Counterpoint: Hydrogen’s Perpetual Unfulfilled Promise
[Aug. 25, 2020]
You may have read Phil Royle’s post recently, “2021: The Year of Hydrogen-Powered Vehicles.” In it, he makes the case that hydrogen has the potential to be a ubiquitous, localized fuel, and even indirectly as a fuel for battery EVs. Nikola poster boy Trevor Milton has also been on an ambitious speaking circuit touting the triumphant virtues of the “fuel of the future” and preemptively claiming that the company is going to be the market-dominating juggernaut in the space.
Despite all the fanfare and fantastic claims hydrogen backers tout, my view of hydrogen’s future prospects remain modest. Simply put, hydrogen only has a single (so far) persistent advantage over electricity as a vehicle fuel. That one advantage is refueling time. In almost every other category, it falls short; including well-to-wheels efficiency, “green” credentials (with a caveat), ubiquity, and cost of infrastructure development. This hypothesis was recently re-validated by Volkswagen AG in developing its MEB electrified vehicle platform.
VW’s decision to charge forward with electrification is no accident. (Image courtesy Volkswagen)
Also, it’s important to keep in mind that currently, the vast majority of commercial hydrogen is produced from natural gas, a fossil fuel. Nothing inherently wrong with that, unless you’re claiming it isn’t a fossil fuel, which many of its backers are. Think I’m just spewing anti-hydrogen propaganda from Greenpeace? Not exactly, the U.S. Department of Energy itself admits the majority of hydrogen is sourced from natural gas. Without boring you with all the potential headwinds hydrogen faces, you can read it from the source at the DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) page yourself.
Yes, if you’re a driver of a Honda Clarity or Toyota Mirai, you’ll be in and out from the fuel pump much faster than the driver of a Model 3, Taycan, e-tron, or other EV, even with the fastest current DC charging technology. That will likely be the case for a decade or more to come. However, the prospect of having a home hydrogen fueling station is slim to nil. Heck, even Honda abandoned its “Phill” (no relation to my TWC colleague) home natural gas fueling system initiative for the Civic NGV for technical headaches. The storage, distribution, and dispensing of hydrogen is orders of magnitude more complex, demanding, and expensive than natural gas.
I already hear the “yeah, buts” coming from hydrogen backers, “What about city and apartment dwellers? How are ‘gas’ stations supposed to make money if each car is sitting there for an hour?” Those mental constraints are the legacy of the old hydrocarbon paradigm. The fact of the matter is, for EVs, a “gas station” could be any city light pole, electrical outlet, parking space, or really anywhere else you could get electricity. Yes, that construction and infrastructure investment takes money. But it’s the difference between thousands of dollars (for an EV charging point), and millions of dollars (for a hydrogen station).
So I will end this post coming around to where I’ve always stood in regard to hydrogen. It makes a tremendous amount of sense for Class 8 and long-haul commercial trucks, where uptime and on-the-road hours are paramount. In and out of the fueling station in 10 to 15 minutes logistically makes a lot more sense than 45 minutes to an hour, which it would likely be for a vehicle like the Tesla Semi. For passenger cars, it makes less sense, if for no other reason than the expense of building out the fueling infrastructure, and the somewhat inflexible form factors of on-vehicle hydrogen storage. And again, hydrogen’s overall efficiency issue is endemic to physics and chemistry. You can’t blame anti-hydrogen environmental activists or electric utility lobbyists for that.
(Main image courtesy BMW)
Follow us on Google News and like us on Facebook!
