It all comes down to how sustainable battery production is in the long term and in a large scale if we continue to use rare earth elements for their production.
Time for fuel cell / hydrogen car?
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It all comes down to how sustainable battery production is in the long term and in a large scale if we continue to use rare earth elements for their production.
Efficiency matters, because the less efficient the process is, the more generation capacity you need.
In a recent report, the IEA stated that moving the current world production of hydrogen over to electrolysis would require more electricity than is currently produced in the entire European Union (with the UK included in those figures). The idea that you can just hoover up spare capacity on the grid is nonsense; it's only workable for small scale production. For mass electrolytic production of hydrogen, it will need its own electricity supply. A developed country like the UK, running its entire transport fleet on hydrogen, would use more electricity for the production of hydrogen than for all other sources of demand, combined.
They also stated that the cost of producing hydrogen from electrolysis could get to within 1.5x to 2x the current cost of producing it from natural gas within a decade, if the right investments were made globally. Bear in mind that production from natural gas constitutes 75% of current global supply (vs <0.1% from electrolysis). So by 2030, you might be able to run a car on electrolysed hydrogen at 1.5x to 2x the current cost of running a car on hydrogen (which is already expensive versus other fuels, per mile and net of taxes). Unless you think the IEA are mistaken?
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There is no reason why the process will not become more efficient. There is enough capacity to support current demand without worrying about efficiency.
I don't believe the aim is to continue using natural gas to produce hydrogen. Is this what you understand from that report?
I don't believe the aim is to continue using natural gas to produce hydrogen. Is this what you understand from that report?
Soldato
Not even close to 'satisfied';
Yeah its not simple or available!
Its a brilliant link, you seem to have overlooked its a 20ft iso container package that requires 400V 3 phase AC. Therefore fails the simple test of being simple, nor does anyone need 270Kg per day so you are looking at a retail model that requires a sale to a consumer. Its almost poetic just how bad a link it is to reflect your understanding. I dare not go to the point of requesting a quote for such a unit
Here's a better link, I think they might look at some CVs of google experts?
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/jaguar-land-rover-project-aims-hydrogen-suvs-2030
Point in demand IF we started to switch transport to HYDROGEN this additional electricity DEMAND would grow quicker than UK production SUPPLY. And 3 times faster than a similar uptake of battery ELECTRIC vehicles. That is a simple part we can agree on.
Soldato
Unfortunatley the reason is physics, you ain't changing that.
I agree; the process will become more efficient. But the timescale for this is looking like decades, not years.
The problem is this; hydrogen produced from natural gas is already more expensive than petrol, diesel, or electricity as a vehicle "fuel". Electrolysed hydrogen has 2.3x to 3.3x higher production costs than hydrogen refined from natural gas. If the right investments are made, the IEA believes this could drop to 1.5x to 2.5x by 2030. But that is still far too expensive for HFCVs to be anything more than an experiment. Production costs for electrolysed hydrogen need to be a fraction of the costs of producing hydrogen from natural gas today, otherwise it will simply make driving too expensive.
Also worth noting that while there is some spare renewables potential on the grid, there are a wide array of storage technologies competing to utilise it. So yes, efficiency does matter. If there are technologies which have lower capital costs and higher efficiency than HFC, hydrogen is going to have a hard time competing for that power. This side of the debate isn't just about batteries vs fuel cells, but about a vast number of other competing products.
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Not even close to 'satisfied';
Yeah its not simple or available!
Its a brilliant link, you seem to have overlooked its a 20ft iso container package that requires 400V 3 phase AC. Therefore fails the simple test of being simple, nor does anyone need 270Kg per day so you are looking at a retail model that requires a sale to a consumer. Its almost poetic just how bad a link it is to reflect your understanding. I dare not go to the point of requesting a quote for such a unit
Not available? Already in production and for sale so what do you mean?
As for the simplicity, I am sure you don't have a refinery in your back garden so why would you expect to have an electrolyser?
Do you know of any reason why a petrol station owner for example would not be able to install one of these units?
Can't change efficiency because of physics? So all petrol engines have the same efficiency?
I am not sure why you are mentioning natural gas. Why would you want to use natural gas (and increase CO2 emissions) to produce hydrogen? That's completely pointless.
Also these storage technologies competing to utilise renewable energy do not appear to be using that energy surplus otherwise there would be no reason for the wind turbines to work intermittently.
I'm not sure why you're skating round most of my post and fixating one one thing. That's completely pointless.
I included figures for hydrogen from natural gas as they provide some context. 1kg of hydrogen refined from natural gas costs up to $3.20 to produce. 1kg of hydrogen from electrolysis costs up to $7.50 to produce. The IEA are expecting the cost of the latter to drop by 1/3rd, which would mean up to $5 per kg. That's still more expensive than refining it from gas today.
Hydrogen is already expensive with natural gas as the main source. Yet it seems that even a decade from now we may not have hydrogen that is both cheap and clean (unless the IEA analysis was orders of magnitude out).
Hydrogen costs about £15 per kg. Hyundai Nexo will do 380 miles on its 6.7kg tank. That gives 26.5p per mile running cost, or around double the cost of diesel. But hydrogen doesn't have the tax burden of diesel. In truth, the net cost of fuel is more like 4x higher. And that will be using hydrogen refined from natural gas. Using hydrogen from electrolysis would cost even more and is expected to still cost more (than hydrogen from gas) in a decade.
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But natural gas is NOT going be used as the energy source for hydrogen production because it is cheaper. Building unsafe nuclear reactors and dumping all waste in the nearby river would be even cheaper but that is not the point.
Green energy will be more expensive but the other cheaper options are not sustainable.
Green energy will be more expensive but the other cheaper options are not sustainable.
But its a lot less efficient. You would need to use a lot of solar panels which could be powering homes or other things.
The difference in running costs isn't pennies though. Fuelling a Nexo is ~£2,000 more expensive than fuelling a Model 3 on UK average miles. That rises to around £2,400 more if we add on the extra production cost of electrolysed hydrogen.
Green concerns are an increasingly large market force, but nowhere near big enough to counter those kind of cost differences. Nobody wants to swap from Petrol or Diesel to Hydrogen and find themselves a grand a year worse off. Reality is, hydrogen needs to fall in price considerably. And that sort of drop simply isn't forecast to happen this decade. Moving from refined to electrolysed hydrogen, as you advocate, would actually drive prices in the opposite direction.
Green technologies only succeed when the finances make sense. It's a large part of the battle, and the main reason why there are a bunch of BEVs on the roads and basically no HFCVs.
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I had thought & remarked that - looking it up though
the efficiency of electrolysis is not actually so bad 60%, apparently so if those overnight octopus 1.2p unit's were deployed for hydrogen production, you could let the market decide,
a contingent who buy a hydrogen car who are prepared to pay, maybe 4x the price per mile, 5p unit, for energy (considering distribution, fuel cell costs too), or, a bev,
but, both would be cheaper than ICE.
Thinking of it anther way, the current, low, offpeak, octopus et al. 1.2p/unit cost, is artificial, a surplus, once there are competing battery/potential-energy storage mechanisms,
it will become 10p/unit like daytime, and, that article suggest 6-7$/Kg for elctrolysed hydrogen at the pumps., which is 16p/unit (7*0.77/33)
so not even 4x ratio I suggested.
you can view this as diesels tax is not sufficiently high, for the environmental impact.
Soldato
Yeah all poor, with a a range of efficiency based on Otto, Atkinson, Miller cycles etc. 20-40% and continues to creep up.
You are essentially arguing about the efficiency of an electric bar heater - Electricity turns into heat, you cant tune that. That helps layman electrolysis, unless you have a way of using less energy to break covalent bonds between hydrogen and oxygen atoms whilst keeping the platinum catalyser replenished.
There is already a surplus of energy which means that it is no being used.
Soldato
Source?
Answer to the OP question remains no. As its you, prove us wrong and get one.
Jeez, Talk about purchase justification syndrome
Correct me if I'm wrong, as I only had a quick skim of the document. But I'm pretty sure that 60% only applies to the power to hydrogen side, and doesn't account for the hydrogen to power side. They don't actually seem to give any figures for this other side of the equation.
So 65kWh of power is used to make 39kWh stored in the form of hydrogen. But you still have to realise that energy. And that's where you get more losses.
Hyundai Nexo has a 6.7kg tank, giving it a range of 380 miles. That's 56.7 miles per kg. You originally put 65kWh of electricity in to make 1kg of hydrogen, meaning you're effectively getting 0.87 miles per kWh.
Are you sure? 100% efficiency?
Wind turbines working intermittently because there is no need for power? Need more?
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/mo...city-an-opportunity-for-early-decarbonisation
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