Hydrogen Fuel Cells vs Battery Electric

daarmcd · 17-02-2024 9:07pm #1

I have an EV.

I keep meeting people that tell me that EV's won't work and hydrogen is the way forward.

Usually these people know nothing about cars or physics but they are sure about hydrogen and that EV's won't work.

Fortunately the guardian published an article last week for these flat earthers.

Will hydrogen overtake batteries in the race for zero-emission cars?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/13/will-hydrogen-overtake-batteries-in-the-race-for-zero-emission-cars

The Tesla boss Elon Musk describes the tech as “fool sells”: why use green electricity to make hydrogen when you can use that same electricity to power the car?

Every transformation of energy involves wasted heat.

That means that hydrogen fuels inevitably deliver less energy to the vehicle.

Those losses increase much further if the hydrogen is burned directly.

David Cebon said: “If you use green hydrogen it takes about three times more electricity to make the hydrogen to power a car than it does just to charge a battery.”

Bloomberg New Energy Finance placed hydrogen for cars in “the row of doom”, with very little chance of even a niche market.

Can hydrogen overtake batteries in cars? “The answer is no,” said Liebreich, without a moment’s hesitation. Carmakers betting on a large share for hydrogen are “just wrong”, and heading for an expensive disappointment, he added.

The gas is highly flammable – with all the safety concerns that entails – must be stored under pressure and leaks easily.

It also carries less energy per unit volume than fossil fuels, meaning it would require many times more tankers unless on-site electrolysers are used.

buyers don’t want hydrogen cars because they can’t fill them,

Across Europe there are 178 hydrogen filling stations, half of which are in Germany.

The economics of hydrogen will change as governments’ enthusiasms wax or wane. Other things could change: technology could improve (within limits) and make the gas more attractive, and prospectors may be able to find cheaper “white hydrogen” drilled from the ground.

Yet for cars the die appears to be cast: batteries are already the post-petrol choice for almost every manufacturer. In the UK there have been fewer than 300 sales of hydrogen vehicles over 20 years, compared with 1m electric cars, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

Batteries’ domination is likely to be extended as the money pouring into research and infrastructure addresses questions of range and charging times. Compared with that flood of investment, hydrogen is a trickle.

Japan’s Toyota is the most vocal proponent of hydrogen, and its chair, Akio Toyoda, last month said he believed the share of battery cars would peak at 30%, with hydrogen and internal combustion engines making up the rest.

Oliver Zipse, the boss of the German manufacturer BMW, said last year: “Hydrogen is the missing piece in the jigsaw when it comes to emission-free mobility.” BMW has its BMW iX5 Hydrogen fuel cell car in testing – albeit using Toyota fuel cells.

Hydrogen offers refuelling in four minutes, higher payloads and longer range

The Mirai goes 400 miles on a fill-up.

Jizique · 17-02-2024 9:24pm

No chance - Zipse is getting subsidies from Bavaria for research and is happy to take them, but no chance; not sure on heavy trucks, undecided here, but not for cars

celtic_oz · 17-02-2024 9:41pm

The round trip efficiency of using electricity to create hydrogen to then create electricity is 18%-46%

Batteries are better than 90% efficient

The future of most peoples energy will be localised then community then regional solar production.

as Elon says "Hydrogen: 'The most dumb thing I could possibly imagine for energy storage'

Old diesel · 17-02-2024 9:44pm

Some anti EVers are arguing for efuels now.

You would still be able to run any current ICE car on them.

But here's the thing - some of this talk from normal drivers or politicians is in the hope of delaying change.

The argument is effectively along the lines of

"Lads there's no point going to all the heartache of changing to EVs if by giving it 10 years we can switch to efuels in 2035 and everything can continue as normal in the meantime."

Problem is - the change to reducing emissions needs to begin right now.

Thats not just EVs - EVs are only one part of very many things to be done even though EVs are currently getting a lot of attention in the public conversation.

MrMusician18 · 17-02-2024 10:04pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121782040#Comment_121782040

Efficiency is only a problem when it makes the fuel expensive to use. Petrol and diesel are as inefficient.

There are two problems with hydrogen that make it a poor choice for cars. It is hard to handle and it is expensive to produce in a carbon friendly way. The latter may be overcome if the build out of renewables results in excessive power generation. The practical problems with hydrogen are different.

Unless a way can be developed to store hydrogen as a fuel that's relatively non toxic and liquid at standard temperature and pressure then it will have a huge challenge that may be technically impossible to overcome.

The other big problem is the enormous head start that BEV's have had. While a hydrogen solution may be developed that is somewhat better than BEV the fact that huge investment in BEV infrastructure will have taken place will mean that market inertia will hamper hydrogen. In order to overcome this, the hydrogen solution will need to either serve a different market, or be an order of magnitude better.

The hydrogen solution isn't even where the nissan was with the leaf 15 years ago. That's how far behind it is.

the_amazing_raisin · 17-02-2024 10:10pm

I think the biggest evidence against hydrogen cars is the fact that manufacturers keep abandoning them in favour of batteries and most of the hydrogen filling stations are closing down

They've probably got a niche still in shipping, aviation and maybe long distance trucking but frankly batteries seem poised to take a significant share of those sectors too in the near future

In that case hydrogen becomes a very costly bridging technology

denismc · 18-02-2024 8:18am

The last time someone tried to use hydrogen for mass transport didn't work out so good;

RainInSummer · 18-02-2024 8:53am

The humanity!

liamog · 19-02-2024 1:20am

If the investment into hydrogen fuel cells (HFCs) had come earlier it could have blocked the investment in battery technology. I think we're now at a point where too much money has been spent on battery tech, and that's it's developed past the limitations that would allow HFC's to take over from combustible fuels.

Battery tech has gotten cheaper and lighter per kWh of stored energy, the other key development is in charging speed. GAC in China have a car that's capable of charging at 6C this technology and similar will continue to roll out to more battery makers. CATL (Supplier to Tesla and BMW) were due to start production of its ShenXing LFP battery which is capable of 4C charging at the end of 2023. 6C is a 10 minute charge time, 4C is 15 minutes.

The H70 hydrogen fueling standards takes around 5 minutes to refuel a Toyota Mirai a car with 650km of range. I'd question how viable it is to roll out all the hydrogen infra required to support a full transition (every vehicle would need a hydrogen fueling station) vs rolling out a mix of differential EV chargers. A car that charges at 10C (6 minutes) those few times it needs a superfast charge on the motorway and takes 6 minutes but spends the rest of its time charging at home on low AC power, or at low DC rates whilst doing something else is likely to be available in the not too distant future.

The main reason I do not foresee hydrogen becoming the mass market solution is the amount of electricity required to electrolyse 1kg of hydrogen. It takes roughly 50kWh to produce 1kg of hydrogen. The current Mirai can hold about 5kg, meaning it takes approximately 250 kWh to get it's 650km. range. The new Model 3 has a rated rate of 437km from its 57.5kWh battery. With a 10% charging loss that means it needs around 95kWh to get the same range.

If people think the grid won't cope with battery EVs, it won't be better when we need to use 2.5x the electricity to do it via hydrogen fuel cell EVs instead.

daveyjoe · 19-02-2024 1:48am

If people think the grid won't cope with battery EVs, it won't be better when we need to use 2.5x the electricity to do it via hydrogen fuel cell EVs instead.

Not a fan of hydrogen but just to play devils advocate. The argument that some would make is that you can go to where electricity is cheap and abundant and create the hydrogen fuel there. You can transport fuel easily (unlike electricity). At industrial scale, it would be possible to produce energy at a cost of less than $0.01/kwh in some locations. So it’s unlikely to cause an issue for residential electricity grids.

liamog · 19-02-2024 2:24am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121786599#Comment_121786599

That's been the big reason that Japan has pushed the hydrogen economy. They wanted to become hydrogen exporters to countries that didn't build indigenous sources. A big investment would be required to replace the global oil transport infrastructure with the same to distribute hydrogen (from producer to consumer pump). Why bother when we already have well developed electricity distribution systems that can skip the electrolysis step. The losses for a HVDC connection are around 3% per 1,000km. If you compare that with the 60% energy loss per km from the rough calculation I made earlier we can build a 20,000km cable for the same energy usage.

I'm not seriously suggesting a HVDC cable from here to Australia is a sensible suggestion, but in terms of energy usage it's not far off. I think the future of hydrogen is much more concentrated, with it being used for periodic storage to back up national grids instead of being distributed to millions of local fuel cell vehicles.

...Ghost... · 19-02-2024 10:57am

Hydrogen doesn't make sense for small vehicles imo. We already have about 1500 fuel stations in Ireland (a third are independently owned), so there wouldn't be a need to add new locations. The figure I see for installation of a fuel station is around $2,000,000 USD, which isn't that expensive....but you'd kit out an average size service station with HVDC chargers for that with a lot less maintenance involved. Then there is the cost to produce and deliver it, versus the cost of installing HVDC chargers and the much lower electricity costs with no deliveries needed.

Hydrogen makes sense for large vehicle transport where a small number of fuel depots could be strategically located for Trucks, Buses and even large watercraft. For Trucks, a few large capacity stations at various points on the motorway would cover them. Commuter buses could use these too. City buses could have a station at each depot, or every other depot depending on how they rotate out buses. A station at critical locations, such as Airports and Docks would be efficient and convenient locations for large vehicles with the latter also serving large watercraft. The key thing here is we would only have a small number of hydrogen fuel stations to build and service and these would service our large vehicle fleet.

The hydrogen should be made with excess renewable generation where possible, rather than burning coal or gas. It is an effective way to store some of the energy we don't use and it's a good excuse to add more renewable generation to our network.

listermint · 19-02-2024 11:14am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121786599#Comment_121786599

Exactly. Just like the oil fields of old. There are geographical locations in the world where renewables are easy and excess is wasted. People exclude that from the thought process and automatically assume excessively wasting fossil energy to create and store hydrogen.

Some places are renewable abundant like the Arabian peninsula is oil abundant.

Clo-Clo · 19-02-2024 11:15am

The storage of hydrogen is the issue and is never discussed when people talk about it, most people think it is similar to petrol/diesel but it's not

listermint · 19-02-2024 11:16am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787183#Comment_121787183

I think the people producing it have the storage down. It doesn't matter what most people think storage looks like 😃

Clo-Clo · 19-02-2024 11:19am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787187#Comment_121787187

But a lot of people just think that fuel station will just fill up one of the petrol/diesel tanks....this is why you see the public talking about it and seem totally unaware of the difficultly in storing it, wasn't it Norway they had a huge explosion recently at a hydrogen filling station?

liamog · 19-02-2024 11:46am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787177#Comment_121787177

The main question for me is does it make sense to transport that energy by converting to hydrogen, shipping it and converting to motion via an onboard fuel cell. Or instead build a network of HVDC transmission lines from the cheap source to the target market.

the_amazing_raisin · 19-02-2024 12:06pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121786637#Comment_121786637

I think there's some geopolitical considerations behind Japan's push for hydrogen

They're an island nation with no oil reserves and almost all of their energy comes in via tankers and as such they're vulnerable to price changes. Just look how awesome the Japanese economy currently isn't doing

They also have a somewhat belligerent neighbour nearby who have been recently building up their naval capabilities, so disruptions to navigation are an uncomfortable possibility

Japan obviously has potential for vast offshore wind power, but they would still need a storage mechanism, which hydrogen could form a part of

I do think going big on hydrogen cars for so long was a mistake and now they're playing catch-up

listermint · 19-02-2024 12:07pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787312#Comment_121787312

Agreed.

Shoog · 19-02-2024 12:22pm

We all know that hydrogen makes no sense on any level apart from an incredibly small number of corner cases, so why do it promotors not realise this if an average job can eyeball the maths/physics and work it out.

The simple answer is, there maybe some who are genuinely researching it's potential, but those promoting it are shills for big oil and the auto industry. It's working because the widespread belief that hydrogen can simply replace petrol with all of the convenience is making people hold off conversion to BEV and helping bolster the "transition" hybrid technology that Toyota is so heavily invested in

So hydrogen promotion is a highly effective delaying tactic of the oil industry just like bioethanol once was.

listermint · 19-02-2024 12:27pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787488#Comment_121787488

Incredibly short sighted to put all your stock into single source energy solutions.

Multiple energy provisions to suit application is the most sensible way. Not all solutions work well in every single environment or application. So it has always been.

Shoog · 19-02-2024 12:32pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787506#Comment_121787506

There are so few situations where hydrogen makes any sense that it can be safely dismissed in considering domestic applications. Hydrogen just drains electricity away from the grid where it could be better utilized charging batteries.

The rate of advancement in battery technology is so rapid and diverse that it opens up huge fields of potential for economical energy storage.

Hydrogen is simply a false hope since it is just a very inefficient battery which leaves you just as dependent on the grid for supply.

the_amazing_raisin · 19-02-2024 1:19pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121787312#Comment_121787312

There's pros and cons to both in my view, and to be fair there's no rule that you can't go with a mix of both

Power transmission is probably the most efficient and cheaper in the long run. Once the infrastructure is built then you can just sell power into the target market and you're done

On the flip side, your target market is pretty much set in stone (unless you win the geography lottery and can sell energy to different markets). So as a producer you don't benefit from market forces when energy prices are high because you don't have any choice where to sell your energy.

There's also the situation where your transmission lines go through a country which you don't have good relations with and they decide to cut your connection to deprived you of income

Flipping over to hydrogen, there's the obvious issues with efficiency of transportation. There was some talk in the UK about pushing hydrogen into the gas network, but that seems to have gone quiet which seems to indicate that it went nowhere. So you'd probably need a lot of new infrastructure and ships as well as somewhere to store the hydrogen onshore

There's also the environmental question if what happens if a hydrogen tanker sinks. It'll probably explode, with some considerable potential for a lot of collateral damage. Even if it somehow doesn't explode, I can't imagine having a load of hydrogen gas bubbles introduced into the water is going to do the local wildlife any favours

For the advantages of hydrogen shipping, probably the biggest one is the access to an open market. Like oil and gas, it can be shipped basically anywhere so producers and consumers aren't tightly linked. For consuming nations, you can also buy energy from multiple sources to protect against supply issues and price shocks

There's also the advantage that hydrogen stores more easily than electricity, so stockpiling energy is cheaper with hydrogen

To me it seems like there's multiple solutions to similar problems and what is the "best" one can vary depending on the circumstances

It seems pretty certain at this point that hydrogen is dead for passenger cars, and probably for commercial vehicles too. Trains, shipping and aviation are potential markets, but they're also competing with batteries there as well

Same for utility scale energy, there's competition and a balance will be found, and possibly disrupted in future

I think one thing that's telling is that while Ireland is currently building more interconnectors to the UK and France, there's also planning permission been lodged for a hydrogen production facility in Aghada Power station. So it's clear that the Irish government and ESB aren't ready to put all their bets on a single horse yet

innrain · 19-02-2024 1:57pm

This is an interesting read from the International Energy Agency.

https://www.iea.org/reports/global-hydrogen-review-2023

Hydrogen has been utilized for almost 100 years in industry, it is not a novelty. Having said that, almost none is produced through electrolysis. I quote from the IEA document:

Virtually all hydrogen used in industry is produced from unabated fossil fuels in the same facilities as where it is used. Carbon capture is a common practice in some industry sub-sectors, although most of the 140 Mt of CO 2 captured is used for other industrial applications (such as urea production) and ends up being released, with only a handful of projects storing CO 2 underground. As a result, industrial hydrogen production was responsible for 680 Mt of CO 2 emissions in 2022, up 2% from 2021.

Does somebody think that the transport industry would depart from the norm and use a more expensive way of producing H2? We saw how 10c differential in price of diesel vs petrol made almost everybody disregard the negative side effects.

Full disclosure, I work with hydrogen, much smaller scale and for completely different purposes as those discussed here, but I'm kinda wired to the problem. For safety reasons I produce my own hydrogen, through electrolysis, instead of using bottled.