Time for fuel cell / hydrogen car?

Its interesting, let me know when they have got the engineering bit covered.

With Tesla buying Maxell last year for their cell coating tech we might find out more Sept 22 that brings a concept closer to production.
 
Last edited:
ver01@ said:
I am sure storing hydrogen has come a long way since then.
Click to expand...
Even if it has, why would I want to go out of my way to attend a dedicated filling area with loads of highly compressed dangerous gas and try to transfer that highly compressed dangerous gas into my car and drive around with it when I could just plug in my car at my house and have a full range every morning?

Seems like a massive backwards step to me.

Bet its not cheap either.

How do we get all this hydrogen too, bet that's environmentally damaging.
 
Hydrogen will probably come much later. Electric is the stop-gap until its figured out (or something better and genuinely clean).
 
ver01@ said:
Did you miss the bit about using renewables only?

This is not bad and covers some of the basic arguments
Click to expand...

I've seen it before but ultimately, going back to your OP on an actual serious note, hydrogen fuel cells are not in a position to be the better alternative to electric when you buy a car in 2 years time - FCEVs still need some big breakthroughs to catch up to BEVs and even if they happen in the next 2 years, they won't hit the mainstream in that time frame.

Then ultimately once you reach that point, you'll be dealing with similar FUD to BEVs now, as my posts above allude to.[/MEDIA][/QUOTE]
 
Kenai said:
I've seen it before but ultimately, going back to your OP on an actual serious note, hydrogen fuel cells are not in a position to be the better alternative to electric when you buy a car in 2 years time - FCEVs still need some big breakthroughs to catch up to BEVs and even if they happen in the next 2 years, they won't hit the mainstream in that time frame.

Then ultimately once you reach that point, you'll be dealing with similar FUD to BEVs now, as my posts above allude to.[/MEDIA]
Click to expand...
[/QUOTE]

What breakthroughs are you referring to? There is a refuelling station near my work place, I can refuel in 5 min and range is more than enough.
 
ver01@ said:
What breakthroughs are you referring to? There is a refuelling station near my work place, I can refuel in 5 min and range is more than enough.
Click to expand...

Something that'll make it truly cost competitive - a Mirai is basically an FCEV equivalent of a Prius and it is (or was, can you still buy it new?) £66,000 (I think that's with Toyota making a loss on it) - that needs to be slashed but how? Someone needs to think of a way to make the fuel cell cheaper.

Then the cost of the hydrogen itself, maybe i'm a bit out of date but a kg of hydrogen isn't cheap, so your fillup is either at parity or more expensive than a fossil fuel fill up - good luck convincing people to change without a good financial incentive, even BEV struggles when it can offer massive reductions. Again, unless i'm out of date, the UK has less than a dozen refill stations - great if you live by one but this is even more limited than the current BEV infrastructure.

Currently it's the realms of 'it works but why would I bother?'
 
Hydrogen can be made from natural gas through reformer/catalyst units easy enough, just there's never been a big commercial reason to do it.

There's already plans to offset natural gas burning by converting some it to H2 and putting the H2 into the domestic gas grid and then injecting the produced CO2 from the reformers into old North Sea oil reservoirs.
 
I am not buying now and in two years many of the issues we are discussing here may be irrelevant.
Cost is not a prohibiting factor now so don't expect it to be in two years. As long as the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy sources only, a FCEV will be my preferred option.
 
Last edited:
ver01@ said:
I am not buying now and in two years many of the issues we are discussing here may be irrelevant.
Cost is not a prohibiting factor now so don't expect it to be in two years. As long as the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy sources only, a FCEV will be my preferred option.
Click to expand...

I'd say cost is prohibitive for most people wanting to buy into the tech - looking around more the Mirai is realistically only available on lease, so despite the headline figure of £66,000 for what would otherwise be a £35,000 to £40,000 car, you need to dive into £750 per month to get into one. At least that's according to a few articles, a quick google is struggling to find much under £1,000 per month for one. Selectcarleasing for example, is £1172 per month, £10,000 deposit, for 4 years, 5,000miles pa. I think these prices include fuel but i'm not sure a fixed price for fuel is a great deal unless you do loads of miles. If it doesn't include fuel, not only is that lease cost even worse but you're supposedly looking at £75 to fill it up.

The infrastructure is clearly going slower than planned - articles from a few years ago touting that we'd have 65 hydrogen filling station by 2020 yet there are only 15, even less if you want one powerful that it can actually fill your tank, not just half fill it.

Something needs to make this tech much much cheaper before you'll get any mainstream interest whatsoever - until then it'll be a plaything for tech enthusiasts or people with money to burn like James May.

Edit - having some cars available to buy would be a start. Just went on nextgreencar to see if maybe some other models are cheaper than the Mirai and it informed me that there are no hydrogen cars for sale as new in the UK in 2020.
 
Last edited:
ver01@ said:
I am not buying now and in two years many of the issues we are discussing here may be irrelevant.
Cost is not a prohibiting factor now so don't expect it to be in two years. As long as the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy sources only, a FCEV will be my preferred option.
Click to expand...

The average driver travels 7,900 miles per year. There are 45.4 million licensed drivers in the UK. So that's a total of ~360bn miles per year.

If it takes 3kWh of electricity to power a battery-electric vehicle one mile, we need to produce an extra 120bn kWh of electricity annually. That's 120 TWh.

The Mirai can travel 312 miles on 10kg of hydrogen (it has 2x 5kg tanks). That's 31.2 miles per kg. So for 360bn miles, we'd need 11.5bn kg of hydrogen. At 100% efficiency, it takes 39kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of hydrogen via electrolysis. So we'd need to produce an extra 450bn kWh (450TWh) of electricity.

I'm being very favourable to Hydrogen with that comparison, too. 3 miles from 1kWh of electricity is low for a BEV. 100% efficiency for hydrogen production isn't going to happen. And there are a bunch of other significant energy costs not considered on the hydrogen side; distribution, storage, etc. These costs also exist for electricity, but they are proportionally much lower. Also, producing 1kg of hydrogen via electrolysis uses around 9kg of water. So that's another significant cost (50bn kg).

For a bit of perspective, we consume around 300-350TWh of electricity each year, total. If electrolysis were only 60% efficient (which is the case with some current hydrogen fuel producers), we'd need to produce an extra ~634TWh, literally trebling the country's electricity production.

It's very easy to trivialise the challenges that face HFCVs. But the challenges are very real.
 
Last edited:
Niche markets, similar to aforementioned trucks, could be enticed by the energy density offered by hydrogen
-say, high end sports car market, even F1 , maybe that's how they, eventually, go low carbon, without introducing a race recharge problem, and/or increasing power too.
 
Kenai said:
Hydrogen needs to face up to same sort of nonsense arguments that electric does, with little basis in reality, so on that front i'll offer up - what happens when my car explodes like the Hindenburg?

Stupid dangerous stuff that should be nowhere near transport vehicles.
Click to expand...

Yeah. That petrol stuff explodes too, it'll never catch on.
 
MagicBoy said:
Yeah. That petrol stuff explodes too, it'll never catch on.
Click to expand...

Petrol doesn't tend to suddenly go boom like some gases can - I'm not really sure on fuel cell tech. Except in severe accidents most people walk away from a car on fire long before fuel tank goes.

I think the future is likely going to be a hybrid of ultra efficient petrol/diesel combined with batteries with new solid state battery advancements, etc. rather than purely one or the other.

(Unless there is a really big breakthrough in battery tech in both materials and manufacturing as well as power density and recharge times/lifespan, etc.)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom