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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.
And a poor way at that. Cannot agree more with his assessment. I have been saying things like this for years, could never understand why people thought it was a great idea.
Hydrogen is an energy *vector*, not an energy source. The energy must come from somewhere - natural gas usually - and, as TFA's author points out, the efficiency of the entire chain from energy source to the wheels is quite insanely bad.
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He's right about all of the negatives, but even that being the case it doesnt mean that a "really bad battery" still isnt the best thing we have for a use case of converting excess power into storage which can provide long range to cars. Personally I hope batteries win but the argument for hydrogen isnt meritless.
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.
"They just have an extraordinarily bad battery."
Also, very interesting and insightful perspective...but does it also account for more efficient processes that are constantly being developed or aimed for?
Well, it's not news. And you can't predict the future, absent an operating crystal ball or what have you. I'm fresh out of magic tea leaves. But let's say that a more efficient process for separating hydrogen is found. To me, this is the really interesting part:
It's a fact that pressurized gases are more of a problem to work with than liquid fuels. There's really no way around that. Everything from storage to leak detection becomes more complicated, and therefore more dangerous and expensive. Propane string trimmers should last forever, right? But problems in the fuel delivery system (seals, problems with a hard line) consigned them to the waste bin of history, so far anyway. That's just propane, working with hydrogen is dramatically more complex and expensive. The molecule is much smaller so sealing in the gas is a problem, you need expensive alloys to avoid hydrogen embrittlement (and current fuel cells operate at fairly high temperatures, so this is relevant), the pressure is much higher so the tank is much more expensive and that smaller molecule means it needs a special lining that you just plain don't need with natural gas, let alone with gasoline or diesel fuel. Fuel cells themselves involve substantial energy input during construction.
TL;DR: On its best day, hydrogen is a massive PITA, and its best day clearly has not even arrived. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a nice idea, one day, but not today.
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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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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.
>> If your goal is to reduce energy consumption, petrol or whatever resource, you want to use it as efficiently as possible.
Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money", he's entirely playing on peoples existing misconceptions that "green" cars are also intended to save the owner money, which is entirely not true.
They're all and only about doing something to reduce emissions from fossil fuel emissions (so don't take into account any extra pollutants from manufacture or recycling of batteries etc). The total cost per mile of ownership of a "green" car is very likely going to be significantly more than say a small efficient conventional gas car like a Toyota Yaris, which is fine if your priorities really are saving the atmosphere not saving money, so please lets get off this stupid misconception once and for all.
More than that....
Bulk commercial electrolysis hydrogen is terribly expensive - generally over $4/kg wholesale, about $6/kg retail (1kg hydrogen in a FCV gives a range of about 2x that of a gallon of gasoline in a non-hybrid), without any significant fuel taxes (unlike gasoline). Home-scale electrolysis will be inherently less efficient, and home users pay much higher electricity rates than industrial users. They avoid distribution costs/profit, but overall they're going to spend a lot more.
Home NG reforming is cheaper, but 1) it uses a fossil fuel, and 2) generally NG-reformed hydrogen can't be used with FCVs, the purity requirements for FCVs are pretty extreme.
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Presuming that by "reducing energy consumption" he really means "saving money",
They're related, and directly so. We manufacture energy by the application of labor; if you're going to store energy from solar, geothermal, wind, or other source into a different-source medium (i.e. not storing oil as fuel oil), you're going to spend more labor (and thus pay more wages, thus incur more cost) using a less-efficient one. That is to say: If you generate 5MWh of consumable hydrogen using 30MWh of electricity, you're going to spend more money than if you store 23MWh of usable electricity in a battery sourcing 30MWh of electricity.
For an electric car, if its amortized lifetime cost including maintenance is not greater than the lifetime cost of an ICE car plus the savings in energy production, then the electric car will save you money. This can occur if the electric car requires less-complex engineered parts (including batteries), if it requires fewer parts overall, it has lower maintenance cost, if its overall labor efficiency per output unit power is higher than the ICE, or some combination of these and other factors. In other words: if the car costs less over its lifetime, it costs less for the electricity it consumes, or both, then the car is cheaper.
Those factors are not unlikely. Electric cars have fewer and less-complex moving parts; electric motors deliver power from electricity at high efficiency (75% versus 25% for gasoline); and large engines are more efficient at converting feed fuels (oil, coal) into electricity (and may use cheaper feed fuels). In my case, I would spend under $10/month on the electricity to drive a Model S 85kW high-end model, and similar to drive one of the more-reasonable $35k Models 3 vehicles--making the Model 3 comparable to a Lexus or similar, but with 1/6 the fuel cost and likely-lower maintenance costs.
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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.
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The reason they're not talking about how you generate the electricity is because you have to do that step whether you use that electricity to directly charge your car, or whether you use it to split water. The loss is the same at that stage between EVs and HFCVs. Where the losses differ is in what the article talks about - splitting hydrogen loses you 60% of your energy, compressing it loses you another chunk, burning it in a fuel cell loses you yet another chunk. It's much more efficient to just store it in a battery.
Electric cars upend multiple industries - from oil services all the way to convenience stores. Change will be fought tooth-and-nail. I just hope Elon doesn't run out of cash before he's had a chance to force the issue on electric cars.
That's why you'll see hybrids first. Hybrids don't completely upset the apple cart and provide a transition technology. Plus you have to remember that there is the electrical grid which provides competing infrastructure to the fossil fuel system. The problem with hydrogen is that unless you can turn it into some sort of liquid form, the existing infrastructure for gasoline refueling is really no better than the electrical grid. Either way you have a substantial build out. Just because hydrogen is a chemical doesn't necessarily mean you can drop it right in place of the gasoline delivery system.
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.
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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.
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Even if you don't bother with making cleaner burning synthetic fuels like they mention because LFTRs give you cheap power to do all kinds of fun things, just replacing natgas power plants with LFTRs would free up fuel for natgas powered vehicles. Actually, we have enough natgas to do that now but... Thorium!
So, some maybe future, hydrogen might be possibly safer.
Hydrogen requires cold and/or pressure vessels and delivery mechanisms. All which will need replacing regularly as they become brittle. Also, hydrogen is much more explosive than gas, so will require extra vapor controls. But gas is more expensive? Right.
Upfront, hydrogen won't make it because the infrastructure for electricity is already there.
And then let's not ignore the 40-50% loss in extracting & using hydrogen.
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Uh.. Just to be accurate, that's a battery swap station, not a supercharger. Basically a lift with a robotic wrench - undo all the bolts holding the battery on, remove the old battery(placing it into a charging port), grab a fully charged one and bolt it back on.
A supercharger still generally needs 30 minutes to an hour.
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More short term near sighted fill my profits spewing from the people who benefit the most from it. Electric cars are better right /now/ and in small counties.
1 billion used batteries every ten years. That's for every car on the road.
How do you think that'll stack for recycling and what not? You know a shit ton of it will end up in dumps with toxic liquids leaking out.
Know how expensive to replace those car batteries are? Imagine if every 10-7 years cars required their entire fuel system removed and install with a new one, gas tank, fuel injectors, fuel lines, carbs, the whole works. Yeah, about the same price.
As greedy as those oil infrastructure types are, and in the inefficencies with hydrogen, we know about them, they are true, in the long run, using large renewable facilities gathering solar wind / hydrodam power, even at the 40% efficency, are going to be better in the long run.
The equipment for hydrogen isn't nearly as toxic, and much more recyclable and reusable. In the end, it is currently the ultimate power storage system, as the byproduct is consumable water.
Should space exploration ever happen in larger scale, having well developed hydrogen fuel cell systems will go a long way as well.
TL;DR -Batteries for a few people seem great. 1 billion batteries per 10 years bad. Most of it will not be recycled. Way worse than k-cups.
Hydrogen less efficient, equipment / left overs more recyclable, less deadly / toxic.
More sustainable long term, like hundreds of years, vs sounds great for the next 50.
This is the standard canard that can make any technology appear to be more efficient than it is in practice. You can always technically use waste heat for something else. In practice, colocation challenges and/or a lack of demand make this only applicable in specialized circumstances. Reusing waste heat also increases capital costs.
No, from that perspective, it's plain absurd. Just buy a BEV.
By "not any time soon", you mean "having existed for several decades", right? Even in the CARB era with NiMH battery packs there were electric freight vehicles with up to 30 tonne capacities. Toyota's CARB-era vehicle was an SUV. And li-ion is dramatically more powerful per unit mass than NiMH, and today's motors likewise dramatically more powerful per unit mass.
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Fuel cells are not perfect, nothing is, but it is in no way a 'scam'. Lets go over a few points here:
*Hydrogen products takes power to make.
Absolutely true! On the other hand it doesn't leak away into the non-existence like electricity stored in batteries either. Our batteries don't maintain charge all that well, just ask an electrical engineer, they have the numbers on this stuff and it's not big secret either. You'd think someone from Tesla would know that.
The advantages of using Hydrogen are that it can be stored for a long time, be shipped to somewhere else, and can 'refuel' a vehicle a LOT faster than recharging a battery. (Unless you swap out uncharged batteries for charged ones, but that's a different story the electric vehicle manufacturers don't want to go into.) Also, unlike a rechargeable battery, if you maintain the system, you will almost never have to replace your fuel tank.
Currently, our common processes of producing hydrogen use electricity for electrolysis, and that has a few points on it's own to cover. First, there are some new versions of electrolysis that are more efficient, there is a new method that functions more like photosynthesis (it's a new development, you'll have to hit the science sites to read about it), and there's a mystery device by a paranoid inventor that I don't think has allowed any proper independent verification so this last one probably is an actual scam. Of course all of those methods do have an important quality, they can all be done with renewable energy sources, even those with limited functionality like wind and solar. (If the sun isn't out or the wind isn't blowing, those methods won't generate power, and that's why they are limited. You have to find a reliable way to store the excess for the non-productive times.) We do all agree that getting away from fossil fuels is good, right?
*Hydrogen hydrogen hydrogen... Yes, fuel cells that we have use hydrogen, but not all of them use the gas. Some of them are fueled by hydrogen from another source. Usually a liquid like methanol. (It would be great to use water directly, but that's a pretty tight molecule, and despite some unsubstantiated claims, it's unlikely to happen.) Again, if someone knew anything worth mentioning about fuel cells, they should bloody well know about this!
*Storage. Storing pressurized hydrogen gas is a bit of a pain, but it was solved years ago. In fact, they've designed those types of tanks for cars that are rated as safer than the gas tank your vehicle already has. (If you have an internal combustion vehicle.) And yes, it has a system similar to the traditional fuel station you're used to. Of course, it's totally non-compatible with the gas stations we currently have as it needs completely different tanks & pumps. If you didn't know, it's so expensive to replace those big storage tanks, it's cheaper to build a new station, which isn't something that any fuel company wants to do. They haven't been proponents of hydrogen in any form, they've consistently been opponents, except for a few one shot concept vehicles they've thrown out to mollify certain environmentalists and government types, and to catch a bit of 'environmentally friendly' press out of it. There's a huge history of their obstructionism on this field, go look it up.
*Oh the humanity! How many people that were on the Hindenburg were burned by the hydrogen? Zero. Yep, all those burns were from the diesel that fueled the engines. Ok, some might have been from the burning cabins and junk inside, but it still wasn't the hydrogen. By the way, for the hydrogen to ignite, it was exposed to flames or sparks outside of the gasbags. All in all, the biggest fear people apparently spout over hydrogen is the Hindenburg disaster, which is rather messed up. Even if they'd have had helium instead, the results would have been very similar. Unless the helium outflow smothered the flames on the outer covering, in which case it's descent speed would have been a lot slower, and might have avoided the rupture that spewed
For people interested in personal energy independence, hydrogen is good for storing surplus solar, if the solar system regularly produces more surplus than will charge an affordable battery. Metal hydride storage is cheaper than battery storage when the power storage quantities are large, and the weight doesn't matter if the storage is for a residence rather than a vehicle. If I drive my vehicle to work, I can't charge it up from my home solar during the daytime, because the vehicle isn't at home. So, if I want to store solar energy at home while I'm away at work, I either need enough battery capacity to supply my home and recharge my vehicle through the night, or I want to use some other storage method. So long as home solar owners are tied to the grid and happy with the deal they get from selling power during the day and buying it back at night, batteries may well work better. For independent home solar owners, hydrogen fuel cells may be a better solution.
Toyota's HFC car refills in three minutes and has a range of about 300 miles. Besides that, it has all the same advantages as any other electric car, in addition to far less weight for batteries.
Toyota's building out fueling stations just like Tesla did. I don't see any reason why an HFC car isn't just as viable as battery cars in the long run.
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