Feedstock is water - substantially free, and electrolytic cells are cheap and simple. A compressor is expensive, but probably costs little more than a battery pack for a BEV.
I'd be most interested to see what other costs you imagine might inflate the price significantly. Perhaps you'll kindly list them for us?
1. Cost of compression. Compression requires expensive high-pressure pumps, and compression to 10,000 PSI requires a lot of energy, which of course is also expensive. ~15% loss
2. Cost of storage at production site. Storage requires special expensive seals, and even then the highly pressurized H2 leaks slowly past seals... and even (very slowly) through the sides of a metal tank! So there is a constant leakage of the fuel, wasting some of it... and thus lowering the overall efficiency. Minimum 10% loss
3. Cost of transport, when H2 is transported to supplement the very limited amount of "green" H2 which can be produced on-site at one of these not-really-"green" H2 dispensing stations. Transport requires use of expensive cryogenically cooled tanker trucks, and the cryogenic cooling is another place where energy is lost. ~10-15% energy loss
4. Cost of storage and re-compression at dispensing site. When H2 is dispensed, or transferred from a tanker truck to the H2 station's tank, it loses pressure. The pressure must be pumped back up, again using the same expensive and energy-wasting high-pressure pumps. Minimum 10% loss
5. Cost of storage in the FCEV's tank. Again, it's impossible to store highly compressed H2, so there is some loss from the tank every day. However, this is actually a very small loss per day. It was estimated at 3-4% per day back when FCEVs used cryogenic cooling in their tanks, but with the Toyota Mirai and newer FCEVs, cryogenic cooling is no longer required. I haven't seen an estimate for this loss in current FCEVs, but we might guess it to be something like 0.5% per day.
6. Energy loss in the fuel cell itself. The fuel cell stack is only about 50% efficient at using the energy present in the H2.
~50% loss!
Add in the energy loss from either using electricity to generate H2 by electrolysis, or the various energy expenses involved with transporting natural gas to a reforming site and running the reforming process, and overall there's a loss of about 75%-80% of the energy present in the hydrogen by the time it actually powers the motor in the EV.
(Most if this info was cribbed from "
The Hydrogen Economy -- Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Are No Panacea". Again, that's one of the sources cited in post #2 in this thread.)
Where the Laws of Thermodynamics really bites using H2 as a fuel, is in the many steps necessary to get the H2 from initial generation, to dispensing into a FCEV in highly compressed form. Even if you can figure out some way to significantly reduce the energy loss in any one step, that doesn't help the overall supply chain efficiency much because there are so many links in the chain.
Former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said that there are four “miracles” that need to happen before hydrogen fuel cells can be practical. Basically, he says, we need better ways to produce, distribute, and store hydrogen, and we need better, cheaper fuel cells. He summarized this as “If you need four miracles, that’s unlikely; saints only need three miracles.”
To be fair, we do now have cheaper fuel cells than when Chu made those comments circa 2009. But not significantly more efficient ones.
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Or Pu-Pu.[/QUOTE]
I thought I was replying to Martin Williams, who is a troll. Yeah, it may well be time to start using the "Ignore" function for his posts.