Featured Toyota Believes Fuel Cell Prices Will Match Hybrids

I've understood embrittlement to affect only certain metals. I can't say I know for sure, but I was going with the idea that this wouldn't matter to a carbon fibre tank, and that by now they've likely got stable linings for fittings and pipes.

Regarding the NIMBY end of it I think that one is a draw. You'll also get people who don't want a new right-of-way ripped in to service a new substation to feed some large high-speed battery chargers. And that's on top of the ones already yelling about generating facilities like windmills and reactors.

Example- The greater Boston area has been wanting to buy cheap hydroelectric power from Quebec for decades, but the NIMBYs have successfully prevented the development of the transmission lines that would support it.

 

People don't realize that Tesla actually tried battery swapping. There was a battery swapping station 1/2 way between San Francisco and Los Angeles and you could swap out your Model S battery.

No one used it. Even with a 7 minute swap time it was a flop.

Tesla shuts down battery swap program in favor of Superchargers, for now

 

The battery in the Mirai is about the size of the one in the Prius, it may even be the same part, and it is also NiMH. Most FCEVs are similar, because fuel cells have a slow response time to load demands. Without a battery to act as a buffer, you'd have a delay as the FC 'spooled' up when you floored the accelerator. So simply adding a plug to Mirai will get you 2 to 3 EV miles to the Volt's 53.

Nissan's FCEV design is different. I get into that below.

"You can get considerably more FCEVs than BEVs on the road per ton of lithium mined." That's Toyota's excuse for not making BEVs, though swap hybrid for FCEV. There is plenty of lithium, I think cobalt for the electrode might be more limiting in terms of raw materials. the supply issue is going to be in the battery production in the near future.

Hydrogen fills aren't only a pain to the end user when the station fill tank is low. Again, I'll say more below.

Another difference is in the use of the two products. Electricity is used everywhere. Investments into the grid and production are going to be needed even if we don't switch to plug ins. Preparing for EVs will increase cost, but there will be savings since the work for that can be done with the day to day requirements.

Hydrogen infrastructure for cars will need to be built from scratch.

Nissan's approach to vehicle electrification is pretty elegant. They have the drive train architecture from the Leaf. For the eNote hybrid, they simply use a smaller battery(maybe smaller motor), and add generator for a series hybrid.

The electric van they used for the FCEV literally uses the same drive train as the Leaf. So the battery meets all its power needs. The fuell cell is small, I think its output is lower than what the Prime uses during charge mode, so can only maintain lower speeds on its own. It just supplies a steady rate of charge to the battery.

Adding the plug and charger back would be a small expense. The unknowns are in how much space all the hardware takes up; I haven't seen interior shots of the van. Low output may not mean small size for the fuel cell. Those type of cells also run hotter than an engine, so insulation and shielding are required.

They there is Nissan's poor thermal control of the battery.

In that case, you need to make the hydrogen station capable of getting close to the flow rate of such an ultra fast charger, or gas station.

In order to quick fill a 10k psi tank, these stations are set up like an air compressor for powering equipment. There is a tank filled to a pressure higher than 10k psi, and the hydrogen in it is chilled to -40 degrees. When filled and chilled, a car can be filled with 5kg of hydrogen in 3 minutes, once the nozzle is hooked up. As the tank empties and warms up, the fill time creeps up. When the tank is 'empty', filling up takes as long as charging a BEV.

These $1.5 million stations might, at very best, be able to quick fill a half dozen cars in secession before fill times become slower than your 6.5 minutes. It might be able to fill a hundred cars over a day, compared to the thousands a gas station can service.

For comparison, a Volt or Clarity PHEV take 12 to 13 hours to fully charge from a 15amp outlet. So most people with PHEVs don't need to install anything. Neither do those with a BEV that aren't going over 40 to 50 miles in a day.

A 40amp Level 2 charger from Clippercreek costs $635, but there are cheaper options. Installation will vary.

The Phill home CNG refueling station was nearly $5000, when it was available, plus installation. Then the annual maintenance for seals replacement was a several hundred dollar cost. CNG vehicle tanks are 3000 to 3500 psi.

In addition to the cost for upgrading the hardware in order to fill a 10k psi, there is the added cost of making it hydrogen compatible. Then there is the cost for making the hydrogen.

That's my plan, and how most people BEVs, that aren't Teslas, do things.

My shallow dive came up with embrittlement mainly be a concern when welding, but the hydrogen involved with FCEVs is under greater pressures than in other applications. Separate for embrittlement, hydrogen can behave like a halogen at times. So potentially as friendly to other materials as chlorine.

The fuel tanks fall under the same USDOT rules as CNG tanks, so have a set end of use date. I expect they will be retired before hydrogen exposure becomes a problem, but that still leaves the fuel lines.

That experiment was way before the Model 3, and all Teslas still had free Supercharging. It might go differently now for those that have to pay to charger. IIRC, the swap was $45.

 

Really like something about this. Is it the beard?

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Swappable with what other cars/trains/houses? Oh.

And if you didn't like their pricing or terms you could go across the street to... Oh.

They built it to fail, and they succeeded.

 

they built it to counter & foil the fool cell car's lobby - attempting to kill EV's from acquiring incentives so that only hydrogen cars could get them. Their puppet Congressman wrote rules to say you had to refuel in a certain amount of time , which was done to assure battery car recharging would fail due to slower refuel times. The lobby never presumed that electric cars could get back on the road as fast as a compressed tanks could get refilled - much less - faster than a big gasser. Here's a demonstration to show how stupid the lobby looked - after Tesla came up with this;

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It was built to get ZEV credits for fast refueling. When the hydrogen lobby got the rules changed to exclude battery swapping, there wasn't much incentive to continuing the program with the lack of consumer interest. Another company, in Israel I think, tried doing the battery swapping thing. Last I heard they are out of business.

Compared to the price of filling up an engined competitor to the Model S, the swap was cheap, but it was competing against free fast charging.

When you need a replacement battery for your lawnmower, or any cordless tool, is there third party options that slip right in with the tool and charger. All the brands I've seen have proprietary cases to their batteries that prevent cross sharing. With the pack part of the chassis structure, why would car companies be different? Besides, the others don't even want in on the Supercharger network at this time, they aren't going to agree to Tesla terms for a swap standard.

I don't see how battery swapping will ever succeed, because batteries aren't propane tanks. When you swap a tank for a grill, it pretty much the same as the tank you turned in. It is going to be able to hold amount the same amount of propane as the old one. That isn't true for a battery. Swap a battery, and the replacement may have a reduced capacity compared to the swapped one.

Tesla's solution was to make you come back, and get your original pack. That other company had the batteries to their cars lease only, or was a ride share.

Once you find a spot that has a shot at working.

 

Just as an FYI, only the S and X are configured for quick battery swaps. The model 3 battery does not have that feature.
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Yes it is all about defining the problem. The fuel cell lobby wants you to define it only as public charging, but in reality people like the convenience of charging at home. They don't want you to think about the cost of building infrastructure. Honda couldn't even get a home cng filler out in the market at a reasonable cost, I doubt people are going to pay $100K to fill with hydrogen in their garage if they could just put in a dryer outlet and fill a bev with electricity (that's what I did for my tesla).

California's CARB says the cost of a 360 kg/day hydrogen station is around $4M using today's technology. DOE looking at doing it cheaper and less renewably says $2.6M. That's about 90 cars a day peak/station ($4kg. Both are talking about fueling for 1M cars in 2030, but that is not nation wide and at a cost to tax payers of at least $2B for 1000 hydrogen stations. Now $2B is only a small part of DOE budget, but the country also has 300M cars and 1M plug-ins today, that doesn't seem like good payback.

Now by 2025 battery pack costs should be down to around $1/wh or a 80.5 kwh pack like that in the tesla would cast $8,050, or around $800,000 for 100 packs, lets say $1.2M giving profit for the batteries and allocation to have them decay faster . A station that could charge 50 packs an hour, would have peak ability to put change 100 packs in an hour, 200 packs in 3 hours, etc. That's about what high volume gas stations can do. My guess is a bi directional 480VAC 5 MW connection, 2 swapping robots station land etc would cost about $1.5M, lets call it $3M per swap station when you include the batteries, but to service 100 M plug-in vehicles you need far less because home charging, work charging, L2 shopping charging, and L3 charging take up most of the demand. Lets say 10% of "charging" is swap in 2030 - that would require about $10B for 5000 swap stations to cover the US including the price of inventory batteries with some having fewer batteries and only 1 swapping robat and slower grid connections. Further if we are talking about filling renewably it would take only 1/3 of the windmills and solar panels to fuel, a much easier proposition compared to renewable hydrogen. This is about 5x the cost for 100x the vehicles served as hydrogen. Japan because of its density requires fewer hydrogen stations but swap is much simpler with smaller packs. The problem with swap is we probably need around 10 million plug-in vehicles before its economically viable without government footing the bill, but that should happen relatively soon in china.

 

...worked closely with high pressure H2 my whole life, every single day, up close and personal. No special probs. Herein we are hearing a lot of chemophobia. Embrittlement was something we faced in certain less common situations when heating with certain metallurgy, and we just followed heat up/cool down/pressure up rules very carefully. But the job of the chemical engineers is to design properly the H2 metallurgy and equipment for the applications. And then test that out rigorosuly before you see it. But something like stainless steel and low temps, duck soup I think.

@bobzchemist - so what was the safety report on that O2 tank issue? Sounds like I would have got fired if I had allowed that to happen in my lab, because cylinders have certain safety handling rules. Yes if you break the top off a gas cylinder you get cruise missile, regardless of the contents. And this argues against H2 FCV somehow? The cylinder is supposed to be safely secured, normally for us that meant upright in a holder. Trying to recall if we had a size limit allowed inside.

 

Not arguing against or for anything but my own paranoia - it would just scare the poo out of me personally until I could see the safety data. It was a university lab, so I think a graduate assistant or three got the boot - it was a long, long time ago - but the noise of that cylinder going through the wall will stick with me forever. It was a minor miracle that no one got hurt.

 

There's been a number of promising developments in fuel cell technology recently. I wouldn't be surprised if they fall dramatically in price.

There remains the problem of the cost of the actual hydrogen, though there have been big leaps there as well (new catalysts for electrolysis, using ocean water, etc.) it remains expensive.

techxplore.com/news/2019-05-fuel-cells-cheap-gas-vehicles.html

rdmag.com/news/2018/12/new-fuel-cell-catalyst-uses-fraction-platinum-currently-used

 

i just gotta ask something, FCEV`s use liquid hydrogen right? Is there a reason it has to be liquid rather than gas? Is it cause the gas got a higher chance of exploding or some? Cause its the production of liquid hydrogen thats expensive and non-envoirmental friendly right?

 

I understand it to be a question of range. In liquid form, you can get a "normal car's worth" of range out of a suitcase-sized tank.

In gas form you'd need a fuel tank the size of a dirigible to match it.

Edit: I've been corrected- the FCEV is still using gaseous H2, just very, very compressed. I suppose a liquid tank would be smaller still.

 

FCEV use compressed gaseous hydrogen, not liquid hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen will just boil off instantly if not kept under pressure anyway and is complicated (and energy intensive!) to make and transport.

There is research on storing hydrogen in solids (porous carbon, MOFs, etc), but getting the right bonding energy hasn't happened.

Plastics have advanced so fast, it's been a shock that upended research into hydrogen storage. Not long ago the DoE seemed to think compressed hydrogen wouldn't ever be practical because of the weight of the tank (hydrogen has excellent energy density by mass, but poor energy density by volume so you need a big, strong tank), but here we are with large, light, and remarkably strong plastic tanks in the Mirai.

 

As per @Leadfoot J. McCoalroller we are talking high pressure hydrogen gas, compressed gas for FCV.
I am not aware of any enviro-issue with liquid H2 but that would be very expensive to manufacture and have a car.
Outside of Helium, liquid H2 is the next closest thing to absolute zero temperature, so that is not easy or common.

I guess this is intended for @MagnusAG99

 

OK that makes sense a couple grad students messing around.
Normally all gas cylinders have a cap that screws on there, so when you are moving the cyllinder, that should be on. Then should have a holder with chain or bar to hold the cyclnder upright in the stand. I do not recall what type of gas we allowed inside but N2 ...maybe the welders have a small O2 tank not sure. Anything toxic would be smaller and in a fume hood.

 

El Dobro that is hyped up BEV-advocacy anti-H2 rhetoric.

 

Bob Wilson