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Tesla Co-Founder Says Hydrogen Fuel Cells Are a 'Scam' (electrek.co)

Posted by msmash on from the the-future-of-transportation dept.

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.

18 of 630 comments (clear)

  1. Hydogen is just a way to store energy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      *People* never thought is was a good idea: oil and automotive executives do, because hydrogen maintains a gas station-style distribution network. That's why they try so hard to sell it to you.

      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.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    2. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by lymond01 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by rockmuelle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Where are mod points when I need them???

      This. This. This!

      I remember talking with my grandfather years ago about the future of energy for cars. He's a EE who ran a telecom infrastructure company for years and always saw things from the infrastructure perspective. Whatever was least disruptive to the energy ecosystem as a whole was going to win. Given the entrenched players at every stage in the distribution chain, hydrogen made the most sense. Each industry segment would profit greatly from upgrading their infrastructure to support hydrogen while not having to abandon their place in the process.

      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.

      -Chris

    5. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by jandrese · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    6. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's to stop people from creating their own hydrogen at home?

      Common sense. Conversion of electricity to hydrogen is only about 60% efficient, so you lose 40% right off the top. Then it takes more energy to compress it. If you store it in a metal hydride, that takes more energy, plus increases the weight by an order of magnitude. There are many more problems with hydrogen, such as metal embrittlement and permeability through almost anything.

      Hydrogen fuel has mainly been pushed as greenwashing, or cynical phoney environmentalism designed to delay adoption of electric cars based on actual sensible technology like lithium batteries. This was most famously done by George W. Bush, to divert research from battery powered electric cars.

    7. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Only the existing infrastructure really isn't suit for hydrogen storage and distribution. Not the pumps, nor the tanks, nor the transports. Its cheaper an easier to convert a gas station to a charging station than a hydrogen station.

      The H2 vision is based more on the thought that batteries will not get to a successful range/charge/recharge/cost balance. Batteries are progressing but not yet to that point, but close enough to re-think H2. I've never thought H2 made any sense simply due to inefficiency of the entire process. Fuel cells in general are still only niche products even after tremendous investment in development for the last 20 years. However, if cheap enough hydrogen could be produced, we would see that niche grow to a bigger portion of the market.

    8. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by rockmuelle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

    10. Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy by mspohr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So, where do you recharge your H2 vehicle on long trips?
      I charge my Tesla at Superchargers which are already installed just about everywhere. Drive 3-4 hours, charge 30 minutes (usually ready for some food and a break by then), drive another 3-4 hours, repeat...
      Tesla Model X can tow your boat (it has a 5000 lb rated hitch).

      --
      I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
    11. Re: Hydogen is just a way to store energy by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Informative

      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?

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
  2. Nothing new here by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Nothing new here by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 4, Funny

      What happened to massive solar farms producing electricity for hydrogen, as tended by robots who also serve up blueberries the size of softballs for lunch?

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  3. He's not wrong, with one caveat. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Hydrogen storage: an engineering trade off by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  5. EVs aren't that much better by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Hybrids are the path of least resistance by sjbe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.