Toyota rethinks its bet on hydrogen
ft.com
ft.com
I'm genuinely baffled at the money and time that was poured into this when it seemed dead on arrival to almost everyone (as far as I know). Am I missing something? Is this some quirk of Japanese techno-optimism and simply a failed moonshot?
I would ask why nearly everyone has contentedly continued using rare earth mineral, cobalt and fossil fuel to power out vehicles when a clean renewalabl source is right here.
Maybe. But IIRC practical reality is that no one actually does this, and there is no infrastructure setup for this. Something like <1% of rare earths in product are recycled.
Please correct me if I'm outdated.
People are starting these businesses already, it's yet another logistics problem to solve. Right now there is more money in pulling apart the packs the using the cells as salvage than there is recycling, but as more and more EVs reach end of life you can bet it will be a sizable market.
Presumably a specific chemistry will end up winning out for chars, but, IMO, most of the cars on the road now will never have their cells recycled.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0MuwO9V4AEGbUo.jpg
Hydrogen is brought up as a potential storage method which may work, but it makes metals it touches brittle. It is not like storing fossil gas. There are ways to limit it, but it has costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
Hydrogen in cars also uses expensive metals, platinum in the fuel cell.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603...
I can see why you’d want a single fuel source for all vehicles.
But I know nothing about fuel production.
Hydrogen for aviation is turbocharged stupidity. Particularly when we're making solid progress on synthetic (and biomass) aviation fuels [1]. (Which wouldn't require a global aircraft and airport infrastructure overhaul.)
[1] https://www.catf.us/resource/decarbonizing-aviation-challeng...
No battery breakthrough will get around the fact that medium and long-haul planes get the bulk of their range from the fact that they get substantially lighter as they burn fuel. Short-haul routes and trainers can be all electric ( https://byeaerospace.com/ ).
We'll probably end up with something like "green" hydrocarbon synthesis--at substantial cost increases. The vast bulk of aviation will never be de-carbonized in any foreseeable future short of something akin to "Mr. Fusion" from Back to the Future.
There's good hope for ammonia in maritime. Man in Germany has had working ammonia fueled gas turbines on a variety of vessels and routes for years with forthcoming retro-fits available this year. https://www.man-es.com/discover/two-stroke-ammonia-engine
Ammonia won't work well in aviation due, primarily, to its very short/slow combustion wave-fronts and low combustion temperatures, but also due to its lack of specific energy density with storage infrastructure that's light enough to be airworthy. It's "do-able", but a very distant "2nd fiddle" to even lite/green Jet-A (kerosene) synthesis.
Personally, I think they could have done some quick cocktail napkin math and figured out their strategy without too much effort, but large mega corps tend to frown upon that sort of thing. I remember the Honda clarity (a retro-fitted civic) was going for $350K and saying to myself: no one thought to use a spreadsheet before building?
Hydrogen is dangerous and difficult to store, dangerous and difficult to transport, and has egregious specific energy density--all of them are deal-killers for any widespread fuel.
The only two benefits of hydrogen over other fuels are:
1. The cleanest and most efficient combustion 2. Ease of synthesis on a distributed scale
Ammonia beats hydrogen on every front aside from:
1. Less efficient/clean combustion (which we can handle with extant NoX scrubbing technologies) 2. Currently, it's only efficient to manufacture it in large-scale non-distributed industrial plants.
The great thing about ammonia is we've been manufacturing and storing it at-scale for about a century so we're really good at it. Ammonia is the best current candidate for replacing bunker oil and diesel in shipping.
In fact, fun fact, it makes for an incredibly good dilutant for extremely deep scuba diving (you can't breathe pure oxygen underwater and most gases, including oxygen, become toxic under pressure). For some reason though, people are queasy about the idea of mixing pure hydrogen and oxygen hundreds of meters underwater.
There's been quite a few deaths from industrial ammonia tank (plant, truck, railcar), leaks but unlike hydrogen there's zero chance for a combustion explosion or incidental damage from fire.
Ammonia also almost immediately diffuses and dissipates in air at atmospheric conditions, so while it's VERY toxic it's only VERY toxic for a VERY brief period of time (a few minutes).
One of the odd "safety" benefits with ammonia is that it takes a rather special set of circumstances for it to combust in the first place. That makes it a sub-optimal fuel in many applications--notably aviation.
Thanks for that neat fact about using hydrogen in diving. I'm only familiar with trimixes or bimixes of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium.
Interesting read re breathing hydrogen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydreliox
It's also extremely noxious at even very low (safe) concentrations so, unlike odorless methane, hydrogen, or carbon monoxide, people know immediately to stay away from the area.
The natural gas (mostly methane) that's piped into housing for heating or cooking is deliberately ordorized with hydrogen sulfide to make it noxious so gas leaks can be smelled.
Because it's far cheaper than diesel or hydrogen.
60% of the cost of trucking is fuel. A reduction in that provides a massive competitive advantage that will push out other trucks. Trucking is a highly competitive low margin business.
Green hydrogen uses about 3X the electricity per mile as a battery powered truck, it can never be competitive on cost. It may be better in every other way, but cost is primary.
Fertilizer? sure. Heating? maybe.
Cars? the infrastructure still has a long way to go. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Mirai/ for the deets.
Even barring a great battery, there are dozens of other great ways to store energy. Pumped hydro is 80%+ efficient, and all you need is a pump and a hill, vs hydrogen electrolysis, which maxes at 80% efficency, and then hydrogen combustion, which is like 40%, on top of all the exotic equipment required for manufacturing.
By all appearances, it just seems like an absolute no brainer....I really dont get it
They are still too heavy. Carrying a ton of battery every time doesn't really makes sense.
I understand the policy around hydrogen (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allocated $8 billion to hydrogen production) as a technological pivot for the United States which leads the world in oil and gas extraction and logistics tech. The US has a lot of gas handling experience.
Optimistically, green hydrogen will diversify the energy supply, bringing "energy resilience", a key policy buzzphrase. Batteries and pumped hydro are undeniably superior in round trip efficiency, but hydrogen does have some desirable properties such as relative ease of overland transport, very long term storage, and being a chemical precursor for some industrial processes.
Pessimistically, green hydrogen is a way for oil and gas companies to siphon many taxpayer dollars while doing superficial work similar to the compliance EVs of the 90s and 00s.
I'm optimistic mainly because my PhD in electrical engineering is being funded partly with the green hydrogen taxpayer dollars. Shout-out to my fellow taxpayers and my advisor's grant writing skills! I'm working on power electronics which are fundamental in renewable energy and by extension green hydrogen electrolysis.
The word "buzzphrase" implies that you think energy resilience is not as relevant as the proponents want to make it seem. Correct?
I've been thinking for years that resilience of the overall energy system is a factor that many green energy transition people appear to systematically overlook.
As I see it, chemicals based energy systems have a huge advantage over electricity based energy systems through their property of bringing large amounts of storage (and thus capacity to bridge outages) with them basically inherently.
The electrical grid is a delicate life support system and I'm convinced that it will - even in the far future - depend heavily upon chemical energy storage and transportation to give it resilience.
As far as I've heard the electrical grids in the US and Europe have come close to breaking points a lot more often over the last few years, compared to before. And even though huge sums of money are being invested in their build-out and maintenance, the supply situation with critical components such as transformers is apparently dire.
Alltogether makes me think that chemical energy storage (and thus, hydrogen, power-to-gas, ammonia, and such) will have a dead-sure place in energy systems.
I think BMW did. They had a good prototype in the early 2000s and really went to town with it. They marketed it heavily as a finished and usable product and I guess the thinking was that no one would notice the difference because the infrastructure wasn't there.
Now, the story goes that a sheik tried to test them and actually ordered a whole fleet, which BMW could not deliver. This dealt a heavy blow to BMW's hydrogen ambitions and the program only continued at a much much smaller scale.
Of course this is all anecdotal, and I do not know how much is really true, but it is the story I heard on multiple accounts when working close to these projects.
SpaceX looked insane to me. For a very long time I was incredibly sceptical Starship will ever fly. Well...
oh, and I remember one other thing. Even though the mirai drivers were getting free fuel (at the beginning), I think H2 was like the equivalent of $17/gallon marked on the pump.
A drop in temperature will be (more or less) proportional to a drop in pressure. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law
The nice case is adiabatic expansion, and at least the sign of the temperature change has the decency to behave the way one would expect:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process
The more realistic case for a gas station is Joule-Thomson expansion, and it thoroughly defies basic intuition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule%E2%80%93Thomson_effect
The reason I bought a Mirai is because I wanted to go zero-emissions but I’m an apartment dweller with no EV charging options. The Mirai is the best vehicle I’ve driven in terms of its features and comfort. However, once my fuel card ran low, I ended up getting a gas-powered car since $36/kg is prohibitively expensive for me to pay out of pocket.
I hope the hydrogen situation improves, since not everybody has convenient access to an EV charger, not to mention the cost of electricity in PG&E territory.
I still have hope for hydrogen fuel usage, but to me it has never made sense to try and push for consumer level hydrogen powered devices and cars. You can't just ignore an old hydrogen fuel tank in like an old junker car even if it is 99% empty, eventually that tank will pop and is a safety hazard. Where someone might accidentally damage or crash a vehicle with a hydrogen storage tank, it won't be just a localized fire, it is just a straight up massive bomb. And the extremely high pressures and/or cryogenic temperatures are not and never will be fool-proof enough for just the regular joe blow to have control over or easy access to it for refueling.
At the moment, we have no hydrogen fuel storage technology that can even get a single-digit-percentage of a hydrocarbon fuel storage specific energy density.
Additionally, none of the current hydrogen storage tech is flight-worthy from an aviation systems management (weight, balance, on-boarding, jettisoning) and safety perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Table_of_materi...
We don't have ANY suitable hydrogen storage tech that's even envisioned, let alone prototyped or practical, that can compete with liquid hydrocarbons for flight.
The closest alternative is ammonia, but for reasons mentioned later in the discussion, ammonia combustion is a very poor match for aviation engines.
How about inefficiency? Conversion from electricity to hydrogen and back will get you only about 35% of the original energy. When using a hydrogen combustion engine instead of a fuel cell, comparison gets a little trickier, but at least the hydrogen generation will cost you about 35%.
If you have a hydrogen energy supply chain and are storing hydrogen in vehicles, service stations and a lot of other infrastructure, escaped hydrogen may start causing structural issues in structures that were never designed with hydrogen storage in mind. If we transition to hydrogen powered cars, parking garages may have to be redesigned to handle metal embrittlement caused by accumulated hydrogen leaks from vehicles.
All this pearl clutching about hydrogen embrittlement ignores that industry solved this problem a century or more ago. It's a consideration that must be taken into account when selecting materials, not some sort of all powerful showstopper.
To be clear, none of what I'm saying should be taken as an endorsement of hydrogen as a fuel for automobiles.
That doesn't exist for trucks at least not end to end. Maybe something like [1] for the busiest parts of the network and then smaller, lighter batteries for the last mile.
Anyway, I'm not convinced there won't be a need for Hydrogen powered transportation unless we make big leaps in battery energy density (to reduce weight) or change our lifestyle.
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-launches-first...
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-launches-first...
Now this tactic has run its course and they are considering of what to do next.
Didnt Prius start the whole hybrid revolution, the logical next step would have been to go full electric.
> Despite the setbacks, Toyota insiders said they had not given up on hydrogen for passenger cars, with Toyoda discussing a partnership last October with his counterpart at traditional rival Hyundai to advance fuel cell vehicles.
It astounds me that people ask about gas vs BEV when great hybrids have been possible for years. And completely decent ones have been sold for decades
Basically every major vehicle Toyota makes comes as a hybrid. The GR86, GR Supra, and GR Corolla (Gazoo Racing) don't come as a hybrid, but they're niche performance-tuned gas vehicles. Oh, and the hydrogen Mirai and battery-electric bZ4X aren't hybrid. But Toyota is nearly all-in on Hybrids now.
And they're also pushing hybrids through other brands. Subaru is integrating Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive into upcoming Crosstrek, Forester, and Legacy models. The Mazda CX-50 hybrid doesn't just borrow Toyota's hybrid system, but even Toyota's engine.
Oh, and like Toyota, their Lexus division has hybrids for most of their models. 5 of their 6 SUV lines and 2 of their 3 sedan lines.
Plus, the Prius line itself is finally a car that gets accolades for more than just its fuel economy with Car and Driver saying, "Long the butt of jokes about tree huggers and science projects gone awry, the Prius has become swan-like in appearance and unexpectedly enjoyable to drive." They even ranked the Prius #2 in compact cars, ahead of the enthusiast-liked Mazda 3.
It can always be argued that companies could do more, but at least recently Toyota seems to be making a huge push for hybrid vehicles and even making some of their biggest vehicle lines (like the Camry) hybrid-only.
Was it the right move for Japan? Probably not.
London has had small numbers of hydrogen buses since 2004, although it's remained a small number since then. Currently 20 vs over 1400 BEVs.
They are marked, but they're still red buses that don't look much different to the rest. London restricts the way public buses can be painted (mostly red), and even efforts like this don't seem to be exempted.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_London_fuel_ce...