A Collaboration on Fuel Cell Vehicles — But Exactly Whose Interests Are At Stake? Not Yours.
Here’s an article that describes a collaboration between GM and BMW on fuel cell vehicles.
Wow, that’s remarkable. Just when I had started to trust the car companies based on the sincerity of Nissan/Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn and his people who build and promote the LEAF, I see this. A few basic points:
• The oil companies are the main supporters of the hydrogen economy. They see hydrogen as a mechanism for them to continue to retain a service station which will continue to provide the consumer with something they can pump. Electricity, on the other hand, is ubiquitous.
• Creating hydrogen suffers a 4:1 efficiency issue. I.e., generating hydrogen in a renewable way requires four times the number of solar panels that would be needed to make the electricity to put into my battery.
• Fuel cell vehicles’ fuel pods cost $500,000 to $1,000,000 apiece. The cost of creating a delivery infrastructure for hydrogen in a landmass the size of the U.S. is ridiculous. Anyone who’s looked into this even casually can see this; the math really isn’t that tough.
• 90% of our travel is commuting 40 miles or less. If the argument for hydrogen is that we need a dispensable liquid fuel to deal with range anxiety, realize that we’re talking about a very small percentage of our driving.
• Hydrogen is incredibly well financed; there’s a Hydrogen Caucus in Congress – a group of senators and members of the House, whose meetings occur only because of the funding of the oil companies.
As always, I encourage readers to jump on garbage like this. We need to recognize that articles like these are essentially lies and obfuscations that only serve to threaten our survival, while making a tiny few billionaires even richer.
Generating hydrogen from renewable energy is not very efficient as you noted. The reason oil companies are interested is they can produce hydrogen from nautural gas along with the reason you mentioned about giving consumers something to pump. This, of course, still releases the same amount of CO2 and other toxins as just straight burning the stuff in an internal combustion engine.
I have designed and mostly built a nice hydrogen generating unit that will be cheap to produce and easy to use and is easily expandable as the need increases. I plan to use it as a dumpload of last resort for my alternative energy system when I get to the point where I have that much excess capacity. But notice, I said “dumpload of last resort”. All other possible loads would have to be satisfied and I would still have to be generating power and need something to do with it. This actually does occur in the summertime and my charge controller deals with it by choking my panels down which is a waste of energy.
Charging batteries is far more efficient than generating hydrogen so electric vehicles are far superior. I read or heard a quote once that went something like “Electric cars will not work for everybody! They will only work for 96% of the population”. I think that makes them worth persuing. I am pretty sure we could cover the remaining 4% of non-electric vehicle use with biodiesel and ethanol. With 40 miles being the range of electric vehicles today, this makes them well suited for use by the Post Office for delivery vehicles. They operate in a constant state of stop and go. I will have to research how many kWh 40 miles equates to but I measured my mail carrier’s truck and I could easily fit 660W of solar panels on top which, on a sunny day, would yeild about 2.6kWh of power. That probably wouldn’t cover the entire route but it would mean that the truck would arrive at the post office at the end of the day at least partially charged so it would not require a full charge from the grid. This would probably cut down on the expenses and variability of the price of fuel that seems to plague the post office on a regular basis. Being the largest vehicle fleet in the country would make it a very good test bed also.
As far as industrial processes go, SRM for creating hydrogen is the most efficient method employed. Works out to about 20% of the energy required for electrolytic hydrogen production.
The holly grail in research is to create a process that is both efficient and doesn’t have the co and co2 byproducts, the latter being the big deal as noted above. Dense energy in the form of liquid fuels is needed for a number of reasons other than automotive, so this will remain a hot topic.
Recently, china has built out an industrial scale coal to synfuel process that allows for full carbon capture. This is one to also keep an eye on since capturing the carbon after combustion is mostly a nightmare.
That’s kind of funny Craig…
I see them as doing the exact same thing when they promote EV’s as they are doing here when they promote Hydrogen… But that’s another issue I guess.
😉
As for what is written here, you have a severe factual error in your first bullet point – current off-the-shelf electrolyzers achieve 70% LHV efficiency (including the energy needed for pumps, RO water purification, etc); while charging losses for batteries typically range ~10% for slow charging, and as high as 25% for fast charging. Ergo, you wouldn’t see a significant difference in the energy ratio between the two storage media.
Now we both agree on the complete stupidity of using hydrogen as a transport fuel, but my agreement lies in the difficulty of distributing hydrogen and the extraordinary costs of fuel cells.
Hydrogen without the oil companies or an infrastructure may be right around the corner. A new Israeli technology uses aluminum pellets in a reaction that releases hydrogen. When the pellets are exhausted you just dump them and refill your tank with a fresh batch. The pellets are then recycled and reused. This future scenario will yield efficient vehicles without lengthy recharge time or range anxiety. Wow!
The only problem that doesn’t solve is the recycling of the aluminum and /or making the aluminum by refining “Bauxite” as it is the most popular aluminum ore uses more electricity than just charging the EV batteries and driving. Why do so many choose to skip the efficiency point. Just because something is possible does not make it a good choice. For example the electrical energy required to refine one gallon of gasoline is 8 Kwh and a car might drive an average of 30 miles with that gasoline, but an electric car can drive 35 to 50 miles on 8 Kwh and doesn’t also consume the gallon of crude oil.
One clever way to prevent progress on something that works is to organize a huge effort on something similar that doesn’t work, and then publicize its failure.
As several comments referring to, so we should not dismiss hydrogen as one of the future energy sources.
New techniques for the separation of hydrogen from water, has long been ongoing and continues unabated.
Fossil raw material is the future of hydrogen. Where does the oil companies fault, like all other industries in energy, does today. Daily values used one billion around the world, within a very short period of time is worthless. Taxpayers must in future pay these bad investments in any way.
New fuel cell technology is constantly evolving.
Looking for my four power sources that will compete in the future. Ordering is insignificant today! Electricity, Hydrogen, Cold Fusion and Plasma. Plus combinations of these.
Siemens plans hydrogen as reserve for Germany with a capacity of 2 weeks of energy storage capacity. Consider the size of a battery with this capacity.
Wow! Where do I begin?
The oil companies are NOT the “main supporters of the hydrogen economy.” They are the main USERS of our produced hydrogen. Approximately half of all hydrogen produced is used by the oil companies, to extract, process, and refine our automotive fuels, among other things (two-thirds of the rest goes to corporate agriculture for making artificial fertilizers, but that’s another story). Of course they are interested in hydrogen, but primarily for their use.
The claimed 4:1 efficiency ratio of hydrogen production to electricity production is based on a flawed (and now 12 year old) analysis that is constantly resurfacing and has been quoted by Plug-in America. I have seen that analysis; it has more holes in it than a mountain of Swiss Cheese. My college statistics teacher would have given him a zero and advised that he might as well skip the course as he hasn’t been listening in class. Glenn’s figures above are much closer to the truth.
As for production of hydrogen from natural gas, Membrane Reactor Technologies’ reformer has acheived conversion efficiencies of around 80%, which substancially exceeds the conversion efficiencies of the best gas-fired electric power plants.
Fuel pods (I assume you mean tanks) cost $500,000 to $1,000,000 each? Rediculous. Off by a factor of nearly 100.
Yes, they cost more than the fuel cell, which is nearly out of the picture now, at about $25.00/kW for an automotive size unit (i.e. a typical 100kW cell would cost about $2500.00) for the first mass-produced units. But the fact that manufacturers are now predicting vehicle prices in the neighborhood of that for a diesel-powered equivalent means the tank costs you quoted are completely out to lunch.
Likewise, you are vastly overestimating the cost of a hydrogen infrastructure- else how could the fossil fuel industry possibly afford one? One hydrogen supplier alone (Praxair) has over 350 miles of hydrogen pipeline in the Gulf area, with massive underground cavern storage, to deliver hydrogen to the area’s fuel refineries for fuel desulfurization (see Praxair’s website).
The government is now planning a natural gas distribution infrastructure, for NG powered vehicles. Hydrogen pipelines cost about the same as natural gas pipelines- in fact most existing NG pipelines are just as suitable for piping hydrogen. So, what’s the problem?
British Columbia put in a hydrogen infrastructure to support 20 fuel-cell powered buses that were used at the 2010 Olympics. Those buses are now in regular fleet use by BC Transit. Near Whistler they are building what is expected to be the world’s largest production facility for renewable and waste-derived hydrogen. Don’t say it can’t be done.
90% of our traveling is 40 miles or less? Maybe for you. We all vary by circumstance, expectations, and desire. We still have a large rural community whose needs far outstrip that. I also know people within this city who regularly travel much more than that, and whose schedules (sometimes self-inflicted, but never mind that) prevent their spending a lot of time recharging their vehicles. They won’t consider a battery electric vehicle, and if we don’t give them another option, they will stick with their gasoline vehicles. As for myself, I ditched my long-over-the-hill gasoline vehicle in January, and (at age 72) do 80% of my traveling on foot or by bicycle (NOT electrically assisted), and the rest by bus or car-sharing service.
As for your last point, I’d like to see proof of that (how you say it is funded, not whether it exists; I have no doubt about that). With our government here in Canada in the hands of the Conservatives, I would expect to see a counterpart of this in Parliament. It’s not there. I live in Ottawa, Parliament is a 40 minute walk from my house; I would surely hear of it if there was one, and the oil companies have plenty of lobbies here.
As for the article that apparently got you ticked off, I read it and see it as a factual report on GM’s and BMW’s intent to collaborate on fuel cell research. How does such a report (collaborated by several other reports, by the way)
constitute “garbage” and “lies and obfuscations”? Just how does such a report serve to “threaten our survival, while making a few billionaires even richer”? And aren’t there quite a few billionaires involved in the promotion of battery electric vehicles (Tesla, Fisker, Musk,etc.)and infrastructure (Better Place, among others)? Your last statement is patently rediculous.
By the way, I attended a ride-and-drive at the World Hydrogen Energy Conference last month, and drove the Honda FCX Clarity. It is a fantastic vehicle, and I would love to own one.
I think your data about ag and corporate H2 is actually about nitrogen.
But, if you find a way to obtain a Honda Clarity FCX, I’d like to know too.
Rev.Manke, Ammonia or NH3 although often manufactured from Nitrogen from the atmosphere and Hydrogen from water, or from animal urine. And is used in fertilizer manufacture, needs either an external nitrogen source nor an external Hydrogen source as they both are readily available (Ammonia nitrate fertilizer is very “Potent” in farming. Also famous for being mixed with diesel fuel to make explosive used in Kansas City Federal Building Bombing.)
No, my figures are for hydrogen. Hydrogen is used along with nitrogen to make NH3, or ammonia, the principle fertilizer used in corporate farming, and is, in the long term, an inferior fertilizer compared to natural fertilizer and other choices. It leaves the soil too nitrogen-rich, and fails to replace other minerals removed from the soil by monocultural crops. In the short term, however, it can result in spectacular yields of the target crop. It is the short term that seems to matter to corporate farming.
Ammonia is typically made by the Haber-Bosch process, which involves hydrogen obtained from its usual sources, nitrogen directly from the air, high pressure and moderately high temperature, and a catalyst, the latter composed mostly of iron. Fritz Haber received the Nobel Prise for Chemistry in 1918 for his work; for his work in further developing the process, Karl Bosch received the same prise in 1931.
David, all the Fuel cell / electric vehicles I have seen or read about use the fuel-cells to charge up other batteries who then power the electric motor. My personal opinion is that the fuelcells should be used in a stationary charging station location instead of a “Grid” connection at 440 vac @ 500 amps which often costs $ 100,000 to install. Install the fuel cells and use piped in natural gas as a hydrogen source or truck in “Anhydrous Ammonia” and crack the hydrogen out of that. instead of building three energy conversion processes into one little car…
Dennis, the batteries in a fuel cell vehicle are there primarily for short term storage of regenerative braking energy, which is then delivered in parallel with the fuel cell’s output during acceleration. At all other times, the motor is powered directly by the fuel cell.
The battery pack is similar to that of a gasoline-electric hybrid, that is, typically about 1.2 kWh of storage, more or less. This wouldn’t take the car very far by itself. The setup is simpler than that of a gasoline-electric hybrid, as it only requires a fixed drive ratio identical to that of a battery-powered electric. One could design a fuel cell vehicle without these batteries, but you would lose the benefit of regenerative braking.
As for your other suggestions, there are many possible choices, and we don’t have to limit ourselves to just one- we can choose according to need and circumstance. For example, we can power our homes and our cars with a fuel-cell based combined heating and power unit, running on solar panels,wind power, natural gas, hydrogen, or a combination thereof as local situations dictate.
We can also use windmills to store excess energy as hydrogen at night, when wind energy is typically at its peak and grid demand is low. We can distribute the hydrogen in dedicated lines, or in existing natural gas lines as an enriched mixture (the latter system is being installed at a wind farm in Germany). The resulting mixture can be used directly, or separated by an appropriate membrane filter and the gases used separately. Or, we can use it in a fuel cell power plant to convert it back to electricity, as you suggested- and either use it to charge your battery-powered car or put it back on grid. The possibilities are almost endless- it’s a matter of making the most appropriate choice for the application.
Craig, since penning my earlier comments, it occurred to me that by “fuel pods” you might be referring to the hydrogen refuelling units. In that case, one would have to compare costs with its BEV functional equivalent, that is, a set of tier 3 recharging units sufficient to supply a similar number of vehicles- along with the required battery and/or capacitor storage, since such a system could not realistically be operated directly from the grid because of the high peak power loads. A realistic cost figure for such a system would rival the figures you quoted for the hydrogen fuel pods. For that matter, have you investigated the cost of a gasoline/diesel refuelling setup (including installing the required underground tanks)?
To put this in perspective, Craig, a typical electric city trolley costs between $1 million and $1.5 million; a typical diesel city bus, in the neighborhood of $800,000. An articulated bus (of which Ottawa City Transpo has several) costs upwards of $1.6 million.