Thanks Paul. So cost is the main factor. And seeing as cost is the main thing putting people off switching from petrol/Diesel engines to electric, obviously the jump to hydrogen would be too big. So do you see electric as a short-term stepping stone to hydrogen powered cars?Paul Waine wrote: ↑Sun Mar 01, 2020 11:21 pmHi Rileybobs, I first heard of vehicles powered by fuel cells in mid-90s. The idea then was that the gas would be natural gas. This was the days before fossil fuels were "wrong" because of carbon emissions... But, fuel cell technology proved expensive and especially much more expensive than petrol and diesel.
EVs, of course, are also expensive. The price of evs has come down as development efforts put into building them, including the battery technology.... including all the costs of mining the metals for the batteries. The biggest issues with evs are (1) how is all the electricity generated, (2) how is enough electricity generated to supply all the evs and all other uses of electricity and (3) how much does the electric grid need to be expanded to handle all this extra electricity. We are improving on (1) with coal generation near to ending and growth of wind and pv, but we will also need nat gas and nuclear for many years. We are nowhere near (2) and nowhere near (3). Much more generation capacity needed and hardly even making a small start on expanding grid capacity.
If an ev car were to cost £30,000 then the equivalent hydrogen fuel cell vehicle might cost £50,000 at the present time. And, hydrogen costs more than electricity, so the vehicle manufacturer's challenge is to sell a hydrogen fuel cell car that costs a lot more to buy than an ev and also costs a lot more to run. That's the big challenge.
Of course, people are looking at it and seeing if they can solve this challenge.
I've seen the NPL's hydrogen fuel cell test car on the roads around me. I got the chance to speak with the driver on one occasion. The NPL is testing technology, reliability etc etc. If those things check out, then the challenges are the cost of fuel cell and the costs of hydrogen.
Then there's the question of how we manufacture hydrogen. Grey, carbon emissions in the process; green, hydrogen from renewable sources and no carbon emissions; blue, I believe is no carbon emissions but not from renewable sources.
I also understand that hydrogen can leak, where petrol, diesel and natural gas wouldn't leak. So, not quite so easy to convert a petrol station to hydrogen re-fuelling. More importantly, while hydrogen is a possible replacement for nat gas in residential heating, it will require significant new investment in new pipelines. (Though, apparently up to 10% hydrogen could be substituted in nat gas supplies very quickly, for an immediate 10% reduction in carbon emissions).
In terms of your two biggest issues with EV (2 & 3), huge investment will be required but I don’t see this being insurmountable. This industry and the infrastructure associated with it will change dramatically over the next 50 years I’m sure. It wouldn’t surprise me if driverless vehicles became the norm in that period of time.