Heres the thing: It's not about efficiency, it's about convenience. Transferring 2700 megajoules of energy to an f150 via gasoline in a few minutes is very convenient, something that would take a Tesla a few hours. If consumers were concerned with efficiency the same way engineers were, we'd all be driving electric hummers and cybertrucks.
Hydrogen isn't aiming to be as efficient as batteries. It's assuming to be as convenient as gasoline, but with little environmental impact.
Obsessively talking about charging times is a frame of reference influenced by decades of driving ICE vehicles. And frankly the hydrogen vehicle thing also seems like it is heavily influenced by this mindset as well.
I can't make or fill gasoline (or hydrogen) at home. After years of "refueling" my Volt this way, I'd have a hard time giving up my "gas butler" that gives me a full "tank" every time I leave my house, and having to return to going to gas stations sounds highly unpleasant and very inconvenient.
This isn't a good comparison at all. You're looking at the set of people who looked at the operational requirements for EVs and said "yes, this works for my needs" and then looking at how those needs are met. What you would really want to do is compare the operational requirements for EVs and the general usage of motor vehicles to see what proportion of the general usage of motor vehicles can be replaced by EVs and their operational requirements.
EDIT: Even further, you would really want to know about the value of different modes of usage as well. So, for example, it is possible that users value edge case usage (such as very long trips) much, much higher than they do day-to-day usage and so still you could meet 90% of general motor vehicle usage with EVs at the same convenience but if the remaining 10% was far more valuable to end users and the inconvenience too high, it might still not be reasonable.
Thinking about "how much users value x" based on the CURRENT PARADIGM is a constraint to progress, and doesn't help predict very much at all. Consumer habits change.
Exactly.
If you are going on a long trip, renting or renting plus flying is likely best. If you are traveling 1200 miles, do you really want to drive for 20 hours solid? I've done it and it mostly sucks.
This is the big problem pro-BEV people are missing. If your goal is to reach 100% green transportation, batteries will never get you there.
When you pose every problem as an absolute, it's impossible to come up with a solution for anything.
I'm not one to make perfect be the enemy of good. If 99% of driving is EV and 1% is ICE then we have a much smaller problem to deal with.
Not long ago, people predicted EVs would never get to the point they are now. The picture will be entirely different in 10 more years. By the time we've replaced the first 90% of ICE vehicles, the solutions to the last 10% will become more obvious than they are now.
When I need a 4x4, I rent one.
The bottom line: electrics are quickly overcoming the 1000Km/charge barrier, in the next 10 years it will probably become the norm. That's a charge level that can last you a full day in almost any conceivable usage mode, so it can cover 99% of real world tasks.
Sure, there will still be very specialized tasks where 2 hours of downtime per day is unacceptable, or some fresh produce delivery route that requires 36 hours non stop driving by a shift of truckers. But that would be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
Can you elaborate on why you’d consider trucking to be a negligible edge case? What I could find online shows it’s over 40% of commercial miles and over 60% of transport for delivered goods.
How much do you weigh the inconvenience of being 10 minutes late for an appointment because you had to make an unplanned fuel stop?
How much do you value 100s of unneeded fuel stops interrupting your life?
Fortunately, it's not necessarily an either/ or. You can buy an EV for 99% of driving and just rent an ICE car when you need to road-trip.
The vast majority of journeys and days overnight charging of a tesla style car is fine. The average driver
1) Spends 55 minutes a day behind the wheel
2) Drives 29 miles a day
https://solarjourneyusa.com/EVdistanceAnalysis7.php
"93% of all vehicle-days show a total distance below 100 miles. It is important to note that only vehicle-days are included where the cars were used that day"
A car with a 300 mile range covers almost all drivers for almost all uses.
So you're down to whether the downsides of owning and operating a gas-fueled car outweighs the downsides of an electric car (having to hire a gas one for occasional long trips)
As more and more people move to electric, there are fewer and fewer customers for gas stations, reducing the number around, and reducing the utility of a gas car even more. The costs of repair become higher, and the cost of the car in the first place will increase as economies of scale tip the other way.
Depends on charging options. If you can charge overnight at home or at the office, then yes. If your only option is spending a long time at a charging station away from home / office, an EV suddenly requires planning.
Thankfully there's more and more public chargers in or near residential areas around here.
Okay, has this been done by anyone? Something that shows current limitations of the infrastructure and projected mitigation of those?
The average American round trip commute is under 40 miles. Longer commutes can be accommodated with financial incentives and legal requirements for employers to provider EV chargers on prem (with pass through billing for the power, or providing it for free). Anything beyond that (high daily mileage outliers) are served by long range EVs and Fast DC charge networks.
The current gas-station/convenience-mart ecosystem is designed around a 5-minute or so petrol fueling cycle. There's nothing they offer that will keep you productively occupied for a hours-long charge cycle.
A 30-minute or hour charge cycle, in contrast, is long enough to perform errands-- I could see a large number of supermarkets, strip malls, big-box shops, and restaurants interested in offering 1-hour charging stations. You can offer cross-promotions (spend $100 in store and your charge is free) and you have captive customers who are likely to wander the aisles a bit longer/order an extra coffee or dessert if they know they need to wait another 10 minutes for their charge to complete. Maybe the no-garage apartment dweller does his charging when he goes for his weekly grocery run.
And electric is intrinsically democratic, if you have civilization you have electric power around. Some upgrades will be required but from a single business' point of view, the investment is much lower than building underground fuel storage tanks, obtaining the necessary environmental and zoning permits etc. Literally anyone can enter the charging market.
A) fast charging causes battery degradation at least 3-5x as fast as charging at or below the nominal "C" rating of a given cell or amortized individual cell rating. This means, in the next 10 years, more batteries have to be produced, more lithium has to be mined and more Tesla parts have to be shipped on diesel powered vehicles. [0][1]
B) it uses more power and places more demand on the grid, hence you're burning more coal in order to meet the demand curve and incur a larger transitional period in production which means more fossil fuels burned, more energy lost to conversion and at the end of the day more Co2 in the air. [2]
0 - https://cleantechnica.com/2017/07/09/tesla-limiting-supercha...
1 - https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/12/is-it-true-that-a-tesla...
2 - https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publication/ev_emissions_imp...
What those people will not do is buy two electric cars plus a gasoline car for their 1% needs. Many people also would rather not hassle with rentals on a regular basis.
But in fairness, it'd be great progress just to get to the point where most two-car families choose electric for one of them, and by the time that happens, batteries will probably be a lot better anyway.
The idea that people will rent vehicles for those longer trips is a bit untethered from reality.
My own car is only a 20 percent solution. The rest is walking, biking, and public transit.
Obviously I'm not actually claiming any particular percentage, since that varies by person.
Hell, you could generalize it to small petrol cars too. I suspect most of us "overbuy" larger and more capable vehicles for the one day a month we need something bigger than a Mirage.
A Tesla can easily take a road trip the same as any ICE vehicle. I've personally driven one across the country. Supercharging along the way now takes the same amount of time as any normal stop for gas.
EVs are already better than a 100% solution because electricity is far cheaper than gas and you can fill up at home.
A few times a year, I make a ~950mi drive in my 2017 MX 100D (~295mi rated, ~220 maybe at 75 mph). In an ICE car its 13.5 hours of driving, and about 4.5 hours of charging. I frequently find myself wishing I owned an ICE car when I'm on the trip. Especially when the weather is cold, and I'm debating the range impact of turning the heat on vs 12 more hours of not being able to feel my toes. Or when the supercharger is busy and it ends up taking 2x as long to get from 5% to 45% because I'm sharing... or the anxiety of trying to make it one more charger to be able to save time by charging 2% -> 55% rather than 12% -> 65% (to avoid charging past the taper..)
I'm hoping the new models coming with 500 or 600 miles of range improve this. I'd probably only need to charge 3 times.
As a ballpark estimate, each such trip would cost at least $50 after taxes and fees for a budget car rental (ignoring gas vs supercharging or any other fees that would be incurred in both situations, assuming there aren't one-way fees, etc). After 100 such trips you'd have paid $50k in rental fees, vs simply having a Tesla with an extra 100k miles. Resale value is a nonlinear function of a lot of variables, but linearizing a few portions of the parameter space for the current market an extra 100k miles would only devalue the car by at most $16k (less if they intended to hold on to it for a few extra years instead of selling it immediately while the mileage depreciation matters the most).
Right now, the most expensive wear in a Tesla is battery cycles.
I did misplace a zero though for what it's worth. A budget rental would only cost $500 or so over 10k miles, not $5k, if they're making the entire trip in a single day and returning it to the same place they picked it up. If that's the case the budget rental would probably be worth it financially (unless they were planning to hold the Tesla for awhile so that it hits a more favorable point in the depreciation curve), and if not then the extra rental fees are likely such that especially counting gas vs supercharging it's approximately a wash one way or the other.
Most people don't buy vehicles for 90% of the use-cases. They buy something that does everything they normally expect a car to do, which includes a long road trip every year or so. Maybe driving to a favorite campground 200 miles away, etc.
The reason people keep bringing these scenarios up is due to the fact that electric cars are terrible for these cases. Nobody is suggesting they can't be used for daily commutes.
Right now electric cars are for people who can afford to also own an ICE or rent an ICE for road trips (or who don't like road trips at all).
https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2019-us-vehicle-sales-figures-...
Too bad GM killed it from their line-up.
- The power to charge the EV is drawn from the grid
- Batteries are heavy, so you cannot scale up batteries for range
- These batteries require a lot of lithium mining
Given these, I would definitely prefer the hydrogen solution.
- I drive a car with a small 14kWh battery, and a backup ICE for when I need it. 90% of my miles are electric. I don't understand why this model isn't more popular. I see no need to drag around a 60kWh battery "just in case" I need that extra range.
- Lithium isn't the huge environment/social problem really. Basically big evaporation ponds in desert areas. There's even some work being done to pull lithium out of abandoned oil wells in some locations. Some of the other components are a problem, such as Cobalt in some formulations. But all these formulations can be played with. And they are one-time for the whole vehicle, rather than requiring continual extraction. And can be recycled. Can't recycle petroleum or hydrogen.
Meanwhile the only practical sources for producing hydrogen require fossil fuels, typically natural gas, and end up emitting CO2. Emitting CO2 is not necessary for EV usage. But most practical sources of hydrogen do. And the efficiency is far lower.
https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/130380-future-batte...
It's not an electrochemical battery but I can agree with seeing it in a general sense as the an energy storage device, in the same way a dam is a "gravitational battery".
If petroleum didn't already exist we'd be trying to create it.
And that’s all ignoring the fact that the city owns the parking strip, not you, and I don’t think they’re going to be interested in having that kind of equipment in their space.
Aren't some cities (LA comes to mind) installing level 2 chargers along the street?
There's also no guarantee they'll put it in front of my house. Or if long-term that's what I want (now I get home from work late and some other EV is parked in front of my house? How do I feel about that if I have an early meeting tomorrow?)
You are forgetting about the power of NIMBY!
If gasoline weren't already a vital piece of infrastructure, nobody would allow a gas station to be built in their neighborhood. Any time someone tried to build one, the pile of litigation would bury the prospective builder. This is already an issue and our society has largely taken the risks of having (literal) toxic waste at the end of their block.
Even with "version 2" superchargers, this is not true. With 250kW (v3) charging, you can get to a sufficiently high state of charge (>80%) in under 30 minutes. And the thing is, given how efficient an EV is, you don't need 2700 mega-joules (20 gallons of gas or 750 kWh) to go ~500 miles. The Cybertruck will do that range to with ~100-150 kWh of battery and charge up in under an hour. This will probably get faster over the coming year as charging rates go up.
And like another comment pointed out, majority of charging happens overnight or during the day when the car sits idle. I own a Model 3 myself and I have not been to a supercharger in several months.
Now you need bigger charging stations because people are spending longer at the pump or else you'll have longer lines. Adding to that, I sure as hell am not spending half an hour at a pump on an already long road trip.
The lack of population density in the US, especially in the middle of the country, makes electric vehicles not a great choice for many people. I'm guessing this is why we see higher adoption in Europe on a consumer and infrastructure level.
As for taking 30 minutes to charge, what people usually do is to make sure their charging stops line up with food/bathroom breaks. Realistically, if I drive 10-12 hours in a day, I would stop about 3-4 times for food/bathroom breaks, if not more. This lines up perfectly with the range in my Model 3 AWD. In many cases, I have ended up having to get up and go get my car to avoid idle-rates because it finished charging while we were still eating.
On these trips, I usually pick a hotel/B&B with destination charging so that I can get going in the morning the next day with a full battery.
Yes, filling up gasoline delivers energy at an insanely high rate due to its density but the vast majority of that is wasted and not converted to miles driven.
The real comparison is miles of range delivered per minute of fueling. And a Tesla supercharger is already competitive with gasoline by this metric. If hydrogen takes longer than gas to fill up a tank for a similar range then its already behind just charging directly.
And it won't be. H2 is terrible for convenience of handling compared to gasoline. Handling liquid H2 is a nonstarter, it liquefies at 21 K at atmospheric pressure; cryogenics like that are not convenient at all. Gaseous H2 will escape through every tiny gap in whatever containment setup you choose, plus it's highly flammable, much easier to ignite inadvertently than gasoline.
And to top it all off, at the end of the day, its available chemical energy per unit mass is only two to three times that of liquid hydrocarbons. That's simply not enough of an advantage to overcome all the downsides.
What H2 can be used for is to make liquid hydrocarbons, through various chemical processes.
Personally I count on hydrogen for high energy space propulsion (either chemical with oxygen or alone in a NERVA for NTR) as otherwise it's IMHO too much of a headache to work with in practice.
There are 2 types of convenience.
- Being able to fuel up quickly on a long trip
- Having your fuel tank full at the beginning of every single trip.
Hydrogen fuel cells (and combustion engines in general) are better only for the former case. Since most people drive less than 300 miles most of the time, it's hard to argue a car optimized for longer trips is more convenient for most drivers.
A 75% charge can happen in ~20 minutes on something like a 250kw Telsa super charger. Battery tech and battery charging tech will only get better/faster. Also the vast majority miles driven on the road aren't "road trip" miles in which you would see the drive-to-fuel/energy exhaustion over and over for days on end scenario. When a Tesla plugs in at home and charges over night, that's actually more convenient than having to go to a gas station.
>Hydrogen isn't aiming to be as efficient as batteries. It's assuming to be as convenient as gasoline, but with little environmental impact.
Energy conversion efficiency is pretty important for that "little environmental impact" part.
And there is also an economic argument: methane/propane work because they are pure energy coming from the ground, you can only burn them to recover it. To produce Hidrogen, you need electric energy, or some very hot source that could be turn to electricity at a high efficiency. It makes zero sense to generate hidrogen in order to burn it for domestic heating, when the equivalent electric energy could give 3-5 more heat using electric heat pumps.
What's "small"?
20% hydrogen on existing grid in place now: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/24/hydrogen...
100% hydrogen trial over next few years: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scottish-homes-wil...
Hydrogen has suddenly skyrocketed up the agenda in Europe this year. There is a pressure group called Hydrogen Europe (which oddly doesn't even have a wikipedia page) which comprises companies like BP, Shell, Total, Equinor, Repsol, Engie, OMV, PKN Orlen, Hellenic Petroleum, and many more. At the same time almost 100% of hydrogen used in europe comes from oil.
It concerns me how much government subsidy (both cash and regulations) is being pushed into hydrogen.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8970377/...
"Hydrogen companies were given a boost this week after the Prime Minister vowed to inject £500million to 'turn water into energy' as part of a 10-point plan for Britain's green recovery.
However, critics say the targets are nowhere near enough compared to Germany's and France's respective plans to invest €9billion and €7billion in hydrogen."
Certainly oil got it later, but few places in Europe had it compared to coal. Refineries grew costing lots of billions.
Then natural gas got it with the investment of big gasoducts.
Then it was renewables. Hydrogen is just the next step, because it is the cornerstone of the chemical synthesis process, not just transportation.
Hydrogen and electricity are just "vectors". They let you use coal,gas,nuclear, hydro or Eolic power to power your cars and trucks with much less dependency on US controlled oil for industry and transportation.
The province of Alberta, Canada has put hydrogen at the core of its energy development strategy. The idea is to use existing natural gas pipelines to transfer hydrogen.
It’s true that a small fraction of hydrogen will permeate the pipes and leak; however, that leakage is not economically significant:
“... this theoretical distribution main leakage rate (43 million ft3/yr) would be 0.0002% of the 24.13 trillion cubic feet of natural gas consumed in 2010.” [1]
Hydrogen can be blended with natural gas (the above calculation was made assuming a 20% blend) or it can be sent down the line exclusively. As for how the hydrogen is produced, there are several ways:
1. It can be cracked from natural gas, after which the carbon is captured and stored back underground. Or,
2. It can be produced from electrolysis of water using energy from a renewable source such as wind or solar, effectively storing the energy for later use.
Either way, the point is that hydrogen is a useful fuel that can be transported over existing infrastructure and then used in a variety of ways that may help with the transition to a zero carbon system. Just to give one example, hydrogen can be combined with carbon dioxide to create jet fuel. [2]
[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/03/f11/blending...
This is not a true statement... Aluminum alloys readily liberate H2 from H20 at room temperarure (an exothermic reaction generating roughly equal parts thermal and chemical potential energy - both of which of course can be used for work) [1].
The oxidized aluminum is environmentally benign and can be recycled by applying more energy to deoxydize the product. The 'purification' process is ultimately where the useful energy comes from. The energy to power the purification can come from any number of sources - but as good stewards, we opt for clean energy sources. Al smelting historically produced a lot of carbon, but thanks to R&D by Apple, there are new carbon-free alternatives for this process [2].
At my company we are researching application of this energy infrastructure loop for powering ships (where source water is abundant). Essentalially, the Al+ is your fuel (battery), and from a volumetric energy density perspective (important for ships), you can store about 2X as much as gasoline/diesel - and way better than liquified or compressed H2 storage. However, on a mass energy density perspective (important for automobiles), it is a bit worse (heavier) than hydrocarbon fuels. Again though, each application has it's own constraints when considering an energy storage medium.
The automotive or civil sectors aren't the only use-cases for hydrogen fuel cells. One needs to take a look at all sectors to really grasp the global impact. A large part of my job is to explore this big-picutre aspect, because we need to understand the long term infrastructure stability/availability of potential "clean" energy supply chains, and it's VERY complex when you consider process efficiencies over the entire supply chain, raw material abundance and regeneration potential/economics/environmental impacts/speed, geopolitical forces affecting supply chains, the list goes on and on (and on).
H2 is an interesting "energy storage" option and it will certainly continue to be researched and applied broadly.
1. PDF - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
2. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/05/apple-paves-the-way-f...
The primary point of the above comment was that you need electrical energy to produce H2. That's a false statement. Al+ can generate H2 without electricity.
The important point is that the energy efficiency of any cyclic energy carrier system (batteries/chemical, mechanical, intertial, etc.) is only one, albeit important, factor. Other factors include mass and volumetric energy density, motion/environmental stability, cost, and so forth. The importance of each of these factors is weighted differently based on the application (e.g. automobiles, ships, trains, aircraft, domestic use, etc.).
2. Hydrogen is used for chemical processes (refining/ammonia) that can serve as a first step even if use for energy storage never becomes feasible.
3.Hydrogen is cheaper to store (<$10) per kWh than basically anything else (>$50).
But it basically won't be relevant until we have 12 hours of storage and zero marginal cost electricity 50+% of the year. Then it may be cheaper than overbuilding renewables or capturing gas emissions to cover the last 10-20 percent
One of the cases I think about for Hydrogen is moving energy around globally. The Sahara has tons of energy potential, but nobody lives there. How can we move that energy around efficiently, even across continents? Definitely not "batteries on boats"
It looks like you can blend it at some modest proportion into existing natural gas infrastructure to lighten its environmental burden somewhat.
Closer to my personal sphere, I'd be interested in using it for longer-term energy storage. It'd be amazing to be able to have some onsite high pressure or even cryogenic storage of hydrogen to be able to store a summer solar surplus for use in the winter. And yes, that's in addition to batteries to handle short term (hours up to maybe a week) of generation/load mismatches. I'd probably want to turn some back into electricity, but I'd be happy to simply burn a bunch too.
Hydrogen really doesn't like to be stored though. It also ruins any storage vessel it is kept in long term.
You see Hydrogen is the smallest atom, small enough to fit between atoms of other materiel. and it will work its way through materials and sometimes bonding with the material sometimes just escaping, this creates a spoilage of the materiel the holding vessel is made of resulting in hydrogen embrittlement, creation of cracks and voids inside the metal,
About the only materiel we believe to be immune are carbon fullerenes and graphene. Which we have had problems producing at scale.
as for cryonic storing it you are just adding another energy cost to they system because you are spending more energy still to chill the hydrogen
>It looks like you can blend it at some modest proportion into existing natural gas infrastructure to lighten its environmental burden somewhat.
and this makes less since.
You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas.
It's true that it's the smallest atom, but it's not the smallest molecule. Helium is more prone to escapement since it's not diatomic. Doing a bit of research it looks like aluminum is actually a fine container for pressurized hydrogen (low permeation rates, low embrittlement). You do need to reinforce it (e.g., composite wrapping) if you want to go to high pressures.
>and this makes less since.
FYI, s/since/sense
I think you're over-indexing on efficiency. That's not the only metric that influences success. Suppose that we have an overabundance of intermittent sources of electricity (e.g., wind and solar). Right now there's not much you can do to store it. Batteries are great for smoothing demand over hours or days, but they're quite far from smoothing demand over weeks or months.
So if you're able to cheaply overproduce electricity, it doesn't really matter if your storage process is not particularly efficient. Even at fairly low efficiencies, it's more useful than throwing it away so long as the capital cost of the conversion equipment is low enough to tolerate the intermittency.
As for the cryogenic storage adding an additional efficiency hit - yes, correct. But there's an intercept of marginal cost, storage density, and efficiency where it will be economical to do it. The technology question is if we can deliver that intercept at a lower total cost than other alternatives.
One thing that's really attractive about hydrogen is that the costs are not the processed media. Batteries are full of expensive to mine and refine materials and their storage capacity is more-or-less directly tied to the quantities of used materials. With hydrogen production the media are water and space, both of which are almost free in many contexts. Vehicles aren't really one of them because volume is precious, but for stationary applications it's a completely different story.
>You have to spend more energy to make the H_2 by splitting the H2O than you get out of burning the H_2, so adding it to natural gas to make it more environmentally efficient doesn't make since as you are increasing the net energy cost of the system than just burning the natural gas.
I think you are missing something or are lacking in creativity. By this logic we shouldn't use batteries either because the energy you get out of the batteries is always less than the energy you put in. Also, where are you introducing additional natural gas? It's merely meant to be used as a temporary storage technology to allow a greater renewable share.
To be more blunt. Investments into storage technologies allow more renewables to be introduced into an electric grid. Nobody cares about the efficiency because that was never the goal in the first place. The goal is reducing the usage of fossil fuels to an absolute minimum and that means using less natural gas, despite the inefficiency.
If hydrogen extraction can be be made efficient enough to economically make more sense than batteries, that's the only necessary criterium. If it can, the rest is a matter of time. If even with this approach it can't, then it won't happen. It's really just economics.
2.) I don't see air travel happening with batteries (except really short distances or really small planes). Weight is just too much of a factor in air travel and the energy density is just too far off with batteries. Hydrogen would maybe be a solution or some fuel that is synthesised from hydrogen.
Air transport is quite possibly the best use case for hydrogen fuel that I can think of, and likely the only way we'll get sustainable air travel in the near future.
Sometimes I wonder if that would end up being a solution for cars, too. It would certainly solve a few difficult edge cases that electrification will have a hard time overcoming.
Some synthetic fuel production processes require hydrogen, so a cheap hydrogen source would still be useful.
That brings up an interesting point. I wonder how much of a factor fuel is in dictating the preferred size for an airliner. Maybe if the fuel economics and physics change, we'll see an evolution towards larger numbers of smaller point-to-point airliners.
Energy is cheap, Storage is expensive.
If storing a KWh of power costs 50 Cent in a battery and 5 Cent in a fuel cell, then it doesn’t matter if you pay 10 or 20 Cent per KWh of fuel.
Of course this is an example with made up numbers, but the point is valid.
As an aside, body fat has a specific energy of 38 MJ/kg.
The specific energy of gasoline does not matter unless put into context with the efficiency of the mechanism extracting it into useful work.
The mechanism in this case is an internal combustion engine and its efficiency is around 10%.
The mechanism for extracting useful work from a battery is an electric motor, and it achieves ~98% efficiency.
Which means gas is only ~4X more dense in terms of actual useful energy. So a battery pack weighing 4x more than full gas tank to get the same range is not unreasonable at all and is basically what a Tesla is.
Difference between electric and gasoline cars. With a gas car the marginal cost of extra range is low. With electric it's high. With gas cars the marginal cost of extra HP is high where with electric it's low.
Therefore, an advanced composite container holding 5.7 kg of CH, would provide a range of 300 miles in a hydrogen vehicle, but will require a storage space of 260 liters (69 gallons) and weigh about 230 lb (104 kg). This will then be about nine times bulkier and three times heavier than a typical 7.5-gallon gasoline tank. (https://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/consumer/hydrogen/basics/documents/task2_gaseous_h2.pdf )
Why would anyone want to discard these batteries with precious minerals?
1. Their lifetime is measured in decades (first in EVs and then in grid-storage) as compared to single-use for gas.
2. They (at least the various types of Li-Ion cells) are 100% recyclable. Battery production will probably switch to "urban mining" once enough has been manufactured to supply the global fleet.
Tesla recently mentioned during their battery day presentation that they plan to do exactly this. Re-manufacturing batteries will be far cheaper than mining fresh raw materials once enough EoL batteries are available.
Thanks for the explanation.
All EV batteries are 100% recyclable and this company was founded by the original CTO of Tesla to do just that.
Just Ammonia for fertilizer alone generates 2% of annual CO2 emmisions, so that alone is a market worth targetting in both environmental and business sense. As soon as the inevitable policy response kicks in there will be a massive market for green ammonia (and therefore hydrogen).
Ammonia has a decent shot at being a shipping or aviation fuel too, but many of its alternatives need the same input of green hydrogen anyway so can share costs and scale with Ammonia production.
As for intermittent renewables, we're approaching the point where we shift from mostly underproduced and only occasionally overprovisioned to them being near permanently overprovisioned and needing to find uses for that electricity that can be rarely halted to help the grid a few times a year.
Hydrogen production fits the cost profile for long-term/seasonal storage that no lithium battery can hit, even if they drop in price even more than currebtly predicted.
That seems wrong to me. I mean, objectively I'd expect the construction expense of a gasoline fueling station to be much higher than just running more electrical distribution lines to a major shopping area.
I think you're making the mistake of comparing the "cost" of new construction to the sunk cost of existing infrastructure. Those gas stations don't last forever and the cost to disassemble and rebuild them needs to be part of your analysis.
If there's a place for hydrogen in the electrical grid then there will be cheap hydrogen available for other potential uses and the market will likely find some niches. Long-haul transport is a big one; instead of electrifying all freight rails in a country use locomotives with hydrogen fuel cells.
>electric batteries today are over 90% eficient on the whole charge-delivery cycle
Isn’t the most common electrical delivery via natural gas power plants which are generally 40%-50% efficient? Meaning the 90% is a downstream measure from the source and not really “whole cycle”? It would be interesting to see comparisons of the true life-cycle efficiency of different modes of energy delivery and storage.
I'm picturing home use replacing oil or gas with hydrogen combined with a fuel cell.
It would be great for high demand situations where solar plus a battery setup capacity was too low. For example winter little sun (low on the horizon too) and a long cold spell.
So maybe that’s a better trade off for the planet.
But unbound molecular hydrogen (H2) is basically nonexistent on terrestrial planets since their gravity is insufficient to hold onto it.
Divide that by 15 to get real world densities of compressed hydrogen composite storage tanks, you need a 104 Kg tank to store 7.5 Kg of hydrogen, for a total of 111.5 kg when full.
Every study that suggests this conclusion was published by Oil companies in the 90s to shut down California's effort to switch to electric cars by the year 2000.
No actual study has ever found this conclusion and in fact all find the opposite. Even with the worse polluting power generating plants, charging an EV directly off of the massive grid power generation is far more efficient in terms of pollution than burning gas inside your car.
Meanwhile, electric batteries today are over 90% eficient on the whole charge-delivery cycle, the industry is rapidly gaining momentum, charge networks are built, the cost of components only goes down. Compared to hydrogen, battery electrics are today where internal combustion cars were compared with electrics 100 years ago: the market has spoken and the massive economies of scale of the winner will relegate the competitor to very specialized niches.
And once you lose the hydrogen vehicles, the whole distribution network becomes a very dubious business proposition. Why build H2 pipes that need expensive and inefficient electric conversion endpoints, when you can rely on and extend the existing electric distribution networks? Indeed, you can store hydrogen, but what advantage do you have by storing it closer to the consumption point, instead of a grid connected hydrogen battery that generates, stores and consumes hydrogen as requested by the smart grid? In that scenario, hydrogen becomes just one of multiple competing energy storage technologies, together with pumped storage, grid connected batteries etc., all together helping to regulate intermittent renewables.