VW says, fuel cells stupid for the next decade.

VW Says No To Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles' Future - HybridCars.com

nice way to put it. Its not a chicken and egg problem. If we tax everyone to build these hydrogen fueling stations, fcv still won't sell, at least for the next decade.

 

In Germany hydrogen will most likely be made from coal and electricity. Sequestering the carbon dioxide from the coal or natural gas, means that you can't build just million dollar reformers at the fueling station, you need to either truck in liquid hydrogen or build pipelines. This costs both money and energy. It might work at a handful of stations near pipelines, but we are talking adding at least a $1/GGE to hydrogen costs. The odds are that truck is going to be burning diesel to deliver that hydrogen. That makes it even less competitive to a phev burning methanol or gasp gasoline or diesel. The unsubsidized price of hydrogen at the us stations now would be at least 3x more than gasoline. That is where germany has an advantage, their gas is much more expensive and they can add more taxes to make hydrogen look better.

If the RAV4 EV does not sell well what chance does a more expensive not as nice Sante Fe hydrogen, that you can only fill up at a 100 stations if california builds them. The Rav4 you can fill at home, work, public charging, etc. The clarity, f-cell, toyota proposed fcv have a much worse case. They are very volt like but much more expensive. A phev can get filled anywhere unlike fuel cells.

Those car companies need to bring costs down, before governments spend a ton of money to build a hydrogen fueling network. No problem testing them on the network they are building in Germany and Japan, but Its hard to see who really is going to spend that much more for a hydrogen santa fe than an electric rav4.

 

That was from the DOEs review last year of costs in 2011. Some think that costs can be brought down as low as $3/GGE, or about to the cost of gasoline before road taxes. In 2005 DOE thought that coal based hydrogen produced by gasification, could be brought down to around $1/GGE, but no one thinks that is possible now, nor do they want to push a higher polution stream and fcv subsidies based on ZEV. That will require a number of technical breatkthroughs that are far from certain though. Gas prices could rise much faster than natural gas, or the government could raise gas taxes and continue to subsidize hydrogen, but..... anything real looks like at least a decade away, just like it did 2004. One possible technology to bring down costs is metal hydride storage which would not require the compression or liquification, but it would make a roll out of current hydrogen fueling station technology obsolete. Does the emperor have clothes? Not right now, but some of the car companies like the subsidies to continue.

Methanol is a different matter. Infrastructure would be much less expensive and current infrastructure could be turned over. The fuel tanks on fcv would be much less expensive with methanol also, but the hydrogen lobby and the ethanol lobby do not like methanol and they are powerful. On a methanol fcv, fuel tanks would be cheaper but their are more techical barriers to the fuel cells. Natural gas carries with it some of the infrastructure problems as hydrogen, but it is much more straightforward. You just need the tanks and compressors, not the manufacturing. Methanol could also be burned in phevs and regular hybrids and ice vehicles. Its easy to produce methanol in renewable processes but cheaper right now from natural gas. In California's methanol experiment, they found that M85 worked very well, but low gas prices and the ethanol lobby killed the experiment. Methanol is much cheaper today than gasoline.

 

Yes add in the wind farms, and the French Nuclear there will be plenty of extra electricity at night. If we look at solar to hydrogen costs its around $9/GGE, which looks bad in the US, but with the price of gas in Europe, it doesn't because of the higher fuel taxes. The economics/tax policy for Europe require much less of a change than they would in america.

That is where the hydrogen subsidiesers arguments get a little off, and where vw is coming from. You can more efficiently put the electricity in a phev. Instead of paying the hydrogen stations to make it, you could just reduce electric rates for buyers of plug-ins. That would cost the governments much much less money. You don't get to zero emissions, just very low emissions though, if you include a range extender engine. The big objection to phevs taking off is costs, but costs are much lower than fuel cell vehicles, and that looks like it will be true for over a decade.

That is the metal hydride storage, and it is quite real, but needs some technical breakthroughs. It would allow for much cheaper trucking of fuel and station storage. It would also make hydrogen cars less expensive to produce. My big objection is building all these fueling stations in multiple countries. If metal hydrides work, most of the money spent will be useless, as hey will have their storage tanks and expensive systems ripped out and replaced. I think Germany is a good place for all the countries to test their cars though. We don't need to build it in america too. For the US taxpayer it would be cheaper to just chip in to a european system for test, than to build another in california

I say don't tax us all for infrastructure before the car companies actually make more of these miracles happen.

Sure, but many of the objections are to the public subsidies and regulatory requirements not the potential.

Honda and Mercedes are gung ho, with cars available, well a handfull of cars. Hyundai and Toyota have promises. All 4 want lots of government money. Public risk, private profit.

VW, BMW, Ford, GM, Nissan are doing R&D and are promising cars if the tech ever develops, but don't want to have to put a few more fuel cell cars out just because Toyota and Mercedes are helping government write the rules and redistribute the money.

 

I skimmed the new NRC report, which has large sections on phev, bev, and fuel cells. It guesstimated that the cost of hydrogen would be around $6/GGE for this test in 2015-2020. One of the main hang ups on alternative fuel cars is fueling availability which will not be there, so they estimated that between 0%-1% will be fuel cells in this period to 2020, much lower than the 2008 estimate. They said that in high volumes fuel cell vehicals might get cheaper than phevs by 2035. To drop the costs they need a market of at least 200,000/year. Will we get that market? They estimate a 55% by 2050, and a 45% it won't even materialize by 2050. To get to that market it will take a lot of government money. Lots of nuances in the report, and I have not read it all.

If they are made in volume the prices will drop, but people will need to actually want them for that, or governments will need to buy them for people. I agree absolutely, lets let germany build a great test site, and wait to see if people there like them. Hell, the california government can even give the german government money for the test, instead of wasting more in california.

Here I disagree with you. Nixon, Carter regulated it so the US could not exploit natural gas resources. They are huge, and easily can supply a percentage of the fleet. The question really is do you build a hydrogen fueling structure with the natural gas, or do you put it in power plants and fuel plug-in vehicles.

 

You definitely need more wells, its not like the old days of the 1920s of sticking a sttaw in the ground, pulling up oil and burning the natural gas that came up with it because it slows down oil production. Well it is a little like that on fracked sites in ND where they are just flaring the gas. These shale fields are huge, and the eagle ford in south texas hasn't even been tapped yet. Its more expensive because we want them to actually recycle the water, an expensive commodity.

So what don't I agree with, the poor negative that has crept in here. THere is plenty of natural gas! Nixon and Carter put on price controls so that it wasn't worth looking for, then they encouraged the country to build coal power plants, because the government caused shortage of natural gas made high poluting coal power plants the government program. Just watch what happens in the next 5 years.

Those rooting for coal, and people like the koch brothers will spread fear of natural gas.

The free marketers and environmentalist will be proved right in the next 5 years when the disaster of running out of natural gas looks more like a made up fear. Remember this is a price cap for fracked natural gas too, as it is quite easy to make in a renewable but currently more expensive manner.

I think the figure is if we went 10% of the miles on our light duty fleet using electricity generated by natural gas, we would use 2% more natural gas in this country. That does not sound like a big enough increase to greatly move the natural gas market. By the time you get over 10% in plug-in or hydrogen miles, I would expect a lot more wind to be built to power the fleet.

 

NRC said FCV might be cheaper by 2035 if a number of things happen. The biggest are fueling infrastructure and volumes of over 200,000 cars per year. Later in the document they said that there was only a 55% chance that would happen by 2050, they didn't give odds by 2035, but it has to be much less.

The end of the document they said that by 2020 - 7 years fuel cells would have very low penetration and be vary low volume 0%=1% of the market, where they really need to be at least at 2% to do volume enough for fuel cell costs to come down. VW was looking out 10 years. The information in the document supports the position that at least until 2020, fcv will not take off.

If you truck hydrogen you need to spend energy currently from the grid to liquefy it, then you use diesel to truck it to a station where you need to spend more energy to keep it compressed in special tanks. The further the source is from the station the more money it costs. Still for a pilot program this is likely the cheapest to do it. There is no way you can make it work though without it costing much more than gasoline if the producer of the hydrogen is far away. Hydrogen is much harder to pipe than natural gas, so long pipelines are very costly also. There are only pipelines in small parts of the country, not viable for most of it. That is why on the graph for a test, when there are only hundreds of stations the cost would be around $6/kg. Currently the government is eating around $9/kg because there just aren't many cars, and the hydrogen takes energy every hour just to store. To build something better you build a reformer in a station, which currently costs about $2M to fill any quantity of cars. Cover the country and we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars. Who will build it if the cars don't come? Germany is building a system that looks like it will cost a few billion dollars. That seems convient enough to test the cars, to see if anybody would really buy one.

Sure Honda and Mercedes have made the most progress and have demo vehicles on the road. Toyota and Hyundai are promoting them like crazy with press releases. Why don't we let these four companies build the fueling stations with there own money if they are so sure that people will buy the cars. Tesla is building its own quick chargers.