HD Hyundai set to debut production 14 ton hydrogen wheeled excavator
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electrek.co
* This information came from an employee of a technology company working on fuel cell mining equipment, on contract from a major US mining company. We were talking shop and it was an offhanded conversation that I haven't researched since.
The concept hasn’t really evolved much during the last 30 years. When I was in elementary school I was supposed to write a paper for science my science ‘class’ and was encouraged by my uncle, who was in the oil industry, to write about this miracle fuel. Even with the primitive technology available to me at the time (Alta vista?), it did not take long to shoot holes in the hydrogen fuels narrative:
It’s difficult to store; there is no infrastructure to support it; said infrastructure is expensive; it is almost exclusively produced from hydrocarbons (which is fine, but that’s typically antithetical to the values of the audience that it is ostensibly marketed as an alternative fuel to).. the list goes on.
And now Hyundai has invested in building this into a niche (wheeled excavators) of a niche (excavators) product.
I don't get it, what am I missing? Does this help them at trade shows?
Hydrogen is perfect, because it can theoretically be made fully green, but practically it never will be due to the terrible economics of electrolysis. But the fact it theoretically could be means it can qualify for all those tax breaks and grants.
Some tax breaks are contingent on investing in 'green' stuff - so for the oil industry it makes perfect sense to invest in the only green tech which will never not use oil and gas.
Win Win (except the environment of course).
I don't know if these limitations are fundamental, or if we'll eventually come across some breakthroughs that make them economical to deal with, but it's something we've struggled with for a very long time so far.
A quick google search says 70% of global market share as of 2022?! Even if that is off it still tells me my perception is incorrect.
Thanks again!
Converting excess electricity to hydrogen is not the worst energy storage technology.
Hydrogen ruins whatever it's stored in, it requires a huge amount of energy to store the hydrogen in a space efficient manner, etc.
Heat some sand, pump some water, compress some gas.
"I'm gonna go split up some waters to get some hydrogens" is fun as an experiment but ultimately not a practical way to store energy.
And yes, in that scenario I would absolutely expect all your alternative suggestions to be deployed already. But we are also just starting to have excess production at all.
^ I also don't think those are possible right now, as the number of electrolysis apertures would need to increase by orders of magnitudes (plural)
If we're speaking from a practical perspective not green-washing, using a methane fueled engine in an electric motor / generator setup is going to be way more efficient and flexible than some insane setup where you've got cryogenic hydrogen tanks hanging out a rock quarry.
[edited to add this:]
Let's distinguish between "pull more carbon from the ground and put it in the air" and "pull carbon from the air and make methane with it". Any H2 system today is going to use a hydrocarbon feedstock. Any "we'll crack water and save the H2" story is a pure fiction. Any process that relies on some theoretical "we've got spare energy so we're going to use that to crack water, then compress the everloving hell out of those H2s and then chill the crap out of that" could just as easily be "make methane using spare energy and spare CO2" likely with substantially less "spare" energy. [edit]
I think 1) will come with a storage and movement demand anyhow (at least short term and for steel making), so there is a feed source for funding (that is not just state subsidies) for the former. Whereas 2) fundamentally requires the CO2 removal from the atmosphere. And I do not see a clear funding source (besides state subsidies) for _that_ problem. (So I think we may mostly disagree on the existence of “spare CO2” as a cheap feeding source)
Do you have any comparison of the physical limits of energy required for those processes? As I said, a lot of my thoughts still rely on “intuition” and that’s always reasonably dangerous. But for me “move H2” sounds like a solvable problem. Yes probably not for longterm, cheap and pressurized storage, but that’s also not required. If you have “pressurized and short” and “longterm and plentiful” that would be fine too.
At "low pressures" (5-30x normal sea level atmospheric pressures) H2 needs roughly 2.5meters cubed to store 1kg of H2.
Apparently it's "normally" stored at 350 to 700 bar (700x sea level air pressure). Compressing it that much requires a bunch of specialized equipment and a lot of energy.
It needs to be stored in complex pressure vessels at -160C or below[2]. I'd hate to have this stuff in big pipelines in a giant network, when utilities still can't quite do normal pressure natural gas correctly[3].
It leaks through just about everything, and lots of "normal" things that it leaks through it also destroys it while leaking through it[4].
A hydrogen economy would require trillions of dollars of infrastructure to work. A methane economy can just work -- it's basically what's already in use to move natural gas around.
So -- I can't point to an existing technology that'd be 100% ideal for a zero net pollution (overall, not just at the point of use) for a mega truck or similar big utility vehicle running a strip mining operation. But H2 really seems like a non-starter once you look at the details. I think maybe better batteries, hot-swapped batteries, hybrid methane generators plus batteries, etc, is a start, and it can be done today. I personally would take a 60% improvement now over a maybe 90% improvement later but probably never.
There's lots of carbon floating around; you can collect it from industrial processes (cement / steel making). You can pull it out of the air or water if you really do have enormous amounts of "spare" energy, which realistically, you probably don't.
[1]http://www.awoe.net/Hydrogen-Compression-General.html
[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/cryo-compre...
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosion...
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
[edited to add reference to gas explosions and formatting]
The problem is, there are some applications that reasonably cannot be made to run on electric anywhere near soon (i.e. at least 20 years from now): oceangoing ships, planes larger than a Cessna and heavy machinery that runs for longer than a few hours every day.
For both environmental reasons and the foreseeable peak oil, these applications need to shift off from fossil fuel - and for that in turn, it's either biofuel (which is ethically questionable because it takes so much space) or hydrogen.
And how are these synthfuels made? They all (except of biofuel, which as I said is ethically questionable) require hydrogen as precursor, and that's my point. It's all carbohydrates, which means you need hydrogen and oxygen (these you can get from water electrolysis) and carbon (these you can get from e.g. CO2 sequestration).
The reason Hyundai is doing this is for the same reason they've been doing loads of stuff with hydrogen for many years: subsidies. They get loads of government money. In Korea. In the US. And elsewhere. There's lots of money to be had. Hyundai gets paid to perpetuate the myth that hydrogen has a future in transport.
And the beauty of it is that it isn't wasted effort. Most hydrogen vehicles are battery electric vehicles where a tiny battery is powered by a fuel cell. Most of the tech aside from the fuel cell and hydrogen stuff is kind of 100% the same. When it flops, you just ditch those bits and shove in a bigger battery and boom nice battery electric excavator.
The market is pretty much rejecting hydrogen on roads (too many battery electrical trucks being sold debunking the myth that they'll never work at this point). So, they switch to construction. Of course the exact same stuff is going to happen there. Cheaper batteries are driving down cost. There are loads of products targeting this market already from a wide range of vendors. Hydrogen is going to be a complete and utter dud there too.
The thing with batteries is that currently they require stuff sourced from one autocracy or another in pretty large quantities if you want decent power density. Hydrogen in contrast, that is pretty easy to make, any reasonably smart highschooler can whip up an electrolysis apparatus.
Hydrogen is definitely orders of magnitude worse in efficiency (especially if it, or the synthfuel it is used to produce, is burned of all things), no question. But we as the Western countries definitely need expertise and capabilities for geopolitical reasons.
Problems right now are: Battery availability, capacity and charging space. But smaller (feeder) vessels seem to already use these kind of booster batteries (not sure where I read that story though..) for short haul routes. So I'd expect to hear about some longer routes starting to use these too
Oh hell no. In large container freighters, they usually have the engine crankshaft directly attached to the prop shaft. Something like the RTA96 - that thing has a rated continuous power output of 80 megawatts. No gears, no nothing. That's also part of the reason why you need tugboats in ports or rivers like Hamburg's Elbe.
The only thing that is electric are the maneuvering thrusters. A ship of that size has a few of them but they are only used when precision navigation is needed.
> So in principle you should be put a couple of container batteries on top and swap those in locks.
At cruise speed large container ships burn thousands of liters of fuel. Even assuming you could get a quarter of the energy density of petroleum from batteries, one 40 ton container worth of batteries would be only one hour worth of runtime.
The power and energy involved in maritime traffic is absurd on an absolute scale, but the sheer size and transport capacity makes more than up for it (IIRC even the dirtiest container ship run on the dirtiest possible fuel has less emissions per kilometer and ton than the cleanest euro6 truck).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%A4rtsil%C3%A4-Sulzer_RTA9...
The first hydrogen car was built in the 1800s. There is nothing ‘early’ about this concept.
I think it's fantastic that a big company is exploring and innovating in one direction. The world needs diversification in research because you never know what you'll find.
If there was, the time to do that was before the world had invested trillions in capex.
If all of the subsidies and regulations incentivizing adoption of BEVs and hybrids were to end tomorrow, they would still continue to grow market share.
Hydrogen will never be able to say that.
Are you aware of some hydrogen storage technology that is becoming exponentially better year over year?
Why are you anchoring to Hydrogen specifically, instead of a broader category of fuels where that argument would make more sense?
The problem for Hydrogen as a transportation fuel is that there are many superior alternatives.
I’m not knocking hydrogen in general.
In fact: I appreciate what you have done for humanity, Hydrogen. I think the sun is great. I appreciate that you upgrade Canadian crude into premium transportation fuels for the US market. I’m sure you also do a lot of other great things for me that I don’t even care about.. but you suck as a transportation fuel, and the sooner you quit pretending to be something you are not, the sooner you can really get out there and be the Hydrogen we always knew you could be.
I’ve got your back, Hydrogen.
They're a mixture of direct on site storage of hydrogen to use as overnight energy when the solar farms no longer work, and largely about ammonia for transport and methanol as a sulfur free marine fuel.
Ammonia can be shipped overseas form Australian solar farms using methanol as shipping fuel to supply ammonia as fertilizer and ammonia as a power station input to generate electricity.
Dicking about with slippery hydrogen in tens of thousands, hell, millions of small personal transportation pods is a waste of resources and a safety hazard, it's too many individual things to keep maintained to the high degree required to prevent leaks, etc.
Doesn't solve all problems, but no technology is perfect.
I'm a bit skeptic about the source for this article, they're saying exactly what I would expect them to say.
[0] https://www.electrive.com/2018/05/15/shenzhen-byd-lands-larg...
I think it's perhaps not unreasonable (once again, looking at a many decade long scale) to look at possible futures and perhaps understand why both countries might be looking to try to eke out some greater degree of independence from both China and America.
Eg. moving a pile of soil from one place to another. Picking up the soil uses energy, but when you put the bucketload down again you recoup all the energy.
Gasoline engines don't recoup the energy, and it just becomes heat in the hydraulic fluid - so much heat that excavators need cooling systems to keep the fluid cool.
Then you've used energy to lift the boom and presumably rotate the machine.
Then you've used energy to "tip" the bucket so that the material falls out into the desired location.
At what point are you going to be recouping energy?
Practically they rarely are, because the way a piston is moved 'slowly' is to have a half-open valve with a pressure drop across it, and that half open valve wastes all the energy into heat in the fluid.
Plus as you say, excavators don’t use a winch and motor, they use hydraulics, and I don’t think the former would be powerful enough to move lots of earth. But OP said “theoretically”, which makes them technically correct (the best kind of correct.)
There are proposed energy storage systems that involve simply lifting a lot of heavy stuff to store energy, and then lowering it again to recover it. So the idea isn’t even new. But said systems have terrible energy density (lifting and lowering stuff doesn’t store very much energy overall) and are basically a terrible idea as it is.
In other words, emission, but hidden further up the supply chain.
With electricity, each thing we convert from petrochemicals to electricity, prevents us from offlining the first power source we'd otherwise decommission.
And the first thing we'd decommission would be the dirtiest power plants, eg Ng, coal, or some such.
H2 can be made clean, and so can electricity. No difference.
What we need to do is scale up clean h2, and support it. More clean tech is better, it's not a competition.
We should be minimizing the use of cars instead.
EPA says a gallon produces 8.8 kg CO2/gal tailpipe emissions [0]. A best-case sedan does about 50 mi/gal [1]. That's 17.6 kg CO2/100 mi for a best case sedan.
A Tesla Model 3 uses about 25 kWh/100 mi [2]. 1 kWh produces about 1 kg CO2 when produced in the dirtiest way (coal), but in the US it's currently about 0.4 kg CO2/kWh on average [4]. That gives you 10-25 kg CO2/100 mi.
So the best case ICE is better only if you are producing the electricity from coal (even gas power is better than ICE). The nice thing about EVs is that you can often charge them with the cleanest power (e.g. solar), but I'm not sure how common that optimization is.
[0]: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [1]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.shtml [2]: https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=46206 [3]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 [4]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US/12mo/monthly
Large power generation systems (even messy ones like coal) are tremendously more efficient per unit CO2 produced than a car engine[1]. You could make a case, though it's been proven wrong many times, that the production of the battery in an EV generates more waste than a comparable ICE vehicle.
https://www.cotes.com/blog/greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-ev-...
- more of our electricity is coming from clean (renewable/nuclear) sources every year. We reached 40% in 2023. [1] Solar and wind are dominating fossil fuel in new generation. [2]
- we're evolving battery materials for cleaner batteries, and more new battery materials will be sourced from recycled batteries instead of new mining. (EVs are still so relatively new and batteries live long enough that we haven't yet reached that point).
0) https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myt... 1) https://www.wri.org/insights/clean-energy-progress-united-st... 2) https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Also, if we have hydrogen supply chains we can use them to hand hydrogen from different sources in the future.
The technology is not here yet, but it is being developed. Battery EVs were completely impractical not long ago.
Third world countries can't make sweaters without violating 100 EPA and civil rights regulations. But they mine lithium cleanly? I don't believe it.
The biggest challenge, besides the obvious one of just building a huge quantity of wind and sun harvesting installations, is hydrolysers that make sense technically and economically when they operate far from 24/7, as the inverse of peaker plants.
For instance, the toyota Mirai's tank has a finite lifetime of 15 years from when it was made before it has to be replaced.
A good setup might be a nuke plant with a couple huge batteries along side, mixed with some grid PV and wind, and per-home battery, smart hot water heaters, and local PV.
H2 is just a silly fuel and a silly battery. Except on rockets where it's still silly but not quite as silly.
(yes, this is a little off topic under an article about an H2 excavator. But if they solve all those problems, I'll applaude them, because at one point we'll either have green H2 available or we'll cease to be an industrial society, of they don't, well it's their problem they tried, not mine)
>H2 can be made clean, and so can electricity. No difference.
Which electricity is clean? If you have clean electricity then you don't need hydrogen.
Where do the trucks get it?
It starts with another piece of infrastructure the port already has put in place. Most cruise ship ports in most major cities do not have the heavy power needed to power the cruise ships when they're docked at that particular city. Sf does. So rather than run their big polluting generators, cruise ships can just plug in while docked here. More than that, it's hydro power from Hetch Hetchy.
Now back to the ferry. They have a barge which takes that clean hydro power and disassociates bay water into hydrogen to power the ferry.
It's a great example of interconnected and symbiotic systems working together to benefit us all.
The vehicle is 20% zero emissions. The cookies are 20% zero fat.
No one is going to make clean energy when they can make money lying about it instead.
We don't accept this absurdity in any other industry.
20% of the grid and running all cruise ships off shore power is only the beginning, you are right. But the fact remains most other major cities don't even do that.
Don't let better be the enemy of good. Just because it's not 100% right out of the gate doesn't mean that 20% isn't better than 0%.
So you are saying you want it to be 0%?
Better is not the enemy of good. But lying is still the enemy of trust. We need trust if you want to push policy.
Example; a "zero emissions" plan that actually produces 80% emissions might get funded over a better plan that produces just 60%. Why? They claimed zero!
Now it really is the enemy of good. Isn't it?
It's 80% of the emissions it was yesterday. That's better right?
If you care to show me how it's zero, I'm happy to listen. I'd prefer if the answer is not based on lying because it's "better." For me, actual science is better.
>That's better right?
Not if it could have been better than that but wasn't because someone lied to get their product purchased over a better one.
The better product being selected because it's factually better for the environment; that's better.
There is no lie anywhere.
You are arguing to argue.
Come to SF, I'll buy you a ferry ticket and a coffee and we can talk about it on the hydrogen ferry itself.
I'm arguing to defend science because I believe claims of zero emissions when in fact they are not hurts progress both economically and through wear on trust in science.
I appreciate the invitation. Maybe next time I'm in the bay.
Cheers.
They meant hydrogen powered wheeled excavator. I could understand it if it was just the hacker news title but the article headline doesn't either. Not sure if this human error, bad AI or deliberately click bait.
Looking forward to BEV versions.
As long as 98% of our hydrogen is coming from fossil fuels it’s only a net negative here.
PEV’s are often more convenient and cheaper to use on a work site than diesel and are actually being adopted for that reason, it’s hydrogen that’s lacking distribution infrastructure.
Care to share some examples?
At the other end mini EV excavators are also becoming quite popular ex: Volvo ECR25, Bobcat E19e, etc
Do you even know what makes those mining trucks functional for this use case? The deeper the mine, the more effective they are!
A work crew putting in a trench really benefits from the equipment being quit. What you think of as “digging in your garden” is just one of plentiful examples of home construction scale equipment. There’s a lot of equipment that fits such purposes like rollers for people’s driveways etc.
Here’s a preproduction equivalent to the hydrogen prototype mentioned in the article:
320 Electric Medium Excavator
Operating weight: 22–24 metric tons | 48,501–52,911 lb Bucket capacity: 1.3 m³ | 1.7 yd³ https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/construction/electric-...
That said, people don’t work 8 hours without taking a break so arguably a smaller battery might be a good tradeoff.
Second, where is the charge point when you are building a new highway? Roads are usually the first to go in, so if you have to spend an hour driving to a charge point, that's an hour of productive lost
If it's out in the boonies, yeah, power usually follows the roads. If it's existing infrastructure being upgraded, just tap in to what is already there
I like electric vehicles, they make sense. I think most construction workers would like electric equipment as well, not as loud, less fumes, less heat. Overall better but it has to make sense.
Large mine trucks are either electric or hybrid. They recharge as they go into the pit.
Modern train engines are just diesel powered generators pushing electric motors. That's how they can claim 100mpg. They could do similar to the construction equipment, and still improve vs just powered by diesel engines directly.
Diesel generators running at a fixed duty cycle and optimized for efficiency can be way more efficient than a mobile diesel engine operating at a wide range of workloads.
"Diesel" can run on a variety of fuels (diesel, natural gas, propane, etc) so you could probably start synthesizing the fuels if you've somehow got a bunch of energy that'd otherwise be wasted; methane's still a bit of a pain to deal with but not nearly as nasty as H2; for feeding remote generators you'd just compress it not liquefy it, and that's something that's already commonplace today.
There's a more interesting question, in my opinion: what happens when it inevitably runs out?
Diesel is of course absolutely trivial. It can be refueled from any petrol station, you can bring your own barrel with a small pump, or even use a jerrycan. Easy to use both in urban areas and out in the boonies. Battery is a bit trickier. Worksite electric hookups and superchargers are viable urban options, and in remote areas you could use some kind of generator.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is a bit of a nightmare. Demand for hydrogen is unlikely to be high enough to warrant a very dense network of fueling stations, so even in urban areas it's going to take a significant amount of time to refuel. And in rural areas you're screwed: a fueling station could be hundreds of miles / kilometers away, and you're not exactly going to fill up a jerrycan with hydrogen either! There's no way you are refueling it on-site, having a regular worker messing around with hundreds or thousands of liters of hydrogen at 600x atmospheric pressure or cryogenic temperatures is just waiting for an accident to happen.
Which is the same as claiming we'd never have solar now, because solar was expensive years ago.
The article also says South Korea is full bore on h2, so this will have a market, and thrive there.
BEV doesn't have the capacity to do this. These units cannot be charged for 1hr 4 times a day. H2 is an instant recharge.
The many different makes ans models of H2 cars recharge instantly by this metric, and so will this.
Synthesizing fuels from CO2, water, and electricity seems like a better solution. It works with existing infrastructure and doesn’t have the storage or safety issues of hydrogen.
>The thing is, it’s highly unlikely that hydrogen will ever become a mainstream alternative to battery power – at least when it comes to on-road transportation
This points to https://electrek.co/2024/04/13/man-to-build-200-hydrogen-tru..., which quote MAN's CEO saying
>it's impossible for hydrogen to effectively compete with battery electric trucks.
A positive piece indeed.