Currently reading: Why is hydrogen no longer the fuel of the future?

A lower carbon footprint is the aim of carmakers from Alfa Romeo to Volvo, yet many are ditching hydrogen plans

Hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) should be making their big stage entrance right about now. Petrol and diesel cars are under fire as the UK government pushes harder for zero emissions ahead of its ban on new ICE vehicles from 2030.

Meanwhile, hydrogen is a key part of emissions reduction from British power generation (plans were announced last year to produce 5GW worth annually by 2030 – roughly the output of two nuclear plants). And FCEVs eliminate much of the range and charging anxiety prompted by the move from ICE cars. So where are they?

Brits can buy just two FCEVs from mainstream car makers: the Hyundai Nexo and Toyota Mirai. Last year, just two Nexos and 10 Mirais were registered. By contrast, 190,727 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) were sold – 12% of the car total.

Mirai 0

Despite decades of research into hydrogen fuel cells, many car makers are now backing away from the technology.

Honda last year announced it was ending its Clarity fuel cell programme, citing low demand. In 2020, Mercedes-Benz stopped its long-running F-Cell programme, due to high costs and an inability to lower them.

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General Motors has broadened the focus of its Hydrotec fuel cells to embrace “land, air and sea” applications. Jaguar Land Rover said in April last year that it would test a Defender FCEV by the end of 2021 as part of its emissions reduction programme, but in October it lost its fuel cell chief, Ralph Clague, and it declined to tell Autocar whether he had been replaced or whether the test went ahead as planned. And even Toyota, the car maker that has backed fuel cells the most forcefully, has shifted its ambitions for the technology away from cars. “In terms of passenger vehicles, I don’t see fuel cells as being a significant opportunity, honestly. We’re talking a few thousand annually [by 2030],” said Toyota Motor Europe president Matt Harrison in an interview last month.

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So what’s the problem? FCEVs have long been held back by a number of issues, chief among them a lack of fuelling infrastructure. The UK right now has just 14 public hydrogen fuelling stations. Toyota was able to take a chance on hybrids in the 2000s because they needed no new infrastructure, but without easy access to hydrogen, FCEVs aren’t attractive.

The UK government is partly to blame for focusing too much on BEVs, argues Celia Greaves, CEO of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association. She said: “There are orders of magnitudes in the difference between levels of support we’re seeing of hydrogen fuelling infrastructure versus chargers.”

Then there’s cost. Hyundai said last year that FCEVs won’t hit cost parity with BEVs until 2030 – but battery producers certainly won’t be standing still for the next eight years. The Hydrogen Council equates the platinum and iridium needed for fuel cells (and the electrolysers to make the greenest hydrogen) with the cobalt and nickel needed for lithium ion batteries; but new battery chemistries are slowly reducing the need for those metals, lowering fuel cells’ cost target yet further.

Swns hyundai nexo 024

Toyota is working on fuelling existing internal combustion engines with hydrogen, but Harrison said this research is so far aimed at motorsport. “Whether that makes it beyond motorsport experimentation into any sort of engine application, we’re some way off making a judgement on that,” he said.

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But as hopes for fuel cells for cars fade, they’re becoming the reality for commercial vehicles, particularly trucks. “Hydrogen fuel cells have low prospects in cars. However, the range and refuelling advantages mean that heavy duty applications have long offered a potential use for the technology,” market research firm IDTechEx wrote in a recent report looking at EV trends.

Vauxhall plans to introduce the 249-mile-range Vivaro-e Hydrogen van to the UK next year, while Renault is promising fuel cell vans for sale in 2023. Meanwhile, hydrogen trucks are being investigated by the likes of Hyundai, Daimler (in partnership with Volvo) and Chinese firm Hyzon, which has already started production.

Toyota Europe is about to start making fuel cells at its Belgian R&D centre to supply customers outside the car industry, such as Portuguese bus manufacturer Caetano. In the UK, Wrightbus makes hydrogen buses for customers including Transport for London.

The idea now is to create a ‘hydrogen society’ into which one day, advocates hope, you can drive fuel cell cars with much less hassle than today. “Hydrogen is coming to sit at the heart of energy for the coming decade,” said Greaves. “That gives us the opportunity to put fuel cell cars back onto the agenda, scale up production and reduce distribution costs.”

Whether FCEVs will ever be able to reclaim the momentum they’ve lost to BEVs, however, is a key question.

The Cheese of the Future

Hydrogen fuel cells make electricity by causing a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, of which the only by-product is water. However, to make hydrogen without using fossil fuels, you have to do the reverse, and that takes a lot of electricity. Ideally, that electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind, otherwise the point of FCEVs is lost.

The BEV argument is that you save a lot of energy by putting that clean electricity straight into a battery. The FCEV counterargument is that there might not be enough batteries to store renewable energy when it’s being generated; for example, on a windy night.

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“Hydrogen will play a similar role to cheese,” Sae Hoon Kim, head of Hyundai’s fuel cell centre, memorably claimed in a speech last September. His analogy recalled nomads who preserved leftover milk as cheese to use over the winter. “Hydrogen can convert excess electricity generated from wind or solar power into [energy-dense] hydrogen that can be stored in huge quantities,” he said. “Electricity is like milk, hydrogen is like cheese.”

British firm proposing local hydrogen cars for local fuelling stations

FCEV sales haven’t got going in the UK because their makers have been trying to sell us the wrong models, reckons Hugo Spowers, managing director of British hydrogen car company Riversimple. “Toyota and Hyundai aren’t pushing their hydrogen programmes, because there’s no infrastructure,” he told Autocar. “If you build an intercity limo like the Mirai, you need 300 filling stations to create a credible market for your car, whereas if you build a local vehicle, one filling station is enough.”

Riversimple’s Rasa FCEV, scheduled for production in 2024, is a two-seat, coupéstyle runabout with a projected range of 300 miles, but it’s no long-distance cruiser. Instead, it’s designed for weekly fills around one local hydrogen pump.

Riversimple is talking to local councils, independent fuel retailers and hydrogen hub developer Element 2 to work out where would be best to install pumps and therefore where to sell the first batch of Rasas. “We’re working to identify eight to 10 launch locations to make a strong business case for a refueller,” said Spowers.

“We put 100 cars in that market, then they have 100 captive customers.” He hopes that this single pump would then attract locally run hydrogen vans, buses and even lorries. “Concentrating demand for all these companies is key to building a business case,” he said. “It’s absolutely delusional to think anyone will roll out a nationwide infrastructure in the hope that vehicles populate quickly enough to make it profitable.”

 

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dbaarda 29 January 2022
I keep seeing people claim the problems facing hydrogen are the need for fueling infrastructure and the cost of fuel cells, and that it's a better option for heavy transport and aircraft.

For some reason people keep ignoring the two biggest problems; that it's really inefficient and hard to store, and that these don't make it much better than BEV for any application.

The hydrogen round-trip efficiency is less than half batteries, so even if fuel cells get cheaper you'll always be paying more than 2x as much per km. And hydrogen combustion is even more inefficient than fuel cells.

Hydrogen may be light, but it's really hard to store, and Mirai's tanks weigh 85kg to store 5kg of hydrogen. Fuel cells are also heavy and weigh about 1kg/kW or ~100kg in the Mirai. This extra weight doesn't burn away on the journey like jet fuel either. This extra weight and the energy inefficiency makes hydrogen only ~2x as many km per kg of weight compared to batteries. This is not enough of a lead to stay ahead of batteries at the current improvement rates.

For aircraft, jet engines are just too nice a fit for heavy long distance transport, and I can't see them being displaced by anything soon. The cost of fuel and pollution would have to get really dire before people would accept regressing to leisurely electric prop or blimp transport. They can't switch to hydrogen combustion because of the storage problems, which means carbon-nuteral synthetic fuels will win.

This also makes it terrible for storing and transporting energy, and even blocks of aluminium would be better.

Which means, the best application for hydrogen in the future will be... (drumroll)... industrial processes that need hydrogen, or that can replace carbon with it. Fertilizer, steel, synthetic fuels, and maybe furnaces.

Lapps 28 January 2022

I beg to differ with the basis of this article. Yes, creating a 'hydrogen network' will be both difficult and expensive, but battery power will not be viable for heavy trucks for the foreseeable future. It will never be viable for ships and aircraft! These three categories consume more fuel than all others put together. So if we are to stop using fossil fuels the creation of a hydrogen network becomes vital. Once a network is created, it will become obvious that larger cars and 4x4s will be much more suited to hydrogen. Darwin's rules will then apply. 

RPrior 27 January 2022

Everyone is blind as bats - and a little batty too.

All who decide to purchase a BEV will require the fastest recharging BUT

1. Fast recharching burns out batteries and charge recycle possibilities will fall to little over 50% of their maximum lifespan potential if recharging utilises 175KWh & 350KWh charging units.

2. if 5% of the Car population (1,5m vevicles) in the country use 175KWh chargers 

and 5% use 350KWh chargers then the calculated requirement for Peaking Power Plants will result in motorists paying for the construction of 1,313 new Power plants (600MWh ea) at a construction cost of $400 billion.

The cost to recharge your BEV has not been properly thought out.

 

In my opinion, Wind & Solar power plants (INTERMITTENT PRODUCTION) would be better  utilised to produce Hydrogen fuel.  I am merely a director of Energy Investments & Finance - What do I know?

matchico 28 January 2022
You are completely wrong...

People will only use fast chargers on long distance trips which is barely a few trips a year for most of us. You'd be lucky if fast chargers are used by 1% of cars on a given day, let alone at the same time, bearing in mind that most will plug for 15/30 minutes max and there are 24h in a day... The rest of the time they will use slow chargers on their drive or in the street.
Avg car will need 3000kwh per yr. 32M car = ~100TWh/yr. That's less than a 1/3 more than current capacity, or about 20 nuclear reactor or 15000 wind turbine. Now if we were to use hydrogen instead, we would need 250TWh/yr, a near doubling of current capacity because making green hydrogen then generating electricity from it is highly wasteful. You need to produce 3kwh to get one at the wheel (1.2 with a bev). So we would need a lot more capacity with H2 than with battery. Simple as that.
It's also expensive and dangerous

scrap 29 January 2022

RPrior, your knowledge of the energy sector (despite your professed credentials) seems a little off...