I’m willing to say “never”. Chicken and egg; you’ll never get H distributed widely while there are no cars to use it. You’ll never get cars bought while there are no convenient refueling spots, especially as gas and electricity are so commonly available.
For certain specialized transport with limited destination points, maybe. Airports, heavy trucking, railroads. Not cars.
This is nothing new. In the early days of the automobile, gasoline was delivered to a store near you in barrels. Finding it and putting it in your car was up to you.
There was no other means of fuel or transport, except hay and a horse. Different scenario. Everybody wanted a car, they were willing to put up with it. Now they won’t.
Those pushing H2 as fuel have no choice but to build those hubs. Otherwise, they would have no way to fuel the vehicles that use H2. The key issue is fueling the vehicles. I could see automated systems actually putting the H2 into the vehicle. I do not see a company allowing an untrained person to handle liquid H2 in their facility. Far too many risks for catastrophic failure with significant loss of life.
Yes. I used to work at a company with an LP forklift. One of my jobs was to take the empty tank in and exchange it for a full one. Note the key point: I did NOT fill the tank. I merely exchanged an empty tank for a full one–and we paid for it, obviously. Liquid H2 is far colder than liquid propane, so not sure if it would be practical to have the general public swapping their own tanks.
There are 10 hydrogen fueling stations in my county. While there are way more gasoline stations, hydrogen stations exist around me in sufficient numbers to make owning a hydrogen vehicle an option for those who want to choose that.
That’s 10 more hydrogen fueling stations than in my entire state. Unless a filling station is on your normal route, a hydrogen vehicle isn’t practical. I suppose it would be faster to fuel a hydrogen vehicle than an EV–but that advantage goes away if you have to drive very far out of your way or if you can charge your EV at home or at work. Which is the way things are heading.
One selling point for EVs is they are cheap to operate. At current prices, it costs far more to operate a hydrogen vehicle than an EV, and it will always be more expensive. So the hydrogen vehicle loses there, too.
The argument was a chicken and egg one - you can’t have hydrogen vehicles without fueling stations and you can’t have fueling stations without vehicles to use the fuel. My point was to show that hydrogen fuel stations exist, therefore hydrogen vehicles can exist.
If you want to make an economic argument for or against hydrogen vehicles, be my guest. But that’s a different argument.
And if you really want to know the price of hydrogen at the pump, I suggest you use your favorite search engine to look up “hydrogen fuel price orange county california”.
–Peter
PS - I knew the stations had to exist somewhere in my area, as I’ve seen both Honda and Toyota hydrogen cars in the wild near me. I was kind of surprised to find as many as that. I figured there would only be a couple.
That’s fine. But your state is not representative of the entire country. Other places are different.
And that is my point. Although they don’t need to be exactly on your route, they need to be close enough. And these stations are close enough for a lot of people living in the area.
I’ve also stumbled across this, which might explain a lot. Yes, they’re a supporter of hydrogen. And I still haven’t dug into the economics, so I’m not commenting there. But it takes action like this to get something like hydrogen off the ground.
Compressed hydrogen is handled safely all the time in industry. The cylinders are heavy. Liquid hydrogen would require a good design.
Those hydrogen problems are the reason people talk about ammonia or methanol as alternatives. They are both hydrogen derivatives that are easier to handle.
I found a similar map of hydrogen locations on the DOE web site. On a lark, and figuring NY might be a progressive enough state to have some hydrogen fueling, I checked for the closest station. It was in Canada. The second closest was in California.
So I guess California is the place to be for hydrogen cars.
Maybe other places should catch up?? Or at least appreciate that a forward thinking state is willing to give a real world trial to a newer technology. Some technologies aren’t useful until there are enough of them, as has been noted many times.
BTW, that organization just went nationwide in the last year. Perhaps they can make some inroads into other states in the near future. Expanding the hydrogen fuel network along the I-5 corridor into Oregon and Washington would be a natural extension, as would getting into Las Vegas and along I-15 in California.
I actually found prices in CA between ~$13 and $20 per kg. A FCEV such as the Mirai, best case, gets about 150 miles per kg. But like EVs and electricity this is the untaxed price and the H2 is (guessing) all made from fossil fuels. All the green hydrogen fueling stations are still theoretical it seems. But study after study shows that charging a car from green electricity is far more efficient than electrolysis, compressions, liquefying, storing and regenerating electricity in a FC, usually by a factor of 3x to 4x. There are probably some good hydrogen use cases where storage is important but not mass usage by consumers who can normally charge their cars at home or work.
Today in CA the renewables plus nuclear is over 50% of total demand