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Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co)
Marc Tarpenning, co-founder of Tesla, believes hydrogen fuel cells are a "scam". Tarpenning, who is not with Tesla anymore appeared on Internet History Podcast last week to outline a number of issues with hydrogen fuel cells. He said (via Electrek blog): If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible. You don't want to pick something that consumes a lot for whatever reason, and hydrogen is uniquely bad. There's a saying in the auto industry that hydrogen is the future of transportation and always will be. It's a scam as far as I can tell because the energy equation is terrible. People will say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's abundant out there in the universe not here. We live on a planet where hydrogen is super reactive -- it's bound up into everything. It's bound up into water, wood and everything else. They only way that you get hydrogen requires you to pour energy into it to break it from the chemical bonds. Electrolysis is the most common method. You put electricity in water and it separates it, but you are pouring energy in order to make hydrogen, and then you have to compress it and that takes energy, and then you have to transport it to wherever you actually need it, which is really difficult because hydrogen is much harder to work with than gasoline or even natural gas -- and natural gas is not that easy. And then you ultimately have to place it into a car where you'll have a very high-pressure vessel which offers its own safety issues -- and that's only to convert it back again to electricity to make the car go because hydrogen fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They just have an extraordinary bad battery.Here's the podcast.
There have been recent developments in using a catalytic reaction to generate H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide) from sea water and sunlight. Hydrogen peroxide is much more reactive (i.e. easier to separate the hydrogen) than water, and much more energy dense at room temperature and atmospheric pressure than hydrogen alone. This is the only promising solution to the hydrogen problem that I've seen.
Hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages. This post seems to list all the disadvantages, and none of the advantages.
As noted, hydrogen isn't an energy source-- it's an energy storage medium. But then, Tesla's batteries aren't an energy source either-- they are an energy storage system that takes energy from somewhere else. Hydrogen can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it can fill up cars in gas pipelines. Electricity can be produced remotely, and shipped to where it charges car batteries by wires. Same principle, different medium. (In principle, electricity could be shipped to the charging station, and produce hydrogen on-site by electrolysis-- but it's probably more efficiency to make the hydrogen remotely.)
Hydrogen's advantage is that it is extremely light: you can react it with air, you don't have to carry the air around, and hydrogen is the lightest thing there is to react with air. Weight-wise, hydrogen is the best possible fuel.
Hydrogen's disadvantage is that it is extremely light: it is hard to store a lot of it because the density is very low. You can do a little better if you go all the way to liquid hydrogen-- but nobody is going to do that for a car (not, at least, until cryo storage gets a lot better)-- and even liquid hydrogen has about the density of the lightest grade of styrofoam. So, the tanks are either big, or high pressure-- or both.
Advantage and disadvantages. This is what makes an engineering trade off.
With current technology, I'd go with batteries. Two or three generations down the line? Your estimate of technology progress is probably as good as mine.
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People (government) also thinks it is a great idea to take USA food-stocks (corn) to make ethanol. It is kick-backs and subsidies -- these technologies would never exist on their own without the government subsidies (because the ideas are not profitable, and even wasteful).
While I am not a proponent of ethanol fuels, the US didn't take food stocks to produce it. They did use feed stock corn, but that corn would never have been for human consumption in the first place. Since then, many have changed their crops to switch grass which has similar yields but requires much less water to grow. So, using food stocks for fuel production did not happen on a large scale, although it is feasible that some farmers switched from food stocks to non food stocks most planted acreage that was not in production.
What any of that has to do with hydrogen fuel cells is beyond me.
They hate nothing more than people charging up at home, on their own terms, with the electricity provider of their choosing, possibly with their own solar.
What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home? Even running the conversion on solar power.
The same reason's why Tesla and nobody else does it:
1) Hydrogren is an extremely volatile and reactive element. It literally has blown the tops of of nuclear containment buildings (see: Fukishima). /etc to handle hydrogen are vastly more expensive, because the hydrogen atom is so damn tiny it can squeeze out (leak) where other molecules can not
2) Hoses / tanks / seals
3) Using electrolysis to fill a "hydrogen battery" is extremely inefficient. Just dump the electricity into a better battery, and be happy with your better conversion rates.
Feel free to name the benefits.
The big win with Fuel Cells was that chemical batteries were so bad that about the only car you could make with them is some tiny commuter car that can't go outside of the city. However, battery technology is improving and fuel cells are still stuck with the same old problems they've always had, so now they just don't make sense anymore.
Hydrogen has lots of issues too. You need a pressurized tank, but hydrogen has a bad tendency to infiltrate the metal in the tank and make it brittle, increasing the risk of explosion. This also makes distribution difficult. Then fuel cells proved to be very touchy and plagued with short lifetimes, especially if the hydrogen wasn't laboratory pure. There's a reason fuel cells never took off and it's not a massive oil conspiracy, it just never made sense.
I read the internet for the articles.
The U.S. ethanol fuel program began in the 1970s after the Arab Oil Embargo. The U.S. subsidizes food production to insure there is always an oversupply, and we don't end up with people going hungry like happened during the Great Depression. This oversupply means there's always excess food. The question then becomes what to do with this excess food.
A lot of it is used as cheap feed for cattle, since Americans love beef. Some of it is given away as foreign aid. Someone came up with the idea of processing the corn to create HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) as a substitute for imported sugar (which grows readily in the U.S. only in Florida and Hawaii).
And someone came up with the idea of converting that excess corn into ethanol to use as a gasoline substitute. This is why our ethanol program is based on such a terrible source crop - the efficiency or cost to grow the corn wasn't a factor because it was a sunk cost. This was excess corn which was going to be eaten by mice and rats anyway - better to get some use out of it than none.
Fast-forward to today. The ethanol lobby has become a monster. We are no longer talking about excess corn which was going to go to waste. Through their lobbying, they've gotten subsidies to grow corn for the explicit purpose of turning it into ethanol. Now it's no longer a sunk cost - the cost to grow that corn and the efficiency of converting it into ethanol ARE a factor. And it's a huge waste of money and resources for what amounts to a needless subsidy of the corn-agri business.
This does have a roundabout tie to hydrogen as a fuel. Liberating hydrogen from water via electrolysis is massively inefficient (about 30% on an industrial scale - 70% of the energy becomes heat). But liberating hydrogen from a higher energy state like in methane can be done much more efficiently. If (big if since there's been little research) you can come up with an efficient and cost-effective way to convert plant sugars or plant matter into ethanol (highly unlikely to be corn), then that becomes a renewable source of high-energy hydrogen. Liberate the hydrogen from the ethanol and you can send it through a hydrogen fuel cell at a much better efficiency. (Of course simply burning the ethanol in an ICE or converting the plant matter into biodiesel may be even more efficient.)
Even waste heat itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Most attempts at desalination have concentrated on reverse osmosis. This requires mostly electrical energy to drive the pumps. But desalination via evaporation and distillation requires mostly heat energy. States like California where fresh water is in short supply could couple up power generation stations and electrolysis factories with evaporative desalination stations, and a lot of that energy "wasted" as heat would actually be used for something productive.
Bulk commercial electrolysis hydrogen could be very cheap is there was real demand for it. Steam electrolysis is "over 100% efficient" if you're using waste steam from the power plant (you steal back some of the huge wasted heat of vaporization, making the electricity input low), so making it in vast quantities as a byproduct of power generation would work well. But no one does it because there's no distribution network.
I'm not sure how much sense home electrolysis would make from an efficiency point of view, but from a "I want off the grid, even if it costs more" point of view it's great. You can power a heavy SUV or jacked-up 4x4 pick-em-up-truck with it, which we won't see with battery power any time soon.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It works that way in my house. Got solar panels installed last year. Inverter syncs to the grid, a couple of fuses make sure nothing melts, and that's about it. The meter runs backward when we're producing more than we're using.
The primary constituents of lithium ion batteries are actually relatively straight forward to recycle (Lithium, Cobalt, Copper, Nickel, Graphite (carbon), Aluminum are the most common elements), and the batteries have useful lifetimes well beyond 10 years. However, the capacity degradation curve for Li-ion chemistries is mostly logarithmic, meaning even after it's done as an EV power store (say at 2/3s original capacity which might be reached after 10 years), it can last another 20+ years as grid storage, which doesn't require anywhere near the same weight/size to energy ratio.
I've never seen one that did that. I'm sure they are out there, but all the "reasonable" ones turn into a pure off-grid system when the grid is down, and when the grid comes back up, will re-link back with it. Meter runs both ways. And when the grid is down, an isolation circuit kicks in and separates you from the grid.
Maybe the rules are different where you are, but seems common. I even found a standard for disconnecting a working solar system from a dead grid. DIN VDE 0126.1. Why have a standard on how to do it if it was never done?
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