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There's a lot of discussion about hydrogen as an energy source for cars in Germany. It is generally considered more ecological than electric, because of much l
by tut-urut-utut 5y ago
There's a lot of discussion about hydrogen as an energy source for cars in Germany.
It is generally considered more ecological than electric, because of much lesser environmental footprint than required for producing batteries.
Another advantage would be bigger driving range and faster refuelling.
However, it looks like that outside of Germany, electric cars just won, and Germany itself will not be able to reverse the trend.
- epistasis 5y ago>because of much lesser environmental footprint than required for producing batteries. I'm very concerned about this, but have found basically zero impact for batteries, in that if one is concerned about batteries, then all that iron mining to build the rest of the car should probably be a bigger concern. After doing research, I'm 99% sure that lithium battery environmental concerns are just concern trolling from fossil fuel interests. But I am very open to concrete new information.
- varjag 5y agoHere is a rather detailed study on total emission effects of EV lifecyle: https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life-cycle-GHG_ICCT-Briefing_09022018_vF.pdf https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life... "An electric vehicle’s higher emissions during the manufacturing stage are paid off after only 2 years compared to driving an average conventional vehicle, a time frame that drops to about one and a half years if the car is charged using renewable energy."
- pkphilip 5y agoThat covers only the energy spent on mining etc but not the environmental impact of digging up entire country sides. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...
- epistasis 5y agoThis seems to be a rather selective concern, when, as the article states, there's only 12kg of lithium in the batteries of a Tesla, which is one of the larger batteries out there. Are you also concerned about the steel, which is on the order of thousands of pounds per vehicle, and requires not only digging for iron, but also the coking coal? And speaking of digging, iron and coal do actually dig up landscapes, whereas most lithium is actually brine mined rather than dug out.
- bbarnett 5y agoSteel is reused, car wreckers strip cars, crush the steel, and off it goes to be made into girders or something. What's more worrying is battery recycling. Toxoc batteries. So far, The West's plan has been to ship them to poor countries, which tend to just bury them. This can be resolved, but will it be? I say this to anyone claiming to be green, unless you know 100% how your product can be recycled, with concrete, in place processes and recyclers, you're a liar, and not green.
- epistasis 5y agoShipping lithium ion batteries is expensive, because they weigh so much. And no, there's no plan to ship them to poor countries, that's just a fabrication, based on nothing. It's quite likely that battery production will be performed very close to fins assembly, because of the low price of batteries per pound, especially compared to something that does get supped a lot, like solar PV panels. Long distance shipping of batteries would add significantly to their cost. In reality, lithium ion battery recycling is baked into this supply chain from the start. There are many startups eager to recycle batteries, the biggest challenge is that there isn't any substantial amount to recycle at the moment. Manufacturing rejects are one of the prime inputs to current battery recyclers.
- Datagenerator 5y agoSmaller batteries, faster cars. In Germany one can really use all the available power in stark contrast to neighboring countries. Lighter cars and fast refueling for long distance travelling are very beneficial, not only to Germany.
- phicoh 5y agoI assume that the vast majority of car owners is quite sensitive to cost. If all things considered the cost of hydrogen is similar to that of an BEV then it make sense that both will exist next to each other. On the other hand, if hydrogen proves to be a lot more expensive than a BEV, then you expect fewer hydrogen refueling stations, which makes hydrogen less attractive.
- reader_mode 5y agoLet's say Germany has a decent hydrogen infrastructure. You go on vacation in say Croatia or Spain, you suddenly can't use your car. Every country has electric sockets everywhere so you can charge over night and building fast chargers is trivial compared to storing hydrogen. Hydrogen sounds useful for commercial vehicles where you can plan routes and stay close to pumps (eg. delivery, bus, etc.) Sounds horrible for personal vehicles. I can see Japan investing in it - you are unlikely to travel out of country with your car.
- chanux 5y agoAccording to James May, Only Japan and Germany can support Hydrogen Fuel Cell decently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XytYTxQEq_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XytYTxQEq_Y
- Ma8ee 5y agoThey are betting on them in Japan, and they are using the olympic village as some kind of proof of concepts with both vehicles, but also residential energy production from hydrogen. And of course the Olympic torch will use hydrogen. Toyota are also betting on hydrogen. This is the reason why, even though they were early with hybrids, they still haven't released any purely electric cars.
- varjag 5y agoThey did release BEV series.
- radicalbyte 5y agoJapan are building on Methane Hydrate as a strategic energy supply. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japan-china-combustible-ice-frozen-fossil-fuel-extract-seafloor-energy-methane-hydrate-a7744456.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/japan-china-combu... We really are the most short sighted and stupid species, and only have ourselves to blame for what is to come.
- chartpath 5y agoYeah wow, let's melt more ice to power stuff.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoIt feels like Toyota has made a massive miscalculation on this. They should have had a huge lead with all their experience of hybrids but now look like the are scrambling to catch up.
- Ma8ee 5y agoTime will. I think hydrogen has huge advantages for e.g. long haul trucks, for which batteries don’t seem to be reasonable. And they will drive the infrastructure.
- fomine3 5y agoFor Toyota, the representative company of Japan, it's not easy decision to all in to BEV because of energy situation. Japan is going to be stuck for global decarbonize campaign because the land/grid is too small to make stable distributed renewables, and obviously nuclear is no longer future option. Making BEV (or Li-ON battery) is energy intensive so it won't competitive with other decarbonated countries for future carbon tax era. That's why they must investigating hydrogen, solid state battery, xEV, and so on rather than just BEV. Other companies investigating other techs like co2 collector. Investigating hydrogen for other uses like truck, ship, storage, emergency generator looks reasonable (Toyota also sell fuel cell system for various use), but still I doubt is they serious for hydrogen car like Mirai, or it's just a demo or for special case.
- jeeeb 5y agoFWIW. I’ve seen a lot of interest in Japan and Australia as well. Toyota in particular seems to be betting big on hydrogen with a PHEV -> BEV transition as backup.
- isoprophlex 5y agoWe're not at the level of, say, > 50% market adoption of EVs. Getting electricity to a battery EV at scale is somewhat of a "last mile" problem, and I'm not sure if upgrading our grids to handle this will be cheaper than rolling out hydrogen infra. Consider that you can ship hydrogen on a truck to existing pump stations (maybe not as efficient) as we do with gas right now. I have no data to back this up, just the handwavy arguments above...
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>Getting electricity to a battery EV at scale is somewhat of a "last mile" problem, and I'm not sure if upgrading our grids to handle this will be cheaper than rolling out hydrogen infra. I read recently that the UK just needs to go back to 2002 levels of electricity generation to cover the whole fleet switching to electric. There are some problem areas, generally people who live in dense urban areas without an allocated parking space but I don't think that is insurmountable.
- epistasis 5y agoHydrogen is super hard to store and transport. Electrolyzers are prohibitively expensive, and probably won't be cost competitive until 2050: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-hydrogen-part-one-the-supply-side/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h... However EV's last mile problem is solved, at least for people with garages. 220v is more than enough for daily charging. A 120v 15amp circuit is almost trickle charging at <5mph, but most car are idle >90% of the time and that slow charging is enough to replenish a typical days driving in 8 hours. As far as the transmission and distribution grid, shiftable load like car charging has the potential to drastically reduce grid costs, by shaving off peak capacity, and utilizing the times of Los grid usage. Chris Clack is a leading grid modeler, and his latest grid models tor decarbonization show massive savings by putting batteries and solar at electrical meters. Car charging is half of the function of home batteries, and it's likely that in the near future, many cars will allow vehicle to grid discharge, like the new f150 truck.
- tyfon 5y agoI have no data here just my personal experience. In my area (in Norway) there are probably 50% EVs on the road now, closer to Oslo I bet the proportion is higher. In my street alone with 10 houses the cars are about 80% EVs and I just heard another neighbour has ordered an ID.4. The local bus is also electric and it has a pantograph that draws 450 kW from a charger just 50 meters from my house in it's "down time" as I am at the end of the route. No problem with the grid so far, but they have put a capacity charge on how much max capacity you use divided into 50 NOK ($5) monthly tiers. The tiers so far are 5, 10 and 15 kW, I'm unusually in the 5-10 bracket since I turned my cars down to 3.4 kW charging. In addition they lower the grid price during night to encourage people to charge when not much else is in use. But so far it has not required a massive grid build-out. It might be since the grid itself is well maintained being critical infrastructure. Since we are in the subject of hydrogen cars and pumps, there is also no tax on hydrogen cars here so there have been a few, but not nearly in the number of EVs. The pumps will sometimes require more time to refill than a charge since if you have many filling in a row the pump itself tends to freeze up and requires quite some time to thaw. The requirements of a hydrogen pump station is far higher than a gas station, it's not just the matter of shipping it on a truck to an existing one. You need compressors and decompressors (why it's freezing up) and it does take quite a bit of energy. There is also the issue of leaking since hydrogen atoms are so small, we did have one blow up not that far from here a couple years back. After living with only EVs for over two years now I think it's the way to go for personal cars and buses, but for ships and perhaps aircraft hydrogen makes more sense. It's also easier to store excess grid power on sunny or windy days using hydrogen, but right now the issue is also that most hydrogen is produced using steam-methane reforming [1] which emits CO2. Way better than petrol though. [1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydrogen/production-of-hydrogen.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/hydrogen/production-of-h...
- timthorn 5y agoThe UK Government is also looking hard at H2 and there's a lot of industrial activity in the area. Just today, Centrica announced a £1.6Bn investment in Hydrogen storage.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI think that is mainly for heating homes, they want to switch gas boilers out for hydrogen.
- RobertoG 5y agoIt seems like there is a push for hydrogen in Europe in the last months, and a lot of it seems coming from the big energy companies. Could be they are trying to find a way to get a piece of the European pandemic recovery funds, which are going mainly to "green" projects?
- epistasis 5y agoThere is a huge effort from natural gas companies to make hydrogen acceptable. In my opinion any fossil fuel hydrogen should be banned, or at least taxed at far higher rates than current carbon taxes. We need electrolyzed hydrogen for industry, and we should make sure it's the cheapest option so that we don't have a market failure again.
- Daniel_sk 5y agoThere is a lot of talk about hydrogen in Slovakia - it's promoted by the head of Mistry of Trade and Industry (Richard Sulik), but not many actual steps towards hydrogen cars are being done so far.