BEVs haven't won yet

The US will be spending many billions on developing cheap ways of manufacturing hydrogen to jumpstart a hydrogen economy.

“The $3 per kilogram credit makes nuclear hydrogen highly competitive with fossil fuel produced hydrogen, Teplinsky said. The U.S. Department of Energy has as a goal, one of its Energy Earthshots Initiatives, to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen to $1 per kilogram in a decade…The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in November also included $8 billion to develop regional clean hydrogen hubs in the U.S. Between the two laws, the U.S. should be able to develop a clean hydrogen economy in seven to eight years, Teplinsky said.” https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/08/clean-hydrogen-industry-got-…

Combine that with what Japan and South Korea are already investing and there almost certainly will be a hydrogen economy producing clean hydrogen at costs approaching fossil fuels, if not cheaper. In many ways, the ideal clean car will be a plug-in fuel cell vehicle, with short trips powered by the grid and long trips using hydrogen with short refueling times. This is likely the Toyota strategy given their development of both solid state batteries and fuel cell vehicles.

For this reason I just bought some Bloom Energy (BE) stock. TMF has written about this company. Bloom uses fuel cells that can generate energy from hydrogen or natural gas without combustion for virtually no emissions. They use this to create microgrids. It also recently demonstrated a very efficient way of producing hydrogen using the heat generated by nuclear power. Since one of the national hydrogen hubs being funded by the DOE is targeted to develop methods of producing hydrogen from nuclear, this seems to put Bloom in an advantageous position.
https://www.bloomenergy.com/news/idaho-national-lab-and-bloo…
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/DOE-awards-resea….

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BEVs haven’t won yet

But they have one hell of a head start…

For what it’s worth, Sandy Munro says that hydrogen makes sense for heavy trucks but not for cars.

The Captain

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For this reason I just bought some Bloom Energy (BE) stock. TMF has written about this company. Bloom uses fuel cells that can generate energy from hydrogen or natural gas without combustion for virtually no emissions. They use this to create microgrids. It also recently demonstrated a very efficient way of producing hydrogen using the heat generated by nuclear power. Since one of the national hydrogen hubs being funded by the DOE is targeted to develop methods of producing hydrogen from nuclear, this seems to put Bloom in an advantageous position.

This will only be a niche application. Here’s the problem: You take electricity from the nuclear power plant to make hydrogen. You then take the hydrogen and use it is a feed stock in a fuel cell in your vehicle, which converts the hydrogen to electricity, which you use to power the vehicle.

Or you could just use the electricity from the nuclear power plant directly in your vehicle, saving two steps and the accompanying efficiency losses at each step. So for transportation, hydrogen fuel costs will always be higher than electricity. Therefore hydrogen fuel cells only make sense for applications where you need to drive beyond battery range. There plenty of those.

But you then also need a hydrogen filling station at your destination, and there straight up aren’t very many of those. That leaves a chicken and egg problem where hydrogen vehicles don’t make sense unless there are enough filling stations, but building filling stations doesn’t make unless there are enough vehicles.

As a side problem, your link indicated they would produce hydrogen from SMRs. SMRs are at least 20 years away from any type of wide scale commercial use. That’s a long time from now.

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What are your thoughts on how the end user (the guy at the pump) would fill up with liquid hydrogen? To me, that end user experience is one that seems risky. Seeing a less than fully competent person hook up their vehicle to a compressed explosive system concerns me. Leads me to believe that - much like when I used to fill up my propane tank for my grill - we would require an employee to connect and pump the gas and for safety reasons, would not allow everyone to fill up unsupervised. That would seem to add a bit of expense to the process.

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Good question. I found this video on how it works. Looks like the consumers dispense the fuel themselves:

https://youtu.be/RCx4CAOofZk

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What are your thoughts on how the end user (the guy at the pump) would fill up with liquid hydrogen?

Automated system–no DIY service allowed.

In Dublin in August many doubledeckers were hydrogen power. The city for several reasons no longer smells of diesel and peat fires. No longer dirty little Dublin.

The Tram system was installed more recently in the last ten years. It is electric but I do not know it that is hydrogen. I doubt it.

There is talk of Boeing and Aerbus developing hydrogen planes.

The issue may be a loss of efficiency as syke is saying, but it may be a gain in stored power on board for distance.

It also might not be a loss of efficiency. Using electric v hydrogen could be an apples to oranges comparison were hydrogen is better.

So for transportation, hydrogen fuel costs will always be higher than electricity.

Not necessarily, and probably most likely incorrect. What you are missing is that much of hydrogen production will be done at no cost because it will use energy that would otherwise go unused.

The intermittency of wind and solar is a real problem. Utilities have to to be able to supply power when the wind isn’t blowing and so they have to build up the capacity to generate more energy than they need on average. That means there are lots of times when more energy can be produced than needed. For solar it is sometimes called the duck curve. https://www.fchea.org/hydrogen-as-storage

That energy can be used to make hydrogen.

We’ve already had posts here about the increased demand on the electric grid with higher BEV adoption. That is a solvable problem but will require expensive upgrades to the grid and a substantial build up of electricity production. If the price of hydrogen production gets low enough, it becomes a viable alternative. At that point, retrofitting gas stations for hydrogen delivery also becomes commercially viable.

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Automated system

How is that going to work when every single manufacturer would have a different attachment located in a different place? We can’t get current EV makers to agree on a set standard - it seems unlikely we would get them to agree on a standard for hydrogen.

How is that going to work when every single manufacturer would have a different attachment located in a different place?

There is an international standard for hydrogen refueling of FCEV.

"SAE International is standardizing the hydrogen fueling protocol and the interface between the FCEV and hydrogen stations. To date, there are a number of standards published including the geometry of the fueling nozzle-receptacle interface (SAE J2600), hydrogen fuel quality (SAE J2719), FCEV to hydrogen station communication (SAE J2799), and hydrogen fueling (SAE J2601). "
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/articles/10-questions-….

The hydrogen folks have thought this out…

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There is an international standard for hydrogen refueling of FCEV.

There is no standard as to where the valve would be placed on the vehicle, nor how the device would connect to the vehicle.

Hawkwin,

That is easy enough to standardize.

x.xx.1: Fill must use NAHFS coupling type A
x.xx.2: Fill must be located between 48-72" aft of Front wheel
x.xx.3: Fill must be no less than 30" and no more than 42" from grade
x.xx.4: NAHFS coupling must be installed at 90* +/- 10* and perpendicular to nominal direction of travel
x.xx.5: When people consider the future, solutions magically appear

We have automated robots that read position “target dots” and visual indicators today. They not only exist, but are in daily use in industrial applications.

https://3dscannersupply.com/products/retroreflective-markers…

If not these, then other visual indicators are exceptionally easy for machines to read.

Make them 3D, make them indelible and have a failsafe “clean fill location indicators” check point.

That is easy enough to standardize.

My position isn’t that it is complicated to create a standard. My position is that there is no current standard - and creating one may be rather difficult to get all the parties to agree to such a standard - and it would likely take an international convention with many different parties to arrive at consensus.

We tend to prefer the path of least resistance. Requiring all personal transportation vehicles (sedans, sportscars, trucks, etc) to have their fueling station located in the same general area seems a big ask absent a proverbial act of Congress (and by extension, agreement by all the other world manufacturers).

Not necessarily, and probably most likely incorrect. What you are missing is that much of hydrogen production will be done at no cost because it will use energy that would otherwise go unused.

Why bother to convert unused electricity to hydrogen? Instead just schedule 100M BEV cars to charge at those times!