is CO2 though. While that isn't the only byproduct of hydrocarbon oxidation, that is the main one. Others can be reduced by other means (catalytic converter e.g.).
I really am not in any way saying using H2 as fuel is bad. It's just that your OP was making it sound like it contained a bajillion joules of energy per cubic centimeter. It doesn't. Its just a chemical, like any other. Some benefits over hydrocarbons, some detriments.
As for its use in airships, that has some merit. It might be something we should revisit as an infrastructure in the future.