Inside Honda and GM’s new North American hydrogen fuel-cell factory

Uses include mining equipment, class 8 trucks, and power generators.

See full article...

 

[drfisheye]

If 'heavy' vehicles are only needed on site or on known routes, they could just as well use swappable batteries. That tech exists. Battery tech is mature. Electricity is cheap. Can't beat that.

Like what this company does in Australia for trucks:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eYLtPSf7PY

 

[EspHack]

RTGs have insanely terrible power density. No better than 5 W/kg. To power a ship you'd need literal tons of radioactive material, and hundreds of tons of shielding. Would be truly terrifying, not to mention impossibly expensive.

Fission reactors are the only practical way to utilize nuclear for motive power requirements.

RTG for fishing boats, fission for the ships

 

[DDopson]

Cryogenic LH2 is twice the price of the most expensive H2 gas. This report estimates $14 / kg, produced from natural gas. Green LH2 would be more expensive. It's very expensive to chill anything down to 20 K. I have trouble imaging LH2 being used at scale anywhere other than rocketry, and even there, it's falling out of favor.

Green H2 gas is more like $6 / kg, half of which is capex cost for the electrolysis plant. Of course, that's a bulk price, and H2 is notoriously difficult to transport and dispense. The people selling it for $36 / kg at filling stations are probably losing money. They could scale up, but they'd only lose money faster.

Hydrogen vehicles have very little chance of ever competing with BEV in consumer segments. Batteries already support most consumer driving patterns well enough that most people aren't eager to pay order-of-magnitude higher fueling costs for whatever range increase you believe H2 fuel provides. How many people with range anxiety over charging stations will be reassured by the whopping 58 H2 filling stations that exist in the US? Hope their trip is limited to California, which has sponsored all but one of those filling stations, with the other one being in Hawaii.

I'm skeptical even for mining vehicles, but we shall see. Perhaps for mines that can't access grid electricity, don't like diesel, and are desperately in love with trucking one of the least dense substances ever discovered. There may be a niche here, but it's going to take huge carbon taxes to get the migration started, and then anyone with access to electricity will prefer other tech paths over learning hydrogen logistics.

 

[Gus]

The cell can't generate hydrogen on it's own. You can't trickle charge it. The charging station might be able to use excess electricity to produce hydrogen, but you aren't going to be generating hydrogen in your house.

A Belgian university developed solar panels which also produce hydrogen.
These are available commercially: Solhyd project, but currently project based (not residential yet, I think).

 

[Dr Gitlin]

A bit surprised this article didn't mention Hyundai, who has just reaffirmed their future vision for hydrogen use and production at CES.

Considering that they have been selling their excellent Nexo hydrogen SUV for many years and that they have a massive construction+ship-building+minning industrial capacity, to me they have way better hydrogen track record and chance of succeeding than Honda or GM.

https://www.hyundai.com/worldwide/en/newsroom/detail/0000000394

You’re surprised an article about visiting a GM/Honda factory didn’t mention a completely unrelated company?

 

[kkeane]

I may have been unclear: this was putting sails (or whatever, can't remember if they're still called sails) on powered ships to reduce fuel use, not as primary propulsion.

Apparently they're called "wingsails", by Swedish company. Here's a (typically breathless) Wired article from a quick web search: https://www.wired.com/story/massive-sails-power-ships-like-never-before/

I thought that's what you meant, but my comment still mostly applies. These ideas have been around for decades, and never went anywhere. If it does take off eventually - great. I'm just not holding my breath.

 

[Jim Bacon]

Is there any big project looking at how to make hydrogen cargo ships? I saw some website with information about a couple of EU projects, but nothing massive to clean the industry a little.

The shipping industry is looking at methanol, and it is less toxic than ammonia, while not taking up huge volumes or needing cyrogenic temperatures like molecular hydrogen. However, formic acid (methanoic acid) might be the end winner, as it is non toxic and even easier to crack into hydrogen (I believe).

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Formic_acid_fuel_cell.html
Formic acid production recently had a breaktrhough:

https://news.mit.edu/2023/engineers-develop-efficient-fuel-process-carbon-dioxide-1030
Direct formic acid fuel cells could also be a winning technology:

https://markets.businessinsider.com...uel-cells-with-graphene-innovation-1032779156

 

[fenris_uy]

The shipping industry is looking at methanol, and it is less toxic than ammonia, while not taking up huge volumes or needing cyrogenic temperatures like molecular hydrogen. However, formic acid (methanoic acid) might be the end winner, as it is non toxic and even easier to crack into hydrogen (I believe).

https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Formic_acid_fuel_cell.html]

Anode: HCOOH → CO2 + 2 H+ + 2 e-

Cathode: 1/2 O2 + 2 H+ + 2 e- → H2O

Net reaction: HCOOH + 1/2 O2 → CO2 + H2O

From that article. That isn't green if the reaction ends with the release of CO2

 

[pusher robot]

From that article. That isn't green if the reaction ends with the release of CO2

It is if the CO2 in the fuel production came out of the atmosphere and not a well.

 

[sbradford26]

RTG for fishing boats, fission for the ships

A recreational fishing boat might have a 150hp motor. Convert that to kW you get 111 kW. (111 kW x 1000 W/kW) / (5 W/ Kg) = 22,200 Kg or about 24 Tons. That versus a Mercury 150 hp outboard which weighs about 206kg (455 lbs). RTGs are great for spacecraft with low predictable power draws, but for literally anything else they make no sense.

 

[Turbofrog]

A recreational fishing boat might have a 150hp motor. Convert that to kW you get 111 kW. (111 kW x 1000 W/kW) / (5 W/ Kg) = 22,200 Kg or about 24 Tons. That versus a Mercury 150 hp outboard which weighs about 206kg (455 lbs). RTGs are great for spacecraft with low predictable power draws, but for literally anything else they make no sense.

Yeah, and it doesn't actually get any better whether you scale it down or up.

Even a 9.9 hp outboard that you put on a 12' aluminum boat on restricted lakes would still correspond to a 1450 kg for the RTG alone. Just a wee bit more than the max 300 kg weight capacity for such a boat (motor + passengers). Those 9.9 hp outboards would be ~50 kg, including a 3 gallon tank full of gas.

 

[null_interface]

RTGs are great for spacecraft with low predictable power draws, but for literally anything else they make no sense.

Or applications where a decade+ of autonomous uptime is critical but you're indifferent to mass.

 

[Turbofrog]

Or applications where a decade+ of autonomous uptime is critical but you're indifferent to mass.

Yeah, if you want to operate some low-power sensors in the middle of the arctic or a desert for 100 years, it makes perfect sense.

Never makes sense for motive power.

 

[andygates]

Question for those better informed on the hydrogen economy than I: at what kind of scale are we able to produce green hydrogen (thinking electrolysis, but unsure if I'm unaware of other options) today? Not trying to concern troll, but looking to understand where we're at on the production side of things, since this article discussed more of the consumption side.

I'm interested in considering how viable hydrogen may be as an option for large vehicles and similar uses as mentioned in the article, and in the interest of forging a path to decarbonization I'm curious how much of a path beyond blue hydrogen we have figured out.

According to these chaps https://www.irena.org/Energy-Transition/Technology/Hydrogen 4% is from electrolysis (of which your supply mix will vary but can be greened).

 

[EspHack]

A recreational fishing boat might have a 150hp motor. Convert that to kW you get 111 kW. (111 kW x 1000 W/kW) / (5 W/ Kg) = 22,200 Kg or about 24 Tons. That versus a Mercury 150 hp outboard which weighs about 206kg (455 lbs). RTGs are great for spacecraft with low predictable power draws, but for literally anything else they make no sense.

minus combustion waste heat you get 33kw actual output

make a bigger RTG then, compensate the cruising speeds of a snail by running for free in comparison, should work somewhere

 

[Helmore]

Hydrogen for personal vehicles definitely doesn't appear to have a future. But that doesn't mean hydrogen doesn't have a future at all. Things like aircraft or heavy machinery could be better suited to hydrogen versus batteries at the expense of higher energy costs. Many of the major issues with hydrogen for personal vehicles are just not as big with large equipment or aircraft. Needing specialty fueling storage and dispending equipment is already a given.

Hydrogen is never going to be a thing with aviation. Three reasons why: Currently aviation fuel is stored in the wings, which is useful as this means that the depletion of this fuel does not shift the center of gravity of the airplane. You unfortunately cannot store hydrogen in the wings, you need cryogenic pressure vessels and the weight penalty (and engineering challenge) for making the wings capable of storing cryogenic hydrogen make that option infeasible. Thus, you go for big spherical hydrogen storage tanks placed inside the fuselage. To preserve the center of gravity during flight, the ideal place would be in the middle of the plane, but that's awkward. So, you place it in the tail and then increase the size of the control surfaces? Or do you go for two hydrogen tanks, one in the tail and one in the nose, which places the cockpit behind the fuel tank? The pilots would then fly using screens and cameras, no window looking out in front of them. Maybe if blended wing aircraft were a thing this could be avoided, but those aren't a thing and may never become a commercial reality.

Then the second reason: Hydrogen is leaky. Very leaky. Since you will have to store the hydrogen inside storage tanks that are placed inside the fuselage, this is an issue. You do not want the possibility of gaseous hydrogen leaking into the fuselage, but that's inevitable with hydrogen. This single issue means that such a solution would never pass any form of safety standard and the FAA would never approve such a plane for commercial use.

Thirdly, batteries are continually getting better. It isn't completely unreasonable to expect to see commercial electric passenger planes being introduced in the 2050s that can do transatlantic flights. By the end of this century, I could see 80-90% of all aviation running on electric batteries, with the remainder using some form of synth fuel (methanol?).

In summary, designing a hydrogen plane is awkward, such planes will never pass through our current safety standards, and hydrogen can't compete on price either.

Hydrogen fueled passenger EVs aren’t anywhere near being mass produced. Hydrogen stations are few and far between and clearly the process for creating the fuel is expensive, slow and sensitive to failure. Passenger vehicles are a curiosity, at best, in this point in time.

I agree that Construction/Mining site vehicles and potentially Semi-trucks are good applications as the fueling stations can be more specific to the routes they take and the sites they are working and limited to these specific use cases. A hydrogen-based recharging station for BEVs is also a decent solution for portable charging stations.

Semi-trucks aren't going to run on hydrogen. The fuel price per mile/km for a hydrogen truck will always be about 5 times the electricity price per mile/km of a battery electric truck. That simple fact makes them uncompetitive with battery electric trucks.

Hydrogen cars are dead, anyone thinking otherwise is deluded.
Hydrogen mining machinery, trucks, ships and planes are currently more viable than battery counterparts.

Inland/riverine and coastal shipping is going to be powered by battery electric as well. This is already happening in China, where riverine shipping using batteries is slowly becoming a thing. Ocean shipping will need something else, but it's not going to be hydrogen. The complexities and costs just make it infeasible. Some form of synthetic fuel is more probable. Besides, the number of ocean-going ships will come down when there is no need to ship fossil fuels. And no, shipping hydrogen is never going to happen, no matter how much the EU, Japan, Australia, and others say that it's going to be a thing.

For any application that absolutely cannot be run on battery power, chances are much higher that it will be anything but hydrogen.

 

[Turbofrog]

Hydrogen is never going to be a thing with aviation. Three reasons why: Currently aviation fuel is stored in the wings, which is useful as this means that the depletion of this fuel does not shift the center of gravity of the airplane. You unfortunately cannot store hydrogen in the wings, you need cryogenic pressure vessels and the weight penalty (and engineering challenge) for making the wings capable of storing cryogenic hydrogen make that option infeasible. Thus, you go for big spherical hydrogen storage tanks placed inside the fuselage. To preserve the center of gravity during flight, the ideal place would be in the middle of the plane, but that's awkward. So, you place it in the tail and then increase the size of the control surfaces? Or do you go for two hydrogen tanks, one in the tail and one in the nose, which places the cockpit behind the fuel tank? The pilots would then fly using screens and cameras, no window looking out in front of them. Maybe if blended wing aircraft were a thing this could be avoided, but those aren't a thing and may never become a commercial reality.

Then the second reason: Hydrogen is leaky. Very leaky. Since you will have to store the hydrogen inside storage tanks that are placed inside the fuselage, this is an issue. You do not want the possibility of gaseous hydrogen leaking into the fuselage, but that's inevitable with hydrogen. This single issue means that such a solution would never pass any form of safety standard and the FAA would never approve such a plane for commercial use.

Thirdly, batteries are continually getting better. It isn't completely unreasonable to expect to see commercial electric passenger planes being introduced in the 2050s that can do transatlantic flights. By the end of this century, I could see 80-90% of all aviation running on electric batteries, with the remainder using some form of synth fuel (methanol?).

In summary, designing a hydrogen plane is awkward, such planes will never pass through our current safety standards, and hydrogen can't compete on price either.

I appreciate that you apprehend some of the core design challenges here, but to me it's an absolutely wild blindspot that you still assume that it's technically easier or more likely to develop a battery chemistry with at least 5 times the specific energy of current state of the art research battery cells in the lab than to develop the technical workarounds for aircraft configurations to accommodate a hydrogen system. Note that cryogenic systems up to 20% H2 weight fraction have been engineered, which corresponds to an energy density of 3200 Wh/kg when burned in a typical 50% efficient fuel cell. There is much room for improvement here in both the efficiency of the storage system, as well as the fuel cell itself.

By contrast, the most advanced single battery cell ever created in a research lab achieved a specific energy of 711 Wh/kg. That's a staggering accomplishment, though it's at the level of a pouch cell, so at a system level that would only correspond to perhaps 400-550 Wh/kg. Again, that's extremely impressive! It's 2x better than the system-level specific energy of any commercial lithium ion batteries that exist today. But despite all those superlatives, and despite the fact that it may not be commercially manufacturable, it's still worse by a factor of 5-8 times compared to an LH2 system that could be built using today's technology.

The gulf between the technologies is in fact so huge that you don't even need to consider the technical complexity of an LH2 system at all to dramatically outperform any battery system that exists in any research lab (or any feasible research horizon, for that matter). A much simpler compressed hydrogen system does it just fine, and removes many of the engineering headaches.

And yes, there are all kinds of places that you can put pressure vessels on an aircraft's wings. The sheer scale of a commercial aircraft obscures it, but the average thickness of the wing on an airliner like the 777 is about 1 meter (at the spar, which is near max t/c and where you would place tanks). You would also include multiple reasonably large diameter nacelles for distributed electrical propulsion, and likely tip tank nacelles as well. Recall that static wing loading (i.e. the weight of the contents of the wings) is basically never the limit load case for engineering a wing. To the contrary, additional weight in the wings actually reduces the critical wing root stress, since the weight of the entire aircraft, including the fuselage needs to be carried by the lift force exerted on the wings in flight. This is why ultimate testing to failure of aircraft wings is performed by flexing the wing up not down. You might also incorporate separate longitudinal nacelles alongside the fuselage, but sealed and separate from it, with any blended fairing connecting the structures ventilated constantly by external bleed air to ensure that even if there was a leak detected it could never achieve a stoichiometric ratio even at hydrogen's lower explosive limit.

The fact that manufacturers like Airbus aren't discounting hydrogen aviation, but you are, should be telling.

In any case, I've spent a lot of time personally and professionally thinking about exactly these kinds of details. I wish batteries were a feasible option. They definitely would make the engineering challenges easier. But at this stage in time, pretending that batteries are going to be a viable option for transatlantic aviation is much closer to a wish than it is to anything else. To ignore the physical engineering reality that hydrogen fuel cells are clearly and undeniably a superior option compared to batteries for aviation is equally as foolish as arguing that hydrogen fuel cell cars are going to replace batteries in personal electric vehicles (spoiler: they won't). It is very possible to acknowledge that different technologies are superior in different applications, and in fact that they may only be sensible at all in certain applications.

 

[Stuart Frasier]

In any case, I've spent a lot of time personally and professionally thinking about exactly these kinds of details. I wish batteries were a feasible option. They definitely would make the engineering challenges easier. But at this stage in time, pretending that batteries are going to be a viable option for transatlantic aviation is much closer to a wish than it is to anything else. To ignore the physical engineering reality that hydrogen fuel cells are clearly and undeniably a superior option compared to batteries for aviation is equally as foolish as arguing that hydrogen fuel cell cars are going to replace batteries in personal electric vehicles (spoiler: they won't). It is very possible to acknowledge that different technologies are superior in different applications, and in fact that they may only be sensible at all in certain applications.

Batteries are unlikely to ever be viable for long haul aviation, but that doesn't make hydrogen viable. Airbus is also exploring electric aircraft, doesn't make it likely either.

We already have a near ideal aircraft fuel in kerosene. We already have an entire fleet of aircraft powered by kerosene. We can make synthetic or bio-derived kerosene. Long haul aviation is going to stay kerosene powered for the foreseeable future.

 

[null_interface]

Hydrogen is never going to be a thing with aviation. Three reasons why: Currently aviation fuel is stored in the wings, which is useful as this means that the depletion of this fuel does not shift the center of gravity of the airplane. You unfortunately cannot store hydrogen in the wings, you need cryogenic pressure vessels and the weight penalty (and engineering challenge) for making the wings capable of storing cryogenic hydrogen make that option infeasible. Thus, you go for big spherical hydrogen storage tanks placed inside the fuselage. To preserve the center of gravity during flight, the ideal place would be in the middle of the plane, but that's awkward. So, you place it in the tail and then increase the size of the control surfaces? Or do you go for two hydrogen tanks, one in the tail and one in the nose, which places the cockpit behind the fuel tank? The pilots would then fly using screens and cameras, no window looking out in front of them. Maybe if blended wing aircraft were a thing this could be avoided, but those aren't a thing and may never become a commercial reality.

Then the second reason: Hydrogen is leaky. Very leaky. Since you will have to store the hydrogen inside storage tanks that are placed inside the fuselage, this is an issue. You do not want the possibility of gaseous hydrogen leaking into the fuselage, but that's inevitable with hydrogen. This single issue means that such a solution would never pass any form of safety standard and the FAA would never approve such a plane for commercial use.

Thirdly, batteries are continually getting better. It isn't completely unreasonable to expect to see commercial electric passenger planes being introduced in the 2050s that can do transatlantic flights. By the end of this century, I could see 80-90% of all aviation running on electric batteries, with the remainder using some form of synth fuel (methanol?).

In summary, designing a hydrogen plane is awkward, such planes will never pass through our current safety standards, and hydrogen can't compete on price either.

While my sense is that hydrogen fuel is not an impending likelyhood for aviation at this point, it's at least being approached by the likes of Airbus. Their conventional designs feature fuselage-mounted fuel tanks and liquid hydrogen - seemingly outside of the pressure vessel section of the fuselage. Hydrogen boil-off is something that would need to be managed preflight, but once inflight consumption would be well ahead of the issue. The tankage itself - while needing appreciable insulation - could be relatively lightweight as it need not withstand the 350-700 bar of compressed hydrogen tanks.

Of course, the concepts have some challenges. A good third of the usual internal fuselage volume is apparently consumed by tankage, which will represent a significant hit to revenues for operators in addition to the significant cost premium for hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen not might be stored at immense pressures, but cryogenic anything should give one pause when designing it to be in the proximity of people in an extremely mass-sensitive vehicle flying in the near-upper troposphere.

Outside of the vehicle sketches there are other issues. Airports will require significant re-design to address the many challenges of handling hydrogen. Operations will need a rethink: fueling will need to occur as late in the departure process as possible, aircraft that are fueled will need to stay ahead of boil-off at all times (active cooling or consumption), aircraft will need to be de-fueled as soon as possible post-landing, and I expect ground maneuvering processes will need a complete restructure to mitigate risks.

 

[Turbofrog]

Batteries are unlikely to ever be viable for long haul aviation, but that doesn't make hydrogen viable. Airbus is also exploring electric aircraft, doesn't make it likely either.

View attachment 72904

We already have a near ideal aircraft fuel in kerosene. We already have an entire fleet of aircraft powered by kerosene. We can make synthetic or bio-derived kerosene. Long haul aviation is going to stay kerosene powered for the foreseeable future.

Sure, I don't actually disagree at all. Synthetic / E-fuels are extremely expensive (best predictions for large scale commercial production put them about 12x more expensive than Jet A) but the technical simplicity and sheer inertia of being able to use existing aircraft without innovation probably makes up for that.

I think it's conceivable that for short-haul aviation you could make a fully-electric hydrogen option at OpEx parity with an existing aircraft run on e-fuels, but obviously the R&D and CapEx to get there is very much non-trivial.

I confess that much of my spiel was a strong visceral response to someone poo-poo'ing hydrogen and then blithely assuming that "80-90% of aviation" could be accommodated with battery-electric aircraft. You can't pretend to be doing a technical analysis and then immediately present what is tantamount to a religious faith-based claim, and one that is completely in defiance of the current technical realities.

 

[Stuart Frasier]

Sure, I don't actually disagree at all. Synthetic / E-fuels are extremely expensive (best predictions for large scale commercial production put them about 12x more expensive than Jet A) but the technical simplicity and sheer inertia of being able to use existing aircraft without innovation probably makes up for that.

I think it's conceivable that for short-haul aviation you could make a fully-electric hydrogen option at OpEx parity with an existing aircraft run on e-fuels, but obviously the R&D and CapEx to get there is very much non-trivial.

I confess that much of my spiel was a strong visceral response to someone poo-poo'ing hydrogen and then blithely assuming that "80-90% of aviation" could be accommodated with battery-electric aircraft. You can't pretend to be doing a technical analysis and then immediately present what is tantamount to a religious faith-based claim, and one that is completely in defiance of the current technical realities.

I saw a study that said that e-kerosene was about 7x as expensive to produce as fossil kerosene in 2020 (using US electric rates), but projected the difference to be 1.5x by 2050 (by renewable energy getting cheaper and oil more expensive to extract).

 

[some guy in San Diego]

The fact that manufacturers like Airbus aren't discounting hydrogen aviation, but you are, should be telling.

It'd be telling if Airbus were a purely private concern, but it's not.
No one's doing work with hydrogen aircraft (or hydrogen fuel at all) at any scale without government money.

 

[Peevester]

According to these chaps https://www.irena.org/Energy-Transition/Technology/Hydrogen 4% is from electrolysis (of which your supply mix will vary but can be greened).

I'm dubious. But even if they're doing it on a trial basis, you net 30% of the usable energy from those solar panels when you use them for this application as compared to simply selling it to utilities, and even with the inflated retail price for hydrogen right now (it's more than doubled in less than 2 years), they're going to lose money.

Green hydrogen may have a limited place in steelmaking or chemical processing, where you've gotta have it and there's abundant electricity and stationary infrastructure, but as transportation power? It's stupid.

How do we know it's stupid? Because nobody is actually running a day-to-day business servicing it. Some of the companies claiming to have hydrogen fueling stations "available soon" have had the same pages up for most of a decade. And a lot of the ones that LOOK like you can buy something, don't actually sell any if you press them.

 

[dbrower]

A hydrogen generator is one potential use for excess production on a home solar/wind installation, but it would only really make sense in an off-grid situation because selling back to the grid is a much better option for excess electricity.

That's only true if the tariff for the grid connection gives reasonable credit for the local generation fed back into the grid.

There are a lot of places that are not providing enough incentive, and effectively punish feeding back to the grid, encouraging batteries or other local consumption (potentially including hydrolysis).

It's probably the case that batteries of whatever kind are a better idea than making hydrogen locally.

Over the long term, there may be a place for hydrogen storage of excess renewable generation, but it's a long way out given the inefficiencies and the cost of fuel cells.

 

[Turbofrog]

I'm dubious. But even if they're doing it on a trial basis, you net 30% of the usable energy from those solar panels when you use them for this application as compared to simply selling it to utilities, and even with the inflated retail price for hydrogen right now (it's more than doubled in less than 2 years), they're going to lose money.

Green hydrogen may have a limited place in steelmaking or chemical processing, where you've gotta have it and there's abundant electricity and stationary infrastructure, but as transportation power? It's stupid.

How do we know it's stupid? Because nobody is actually running a day-to-day business servicing it. Some of the companies claiming to have hydrogen fueling stations "available soon" have had the same pages up for most of a decade. And a lot of the ones that LOOK like you can buy something, don't actually sell any if you press them.

You can't really say it's stupid because of that because there's no meaningful penalty for carbon emissions today. Carbon taxes are insanely low, so the negative externalities and market failures remain.

That said, because of its inefficiency for many applications, hydrogen is useful for end-game carbon reduction. There's a lot of renewable penetration and electrification that needs to happen first.

 

[fung0]

...I feel truly heartened to see an earnest effort to scale up production of a technology that uses an, ultimately, abundant energy source with nothing more than water as exhaust.

I find this sort of statement disheartening, especially in a reputable technology publication like Ars.

It is entirely incorrect to call hydrogen an "energy source." In fact, it is simply a storage medium. The distinction is crucial.

We are not mining hydrogen directly, we're creating it using other primary sources. Some of those sources are 'green' and some most certainly are not. Thinking of hydrogen fuel cells as inherently environmentally benign is just the sort of greenwashing trap we've seen too many times already.

 

[steelcobra]

I find this sort of statement disheartening, especially in a reputable technology publication like Ars.

It is entirely incorrect to call hydrogen an "energy source." In fact, it is simply a storage medium. The distinction is crucial.

We are not mining hydrogen directly, we're creating it using other primary sources. Some of those sources are 'green' and some most certainly are not. Thinking of hydrogen fuel cells as inherently environmentally benign is just the sort of greenwashing trap we've seen too many times already.

Yep, especially since it's effectively just a way to move electricity into the motors.
H2:
Waste a huge amount of energy splitting, transporting, storing, and pumping it into a car, then use it fast enough not to leak away by using its reaction in a fuel cell joining into water to generate electricity to run the motors.
BEV:
Use the existing infrastructure to directly move energy into the car's storage from the grid, then directly to the motors.

 

[kkeane]

Yep, especially since it's effectively just a way to move electricity into the motors.
H2:
Waste a huge amount of energy splitting, transporting, storing, and pumping it into a car, then use it fast enough not to leak away by using its reaction in a fuel cell joining into water to generate electricity to run the motors.
BEV:
Use the existing infrastructure to directly move energy into the car's storage from the grid, then directly to the motors.

But also:
H2: works for nearly anybody, just like gasoline.
Batteries: limited to a market niche of people for whom they fit into their lives.

In the end, both are too expensive; we'll probably end up having to use synfuels.

 

[erktrek]

Electrek has an interesting article about the CEO of Man Trucks who thinks it's "impossible for hydrogen to effectively compete with battery electric trucks"... yes it also mentions that even while saying that the company STILL continues to develop an H2 version. Companies love those government incentives/tax breaks I guess.

I wonder about the long term maintenance costs of the fuel cell, compressed storage tanks, and the support systems like the piping and battery. Also looks like from the DOE Technical targets that the "dormancy" for a high pressure h2 tank from 95% full targets 10% remaining after 30 days but I could be reading that wrong.

 

[steelcobra]

But also:
H2: works for nearly anybody, just like gasoline.
Batteries: limited to a market niche of people for whom they fit into their lives.

In the end, both are too expensive; we'll probably end up having to use synfuels.

H2 pumping stations work great if you're the first one there in at least half an hour, or it'll be slow as hell. It's also great that you can pay $200+ a tank of it. Also only an option in California.

Versus stop at a roadside charging station and have lunch. Park and plug in at work. Hell, if your car's compatible you can get 80% charge in 15 minutes at a Tesla supercharger. Can charge at most places, and the Tesla network on 50,000+ stations is being opened up to most EV brands now.

The idea that EV is harder to fit into your life than H2 is hilarious, and just blatantly wrong in 49/50 states.

 

[DDopson]

H2 pumping stations work great if you're the first one there in at least half an hour, or it'll be slow as hell. It's also great that you can pay $200+ a tank of it. Also only an option in California.

Versus stop at a roadside charging station and have lunch. Park and plug in at work. Hell, if your car's compatible you can get 80% charge in 15 minutes at a Tesla supercharger. Can charge at most places, and the Tesla network on 50,000+ stations is being opened up to most EV brands now.

The idea that EV is harder to fit into your life than H2 is hilarious, and just blatantly wrong in 49/50 states.

What's the 1 state where H2 is easier than BEV? I think you meant blatantly wrong in 50 of 50 states.

 

[steelcobra]

What's the 1 state where H2 is easier than BEV? I think you meant blatantly wrong in 50 of 50 states.

Oh, I'm not saying it's easier, it's only possible to actually operate one in California.

 

[shawnce]

When Teslas started there was millions of charging stations, one at practically every house in the US. They were not usable for (long) road trips, but made a BEV much more practical in the beginning.

Also the capital costs of installing something like a supercharger is comically cheap compared to a hydrogen filling station, especially when trying to support a similar vehicle throughput (delivering hydrogen to many vehicles in parallel and back to back requires large installations). Also a big difference is electricity is almost universally available or far more easily available.

That is all before even getting into the operational costs of a supercharger compared to a hydrogen station.

 

[DDopson]

Oh, I'm not saying it's easier, it's only possible to actually operate one in California.

It's also "possible" in Hawaii, which has one H2 filling station. Which means that you either are limited to only driving on one of the Hawaiian islands, or you have to take a ferry every time you need to fill the tank. Notably, all four of the major islands have a public electric grid capable of supporting BEVs.

I rather strongly suspect that 47 filling stations isn't enough to support all of California, only some of the major metros, and even within those metros, it's going to be a lot less convenient finding H2 filling stations than folks are used to with the normal gas stations. For comparison California has 7,997 normal gas stations. Just the LA metro area will have a lot more than 47 gas stations. Or for the whole of the US, it's 160,000 gas stations. Only 3,400X deployment scaling left to go!

Unlike with BEVs, where routine charging happens at home and at work, H2 cars need to visit the nearest H2 filling station on a regular basis, not just when attempting 1000 mile long-distance road trips. You probably can't even do a 1000+ mile road-trip with an H2 car, unless two of those California filling stations happen to be 1000+ miles apart. Then you could drive between those two stations, if that happens to be where you want to go. It's hard to see how H2 will cure "range-anxiety".

 

[Stuart Frasier]

Unlike with BEVs, where routine charging happens at home and at work, H2 cars need to visit the nearest H2 filling station on a regular basis, not just when attempting 1000 mile long-distance road trips. You probably can't even do a 1000+ mile road-trip with an H2 car, unless two of those California filling stations happen to be 1000+ miles apart. Then you could drive between those two stations, if that happens to be where you want to go. It's hard to see how H2 will cure "range-anxiety".

At $36/kg currently in CA, that 1,000 mile journey would be cost prohibitive anyway.

 

[shawnce]

I saw a study that said that e-kerosene was about 7x as expensive to produce as fossil kerosene in 2020 (using US electric rates), but projected the difference to be 1.5x by 2050 (by renewable energy getting cheaper and oil more expensive to extract).

View attachment 72912

Yeah I am fairly sure shipping/aviation will likely move to synthetic liquid fuels without hydrogen making much penetration outside of some special case situations (for those that can't move to a battery electric solution). I also don't think the synthetic liquid fuel will be ammonia for a range of risk reasons but potentially methanol for lower density needs and kerosene for higher density needs.

 

[steelcobra]

It's also "possible" in Hawaii, which has one H2 filling station. Which means that you either are limited to only driving on one of the Hawaiian islands, or you have to take a ferry every time you need to fill the tank. Notably, all four of the major islands have a public electric grid capable of supporting BEVs.

I rather strongly suspect that 47 filling stations isn't enough to support all of California, only some of the major metros, and even within those metros, it's going to be a lot less convenient finding H2 filling stations than folks are used to with the normal gas stations. For comparison California has 7,997 normal gas stations. Just the LA metro area will have a lot more than 47 gas stations. Or for the whole of the US, it's 160,000 gas stations. Only 3,400X deployment scaling left to go!

Unlike with BEVs, where routine charging happens at home and at work, H2 cars need to visit the nearest H2 filling station on a regular basis, not just when attempting 1000 mile long-distance road trips. You probably can't even do a 1000+ mile road-trip with an H2 car, unless two of those California filling stations happen to be 1000+ miles apart. Then you could drive between those two stations, if that happens to be where you want to go. It's hard to see how H2 will cure "range-anxiety".

I've checked the routes, you can get to Vegas in a Mirai, but you can't get home with its 400 mile range.

At $36/kg currently in CA, that 1,000 mile journey would be cost prohibitive anyway.

Mirai buyers get a $15,000 fuel card with it, and they're running out a lot faster than they expected them to.

 

[Stuart Frasier]

Mirai buyers get a $15,000 fuel card with it, and they're running out a lot faster than they expected them to.

I don't know if it is still a thing, but Toyota was selling certified Mirais for ~$12K around here with a $15K fuel card. Basically you'd be buying the hydrogen at a discount with the Mirai thrown in for free! Still would be bonkers unless you drove very low miles and never left CA.

 

[steelcobra]

I don't know if it is still a thing, but Toyota was selling certified Mirais for ~$12K around here with a $15K fuel card. Basically you'd be buying the hydrogen at a discount with the Mirai thrown in for free! Still would be bonkers unless you drove very low miles and never left CA.

Man, those don't hold value well. 2023 models are under $30k, and 2022 to under $20k, which for a car that starts at $49,500 is a pretty huge drop.

 

[r0kk3rz]

Sure, I don't actually disagree at all. Synthetic / E-fuels are extremely expensive (best predictions for large scale commercial production put them about 12x more expensive than Jet A) but the technical simplicity and sheer inertia of being able to use existing aircraft without innovation probably makes up for that.

The thing that makes me think that Syn Fuels are the future of aviation is that it can be introduced completely through industry regulation. Once the fuel is certified we can have a roadmap of increasing the % blend of Syn Fuel and regular aviation fuel, progressively turning the industry carbon neutral. This also gives the Syn Fuel industry time and funding to ramp up production to meet the needs of global aviation.