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

This is the truck of the future!

[Rei]

... said someone from 1996, maybe.

Re:This is the truck of the future!

[Registered Coward v2]

... said someone from 1996, maybe.

Truck emmisions are an issue for ports. A lot are older OO vehicles that aren’t clean idle ans aome ports offer incentives to get new tractors. If LA can get a significant numbers of the trucks to be H2 fueled it’s a win.

Re:This is the truck of the future!

[Rei]

You're citing a "FutureGen" reference from 2005, backed up by a dead link.

Google "hydrogen price per kg", since a kg of hydrogen is approximately a gallon of gasoline equivalent. Prepare to be disappointed.

Re:This is the truck of the future!

[LynnwoodRooster]

The cost is equivalent to $5.60 per gallon of gas, and Toyota includes 3 years of free fuel...

This truck is a triumph.

[Rei]

I'm making a note here: "Huge Success".

Re:This truck is a triumph.

[glitch!]

To me, a Triumph is a car that is almost certainly a sports car that failed in some way. Firstly, the "TR" references the fact that Triumph started out using tractor engines. The TR120 and TR140 were interesting, for those who like different designs or imported cars. The Spitfire was... I don't know. I think it competed with the MGB, but both were low in horsepower. The TR6 might be the best of the line. It had a great look, and apparently it did not fall apart like the offerings from Fiat. I have to admit that I did LUST (yes!) after the TR7 design. But comparing the TR7 to the Fiat X19 is probably not going to give useful service life information. And to finish off the story, Triumph got a 215 V8 in the TR7 and called it the TR8. Good idea (I think), but it didn't save them.

Re:reuse that water

[DDumitru]

Actually a lot of water:

30 kg of H2 = 30 x (16+2)/2 = 270 kg of water or 71 gallons of water.

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.

Re:300 mi range and a sleeper cab?

[Rei]

The Tesla truck comes in two versions, 300 and 500 miles. They charge to 80% in in half an hour at a megacharger station, aka during a US trucker's mandatory rest break (we have much more frequent rest requirements here).

Battery speculation runs between 600 and 1000 kWh.

Re: DOA

[atomicalgebra]

What are talking about? Anheuser-Busch purchases 800 hydrogen trucks. 20x the order they made with Tesla.

Where are you going to get the fuel?

[whoever57]

https://www.hybridcars.com/fue...

Hydrogen is just fossil fuel in disguise.

Re:Where are you going to get the fuel?

[whoever57]

Read all the statements about how the target prices for electrolysis have not been met. Look up the efficiency of turning water into compressed H2. It's much more efficient to use that electricity to charge a battery. Then you have all the distribution and storage costs (before the H2 actually gets into a vehicle). Then you have got the fact that hydrogen vehicles still need significant batteries because it's not practical to regenerate energy back into hydrogen in a vehicle.

Then you have the need for a massive infrastructure build-out, that isn't needed for BEVs.

Today, and for the next few years, hydrogen will be produced from fossil fuels.

The concept of the "hydrogen economy" is a con put out by the fossil fuel industry to delay the renewable fuel industry from taking over transportation.

Re:Where are you going to get the fuel?

[blindseer]

If these trucks use hydrogen from electrolysis, in California (the planned location for most of these trucks), and California continues with their plans to drive nuclear power out of the state, then these are natural gas powered trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Kenworth has been making natural gas trucks for years.
https://www.kenworth.com/news/...

There appears to be plenty of natural gas filling stations in California.
https://maps.cngnow.com/search...

Hydrogen fueled trucks are a stupid idea.

Re: Where are you going to get the fuel?

[Rei]

Or contrarily, if you don't have a good location for pumped hydro, and operating on the premise that grid-scale battery storage is not cost effective, you could use said excess-power-hydrogen to create far-easier-to-store fuels while simultaneously removing CO2 from the atmosphere (e.g. reverse water gas shift + Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier, or a number of other processes). There's also electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (ERC).

Re:300 mi range and a sleeper cab?

[Mashiki]

Pretty much. Which means the only places these things really exist is at depots where trucks sit, or in locations where the trucks are used to shunt from a depot to another, or a short distance to a factory/dock of some kind.

Give me a break

[ukoda]

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

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.

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:300 mi range and a sleeper cab?

[Rei]

1) Multiple trucks exist. You're confusing "existing" with "being in mass production"

2) There is no nationwide network of either. The difference is that fuel for the electric truck costs an order of magnitude less than for the hydrogen truck, which is the most important factor for fleet operators.

3) As a general rule, EV batteries are cheaper and longer lifespan than fuel cells, too. FCVs having to also have a battery pack, just a smaller one.

Re: 300 mi range and a sleeper cab?

[Rei]

It literally says the exact opposite. The title of the article is "Tesla Semi test program partner says that performance specs are for real". Said partner is XPO Logistics, who, in a conversation with Morgan Stanley, stated:

The Tesla semi has already received important validation from some customers. We spoke with mgmt. at XPO Logistics, one of the largest logistics companies in the country, that has been talking to Tesla on their EV semi for the past 18 months, including testing live prototypes. XPO mgmt. confirmed that in their testing, the features and capabilities of the truck mostly lived up to Tesla’s claims at the launch event, including the performance vs. diesel trucks up a 5% grade (55 mph vs 45 mph), recharging time, safety/anti jackknifing features and payload (similar to a typical diesel truck, as confirmed by Tesla).

You stated "There is no testing by fleet operators." Are you saying that XPO Logistics isn't a fleet operator?

Isn't water vapor an even worse greenhouse gas?

[pak9rabid]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't water vapor (the emissions from fuel-cell-based engines) an even worse greenhouse gas than CO2?