Thought I’d share this video from one of the channels I subscribe to, Real Engineering. He has a series on renewable energy methods and systems, but this is the first one he’s done on hydrogen. I guess he’s going to do a followup video comparing and contrasting hydrogen to battery wrt vehicle use, so if anyone is interested in this thread I’ll post that one here down the road.
The video discusses Shell’s prototype hydrogen production system located at a regular Shell fuel station in London as well as some of the pros and cons of hydrogen and why it might be a better system than pure battery power for getting us off the current fossil fuel burning ICE system today. I’ve always felt hydrogen had great potential for this application if we could get past some of the engineering issues of storage and economically making the fuel as well as transportation and safety. But for a system that is most like what we have today (i.e. longer ranges, filling up and operating essentially the same as today with gas or diesel fuels, etc) hydrogen is the best fit.
the only real benefit to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is that is essentially an electric vehicle (EV) with a “battery” which can be refilled in minutes. but honestly, there’s only two really practical ways to obtain hydrogen- electrolysis of water or cracking it out of hydrocarbon molecules.
electrolysis takes a ton of energy, and IMO it’s far more sane to just use generated power to charge batteries on demand. don’t waste the in-between step of converting electricity to hydrogen just so you can convert it back to electricity to move the car. plus you have the energy costs of transporting and storing hydrogen which are not trivial. Hydrogen can embrittle metals and leak through a lot of supposed “seals.” so you’ll have to account for product lossage along the transport chain.
cracking it out of hydrocarbons means you’re still using fossil fuels and have carbon left over to deal with.
All valid arguments. WRT just using batteries, the issue there is, of course, that batteries don’t have the performance envelop, and the small detail of ‘can be refilled in minutes’ is kind of a big deal. Also, the supply of many of the rare earth metals used in the current generation of battery technologies are limited, especially on the production side, and can’t meet the demand if we are wanting to go with production of vehicles even close to what they are today with ICE vehicles. Not even close.
As to the storage issue, certainly it’s an issue, but as I’ve said before in these threads that’s just engineering. We already know you can store hydrogen, since we’ve been doing that for quite a long time, and new composite fuel tanks don’t have the same issues you are describing here.
I do agree that producing hydrogen is a real issue, and is one of the main real stumbling blocks I see, since the cost of production exceeds the cost of traditional fuel by enough that it seriously hampers mass adoption. If you watch the video, Shell has basically built an on-site hydrogen production system using the electrolysis method. The main issue there is the large up front capital cost to build the facility as well as energy use, which they didn’t go into in the video.
I didn’t bother watching more than the first thirty seconds of the video but having been involved in the use of hydrogren as a fuel I can say that those “engineering challenges of storage…as well as transportation and safety” are fundamental problems with its use as a portable fuel. Hydrogen is not a good medium for transportation due to its low energy density, propensity for leakage, reactivity with common materials for sealing and piping, and fairly broad range of detonability and energetic reactivity. The aerospace industry standard for hydrogen safety, AIAA G-095-2004 Guide to Safety of Hydrogen and Hydrogen Systems runs over a hundred pages plus appendicies regarding all of the challenges with using hydrogen as a fuel, and we do so primarily for upper stage applications where the high specific impulse performance due to low molecular weight offers enough advantages to outweight the substantial difficulties.
Setting all of that aside, however, is the incorrect assumption that hydrogen is somehow carbon-neutral; although the tank-to-tailpipe for hydrogen produces only water exhaust, all commercially available hydrogen comes from reformation of natural gas or biofuels with net negative efficiency. The more renewable methods of hydorgen extraction via various water splitting methods (electrolysis, high temperature, photoelectrochemical) are inherently inefficient and are unlikely to ever present a way to produce hydrogen fuel in quantities sufficient to power a transporation infrastucture sufficient for even a small nation without some radical technical developments such as commercially viable controlled nuclear fusion.
only if you cling to the notion that refueling your car is something you go somewhere to do. One of the main advantages to EVs is they can be refueled at home or work while it’s otherwise doing nothing.
batteries don’t contain rare earth metals. the most difficult material current cells use is cobalt, which isn’t so much “rare” as a lot of the known deposits are in unstable and/or violent regions of the world e.g. Congo.
I don’t want to hear the phrase “that’s just engineering.” Engineering doesn’t make the impossible possible, it can’t always make the impractical practical, and it can’t always make the costly cost-effective.
yes, but they still need electrical power to do that. and it’s still inserting two more conversion steps before anything actually gets the vehicle moving.
If we’re creating our fuel using distributed electrical generation, what about taking one more step and converting the Hydrogen to CH4? Seems to me we’ve already worked out the technology to deal with natural gas as a fuel. I guess it’s not as elegant as H2O -> H2 -> H2O, but so what?
As we’ve discussed in the past, when you’re just taking your raw electrical power to generate your transportation fuel, you can synthesize any arbitrary molecule you want, the only question is how easy it is to manufacture that molecule and the costs and benefits of dealing with that molecule.
H2 seems like a pain in the ass to work with, the only advantage is that you can use pure H2O as the feedstock. Turn your H2 into CH4 and you mitigate a lot of the pain.
Currently they take fairly long times to charge and they don’t have the performance envelop of fossil fuel (or hydrogen) systems. That’s not ‘clinging to the notion’, it’s a real issue that you can’t just handwave away.
I was thinking of lithium, though you are right it’s not a rare earth element either. Sorry about that. However, it’s still a real issue especially on the production side. Again, it’s not something you can simply handwave away when you start talking about ramping up to the sorts of scales we have for current vehicle production.
True, though now you seem to be getting out of ‘that’s just engineering’ and into ‘is it practical?’. Obviously Stranger there agrees with you…he’s been saying in these threads for years that storage is a major and seemingly insoluble issue wrt scaling up this technology. Obviously Shell and Toyota disagree, and as they have at least demonstration prototypes of their system both on the production and fuel station storage side and on the vehicle storage side it’s not like it’s totally impossible. Whether it’s impractical or not is going to be a market and scale issue, with, again, several companies saying they think it will be. Frankly, I think production is the main issue, since the cost to produce hydrogen and the logistics of distribution seem to indicate the cost to the consumer would be significantly higher per tank of fuel than currently even in Europe.
Absolutely. No matter how you slice it, you have to inject electrical power in at some point. And, yes, it take more steps. But current batter technology has serious limitations as well, and the bottleneck one as well as the performance envelop seem to be show stoppers if we want it to be more than a niche system. Cost might be the killer for hydrogen. And, of course, our current system has major issues too. Somewhere along the line we, as a society, will have to make a choice on which way to go that has the best cost to benefits. I think you (and Stranger) are dismissing hydrogen to easily, but the market will be the judge in the end and hydrogen certainly has been eclipsed by AEV and has been very slow to progress so perhaps you are both right.
Anyway, thought some would find the video interesting.
Didn’t Bush Jr. push this idea for a while? The idea was to bypass the battery storage issues and thereby increase range for cars. I thought also that the hydrogen was to be generated from nuclear energy, and thus reduce carbon emissions overall.
It runs up against the same problems as any other energy generation process, which is that oil is cheaper. How it would compare to solar I don’t know. As well as the problem of infrastructure that would be necessary, but I suspect compared to solar that would be a wash.
We should still convert to nuclear, but not just because of this.
What do you mean by “performance envelop”?? My Volt is the most powerful car I’ve ever owned, and the Bolt is 33% more powerful than that.
Currently they don’t take very long to charge. The Chevy Bolt can go 90 miles from a 1/2 hour charge, and that’s after using up the 238 miles of range from the overnight charging. Which means you can drive 400 miles a day even if you only take two 1/2-hour breaks. Tesla Model-3 can do even better - 130 miles from a 1/2 hour charge.
Figuring out how to swap batteries in a matter of minutes is an easier engineering problem to solve than all the problems associated with hydrogen production and storage. “Fill-up stations” won’t fill your batteries, they’ll just take your empty ones and give you ones already filled.
Half an hour charge. So, if you wanted to drive, say, 500 miles you’d need to stop and charge for an hour along the way. Whereas, you might stop for 10 minutes (including bathroom and soda break) with a regular vehicle. That’s a serious performance gap.
Also, how many Tesla Model-3’s are being produced a month? From what I’ve heard, folks towards the end of the list could be waiting until 2020 or 2020 to get their cars. And even at the most optimistic, Tesla is producing over an order of magnitude less cars a month than any of the main manufacturers. Granted, that’s mainly because Tesla is a very new car company without the production experience, but even the main manufacturers would have trouble building the numbers of AEVs needed to meet current demand because the current battery production can’t meet anything close to that demand along with the demand for all the other things those batteries are used for. That’s kind of a serious issue and I don’t see anything on the horizon that will change either of those things, either the performance issues or the production ones of scale.
Well, here you have two issues. First, the upfront capital costs of buying a bunch of very expensive batteries for swapping out, and figuring out relative value (are you going to swap a $15k battery that only has 80% capacity at max with one that is at 100% or at 60%?). Secondly is the same issue as above…how do you produce all those 100’s of millions of batteries with the current limitations in mining the materials needed at the same time meeting all of the current needs for the same things for cell phones, laptops and the rest?
Obviously electric cars aren’t great for trips where your plan is to drive across the continent with only a few ten minute bathroom breaks between Vancouver BC and Miami Beach.
Most uses of electric cars aren’t multi-hour marathons though. If you really want the capability to drive to Mount Rushmore for once a year for your summer vacation, you won’t be able to go all-electric for your family vehicle fleet. Or you could just rent a hydrocarbon burning IC car for that week. Or fly.
Yes, in the future when/if IC cars become more and more uncommon and gas stations become fewer and farther between eventually that once a year road trip with the kids in the back of the station wagon will become a thing of the past. Or we could see a wave of minor incremental improvements in batteries over the next 20 years that add up to major improvements and cross country family road trips will still potentially be a thing.
Yes, it’s a serious gap - * for someone who wants to drive 500 miles with only one 10-minute break.* That is an extremely rare and specific use case.
A more typical use case is where someone parks the car at home every night, and drive <200 miles every day. Under this scenario, a gasoline car owner needs to make a trip to a gas station and spend 5 minutes every few days. An EV owner spends 5 seconds every morning unplugging the car, and 5 seconds every evening plugging it in. That is a serious “performance gap” in favor of EVs.
How many hydrogen cars are being produced a month?
Range anxiety is a real issue with electrics. And recharge time is still an issue, since even half an hour to recharge to 80% is a lot more time than currently takes to fill up a ICE vehicle.
And, again, this is only one issue. Seriously, I don’t see what you are arguing here. If AEV’s don’t have a performance gap to your mind why hasn’t the general public adopted them more fully? Price is only one factor, and if you do a cost comparison between capital and recurring costs…well, ok, that would certainly be an issue if you wanted a quick ROI. But over the long term and assuming the batteries don’t degrade over that time period badly, it would be to the AEVs favor. So, why do you think they are a niche product?
Zero, as far as I know. They are still in the prototype stage and still being tested. But the main reason isn’t production of the vehicles or any need for any sort of special materials to build them, it’s logistics and infrastructure. Plus, the cost of producing hydrogen currently makes the vehicles noncompetitive with gas or diesel at the current cost for those fuels, even with the recent rise in price.
I don’t know what Toyota is using for their demonstration vehicle. They seem to think that, material wise it’s viable, which it wouldn’t be if it needed a great deal of platinum (although don’t catalytic converters use platinum?).
Lithium is a definite bottleneck wrt building the current generation of batteries. And the number of sources that are currently producing it is limited. As far as I know and right now, this is a major issue wrt scaling up production to anything like the number of electric vehicles that would be needed to even produce like numbers to vehicles produced today.
As for hydrogen cars and electric motors, that’s true, they will need the same components as an AEV…but they won’t need the batteries, which is what we were talking about. The electric motors don’t require things like lithium, nor, as far as I know, any other material that is a bottleneck to production.
No it isn’t. Go find a Tesla or Bolt owner and ask them.
And it happens when the car is parked anyway.
Price is a huge factor, along with low gas prices. EVs are still expensive enough that you would never recoup the full cost through gas saving alone, at least not with current US gas prices. (Even if you intend to keep your car 200,000 miles, at 40 mpg it will only use $12,000 worth of gas. Even if electricity were free, which it obviously isn’t, the price difference between EVs and comparable gas cars are about that much.)
Also, there is very limited selection of EVs (nobody makes an electric pickup truck, minivan or convertible), and there is always skepticism towards unfamiliar new technologies.
Just like EVs - there are only 3 manufacturers right now that make EVs with any reasonable range (Tesla, GM and arguably Nissan). Prices will fall and production numbers will increase as they scale up their production, and more companies join in.
XT, I’m not sure what you’re arguing. It sounded like you felt hydrogen cars were more viable than electric cars, but your arguments are all about electric versus ICE.
Range anxiety is due to cars with short ranges and gaps in the charging station network. Ranges have increased dramatically in the last few years, and the network issue would be much worse with the first hydrogen cars that come out. You can’t compare the EV situation today with some theoretical mature hydrogen infrastructure.
Because it’s an immature market with an infrastructure that is just starting to be developed. Why do you think this is any different than the path hydrogen would take?
The problems with hydrogen are not only logistics and infrastructure. As discussed above, energy density, production costs, and finding materials for transport and storage that won’t corrode and leak are all significant engineering and economic issues. I think most ICE-alternative researches would say the battery challenges are easier to solve than all the challenged with hydrogen.