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.

Comments

Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

*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.

Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[rockmuelle]

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

Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[Solandri]

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.

Re:Hydogen is just a way to store energy

[rockmuelle]

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

Hybrids are the path of least resistance

[sjbe]

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.