Featured Hydrogen Fuel Cell's Dark Side(s)

If you read the bloomberg article I posted or even the part that I put in my notes, Shell has decided to stop investing in hydrogen in california. First Element is that company that toyota invested in that is running most of the california stations. Is it forward looking? I don't think so its business plan is way behind schedule which is why there are only 66 stations and many of them are un reliable instead of the 200 promised. Hydrogen stations were supposed to be much cheaper and more profitable and fast chargers. That is not the case. Tesla was able to build a much better network. If it was easy and profitable toyota or hyundai or others would be doing it. The hydrogen highway in california is a failure and they are just trying to make it more reliable.

Really big oil says hydrogen is the solution, but ... isn't building stations because it doesn't believe it will work for personal light vehicles.

[quoute]
FuelCell Energy and Toyota Announce Completion of World's First "Tri-gen" Production System - Toyota USA
Newsroom[/quote]
The first tri-gen was in 2016, so pretty misleading here. This is a good next experiment for short range fuel cell trucks though mandated bev or fc in the port of long beach. This has nothing to do with a personal vehicle infrastructure. This truck experiment I agree with. Until then why push to commercialize personal hydrogen vehicles?

I don't think that inacurate story could be any more misleading. BMW is going to produce a demo ix5 fuel cell as a demo. It is part of bmw's partnership with toyota. It is not using an ice, and there is no ix4 fuel cell. This will not be sold or leased to the public, it is only a demonstration vehicle to get feedback. It is using toyota fuel cell plates, but manufactured into a fuel cell by bmw. It has a 2.5 kwh hybrid battery to provide power and buffer the fuel cell and capture regn braking. BMW sold over 15% of the vehicles last year as plug-ins, no they are not getting rid of electric cars, they are growing them. They did do a 7 series hydrogen ice demo a long time ago.

What is it about hydrogens failures that you fail to recognize. These retreads of puffery that never materialized are not breakthroughs. Nothing wrong with exploring new tech (well old tech) like the honda cr-v fuel cell. It can run happily in small volume on the tax payer funded infrastructure not in place. As I said in a previous post, they should run experiments on delivery vehicles. Is it exciting, no, it was suposed to be cheap and easy by now.

As the grid continues to decarbonize, and green fuels are added to gasoline, and battery costs continue to fall - phevs and bevs continue to improve. When Mary Nichols of CARB pushed hydrogen over plug-ins 15 years ago she was part of the political movement saying plug-ins could never be where they are today. She recently turned in her hydrogen mirai for a ford BEV. This is the woman that led the charge for government funding of hydrogen for personal transportation, but now no longer working for carb she has made her choice and thinks trucks not personal cars are where hydrogen has a chance.

 

Wow!

Hopefully the younger generation is more positive and welcoming to technology.
No wonder so many youngsters complain about the older generation and the ecological and financial mess they are leaving them in the USA.

Maybe Greta Thunberg is on to something.

I would tell the youngsters don't think all grownups are like that.

 

Using the word exciting makes your comment sound like it comes right from the marketing department of big oil...in the last century

I saw a snail crawling across my garden the other day. I don't think it was evolving but it was making progress!

How can hydrogen continue to become a major player? Isn't that like watching a Little League baseball game and seeing the weakest player on the team strike out for the 3rd time in a row and noting that he's continuing his path to become a NY Yankee?

Maybe one day soon they'll realize that they've ground off just a bit too much

Mike

 

After reading a couple dozen fluff pieces extolling the virtues of hydrogen, yet never seeing a hydrogen pump appear near an EV charger, I think they'll understand why we were jaded on the subject.

 

I’m very open to new technologies.
I am one of the early adopters to convert my 2nd gen Prius to a plug-in.
Also a very early adopter of BEVs back in 2010.
I have spent hundreds of hours talking to the public at state fairs, community groups, car shows, state legislators, and churches.

When you hear promises about hydrogen cars for 40 years and NONE of them come to pass, you get jaded.

You throw a ton of references that you say support your position.
People have taken the time to read those. They reply, finding they don’t say what you say they do.

You then brush that off.
If you want to discuss the tech, great. Please respond to the critiques.
If you are just throwing as much mud at the wall to see what sticks, please stop and read the articles you choose to link.

 

There is a ten year history of hydrogen announcements down in the FCEV sub-forum.

 

How is building a lot more hydrogen stations for fuel cell cars that no one really wants going to solve the problem. How much should tax payers pay for each fuel cell car -$20,000? $50,000? $100,000?

Europe now has over 250 hydrogen stations with 105 in the most pro hydrogen country - germany. Last year German sales of fuel cell vehicles dropped to 263. The chicken and egg problem is being solved but expensive hydrogen stations are getting more expensive, and fcv aren't selling. California would be better off just subsidizing stations in germany.

fuel cell lobby wanted $300M in california tax dollars but is getting another $106M instead. Lawmakers strike $106 million deal for hydrogen vehicles - CalMatters
To put that in perspective hydrogen with 1.1% of the market and less of the installed base is getting 15% of the money, while plug-ins representing 98.9% will get 85%. Hey the plug-ins don't really need it to grow why not throw all the money at hydrogen cars. That would be exciting.

Is she driving a fuel cell vehicle? I thought her family had a bev and she doesn't own a car herself, not that that matters.. If she is not driving a fuel cell, why not if its so much better?
x.com

I don't know what age you consider youngsters, but I encourage you to ask them if they want a fuel cell vehicle. I don't think the target of fcv includes anyone under 40. A lot of them will tell you they want a plug-in though if they could afford one.

 

Transportation options need a complete reset from current options - any technology that might do that should be encouraged.

How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America - Vox
"The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created."
Why Do Many Gen Xers and Millennials Hate Baby Boomers? | Psychology Today
"Many Gen Xers and Gen Y-ers (millennials), however, perceive baby boomers in much less flattering terms. Boomers hogged the economy and the world’s resources for their own financial gain and/or consumptive habits, I’ve been repeatedly told. They are often seen as greedy and wasteful, with no regard for what future generations will inherit. To put it another way, they’re frequently viewed as dinner guests who’ve eaten and drank pretty much everything set out on the table, leaving only scraps for those who came later to the party, even their own children. In short, the sorry state of the world, including global warming, is considered to be largely their fault."

A new technology - hydrogen or another break through is sorely needed for transportation.
The mountain of debt that the younger generation in America is being saddled with by the previous generation is unconscionable.
The current transportation status quo -the people clinging to gas and electric- the current love affair with debt as well as disdain for potential new solutions and closed minds to a new path forward are probably symptoms of a much larger problem.

 

Love it.
Electric is now part of the problem with gasoline.

 

So as a Boomer, I'm to blame? (this is not directed to John321). My Grandparents and Parents grew up during the recession and the war years. They scrimped and scraped and saved. As a kid, I never got more than 1 present for birthdays or Christmas. I couldn't do that to my kids. So yes, I overspent and overconsumed and gave them everything I could. And now they want to blame me? I guess we've turned them into spoiled brats. Maybe we should have stuck with the 1 gift scenario, but then would we have been labeled as cheapskates?
.

 

Did you support tax cuts for the upper classes and corporations, and rack up debt to pay for those extra gifts? Ignore warnings of the damage being done to the environment?

The criticisms aren't about what the individuals did, but how things were run when the group gained public and private power.

 

generational jealousy. we're all equally bad. finger pointing never solved anything, but it is what humans do best.

 

Great. Does encouragement mean very high taxes to pay for subsidies even after all the promises of breakthroughs turned out to be false. Does it mean robbing phev and bev drivers because you want to use all the renewables to fuel green hydrogen and it takes around 4x electricity to power a personal fcv for the same miles as a similar phev or bev? Sounds like you are part of the hydrogen lobby. How about trucks and r&d and not wasting billions more on a personal vehicles. You saw my article and the 4 companies pushing for more tax funding.

The breakthrough we have had is for plug-ins (PHEV and BEV) which are doing things that the hydrogen lobby said could not be done. I know 5 gen Y (28-43 yo) that have plug-ins 2 on my block. 4 more will likely buy one in the next couple of years. That is not counting my family. My brother, myself, and 2 cousins (one a gen Y) have 2 teslas, a ford mach E, and a cadilac lyriq. My partner is going to probably lease an i4 and she is a gen Y. None of us live in california but none of us would take a fuel cell instead. Talk to some gen Y, don't read crap from vox about generational resentment about climate, and say what they really want is to pay higher taxes to help keep transportation the same but more expensive with hydrogen.

Hell even toyota has admitted that they aren't going to make very many fcv and they are finally investing more heavily in plug-ins. Its taken a long time. Look at the data. Even with around $50K/vehicle of subsidies from the japanese, american, and california government, people aren't putting many fcv on the road in california. Many that tried them have swiched to a plug-in.

 

Well I could tell you that us baby boomers’ obsession with actually starting the “hydrogen economy” are probably the reason hydrogen is getting a bad break but it has also been really bad timing. Remember George Bush’s $1.2B Hydrogen Fuel Initiative that he announced in 2003? This was because of the sorry state of battery technology at the time and hydrogen and fuel cells seemed the best solution to make us energy independent on fossil fuels. By the time he tried passing it through congress it got knocked down to around $220M in 2005. Why? Toyota and Honda came out with hybrids and one was particularly popular - the Prius. As you know efficiency and conservation will always be a better value than new technology.

But before that we boomers have always been obsessed with using hydrogen to run things. Allis-Chalmers was the company who made the first fuel cell forklifts, tractors and golf carts in the 60’s while GM built the first fuel cell car called the Electrovan. Read about all the progress here: Timeline of hydrogen technologies - Wikipedia. The first 700 bar compressed hydrogen fuel tank was demoed in 2001. Since in 1804 Swiss inventor Francois Isaac de Rivaz patented the first hydrogen car everybody has tried to make hydrogen the fuel to save us from whatever. So why is it still unpopular as a fuel or an energy carrier? Read this:
https://dannykusuma.medium.com/hydrogen-hype-a-story-of-energy-loss-f37a592331c8#:~:text=Some stations generate hydrogen onsite,further: DOE, 2009).

Written this year and it explains a series of negative sum gains when using hydrogen by a young engineer.
Highlights

• The best electrolyzer today consumes 50 kWh to produce 1kg of hydrogen
• At 66% conversion you have a heat loss of 34%
• To do this on a massive scale requires getting hydrogen to refueling stations from a single supplier. You can do this through pipelines or via shipping. Piping hydrogen through pipelines requires multiple compressors further down the line to keep it flowing which consume about 3-5%.
• The second way is to ship it and the main takeaway is to convert hydrogen to ammonia (something discussed by @Trollbait and @austingreen in other posts) which has an efficiency rating of 92% using the Haber-Bosch process. Then uses a cracking process to convert the ammonia back to hydrogen which has an efficiency of 76%.
• After either transport method or you were lucky enough to cogenerate your own hydrogen you still have to compress hydrogen to 880 bar to get it to flow into 700 bar tanks. Theoretically you could get that down to 1.4 kWh to compress a kg of hydrogen to 700 bar but in practice it uses about 3.2 kWh to compress and then cool hydrogen to 880 bar. That's about 10% of the energy content.
• So you are now left with roughly 35% of the energy you put into making and then distributing the hydrogen.
• But we haven't finished since fuel cells don't use hydrogen as a fuel but as an energy carrier to convert to electricity and these are roughly 40 to 60% efficient.
• In every case, a cheaper, more efficient, simpler method of energy usage has beaten hydrogen to the punch.

So we boomers are guilty.....of wasting prodigious amounts of time, money and energy to make "hydrogen, the fuel of future". Does that mean the next set of engineers are going to abandon trying? Nope, they are still trying. Guess what? Are we there yet?

 

Green hydrogen production is improving. That's great, as much of our traditional hydrogen use goes into making ammonia to grow crops. It can also displace carbon use in other fields, like steel making. Then it could also work as energy storage in areas where renewable electricity production sees extended reduction in output.

In all those cases, the hydrogen can be made onsite or very close by. Vehicle fleets could also do so. They will save costs by having a few, high utilized stations were they are needed. Duty use could even mean slow fill pumps will work for them.

 

When I see the shafts holding wind turbines, I wonder if their hollow center should be filled with:

• battery stack to store excess energy for evening supply
• fuel cell storage holding excess energy for evening supply

Either way, the stored energy passes through the same lines that pass the wind power.

So which way, hydrogen or LiXX, to store and later distribute the excess power?

• Battery has the ability to respond within a cycle to changing loads.
• Fuel cells are slower to respond and still need buffer batteries to deal with rapidly changing load.

I prefer KISS engineering. The hydrogen fuel cell and electrolyzer are extra parts, not needed.

Bob Wilson

 

Don't they put ladders for the maintenance crews inside the towers?

Mike

 

It's been quite a while since I've seen anyone use that term.
Doesn't look to me like many follow the kiss theory these days, we've all apparently gotten too smart and getting smarter every day, it seems

 

Which will work better for 2 to 3 months of reduced renewable output during the monsoon season?

Hydrogen grid storage can start with it being fed to existing natural gas plants.