Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.