Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai answer fuel cell questions

For question 1) I agree with those fuel cell advocates, that it is unfair to compare future possible battery advancements to today's fcv as far as fueling.

2) Yep, for question two, I agree with Mr. Voelker's analysis of their answers

3) Here is where the lobbying group and car companies really poked the pooch. There is not anyone that isn't going to make money on them asking for these cars now, and they haven't given any compelling reason why individuals were. Here is a car and driver review.

2015 Hyundai Tucson Fuel Cell First Drive – Review – Car and Driver

Which makes you ask what is better about it than a less expensive phev? I can't think of a thing to excite people.

 

Interesting replies, even though they dodged some of the questions.
They do have a point about fuel cells being better suited for larger vehicles. I'd like to see how, for example, a city bus compares, one being a fuel cell bus and another BEV. Here, refueling time doesn't matter, as long as the bus can recharge over night. What would the specs be in terms of weight difference, passenger capacity difference, cost difference, fuel cost difference, etc.

Mike

 

Fuel Cell technology is taking forever to be released to the general public.
It's currently being deployed sparaticially in industrial applications like fork lifts and city buses.

Both Ballard Power and Plug Power who have parterened with Honda for the FCX Home Fueling Station (HFS)
have gone through many versions of the HFS and types of membranes looking for which type of cell will work best
for public release.

Last I heard, natural gas powered cells were being discussed as a way to keep the grid involved for home fuel cells, aka
cells to produce the fuels for the cars, household heat and hot water as a by products.

How it will end up when it's finally released is anyones guess.

The 2002 Honda FCX was a very attractive offering in my personal opinion (IMPO),
but the current models lease terms and availability are way out of my geographical and price range. As is most probably a Home Fuel Cell.
I can't wait to see Toyota offering next year and the changes it will bring to the auto fuel cell segment.
It's still hard to let go completely of what fuel cell technology has to offer, environmentally. Even after all the agencies involved get their piece of the
fuel cell pie charts.

I'll read the article linked above when I have more time to look at it in depth, sorry about my lack of time ATM, Ashlem.
Fuel Cell for autop is takm

 

My take is that it is the same old same old. Put down the BEV while avoiding saying something that isn't completely positive for the FCV.

For question #1) comparing possible future advances isn't fair, but they are still pushing that refueling will as convenient as gasoline, while omitting that may not be so 100% of the time. The nature of handling high pressure gases means a station can only handle some many cars within a given time. Arrive after a rush of customers when the station pressure is low, and refueling a FCV can be nearly as long as fast charging a BEV.

#2) Makes sense to limit the cars to people near refueling stations. That just doesn't strike me as being really ready to sell these cars when the automakers are doing very little to help the expansion of said stations. FCVs may prove to be better for heavier vehicles than BEVs, but since such would future vehicles at this point, and not a straight up comparison at this time.

#3) Honda and Mercedes both have had a pilot lease program for FCVs for a few years now. How do those leasees feel about their cars? Any movement among them pushing for FCVs?

 

Right now cost of the bus, maintenance, and fuel for fuel cell busses are all much higher than cng busses.

Austin has an experimental plug-in fuel cell bus which seems to have lower maintenance costs, and has much lower fueling costs than a straight fuel cell bus. The price would be lower in volume as big batteries are cheaper than fuel cells, and allow the fuel cell to be greatly down sized. The stack only needs to provide steady state power, and can recharge the pack at stops. This should put less pressure on the stack and less maintencance. Key is getting the cost of fuel down by A) local production from methane at a depot, and B) refueling the battery with much cheaper than hydrogen renewable electricity.

Fork lifts are also a place where fuel cell research seems to be working.

Neither of these applications though require a large roll out of publically funded hydrogen stations.

 

This piece has a nice description of a hydrogen station:
A visit to a hydrogen refueling station at Ecoful Town in Toyota City, Japan
A car takes 5 minutes to fill there.

 

To me the key is these expensive stations can only handle 30 cars or 6 busses a day. Assume a car fills up once a week and you have no busses. With 100 stations you have 700 station days in a week or a max throughput of 21 K fill ups. But gas stations aren't uniform, there will be clumping and people with collide, leaving you with only about 10K cars as through put, with some cars waiting hours on the weekend. Solutions are liquid hydrogen for more throughput on the busier sttations, but now these fuel cell cars would be less efficient than cng with more tax money going to build hydrogen stations perhaps as much as $30,000 per fcv.

 

How would liquid hydrogen allow higher volume of cars to be serviced? It's at room pressure, and still needs to be pumped up. Do you mean a station that doesn't reform NG on site, but gets liquid hydrogen delivered instead would handle more cars? Some stations do this, but I don't think those in service are set up to handle any more than the Japanese station in the article.

I think Liquid Aire, or another gas company, claimed that they could do a 100 car per day station. No word on cost or land space needed though.

 

The higher volume stations have liquid delivered to them. If you are not on a pipeline, producing on site and compressing can only be done so fast, so you either need a huge tank or go liquid. You can produce and liquify on site, but not produce and compress faster, so we hear limits of 3-30 cars a day on gas station sized compression only systems. Make the station bigger with a larger tank and compessor, and you can do it, but that takes more capital.

Sure you can build out the pipeline system, but that is a lot more expensive than liquid. Fuel cell lobby likes to pretend magic (technical breakthroughs) will reduce cost quickly, but this has been the case since 2004, and costs have always been higher, one reason is need for extra energy to liquify for non-trivial systems.

Here is a proposed 100 vehicle day facility, cost $5M to produce renewable h2 at $13/kg
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/fcto_h2_fueling_station_honolulu_feasibility_analysis.pdf
It likely would be cheaper in california instead of hawaii, but hawaii makes more sense for the trial. Liquid from refromed natural gas would be much less expensive per kg, but not available in hawaii.

 

This was the pamphlet I was picturing: http://www.airliquideadvancedtechnologies.com/file/otherelement/pj/b7/59/cd/7e/al_plaquette_hydrogene_uk434602932671885752.pdf

It was Air Liquide, and the largest station is for about 40 cars/day.

Getting liquid delivered is faster than reforming onsite, but there is still the time constraints of pressurizing the gas for refueling. It's something that can be minimized with larger tanks and faster pumps, but seems to be the main constraint of station through put. Doesn't matter how much liquid is in that tank if the filling tank is low on pressure. The pump and cooling system can only refill it so quickly.

 

The EV FCV hybrid is an interesting idea as well. As long as the pack can take the continuous charge/discharge and not overheat.
I'm sure as the technology advances there will be a solution found that doesn't require as much pack heating and cooling to keep the batteries happy.

I noticed that none have commented yet on environmental impact.
Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai answer fuel cell questions | PriusChat

And I was thinking early today about how the refueling a fuel cell would be much less of a change in procedure for most drivers as opposed to plugging in.
I'm not sure that is a good thing for consumers, but from a business point of view it makes sense as far as being able to sell the bennies of refueling to the public.

I saw one artists mockup of the toyota fcv that had wind turbines in front of the front wheels , just behind the black scopes in the bumper
Image: Toyota Fuel Cell Sedan at Aspen Ideas Festival [photo: Riccardo Savi], size: 1024 x 681, type: gif, posted on: August 28, 2014, 5:55 am - Green Car Reports
interesting.
And, will the FCV be even slipperier than the prius?

 

Sure and a tank to handle 40 cars with 10,000 psi is only a little bigger than the tank needed to fuel 100 cars from liquid. Air liquid does both compressed and liquid. Make it 200 cars at a car every 2 minutes (mulitiple nozzles) and that tank gets really big.

Liquid is already compressed, it just needs to expand, storing compressed means compressors heat the hydrogen, and you need to wait for it to cool if you are going to get a full tank. Yes you need to fill it before hand if you are having through put. There are probably technical advances to cool and compress to 10,000 psi at the same time. You might keep just about 20 kg of hydrogen in liquid and use that to cool the other hydrogen if cars come in fast, a kind of 5 car buffer to allow the pumps to catch up.

 

Thanks!

Owch, in a world of the Web, I would prefer to read the source material, not just a digest. But this article reads well:

In effect, only a small portion of our population will ever be candidates for H{2} fueled vehicles. Living in North Alabama, it won't ever excite my interest. Like the pig and chicken who met to discuss Framer Brown over a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was interested but the pig was committed. Outside of a sliver of California, we're all chickens.

Bob Wilson

 

money being poured into two different fuel types refilling stations isn't a very efficient use of funds. but hopefully, the winner will be determined fairly quickly (without subsidization) before national rollout.

 

That or they'll figure out how to generate hydrogen on the fly from ordinary sources:

• methanol CH{3}OH
• ammonia NH{3}

Bob Wilson

 

No problem creating hydrogen from methanol but the methanol mostly comes from natural gas, that comes in nice convient pipelines, so add that additional step and energy loss.

Certainly we know how to take a tank of methanol and water, run it through a reformer to get hydrogen and CO2 on board a car, then run it in a fuel cell. Unfortunately this would be slightly less efficient than the clarity (60mpge), and toyota could for about $200 modify the prius phv to run on methanol and get 50mpge in charge sustain and stay 95 mpge on electricity, which makes you ask why for little or no efficiency gain.

NH3 onboad is a non-starter, as you will produce NOx, so tailpipe emissions are not 0.

 

+1

In the US, economics make it look very unlikely to have national roll out of 10,000 psi hydrogen. Some other scheme like metal hydride storage might work. Certainly no dream of national roll-out in the near term (20 years).

 

Ok so here is the question? How much is it going to cost? From hyundai's pricing you can probably buy a camry hybrid and lease a leaf, and have spent less money after the 3 years (if including residual value of the camry). What do you think is more convient? With so few hydrogen stations, if you move or change jobs, the odds are that fcv won't still work? You can move to mississippi or alaska and hybrid camry + leaf still works. So this is not a business case for consumers, but a selling point to governments.

 

What was that question again?