Have they solved the problem of where hydrogen comes from? Last time I looked this up, the main process for making hydrogen is the shift reaction, which is hardly carbon neutral.
But with both cases, something clean is at least possible. Solar/wind/stuff not invented yet, could be the source. Phase out the coal and you're done. When petroleum-based combustion happens in the car, you probably wont ever get carbon neutrality.
Well, if we are talking about not-yet-invented stuff, we might also someday have feasible artificial hydrocarbons or corn-fuel farms run with electric combines. Nether one of those would require a fundamental change in car design.
All I meant there was that it can be changed and blended instantly, electricity is electricity. Look how long it's taken to change sulphur, lead, ethanol, etc in the us gas supply. And this still requires work for the existing fleet of cars.
That's it. Don't go hunting for your something else, it's just wasting time. Nuclear, given lead times and more, is also quite possibly wasting time, though I'll allow some possibility it isn't. Long-term though, it's almost certainly highly problematic.
Electric vehicles are capable of being much more efficient when going from energy source (the sun) to actual work preformed. About three times more efficient than hydrogen. [1]
Your comment seems seems to me like a classic strawman. The electric power production is being decarbonised and more money is spent on renewables than fossil energy. [2] if you feed that energy to a battery car, you need less power production than if you feed it to a hydrogen car.
Hydrogen may provide a viable alternative, but it seems to me that the substantial infrastructure needed is going to be costly [1] and the electric infrastructure is well built out already.
Hydrogen and hydrocarbon fuels are just sources of electrons. The beauty of a real electric car is the efficiency of going directly from stored electrons to power.
Refueling time and storage equipment seems like major differences between hydrogen and battery. They both have slightly different use-cases that make different bets on future technology. Maybe one will win out or maybe both will play a role. I'm personally waiting for the Nucleon to come back.
I'm not an expert at any of this stuff and this math could very easily be wrong, but I just spent some time with Wolfram Alpha validating that claim. a 40,000 liter hydrogen truck can carry 425 gigajoules of liquid hydrogen; if it drives 500 miles, a diesel tractor trailer getting 5mpg would burn 100 gallons of diesel, that's 14 gigajoules of energy (now keep in mind that much hydrogen only weighs 3000kg - a typical load for a tractor trailer is 10000-20000kg) - if it was a fuel cell truck, it could be twice as efficient as an ICE so would only need 7 gigajoules. 7 gigajoules is 1.6% of the transported 425 gigajoules of energy. A state of the art HVDC transmission line loses 3.5% per 1000 km, so it seems like a hydrogen truck might actually be more efficient than wires.
what about locally-produced electricity ? If an electric car recharges on locally-produced electricity along its journey then we can eliminate transmission losses
There are hundreds of what-ifs that influence which will be a better choice, IMO it's not clear cut that one technology is better enough for all situations that it'll crowd the other one out of the marketplace entirely.
The big piece left out of the discussion about hydrogen often is the energy costs for producing hydrogen. It is either produced by extracting hydrogen from natural gas which produces CO2, or by electrolysis from water. In both cases, the hydrogen has to be compressed up to 700 bars for transportation. In the hydrogen car, the fuel cell produces electricity to drive the car. The net result is, that the hydrogen car has perhaps a 30% efficiency of the electricity reaching the motor. A battery powered electrical car has about 90%.
The bottom line is, for the same amount of primary energy, a pure electrical car gets 2-3x the range of a hydrogen car. And of course, that directly translates into the costs of driving.
The article also gives some off number about electrical cars: they are not limited to 200 miles of driving - a Tesla does up to 300, and recharging at a supercharger station takes about 30-45 minutes. And, of course, in contrast to a hydrogen car, an electrical car can be recharged over night at home, so most trips do not require any recharging at all.
Electrolyzing water is so inefficient in terms of Watt hours consumed that it is really only practical (unsubsidized) if your electricity is 2 cents/kWh or less, which is cheaper than even the very lowest cost hydroelectric used by huge data centers in the dalles, OR and Grant and Douglas counties in WA, which have the record lowest industrial kWh rates.
Not entirely true. I am not sure about the US but in Germany we have in times of very strong wind negative electricity prices. And that is to some degree the beauty of hydrogen: you can store it relatively well for some time, so you do not need to produce it right when you are charging your battery but when electricity is the cheapest.
It's not hydrogen is all better as some people here on HN seem to think the argument is, it's just that both battery powered vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles both have some advantages over the other that might be very beneficial if used together.
This is absolutely right, it has been pointed out before that a hydrogen based energy world could give countries in the Middle East and North Africa a chance to still continue making money with energy after their oil is gone by producing and shipping solar hydrogen from the desert.
I am from Germany too. Yes, sometimes we have negative prices for electricity. But that does not mean, it pays for investments for facilities, which only make sense with low or negative electricity prices. And it is a rather temporary phenomenon. With the transition from coal to gas, it becomes much more feasible to switch off power generation to avoid surplus electricity.
Long term, with enough battery powered electrical cars on smart grids, charging will be synchronized with the electrical power levels. And then we are back to electrolysis using 3x the electrical power.
Embrittlement is often cited by hydrogen naysayers, but if they're selling cars how serious a problem can it be? Maybe they just coat their tanks with something impervious?
I mentally substitute ammonia for hydrogen when the question comes up, because it is much less implicated in embrittlement and is otherwise quite similar to hydrogen. (IANA Chemist, but I've read that ammonia actually carries more hydrogen atoms than elemental hydrogen does, at the same pressure.)
Energy cost from wind may go negative for very short periods of time, fluctuating, but if you include the capital cost of building huge wind turbines and connecting them to the grid, the average yearly cost of electricity from huge wind farms (unsubsidized) is not lower than 6.5 to 8.5 euro-cents per kWh. It's a lot better than hydrocarbons but it is NOT competitive for huge constant base loads with rare specific geographic hydropower bargains (2.5 US cents/kWh for "all you can eat") power if you can locate a facility very close to the Grand Coulee or Rocky Reach dams on the Columbia river.
Also - if the power source (like geothermal or solar) is remote, energy transport via high tension line can be inefficient. Hydrogen can be seen as cheaper transport of energy.
Recharging your car at home at night only works for suburban US (and some parts of Europe), there are also lots of people like me who live on apartment flats 8 or 10 storeys high who cannot use that. There's also the issue with what happens to the battery, long-term, when you're driving your car at -15 Celsius in the winter and at +38 in the summer. I agree, though, for most of the HN demographic (own their own suburban homes, live in CA) owning a Tesla is feasible.
Presumably not everybody is depending on street parking. For those who live in 8 or 10 story buildings, how many don't have a dedicated parking space if they have a car?
Apartment buildings will start to have chargers, if they have parking spaces.
> there are also lots of people like me who live on apartment flats 8 or 10 storeys high who cannot use that
Why is installing a few NEMA outlets in the parking garage not an option? My HOA did just that, and while we still need to figure out the etiquette of taking turns (there are more vehicles than available outlets), it's not an architectural issue for most buildings.
End of the day, though, this is less about charging availability and more about range after a single full charge - you don't expect your apartment complex to host a gas station, for example, but you go out of your way to fill up at one and then drive on a full tank. Gasoline vehicle's top-of-the-line range looks to be 600 miles (Toyota Prius has a 12-gallon tank, so multiplying that by 50 MPG), top-of-the-line Tesla Model S is 90D with rated 292 miles of range, so I'd say things are getting pretty close to where one could drive to a Tesla SuperCharger, spend exciting 20-25 minutes there, and then drive charge-free for the next 4-5 days, with perhaps occasionally charge-up at the office, train station, or the mall.
A huge number of European apartment buildings have NO on site parking spaces whatsoever. Look at most of the apartments in Berlin for example. It's all street parking, or you have to rent a space in a parking garage somewhere.
The two Achilles heels of fuel-cell automobiles have been the cost of the fuel cell itself, and sourcing the hydrogen needed to fuel it.
Fuel cells typically use a lot of highly-expensive catalyst, with full costs on the order of a million dollars each. Odds are good the sales price of these vehicles (just under $60k) represents a small fraction of the manufactuer's actual costs. This is a test pilot for real-world experience.
Hydrogen is the other problem, both in sourcing it and in distributing and dispensing it. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source[1], but an energy carrier. You need some other source of energy to provide hydrogen, usually via hydrolysis, or from some hydrogen feedstock, usually natural gas.
In the case of hydrolysis, your problem is the energy cost of electrolysis, which costs you about 40% of the input energy. The bad news is you get much less hydrogen energy out than electrical energy in, the good news is that you can store the hydrogen, while electricity doesn't bank well.
In the case of natural gas, you've got the sitation that your vehicle is still ultimately consuming fossil fuels, though methane (CH4) emits far less CO2 than petrol (about a C8H18) -- roughly half as much. Since you're pre-processing the methane into hydrogen, there's the option of sequestering the carbon for other uses.
Hydrogen also has extensive problems with storage and handling -- it doesn't like to be contained, will literally leak out between the atoms of containers, embrittles metals, etc., etc.
Another alternative, one I'm interested in, though 50 years of serious research[2] has yet to result in a working large-scale prototype, is Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis. Effectively it creates hydrocarbon fuels using electricity. The most promising model I'm aware of sources both hydrogen and carbon from seawater, hence seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis. Penciling out the studies I'm aware of, it actually could scale up to current US and forseable global levels of production, without literally paving the world with solar panels and/or synthesis plants[3]. E.g., not patentently impossible. The fact that the research hasn't proceeded further makes me question its ultimate practicality.
If, however, it is possible, then we end up with a fuel that is an exact chemical analog of existing hydrocarbon fuels, is infinitely miscable with them in the fuel processing, dispensing, and utilisation chain, and is carbon neutral.
And if you're generating hydrogen, you're already about 90% of the way to creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels which avoid most or all of hydrogen's storage, transport, dispensing, handling, embrittlement, and energy conversion issues.
As I mentioned, I've looked into this in several posts, you might want to start with the historical overview here:
1. Technically, so are petroleum, coal, and natural gas. Though the source energy was supplied hundreds of millions of years ago, on average, in the form of sunlight converted to plant matter. Given this, at the rate of roughly 5 million years of ancient primary production per year of current consumption, you could make a reasonable argument that the fully realised solar energy cost (what's called "emergy") of petroleum is about 5 million per single unit of energy delivered. At the very least, we're spending 5 million years of accumulation per year. Something you might want to reflect on.
2. Brookhaven National Lab, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab. Generally serious outfits.
3. For a counterexample, see schemes for biofuels. At best, present US fu...
Once you start filling your electric car every night from a plug in your garage, the idea of (weekly?) driving to one of a handful of special hydrogen fueling stations is seriously unattractive. In fact, filling up the old gasoline car becomes annoying.
This article definitely reads like a PR piece from an oil company (which is, after all, where the hydrogen comes from). The New York Times has a history of biased journalism against electric cars...
As I've said before, going all-in on EVs are a non-starter in some areas (esp. Japan) because they can't produce enough electricity locally, and they can't import it from a trusted ally. Hydrogen, OTOH, can be shipped over long distances.
I honestly think you should rethink this, I do not think the article is biased and clearly states that hydrogen is not cheap. And as soon as we are getting fully self-driving cars, the hydrogen vehicle can drive to the fuelling station on its own and refill themself, so where is your problem there? They do not solve all the problems but so do electric vehicles. A combination of both might be far better.
Or in your words: Your comment definitely reads like a opinion piece from someone who has invested to much in Tesla stocks and now fears of losing some of his investment. People on HN have a history of hyping electric cars ... ;)
Your comment describes an environment that doesn't exist (unmanned self-driving cars, self-refueling, cheaper hydrogen) all to get to parity with the convenience of plugging in your car at night when you get home.
It's very reasonable to say in the current technology state, they are much worse.
Seriously, you are critizising a technology that is not there yet in comparison to a technology that is also not there yet? Recharging electrical cars in a smart grid, long range capability (we all know what 200 miles in a Tesla means and how much of it is left after a few years), loading time etc. Are they solved right now?
And these are real problems, not "having to go to the gas station as all the other people" problems. In comparison to gasoline powered cars are hydrogen based cars mostly missing infrastructure and mass production. Electrical cars do too, but you cannot say one is better than the other as they are pretty much complement to each other.
> Battery electric vehicles are still limited to a maximum of about 200 miles of driving before a recharge is required, and charging up can take time — four hours or more in some cases. Batteries are also heavy, which presents challenges for powering larger vehicles like trucks or SUVs.
I had not considered the weight disadvantage of Li-on. Perhaps we'll have two technologies side by side: batteries for smaller, more centrally-located vehicles and hydrogen for larger and more remote ones.
The energy-intensity of enriching, packaging and distributing hydrogen looks less daunting in a duck-curve [1] characterised solar future. One could simply generate hydrogen when rates drop below a threshold.
First of all, one needs to see how much weight a hydrogen based solution could save at all. With a fuel cell vehicle, you still need a battery to power the car (the fuel cell cannot handle the peak powers, it can only recharge the battery at a constat rate), you need a high pressure container for the hydrogen and of course the fuel cell itself. So this does not leave much weight advantage vs. a pure battery vehicle.
And just a couple of days ago Elon Musk announced that Tesla would introduce battery powered Trucks and Semis even. Seems he thinks that the weight is not a big problem.
Using Aluminum-air batteries as a secondary source in lithium ion cars for longer range would likely be a good alternative. Swap out at your convenience.
One of the issues with hydrogen power that you can't use regenerative braking as easily. Of course you could run a hydrogen/battery hybrid system, but its not obvious that hydrogen would really be that beneficial in that configuration.
I have always hated parking meters and felt in most cases it was just another way for cities to milk the tax payers for more money. But parking meters start to make real sense in an EV world. Instead of just buying time, the meters could have a plug so you can buy electricity and recharge the car too.
54 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadTesla had a great 'well to wheel' efficiency analysis post on their blog a few years back that killed any notion of a hydrogen economy.
The stories cycle back every couple of years. In fact it reminds me of PG's old submarine essay:
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refut...
That's it. Don't go hunting for your something else, it's just wasting time. Nuclear, given lead times and more, is also quite possibly wasting time, though I'll allow some possibility it isn't. Long-term though, it's almost certainly highly problematic.
Your comment seems seems to me like a classic strawman. The electric power production is being decarbonised and more money is spent on renewables than fossil energy. [2] if you feed that energy to a battery car, you need less power production than if you feed it to a hydrogen car.
Hydrogen may provide a viable alternative, but it seems to me that the substantial infrastructure needed is going to be costly [1] and the electric infrastructure is well built out already.
[1] http://tonyseba.com/toyota-vs-tesla-can-hydrogen-fuel-cell-v...
[2] Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status report found. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/01/renewabl...
Unless you do battery swapping, in which case they don't seem all that different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY
I wonder what happens when you factor-in maintenance, safety and production costs
The bottom line is, for the same amount of primary energy, a pure electrical car gets 2-3x the range of a hydrogen car. And of course, that directly translates into the costs of driving.
The article also gives some off number about electrical cars: they are not limited to 200 miles of driving - a Tesla does up to 300, and recharging at a supercharger station takes about 30-45 minutes. And, of course, in contrast to a hydrogen car, an electrical car can be recharged over night at home, so most trips do not require any recharging at all.
It's not hydrogen is all better as some people here on HN seem to think the argument is, it's just that both battery powered vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles both have some advantages over the other that might be very beneficial if used together.
Long term, with enough battery powered electrical cars on smart grids, charging will be synchronized with the electrical power levels. And then we are back to electrolysis using 3x the electrical power.
I thought storing hydrogen was challenging, since hydrogen atoms are so small?
I mentally substitute ammonia for hydrogen when the question comes up, because it is much less implicated in embrittlement and is otherwise quite similar to hydrogen. (IANA Chemist, but I've read that ammonia actually carries more hydrogen atoms than elemental hydrogen does, at the same pressure.)
For commercialization efforts see See also http://www.bloomenergy.com/ and http://ballard.com/.
Also - if the power source (like geothermal or solar) is remote, energy transport via high tension line can be inefficient. Hydrogen can be seen as cheaper transport of energy.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_electrolyte_membrane_e...
[1] - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544206...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_exchange_membrane_fuel_...
Apartment buildings will start to have chargers, if they have parking spaces.
Why is installing a few NEMA outlets in the parking garage not an option? My HOA did just that, and while we still need to figure out the etiquette of taking turns (there are more vehicles than available outlets), it's not an architectural issue for most buildings.
End of the day, though, this is less about charging availability and more about range after a single full charge - you don't expect your apartment complex to host a gas station, for example, but you go out of your way to fill up at one and then drive on a full tank. Gasoline vehicle's top-of-the-line range looks to be 600 miles (Toyota Prius has a 12-gallon tank, so multiplying that by 50 MPG), top-of-the-line Tesla Model S is 90D with rated 292 miles of range, so I'd say things are getting pretty close to where one could drive to a Tesla SuperCharger, spend exciting 20-25 minutes there, and then drive charge-free for the next 4-5 days, with perhaps occasionally charge-up at the office, train station, or the mall.
Fuel cells typically use a lot of highly-expensive catalyst, with full costs on the order of a million dollars each. Odds are good the sales price of these vehicles (just under $60k) represents a small fraction of the manufactuer's actual costs. This is a test pilot for real-world experience.
Hydrogen is the other problem, both in sourcing it and in distributing and dispensing it. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source[1], but an energy carrier. You need some other source of energy to provide hydrogen, usually via hydrolysis, or from some hydrogen feedstock, usually natural gas.
In the case of hydrolysis, your problem is the energy cost of electrolysis, which costs you about 40% of the input energy. The bad news is you get much less hydrogen energy out than electrical energy in, the good news is that you can store the hydrogen, while electricity doesn't bank well.
In the case of natural gas, you've got the sitation that your vehicle is still ultimately consuming fossil fuels, though methane (CH4) emits far less CO2 than petrol (about a C8H18) -- roughly half as much. Since you're pre-processing the methane into hydrogen, there's the option of sequestering the carbon for other uses.
Hydrogen also has extensive problems with storage and handling -- it doesn't like to be contained, will literally leak out between the atoms of containers, embrittles metals, etc., etc.
Another alternative, one I'm interested in, though 50 years of serious research[2] has yet to result in a working large-scale prototype, is Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis. Effectively it creates hydrocarbon fuels using electricity. The most promising model I'm aware of sources both hydrogen and carbon from seawater, hence seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis. Penciling out the studies I'm aware of, it actually could scale up to current US and forseable global levels of production, without literally paving the world with solar panels and/or synthesis plants[3]. E.g., not patentently impossible. The fact that the research hasn't proceeded further makes me question its ultimate practicality.
If, however, it is possible, then we end up with a fuel that is an exact chemical analog of existing hydrocarbon fuels, is infinitely miscable with them in the fuel processing, dispensing, and utilisation chain, and is carbon neutral.
And if you're generating hydrogen, you're already about 90% of the way to creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuels which avoid most or all of hydrogen's storage, transport, dispensing, handling, embrittlement, and energy conversion issues.
As I mentioned, I've looked into this in several posts, you might want to start with the historical overview here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
________________________________
Notes:
1. Technically, so are petroleum, coal, and natural gas. Though the source energy was supplied hundreds of millions of years ago, on average, in the form of sunlight converted to plant matter. Given this, at the rate of roughly 5 million years of ancient primary production per year of current consumption, you could make a reasonable argument that the fully realised solar energy cost (what's called "emergy") of petroleum is about 5 million per single unit of energy delivered. At the very least, we're spending 5 million years of accumulation per year. Something you might want to reflect on.
2. Brookhaven National Lab, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab. Generally serious outfits.
3. For a counterexample, see schemes for biofuels. At best, present US fu...
This article definitely reads like a PR piece from an oil company (which is, after all, where the hydrogen comes from). The New York Times has a history of biased journalism against electric cars...
Or in your words: Your comment definitely reads like a opinion piece from someone who has invested to much in Tesla stocks and now fears of losing some of his investment. People on HN have a history of hyping electric cars ... ;)
It's very reasonable to say in the current technology state, they are much worse.
I had not considered the weight disadvantage of Li-on. Perhaps we'll have two technologies side by side: batteries for smaller, more centrally-located vehicles and hydrogen for larger and more remote ones.
The energy-intensity of enriching, packaging and distributing hydrogen looks less daunting in a duck-curve [1] characterised solar future. One could simply generate hydrogen when rates drop below a threshold.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/Documents/FlexibleResourcesHelpRenewab...
And just a couple of days ago Elon Musk announced that Tesla would introduce battery powered Trucks and Semis even. Seems he thinks that the weight is not a big problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium–air_battery
Edit: I know weight and mass aren't the same but we are all considering the same gravitational pull so we can disregard the pedantic argument...
Not a big difference considering that weight isn't a big issue (wind drag and wheel/road friction are the main factors for range).
For example, someone calculated that simply removing the side-mirrors on a car would increase range by 5+ percent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S
Wow!