The case for hydrogen-powered cars
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Part 1: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 2: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 3: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11556/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 4: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11572/why-fuel-cell-ca...
> This is an extremely long, in-depth blog series, so I'll start by giving you a summary.
> Besides the battery, the biggest component(s) by weight is/are the motor(s). Current generation electric cars use still fairly heavy central motors with an actual axle to the wheels. Upcoming generations will use in-wheel or near-wheel motors that have almost no drive train associated with them: no transmission, no gearing at all, no weight lost to things that aren't necessary. This is one of the reasons electric cars can actually become lighter than traditional gasoline-powered cars; the chassis can be reduced because there are almost no driving forces on it anymore. Note though: this is an advantage of both battery and fuel cell electric cars!
Motor on the wheel seems so obvious but still no one seems to build such a car. I’ve asked automotive engineers about this and the answer I get is often:
Wheel based motor would make the wheel heavier and thereby increase rotational inertia which decreases acceleration and increases the required (kinetic) energy for a given speed of the car. I also heard that the increased wheel weight reduces the performance of the suspension.
I suppose another problem is the need for two (4 for 4WD) gear boxes, since electric motors are low torque, high rpm. The author says „no gearing at all“ but how is this feasible with an electric motor?
Anyone in the knows can comment on this?
You can make lower RPM electric motors that can do direct drive but they will loose efficiency, power and speed. At some point gears became better to reduce the RPM, even after accounting for gear loses. Even current electric cars really need 2-3 gears for maximum performance and efficiency, but they can get away with fixed gears which greatly simplifies things. One of the interesting things about the 4 wheel drive Tesla’s is that the 2 motor/gear assemblies are optimized for different speed bands so they can have the benefit of both without needing to shift gears, they just shift power from one motor to the other.
In wheel motors generally will only be done for low speed applications where a suspension is optional, just like airless and omnidirectional tires.
A hydrogen car takes about five minutes to refuel. On a typical day, a battery car takes about five seconds to refuel: you plug it in and you leave it overnight. Sure, the actual charging takes longer, but who cares? You’re not involved.
On long trips, this reverses, but how often do you do those? Most people do a couple a year. You might lose a couple of hours waiting for charging there. Otherwise you’re saving minutes every week.
This is something I see people having a hard time truly understanding. They see that a car takes hours to recharge on a home 240V outlet, think “that’s a long time!” and stop there. They don’t realize that it’s a time saver most of the time.
Even if there was a hydrogen station on every corner, and the price was as cheap as electricity, I’d still never buy a hydrogen car. Who wants to visit a fueling station every week?
Still, we're a two-car family and our second car is ICE (a Subaru). Gasoline is way more convenient than electric for out-of-town weekend trips. I take these trips frequently enough (more than once per month) that I don't want to rely on renting a car every time.
Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.
However, will they plenty of charging stations, so that you never have to worry about moving your car so someone else can charge? That seems doubtful. I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
What the US needs is a political desire for New Deal type programs. Work still sucks outside of 2-4 (?) metropolis areas. Probably a large infrastructure project could get charging stations to the masses at the apartment level, and not much else.
One exception though could be a vast surge in oil prices. We’re talking 7$/gallon.
> I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
That's usually how it's done here. And the cost is not negligible at all, more than what I pay in gas each month. And on top of that you pay for the electricity of course. And I'd say that most apartments that even have parking associated with them you will often need to wait years and years to even get a spot (electric or not).
I don't see it changing without government/tax incentives for the owners, which won't be happening under republican leadership.
It takes longer, sure, but it's rare that my car will not be at 100% in the morning if I leave it overnight.
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...
I put gas in my car, probably once every 2-3 months without a work related trip...and that's with me driving about 70 miles a day give or take.
A hydrogen/electric version of the Volt instead of gas/electric would make a lot of sense IMO.
Today I drove from the south east to the Lake District - a distance of about 400 miles. I made 3 5-10 minute stops en route for food, toilet and one for fuel. I found that once I'd stopped for 10 minutes I just wanted to get going again and get to my destination. I'm really not sure I would be happy hanging around a service on the M6 toll road for 1-2 hours because I needed to recharge my car.
I don't often do long trips, perhaps 2-3x a year, but when I do I really just want to get to my destination as soon as possible.
400 miles is pretty easy, though. In my car (Model S 85), I’d probably plan to stop once a bit past the halfway point for lunch. 20-30 minutes should get enough to finish the trip. That’s assuming I can charge at the destination. If you can’t, it’s tougher.
In a Model S 100D or a Model 3 LR, you could probably stop for only 10 minutes somewhere in the middle. They charge faster (especially the Model 3) and don’t need much extra to make that trip.
As an alternative I drive a Chevy Volt which has a gas run battery charger. While the battery only has a 50 mile range, the gas powered battery charger has about a 250 mile range
Although at this time I do wonder what could possibly move one to purchase a Mirai.
If you look at the current state of things, hydrogen cars are even more expensive and are impossible to own in most of the country. That might change in the future but it’s hard to match the infrastructure advantage of having millions of “fueling stations” in the form of electrical outlets, and BEVs continue to improve as well.
As battery capacity improves, charging from a regular outlet will only take longer and longer. And driver waiting time is short only if you can charge at home and never care about going anywhere beyond the charging range. It does work for a large number of people, but is a non-starter for a large segment as well.
Basically, it's about the ability or potential of going anywhere. I bought a car that technically has the ability to go off-road. The reality is that I probably never will. But it sure feels good to know that I could. Paid extra for it and all. Completely irrational, but makes me happy.
That's the reason that people worry about range and refueling time. It's not rational, it's just humane. We aspire to do more , see more and go further. Not all of us do, but it's a very human emotion. That's not a bad thing.
It’s different when talking about a good long-range EV with a good charging network. Not only are long trips practical, but the speed penalty is pretty small.
If you don't have your own charger or access to a free one, commercial chargers aren't necessarily cheaper than gas either. Last time I ran numbers for my wife's plug-in, apart from free chargers (Volta or some municipal ones) putting in gas was cheaper.
Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas), and that a BEV is cheaper to assemble (less parts, less piping), the market for hydrogen cars is completely dependent on the price of batteries.
As batteries get cheaper, and rapid chargers get faster, the niche that hydrogen can occupy gets smaller.
The thing is, hydrogen cars are electric cars. It's possible some of them will even include a larger battery and become plug-in. So every hydrogen car sold will also benefit the development of better BEVs.
To me, this is a clear feedback loop that benefits pure BEVs. And where will BEVs be when hydrogen cars actually hit the market with significant numbers and models? What if 150kWh batteries are standard? What if 400kW charging is standard? What if the price is not much higher? These are all within reach. It's just a matter of time, and the hydrogen economy does not seem to be moving fast enough that its got time to spare.
But I fully support all subsidies and financial support for development of hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it won't be success in cars, but it could be in other fields.
There are other options. You can producte H2 directly from sunlight. https://setis.ec.europa.eu/setis-reports/setis-magazine/fuel...
And we might run out of Lithium. Or Cobalt. Or Vanadium. I doubt that we run out of Hydrogen.
Lithium-cobalt is not the only chemistry. I’m optimistic about alternate chemistries in the long term. Especially now that the battery market is growing so rapidly. There are massive investments in research.
I doubt we’ll run out though. They’re not that rare. Besides, it’s a renewable resource, not a combustible one.
- Batteries are the most efficient in the long run and very dynamic at power release, but they are heavy (more than half the weight of Tesla's truck is the batteries), use lots of rare resources and take pretty long to recharge. It's getting better, but if you really want to drive a few thousand miles with short fuel breaks in an emergency, you can't.
- Hydrogen fuel cells suck at dynamic release, they really want to have a constant power draw. They're less efficient than batteries, but you can refuel quickly and don't have to carry the fuel weight with you all the time.
Taking all the technical challenges of storing hydrogen and making efficient fuel cells aside for the moment, combining the two technologies is really awesome in a way. You can get rid of two thirds of the batteries — and suddenly you have a car that's all of: easy to instantly refill, still dynamic to accelerate and overtake on the highway due to the batteries, but you also just have to dimension the fuel cell for average, not for peak power draw.
Considered the hydrogen is CO2 neutrally generated, it's really the optimum solution.
What kind of emergency would involve driving a few thousand miles quickly? I can only see a few hundred (hurricane evacuation).
At those distances, why wouldn't you fly?
From that link platinum is 3.7E-6, others [Li, V, Co] are O(2E-3), or more, by percentage of Earth's crust.
There are internal combustion engines that use hydrogen as fuel. A hydrogen powered car does not need to be electric.
- just fueling hydrogen vehicles requires an substantial amount of electricity for the compressors. An electric vehicle could drive at least 10% of the distance on this electricity alone. That is not counting the compression work at any the production site and when filling the trucks.
- distributing hydrogen requires trucks. In most places, the elecricity network is available.
- refueling with a hydrogen vehicle is faster then recharging. But you have to refuel them at fuel stations. Electric vehicles can recharge at home or any parking lot with outlets - more and more companies have parking lots with electrical outlets.
I think that, when people are worrying about charge time, they're really asking, "Will charge times mean that a 5-hour trip to visit Mom and Dad now turns into a 10-hour trip, or, worse, something that requires an overnight stay?"
~330 mile range is available today, which is pricy, but quickly dropping. The expected 50% battery price drop within 5 years is probably going to make 300+ mile ranges become standard and likely 600+ Mile ranges will start showing up. Further once you get into the 400+ mile range territory particularly charging say during lunch can significantly increase range without completely filling the battery.
These are probably easier to deploy and maintain than hydrogen tanks, right?
The physical and mental infrastructure for both of these are already in place.
That's why I'm currently quite fond of platinum as a speculative investment. Fuel cells require quite a bit of platinum. Yet platinum has rarely been cheaper relative to other commodities like gold. I think because the market is discounting a decline in diesel engines and maybe because of recycling. (Even though platinum has been more expensive than gold even before catalysts were common.)
In addition, platinum deserves to receive a geopolitical risk premium. 80% of the world's platinum is mined (at a loss!) in South Africa, which is prone to intense labor disputes and looking less attractive every day. And the next big producer is Russia. Yet above ground stock piles have declined in the past decade.
In the 1+ year that I've been in platinum, it hasn't been a success. The market just remains comatose. But we'll see :-)
-That's BS. Should say 30 min. to 1 hour. Hydrogen is a dead end. Toyota and Hyundai are only making hydrogen cars for the ZEV credits.
So you need to dump a bunch of energy in creating a very difficult to handle material. In comparison, battery tech gets 7-10% better each year and has the immense economies of scale of electronics, electric motors, and power electronics all driving down cost and increasing competition.
There's a reason oil and gas companies propelled a lot of this development.
I am probably misunderstanding the whole "most abundant element in the universe" thing. Can you explain?
Since it's so reactive, it's both a pain to handle and to extract unless you have a lot of natural gas reserves, where it's relatively abundant.
Or you find it in the interstellar medium but I mean good luck mining a nebula.
Isn't it kind of obvious which tech is more likely to overcome its impediments? Especially since problems that can be solved in small bitsized pieces is exactly the kind of thing big corporations are good at?
Then there’s storage of Hydrogen, which is manageable, but not trivial. Transportation is difficult, but again possible to manage given enough drive to make it work. Fuel cells also currently require expensive catalysts such as platinum. I don’t see any of these problems close to being approached, never mind solved.
This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don’t feel it has answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are anything, but.
This is not really fair..
Batteries can be produced cleanly just as much as hydrogen. It's just a matter of chemistry, mining practices and cost.
Furthermore, batteries is not a fuel. It is not burned. It can be recycled or reused.
But I get what you mean. All in all this is a technological arms race, and it seems to me that batteries have a pretty big head start. Though it's not over until we get a battery that is made from cheap common elements that has 2-3 times the capacity of todays batteries. In the meantime I suppose hydrogen fuel for the personal transport sector has a chance.
So, for common transport, I don't know whether pure hydrogen still fits in. It hasn't scaled, and it's still more difficult to handle.
You can generate methane from rotting garbage, cow dung and whatnot. Almost anything that rots. And some of it is now torched as the transport is too expensive from far away oilfields.
But here's and idea: burn that methane directly in fuel cell?
https://newatlas.com/platinum-free-methane-fueled-fuel-cells...
People are WAY too exited about that "only water vapor from the tailpipe!" -hype.
Hydrogen does not fit into the more popularly imagined future where renewables creates electricity that is then stored in parked cars, to be used when everyone gets home and the solar has run out.
All this time I thought it was a biblical reference but I guess it's actually about California. Everything's about California, really, when you get right down to it.
Heavy trucks, though...
Energy == Money == Power and currently the MIC has most of it. Decentralized production of energy is their biggest threat.