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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.
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
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.