Toyota Unveils Project Portal 2.0 Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Semi Truck (cnet.com)

Toyota is actively working to make vehicles powered by alternative energy sources. Last year, the Japanese automaker unveiled Project Portal, a novel hydrogen fuel-cell system designed for heavy-duty truck use at the Port of Los Angeles. Today, Toyota announced that it built a second hydrogen fuel cell-powered heavy-duty truck with 50 percent more range. CNET reports: Project Portal gets its power from a pair of hydrogen fuel-cell stacks borrowed from the Mirai sedan. Combined with a 12-kWh battery, the truck put out an impressive 670-plus horsepower and 1,325 pound-feet of torque. Its total combined weight rating is a hefty 80,000 pounds. The first version's range was about 200 miles, but this second version pushes that range north of 300 miles. The new Project Portal also packs a sleeper cab and a revised powertrain that boosts cab space without requiring a longer wheelbase. Project Portal 2.0 will begin its drayage work this fall. The pioneering variant has already clocked more than 10,000 miles as it transported goods over short distances in and around the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. As with every other hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle, the only emissions byproduct is pure potable water, although I don't blame you if you're not comfortable enough to pour a glass and take a sip of tailpipe juice.

Comments

Re:300 mi range and a sleeper cab?

[LynnwoodRooster]

It's about the same range as the Tesla truck, but given it's an H2 truck, if there are fuel stations, you can refill in about 10-15 minutes, which means long-haul is a potential. The rumored Tesla semi truck will have somewhere around 600 kWh of battery, meaning it would take a supercharger around 5 hours to recharge. That's a big advantage of liquid or gas fuels - near-instant refills. Range on a tank is really much less important when you have to stop every 4-5 hours to refill for 15 minutes, versus stopping every 4-5 hours to recharge for 4-5 hours.

Hydrogen? They mean natural gas

[blindseer]

There are no mines or wells to bring up hydrogen from the earth. Given current sources of electricity for electrolysis and how hydrogen is predominately formed this is a truck that burns natural gas. There are already natural gas trucks on the market, Kenworth announced they'd have some in 2104.
https://www.kenworth.com/news/...

Given that T. Boone Pickens has been talking about his "Pickens Plan" on energy policy for 10 years now moving transportation fuel to natural gas is far from new.
https://www.ted.com/talks/t_bo...

Cut out the middle man from natural gas to moving cargo and just use natural gas in the trucks. What hydrogen does is add the costs and losses in running power plants on natural gas for water electrolysis, or using that natural gas in steam reformers. Natural gas trucks exist now, they have better range than these hydrogen trucks, and I'm guessing that they cost less to make and maintain. Natural gas reduces particulate emissions, NOx emissions, CO2 emission, and other air quality problems.

If we burn natural gas in trucks instead of for electricity then where do we get our electricity? Pickens endorses wind and nuclear, and I believe he's right about that. Pickens admits his plan is a "bridge", a plan that alone is not a permanent solution because the natural gas will run out at some point. Something will have to replace even natural gas at some point. How long can natural gas last? Decades at least, if not centuries, so it's not like investing in natural gas will be a loss for someone buying a fleet of trucks, the trucks will have plenty of natural gas for the life of the truck.

What's one possible endpoint for the Pickens Plan "bridge"? Synthesized fuel. The US Navy has been researching how to turn electricity and seawater into jet fuel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This synthetic fuel process from the US Navy doesn't have to produce only jet fuel, it can produce hydrocarbons of any length on that carbon chain, from methane (the primary component of natural gas with one carbopn) to cetane (primary component of diesel fuel with 16 carbons).

Synthetic fuels from this process the Navy is researching produces hydrogen as part of the process, they just take one more step of grabbing carbon (from CO2 dissolved in the water) and attach it to the hydrogen to make fuel. The Navy is intending this electricity to come from a nuclear power plant on a large warship but the electricity can come from anywhere, and the water can come from anywhere it is exposed to the air and dissolves the CO2 from the atmosphere. It closes the carbon cycle so this fuel is as "carbon free" as anything else.

I expect any plans to use hydrogen as transportation fuel to fail, unless that means of transportation is a rocket. It's just far easier and cheaper to cut out the hydrogen middle man and burn natural gas for cleaner running trucks. If the concern is CO2 output even from the natural gas then produce "synthetic natural gas" (or rather "substitute natural gas" since synthetic and natural are opposing terms) and introduce that into the existing natural gas infrastructure.

Hydrogen is a terrible fuel, especially since it's not really a "fuel" as most people understand it since it does not exist as something we can just dig up out of the ground. This Toyota truck burning hydrogen is a stupid idea and there are already existing solutions that are far easier and cheaper to implement.

Re:Give me a break

[blindseer]

When are people going to realise that hydrogen based vehicle are never going to amount to anything. I have been reading about them since the 1980s and it has gone nowhere in all that time.

That will probably happen about the time public schools teach real math and science.

I can't help but wonder how many hydrogen vehicles were bank rolled by big oil to muddy the waters around EV development.

I doubt "big oil" is behind funding hydrogen. They have nothing to gain from this. There's certainly a lot of hydrogen produced from natural gas right now but the oil companies have to know that if someone makes a working hydrogen vehicle that the next step is someone finding a means to improve electrolysis of water for hydrogen.

I'm guessing it's the car and truck manufacturers funding this. They are the primary target of "greenies" because of the petroleum they burn. Car makers have a lot to gain on hydrogen because the "greenies" are doing all they can to make car ownership unattractive. If cars can be proven to be able to run on hydrogen then nearly all the complaints on environmental impact go away.

News flash, EVs are here now and for most people practical (but still over priced) and hydrogen solutions will not be able to catch up with EVs.

News flash, no long haul truck is going to run on batteries.

Batteries just do not have the energy density required to keep a truck moving long distances. Trains might solve some of the long haul transport needed, and they can be electrified, but trucks still need reasonable range to do multiple short hauls in a day to compete with diesel. Even these short haul trucks can't be electric. This hydrogen fuel cell truck that Toyota is showcasing has a range of 300 miles or so on a tank, which is barely enough for running a day driving loops around a dockyard.

I worked in a metalwork shop and they had two forklifts for moving parts inside the shop. The "small" one (small in quotes because it's relative) was electric. The big forklift was propane. No one liked to drive the electric forklift because it was underpowered, and once the battery ran down it was done for the day and needed overnight to charge. In a forklift the weight of the battery wasn't much of an issue because it served nicely as a counterweight against what was being lifted, the propane forklift had steel counterweights. On even a short haul truck the battery weight counts against it as that reduces the cargo it can carry. On a long haul truck the batteries would have to weigh more than the cargo to get a reasonable range.

Battery-electric passenger cars are fine for a daily driver. Even then most owners of a BEV have a second gasoline vehicle for longer drives, such as taking the kids to visit Grandma once per month. The practicality of BEVs to be a true replacement for gasoline and diesel fuel vehicles is still questionable. Plug-in hybrids are a nice compromise but they are still burning hydrocarbons. Compressed natural gas vehicles seem like a more viable compromise over BEVs and gasoline. CNG vehicles cut CO2 emissions by half, can fill up at home like an electric (since many homes have natural gas service already), and can tank up in minutes at a station equipped with a CNG filling point.

I've seen hydrogen mixed with natural gas as a compromise, it reduces CO2 emissions further than natural gas alone but does away with many problems of hydrogen storage as the hydrogen is "dissolved" in the natural gas and doesn't attack seals and metals (and therefore creating dangerous leaks) like pure hydrogen. If we see hydrogen make it to the transportation market then it's likely to be as a mix with methane and other hydrocarbon gasses. This methane doesn't have to be from fracking out of the ground, it can be synthesized or from biomass processing.