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.
That was...that was like the Onion or something. That's like saying Subway saying they're nervous about the pizza place because the pizza place doesn't use buns. Oil companies don't care how gas is distributed -- and they certainly don't care how hydrogen is distributed, as long as there is gas involved somewhere.
Fuel cell cars have been "on the verge" since the mid 90s -- I worked with a couple people who eventually were employed by Nissan and Honda. There are FCVs out there -- but they aren't efficient, there isn't a hydrogen infrastructure, etc. The idea of an FCV is nice: no giant battery, no pollution from the car...but like the Tesla employee said, there's a cost to getting hydrogen into the cars -- the whole cycle is a challenge to make efficient. Ideally, it may be cleaner than giant batteries from cradle to grave...but even after decades of work, it's still not there yet.
I think of the idea of roads that charge the cars as they drive...but that's not too far from just having cars get loaded onto a train for long distances. The US, at least in its populous areas, should think more about mass transit. Futuristic mass transit (think Asimov) Heck, even Uber and Lyft are making a dent in everyone using their car all the time.
Completely agreed that hydrogen fuel cells don't make sense from an energy standpoint (unless you're liberating the hydrogen from a high Gibbs free energy source like methane, or if you're getting the energy from a non-polluting source like nuclear or wind (in which case the hydrogen is basically acting like a battery). The transport argument is more specious. Yes transport and storage is worse than for gasoline (pretty much everything is worse, which is why we use gasoline). But electricity isn't much better - easier to transport, more expensive to store, and much harder to transfer from one storage medium (the charging station) to another (the car battery).
From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.
An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).
Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.
Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor. Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)
So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.
Now look at the fuel price side.
Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ. Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.
So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.
Plentiful. Convenient to refuel. Probably the two most important factors for something to be viable for wide scale commercial deployment.
Batteries are slow to recharge, there's no getting past that. You can claim that batteries will get faster, but that's ultimately unimportant. Current is the factor. Either you store it at voltages that are unsafe to handle or you deal with massive cables. People say you'll just recharge at work with a slower technology. My office has two stations, if more people need to charge, they'd have to start equipping the parking lot with charging stations. Really stop and think for a few minutes what that would involve from the sheer logistics portion of equipping a non-trivial percentage of parking spaces with charging stations, let alone maintaining them. Like it or not, electric is a logistical nightmare.
Hydrogen has some definite disadvantages, but the fact that it can use a distribution network similar to what we use now trumps a lot of those disadvantages. And the fact that it's lighter than air eliminates a lot of the safety concerns people like to parade around. Unlike gasoline fumes, it won't build up in parking garages, so the ventilation they have to put in becomes unnecessary.
It's a poor way to store energy the same way nuclear power is a very expensive way to boil water. Fusion is our best bet, our science isn't there yet. Hydrogen can replace hydrocarbons, eliminating reliance on fossil fuels in the near term long before we master cold fusion, matter/anti-matter or (insert random scifi power source) to replace it. If goal is permanent cheap power? it's a not yet result. To remove our dependence and trashing of the environment as well as producing clean water as a side effect? hydrogen is the way to go, for now
~corporate tool, but employed~
Of course existing infrastructure is bad for hydrogen, but upgrading existing infrastructure is part of the benefit for the hydrogen crowd. While the physical elements of our current infrastructure definitely won't support hydrogen, the business infrastructure is already in place to match the existing fuel distribution model. A one-time cap-ex investment to swap out fossil fuel infrastructure components with components that can support hydrogen is all that is needed to maintain the existing business model. Sure, it won't be cheap, but it will likely be a supported by tax incentives (create local jobs to do the retrofit, write off retrofit) and it provides an opportunity for the oil service industry to learn hydrogen infrastructure by developing it on the taxpayer's dime.
Don't think about this like a financial engineer, not a civil engineer. It doesn't matter what makes the most sense from a technical perspective, what matters is not disrupting cash flow for entrenched industries. I didn't really appreciate this argument until I started running a company. But after spending the last four years around finance people, I have a new appreciation about how they (and by extension, most businesses) view the world. They optimize around profits, not technology.
-Chris
Plentiful. Convenient to refuel. Probably the two most important factors for something to be viable for wide scale commercial deployment.
I think the main advantage of hydrogen is that it's waste product is water so in theory it should have less polution but as far as convenience, instead of using electricity to make pure hydrogen, it makes a lot more sense to use electricity to make hydrocarbon fuel (some sort of artificial gasoline created by splitting co2 and/or h2o). An artificial fuel could use the existing distribution channels and doesn't need special pressurized containers. Batteries, fuel cells, etc... don't even come close to the amount of energy per pound of regular hydrocarbons. I wouldn't be surprised if firewood actually has more energy per pound than current battery technology.
The Tesla batteries are actually outlasting their estimates. At 8 years and 100,000 miles (the standard warranty), they still hold over 85% of their charge; and the Tesla Model S usually only allows an 80% charge, unless you tell it to fill up for a long trip. For commuters or a system with a high availability of Tesla's 20-minute super chargers, you'd still be going 100 miles between a charge (about an hour and a half) at 30% battery life, 37 years into the car's life; commuters particularly are doing under 50 miles per day and coming home to charge in between.
In the short-term, long trips are unfeasible on a new electric car due to lacking infrastructure and long charge times; in the long-term, severely-degraded cars 40 years and half a million miles into their life could still make cross-country trips on the original battery.
A properly-maintained gasoline engine often can't make 250,000 miles without a rebuild; the car is considered old and dead after 100,000 miles, but that's kind of dumb. breaking 400,000 miles on a Tesla battery in the above scenario should be doable. My car, at 100,000 miles, is getting 78% of its original range; I'll probably have sunk around $7,000 total into maintenance (including transmission maintenance--Teslas don't have one) after I've had the engine's systems repaired to get it back to its full range of 320 miles on an 11 gallon tank. Mind you the car's 12 years old; it's been cheap to maintain. Just a 2004 Mazda 3, and that's still on the L-Series engine (a Ford make; Mazda switched to their own engine for the 3 series, which is superior in terms of early-life maintenance costs, and thus total lifespan).
Right now they're on rough par for lifespan; electric cars are doing better for fuel costs and maintenance in most use cases.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Don't think about this like a financial engineer, not a civil engineer. It doesn't matter what makes the most sense from a technical perspective, what matters is not disrupting cash flow for entrenched industries.
Well I am an accountant and an engineer. You are right about progress following the path of least economic resistance but I think you have that path misidentified. Part of the flaw in your argument is in thinking there is just one big industry in the fight here. Basically you will be pitting the electric generation companies against the refining companies. Except not really or at least not immediately.
The least disruptive technology is actually plug in hybrids because it bridges both types of infrastructure. It can behave exactly as current gas powered cars do. As battery technology gets better you'll see the range of the electric vehicles go up and the charging times go down and the charging infrastructure get built out. Eventually you reach a tipping point.where it makes sense to go all electric and drop the second engine. In the mean time the gas station still sells fuel, the electric company gets time to beef up their already existing infrastructure and you don't have to introduce any truly different infrastructure like compressed gas or specialty chemicals.
To make fuel cell vehicles work you have to build out all new infrastructure everywhere all at once and to date they are behind the curve in performance. There is no consensus on what form hydrogen should be distributed in or how it should be implemented on the vehicle. With hybrids you can incrementally solve the problem today. I don't think it is very likely that fuel cells will make some miraculous technological leap that will make building out all that extra infrastructure economically worthwhile in the near future.