Good that there's serious money being sunk into alternatives to electric cars, more is always good.
But I'm seriously tired of the fact that all articles about fuel-cells enthusiastically exclaims that "it's only byproduct is water!!!!", as if hydrogen was some sort of magic alternative to hydrocarbons. It's not, it's an energy transmission medium, not an energy source.
For fuel-cell cars to work, you would need to have energy some place that consumes water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing the oxygen into the air, and the hydrogen into containers that can then go into some sort of infrastructure such that individual cars can be filled up with it as necessary.
And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.
But for electricity, we already have the infrastructure. If you have a house, you have a place for filling up your electric car, and you have a method for paying for the energy that your car consumes, and there is a way to move the energy from wherever it is produced to your house.
So the story for electric car adoption is "You don't have to take trips to the gas station anymore!", but the story for fuel cell car adoption is "You have to take trips to a new type of gas stations that don't exist yet!". That's quite a hurdle...
> For fuel-cell cars to work, you would need to have energy some place that consumes water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing the oxygen into the air, and the hydrogen into containers that can then go into some sort of infrastructure such that individual cars can be filled up with it as necessary.
Yeah, sure. We know how to do this, its called electrolysis; we even know how to build fuel cells that can both generate energy and act as electrolysis systems.
> And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.
No, we don't. Because -- as many currently existing hydrogen stations, like the public one in Emeryville, do -- you can very easily do the electrolysis at the filling station. So you just need water distribution infrastructure (which is one of the basic necessities of civilization) and electricity distribution infrastructure (which, as you note, is likewise a solved problem), and then you don't need any additional hydrogen distribution infrastructure.
> So the story for electric car adoption is "You don't have to take trips to the gas station anymore!", but the story for fuel cell car adoption is "You have to take trips to a new type of gas stations that don't exist yet!".
There is absolutely no way that Hydrogen would be produced via electrolysis. The process is horribly inefficient but more importantly the cheapest way to produce hydrogen is through steam reformation of coal (or organic material to a way lesser extent). You spray coal into a hot stream, methane decomposes from the mixture, then the methane is converted to Hydrogen. It's by far the cheapest way to produce hydrogen and would easily cost a fraction of hydrogen produced from electrolysis. This process is also extremely CO2 intense.
I really have to wonder if this is just a show put on by Toyota. The viability of H2 production is dubious at best, and at worst if you consider our drive towards a low carbon economy.
> There is absolutely no way that Hydrogen would be produced via electrolysis.
You mean, other than the fact that it absolutely is produced that way in existing fueling stations, and much of the drive for hydrogen as part of a clean energy solution relies on the use of electrolysis (or, possibly, splitting water with nuclear reactor heat) as the generation mechanism.
> The process is horribly inefficient but more importantly the cheapest way to produce hydrogen is through steam reformation of coal (or organic material to a way lesser extent).
Its certainly a cheaper way to produce it, but its not necessarily cheaper as an overall process, because then you do need an expensive distribution infrastructure. More, the necessary distribution infrastructure, even if end-to-end efficiency including distribution costs is better, has a much higher startup cost than distributed electrolysis.
Also, distributed electrolysis buys you directly in to any improvements in efficiency, greenhouse gas reduction, etc., for large scale energy production, whereas relying on steam reformation of coal, natural gas, etc., leaves you not only maintaining more dedicated distribution infrastructure, but with a separate carbon-intensive generation infrastructure that needs its own improvements.
Again how many stations exist? I'm not arguing the concept, I am arguing the feasibility. What is the cost for fueling at these stations? Solar panels generate electricity yet we don't use them to power industrial operations because solar expensive! Just like H2 from electrolysis won't be able to compete with industrial H2 production from coal. Also, what you're suggesting is using predominantly coal to generate electricity from a traditional plant (~40% eff), then transmitting the electricity to a station (90%), then creating H2(60%). Compare that to coal steam reformation (75%) and transportation (80%, being conservative), the latter is far more efficient and cheaper.
And what infrastructure do you need? A gas truck with a pressurized tank on it. The cost of hydrocarbon based h2 will displace electrolysis in large scale production.
And your last point about distributed load efficiency gains, electric cars are already able to balance load and feed into a grid. It's always going to come down to cost, I'm going to buy the cheapest h2 around and it's going to come from steam reformed coal.
When I see proof of concept I will be less skeptical. As well this only solves conversion efficiency, batteries are already +85% for conversion efficiency.
> And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.
On the other hand, electrolysis can be significantly more distributed than gasoline, you don't need a limited number of refineries anymore. Hydrogen can be generated city-wise, at the station, or even (with further efficiency hit) at-home.
You need to pressurize the hydrogen to 5-10 kpsi which requires a compressor in every home, this cuts efficiency. Electrolysis is also very inefficient (%65 is usually cities as the upper efficiency[1]). Most importantly the cheapest way to produce hydrogen is through stream reformation of Carbon based fuel (high CO2 emissions req), making electrolysis cost prohibitive.
Hydrogen is not a great way to go, especially when you consider that batteries and electric motors are already very efficient. Working on energy density in batteries would be more cost effective then chasing after H2.
The only game-changer I could see there would be if we could make some sort of in-your-home hydrolyzer, so that you just connect water and electricity to it, and it connects to your car to fill it up. That's on-par with the convenience of an electric car, if we ignore the safety issues of hydrogen gas leaks in urban neighbourhoods...
Regenerative fuel cells are cells with an in-cell hydrolysis system; if you could incorporate them, a fuel cell vehicle would have pretty much the same recharging UX as any other EV.
Even with stationary at-home electrolysis systems, if you don't store more than one fill-up in the system, there's marginal additional risk compared to having a hydrogen-fueled vehicle in the first place.
Great, that allows you to very easily compare that vehicle to one with a chemical battery, and evaluate it on cost, range, engine power, "battery replacement", etc! And then we can avoid all this "but it runs on water" nonsense and look at the actual capabilities.
>And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.
Imho, the only way to do this would be to have solar assisted charging stations in parking lots across the country.
We appear to already have the infrastructure for electric cars, and at low adoption rates that's true. But according to the utilities, that infrastructure is in no way ready for sweeping adoption of electric vehicles, so then too we would need to overhaul our existing infrastructure.
The difference there lies in that the electrical infrastructure can be overhauled gradually, as electric car adoption increases. We already have something that is useful to the current EV owners, and it can be made better. I'm also not convinced that the utilities are correct, current peak use is probably a lot higher than what a fleet of slow-charging vehicles would consume at night.
In the case of hydrogen infrastructure, we have nothing. If you're the first guy to buy a hydrogen car, you can't fill it up anywhere, there's an enormous amount of investment and work needed to get to that first hydrogen gas station, and I don't see that happening. Who would put up the money to make that bet?
> In the case of hydrogen infrastructure, we have nothing.
Well, more than nothing, but not a lot just now. Though more is in development.
> If you're the first guy to buy a hydrogen car, you can't fill it up anywhere
I'm going to guess that the first several tens of thousands of people to buy consumer electric vehicles in the US will be clustered around the places where the existing infrastructure is [1], so that this won't be even approximately true (there'll be an interesting trade off until infrastructure builds out in that FCVs will have a longer single charge/tank range than EVs, but a much more limited area of operations since there'll be limited refueling locations especially outside of the "home" areas.)
We could take the gasoline, burn it to generate electricity and use that to charge electric vehicles. If you consider the massive efficiency advantage, we'd probably still come ahead over using internal combustion engines.
This is in other words a complete non-issue. But I'd love to hear plans on safeguarding inevitable hydrogen leaks in residential areas. Should we tell people to get rid of their garages?
I think you are confused. Gasoline drive is perhaps 30% efficient. Electric drive is perhaps 80%. Charging batteries I don't remember, but let's call it 80%.
It works better if you have a very high efficiency gasoline-powered generator (a 60% efficient generator gets you 38% efficient) but that can't really be done at the homeowner scale.
I guess you are underestimating just how terrible internal combustion engines are and overestimating charging + driving losses.
Consider that hybrids or HEVs can improve substantially on the efficiency of just a pure ICE. I guess the problem with using an ICE for driving directly is that you are often forced to run it at RPMs and states where it is nowhere near that hypothetical 30% efficiency, simply to get the acceleration the user demands.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's very rare on earth so it has to be manufactured. So the oil companies totally would love you to switch from the oil they will sooner or later not be able to fracking get anymore to hydrogen which they can raise prices on until the day when nuclear fusion becomes something they could sell again as long as it remains expensive enough to be sellable.
Hydrogen is dumb, at 300 miles / 450kms a fuel cell I notice there is no mention of the price which is laughably much more than gasoline is today. Then they say that mileage is further than "most" electric cars. True except for the Tesla which actually 85kwh edition has at least 450kms of range. And also Hydrogen cannot be regenerated from breaking which makes it less efficient than full electric. In the future it maybe possible to charge your car with solar or wind or fart energy, but not if your Petrol Company lobbied alternative fuel car runs on a Hydrogen Fuel Cell and has the acceleration of a brick on wheels at 0-100kms in 9.6 seconds. A hummer does that in around 10.5 seconds.
The article does mention price: "While EVs take hours to recharge, the fueling cost is a fraction of the roughly $45 a hydrogen fill-up will cost."
That's more expensive than gasoline, but as of a few months ago the price difference would have only been about 30% compared to my relatively fuel-efficient Honda Fit. The gap is larger now thanks to the recently plummeting gas prices in the US, of course.
> And also Hydrogen cannot be regenerated from breaking which makes it less efficient than full electric.
As the article doesn't mention but Wikipedia does, the Mirai also has a battery and supports regenerative braking. It's basically a hybrid car that uses a fuel cell instead of a gasoline engine.
Ok I was wrong about the regenerative breaking. It makes sense since it would be easy to implement. Most of the drive system of a Hydrogen Car will be electric already. It will use batteries as well. The world will once again be at the whim of the hydrogen producers which would likely be Shell, BP or Exxon. Electric cars are only going to get better and generating your own power is only going to get easier. Oil companies don't like the loss of control. Hybrid's pull some tricks to save fuel, but I might argue they have much more points of failure and are harder to fix when they do fail. I predict that on Dec 15th they will sell one or two of these cars to Toyota Executives whom receive a bonus just a little more than what the car would cost if they did.
Keep in mind that the $45 fill-up cost is for about 300 miles of driving, versus 4-500 miles for a typical gasoline car.
At current prices, my Prius v will go about 500 miles on a $30 fill-up, which would cost $75 for hydrogen, assuming $45 gives you 300 miles. Even if gas goes back to $4/gallon, it's still $45 for ~500 miles.
A full charge on a Model S would cost me something like $8, by comparison. Less if I went for time-of-use metering and charged it at night.
Just a nitpick: hydrogen is extremely common on Earth, but it's uncommon to find it by itself, rather than bound into some larger molecule like water or hydrocarbons.
They don't mention the price because current systems cannot accurately measure the amount of H2 being dispensed into the car. Every Fuel Cell car comes with free fuel coordinated by the manufacturer.
Speaking as someone who once worked on a H2 dispenser with a reasonably accurate meter, this is by the choice of the test program. Even without a meter you can figure out roughly how much H2 ends up in the car just by checking the tank pressure at the start and end of the fill. If it is a test program they are going to know the size of the tank (assuming that they don't have a working data link for some reason).
There have been two major hurdles for the development of hydrogen fuel-cell cars:
1) storing the hydrogen - hydrogen is extremely corrosive, and not very energy dense compared to gasoline
2) variable energy output - fuel cells are good at producing a steady, constant amount of power, but the power requirements of a car can be quite variable (especially for city driving)
Firing bullets at it when the tank is new is just a publicity stunt. Those tanks need to be holding hydrogen for at least five years, all while being cycled from full to empty, then lets see how well they hold up.
On #1, energy density isn't a huge problem; sure, hydrogen is worse than gasoline in energy:volume (though much better in energy:mass), but its energy:volume is better than that of existing battery technologies -- this is one of the advantages FCVs have over battery-powered EVs.
#2 is similar to problems solved by Toyota's gas-electric hybrid design, and Toyota's Fuel Cell Vehicle's back to their earlier demonstration Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle version of the Highlander use a similar approach, with a battery to buffer the fuel cells output the same way that the battery is used in their Hybrid Synergy Drive to buffer ICE output.
On #1, it actually is a problem. Look at the range of the fuel cell cars that have been released or announced. None of them have even as much range as a Tesla Model S (and they cost more...).
It also presents a problem for refueling. There is no reason to expect a hydrogen car to refill any faster than a natural gas car (and plenty of reasons to think it will take longer to get the same amount of range). If you aren't familiar with natural gas cars, take a look at the Edmonds's long term review of the Honda Civic NX.
Frankly, I don't see how hydrogen cars are going to compete with electrics in terms of range, performance or refuuling time. Who is going to buy them? And we are subsidizing the hydrogen infrastructure, why exactly?
H2 is difficult to store. To store enough of it to be useful it needs to be either very high pressure or so cold is becomes a liquid. Because it is so small, it tends to leak through most materials and can cause them to become brittle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement) but it is not "extremely corrosive". Thick carbon fiber tanks can store H2 at high pleasure so that with the efficiency of an electric drive-train, the car has good range.
But I'm seriously tired of the fact that all articles about fuel-cells enthusiastically exclaims that "it's only byproduct is water!!!!", as if hydrogen was some sort of magic alternative to hydrocarbons. It's not, it's an energy transmission medium, not an energy source.
For fuel-cell cars to work, you would need to have energy some place that consumes water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing the oxygen into the air, and the hydrogen into containers that can then go into some sort of infrastructure such that individual cars can be filled up with it as necessary.
And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.
But for electricity, we already have the infrastructure. If you have a house, you have a place for filling up your electric car, and you have a method for paying for the energy that your car consumes, and there is a way to move the energy from wherever it is produced to your house.
So the story for electric car adoption is "You don't have to take trips to the gas station anymore!", but the story for fuel cell car adoption is "You have to take trips to a new type of gas stations that don't exist yet!". That's quite a hurdle...