Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison, we’d be watching TV by candlelight?
—Al Boliska
“Fool cells.” That’s how Elon Musk once famously described fuel-cell vehicles. Too expensive and too inefficient said the once — but no longer future — king of EVs, referring to cars propelled by hydrogen. So far, he’s been right. Fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) have indeed been too expensive and not nearly efficient enough to do battle with Musk’s battery-powered automobiles. Throw in the fact the fuel itself has also been rather expensive, not to mention a non-existent refuelling infrastructure, and it’s little wonder fuel-cell vehicles sell in the hundreds while Tesla alone sells millions of battery-electrics every year.
Almost one in five cars sold in Canada last quarter was at least partially battery-powered; fewer than 300 Toyota Mirai FCEVs have been delivered in Canada since 2018. The numbers, to be perfectly frank, are not good.
But what if all — yes, all — of those above-named problems could be rendered moot? With existing — if still burgeoning — technology, no less? Innovations that could render hydrogen cheaper, make infrastructure more tenable, and turn fuel cells more efficient in their energy use than EVs? And, what if, in one short Driving into the Future online panel, we could bring together four leading experts who will show us how it can all be done? Here’s just a sample of the myths that our latest show, Hydrogen: The Missing Piece, will debunk.
Hydrogen is energy-inefficient
This is the biggest knock against FCEVs, namely that it’s far more efficient to use electricity to power cars directly than to create “green hydrogen” — the only one of the many different types of hydrogen available that is truly zero-emissions — and then use it to power a fuel cell.
So far, that simple equation has proven correct. Electrolysis, the only convenient and repeatable source of green hydrogen, uses about 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce one kilogram of hydrogen, which in turn, says Natural Resources Canada, can propel a Toyota Mirai 100 kilometres (actually, about 115 km, but I’m rounding so everyone doesn’t have to search for their calculators).
For a deeper dive into the latest hydrogen-fuel innovations, sign up for our next Driving into the Future panel
No PhD in physics is required to understand that 50 kWh is a lot of electricity to travel just 100 kilometres, especially for such a small car like the Mirai. In fact, according to NRCan’s numbers, not even GMC’s monstrous Hummer EV comes close to those numbers in terms of inefficiency. Hyundai’s Ioniq 6, perhaps the Mirai’s closest battery-powered equivalent, uses only 16.2 kilowatt-hours to cover the same 100 klicks. That’s a whopping three times less energy expended, a disadvantage that even the most dramatic gains in fuel-cell efficiency are unlikely to bridge in the near-future.
But what if we could make the fuel more efficiently?
That’s exactly what Robin Hamilton, the Chief Technology Officer for Dark Matter Materials, is trying to do. Instead of energy-intensive electrolysis, DMM has developed a thermo-catalytic water-splitting process that requires only between two and eight kilowatt-hours — the variability being the amount of heat added to speed up the process — to produce a kilogram of hydrogen.
Do that math again and a Toyota Mirai would need, at worst, 8 kWh to drive 100 kilometres. There are no EVs extant nearly that efficient and, if Hamilton’s nanoparticle process be real, it would make the Mirai twice as efficient as the aforementioned Hyundai Ioniq 6. In other words, thermo-catalytic production could be the revolution hydrogen needs. And if you want to learn how DMM could revolutionize ZEVs, you’ll want to join us for our Hydrogen: The Missing Piece panel.
Hydrogen is too expensive
As Motor Mouth reported last week, hydrogen remains far too expensive. Californian FCEV owners are currently paying as much as US$36 per kilogram for the stuff. At the few hydrogen stations currently operating in Canada — mostly in British Columbia — it’s about CDN$15/kg. Even that, however, is about double the CDN$7.50/kilogram that would make a Mirai cost-competitive with an equivalent hybrid-powered compact.
Hamilton’s thermo-catalytic reduction in the amount of electricity needed to produce hydrogen would surely alleviate some of that price disparity, but, as we discussed in last week’s Motor Mouth, the cost of producing hydrogen represents as little as 15% of the cost at the pump. The remaining 85% is the cost of “densifying” and shipping.
That’s where Verne’s cryo-compression strategy comes in. Unlike previous systems which either compress hydrogen (to 700 bar, like in the Mirai) or liquefies it (as Toyota does in its latest H2-fueled piston-powered Corolla race car) cyro-compression does both simultaneously. The result makes for not only cheaper handling of hydrogen, but also more energy-dense fuel. In fact, says Verne, cyro-compressed hydrogen is almost twice as dense as the gaseous hydrogen that powers the current Mirai. In other words, a Mirai could pack almost twice as much hydrogen into the same space — giving it a range of nearly 1,200 kilometres — or it could free up a little more cabin space.
As to whether it could reduce the cost of hydrogen enough so the operating costs of fuel-cell-powered vehicles would be competitive with a gas-fuelled equivalent, that’s currently unknowable. Certainly, reducing the amount of electricity required to produce the raw product and reducing its infrastructure costs by 65% would go a long way in making hydrogen a viable fuel for the future. Especially if, as Toyota recently promised, its third-gen fuel-cells will be 20% more efficient than those currently powering the Mirai.
Hydrogen isn’t charge-at-home convenient
For a lot of people, the attraction of a battery-powered vehicle is the ability to plug in at home, eschewing gas stations seemingly one of the primary selling points — at least to early intenders — of buying an EV. A hydrogen-fuelled FCEV may provide many benefits — faster refuelling, longer real-world range, etc. — but it can’t be refuelled at home.
The latest twist in the ZEV wars is the plug-in fuel-cell hybrid vehicle. Essentially a traditional PHEV, only with the gas engine replaced with a fuel-cell stack, an FCHEV is actually far simpler to build than something like a Prius Prime, mainly because a fuel cell’s powertrain — electric engine, inverter, and motor control unit — are virtually the same as an EV’s, only the battery and fuel are different.
And even here, they are not so different as most people assume, a fuel cell having a cathode, anode, and even an electrolyte just like the batteries that power Teslas, with the main difference being what powers their electron transfer.
And like traditional PHEVs, if the battery is big enough — like the Renault Embleme we covered late last year with its 40 kilowatt-hours of NMC lithium-ion — the hydrogen would only need to be tapped into on the open road.
Sounds like a technology worth investigating to me. But, if you really want to get the straight goods on the benefits of marrying battery and fuel cell, you should join Driving into the Future’s latest panel,Hydrogen: The Missing Piece, on Wednesday, March 12 at 11:00 a.m., when Dr. Lorenzo Bartolucci, an associate professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, can give you all the details on his work optimizing the powertrains for the fuel cell hybrids of the future.
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