How to Promote the Hydrogen Economy Hoax

Well, you are assuming no long journeys. Hydrogen cars have the advantage of being able to be quickly charged en route, and are always available for a journey; you never have to wait for it to be charged before setting out. Clearly, if you have exhausted the battery in a BEV, it cannot undertake another journey immediately.

Secondly, you can stockpile hydrogen if you are making it from rooftop electricity very easily and inexpensively. To do so with batteries would involve yet another battery pack as big as the one in your car. I suspect a domestic hydrogen plant would last a lot longer than a battery and be able to store more energy.

Third, in Europe, home charging is not s possibility for 60% of the population. They CANNOT own a plug-in but a hydrogen car IS something they can own. The same is true of about 40% of Americans I believe.

I've no objection to enthusiasts buying battery cars and see no reason why both cannot exist side by side. The main thing is to cut our emissions of carbon dioxide and reduce pollution in our cities. Both are capable of doing that. It is not a competition, and I see no reason for people here to make it one.

 

Pushmi copied a list of costs for hydrogen which I reproduce in abbreviated form with my comments

1. Cost of compression. - An energy cost. The pumps are not particularly expensive.
2. Cost of storage at production site. - in large quantities about $1 per kWh
3. Cost of transport. Cryogenics is not involved. After the capital cost of the tanker, this boils down to an energy cost again.
4. Cost of storage and re-compression at dispensing site. Minor cost, but an energy cost again.
5. Cost of storage in the FCEV's tank. About $6 per kWh Any losses are tolerable and represent an energy cost.
6. Energy loss in the fuel cell itself. This is obviously an energy loss.

What it all boils down to is capital cost and energy cost. The capital costs come down to tanks and compressors. Both are expensive, but they can be expected to last many years, so the cost contribution to the fuel cost is small. The energy cost includes things like power for compressors, power to transport the stuff to where it is needed and losses in gas or efficiency of the fuel cell. These can all be made up for by simply supplying more energy.

I therefore stand by my assertion that the cost of hydrogen is almost 100% defined by the cost of the energy needed to produce it. If this energy comes from wind or sun, the cost is far lower now than any other energy source and still falling, so I believe the hydrogen economy is probably inevitable, failing a number of huge breakthroughs in battery technology.

 

I understand that electrolysis is an enormous loser against a BEV, I hope I have made that abundantly clear. However. There *could* be ways that hydrogen comes about by other means that are going to occur anyhow (i.e. if O&G decides it's optimal to convert gas to carbon products) so we should be in a position to take advantage of it. I do not ever think there will be widespread fuel cell cars but that doesn't mean fuel cells arent viable in situations. Hell if you go around a warehouse you will find propane powered fork lifts, nobody is proclaiming propane is ideal but it can work. I think in city buses fuel cells may be great, or other similar situations. Like fleets of city cars that park the same place at night. Why not be prepared to use it instead of throwing in the proverbial towel already? That's my point.

On the labeling and name calling, I do stand by that too. I feel as if you maybe got caught up in one upmanship and trading jabs and get carried away. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it seems to me. As others have said, if you feel someone IS indeed a troll then the back and forth is precisely what they are after. If you call names, you cast aspersions, you try and label and one up them you only get dragged into it. If you think they're a troll, either reply as you would a friend or just don't reply. Anything else feeds them.

As for this person in specific, my radar did go up when he posted he couldn't get a BEV because he'd forget to plug in, and if he did he didn't want to do it when he gets home as it's pricier at that moment and he only wants to do it overnight. I showed him a wifi smart charger that allows him to program it so the issue is non existent but he kept persisting. If he REALLY wanted to solve the dilemma he'd say great thanks for the find! But he didn't, he kept on keeping on, so I stopped trying to help since he wasn't actually trying to solve an issue. You're free to carry on as you want, but just know that if you want to keep trolls away then name calling and ranting posts are only letting them win.

I would not call myself a fanboy of anything really, I don't get bent up about how people choose to propel themselves, gas BEV or anything between.

 

A troll is not defined as someone who disagrees with you. Nor as someone who ignores an answer to a question he didn't ask. If you disagree with me feel free to ignore my posts. I prefer polite debate where disparate views are respected to being howled down by those who cannot tolerate the views of others anyway.

 

At age 68, not my first rodeo. <grins>

Bob Wilson

 

We already have an electricity grid. Adding charging stations is easy.

We do not have any hydrogen infrastructure - hydrogen production is difficult. Hydrogen distribution is extremely difficult. Then we would need to build a LOT of hydrogen filling stations - these cost $2 Million each. They only can fill about 15 cars / day.

We have about 120,000 gas stations, and they probably fill about 100 cars a day, on average. Doing the rough math, that means we would need to build 800,000 hydrogen filling stations.

It would cost $1,600,000,000,000 to build just the filling stations.

If we could build them at a rate of 10 / day - it would take 80,000 DAYS to finish building them all. That is over 219 YEARS.

Are you willing to wait 200 years to be able to fill up you hydrogen fuel cell car? Would you buy a FCEV now and wait 200 years, or would you wait 200 years to buy it?

 

I think @NeilBlanchard has the basis for a solution. Add a hydrogen station tax/fee on every hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Something along the lines of what Tesla has been doing for the SuperCharger network in pricing their model X and S. So let's do some back of the envelope:

• estimate $1,000,000 per hydrogen fuel station
• expected FCV life, 10 years
• $1k/year, hydrogen station fee or $10,000 hydrogen station purchase fee
• 1,000 FCVs per year -> $1,000,000
• every 1,000 FCVs fund one hydrogen fuel station per year or 10 the first year
• after 10 years, 10 stations

Bob Wilson

 

Well, yes and no. A Tesla supercharger charges at 125kW and let's say an average car will be on charge for 40 minutes. An ICE car (or a hydrogen car) is charged in - say five minutes, and takes a few hundred Watts each. So to provide the same level of service to Teslas (i.e to charge the same number at the same rate) as a single fuel pump you need eight superchargers. These will take a total of one MegaWatt.

A typical UK motorway filling station will have about 30 pumps, so an equivalent one equipped with 240 Tesla superchargers will take 30 MegaWatts. This is sufficient to power a town of 150,000 UK homes (or about 60,000 US ones) and requires a large substation. Generating capacity would have to be boosted as well as transmission lines to support the increased demand. My (very) rough estimate is that if the whole of the UK switched to BEVs we would have to boost our power network by about 50%

The bottom line is that it is not quite as easy as you seem to imagine.

There is already a hydrogen infrastructure. There is an industrial demand for it independent of transport needs. It is not particularly difficult to produce it - it needs a lot of energy, but it can be produced very easily in an oil refinery, or by electrolysis. Transporting it by tanker is no more difficult than any other fuel - you just need high-pressure tankers. I imagine that adaptation of an existing filling station to supply hydrogen vehicles costs a tiny fraction of $2,000,000 - possibly $50,000 a pump in a largish roll out. (It is stored above ground, so doesn't involve excavation to house a tank) A pump can fill a vehicle in around 5 minutes, 12 an hour, or 288 a day.

The rest of your post is based on your figures which I believe to be largely incorrect so will not pursue it in any detail. I imagine that what will happen is that filling stations will do what happened in the UK when diesel became popular. Gradually they replaced petrol pumps with diesel ones on a one-by-one basis to meet the growing demand.

I will agree that if hydrogen cars really take off, in your country or mine, it may prove difficult to meet the demand for hydrogen quickly, but I have little doubt that it can be done. A growing number of countries are now finding they have excess energy - GigaWatts of it - at times and this would be quite easily utilised in making hydrogen which can be stockpiled until needed. It is a fuel which fits well into what is becoming an increasingly renewable-based electricity supply industry.

Finally, I would remind you that domestic electrolysis plant powered from rooftop solar panels are also a distinct possibility. Were these to be mass-produced the cost might well be affordable to many who would normally fill their cars at home. The average motorist does only 40 miles a day, so provided the plant produced a little more than this, the excess could be stockpiled to meet what would be required for a longer journey. This would work better in parts of your country than mine (the UK) where overcast skies are the norm, but the net result of it would be a reduction in the need for filling stations which would be needed only for people making long journeys and wishing to fill up en route.

I enclose a pic of a typical hydrogen storage facility suitable for a filling station. These are capable of 900 bar pressure and could either be charged from a tanker or delivered ready charged from a truck, given suitable unloading equipment which would be quicker.

 

This would certainly be one way of doing it, but see my revised figures. I think Neil Blanchard's figures are far too high.

It is more likely that single-pump replacements will occur at existing stations, as a result of a growing demand. If a business can make money out of supplying hydrogen, an initial investment is often worthwhile. My image of such an installation is little more than a concrete base for pre-charged cylinders in a sort of pallet to stand upon (See above pic as an example) High-pressure piping would connect this to a dispensing unit containing pumps and credit card readers. In mass production, I cannot see how this would cost more than $50,000 a pump.

 

Some more information on the cost of hydrogen filling stations here:

https://pureenergycentre.com/hydrogen-fueling-station/

My $50,000 was a bit low, but I think if larger numbers of these are rolled out the cost would fall dramatically due to economies of scale, and technical refinements. I suspect that production of these systems is nearer prototype stage than the mass production stage and contains very little 'value engineering' to get the cost down.

The main point I'd like to make, however, is that the technology of a hydrogen filling station is well advanced, and no great deal to install almost anywhere.

 

Electric cars almost always get charged at home. We have had 2 EV's for about three and a half years, and we have used public chargers about 2 dozen times. So, about 4 times a year. So, the number of public chargers only needs to a small fraction of the number of gas stations.

Unless, you can make gasoline, or hydrogen at your house ...

And if you get hydrogen with electrolysis, then it will take about 3X more energy than if you use batteries to store electricity.

 

You are in the two-thirds of American homes who have room to do this. The other third would presumably have problems with charging at home. In Europe the proportions are reversed. Two-thirds of Europeans cannot easily or at all charge a car at home.

Also, you are no doubt using mains electricity to do your charging overnight. It can be tricky to do so from a solar roof if you are using the car in the day as most of us do. You could do it with another set of batteries I suppose, but even then it would take time to recharge and you would need a battery pack at least the size of the one in your car I think.

Making your own hydrogen probably IS feasible, and you are correct that the efficiency is poor. However, provided you get enough hydrogen for your needs, the only effect of the poor efficiency is to increase the size and cost of your solar panel installation. This is falling, and given that they can be expected to last up to 25 years, providing you with free motoring for this time, I suspect the extra cost might be worth it. Certainly, it would be nice if the initial investment were smaller, but I doubt if the poor efficiency would stop you going ahead with it.

I am not suggesting this would be affordable now unless you are very rich, but rather at a time when hydrogen cars are common, the equipment for doing so is beginning to be mass produced, people are familiar and comfortable with the technology, and it is less expensive it may well happen. It is technically feasible now, but not yet financially feasible.

It has the advantage that the hydrogen can be stored in a tank, which will be less expensive and will last longer than batteries and you can fill your car quickly and easily.

Unfortunately, its still not much help to the twothirds of Europeans and onethird of Americans who have no room to do this. They will have to stick with filling stations, but at least they can run a non-polluting car.

 

If anyone owns a car, it has to be parked someplace; either at home or at work.

So, install a $500 L2 charging station for that parking spot. Done, problem solved.

This costs FAR less than even just the hydrogen filling stations - let alone the production, transportation. The extra energy used in the hydrogen storage mode will cost THREE TIMES AS MUCH, at least.

Hydrogen cost more to build, and more to run.

Batteries are getting better, and they are already less expensive, than fuel cells.

 

Fuel cells produce a fair bit of heat - they are more efficient than ICE's, but not by much. The Mirai only gets 67MPGe - about HALF the efficiency of an EV. So, it produces about as much heat energy as an EV uses in total.

Fuel cells are quite sensitive to heat - they need a lot of cooling, and they can overheat more easily than an ICE.

More cooling means more aerodynamic drag. And, it means more complexity, and that means higher costs to repair.

The Tesla Roadster 2 is reported to have a 200kWh battery and a 620 mile range. In a few more years, this will be commonplace.

 

This would be an improvement, certainly, if it didn't affect anything else. I have two concerns.

First, what effect does charging at five times the manufacturer's normal recommended charging rate have on the life of the battery?
Second, what happens to the battery if the sensor fails to work?

 

I don't know about the USA, but the UK has laws that will prevent you installing a charging point at work or anywhere else that you decide to. The electricity company would have to agree to supply it too, and if it caused more demand than their existing cabling could tolerate would either refuse or expect you to pay for extra cabling and maybe a larger transformer upstream.

Sadly, getting things "Done, problem solved" is not as easy as typing it. Better batteries imply greater charging problems by the way.