https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/26/hydrogen-cars-have-4x-annual-fuel-cost-2-70-times-the-carbon-debt-as-electric-vehicles/
[Hydrogen as an energy store has been coming at me from multiple
directions this past couple of weeks. Most of the stories have stood on
their own as showing why 'the hydrogen economy' remains an
industry-driven, taxpayer-funded mirage which has no place in our need
to move to a lower-carbon energy mix and need to squeeze all the value
we can out of renewables so long as we are still using fossil carbon
energy sources for anything, anywhere, anytime on this planet. With
that, a small number of articles follow to try to put the misinformation
campaign back on a leash.]
Hydrogen Cars Have 4× Annual Fuel Cost & 2–70× The Carbon Debt As
Electric Vehicles
April 26th, 2019 by Michael Barnard
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are the bad idea that refuses to die, zombies
revenant from their ~2005 grave, lurching forward into transportation
discussions over and over. They are the B-movie monster that rises from
the bathtub they were drowned in, only to be killed again in a different
way. It’s time again to put a pickaxe into their rotting brain pans.
Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday it will supply its fuel cell vehicle
technology to major Chinese automaker Beijing Automotive Group Co. as it
seeks to expand business in the world’s largest auto market by volume.
Yes, Toyota continues to defibrillate the corpse of its dead technology,
something it will continue to do until whichever set of three aging men
who committed to it 30 years ago finally shuffle off this mortal coil,
taking the need to save face with them.
An acquaintance recently posted a picture of a retail hydrogen pump in
Sacramento on social media. The solitary pump, lonely in its sea of
asphalt under a suitably gloomy sky, was charging $16.85 USD per
kilogram of hydrogen.
Why is that important? Well, a kilogram of hydrogen is the energy
equivalent of a gallon of gas. Hydrogen fuel cells are about three times
as efficient at converting hydrogen to energy as internal combustion
engines are at turning gasoline into energy, so you go about three times
as far on a kilogram of hydrogen despite it having the same energy. The
Toyota Mirai gets about 66 miles per gallon out of its 5 kg fuel tank.
So really, you are paying about $5.50 to travel the same distance as you
could with a $2.50 gallon of gasoline. Hmmm… in a car that costs a lot
more than an internal combustion car too.
That might get better sometime, but maybe not. The best resource I found
recently when structuring out an end-to-end air-to-fuel system to show
why that’s such a poor idea, especially when fed with natural gas as
Carbon Engineering does, is that mass production of clean hydrogen in
the best case might get down to $5.00 per kg. That’s just the generation
cost. That’s not storage, distribution, or markup, and is not the price
a consumer would pay.
And hydrogen fuel pumps cost a million or two for a couple and more for
the storage tanks. They are much more expensive than gas pumps, so
hydrogen stations have to mark up the hydrogen a lot more than gas
stations have to mark up the gas.
And those hydrogen stations don’t exist. They all have to be built on
somebody’s nickel.
Meanwhile, making clean hydrogen is energy intensive and you throw away
a lot of the energy. Let’s assume they get 10 MWh of electricity from a
wind farm. Then they convert water to hydrogen and oxygen with the
electricity. High-efficiency PEM electrolysis is about 80% efficient
(projected to rise to a theoretical peak of 86%). That takes about 50
kWh per kilogram, so you have a couple of hundred kilograms of hydrogen.
You’ve thrown away 20% of the electricity and are left with 8 MWh
embodied in the hydrogen.
Then you compress it, store it, ship it, and pump it. All of those
things take energy. Let’s say another 10%. So now you have about 8 MWh
in the 200 kg of hydrogen that you have spent 11 MWh on far.
And then you put it in a Toyota Mirai at its best case 60% efficiency
and throw away another 40%. That means you get 4.8 MWh of energy out of
the 11 MWh you’ve spent. Those 200 kg will allow a Toyota Mirai to drive
about about 13,000 miles. Let’s be nice and say the retail price of
hydrogen gets down to $10 per kg. That will cost you $2,000 to drive
those 13,000 miles.
What if you put that 11 MWh in to a Tesla Model S P100D? Well, that car
travels about 100 miles for every 30 kWh of electricity you feed it.
That means 11 MWh will allow a Tesla Model S to drive about 37,000
miles. That’s about three times as far for the same energy input. And
the average cost of electricity in the USA (not the night time cost when
you actually charge) is 12 cents per kWh, so those 11 MWh will only cost
you about $1,300.
Just to finish this off, the gas car at 28 miles per gallon and 200
gallons will travel about 5,600 miles at a cost of about $500.
That starts to add up over a year. Let’s see what this all looks like
side by side.
[link to table image which shows a Tesla Model S gets almost 3 times the
range per dollar as a mid-size gasoline car and 4.5 times the range per
dollar as the hydrogen-fuelled Toyota Mirai:
https://cleantechnica.com/files/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-25-at-3.10.33-PM.png]
Yeah. The hydrogen-powered Mirai (if you could buy one where you are and
if there were hydrogen pumps where you wanted to go, and neither of
those things are true) would cost you about four times what just using
the electricity would cost and almost twice what just driving a gas car
would cost (and hydrogen cars are expensive of course).
Of course, this is the nicest possible way of making hydrogen. Most of
it actually comes from steam reformation of natural gas, which has a CO2
debt of its own. The source I quickly found for steam reformation of
hydrogen indicates that industrial processes emit 25,808 kgs of CO2 for
every 2,551 kgs of hydrogen produced. As the authors from the Gas
Research Division, Research Institute of Petroleum note: “In most cases
CO2 is purged to the atmosphere because of its useless and harmful
nature.“ So that’s not good. What does that look like over a year?
Gasoline produces about 9.1 kg of CO2 for every gallon. Wind energy
produces about 8 kg per MWh full lifecycle including all mining,
refinement, manufacturing, distribution, construction, operation and
decommissioning (and that’s getting better as more of those elements
decarbonize).
[link to table image showing Tesla Model S creates 32 kg of CO2
emissions in a year of driving, while the Mirai produces 2,062 kg and
the gas car produces 4,375 kg:
https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/26/hydrogen-cars-have-4x-annual-fuel-cost-2-70-times-the-carbon-debt-as-electric-vehicles/
(if climate change is the issue of our time, doesn't this spell out
for you why electric vehicles will win out, especially as battery
technology continues advancing for both vehicles and stationary storage?)]
Yeah, hydrogen from steam reformation of natural gas is still better
than burning gasoline, but that’s still a couple of tons of CO2 from the
hydrogen process. And then you look at the wind energy (or solar) going
into a Tesla battery and you say, wait a minute. Is that right? Would it
really be that much better for the planet to drive a Tesla instead? And
that much cheaper too?
Yes and yes.
Even if you just plugged into the wall in California, you’d still only
be around 1,200 kg of CO2 per year and improving annually. CAISO just
announced that California exceeded 100% of net demand from
carbon-neutral electricity sources (wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear) for
a bit over an hour on April 21, 2019. There are provisos on that, in
that it was a low-demand period during the shoulder season, but that was
17 GW of low-carbon electricity pumping through the wires of California.
If you’d been recharging your Tesla then, you would have been averaging
about 12 kg CO2 per MWh, and you’d be under 50 kg CO2 for the year.
Gas stations make a couple of grand a week on gas typically, running
about 3% profit margin on gasoline. Hydrogen pumps and tanks cost
millions. Gas stations in cities are a dying breed because the only way
for land that valuable to pay for itself is to build upward, and
refueling stations with highly flammable substances require their own,
single-story footprint. There’s no way to square that circle.
There are other reasons, but this is the reality of hydrogen for cars.
It’s a dumb idea economically for individuals and it’s a dumb idea for
the environment too.
It’s much, much better to decarbonize the grid and put that electricity
into cars than into hydrogen. The slipperiest molecule might have a 3-4%
transportation play in larger form factors (and maybe it will hold onto
its forklift market for a while longer), but for cars it makes no sense.
--
Darryl McMahon
Author, award-winning book The Emperor's New Hydrogen Economy
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